1. "Pan's Labyrinth": I don't know that I've ever seen a more richly and fully realized fantasy film. In Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece, Fascist Spain and a little girl's imaginary world of monsters and fairies are two sides of the same coin. One isn't the "fantasy escape" from, or the "harsh contrast" to, the other; each is a reverse impression of the same treacherous experience.

2. "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer": Think of it as "cine-sthesia" -- a lush, sensuous, brutal fable (aren't fables meant to be all that?) in which sight and sound are masterfully orchestrated in the service of ... smell. My senses were re-invigorated. My jaw was on the floor half the time, and my eyes, ears and nostrils wide open from beginning to end.
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3. "Man Push Cart": A Pakistani pushcart vendor survives one day at a time on the streets of midtown Manhattan. A modern Sisyphean tale of urban survival, told with Bressonian minimalism and specificity -- and if that doesn't sound like a rip-roaring good time, it's also spellbinding, suspenseful, heartbreaking and dazzling to behold.

4. "A Prairie Home Companion": Robert Altman's vision was always so wide that it embraced life and death at the same time, but never so warmly and wisely as in his valedictory film -- an elegy for a career and a companion to "Nashville," especially.
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5. "The Descent": Six women go spelunking in the bowels of Mother Earth. A plunge into subterranean horror, deep underground where our bones will someday lay, and even deeper into the darkness of the subconscious.

6. "The Bridge": Another kind of plunge into the abyss: Cameras capture suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge over the course of one year. The filmmakers work backwards to fill in the gaps, to see if it's possible to understand what brought these people out onto the span. Maybe the only film that has ever dealt so honestly (yet also hauntingly, poetically) with the most important decision of people's lives (that is, whether to continue living them) -- a decision many have to make again and again and again, every waking moment.

7. "51 Birch Street": Nice house, nice neighborhood, nice Jewish family. Documentarian and sometime wedding videographer Doug Block investigates the mystery of his own parents' marriage -- and all the drama of "ordinary lives" emerges, as we see how the past flows into the present.

8. "Half Nelson" / "Old Joy": Two tales of struggle with personal and political idealism as Americans (in the urban Northeast and the bucolic Pacific Northwest, respectively) age into their 30s and 40s, worried about what they've lost, who they've become and who they're going to become.

9. "Flags of Our Fathers" / "Letters From Iwo Jima": Images, words, symbols, stories, propaganda ... Clint Eastwood's two-part epic, ostensibly looking at the battle for Iwo Jima, first from the American and then from the Japanese point of view, is really about the meta-weapons of war -- powerful as any atomic bomb. As Peter Bogdanovich says of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" in "This Is John Ford," these movies understand the value (maybe even the necessity) of "printing the legend" -- but the director also makes a point of showing you the truth behind it.
Watch a Clip: "Flags of our Fathers"

10. "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan": This is what movies do best: They show you the world through someone else's eyes, even when that someone is a ridiculous cretin from a mythical Kazakhstan. I don't think we've even begun to consciously understand why this movie is so funny, or how it managed to resonate so strongly with a mainstream American audience. But the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen smartly and hilariously connects the anarchic wit of W.C. Fields, the Marx Bros. and Preston Sturges with the reality-based satire of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report."
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Honorable Mentions
"The Good German"; "The Break-Up"; "Inside Man"; "49 Up"; "Volver"; "Brick"

Worst
"World Trade Center": Of course it's not really the worst movie of 2006, not even close. But Oliver Stone's superficially "nonpolitical" film about Sept. 11 could not have been more political, almost by definition. As such, it's perhaps the most deceptive and dishonest. It will always be "too soon" -- and "too late" -- to make a feel-good movie about Sept. 11 simply by narrowing or widening the zoom (in to the guys in the rubble, or out to the rescuing Marine headed to avenge this slaughter in Iraq), but what Stone served up was the knee-jerk, Rumsfeldian antithesis of the ambivalent wisdom expressed in Eastwood's 2006 war movies.

What are the year's 10 best movies? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

Jim Emerson is the former editor of Microsoft's online/CD-ROM movie encyclopedia, Cinemania. He has written a lot over the years, mostly about movies, for many publications and Web sites, and is now the editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also publishes his blog, Scanners (blogs.suntimes.com/scanners)