Rotten Tomatoes has compiled its best-and-worst reviewed movies of 2006, and today announced its 8th Annual Golden Tomato Award winners. They include Casino Royal for the Wide Release / Action/Adventure category and The Queen for the Limited Release / Drama category. This year’s Moldy Tomato Award, for the worst-reviewed movie of the year, went to Basic Instinct 2. Here’s a full list of winners in all 14 categories:

2006 Golden Tomato Award Winners
Wide Release / Action/Adventure: “Casino Royale”
Limited Release / Drama: “The Queen”
Animation: “Cars”
Comedy: “Borat”
Documentary: “Wordplay”
Foreign: “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Horror: “The Descent”
Family: “Lassie”
Romance: “The Science of Sleep”
Sci-Fi: “Children of Men”
Thriller: “The Departed”
Moldy Tomato (Worse Reviewed Movie of the Year): “Basic Instinct 2”

Thank God for Greencine’s Dave Hudson, who does the heavy lifting of trawling for movie stories and posting links with appropriate related content. He has many of the latest top tens, including Newsweek’s David Ansen and the LAT critics, and also has round-ups on the latest reviews of The Pursuit of Happyness, The Good German, Letters from Iwo Jima, Dreamgirls, Inland Empire and others.

On The Pursuit of Happyness, I suspect that many critics’ ingrained assumption is that heartlifting subject matter and movie star equals studio glossy entertainment. But Italian director Gabriele Mucchino avoids most of the conventional pitfalls and gives us a rather gritty portrait–frightening, really–of a man on the edge of poverty and homelessness who has to pull himself out of a deep trench and take care of his kid at the same time. This movie is a formidable accomplishment. Yes, we know the father, sensitively played by Will Smith, will prove to be a winner. But this movie tackles tricky racial issues in a head-on way that perhaps a homegrown director might not have. Pursuit of Happyness is connecting with audiences—it opened well this weekend — and will prove to be a huge holiday hit. And Smith will earn his Oscar nomination.

The NYT’s Manohla Dargis goes to town in this pan of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is a very entertaining review:

In his genre pastiche “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. Based on the well-regarded Joseph Kanon novel, this film stars a distracted, emotionally detached George Clooney as Jake Geismer, an American journalist who, following World War II, returns to Germany to check out the doings at Potsdam and find his lost love, Lena, a frau who, as played by a vamping Cate Blanchett, recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s postwar heroine Veronika Voss by way of Carol Burnett.

As it turns out, they don’t make them like they used to even when they try. Mr. Soderbergh has explained that with “The Good German” he was seeking to make a film that looked and sounded like an old studio picture, but without the old studio prohibitions. In the name of verisimilitude and creative freedom, his actors talk a blue streak in black-and-white images captured with period-era camera lenses. More lewdly, Tobey Maguire, who plays Tully, one of those smiling sadists of the type once played by Dan Duryea, helps the film earn its R rating by doing the kinds of things to Ms. Blanchett that audiences could only dream of doing to Ingrid Bergman. Here’s looking at you kid, flung over the bed and on your knees.

Any cinephile will want to see Apocalypto, because it boasts bravura filmmaking. The squeamish may want to put down their popcorn, especially in the opening scenes. Director and co-writer Mel Gibson loves to shock us. Red-blooded action fans will get their adrenaline rush, assuming they can manage the subtitles. One could imagine actors playing these roles in English, but it wouldn’t be as real. Gibson is seeking authenticity.

There’s never a dull moment. The best sequences are like the one pictured above: Indians running full-tilt through the jungle, muscles rippling, hearts pumping to the max, tracked by cinematographer Dean Semler’s cameras whizzing through the blurry underbrush. (Sheigh Crabtree reports on those cameras in the LAT on Sunday.)

Gibson wanted to film a chase movie, close to the ground, and that’s exactly what he did. Some scenes make us gasp at their audacity and beauty—there’s a moment when the sky turns dark and our exhausted hero turns to see the flash of his pursuers’ torches in the forest, moving relentlessly toward him. The cameras go everywhere: over the river, through the trees, under the water.

But Gibson is compelled to go too far, sometimes ludicrously. He removes pumping hearts from heaving chests, lops off sacrificial heads and bounces them down the Mayan Temple steps. Blood spurts out of an artery at a 90 degree angle. Much of the mayhem and carnage is hard to take. One can argue for realism, but on the other hand, the many strokes of luck that spare our young hero’s life—and we very much want him to live—stack up a tad implausibly.

Apocalypto recalls John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (without any English-speaking white people) in the way Gibson takes us back to an exotic ancient culture. It also has the atavistic violence of the Indian films Black Robe and The Fast Runner. Apocalypto is unpredictable. Even Green. (”I’m no tree hugger,” Gibson insisted to EW.) The message seems to be: don’t mess with Mother Nature, or she will kick your ass.

Dare I say it? The movie could nab an Oscar nom or two. Maybe Cinematography, like The Passion of the Christ, which also earned noms for Makeup and Original Score. If Gibson hadn’t misbehaved, it might have been more.

Here’s Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. And here’s THR’s Kirk Honeycutt.

Happily, it looks like long-time Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman will be staying. The Sun’s Nathan Lee makes a strong new addition to the film staff. Here’s Stu Van Airsdale’s in-depth look at the behind-the-scenes machinations at the once and future film coverage at the Voice, now under New Times ownership.

Film critic’s blogs are cropping up faster than kudzu. Check out Philadelphia Inquirer critic Steven Rea’s on movies online, the blog he launched at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. He promises that he’s updating it “on an almost-nanosecond-changing basis.” Best of luck with that.

Borat’s getting 95 % fresh from Rotten Tomatoes! And filling in for Roger Ebert, Jim Emerson gives it four stars. UPDATE: Slate says Sacha Baron Cohen is reviving Jewish vaudeville.

Early reviews are coming in on Babel, and they are polarized: New York, Newsweek and The New Yorker vote thumbs down on Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s complex storytelling, while Time and Rolling Stone give a thumbs up. So far it’s earning a respectable 75 % fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. While Paramount Vantage may be reeling from these body blows—this is a review-driven movie if there ever was one, and Oscar hopes are running high—their big double truck quote ads will still have plenty of respectable reviewers gushing about the movie. And not everyone will read every negative review. The movie itself elicits strong positive and negative responses. Some people feel its powerful current. Others don’t. Count me in the enthusiastically thumbs up column. Especially on a second viewing, the craftsmanship is exquisite. Is it very sincere? Yes. It’s also more emotionally honest and less crudely manipulative than last year’s Crash.

Here’s David Ansen:

For a while, “Babel” holds you in its portentous grip. Iñárritu is a master of gritty textures, unnerving editing and menacing atmosphere, and the actors, both famous and obscure, are all first-rate. But what seemed like an original, searingly personal vision in “Amores Perros” has deteriorated, two films later, into pretentious, overdetermined shtik. Iñárritu and Arriaga no doubt sincerely believe they’re making a serious statement about Humanity—the misunderstandings, cultural blind spots, cruel twists of fate, bad decisions and simple nastiness that escalate into global tragedies—but their fatalism is beginning to look as arbitrary and precooked as any Hollywood formula movie. Instead of selling facile uplift, they’re pushing gloom.

And Peter Travers:

There is no way for a review to encompass the beautifully integrated, soul-searching portrait that Inarritu paints of a world in crisis. Pitt, raw and emotionally bruised, gives his most mature and moving performance to date. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto brings a poet’s eye to the images. Stranded at the Mexican border, a victim of Bush immigration policy, Barraza leaves you shattered. At an ear-busting Tokyo disco, the sound goes dead so we hear only what Chieko hears. Kikuchi is unforgettable, nailing every nuance in her role. Just try to erase the sight of her, standing naked and vulnerable on a high-rise balcony while an uncaring city bustles below. All of Babel is like this – it’s impossible to shake.

From Slate, the critical buzz on The Queen and Flags of Our Fathers Reviews:

By Doree Shafrir (Updated Friday, Oct. 20, 2006, at 1:55 PM ET)

Marie Antoinette (Columbia). The critics are split over Sofia Coppola’s interpretation of the short life of the French queen, played by Kirsten Dunst, though many note the film’s strangely apolitical nature. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott reads meaning into Coppola’s confectionary portrait: “Beneath its highly decorated surface is an examination, touched with melancholy as well as delight, of what it means to live in a world governed by rituals of acquisition and display.” But The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane is less captivated by the film’s unabashed superficiality, noting, “There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense.” In New York magazine, David Edelstein dismisses the film as “basically the story of a little lost rich girl who becomes a party girl who becomes a national disgrace–in an utter vacuum.” Slate’s Dana Stevens takes the strongest stance against Coppola’s version of events. “Just because the film’s heroine has nothing to say about politics, revolutionary or otherwise, doesn’t justify Coppola being similarly dumbstruck.”

Flags of Our Fathers (Paramount). Clint Eastwood’s film about Iwo Jima has left most critics impressed with the 76-year-old director. “He’s doing risky work while his contemporaries retire or, worse, conform,” lauds Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Kenneth Turan, in the Los Angeles Times, is equally impressed with Eastwood, whom he says “handles this nuanced material with aplomb, giving every element of this complex story just the weight it deserves.” Reviewers also note the present-day parallels. The Paul Haggis-penned film “raises pointed questions about how heroes, and wars, are packaged and sold,” writes David Ansen in Newsweek, so “it’s hard not to think his movie is a commentary on today.” But not everyone is as enamored with Eastwood’s work. Premiere’s Ethan Alter dismisses Flags as resembling “one of those dry History Channel documentaries, only with more elaborate re-enactments.” And movie blog Cinematical poo-poohs, “There’s a good 30-minute war movie in Flags of Our Fathers, if you’re willing to sit through another hour and a half of vintage Paul Haggis crybaby-psychobabble to see it.”

Jeff Wells rounds up the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes averages and correctly predicts that Flags will wind up in the Oscar best Picture race.

Oscarwatch lists the top ten best reviewed movies in current release on Metacritic. While this can be an indicator of what the critics may do at year’s end, it’s not an exact reflection of Academy taste. Oscar voters are influenced by critics but they also respond to craftmanship, high-mindedness, spectacle and well-funded PR campaigns that make sure that they see certain movies. Remember Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, Gladiator, Ciderhouse Rules and Chocolat? For example, if Peter O’Toole doesn’t come to Hollywood to make the rounds, his seemingly inevitable Venus nomination might not happen. On the other hand, in a weak year for men, it could happen anyway. The movies on this list that have a shot are The Queen, The Departed, Half Nelson (for Ryan Gosling) and Little Miss Sunshine—and 49 Up for documentary. Also earning a 90 earlier in the year was United 93.
Metacritic:
1 Queen, The 90
2 Departed, The 89
3 Mutual Appreciation 86
4 Half Nelson 85
5 Lassie 84
6 Old Joy 81
7 49 UP 80
8 Gabrielle 80
9 Little Miss Sunshine 80
10 Deep Sea 3D 78

Based on the footage I saw at Comic-Con, one movie I’m really looking forward to, which was tantalizingly shown in Venice and not Toronto, is Alfonso Cuaron’s futuristic thriller Children of Men, starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, which has opened in Blighty to strong reviews (especially for Oscar perennial Michael Caine) and business (it opened number one, with a $6,597 per theater average).
Early reviews: THR. “Based on a novel by British mystery writer P.D. James, the film works both as a thriller and as a satisfying political and social drama,” writes Ray Bennett.
Variety.
Emanuel Levy.
The Brit reviews: “An entertaining and utterly barking vision of the future,” writes The London Times.
“…there is something just so grimly and grittily plausible about the awful world conjured up here, and the full-on urban warfare scenes really are electrifying,” writes <a href="The Guardian.
View London.
Empire Online.
The Daily Mirror.
The BBC.
Time Out interviews Cuaron about shooting the future in London:

“We said: let’s do something like ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ – but in the future. Both this and ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ are road movies, first and foremost. There was also continuity between the two films in the sense that the principle was the same: to make a road movie in which context is as important as character. If you want to be mean, you could say that ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ is a very formulaic film – two guys on the road with a girl, shit happens. It’s the same here: ‘Children of Men’ is a road movie in which a reluctant hero tries to bring a character to safety. You could give that story to Michael Bay. But for me, what was important was the social and political resonance and the context.”

The Steve Zaillian period drama starring Sean Penn as a corrupt southern politician flopped at the Toronto International Film Festival, because it’s a film that was pushed out of last year’s Oscar season for a reason, and because it wears its Oscar hopes on its sleeve. In that context, it disappointed. The critics weigh in today—Metacritic gives a weak 38 ranking, while Rotten Tomatoes goes with a mere 13% fresh:

The WSJ.

The Wash Post.

NYT.

New York’s David Edelstein prefers The Science of Sleep.