I do not toss around praise lightly, but Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is the best movie of 2006. It is the best dystopian movie since Blade Runner, the most pitch-perfect juxtaposition of detail since I don’t know when (maybe Jacques Tati’s Play Time), the most rugged and bone-crunching depiction of war violence since Saving Private Whitey, a film with more balls than that cinematic castrato Quentin Tarantino will ever have in his entire oeuvre, who is a pansy and an assclown and an overgrown adolescent in comparison to Alfonso Cuarón. Cuarón has guts, intelligence, and an innate no-bullshit instinct I haven’t seen on the screen since Samuel Fuller. It is something of a miracle that such a brilliant film was made from a humdrum P.D. James potboiler I read years ago. But Cuarón has done it. This is The Battle of Algiers for the present day, cast deceptively in a future setting. Its terrifying possibility is that the world we see on teevee will become our world and it has the temerity to shake us out of our complacency.

The film is consummately acted, meticulously staged and photographed. Even Clive Owen is used in ways that we haven’t quite seen him in before, teetering between vigilant and vulnerable, ready to crumble like a disused salt shaker into the smoldering hell surrounding him.

It is not an easy movie to watch, but it is cinema personified. The Mexicans know what they’re doing. They have given us three brilliant films in 2006 (Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel being the other two). If Hollywood is wise (oh one can dream!), they will give these men the keys to the kingdom. But it is Children of Men that has the emotional heft: alternating between joy and horror and surprising us again and again with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transitions carried out in continuous long takes. It does not insult its audience. It presents us with an apocalyptic situation without explanation, much as Night of the Living Dead frightened in 1968, and it allows us to connect the dots with revelations imploding in our heads hours after viewing the movie. That it presents nightmares without skimping out on hope is no small feat. Other dystopian movies present characters who are as miserable as the settings. Not Children of Men, which is cynical, but there’s always room for Jello (or, at least, Michael Caine’s Scooby snacks).

I’m a huge fan of the late underrated director Lindsay Anderson, best known for his remarkable trilogy if…, O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital (the first two are masterpieces and unavailable on DVD, a telling sign that the DVD format is inefficient at rectifying the gaping holes in film history, preferring such solid holiday sellers as Full House: The Complete Fifth Season). Lindsay Anderson, perhaps unable to get work in the 1980s, was reduced to helming puff pieces like Wham! In China: Foreign Skies. What I didn’t know was that, earlier this year, an archive of Anderson’s papers revealed the great director’s true intentions. Apparently, Anderson made a documentary showing the clash of Wham’s management with Chinese bureaucracy, hoping to show how Western values had an effect on China. Of the film, Anderson noted that it was made under “arbitrary orders from George Michael, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about …a young millionaire with an inflated ego. I was struck by his total disinterest in China. His vision only extends to the top 10.”

I wonder if Anderson was inspired enough by Jean-Luc Godard’s fascinating 1968 documentary, Sympathy for the Devil, which juxtaposed the Rolling Stones against a study of the revolutionary in Western culture, to make a similar film involving Wham.

[UPDATE: More information from the University of Stirling: “At the start of 1985 he had just returned from Washington DC where he had directed a troubled production of Hamlet which was plagued with problems and closed after a short run…..In a letter to a friend written in January 1986 he explained that he undertook the Wham! project ‘in a spirit of curiosity. Curiosity about China and curiosity about the odd confrontation of China and Wham! – and even a certain curiosity, not very great, about the phenomenon of Wham! itself.'” Also of interest: Anderson’s letter to the crew after Wham pulled him from the project. George Michael and Sony Music hold the rights to Anderson’s version and have prevented it from being seen.]

[UPDATE 2: Amazingly, someone has collected the whole of if.. on YouTube: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight (this segment has a corporal punishment long take with incredible blocking), Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven and Part Twelve.]

I’ll take a page from the Black Market Kidneys playbook and unapologetically pilfer the Gray Lady’s idea. Here are five comedies I would take to a desert island:

1. Our Hospitality: I’ve had countless arguments with film geeks over whether this great Buster Keaton film can be constituted as a classic. And it really boils down to this: your heart either pumps along to the four ventricles behind this film or it doesn’t. Sherlock, Jr. is certainly Keaton’s technical masterpiece. The General is the Keaton’s photographic masterpiece. But, if I had to pick among the three great Keaton films, it would be this one. If only for the great sequence in which Keaton is trying to keep inside the house to avoid being shot and the dog that follows Keaton across the country.

2. After Hours: This is Scorsese’s comedy masterpiece, a woefully misunderstood film that is nothing less than a Candide-like dissection of America, where connecting with others is hindered by people who are ensnared by their own cultural fixations and violence is sometimes the only way out. Is Griffin Dunne really the normal one? Or does his yuppie contentment trigger the madness around him? I’ve never tired of this film, which can be viewed as a deranged laugh riot or a scathing allegory.

3. O Lucky Man! And while we’re on the subject of Candide, I’d be remiss if I didn’t dig up Lindsay Anderson’s great three-hour epic. I’m not certain if O Lucky Man! qualifies completely as a comedy, but it certainly has many funny and fucked up moments. I’ve yet to meet a single American who has loved this film as much as I have, but I’d certainly count this in the top five.

4. The Rules of the Game: Of course, if you’re on a desert island and you’re on a fish and pineapple diet, Renoir’s indictment of the upper class, showing the utter folly of hubris and manners, is mandatory repeat viewing. That way, in the event that you do get rescued, you can remind yourself how not to be self-indulgent.

5. Monkey Business (1931): This is certainly a funny film featuring the criminally underrated Zeppo Marx. But the reason it’s on this list is for educational purposes. There are valuable lessons here on how to sneak aboard an ocean liner. And such a skill set might come in handy, should you manage to escape the island. (I should note that if there was a sixth choice, the fantastic 1952 film Monkey Business directed by Howard Hawks, entirely unrelated, would most certainly be on here.)