Cautionary Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2006)

Harry Lime in the Third Man tells Holly Martins "in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo - Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance...In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?...The cuckoo clock." Great art stems from turmoil and pain and this movie reflects that paradigm. 2006 has been a year for bleak futures in film exemplified by Inconvenient Truth, Idiocracy, V for Vendetta and now Children of Men. In the early 70s amidst the quagmire of Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the corruption of the Nixon administration the cinema produced Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and THX 1138. Now amidst the quagmire in Iraq, the legitimization of torture, the suspension of habeus corpus, and the corruption of the Bush administration director Alfonso Cuarón has woven a cautionary tale set in 2027 England but the issues at stake could not be more topical. The single take tracking shots drag the viewer by the hair through a world more terrifying than any horror film could conjure. I was riveted by this pre- apocalyptic drama to the very last frame. When the credits rolled I looked at an audience quite literally stunned and silent. I cannot recall another film that delivers such a punch. I felt so raw afterward I had to have a drink. It is without a doubt the best film of 2006.