This was your critic's 21st year of passing judgement on movie releases. The very first notice was for Clint Eastwood's Western Pale Rider, and it's reassuring to know that the last great American icon still has something valid to say about his troubled nation in Flags of Our Fathers. But while Clint remains the same, much else has changed - especially where Hollywood is concerned.

A laudable attempt was made in 2006 to the introspective gravitas that permeated American cinema in the wake of Watergate and the defeat in Vietnam. But Steven Spielberg's Munich, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, Stephen Gaghan's Syriana and Terrence Malick's A New World were too conscious of their duty to appeal to the lowest common denominator (in order to make money) and, thus, lacked the intellectual and emotional depth necessary to provoke reappraisal.

George Clooney's Ed Morrow biopic, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Paul Greengrass's 9/11 reconstruction, United 93, were admirable exceptions. But Hollywood's failure to produce hard-hitting cinema on a par with All the President's Men, Chinatown, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Taxi Driver suggests that the major producers are even more in the grip of the vested interests that control the country's thought processes than they were at the height of the infamously restrictive studio system.

Rather than examining the plight of the world, the multi-nationals controlling the purse strings demanded escapism from it. Consequently, we were bombarded with lacklustre franchise entries like Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men: The Last Stand and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, as well as lame such adaptations as The Da Vinci Code and Miami Vice and utterly redundant remakes as Poseidon, The Omen, The Wicker Man, Marie-Antoinette and All the King's Men.

The latter's heart was in the right place, in seeking to expose declining standards within American democracy. But Hollywood has seemingly lost the knack of producing credible anti-heroes and now has to resort to profiling celebrities with feet of clay, like as Johnny Cash (Walk the Line), Truman Capote (Capote) and George Reeves (Hollywoodland), or superheroes who are ripe for the latest periodic makeover, like the Man of Steel (Superman Returns) and James Bond (Casino Royale).

The latest 007 adventure commendably eschewed digitised effects (wherever possible) and it's to be hoped that the animation industry heeds the lesson, as computer-generated fare like Cars, Flushed Away and Happy Feet has largely been devoid of charm because of the artistic inanity that's built in to its graphic ingenuity.

There were surprises this year, with Snakes On a Plane, The Devil Wears Prada and Borat all doing much better than the critics (particularly Stateside) had predicted. Elsewhere, a shortage of genuinely impressive pictures led to the overpraising of such solid offerings as Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Andrea Arnold's Red Road.

So, what was worth seeing in 2006? Honorable mentions should be made to The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tzameti, Fateless, L'Enfant, Tony Takitani, New York Doll, Thirst, Russian Dolls, Keane, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Pan's Labyrinth, Requiem and Into Great Silence.

But the Top 10 has to be Michael Haneke's thriller Hidden; Marziyeh Meshkini's street kid drama, Stray Dogs; Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's seaside romp, Cockles and Muscles; the documentary trio of Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's Ballets Russes, Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated and David Leaf's The US vs John Lennon; Phil Morrison's small-town charmer, Junebug; Christi Puiu harrowing medical road movie, The Death of Mr Lazarescu; Joaquin Oristrell's riotous Freudian period farce, Inconscientes; and, Jafar Panahi's Offside, a study of female football fans in modern Teheran that was the only decent thing to come out of the World Cup.

What a shame we couldn't include such reissues as I Am Cuba, Brief Encounter, Army in the Shadows, Paris Nous Appartient, Celine and Julie Go Boating, The Innocents, Rebecca, Manhattan, The Fallen Idol, The Wizard of Oz and The Dead - which would make the highlights of any year.retreat from the relentless diet of remakes, sequels and spin-offs, with gay cowboys (Brokeback Mountain) and transsexuals (Transamerica) dominating the award season before the mediocre ensemble drama Crash astonished everyone and won the Oscar for Best Picture. There was even a hint of