A QUOTE for the year in movies: "Honesty is not synonymous with truth." That's Vera Farmiga's Madolyn in that two-hour-plus game of liar's poker, The Departed. Like that Scorsese film, 2006's cinema played out as a liar's carnival. Who was the most popular film hero of the year? Probably Capt. Jack Sparrow, no fan of the truth himself. ("Hello? Pirate.")

In the Top 10 films of the year, as well as in many other noteworthy entries, we see a roster of pranksters, double agents, spinmeisters and illusionists. Perhaps stories about liars are natural for cinema, which is itself a lie—really, a blank screen eclipsed by a speedy procession of still images. But perhaps this year's special emphasis also reflects a society in which truth is so valuable that it is rationed.

Among filmmakers we see a growing cynicism, reacting to lies in all their forms—lies of omission, lies of exaggeration and, of course, bald-faced, breezy, smiling lies. If the movies of 2006 celebrated liars, it never exalted them as much as public life did. "Hello? Politician," as Capt. Jack might say if he were kicked upstairs.

My picks for the best of 2006 are in boldface and in no particular order; they include a couple of films that didn't open in the valley.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu The con man of the year, an ersatz Kazakh named Borat Sagdiyev, proved that subtitles don't have to sink a film's chances, and medical shows are as popular now as they've ever been. So even though this film had "death" in the title, and even though it was in Romanian, local exhibitors should have taken a gamble and shown it. One finds a shock of recognition in the night-long effort of a dying man to get to the hospital. Anyone who has burned with exasperation trying to outwit their HMO might find some solace in the story of the martyrdom of St. Lazarescu.

Brick Re-engineering film noir for the age of the pastel-hued, morose indie movie: That was Rian Johnson's task. And he created a movie every bit as solid as its title. It beats out the fun but overstuffed The Departed, Soderbergh's well-cast but punchless The Good German and De Niro's foggy The Good Shepherd: all similar cavalcades of deceivers built on the foundation of film noir. Johnson's relocation of Dashiell Hammett terrain to a modern high school was worth seeing several times, just to untangle the alibis and double-talk.

Notes on a Scandal And speaking of revisits to the classics: How about this needle-fine female (Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett) variation of Strangers on a Train? As a study of dissembling, hypocrisy and scheming, it's worthy of Richard III (and note the king's portrait glimpsed onscreen on a school bulletin board).

Thank You for Smoking O, rare Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart). What a captivating artist of distortion you are. What a living cautionary tale to the credulous, who have been taken in by your colleagues in the well-paid art of bullshitting.

The Queen Very funny, with Helen Mirren as her majesty, engaged in an effort to ignore the 20th century. And very instructive in how to triangulate a potential political calamity, in those moments where the public suddenly shows its rage at government mulishness.

Children of Men This film shares a little bit with the above. The hero, Theo (Clive Owen), is caught between lying terrorist revolutionaries and a scheming, lethal government sometime in the near future; the story may have some resonance to those who want neither Osama nor Bush.

Pan's Labyrinth This Goya-themed fantasy, set during the ascendancy of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, is a story of a similar fork to the one in Children of Men: a little girl, caught between the panicked world of Franco and the arbitrary laws of the Underworld.

The Prestige A pair of magicians engage in a war of violent deception. While this is an entertainment, never—not even in Orson Welles' day—has there been such a disturbing look at the ruthlessness of magicians.

Dave Chappelle's Block Party Chappelle has been known to tell a few lies onstage. More specifically, the scenes of rural Ohio combat the lie that the Red States are places of no culture and no tolerance.

An Inconvenient Truth The title says it all. It was a very inconvenient year for truth and truth tellers.

Runners-up: Little Children, Three Times.

I HAVE LESS appetite for cooking up a worst-of list than ever, mainly because the year in film was considered by a number of critics I know as the worst in memory. Even the titles seemed to be telling people to keep their distance: How to Eat Fried Worms, I Like Killing Flies—and apparently, there was a film pathetically titled See This Movie, to which the public replied, resoundingly, "No."

There was a time when I tried to see every movie ever made, but life is short, so I can't weigh in on such nonpareils as Grandma's Boy, Big Momma's House II and the grimly visaged Little Man, said to be the most horrendous film ever to carry sprockets.

However, supposedly A-list movies like My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Lady in the Water and Lucky Number Slevin reportedly had theater janitors sweeping up piles of bloody corneas, self-ripped by patrons who preferred a life of blindness to one more instant of the film in question. If Marie Antoinette had gone on for another few minutes, who is to say I wouldn't have taken Oedipus' way out?

Finally, a note from the past on the future of movies: "And if you foresee how few years remain for the grandest prospect for a major popular art since Shakespeare's time dissolves into the ghastly gelatinous nirvana of television, I think you will find the work of this last or any recent year, and the chance of any sufficiently radical improvement within the tragically short future, enough to shrivel the heart. If motion pictures are ever going to realize their potentialities, they are going to have to do it very soon indeed. "The passage, printed in Phillip Lopate's 2006 book American Movie Critics, comes from critic James Agee's film wrap-up for 1944. Replace the comment about television with "podcasts," and it sums up the danger of cinema being reduced to "downloadable content," gazed over by a distracted watcher as he walks from his car to his classroom.

Under such circumstances, only the most glib talking-head, or the most violent image, can survive. Anything that's really cinema—that's subtle, that builds with anticipation or tells a story with understatement—is in danger of being literally lost in the shuffle.

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