AP / Francois Duhamel

It has been a heady year at the movies, both nationally and locally. Three films that had been filmed in Rhode Island in 2006 — Underdog, Evening, Dan in Real Life — opened. All three had glittery Rhode Island premieres. But the response to the first two films was underwhelming; Dan in Real Life received mostly good reviews and a respectable audience turnout.

Yet for all the hoopla they received, the three films were overshadowed by two locally made documentaries — Buddy, Cherry Arnold’s comprehensive look at the life and times of former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., and You Must Be This Tall: The Story of Rocky Point Park, David Bettencourt’s sentimental trip to the once famous amusement park that was flattened for new development. Both films were booked into some of the state’s biggest theaters and drew crowds of nostalgia buffs.

The box office slump that hit the nation’s theaters two years earlier was declared over, thanks to huge summer returns on such films as Spider-Man 3, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Hollywood rejoiced … until autumn came along to throw water on the bonfire. But big openings at the end of the year for films such as I Am Legend and Alvin and The Chipmunks promised that happy days might be here again.

Hundreds of movies opened during the year. Some were so haunting that key scenes linger in the memory — Evening, Blades of Glory, Into the Wild, Gone Baby Gone, Enchanted, Waitress, Hairspray, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Others were so ephemeral that I can barely remember what they were about only months (weeks even) after seeing them — Hitman, I Think I Love My Wife, Catch and Release, Rush Hour 3, Because I Said So.

Sifting through all of them, it was relatively easy coming up with selections for my 10-Best list. Going through a small mountain of titles that were candidates for my 10-Worst list proved to be a more difficult task.

But here are the ones where I felt at the end that my time in the dark was not misspent:

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Johnny Depp, one of our most inventive, risk-taking actors, teamed again with director Tim Burton for another outrageous turn in this blood-soaked Stephen Sondheim musical about a revenge-seeking, driven-to-madness barber in 1890s London who slit the throats of his customers and turned them into meat pies. Not for the squeamish, Depp and Burton captured the dark tones of Sweeney Todd, a brooding piece in which even the animated opening credits dripped blood.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Eighty-three-year-old director Sidney Lumet showed he could dance rings around younger filmmakers in this high-octane thriller about a pair of estranged, down-on-their-luck brothers who join forces to solve their money problems by pulling a pushover robbery at a jewelry store. They know all the ins and outs of the place, because the store belongs to their parents. But, of course, the “perfect crime” begins to go woefully wrong in this twisty crime drama. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke were perfect as the larcenous brothers who found themselves up to their necks in trouble in a film where Lumet played games with the timeline, but always kept us on the edge of our seats.

Into the Wild

Youthful idealism, the call of the wild and the lure of the wide open West combined to create tragedy for a young man who burned all his bridges and headed for the open road to Alaska in hopes of living out his fantasy of living off the land … with the help of a book called Edible Plants. Sean Penn’s episodic, always engrossing film is based on the real-life exploits of Christopher McCandless who, in the early 1990s, only days after college graduation, shucked his old life and headed West. Despite being a film about a fool who throws over everything for nothing, Into the Wild roared along with its mix of thrilling adventures and enough colorful characters to fill two Mark Twain novels.

Michael Clayton

George Clooney played a “fixer” for a big law firm, the guy who rode in to sweep up problem details for corporate clients, bending the law more than a little to suit them. But when one of his dear partners becomes seemingly unhinged and switches sides upon learning that the drug company his law firm has been representing in a long court battle is in the wrong, Clayton begins worrying about the underhanded tactics, including murder, that are sometimes employed to win a case. Tony Gilroy’s film is a suspenseful, seat-gripping meditation on ethics. Tilda Swinton is terrific as the drug company director who stops at nothing to protect her corporate interests.

No Country for Old Men

Although the film’s ending melts away into something that doesn’t quite tie all the script’s loose ends neatly, up to then Joel and Ethan Coen’s movie was sheer cinematic bliss. It revolves around a ruthless psychopath who is relentlessly searching for a missing satchel full of drug-deal loot that has been snatched by a stranger who is at the end of his rope and believes the money will solve all his problems. But it only marks the beginning of his terror. Heart-stopping tension, unforgettable images and squirming hold-your-breath moments, as the crazed killer gets closer to his goal, were the hallmarks of this thriller.

Hairspray

High hair, bubblegum rock ’n’ roll, integration and John Travolta in a house dress were the unlikely set of ingredients that set this toe-tapping screen version of the stage musical based on John Waters’ 1988 film aglow. A chubby teenage girl sparked the action when she finally gets a spot on a 1962 Baltimore bandstand TV show, then sets out to integrate it. With its rousing musical numbers and Travolta surprising one and all by “becoming” overstuffed Edna Turnblad, Hairspray was a joy from beginning to end.

Enchanted

With rats helping a Cinderella-like character scrub toilets and the heroine popping out of a Times Square manhole, this live-action, modern-day tweaking of Disney cartoon classics delighted both children and grownups. It began in a cartoon fairy tale world, then jumped to glittery Manhattan where an almost-princess was pursued by a wicked queen’s murderous henchman, her fairy tale prince-in-waiting and a lonely attorney who turned out to be her real Prince Charming. A wise-guy chipmunk, somersaulting construction workers and a poisoned apple were some of the ingredients that kept this fantasy soaring.

You Must Be This Tall: The Story of Rocky Point Park

Rhode Island documentary filmmaker David Bettencourt brought Rocky Point Park, the state’s favorite summertime playground since the 1840s, back to vibrant life in this nostalgic sentimental journey. Although the sad destruction of the park at the end was inevitable, Bettencourt used archival photos, paintings and old home movies coupled with historical footnotes and anecdotes provided by people who worked there and people who visited every year to give us a comprehensive look back at the way it was (and we were). Why, you could almost taste the chowder and clam cakes from the Shore Dinner Hall once again.

Knocked Up

Walking a thin line between raunch and romance, this tale of a woman who became pregnant following a one-night stand and decided to get to know her baby’s father along the route to the delivery room, was often hilarious. Some were offended by the raciness and boldness of the plot, but Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen charmed as the surprised about-to-be mother and the reluctant, goofily inept father-to-be who sets out to change his childish ways and, miraculously, grows up before our eyes. In the end, Knocked Up turned out to be something very strange: a racy movie with a pro-life message.

Gone Baby Gone

Ben Affleck has had his ups and downs as an actor. But he was a winner behind the camera with this tense film that began as a hunt for a 6-year-old girl kidnapped from her Dorchester, Mass., home, then took off in entirely new directions before finally winding up where it began. Ben’s brother, Casey, scored, too, as the in-over-his-head private detective hired to help find the missing girl, sifting through the seamier characters of Boston in his search. Ben Affleck staged several thrilling scenes to keep the Adrenalin flowing as the rug was constantly pulled from under the audience.

Almost made-its include El Violin, a tense Mexican film about rebel farmers hiding weapons from a repressive government that was shown too briefly at this year’s Providence Latin American Film Festival; La Vie en Rose, the tragic biography of Edith Piaf; The Namesake, Mira Nair’s screen version of Rhode Island-raised Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel about Indian immigrants trying to acclimate themselves to American life; Juno, about a pregnant teen who takes the future into her own hands; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (opening here soon), a life-affirming film about a paralyzed man who painstakingly dictates a book by blinking his eyes when an assistant says the letters he needs for each word; and two Iraq-based documentaries — Body of War, about a severely wounded soldier who returns to the States to take on President George W. Bush’s war policies, and the provocative No End in Sight.

Along with the good came the bad. It would have been easy to fill my 10-Worst list with a bunch of cheesy low-budget horror films. Instead, however, I chose films that attracted stars and big budgets to scripts that must have sounded promising on paper. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, something went drastically, dreadfully wrong.

Reign Over Me

Adam Sandler tried and failed to expand his dramatic horizons in this grim film about a man whose wife, three young daughters and even the family dog perished when their plane crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Except for a surprising and very sudden epiphany during a late weepy moment, Sandler played a one-note character: bedraggled, slack-jawed and aimless, who dragged himself along as though walking in a fog. Sandler’s fans, rightfully, stayed away in droves.

Feast of Love

A top-notch cast — Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Selma Blair, Jane Alexander, Fred Ward — were left high and dry in this heavy-handed melodrama about several couples who are twisted and turned every which way but loose by the whims of love in Robert Benton’s film. Kinnear played a clueless coffee shop owner who kept falling in love with the wrong woman, not realizing for an instance that Wife Number 1 was a lesbian or that Wife Number 2 was in the middle of a torrid affair that she didn’t want to end. This tangled web of a movie was often so over the top that it was inadvertently hilarious.

Number 23

Unfortunately for Jim Carrey, his dramatic muse struck again, in this dud about a man whose obsession with a strange, unfinished book and with the number 23 fueled the plot. The film jumped between the man’s annoying obsession with the book and passages from the book, which were played out on screen to jarring effect. As Carrey’s character grew increasingly frantic, and increasingly out of his mind, rather than winning sympathy, he and the movie became unbearable.

Shoot ’Em Up

The ultimate victim for this splatterfest was the audience. Clive Owen starred as a mysterious stranger who tried to save a pregnant woman from a murderous gang, delivering her baby between gunshots and even cutting the umbilical cord with a well-aimed bullet. It sounds like fun, but soon he was on the run with the infant whose mother was killed in the crossfire, joining up with a prostitute who went on the run with them, fleeing a never-ending army of killers. Paul Giamatti played their leader as more buffoon than terrorist and the film never developed beyond comic book pretensions. At one point Giamatti’s character explained that “Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.” Shoot ’Em Up proved him dead wrong.

Grindhouse

The cheesy horror-hot rod movie double features that were the staple of rundown drive-ins in the 1970s influenced this double-feature offering. Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, was a homage to back-road hot rod movies where tough women, cruel men and lots of attitude met behind the wheel of muscle cars. There were two demolition derby-style car chases, although most of the 90-minute film was deadly dull, focusing on two sets of foulmouthed women sitting around chatting about sex and drugs. Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror was a knock-off of Night of the Living Dead in which a secret military operation went haywire, unleashing a virus that gave its victims ugly, pulsating boils before turning them into flesh-eating monsters. Many film critics thought Grindhouse was cheekily clever, but audiences knew better and stayed away.

Mr. Brooks

Kevin Costner decided to change his aw-shucks, good-guy image by playing a well-respected businessman-philanthropist who gets his kicks from murdering strangers — all presented in grisly, graphic detail. The contrived and convoluted script, full of coincidences and off-the-wall surprises, might have been played as a comedy of errors. Instead, it was played straight, making it a calamity of errors.

The Ten

A solid cast — including Liev Schreiber, Winona Ryder, Jessica Alba, Oliver Platt, Paul Rudd and Famke Janssen — were stranded by an unfunny script in this offbeat spin on the Ten Commandments. One character fell out of an airplane without a parachute at the start and spent the rest of the movie stuck head and shoulders in the ground. In the Thou Shalt Not Murder segment, a surgeon deliberately left scissors in a woman’s stomach as “a goof.” When she died, no one was laughing, least of all the audience. The Ten is a perfect example of a script that must have sounded a lot funnier in the reading than in the final execution.

Hot Rod

Saturday Night Live performer Adam Samberg tried to crack into the movies, as so many SNL stars do, and failed miserably, as so many SNL stars do. In Hot Rod he played a naïve simpleton who kept trying — and failing — to win the respect of his belittling stepfather by becoming a daredevil movie stuntman along the lines of Evel Knievel. Unfortunately, the stunts, which included jumping his moped across a municipal swimming pool, were lame, as was the entire painful experience of the movie.

I Think I Love My Wife

Chris Rock directed and starred in this tedious exercise about a supposedly bright and very successful investment banker who turned into a clueless schnook, treading closer and closer to adultery because of his inability to say no to an old flame who turned up looking for help in finding a job. The audience, or at least the few who saw I Think I Love My Wife, was way ahead of the dunderheaded, blind-eyed banker in realizing that his old girlfriend was a manipulator, even as the film got stuck in a rut.

Rocket Science

This interminable film about a stammering boy with an unhappy home life who is encouraged by the girl of his dreams to join the high school debating team had all the ingredients for an underdog movie. But the boy, played by Reece Daniel Thompson, was not only awkward but unsympathetic and the film’s premise unlikely. Director Jeffrey Blitz, who’d won acclaim five years earlier with his spelling bee documentary, Spellbound, loosely based the script on events in his own life. One can only hope this movie proved therapy for him.

Movies in contention for the 10-Worst list included Hilary Swank in The Reaping, a 10-Plagues of Egypt plot set in a Louisiana swamp; Diane Keaton as an overbearingly meddlesome mama in Because I Said So; Jennifer Garner as a woman discovering uncomfortable things about her late fiancÉ’s past in Catch and Release; Jane Fonda as the stern grandma who tries to straighten out granddaughter Lindsay Lohan (fat chance) in the dysfunctional family drama Georgia Rule; the nutty romantic entanglements of The Jane Austen Book Club; the nearly plotless Rush Hour 3.

Well, better luck next year.

mjanuson@projo.com