Entertainment Weekly names Casino Royale top movie of 2006

Entertainment Weekly columinst Owen Gleiberman has listed the latest James Bond film Casino Royale as the #1 movie of 2006:

1. Casino Royale
It's admittedly a little jarring: Could the best movie of the year actually be the most entertaining movie of the year? Scandalous! How old-fashioned and obvious and déclassé! The beauty of Casino Royale is that it does more than just restore the lustrous excitement of the James Bond series. By reimagining 007 as a volatile human being who confronts every new pleasure and danger — high-flying chases and high-stakes card games; dry-ice flirtation and deadly torture; hell, even ordering a martini — as if it were happening to him for the first time, the film reconnected audiences to the very soul of movie escapism, reviving the primal enjoyment of what action, suspense, and romance feel like when there is something at stake. As 007, Daniel Craig floods the screen with personality the way the old stars did, using his saturnine sexiness, his implosive intelligence, and the silent lone-wolf hunger at his core to turn James Bond into a superagent for our time, a man who's still discovering what his license can win him. Many have asked: Is Casino Royale the greatest Bond film ever? Let's put it this way: It will never be quite as quintessential as, say, Dr. No, the first and (to me) still the finest moment of Bond's Connery/Cold War/Playboy heyday. Yet if Casino Royale isn't a greater Bond film than that, it's a greater movie, period.

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