Want my prediction for Super Bowl XLI? Colts 20, Bears 17. Don’t care about that? You’re just here for the reviews? Fine, you’re the boss. Below, I catch up with some worthy 2006 movies that snuck in under the wire or unfairly vanished without a trace. And then, there are two albums I’m smacking my forehead I didn’t give enough love to when they were first released.

The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures)

Anybody remember when Matt Damon was dismissed as a lightweight actor? A pretty boy? Nobody hates Good Will Hunting more than I do, but since then he’s rarely stepped wrong – and more often than not, he’s been a real surprise. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ocean’s Eleven, Gerry, Syriana, and the Jason Bourne films reveal a likable performer perfecting a persona – the impressionable young man coming to terms with the terror of adulthood. The Departed seemed like the perfect capper, but now with The Good Shepherd he gives the persona one more twist. Director Robert De Niro and writer Eric Roth have fashioned an intelligent drama about the beginnings of the CIA, and Damon plays the titular idealist who must lose his soul. If that banal storyline makes you roll your eyes, consider how effectively absorbing the finished product is. Much credit must go to Roth’s sharp script, but this is Damon’s movie. He captures a young man standing on the cusp of his full potential, mixing boyish enthusiasm with a hustler’s ambition. You know how the story’s going to end, but you watch to see how Damon will follow it down.

Inland Empire (518 Media Inc./Absurda)

Don’t look to me for reliable David Lynch assessments – my favorite of his movies (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) is universally loathed and my second favorite (The Straight Story) is his most non-Lynchian. This new one? Like with Mulholland Drive, the central story here is teasingly enticing, but soon he wanders into other areas, other themes, other images that grab his attention. And like with Mulholland Drive, the main obsessions are Hollywood and actresses, clinging to your integrity and not turning into a whore. When he sticks to these topics, Inland Empire is terrific – it’s frightening and it’s funny, and you may find it hard to breathe during certain sections. But the side story about Poland? I dunno either, but Lynch’s hypnotic flow makes me want to sit through the whole bewildering thing for another three hours.

The Fountain (Warner Bros. Pictures)

I understand not liking director Darren Aronofsky’s very personal sci-fi romantic drama, but I don’t get the smug dismissal it received in so many quarters. Parallel storylines, shifting time periods, powerfully ruminative score, grand stabs at the metaphysical and poetic – Aronofsky may be one more art-damaged nerd spouting off about the agony of love lost through pretentious metaphors, but he’s a nerd whose beguiling style has only gotten stronger since his assured debut, and, as an added bonus, he’s starting to really love his characters. If Requiem for a Dream was technically skillful but a thematic dead-end – how many times do you need to know that drugs are bad? – then The Fountain is a bracing jump into the unknown. Like Apocalypto (see below), this is the sort of nervy nearly unclassifiable film that studios work strenuously hard to make sure they don’t release, and so when it does happen, it’s worth supporting, especially when the results are so bold. There are embarrassing moments here to be sure. But the sincerity of the endeavor, the beauty of the images, the strength of its beating heart – to treat such an effort with contempt and condescension is to fail to at least try to understand how such a mad work can sneak its way into your soul.

Battle in Heaven (Tartan Video)

When someone tells me that he’s given up on movies – that he no longer gets the same rush and enjoyment out of them – I always think that the person should try seeing a few more foreign films. It’s not that all movies made oversees are inherently superior to Hollywood studio films – it’s just that, because their rhythms are often different than what we get in American movies, they keep us off-balance. I may not like the finished product, but at least I know it’ll push me a little; that unpredictability reconnects me to my younger years when summer movies seemed like the most mysterious, wonderful things in the world. That brief soliloquy leads me to Battle in Heaven, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ latest film, which may not be a great work, but is an interesting one that has stayed with me. Its pieces don’t quite all fit – a kidnapping that goes bad, a man so depressed even his sex fantasies are draped in sadness, a critique of life in Mexico City, a tragic act – but I find myself trying to put them together in my mind. The pieces still won’t go together, which is a failing of Reygadas and his sometimes intentionally antagonistic style. But Battle in Heaven is the sort of movie that makes me sure I’m never gonna give up on the art form.

Apocalypto (Touchstone Pictures)

Only end-of-the-year listmaking could get me into the theater to see it, and even then I figured, sure, it would be pretty violent but I could handle it. I’d like to say that I was surprised – that it added up to more than The New World with bloodthirsty savages – but Mel Gibson’s portrait of the end of a civilization meant to mirror our own is as advertised. Violent, yes, but if you’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you can see its gore coming. As for action-packed, it is, but only in the last half-hour, when you get caught up in its intensity. Gibson has a vision, but he’s never been much of a storyteller, and I don’t think his action set pieces are that amazing. Crude and effective, yeah. But amazing? The only surprise comes at the very end, when he allows a rare moment of grace and subtlety to creep in.

Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Pedigree as far as the eye can see. Oscar-winning actresses, respected director, well-regarded playwright, acclaimed composer, sophisticated production. And what does it leave us with? A laughable psychological thriller where almost no one exhibits normal human behavior. It’s not just that sexual obsession and class issues have been better handled elsewhere – The Talented Mr. Ripley springs to mind, for instance. It’s that the movie that director Richard Eyre is making should be a bitchy, dark delight and the one he ended up with thinks it’s bitchy, dark art. It’s a one-word difference, but it sinks the whole operation, and no amount of furrowed-brow intensity or Philip Glass orchestrations can fool me into thinking otherwise.

The Essex Green, Cannibal Sea (Merge)

Almost 10 months old now, this album makes one critical mistake: It’s so unassuming its poppy sweetness sailed right by me. So thank yearly best-of lists that were more alert than I was to this band’s achievement. It’s more fun to think of Sasha Bell and Chris Ziter as heartbroken kids toiling in some English fishing town – the classic tenor of their tunes feels ancient, weather-beaten. But, no, they reside in Brooklyn, trapped in a mythologized past as profoundly as Colin Meloy. They bite Bob Dylan; they harmonize like fiends. They make my favorite strain of indie rock – "indie" meaning intimate and lovely, not cool and bored with itself.

The Thermals, The Body, The Blood, The Machine (Sub Pop)

John Darnielle fronting a real band, the Mountain Goats taking on the Bible – those are the ideas conjured up by Hutch Harris’ emotional-but-not-emo rock. His voice the untrained wail of a fed-up regular guy, he channels the Pixies while watching the evening news. He wails against God the way only a true believer can, angry but devoted. A bummed-out white guy who’s good with a guitar is nothing new, which even Harris must know. Which is why he’s freakin’ pissed – and why he makes sure he’s much better than simply good with his guitar.