There’s a particular kind of shock that hits when you realize a movie you still think of as “recent” has quietly slipped past the two-decade mark. It happens every year, but 2026 feels like a especially rough one for anyone who came of age watching DVDs in a living room rather than streaming on a phone. Below are six films from 2006 that have officially aged into their twenties, and a look back at why they still hold up.
The Departed
The Departed premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre on September 26, 2006, and was released on October 6 by Warner Bros. Pictures in the United States. Martin Scorsese’s Boston crime saga, based on the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, brought together Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson in a story of dueling moles inside the police and the mob. A critical and commercial success, the film grossed $291.5 million on a $90 million budget, and receiving acclaim for its direction, performances, screenplay and editing.
What really cemented its place in film history came the following spring, when it finally gave Scorsese the recognition many felt was long overdue. At the 79th Academy Awards, The Departed won Best Picture, Best Director, along with awards for its screenplay and editing. Twenty years later, the film’s rat-a-tat dialogue and Boston grit still feel sharp rather than dated, which is more than you can say for most crime thrillers of that era.
Casino Royale
Bond fans were skeptical when the news broke that a blond, relatively unknown actor named Daniel Craig would be taking over the tuxedo. The film premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square on 14 November 2006, and was theatrically released first in the United Kingdom on 16 November, and in the United States a day later. The reboot stripped away the gadget-heavy excess of the Pierce Brosnan years and gave audiences a rawer, more grounded spy built around brutal fight scenes and a genuinely gripping poker table showdown.
The gamble paid off in a big way. It was the 4th-highest grossing film of 2006, and was the highest-grossing installment to the James Bond franchise until Skyfall surpassed it in November 2012. Two decades on, Casino Royale is still widely regarded as one of the best entries in the entire 007 catalog, and it’s the film that essentially rewrote the formula for how modern spy movies get made.
Little Miss Sunshine
This scrappy indie comedy about a dysfunctional family road-tripping across the Southwest for a children’s beauty pageant became one of the biggest sleeper hits of 2006. Shot on a modest budget, it turned into a Sundance sensation before landing distribution deals that eventually pushed it into wide theatrical release later that year. The film’s ensemble, including Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, and a young Abigail Breslin, gave it an emotional honesty that resonated far beyond the arthouse crowd it was expected to reach.
It went on to earn multiple Academy Award nominations, including a win for Alan Arkin’s supporting performance as the foul-mouthed grandfather and another for the original screenplay. What’s stuck with audiences since isn’t just the humor, but the film’s gentle insistence that failure and dysfunction don’t have to be the end of the story. Two decades later, its yellow VW van remains one of the more recognizable images from mid-2000s cinema.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro’s dark fairy tale, set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in the years following the Civil War, blended horror, fantasy, and political allegory into something that felt unlike anything else released that year. The film follows a young girl who escapes the brutality of her stepfather’s regime by retreating into an underground fantasy world populated by unsettling creatures. Its practical effects and creature design, particularly the now-iconic Pale Man, have aged remarkably well compared to the CGI-heavy fantasy films of the same period.
The film picked up three Academy Awards for its technical craft and remains one of the most acclaimed foreign-language films of its decade. Del Toro has continued to reference and revisit the themes of Pan’s Labyrinth throughout his later career, and the film is frequently cited as the clearest expression of his artistic sensibility. Twenty years on, it still gets taught in film classes as a masterclass in blending genre storytelling with historical weight.
The Devil Wears Prada
Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Miranda Priestly, a thinly veiled stand-in for a real-life fashion magazine editor, became instantly quotable and endlessly meme-worthy long before memes were really a cultural fixture. Anne Hathaway starred as the reluctant assistant thrown into the high-pressure world of fashion journalism, and the film’s mix of comedy and workplace anxiety struck a chord with audiences navigating their own early career struggles. The costume design alone, overseen by Patricia Field, turned the film into a lasting reference point for fashion on screen.
Streep earned an Academy Award nomination for the role, adding to a career that already had plenty of accolades but few performances quite this widely beloved by casual audiences. The film’s success also helped cement a mini-boom in fashion-adjacent films and shows throughout the following decade. Even now, its lines get recycled constantly online, which says something about how well the writing has aged compared to other office comedies from the same era.
Cars
Pixar’s tale of a hotshot race car learning humility in a forgotten Route 66 town didn’t land with critics quite the way earlier Pixar films had, but it found an enormous and enduring audience elsewhere. The film’s real legacy turned out to be commercial rather than critical, spawning a merchandising empire that reportedly became one of Disney’s most lucrative outside of the princess line. Kids who grew up obsessed with Lightning McQueen toys are now adults, which is its own small reminder of how much time has passed.
The film also holds a somewhat bittersweet place in Pixar history as one of the last projects closely shepherded by voice actor Paul Newman before his death two years later. Two sequels followed in the years after, extending the franchise well past what anyone expected from what was originally seen as a more modest, old-fashioned Pixar effort. Twenty years later, the film’s nostalgia for classic American highway culture feels almost prophetic given how much attention that same nostalgia gets today. These six films represent just a small slice of what 2006 delivered, a year that turned out to be unusually stacked with movies that have held up rather than faded into obscurity. Whether it’s the crime drama grit of The Departed, the fantasy horror of Pan’s Labyrinth, or the workplace comedy bite of The Devil Wears Prada, each one still finds new audiences decades later. That’s a rare thing for any film, let alone six from the same calendar year.
