The Best Films of 2005...

2005 was a good year for movies, especially if you knew where to look. There were some surprising discoveries and some surprising disappointments. A number of very good directors made mediocre films and there were some remarkably assured debuts. 2005 has seen primarily two critical darlings, Brokeback Mountain and A History of Violence -- both generally well made and both rather overrated (particularly the cult which has arisen around Brokeback).
I know it was a good year because I have had difficulty reducing my list down to the traditional top 10, therefore I prefer a top 25.

So here it goes...

25. A History of Violence
David Cronenberg's latest is his most conventional and impersonal to date. Yet there is something sly about his willingness to indulge the film's violence thereby exciting bloodlust from the audience, only to later implicate the audience, filmdom, and even himself as he reveals the effects and damage of violence. It's not nearly as good as many think it is, because it's not nearly as good as it thinks it is, but it does have ideas worth expressing.

24. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The latest film about everyone's favorite boy wizard is the best and most imaginative yet in the series. Mike Newell provides visual wit and manages to wonderfully integrate the visual effects with the story. The film introduces some interesting metaphors for growing up as its young cast continues to develop both physically and emotionally. It's also the most morally grounded of the series as Harry is confronted with various tests of character.

23. Land of the Dead
Never content with a mere zombie film, George Romero makes his undead world a biting satire of capitalism with Dennis Hopper at the top of his corporate punching bag. Romero has always been a director whose ideas (however trivial they may be) outweigh his talent as a filmmaker, though this may be his most polished film. He remains, however, the master of horror-as-metaphor.

22. Crash
Paul Haggis' racially themed film has two or three of the best scenes from any movie this year, yet I can't get over the feeling that he must have the impression that every person in Los Angeles is a racist and has nothing to talk about except for that which relates to racial issues. Nevertheless, he manages to get some strong performances from his ensemble cast, particularly the often underrated, Matt Dillon, and he gets his point across however bluntly and even clumsily at times.

21. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Probably the best exorcism film since Friedkin's, director Scott Derrickson manages to effectively blend horror movie scares, with an aesthetic flair (thanks to Tom Stern's wonderful cinematography) and leaves the audience asking themselves what they believe about the existence of the supernatural/demons/God. Unfortunately, at times, his horror movie sensibilities undercut the seriousness of his spiritual inquest.

20. Land of Plenty
Wim Wender's post-9/11 journey of spiritual renewal is a passionate and well-meaning film for today and now. It has an immediacy that may be irrelevant a few years from now, but one can't ignore its current significance. Even if the brief political ramblings are a bit heavy handed, one has to admire his humanism and his love for the characters.

19. Serenity
Joss Whedon's pop sci-fi adventure is certainly one of the most purely enjoyable films of the year. He fills it to the brim with wit, humor, action, and general rascaliness. I'm not the first to claim that Nathan Fillion may have what it takes to claim the mantle held by Harrison Ford for oh so many years.

18. The Holy Girl
This film plays out like a minor miracle in its exploration of teenage sexual awakening combined with spiritual fervor. Lucrecia Martel is a unique visual stylist with slightly offset compositions that encourage the viewer to see her film from an entirely different perspective. Maria Alche has a wonderful and understated naturalness to her performance as Amalia, the film's young heroin.

17. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
George Lucas concludes his epic saga with a bang. Though not without its flaws, it manages to humanize Darth Vader and provides a reasonable motivation for his transition to the Dark Side. Lucas also manages to show that the man who is most responsible for modern special effects is also their chief manipulator. One of the best entries into what is almost certainly the cinema's most accomplished mythology.

16. Last Days
Silently following a drugged out, fading rock star through a lot of non-action straight to the grave might sound both pointless and depressing. Yet with Gus Van Sant's characteristic long, fluid takes, it becomes a haunting meditation of a lost and fractured soul.

15. Melinda and Melinda
Woody Allen, in even his most banal films (this is not one), makes me smile because we have grown so accustomed to his mannerism that you can almost anticipate the joke before it comes. Though Allen was not in this film, his humor was. Here we look at the same story told from two different perspectives: the comic and the tragic. Neither one seems to be the full truth, but when combined, you might get something close to life.

14. Pride & Prejudice
Joe Wright turns in a remarkably assured debut film with this Jane Austen adaptation. It's one of the best "costume films" in recent memory. He gleans excellent performances from his cast, particularly Keira Knightley who is charming as Elizabeth Bennet. He wisely manages to avoid many of the romantic comedy cliche's, and proves a formidably visual stylist through his orchestrations of the ball sequences and his use of the English countryside.

13. King Kong
Peter Jackson may well have tapped into the imagination of this generation. Bold and excessive, Kong throws in the kitchen sink to create in the audience a sense of childlike joy and awe. Whether its a giant ape fighting three T-Rex's or a second rate vaudeville performer doing a dance routine for a giant ape, Jackson finds the action and the emotion. Andy Serkis' work is a revelation.

12. Howl's Moving Castle
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most consistently overlooked great directors working today, perhaps because he is an animator. Yet even while this may not be one of his towering successes, it is still perhaps the most fantastic and imaginative film of the year. He creates an entire world within his film and a protagonist whose goodness rubs off on everyone around her. Unlike most family friendly animations, he doesn't provide "good guys" and "bad guys", but complex characters with motivations and capable of change.

(tie) 11. The White Diamond
This Werner Herzog documentary finds an eccentric aeronautics engineer who is determined to build a small airship that will fly over the rainforrests of Guyana. His vigor is motivated as a kind of penance for his guilt over the death of a friend and colleague years earlier. As with his best films, Herzog takes that magnificent man and his flying machine, and creates spiritual metaphor for transcending the earthly realm.

(tie) 11. Grizzly Man
Another Herzog documentary, this time about bear activist, Timothy Treadwell whose annual foray's into the Alaskan wilderness led to his being eaten by one of the bears. The combination of Treadwell's video tape footage with Herzog's often contradictory narration, at times creates an almost magical effect. The conflicting worldviews presented engages the intellect, and in some of the quieter moments, Herzog points out how mystical it is to capture the wind blowing.

10. Match Point
Woody Allen's latest film is almost certainly one of the darkest films of his career. It is a film about luck, chance, randomness, and the meaninglessness of life. As Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors is able to get away with murder because God does not exist (or, at least he believes God does not exist), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is able to go and do likewise. Wheras in the former, though probably the superior film, exists in a cold, sterile world where God does seem mysteriously absent, for Match Point, in which later scenes takes on elements of Greek tragedy, the meticulousness of Allen's direction undercuts his assertion that the world is governed by chance. As Allen himself is deified in orchestrating the events of his film, therefore they cannot be by chance or luck, so might God's presence be in this world. To see a film is to see a filmmaker, to see a world is to see a worldmaker. Though there may be no justice in this life, with a little luck, there might be in the next.

9. Turtles Can Fly
An equally beautiful and devastating film from Iraq focusing on a group of orphans in a Kurdish refugee camp just before the U.S. invastion of Iraq. It's about the will to survive under extremely harsh circumstances. Its cast of children (many deformed by shrapnel or land mines) are wonderful to watch with their resilience and even contentment.

8. Cache'
Michael Haneke challenges our notions of the nature of film and perception, all while confronting issues of guilt and revenge. We all have our dirty, little secrets, and his bourgeois, Parisian family is no different. Yet as soon as they beginning receiving anonymous video tapes of their everyday activities and they know that they are secretly being watched, they suddenly begin thinking about that one thing that they don't want anyone to find out about. Conflicts erupt and Haneke is almost stubbornly oblique in his refusal to give answers to what it all means.

7. Broken Flowers
Bill Murray is an aging Don Juan looking on his life with nothing to show for it. He receives a letter from an old flame telling him he as a teenage son. He then takes off on a kind of spiritual journey, visiting old girlfriends and evaluating his life through his various romances. This is Jim Jarmusch's finest film to date, mostly because his characters stop talking and begin reflecting.

6. The New World
Just because this may be Terrence Malick's worst film, doesn't mean that it's not still wonderful. Here he tackles the settling of Jamestown and the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas with his typical poetic naturalism. The opening scene is almost painfully beautiful, and no director perhaps ever has had as profound an appreciation for nature and natural settings. His camera observes and captures with a magical poignancy.

5. Junebug
In yet another startling debut, Phil Morrison captures real, normal people. As red state/blue state tensions flare in our world, he focuses on the humanity and eccentricities of his characters. The film solves nothing, but it does honestly portray a part of America that has rarely seen so truthful and loving a depiction. I may well shed tears if Amy Adams doesn't receive and Academy Award nomination for her infectiously enthusiastic performance.

4. Millions
Danny Boyle continues to prove to be a formidable talent of world cinema with his most light-hearted and family friendly film yet. Here we see the poignancy of having what Jesus called "the faith of a child" as a boy with an encyclopedic knowledge of Catholic saints is tested when he receives a "gift from God" in the form of a duffle bag filled with cast. To be cliche, this film is heart-warming, funny, and very human.

3. Munich
Steven Spielberg has made one of the best films of his career in this impassioned dramatization of Middle Eastern politics and the cycle of revenge/violence. In the aftermath of 1972 Munich massacre, Israel reacts the only way they can... by retaliating. Yet, while they may be justified, Spielberg reminds us that by acting when we act like the terrorists, we become them and only perpetuate the problem. It's messy, complex, and his first film in a long time that follows through with the core of its convictions. The final montage brilliantly places the events of the film into startling context.

2. Saraband
Though Ingmar Bergman's final film will never be remembered as one of his finest, it just goes to show that even a mediocre Bergman film is better than almost anything anyone else has to offer. Here his 40+ year relationship with actors Liv Ullman and Erland Josephsson concludes as their silent chemistry is almost palpable. This examination of a broken family, which is an indirect sequel to his Scenes From a Marriage, is penetrating and often painful, yet the final moments in which Ullman speaks directly to the camera as a tear rolls down her cheek has the kind of quiet poignancy that a master like Bergman can finally say goodbye with.

and...

1. 2046
Not only is this the best film of the year, but it may also be Wong Kar-Wai's best film, which also means that it is probably the best film to ever come out of Hong Kong. It is a haunting meditation on lost love, memory, and the inability to escape one's past. Christopher Doyle once again proves why he may be the best cinematographer in the world today with his lush imagery. And in one single moment, when she realizes that she is in love with Tony Leung's playboy-like character, the beautiful Ziyi Zhang outacts every other great performance of this year. Wong's combination of images, music, and voice over allows this to become one of those rare films which begins to take on a life of its own in the viewers head, even as the film is still playing. Wonderful.


Honorable Mentions:

Bad News Bears - Richard Linklater's remake is easily the funniest and best comedy of the year and Billy Bob Thornton is in top form as the boozing coach.

Batman Begins - Christopher Nolan directs one of the best superhero/comic book movies ever. Christian Bale is the complex and human Dark Knight. Though the actions scenes seem strangely out of place in film which does so much to create compelling characters.

Kings and Queen - Half comedy and half tragedy, this French film follows two characters with different demons to overcome and numerous emotional ambiguities along the way.

Nobody Knows - One of the most original coming-of-age stories in recent memories follows four abandoned Japanese children who must learn to take care of themselves.

Oliver Twist - Though disappointing considering how much I love Roman Polanski, it is neverthess a very satisfying Dickens adaptation.

Eros - Three short films one by Wong Kar-Wai, one by Steven Soderbergh, and one by the nearly 100-year-old Michelangelo Antonioni all about eroticism. Though Antonioni's may be painfully inscrutable, as Andrew Sarris put it, "...at this point, I can be content that he knows more about what it means than I do."

Or (Mon Tresor) - An Israeli film which sits and observes as a beautiful teenage girl begins to accept the only path left for her (presumably because of a flawed society) as she attempts to protect her aging, prostitute mother.

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist - Though Paul Schrader's film may be the most theologically challenging horror film since Ferrara's The Addiction, it is painfully marred by an almost aesthetic indifference.

Red Eye - Though a very conventional thriller, it also represents the consummation of Wes Craven's career in which his heroin retains her humanity by refusing to become the killer at the end.

Kontroll - Hangarian film which journey's through one man's personal hell as represented by the Budapest subways system.


Unfortunately, this list isn't as authoritative as I might like it to be because I haven't yet seen all of the noteworthy films that I was interested in, therefore, as I watch more films from this year, I may periodically update this list.

The following are films that I have yet to see:

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Good Night and Good Luck
Capote
March of the Penguins
Nine Lives
The Weather Man
The World
Cafe Lumiere
Paradise Now
The Weeping Meadow
Wheel of Time
The Best of Youth
Pulse