It may not go down as a great year for movies, but 2005 has certainly been a great year for movies worth talking about. With an unexpected surge of politically provocative films such as Syriana; Good Night, And Good Luck; Munich; Lord Of War; and A History Of Violence, narrative features finally caught up with their documentary counterparts in addressing the issues of the day. At year's end, moviegoers are engaging in animated discussions over oil and gun trafficking, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gay tolerance in Middle America, and the potentially wacky consequences of siring dozens of children. Not wanting to ruffle any feathers, The A.V. Club has hailed Noah Baumbach's funny, sharply observed coming-of-age film The Squid And The Whale as our consensus favorite. Okay, we'd actually be happy to ruffle feathers, but we just really like that movie. And that doesn't mean we excused ourselves from the debate. What follows are the best, the worst, and the most stupefying movies the year had to offer.
NOEL MURRAY
Top Ten
1. The Squid And The Whale
Unlike Noah Baumbach's mannered early comedies, this unflinching dissection of an academic family in decline has the visual immediacy of a French New Wave film or a vérité documentary. It's structured like an especially punchy New Yorker short story, and set in a grimy mid-'80s Brooklyn milieu that's the literati version of squalor. At the center of the story is Baumbach's alter ego, a teenage narcissist whose overanalytical parents have taught him that being an asshole is some kind of heroic act. When he realizes their mistake, he drops from smug surety to blind panic, in ways that are both hilarious and terrifying.
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. Cinderella Man
Journeyman middlebrow craftsman Ron Howard has finally made a great film, combining the themes of Parenthood and Apollo 13 with the visual dazzle of the overrated Oscar-winner A Beautiful Mind. Though Cinderella Man's optimistic boxing hero doesn't dwell on the depression of The Depression, Howard certainly does, making the contrast between the civilized suburbia of the movie's opening scenes and the devastation that follows into an almost post-apocalyptic vision of America in the '30s. But the movie's ultimate message is that hard times are like boxing matches, in that competitors have to have faith that when the bell rings, the punching will stop.
4. Mysterious Skin
5. My Summer Of Love
Though Pawel Pawlikowski's moody love story is funny, heartbreaking, and thoroughly accessible, it's still the kind of movie that's more about how it sounds when a man pulls up a blade of grass than about who that man actually is. The three-way romance—between a Bible-thumper, his bratty sister, and her rich friend—plays out like a Biblical parable, with an Edenic small town having its peace threatened by a snakeskin-clad, apple-eating harlot. But Pawlikowski mainly uses the primal story hooks to pull the audience into a world of cinematic texture. The whole movie has the quality of an unplanned nap on a grassy hill.
6. Caché
7. Kung Fu Hustle
8. Nobody Knows
9. Tony Takitani
10. A History Of Violence
The Next Five
Love springs darn near eternal in movies around the world: In Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron, two bruised young lovers break into strangers' houses, looking for a perfect fit. In Fatih Akin's Head-On, a marriage of convenience becomes an impossible romantic ideal. In Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, an aspiring concert pianist tries to prove himself worthy of the love of thugs and aesthetes alike. In Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, a dour but noble aristocrat wins the heart of an independent-minded commoner. And in Mike Mitchell's Sky High, teenage superheroes fight hormones as well as villains.
Performance Of The Year
Nearly every year, the paucity of good roles for women means there are more praiseworthy performances by actors than actresses. But this year, the quality of top female turns makes up for the diminished quantity. In the leading and supporting categories alike, indelible work was done by actresses Sasha Andres (She's One Of Us), Rachel McAdams (Red Eye), Nathalie Press (My Summer Of Love), Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe) and Maria Bello (A History Of Violence). But the most memorable performance came in Walk The Line, an otherwise hit-and-miss movie. Alongside her co-star Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon brought the romantic struggles of June Carter and Johnny Cash to vivid life, and Witherspoon in particular provided a unique insight into a country-music legend who acted like a ditz onstage but kept a family together through the force of her righteousness.
Overrated
Miranda July's feature-filmmaking debut Me And You And Everyone We Know has an offhanded, "this is a moment in time" quality, and her actors look and behave like people trying not to be self-conscious about the camera pointing at them. July finds a thick streak of prosaic romanticism in her low-rent L.A. suburban milieu, but her emotional range runs from cute to smarmy, and what's missing are recognizable human relationships. Sex comes up a lot in Me And You, but it's exclusively theoretical. July doesn't give her characters depth enough for the audience to imagine them being intimate, or even lusty. They're paper dolls, all of them, and July's the type of annoyingly quirky person who thinks paper dolls should hang in art galleries.
Underrated
Director Curtis Hanson makes a valiant attempt at transforming the artificiality of chick-lit into something more like life with In Her Shoes, which follows the scattered love interests and family members of two mismatched sisters. Hanson arguably gets more out of location shoots than any other contemporary mainstream director, and here he contrasts Philly's lived-in spaces with a Florida retirement community, while framing them both in off-center compositions that emphasize how people talk past each other, not to each other. He takes the episodic, melodramatic material seriously, and films it like shambling '70s-style Cinema Americana—more Five Easy Pieces than Bridget Jones's Diary.
Future Film That Time Forgot
Writer-director Richard Ledes puts enough style into his debut film A Hole In One to suggest that maybe it won't be entirely forgotten, but only if he makes something better someday. On its own terms, A Hole In One is hopelessly nutty, right down to a premise that has Michelle Williams playing the lobotomy-craving moll to gangster crooner Meat Loaf. Intrepid souls who dig it out of the dollar bin a decade from now can look forward to the scene where Meat Loaf sings a jazzy rendition of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" to his hired goons. They shouldn't anticipate much else.
Worst Of The Year
It probably isn't polite to kick a well-meaning documentary like 39 Pounds Of Love, which just wants to tell a nice story about the simple aspirations of a severely handicapped man. But when soft-soap feel-good tripe like this makes the short list for the Academy Awards' Best Documentary category while great films like Grizzly Man, Double Dare, Reel Paradise, and the all-but-unknown Sheriff get overlooked, it's time to get a little cranky.
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