The 20 Best Films of 2005

The movies of 2005 posed a lot of compelling questions: What is love? How does one become a superhero? Is violence something inherent inside you? Can murder be morally justified? Will digital replace film? These intriguing queries, along with others revolving around patriotism, interpersonal commitment, and cultural/racial divides made this an exceptional year at the cinema. Some of the more shocking outcomes revolve around the continued dominance of science fiction and fantasy, with horror finally finding its own indisputable artistic merits. History played a major role in many of the year’s best, as did the usual smaller, personal stories of people and their problems. Efficiently balancing the big picture problems of the world — and in one instance, the cosmos — with crispy conceived character, seamless computer technology, and narrative nuance, it was an amazing 12 months at the movies — one that might actually change the way films are made from now on.

20

2046
(dir: Wong Kar-Wai)
If Wong’s previous films have played out with the aching melancholy of a rainy day, then 2046 is the stormy night after. Visions of unrequited love and unfulfilled yearning swirl in the dreamy imagination of Tony Leung’s Mr. Chow, writing serials in the same complex where he met Maggie Cheung’s Mrs. Chan in In The Mood For Love. That the latter was a 1960’s period piece and this is set in the futuristic world of an already advanced Hong Kong is as effortlessly handled as Leung’s apparent aglessness. Into this unlikely backdrop, Wong pours all of his existentialist, isolationist blues and the result is at once fleetingly wondrous and painfully resonant.
Simon Wood Amazon

19

War of the Worlds
(dir: Steven Spielberg)
No doubt about it, Steven Spielberg’s version of HG Wells’ science fiction classic is an intense tour de force. In spite of its title, inspirations, and target audience, War of the Worlds is one of the most mature entries in Spielberg’s oeuvre. Here, the prominent director acknowledges once again how social wounds produced by the horrors of recent historical events tend to remain as part of the human subconscious. Indeed, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is probably one of the most powerful metaphors of 9/11 and the Nazi holocaust ever. As such, this movie really knows how to exploit our current fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Adding to the sense of dejection and despair, and going against current trends and conventions, the nominal hero (played by Tom Cruise) is unreliable, morally ambiguous and ultimately unable to stop the alien menace.
Marco Lanzagorta PopMatters review Amazon

18

Land of the Dead
(dir: George A. Romero)
Was any movie moment cooler this year than when George Romero’s Dead zombies stopped in their gooey tracks to watch the skies explode with fireworks? Never one for subtlety, Romero continued his zombie series with a Patriot Act-bashing story that effectively explored issues of absolute power. The action was thrilling, the plot percolates along perfectly, and the dialogue was some of George’s best. As a zombie movie it has all the right ingredients — vicious slayings, big scares and lots of blood. But it worked, too, as a redemptive tale of citizens taking back the night.
Nikki Tranter PopMatters review Amazon

17

The Squid and the Whale
(dir: Noah Baumbach)
So many slice-of-life movies trip over awkward timelines, forced endings, or an absence of narrative drive. The Squid and the Whale is simply about a family dealing with divorce, yet writer-director Noah Baumbach assembles his vignettes with such precision and lacerating wit that this essentially plotless movie feels more complete than dozens of more traditional stories. Jeff Daniels retreats from likeability as the pompous, wounded father, and Jesse Eisenberg is close on his heels as a worshipful son; somehow, there’s still plenty of empathy to go around. Baumbach is one of film’s best writers — of characters, of recognizable yet idiosyncratic situations, and especially of dialogue — and here directs his own material with immediacy. Sadness and hilarity provide the film’s alternating stings.
Jesse Hassenger PopMatters review Amazon

16

Oldboy
(dir: Chan-wook Park)
Oldboy‘s awe-inspiring premise is reason enough to look at the film: a man is released after 15 years locked in a hotel room and has five days to find out why. The fact that it then finds time to explore vengeance, parenthood and passion, friendship, family, and betrayal makes it even more gruesomely satisfying. It’s so confronting and so superbly pieced together that it’s a near injustice to think of it as a mere film. This is an interactive experience. Let yourself be captivated and you’ll yell and scream and duck and dive right up until the creepy finale. It’s an absolute thrill.
Nikki Tranter PopMatters review Amazon

15

The Upside of Anger
(dir: Mike Binder)
Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) hits the bottle and becomes a right raving bitch when her husband runs off with his mistress. With a life to get back to, four daughters to mentor, and a neighbor (played by Kevin Costner) after something beyond friendship, Terry’s decent into bitterness is challenged at every turn. Still, she does her best to let the world know it’s done her wrong. Though development of Terry’s kids (played by Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Evan Rachel Wood, and Erika Christensen) often falls by the wayside (Binder’s own part in the film comes via gross little subplot that also risks sinking the entire film), The Upside of Anger is emotionally gripping with a love-it-or-hate-it final twist that only highlights how fragile self-perception and understanding can be, especially in times of trauma.
Nikki Tranter PopMatters review Amazon

14

The Devil’s Rejects
(dir: Rob Zombie)
This movie is violent, bloody, cruel, distressing, offensive, and funny: the way a good horror film should be. Rob Zombie’s outstanding sequel to his terrifying House of 1000 Corpses (2003) is a genre hybrid that aptly combines the characteristic elements from the horror, police and road movies. When the police siege an alleged house of horrors trying to impose their brand of social order, the maniacs are forced to flee, expanding their reign of terror across several towns. The result is a cautionary tale that allegorically talks about some of the complexities resulting from the recent military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And of course, the infamous “road kill” scene may well be the single most powerful moment seen on a movie screen during 2005.
Marco Lanzagorta PopMatters review Amazon

13

Kung Fu Hustle
(dir: Stephen Chow)
Stephen Chow is a god of the modern cinema, and I worship at his temple. Combining riotous humour with surreal splendor and amazing action scenes, Kung Fu Hustle blends styles like a spastic tornado in a fashion museum. Part-Keaton, part-Looney Tunes, part-Tarantino, and all genius, Chow brings back a bunch of retired kung fu actors to play a bunch of retired kung fu masters fated to stand against the most powerful triad in town, and then stirs in his own hapless character to mixed effect. Frankly, Chow The Director’s use of Chow The Actor is less than exemplary and actually detracts from the overall quality and integrity of Kung Fu Hustle. But this movie is still so thoroughly entertaining that it really doesn’t matter at all.
Roger Holland PopMatters review Amazon

12

Crash
(dir: Paul Haggis)
Aside from Brokeback Mountain, Crash was the other ambitious and courageous effort of the filmmaking season. With an impressive directing debut by Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, Crash is a film that looks at the racial collisions of several Los Angelenos during a 36-hour period. The film is an amalgam of riveting, exceptional performances from Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, and Don Cheadle, to Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, and Michael Pena. Though not without its flaws, Crash is a spectacular effort. Haggis’s brilliance lies in how he reproduces familiar plot lines such as the use of prejudice in everyday life combined with the tacit acceptance of this fact. Then he flips it all, repackaging the story for contemporary audiences. There is nothing necessarily new about the experiences these characters face but Haggis makes sure we notice each and every one of them.
Courtney Young PopMatters review Amazon

11

Me and You and Everyone We Know
(dir: Miranda July)
In which the very wonderful Miranda July makes a successful transition from performance art to cinema, while exploiting the capital of her earlier work and winning a large shed full of shiny awards along the way. Me and You and Everyone We Know is warm, charming and filled with the utterly unexpected. It sees big things in small people, and poetry in the mundane. And it has a message: “You think you deserve that pain. But you don’t.”
Roger Holland PopMatters review Amazon

10

Capote
(dir: Bennett Miller)
Truman Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) wanted to write the nonfiction book of the decade about a Kansas bloodbath and its perpetrators. Little did he know how cannibalizing the life story of hapless drifter Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) would become its own kind of manslaughter. First time feature director Bennett Miller has crafted a deceptively bare bones parable about an artist’s responsibility to his art versus the cost to his soul, set against a lonely Midwest wilderness and stocked with stand-out performances from Hoffman, Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bob Balaban and Catherine Keener. As austere and merciless as an icewater baptism, and just as difficult to recover from upon completion.
Violet Glaze PopMatters review Amazon

9

Syriana
(dir: Stephen Gaghan)
Critics complain that individual story lines are underdeveloped, but Syriana isn’t meant to be a character study. The politics of Stephen Gaghan’s sprawling oil industry may be maddeningly intricate but, like viewing a Diego Rivera mural, from afar the portrait of self-destructive greed is clear. This film is not an expose, or a conspiracy theory, and we don’t need to give the characters any sympathy. The central story elements (the power struggle between a leader who wants to build up his oil-rich country and one who wants to get rich by playing the corporate puppet) should be familiar to anyone with knowledge of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Latin America for the past 40 years. If the film doesn’t add any new information to this abomination, the dark humming portent at its closing — that this will not end until we’ve swallowed ourselves whole — is still powerfully conveyed.
Michael Buening PopMatters review Amazon

8

The Constant Gardner
(dir: Fernando Meirelles)
This year’s best movie for grown-ups, The Constant Gardner is a throwback, in the nicest possible way, to the cinema of the ’70s. An ultimately heartbreaking romance wrapped up inside a well-constructed and credible political drama, Fernando Meirelles’s movie is hardly a thrill-a-minute rollercoaster ride of explosions, shoot-outs and smug one-liners. But it is graced with exceptional performances from both Ralph Fiennes and the lovely Rachel Weisz, and it tells much of the truth about the African continent — if only from an inevitably external perspective.
Roger Holland PopMatters review Amazon

7

King Kong
(dir: Peter Jackson)
Proving that he truly is the heir apparent to the ’70s vanguard of blockbuster cinema (read: Lucas and Spielberg) that crazed Kiwi Peter Jackson delivered his homage to the movie that made him want to be a filmmaker in the first place, and the results were epic indeed. Sure, it’s too long and offers a few miscast actors along the way (sorry Mr. Brody), but as he proved with his brilliant Lord of the Rings films, Jackson understands the dynamics of big screen action. And once we get to that sinister Skull Island, he shows his penchant for expertly choreographed staggering set pieces again and again and again. From the terrifying T-Rex battle and bug pit to a sublime moment of ice “skating” in Central Park, this is not just a director’s love letter to his artistic inspiration — this is his own legacy to the art form itself. What a mighty and magnificent bequest it is.
Bill Gibron PopMatters review

6

A History of Violence
(dir: David Cronenberg)
Director David Cronenberg, adapting a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, gleefully takes American cinema’s fixation with evil invading innocence (Shadow of a Doubt, Out of the Past, Blue Velvet) to craft an enormously entertaining thriller that ridicules our love of screen brutality as we, the audience, feign virtuousness. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is an ideal father and a highly efficient killing machine code named “Joey,” whose unmasking threatens to tear apart, but ultimately brings his family together. If this starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie would be a high concept action romp called True Lies. Cronenberg’s exploiting of this dichotomy, the horror of the tautly and realistically detailed action meshed with the winking humor of its genre conventions, forms the unsettling basis of his masterful drama.
Michael Buening PopMatters review Amazon

5

Good Night, and Good Luck
(dir: George Clooney)
For all of its politics and heavy-handed allegory, Good Night, and Good Luck is — before everything else — a taut, beautiful piece of filmmaking. Director George Clooney hit a home run with his first outing, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but it was too reliant on a Soderbergh-esque narrative and cinematographic qualities. Here, though, Clooney steps out on his own as a director and steps up with a thrilling political noir as indicative of the period it’s paying homage to as it is to the present political climate. The monochrome photography of Robert Elswit is simply amazing, with blacks as thick as ink and whites as clean as freshly washed linen. And the acting of everyone involved, from Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Jeff Daniels, and Frank Langella to David Strathairn (who literally becomes legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow) is exceptional and flawless.
Dante Ciampaglia PopMatters review Amazon

4

Sin City
(dir: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller)
Welcome to the future of filmmaking. Not just from a technical standpoint — and no film from 2005 could hold a fully rendered foot-candle to City‘s shockingly inventive computerized production design — but for a full blown bucking of the entire Tinsel Town system. When he couldn’t get the puffed-up powers to be to credit creator Frank Miller as “director” of this film, Robert Rodriguez up and quit the Guild, thumbing his nose at those who would deny that ‘visualization’ is part of the cinematic process. Some of the dialogue is hopelessly corny and the interwoven plots often play like cheap dime novel noir, but Rodriguez and Miller have proven, implicitly, that something visually stunning can be made out of expertly crafted ideas, all tweaked with a little cutting edge technology. All flaws aside, in the years to come, Sin City will be the milestone that begat the true post-millennial movement in digital filmmaking.
Bill Gibron PopMatters review Amazon

3

Munich
(dir: Steven Spielberg)
Steven Spielberg’s second film of 2005 is not only the better of the two, but also his best work in years, if not his best work ever. Munich, which focuses on Israel’s retaliation against Arab and Palestinian terrorists in the wake of the kidnapping and execution of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, finds Spielberg as a director less interested in happy endings and infallible good overcoming utter evil as much he is with plumbing the depths of moral ambiguity. Spielberg’s “serious” works have always been marked by a certain naïveté, coloring them as simplistic and almost utopian. Not so here. Spielberg reveals a side of himself as a storyteller that he hasn’t shown before: that of a filmmaker able to ask hard questions while putting the burden on his audience to work out the equally tough solutions.
Dante Ciampaglia PopMatters review

2

Batman Begins
(dir: Christopher Nolan)
It’s been a rough 10 years or so for Bat-fans. They paid their $8.50 to watch in horror what Joel Schumacher hath wrought in Batman & Robin, and hung their heads in despair (for free) as the franchise lay dormant, enduring the implicit taunts of intelligent X-Men and Spider-man movies. But in swoops Christopher Nolan, and the day is saved. His Batman Begins is not only faithful to its source, but terrific stand-alone entertainment. It’s the kind of superhero movie that gets your non-nerd friends interested in comic books, however briefly; who wouldn’t be tempted to pick one up after watching this smart, serious (but not humorless) and impeccably cast extravaganza? Christian Bale is especially perfect as Bruce Wayne first and Batman second, rebuilding the Dark Knight from haunted youngster on up.
Jesse Hassenger PopMatters review Amazon

1

Brokeback Mountain
(dir: Ang Lee)
The story of how the movie Brokeback Mountain came to be is a story characterized by “floating” and uncertainty. It is based upon a short story written by Annie Proulx, garnered the title of “the best non-produced screenplay in Hollywood” and literally “floated” for seven years through the executive suites of all the major studios, with no one knowing exactly what to do with or make of the subject matter. Gaining the moniker “the gay cowboy movie” (which is a huge disservice to the narrative), Brokeback Mountain became a film that was toxic to many. Irrespective of how one may feel about the premise, many things are certain: the cast is exceptional, particularly Heath Ledger in an Oscar worthy performance, Ang Lee’s precise, intricate and sensitive direction is a sheer marvel, and the film’s epic scope deals in a love story that straddles the decades, a tale of surviving in a time and place where the feelings these two men have for one other are a truly fatal taboo.
Courtney Young PopMatters review Amazon