Top 10 Movies of 2005

Fast away the old year passes, but not before we critics get one last chance to praise what we think are the best movies of the waning year. Not having subjected myself to Monster-In-Law or anything with multiple Xs in the title, this year I refrain from my usual Worst of the Year companion list and focus instead on my favorite films of 2005, well worth catching up with on DVD or in theaters now.

GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK George Clooney's tribute to legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow reminds us that newspeople of conscience once used the media to stand up to repressive political agendas. David Strathairn is magnetic as Murrow, and Clooney is terrific as producer Fred Friendly, Murrow's accomplice in facing down fear-mongering Senator Joe McCarthy. Shot in gorgeous black-and-white, and brought in at a fleet 90 minutes, Clooney's film is a triumph of wit, economy, and pizazz.

MILLIONS - A young boy in working-class northern England find a suitcase stuffed with cold cash, and consults with his superheroes, the saints, to try to figure out how to use the money to do good. Danny Boyle's fresh, kinetic filmmaking style complements a touching story that's acute, funny, sophisticated, and full of imagination.

THE CONSTANT GARDENER - Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (City Of God) directs this a terse political thriller about western capitalism running amok in the Third World for the profit and greed of an elite few. Ralph Fiennes delivers a performance of subtle ferocity masquerading as passive discretion as a gentlemanly English bureaucrat in Africa who won't give up the scent after his activist wife is murdered.

CINDERELLA MAN - Russell Crowe has one of his best roles as James Braddock, the hardluck Depression-era boxer who managed to parlay a one-shot fight into an improbable title bout against heavyweight champ Max Baer—becoming the hero for downtrodden working people all over America. Crowe displays the warmth and humor missing from his usual macho Hollywood roles, and Ron Howard directs with plenty of heart.

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL - Forget the penguins. The avian stars of the year are the flock of wild birds who bond with volunteer caretaker Mark Bittner in Judy Irving's disarming and deeply moving documentary.

PRIDE & PREJUDICE - An excellent cast and the fluid pace and emotional urgency of Joe Wright's classy production highlight this most seductively beauteous Jane Austen adaptation yet. Keira Knightley makes a perfect Lizzie Bennet, observing the human foibles around her with sparkling wit and an irresistible laugh. Matthew MacFadyen's rough-cut gem of a Darcy suggests the inner turmoil of a serious young man with no gift for idle chitchat adrift in a milieu of chattering socially butterflies. Wright conveys Austen's world of strict social conventions and rebellious romantic yearning with gusto.

MIRROR MASK - As someone who sketched obsessively as a child, I love the idea of a fairy tale heroine swept into the fantasy world of her own drawings (her id), not some distant realm accessed down a rabbit hole or on top of a twister. Thematically rich and visually propulsive (despite some too-cute Muppety effects), this Neil Gaiman/ David McKean modernist fairy tale kept me engrossed.

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE - The series' first English director, Mike Newell, makes a roaring good adventure full of magic, humor, and heartbreak out of J. K. Rowling's complex, problematic fourth book—less concerned with Harry's past than with the character he's developing in the present. It's not quite as shrewd a piece of filmmaking as the third and best film so far, The Prisoner Of Azkaban, but Newell crafts a solid bridge into Harry's perilous future.
2046 Wong Kar Wai's lush and woozy romantic drama establishes its premise in the first few minutes: the prison of the past and how it can impede life in the present. If you don't get it going in, the dazzling, time-traveling narrative of doomed romantic escapades and ironic futurism (the protagonist writes sci-fi stories) may just seem random. But if the premise grabs you, the audacious dual storyline adheres to its own elliptical logic, pulsing with wit, poetry, and sultry eroticism.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - Ang Lee's poignant love story of two itinerant ranch hands who fall in love during a summer herding sheep in the Wyoming mountains is more than just a hot-button issue movie. As their deepening bond colors their lives over the next 20 years, in an era when it was still called "the love that dare nor speak its name," the story traps the audience, like the men themselves, in the culture of dusty, dying western towns, cheap honky-tonks and empty machismo from which they can't escape. Their only chance to breathe is in stolen moments back on the mountain, and what they sacrifice and compromise in themelves and their lives for those moments makes for a powerful, yet restrained ballad of longing, lost opportunities, and the perils of a life lived divided from one's true self. And oh, yes, this movie contains the performance of the year from Heath Ledger, an aching masterpiece of abject self-containment.

Runners-up:

KING KONG - There are at least two hours of propulsive moviemaking brilliance in Peter Jackson's 3-plus-hour epic. The ferarsomely noble, beat-up, psychologically correct ape is a marvel. Naomi Watts is phenomenal as the scrappy vaudeville hoofer with the smarts to bond with him. (Theirs is the second-most haunting doomed relationship of the year, after Brokeback Mountain.) The Depression–era '30s setting is done with plenty of sass and verve as Jackson pays homage to the classic original. Only in the middle act do things deflate as Jackson lets armies of CGI dinosaurs and primordial swamp bugs run away with the movie. Otherwise, this is an unexpected treat, jam-packed with thrills, delirious with heartbreak, and loaded with cultural subtext.

3-IRON - The apparent sanctity of hearth, home, and married life is quietly tweaked in this metaphysical fairy tale from South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, about a young man who breaks and enters empty houses (not to steal, but to tidy up), and a battered young wife who joins him on what is not so much a crime spree as an eccentric courtship. Their story flows with the antic, mysterious grace of a silent Keaton film, as they invent a subversive, yet benign alternate reality to the stressful, consumerist, sometimes brutal modern lives around them.

TOUCH THE SOUND - Another spellbinding documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer (Rivers And Tides), this one features deaf concert percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Going way beyond mere biography or art documentary, it takes the viewer on a spiritual journey about making art and living life as Riedelsheimer explores the creative process as something intuitive and ecstatic.

LAYER CAKE - Daniel Craig inhabits his role and the screen with quiet authority as a sharp young coke dealer whose plans to cash out and go straight go badly awry. Beneath the film's often nasty exterior beats the heart of a sly, uncompromising morality play.

UP AND DOWN - The intoxicating Czech film renaissance continues with this wry, sharply-observed tale of immigrants, con men, refugees, and regular folk struggling to cope with the ever-changing rules of modern life. It'll be a long time before you see a movie this rich, complex, and life-sized coming out of mainstream Hollywood.

Guilty Pleasures:

THE LEGEND OF ZORRO - Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones' swashbuckling stunt fest is completely ridculous, and compulsively entertaining.

Runners-Up:

CORPSE BRIDE and SIN CITY.