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During the years when I was a daily newspaper movie critic (in Seattle and Los Angeles) I routinely saw 250+ movies a year. Now I see only a small fraction of that, but I see them the way most people do -- when I want to, not when I have to. Roger Ebert estimates he reviewed more than 280 movies in 2005 -- and that doesn't count all the ones he saw at festivals (Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto...) that he hasn't reviewed. Yet.
So, when it comes to the movies of 2005, I don't have nearly the broad perspective that Roger has (and I still haven't seen some of the movies on his Best of 2005 round-up). We also have very different feelings about his choice for best movie of the year ("Crash"), but that's not the purpose of the list below, which is to celebrate the films that most inspired and excited me in 2005. For the first time in a few years, I think there were some new movies in theaters that actually deserve to be called "great," and that's a good reason for joyous revelry. Merry Cinemass!
1. "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." Sometimes you just fall in love with a movie, everything about it -- the atmosphere, the way it looks and moves, the whole thing. I had tears of elation in my eyes through most of this picture. It's a mythic journey -- a quest for meaning, a ritual of duty and honor, a voyage of revenge and redemption -- that treks across the border from Texas to Mexico, mixing the harsh but elegiac poetry of Sam Peckinpah with the surrealist/absurdist poetry of Luis Bunuel, and with more than a pinch of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, one of my all-time favorite books. (Just between you and me: Like that other cowboy movie everybody's been talking about, it's also a love story between two men -- one dead, one alive -- but without the sex.)
2. "Brokeback Mountain" Every great love story has to have an obstacle -- from "Romeo and Juliet" to "Letter from an Unknown Woman" to "Splendor in the Grass" to "Ali -- Fear Eats the Soul" -- and Ang Lee's film quietly earns its stature as one of the movies' great love stories. Because it's so emotionally reined-in, it evokes emotions with resonant images (a mountain, a highway, a shirt and a jacket) without having the actors splash them all over the screen. And using images to express ideas and emotions is the essence of what movies do.
3. "The Squid and the Whale" Noah Baumbach's tragicomedy is so sharp in its humor and piercing in its observations that it gives me shivers just thinking about it. Every moment is so compelling and complex that it defies summarization. Let me just say that this is my choice for the finest ensemble cast of the year (and there are some very strong alternatives): Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Klein, and William Baldwin. It's the fillet of its (unclassifiable) genre!
4. "Cache" These days, I'm grateful for a movie that allows you to watch it, that has enough courage (and integrity) to hold still long enough so you can really pay close attention, wondering about what it's doing even while it's doing it. Michael Haneke's latest requires your attention. It's an epistemological investigation, and one of the great movie mysteries. But can it really be "solved"?
5. "Munich" This is Spielberg's "The Conversation" -- and his "Godfather," without the false security and sentimentalism of the Corleone famiglia. (Think of the movie as a feature-length meditation on, and dissection of, the baptism/massacre sequence at the end of "The Godfather.") It's also, come to think of it, his "Do the Right Thing" -- where there are lots of hard questions bouncing off one another and no simple answers that will fit on a bumpersticker.
What a relief in these days of sophistic dichotomies to encounter a film that honors the great Jewish intellectual, cultural and religious traditions of pursuing wisdom through deep questioning, digging beneath the superficial aspects of politics, morality and dogma to uncover more significant truths. It's easy to sit back and smugly pronounce, "An eye for an eye," and leave it at that, but it's also irresponsible, delusional, and lazy. It takes guts to examine what vengeance and self-defense mean in reality, and Steven Spielberg has shown here that he has the stomach for it. To say such close examination is the moral equivalent of "moral equivalency" is to say that right and wrong aren't choices but easily distinguishable absolutes (where's the choice if it's so easy to tell one from the other?), that there's no such thing as "collateral damage," and that actions have only the intended consequences. (Oh, the movie's a crackerjack espionage thriller to boot -- where threats and illusions are all around, and no one can be completely trusted.)
6. "Grizzly Man" Here's a tragic and transgressive love story in which the obstacle is not sexual identity but species identity. That's not to say that the crazy, fascinating, mystifying, infuriating subject of Werner Herzog's film, Timothy Treadwell, wanted to have sexual relations with bears; it's that he wanted to actually become a bear. First things first.
7. "Keane" Lodge Kerrigan plunges you inside the consciousness of a disturbed man and leaves you stranded in there for the length of a film. I've rarely seen a movie that takes you so deeply and terrifyingly into another person's head.
8. "A History of Violence" David Cronenberg has been one of my favorite filmmakers for a long time, and this is one of his best -- a taut-as-razor-wire thriller about the the intrusion of the past into the present, and the legacy that parents may or may not pass down to their children. That's right: A graphic novel thriller version of "Out of the Past" meets "The Brood." Kind of.
9. "Murderball" It's so not what you think it is. I haven't had a better time at the movies, and I've rarely been so caught-up in the lives of the "characters." Another great movie grappling with one of the great subjects: what it means to be a human being. Star of the Year: Mark Zupan. The camera loves this guy.
10. "Capote" Again, for the sake of capsule description, I'll suggest why I love it by taking note of what it's not: It's not a righteous condemnation of, or an artist's excuse for, the tricky moral games Truman Capote played in order to write his masterpiece, "In Cold Blood." It's a cool observation of a brilliant, fascinating, infuriating, manipulative, conflicted character being who he is.
A few runners-up: "Broken Flowers," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Syriana," "Palindromes," "Oldboy," the last few minutes of "The Woodsman." And quite a lot of "War of the Worlds," but NOT the last few minutes.
Another 10 might come from movies I still haven't even seen: "The Best of Youth," "Junebug," "Nobody Knows," "The Constant Gardener," "Wallace & Gromit," "King Kong," "Yes," "Nine Lives," "Head-On," "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," "The World," "Saraband," "Walk the Line," "Mysterious Skin," "Wedding Crashers"...
No, no, not for me: "Crash," "Hustle & Flow," "Me and You and Everyone We Know."
Man of the Year: George Clooney, for getting both "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" made.
Male performances of the year: Heath Ledger, "Brokeback Mountain"; Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline, "The Squid and the Whale"; Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Capote"; Damian Lewis, "Keane"; Jeffrey Wright, "Broken Flowers" and "Syriana"; Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Pepper, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"; Daniel Auteuil, "Cache"; Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris and William Hurt, "A History of Violence"; Ciaran Hinds, Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Lynn Cohen, "Munich"; David Strathairn, Frank Langella, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels, "Good Night, and Good Luck"; Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogan, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"...
Female performances of the year: Laura Linney, "The Squid and the Whale"; Catherine Keener, "Capote" (and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"); Felicity Huffman, "Transamerica"; Maria Bello, "A History of Violence"; Melissa Leo, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"; Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, "Brokeback Mountain"...
Cinematography: Chris Menges, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." A moment: A man scrambling through the barren desert suddenly finds himself in an explosion of eye-popping bright-yellow blooms. Another: A man sits at a dilapidated open-air bar in dusky light so vivid it practically smells of dust and Mexican sage and Tecate and tequila, while an absurd black-and-white Mexican science-fiction movie plays on the television. I was afraid movies had given up making images like this.
Favorite dialog exchange: From "The Squid and the Whale": Trying to impress Sophie, Walt tells her she really should read Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," because it's a masterpiece. She does. And when she tries to discuss it with him, it becomes clear he hasn't read it himself. "It's very Kafkaesque," he says, trying to weasel out of any meaningful conversation. Pause. "It's written by Franz Kafka," Sophie says, deadpan. "It would have to be."
Breathtaking moment of the year: From "Munich": I don't want to give it away, but it involves opening oneself to the sensations of being alive, even as consciousness itself is slipping away; the gentle, healing touch of cat fur on tender, bare, punctured skin....
