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Not long after Santa makes good on his list, movie critics traditionally deliver theirs. Most of them do, anyway. Pauline Kael stubbornly refused (though you can bet she always kept one in her head), and after her rival Andrew Sarris published his hierarchical (and influential) book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1927-1968, she accused him of being a "list queen." Sarris's reply is not on record, but I hope it was in a similar spirit -- something along the lines of "I know you are, but what am I?"
Ah, critical discourse.
I always make it a habit to check out the year-end lists of my favorite critics (like Roger Ebert, of course, and Sarris, A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ty Burr, J. Hoberman, Michael Wilmington, Charles Taylor, Wesley Morris, Michael Atkinson, Henry Sheehan, Peter Rainer, Andy Klein, Leonard Maltin, and so on...) -- and now, thanks to the Internet (without which we'd be... unemployed) it's easier than ever.
As I write this, Critics Top 10 is tracking the ten best lists of 472 movie reviewers. I was crushed to find that, at this moment, I am the only one who has "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" as his top choice, although 29 critics (mostly the really good ones) put it somewhere on their lists. I hope this situation will soon be remedied. I submitted the lists of two excellent critics, Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy, who feel as strongly as I do about "Three Burials."
As of January 6, 2006, the consensus top ten among all critics listed are (in order): "Brokeback Mountain," "A History of Violence," "Capote," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "The Squid and the Whale," "King Kong," "Crash," "Grizzly Man," "Munich," and "The Constant Gardener." If, however, you consult the Passion Index (not to be confused with Hoberman's Passiondex™ formula over at the Village Voice poll), which gives extra weight to films that rank Number One on critics' lists, then the order changes to: "Brokeback Mountain," "2046," "A History of Violence," "The New World," "Hustle & Flow," "Kings & Queen," "Capote," "Crash," "King Kong," and "Munich."
Movie City News also has an amazingly comprehensive catalog of lists and other year-end movie awards in its Awards Watch section. They also display critics' choices for The Worst of 2005, if you're into that kind of thing.
I mentioned Take 7: The Village Voice's Seventh Annual Film Critics Poll, which compiles lists from 103 critics who write for so called "alternative" publications. I hate that term. Isn't everything an "alternative" to something else? In this case, it means critics for weeklies owned by the Village Voice, as well as the Boston Globe (a major daily) and Salon.com (but not Slate.com) and others that seem pretty mainstream to me. Maybe they're an alternative to Gene Shalit, Jeffrey Lyons and Joel Siegel, I don't know. David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" was the runaway winner in that poll, with a larger margin of victory than in any previous year.
But what I like most about the Voice poll is reading the excerpts from the written comments critics submit with their ballots. This year, there are more than a hundred of these pithy comments, divided into two sections: "Topical Medley: The Critics Speak," for a wide range of observations about the year and its films, and " Alone in the Dark: Critics Defend Their Orphan Picks," which ought to be fairly self-explanatory. It's really fun to just scroll through them. Here are some of my favorites -- and some of you may recall discussions of some of these issues in Scanners:
The most ambitious TV is shedding harsh light on the shortcomings of Hollywood, especially when it comes to dialogue. After strokes of insider-speak like "The Wire" and "24" (and of course the Sorkin years of "The West Wing"), are we really expected to sit through whole sections of films where people tell each other things they should already know? LAURA SINAGRA
Joe Dante ["Homecoming"] and Martin Scorsese ["Bob Dylan: No Direction Home"] just made it official: Television is the new cinema. MATT SINGER
Some speculated that Werner Herzog had found his next Klaus Kinski, but Timothy Treadwell seemed to be Kinski and Herzog in one, both the unbalanced psychonaut and his own best exploiter. SAM ADAMS
Anthropomorphism was the major motion picture trend — an impulse that was not limited to animals. With digital technology supplanting real actors and authentic wildlife, a CGI counter-revolution embraced mimetic versions of Johnny Cash, Truman Capote, and Ed Murrow and doted on neo-National Geographic docs starring monogamous penguins and personable parrots. Standing apart from either trend, as usual, was the unsentimental humanist Werner Herzog. THOMAS DOHERTY
Zombie films have shifted from the return of the repressed to the return of the suppressed. What is being awoken from a death slumber in Joe Dante's "Homecoming" [made for Showtime's Masters of Horror series] is not some long-buried psychological trauma — it's a trauma that began the first time President Monkeybone stole his election. MARK PERANSON
Naomi Watts doesn't merely create her own character. She creates Kong, in the amphitheater of her eyes, purely by the strength of her reactions. You try sustaining high notes of contagious terror and tenderness while interacting for months on end with a blank green wall. F.X. FEENEY
George Clooney and David Strathairn have attracted most of the kudos for "Good Night, and Good Luck" but it's Laura Palmer's dad who haunts me the most. Ray Wise's Don Hollenback is such a quivering wreck-in-progress, Strathairn's Murrow can barely stand the sight of him. JASON ANDERSON
Enjoy that IRS audit, George Clooney. DAVID BLAYLOCK
"Caché" was so diabolically effective in large part due to the production design. The couple's apartment was a bourgeois intellectual's idea of paradise, all modernist furniture, overstuffed bookshelves, and recessed lighting. You could practically hear critics salivating as they pictured their own dingy walk-ups. SAUL AUSTERLITZ
It's appropriate that the major narrative event that occurs in the final shot of "Caché" is hidden. The very act of looking—of directing our energies towards understanding even when we suspect that definitive answers may not be forthcoming—is what the film is all about. ADAM NAYMAN
I didn't see any films about the war in Iraq that were unembedded enough to suit me — or that bothered to show much concern about the innocent Iraqi citizens who are still being killed or tortured in the name of our good intentions. JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
The debate over the ethics of torture reached even the grindhouse, or its suburban megaplex equivalent. Oddly, it took the year's most extreme piece of yahoo bait, Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects," to recalibrate its audience's moral compass. By shifting the viewer's sympathies to anyone in the torture chair, this redneck "Funny Games" forces us to acknowledge a fundamental distaste for the practice and a kinship with all the victims. JIM RIDLEY
"The Power of Nightmares" [the BBC documentary that charges the "War on Terrorism" is mostly a government hoax] is "only" available online? As of mid December, archive.org claimed nearly 48,000 downloads (and who knows how much DVR samizdat). What art house wouldn't kill for a draw that size? SAM ADAMS
As public opinion about the war in Iraq began turning, critics started seeing anti-war commentary in everything from "A History of Violence" to "Star Wars." The coy criticism of contemporary genre pictures has become increasingly annoying. At this point, even the blunt policy wonkery of "Syriana" is preferable to another political shadow-play. Sometimes subtlety is overrated. NOEL MURRAY
"Crash" offers a lesson on racism for those viewers who don't have to think about it, namely, white people. CYNTHIA FUCHS
The almost unbelievably biased critical response in favor of the dreadful "Squid and the Whale" is proof of what happened when the educated and privileged classes moved into positions of power. They usurped cultural savvy as their own provenance the way they also gentrified neighborhoods — turning the movie theaters into cultural slums. A friend exclaimed that he wouldn't want to live next door to the people in "The Squid and the Whale" let alone watch a movie about them. ARMOND WHITE
I've met Georgia Brown and Jonathan Baumbach [the real-life parents of Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed the fictionalized "The Squid & the Whale"] on occasion. To see two people I know eviscerated by their own son: Now that's entertainment! DARYL CHIN
