Film
Contrary to the year’s entertainment reports, the movies didn’t die, Hollywood didn’t prepare to close shop and audiences didn’t leave theaters empty as they ran home to their enormo-screen HDTVs and DVD box sets. Maybe next year. This year, Scene critics Donna Bowman, Noel Murray and Jim Ridley found a few reasons to stick with this “cinema” thing—the most memorable films, performances and sidelights of the moviegoing year 2005.
The Best of 2005
Villain or Hero? Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello in A History of Violence
Broken Flowers For many, Jim Jarmusch’s comedy-drama is Exhibit A in the emasculation of Bill Murray and the kowtowing of critics to oblique, static styles. Underneath the mannered presentation, however, is a thrilling and disturbing subversion of the mythic-quest structure itself. At the end, Murray’s Don Johnston has gone from passive to active by a most unexpected route; every inch of his world seems to hold a clue to his mystery, yet he has no way to parse the signal from the noise. —DONNA BOWMAN
Caché Michael Haneke’s movies plumb the depths of surveillance culture; in his hands, the rewind button is a torture device, sometimes literally. In his thoroughly unnerving, original thriller, bourgeois couple Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are shaken out of their complacency by anonymous videotapes delivered to their door. Every bland exterior shot of their comfy home becomes a threat as we wait for the tell-tale scan lines to appear, which epitomizes Haneke’s challenge to our spoon-fed viewing habits. Watch that last shot carefully—and get ready to argue. —JIM RIDLEY
A History of Violence Is David Cronenberg’s ferocious urban Western a hot-blooded defense of forced vengeance, or a chilling critique of our itchy national trigger finger? The year’s outwardly simplest piece of pop entertainment is also the most devious, exploring the same moral irony at the heart of Taxi Driver: in a culture drawn to the vigilante, the difference between a murderer and a hero is killing the right person in the right situation. —JIM RIDLEY
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Kings and Queen Arnaud Desplechin stuffs a bundle of quirks into this oddball character study; it’s impossible to take your eyes of Mathieu Amalric’s flashy star-making turn as the mentally ill cellist Ismaël. But it’s the mystery of his ex-wife Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), embodied in her novelist father’s accusation from beyond the grave, that turns the movie into the most unlikely suspense film of the year. —DONNA BOWMAN
Kung Fu Hustle The slipshod digital effects and choppy plotting of Shaolin Soccer gave no indication that writer-director-actor Stephen Chow was capable of a martial arts comedy this exciting, funny, formally daring and beautiful. Here, he tells a conventional tale of a hero’s awakening in a thoroughly unconventional way. The hero—Chow himself—doesn’t even appear in some of the movie’s biggest set pieces, thanks to a democratic storytelling approach that follows whomever’s most interesting at the time. —NOEL MURRAY
Land of the Dead When future social historians want to know what it felt like to live in a country building a gigantic wall on its southern border, empowering right-wing militias to keep out undesirables, demarcating the difference between them and us by racial profiling, and trusting that the Department of Homeland Security will keep us secure, they’ll watch the climactic fourth film of George Romero’s zombie saga. Meanwhile we can marvel at the control Romero shows over the revelation of his particular version of Fortress America, and root for the zombies’ emerging intelligence to take down Dennis Hopper’s blind plutocracy. —DONNA BOWMAN
Mysterious Skin Brokeback Mountain may be a lovely, heartbreaking, classically constructed melodrama, but those looking for a more incisive depiction of gay life in small-town America should brave the more troubled emotional ground of Gregg Araki’s film, which follows the intertwined fates of two Kansas boys: one a gay hustler, and one a UFO devotee. Though infamous provocateur Araki still confuses violence for meaning too often, he also grounds his movie’s queasy vision of illicit sexuality in the inviting landscape of memory, where even minor incidents acquire the glow of legend. And major incidents, like childhood trauma? Viewed the right way, they can set you free. —NOEL MURRAY
Nobody Knows The title summed up public awareness of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s quietly devastating film. It was a sad fate for a movie about abandonment—the fact-based story of four children left alone to raise themselves in a cramped apartment, and how their dream life of nonstop video games and junk food without adult supervision shifts almost imperceptibly into a nightmare. But like its child heroes, it deserves immediate discovery. The final freeze-frame calls to mind another movie about neglected youth in crisis, The 400 Blows—that’s the company in which Kore-eda’s beautiful film belongs. —JIM RIDLEY
Sin City On its own terms—an immersion in pulp-comics dread, machismo and bloodshed, without mercy or apology—this adaptation of Frank Miller’s gutter-noir graphic novels is close to perfect. Back in April, it heralded a year of ambitious, exhilarating genre movies that were borderline indefensible in their extremity and cruelty, from Park Chan-wook’s hammer-wielding head-scrambler Oldboy to Rob Zombie’s yahoo classic The Devil’s Rejects. Like those, it is distinguished by dark humor, style and an amazing cast—and the nerve to follow its sicko impulses wherever they lead. —JIM RIDLEY
Tony Takitani Movies can’t exactly replicate the feeling of reading a book, but Jun Ichikawa’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story comes remarkably close, from its murmuring narrator—so like the voice in our heads when we read—to the way the sideways drifting camera replicates the turning of pages. As for the story, which concerns an emotionally repressed commercial artist and his shopaholic wife, it doubles as a study of how we slowly kill ourselves by trying to use all the stuff we accumulate. Like The Squid and the Whale and My Summer of Love, this short, elegiac little film is easy to take in and hard to forget. —NOEL MURRAY
The Actors’ Studio
America Ferrera An ensemble of teenage girls is a hard environment in which to be yourself. But Ferrera’s unique energy in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants left all her co-stars—hardly duffers themselves—in the dust. Her brilliant smile, true girl-next-door look and quick wit added an invaluable realism to the Sisterhood. Those unfamiliar with the story might sniff at the multi-culti casting, but a few minutes in her presence will leave any girl pining after Ferrera for her own best friend. —DONNA BOWMAN
The 40 Year Old Virgin It’s the loose, improvisational energy that makes The 40 Year Old Virgin’s quintet of leading players (Steve Carrell, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen and Catherine Keener) hysterically funny. Unfortunately, it’s the same improvisation that makes the movie go on about half an hour too long. But excerpted into the same pull-quotes and private highlight reels that made Office Space into a cult hit despite its story problems, there wasn’t a more entertaining bunch of film actors in 2005. —DONNA BOWMAN
Terrence Dashon Howard The heir to Marlon Brando, R.I.P., may be Howard—another actor who is unable to disappear in a part, yet is somehow even more fascinating as he wrestles with it in plain view. In two flashy high-profile roles, as Hustle & Flow’s yearning pimp-turned-rapper and Crash’s racially profiled TV director, he put on a one-man fireworks display. But he really showed his talent by swimming the cesspool of John Singleton’s abysmal Four Brothers and coming out spotless. —JIM RIDLEY
Philip Seymour Hoffman Like last year’s remarkable act of Oscar-bait mimcry—Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator—Hoffman’s stunning transformation into Truman Capote was hailed by some and shrugged off by others as a mere stunt. But as with Blanchett, it’s what Hoffman does with his imitation that makes it great. He apes Capote’s mannerisms, but he also depicts the immediate ravages of Capote’s bargain with fame. When he’s trying to whimper his way out of witnessing the execution he not so secretly wanted to happen, the Hoffman of Boogie Nights and 25th Hour is onscreen more than the Capote of The Tonight Show and Murder By Death. —NOEL MURRAY
Heath Ledger Shattering taboos while embodying the taciturn Western loner to a tee, Ledger is so strong and subtle in Brokeback Mountain that his performance (like the movie) doesn’t announce its greatness. But as the inexpressive cowboy Ennis Del Mar, he practically paints a rainbow of emotions using only the color brown. He’s just as good as skateboard pioneer Skip Engblom in Lords of Dogtown, a left-field triumph that didn’t get its due. —JIM RIDLEY
Rachel McAdams & Cillian Murphy Among the many old-school pleasures of Wes Craven’s crackling Red Eye were the lead performances by its two stars-in-the-making, respectively playing a resourceful damsel-in-distress and a sexy, ruthless villain. Even when the story drops down a massive plot hole, McAdams and Murphy still hold audience attention with the force of their mutual attraction and disgust. —NOEL MURRAY
Viggo Mortensen In A History of Violence—a movie whose subtext is largely about acting—he gave the year’s most underrated performance, embodying the warring halves of a divided soul. Even in the haunting last shot, he leaves us wondering which half we’re seeing: the anguished family man, or the killer inside. —JIM RIDLEY
Scene Stealers
Stunning Transformation Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote.
• It was hard to root for good, as personified by the dull, whiny children of Narnia, when Tilda Swinton’s fabulous White Which represented the loyal opposition.
• Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Harry Lime-like assassin stalked Serenity with suave menace.
• There was nothing at all suave about Kevin James’ shlubby love-struck accountant in Hitch, but he was a charmer just the same.
• As a sweetly dithery Southern belle in Junebug, the radiant Amy Adams played a none-too-bright person without a trace of condescension.
• And among The Devil’s Rejects’ crew of devilish hambones, nobody stopped the show like Robert Trebor, whose jaw-dropping interlude as an obnoxious reviewer gave movie critics across the nation a well-aimed kick in the nuts. —JIM RIDLEY
The Squid and the Whale Noah Baumbach had previously shown a flair for making egomaniacal pricks sympathetic in Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, but in his creative breakthrough The Squid and the Whale he pushed his characters’ behavior much further into the gray, allowing his indivisible ensemble to show varying degrees of self-absorption—from Jesse Eisenberg’s fast-talking arrogance to Owen Kline’s bratty adolescence, from Laura Linney’s passive-aggressive Earth Mothering to Jeff Daniels’s dead-eyed misanthropy. —NOEL MURRAY
Vince Vaughn There’s nobody else in the movies with his crudeness and danger. In the admittedly hit-and-miss (mostly miss) Wedding Crashers, he threatens to drag the rom-com plot into avant-garde anarchy every time his larger-than-life frame reappears on screen. It appears that Vaughn is done trying to make a marquee idol of himself, and just wants to take potshots at staid genres from the sidelines. As long as you’ll let me watch, Vince, knock yourself out. —DONNA BOWMAN
Documentaries
Identity Politics. Once again, politics played a major role in this year’s wave of documentary features, and once again the high-profile “issue docs” weren’t as effective as quieter, probing character pieces. In The Education of Shelby Knox, a conservative Christian teen takes a hard look at her Texan community’s abstinence-based sex education, and gradually realizes the extent to which she’s been lied to all her life. In Waging a Living, four working-class Americans share how much of their income goes to shelter, transportation and childcare, leaving almost nothing for food and doctors. In Sheriff (airing the first week of January on PBS’s Independent Lens), a small-town North Carolina lawman models the seemingly benign cronyism and self-righteousness that governs much of the country today. In Gay Sex in the ’70s (opening next month at the Belcourt), veteran New Yorkers remember a libertine era far removed from today’s repressive sociopolitical climate. In Reel Paradise, a family of well-meaning liberal Americans bring junk culture and casual imperialism to a welcoming third-world culture; and in the chilling Darwin’s Nightmare, a third-world culture threatens to send pestilence and violence back to America, as payback for a century of shameless exploitation. —NOEL MURRAY
Grizzly Man There are probably more documentaries about filmmaking than any other subject (all those making-of featurettes count, right?). But none of them are like Grizzly Man. Oh, you thought it was about bears and the crazy environmentalist Timothy Treadwell who eventually got killed by them? So do a lot of people. Werner Herzog, though, knows where this story really lies: in our compulsion to be on camera, to present our story with some kind of perfection, but without a script and without any of the scenery (be it other people, animals or the land itself) on board with the project. —DONNA BOWMAN
Themes and Trends
All Conquers Love. Impossible romance flowered this year, not just in Brokeback Mountain, where the fear of social disapproval keeps a passionate affair in check, but also in King Kong, where a lonely gorilla tries to hold onto a pretty toy he’s not allowed to keep. Of course, the pile of bones in Kong’s mountain cave indicates that this particular love wouldn’t have lasted long. But that was a persistent undertone to all of 2005’s romantic tragedies—like Grizzly Man, about one man’s desperate need to protect the animal that ultimately consumes him; Mysterious Skin, about an incident of childhood abuse that defines one man’s self-destructive adult sexuality; and Head-On, about a marriage of convenience that becomes ridiculously idealized in the minds of the two partners. Which brings us back to Brokeback: does anyone want to argue that this cowboy-on-cowboy relationship would’ve survived for two decades if hadn’t been furtive and taboo? —NOEL MURRAY
Get the Pliers. National concerns have a way of seeping into popular entertainment, consciously or not. And while it’s silly to read every movie in the context of current events—“What is Herbie: Fully Loaded if not an allegory of the Iraqi elections, with Lindsay Lohan as the hope for reform and Matt Dillon representing Sunni fundamentalism?”—it’s also silly to ignore something cropping up like crabgrass from film to film. When even Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had a sequence about the justified use of torture, it was clear that, um, information extraction was much on the movies’ minds. With finger-snipping (House of Wax, Hostel) emerging as the new fingernail-pulling (Syriana), torture was the leitmotif of the movie year 2005, from Domino to Wolf Creek. The dull, rusty Saw II invited its audience to enjoy the victims’ suffering—what the hell, they deserve it, right?—while The Devil’s Rejects found a way to strap even the torturers into the torture chair, at the hands of a ruthless lawman with God on his side. Were all these movies an exorcism of secret concern, or simply a matter of Hollywood finding the right button to push? Give me an answer…now. —JIM RIDLEY
Smugglers. 2004 was the year of righteous indignation and political preaching to the choir. As bracing as that can be, I prefer 2005’s genre tales, veiled messages and even unintended commentary. Land of the Dead was as potent a punch as Fahrenheit 451, Head-On married a punk pose to commentary on the supposed clash of civilizations, and Brokeback Mountain created a gay relationship almost devoid of identity politics. But for sheer impact, nothing beat the accidental portrayal of imperial ambitions in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lewis might have been taking on fascism, but the White Witch’s dungeons and secret police play like an indictment of the War on Terror. —DONNA BOWMAN
Better Than You’ve Heard, Worse Than You Could Imagine
Be Cool What could be worse than a smart, fleet, stylish little movie like Get Shorty getting subjected to a moronic, clumsy sequel like Be Cool? Yes, it was nice to see John Travolta dance with Uma Thurman again. Yes, The Rock was kind of funny. But what the hell was all that business with generic soul chanteuse Christina Milian singing with Aerosmith? Is this a movie or a very special episode of Kim Possible? —NOEL MURRAY
The Brothers Grimm Just another misbegotten Terry Gilliam project, brought low by money and corporate suits. But unlike some of Gilliam’s other great stillbirths, there’s little chance that this one will be resurrected by fanboys and proclaimed a lost masterwork. Cramped, colorless and soul-deadening, no amount of frenetic milling-about by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger can make the film come alive. Gilliam’s never had what one would call a light touch, but The Brothers Grimm raises the question of whether the man is also just out of imagination. —DONNA BOWMAN
Elizabethtown In both its short and long versions, Cameron Crowe’s unwieldy labor of love suffers from a preposterous premise, too many quirky characters and a kind of smug pandering. But the movie also contains many sincere moments of specific yearning, as a son grapples with the legacy of his father, and a Generation X filmmaker tries to explain what America means to him. —NOEL MURRAY
Monster-in-Law Whatever sins are in Jane Fonda’s and Jennifer Lopez’s pasts, surely this horrendous act of public humiliation counts as penance. Other movies I hope never to encounter again: Me and You and Everyone We Know, Son of the Mask, Flightplan, Hide and Seek, the aptly named Derailed, and Alone in the Dark—you know, the one with Tara Reid as a brilliant archaeologist. —JIM RIDLEY
Sky High Pixar/Disney’s The Incredibles soured on me after a couple of viewings, but this beautifully scripted Mouse House sleeper about a high school for teen superheroes looks more and more like a little classic—it wrings just about every possible gag from the situation, while allowing its characters’ charm and teenage confusion to trump the special effects. You won’t be disappointed. Other sleepers to seek out on DVD: the disarming romantic drama Dear Frankie, the exhilaratingly loony Transporter 2, Disney’s endearing Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, the visually sensational Bruce Willis thriller Hostage, and Ridley Scott’s better-than-reviews-indicated Crusades saga Kingdom of Heaven. —JIM RIDLEY
War of the Worlds Steven Spielberg’s version of the H.G. Wells invasion thriller contained some of the most frightening imagery of the year. Even though its picaresque storyline doesn’t finally come together, the seeming futility of resistance to alien invaders has never been more powerfully dramatized. His devastated urban neighborhoods seem like 21st century analogs to the bombed-out shells of cities he showed in Schindler’s List, and undercut any “good war” or “greatest generation” platitudes in his hero’s eventual triumph. —DONNA BOWMAN
Jim Ridley’s Top 10
1. A History of Violence
2. Grizzly Man
3. The Devil’s Rejects / Land of the Dead
4. Head-On
5. Brokeback Mountain
6. Pulse
7. Nobody Knows
8. Caché
9. Sin City / Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
10. The Squid and the Whale
Noel Murray’s Top 10
1. The Squid and the Whale
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. Cinderella Man
4. Mysterious Skin
5. My Summer of Love
6. Caché
7. Kung Fu Hustle
8. Nobody Knows
9. Tony Takitani
10. A History of Violence
Donna Bowman’s Top 10
1. Grizzly Man
2. Land of the Dead
3. My Summer of Love
4. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
5. Nobody Knows
6. Broken Flowers
7. Kung Fu Hustle
8. The Constant Gardener
9. Head-On
10. Kings and Queen