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The Best Films of 2005

Socio-politically-minded Big Idea films were all the rage in 2005.

The Best Films of 2005

Whether a reflection of mainstream cinema’s desire to promote more intellectually challenging entertainment, or simply an indication that hot-button topics are increasingly profitable ventures, socio-politically-minded Big Idea films were all the rage in 2005. From Syriana’s oil industry exposé to The Constant Gardener’s pharmaceutical conspiracy theory and Munich’s examination of terrorism, and from Brokeback Mountain’s assessment of gay repression to the portraits of diverse sexual identity that color Rent and Breakfast on Pluto, high-toned prestige pictures tackled controversial topics with a mix of artistry and self-aggrandizing pedantry. While such liberal-minded films dominated the headlines, religious conservatism also exerted an amplified multiplex presence, whether through explicit allegories like The Chronicles of Narnia or via the covert messages of The Island and Aeon Flux. More compelling spirituality, however, was offered by foreign and independent iconoclasts like Werner Herzog (whose banner year included the docs Wheel of Time, Grizzly Man and The White Diamond) and Gus Van Sant (with the Cobain-ian Last Days), two directors who were joined by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), and Claire Denis (L’Intrus) in pushing the boundaries of visual and narrative experimentation. True, a typical avalanche of mind-numbing drivel crowded theaters each weekend. Yet there remained a heartening number of exciting, thought-provoking high-profile projects crafted (more or less) from within the studio system, including David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, the Farrelly brothers’ Fever Pitch, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck and Wes Craven’s Red Eye. And moreover, when it came to pure artistry, no work—mainstream, independent or foreign—was equal to Terrence Malick’s The New World, Slant Magazine’s unanimous 2005 Film of the Year. Nick Schager


ED GONZALEZ

The Best Films of 2005

1. The New World (Terrence Malick)

A great film starts on the big screen and works its way into the mind, encasing itself within the confines of other lasting memories. I will never forget the first chapter of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times or every flabbergasting image of Terrence Malick’s The New World, a film whose sociological and emotional heft is encased in a reverie of hallucinatory images. Malick is a poet who approaches the story of John Smith and Pocahontas as if it were a specimen of lost time trapped in amber. He turns the fossil in his hands, reflecting the light of the sun through the resinous shell of history and onto his characters from many remarkable, expressive angles. The image of Q’Orianka Kilcher swaying her arms in the wind toward the heavens isn’t easily forgotten, though sometimes the soundtrack I give this vision of the actress in my head is not James Horner’s menacing score but Aphrodite’s Child’s “Rain And Tears.” One could say great films also allow us to generously mix and match the memories they give us.


2. The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana)

From a summer day in Roma in 1966 to a winter night in Norway in 2003, The Best of Youth chronicles some 40 years in the lives of the Carati family and their friends. If not as visually attention-grabbing as Emir Kusturica’s Underground or Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, this epic elegy to family and country is no less seductive as a towering work of narrative fiction, giving itself generously to the people of Italy in the same way Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children offered themselves to the people of Colombia and India, respectively. Over the course of six riveting hours, Giordana weaves a delicate tapestry of human ecstasy and misery, paralleling the ups and downs of a family with the rise and fall of a country.


3. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

In a scene from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), a young soldier, grabs country-boy Tong’s (Sakda Kaewbuadee) leg inside a movie theater, to which an excited Tong responds by trapping Keng’s hand between his thighs and grabbing his shoulders with his arm. The twisting of arms and legs becomes a stirring expression of romantic passion and movie love. It also anticipates the tangle of trees that likewise bind the two lovers during the film’s audacious second half. Both love story and folk tale, Tropical Malady intersects eros with cultural ritual, heralding the thrill of the chase and asserting that the deepest romances are not sexual but spiritual in nature. Literally.


4. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)

Through a series of grisly acts of violence at once exciting and shocking, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence interrogates the way we respond to bloodshed in movies, but it’s cheap to say the director is content reducing his audience to a pack of Pavlovian dogs. The film’s prodding isn’t one-way. Indeed, Cronenberg’s jabs encourage a very critical engagement between the audience and the emotional, corporeal surface of his film. In the end, more important to him than any plain critique of movie culture’s history of violence is how one man’s relationship to his gun reflects a very specific American legacy of lone-wolf, vigilante justice.

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5. Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Today, horror films may be lighting up the American box office, but you have to look hard to find ones with a discernable care in the world: Cabin Fever is the film Friday the 13th should have been, and it’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, not Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, that delivers on the promise of John Carpenter’s They Live by truly assessing the soul-sucking drain of our clogged technological world. Kurosawa creates and sustains a level of white-knuckle terror across the film’s entire running time in ways that shame the masters of horror that came before him.


6. Wolf Creek (Greg McLean)

A beautiful expression of existential terror that doesn’t come with the noxious sexual baggage that typically dooms its horror ilk, Wolf Creek immediately stands apart from the pack, beginning with the stunning image of sunset-tinted waves crashing onto the sands of an Australian beachfront. For a split second, this expressionistic shot resembles a volcano blowing its top, and the realization that it’s something entirely more mundane exemplifies the unsettling tenor of the film’s casual shocks. Like two of the best horror films of the ’80s, Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, Wolf Creek is propelled by a lyrical sense of doom, and the ease with which first-time director Greg McLean creates a compelling sense of place and characters worth rooting for is truly something to behold.


7. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)

Mysterious Skin appears to exist in a memory deprivation tank flooded with a hyper-saturated stream of pop-cultural codes. With great clarity and poignancy, Gregg Araki’s dreamy aesthetic evokes a sense of colors moving between past and present by osmosis, a visual expression of the way his characters cope with their existence. The colorful veneer of the film’s sexual abuse scenes is wistfully subversive—a representation of the way two young men look at the past through the eyes of children who never quite learned how to grow up. Araki humanely ushers them into adulthood, having grown as a filmmaker without having abandoned his indie spirit.


8. Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Anchored by a physically unsettling and emotionally complex performance by Yagira Yuya, for which the 14-year-old actor rightfully won a Best Actor prize at Cannes ’04, Nobody Knows elaborates on the affecting, memory-obsessed themes that run throughout Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi and After Life. Confidently and maturely directed, Nobody Knows is a film of serene composition whose graceful and emotional narrative takes the pulse of a nation through the tragedy of one family.

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9. The White Diamond (Werner Herzog)

Werner Herzog’s heart and soul belongs to the jungles of the world, and in The White Diamond he follows airship engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington into Guyana’s Amazon canopy where the doctor, first revealed as a bug-eyed, fast-talking eccentric, hopes to study the area’s uncharted treetops and wildlife. But in Herzog’s 40-year-plus career, he’s never filmed or documented a mission that doesn’t reconfigure itself once it has been set into motion, and Dorrington’s operation is no exception: Under Herzog’s ephemeral and watchful lens, what begins as a run-of-the-mill science experiment unspools as a heartbreaking spiritual journey, and what he shows us becomes as important as what he doesn’t.


10. Crimen Ferpecto (Álex de la Iglesia)

Spanish auteur Álex de la Iglesia continues to show absolutely no signs of reconciling his dramatic and comedic impulses. Though inextricably bound to one another, these dueling urges refuse to play nice, and it’s the fallout from their non-stop collisions that makes the director’s latest genre pastiche so much fun to watch. Though not as consistent in tone as La Comunidad, Crimen Ferpecto is more self-reflective in the sense that the battle between its two leads mirrors the ongoing war between the serious and the absurd that has become par for course in de la Iglesia’s metafictive canon of films. The film is both a bawdy comedy of the sexes and a snappy critique of our consumer culture.


Honorable Mention

Last Days, Machuca, Private, Schultze Gets the Blues, Junebug, Fever Pitch, HellBent, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Red Eye, and Darwin’s Nightmare.


Worst of 2005

Crash, Palindromes, A Hole in My Heart, Chaos, Secuestro Express, Must Love Dogs, Don’t Move, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Constant Gardener and Les Choristes.

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NICK SCHAGER

The Best Films of 2005

1. The New World (Terrence Malick)

A sumptuous tone poem of epic emotional proportions, The New World renders the Europeans’ arrival on the American continent as a tale of diametric conflicts in which destruction and creation, constriction and freedom, become symbiotically knotted. That rare filmmaker whose work truly warrants the label “spiritual,” Terrence Malick finds myriad ways of conveying the world’s, and man’s, kindness and cruelty, two opposing forces that form the crux of the film’s central, ill-fated romance between John Smith and Pocahontas. Buoyed by Q’Orianka Kilcher’s superlative performance as the Native American princess, as well as the auteur’s trademark romantically humanistic aesthetic, this marvelously seductive film addresses the collision between civilization and primitivism—as well as the tragedy in man’s foolish desire to control and reshape nature—with a poetic realism seemingly so free of artifice and guile that it comes across less like a manipulative man-made construction than like a piece of organically produced art.


2. The White Diamond (Werner Herzog)

Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond vividly encapsulates nearly all of the director’s recurring thematic obsessions: adventurers plagued by past tragedies; the beguiling beauty of the untamed wilderness; the sacredness of the world’s age-old mysteries; and contemporary man’s simultaneously harmonious and dissonant connection to nature. Yet despite such familiarity, this gorgeously shot documentary’s real-life tale of Dr. Graham Dorrington’s airship study of the Amazon’s jungle canopy nonetheless stands as a rapturous and haunting meditation on spiritual desolation and attempted atonement. Once again journeying into a geographical and emotional heart of darkness, Herzog returns with a quasi-mystical masterpiece.


3. Last Days (Gus Van Sant)

A hypnotic portrait of a Kurt Cobain-like recluse, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days is infused with the looming specter of death and the disorienting disparity between image and reality. Its stylistic inventiveness a rebellion against formulaic conventions in much the same way as the Nirvana frontman’s assaultive anti-pop music, the film feels wrapped in a haze of forlorn confusion. Paralyzed by spiritual estrangement and despair, Michael Pitt’s somnambulant star is akin to the walking dead, and his melancholic singing is nothing short of a primal scream for communion with a world from which he finds himself detached.


4. Wolf Creek (Greg McLean)

Raw, nasty and unnerving as hell, Wolf Creek faithfully and fearsomely assumes the grisly mantle of seminal classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, delivering an austere, gimmick-free descent into unbridled mayhem. First-time director Greg McLean strands his would-be victims in an ominous Australian Outback untouched by modernity and governed by a severe brand of Darwinian law, a fact proven after they meet a hillbilly hunter with a sadistic streak. By making us actually care about its happy-go-lucky characters, the film reaches an apex of wince-inducing terror unparalleled in recent horror cinema.

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5. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach)

The devolution from coherence to divisiveness is the chief focus of Noah Baumbach’s sincere and delightfully silly The Squid and the Whale, the semi-autobiographical tale of an intellectual Brooklyn couple’s contentious divorce. Exuding a blend of lofty sophistication and insecurity-bred condescension, Jeff Daniels transforms his supercilious literary has-been father into a figure of scorn and pity, a bravura performance matched by Owen Kline’s breakthrough turn as a distraught kid with ejaculate-smearing issues. As the superbly acted film’s wry, elegant script about maturation touchingly elucidates, what one wants isn’t always what one gets, and who one aspires to be is not always who one truly is.


6. Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

A cinematic philosopher who uses horror conventions as a façade for eerie existential inquiries, Kiyoshi Kurosawa plumbs the depths of man’s technology-exacerbated alienation with the chilling Pulse. A depiction of societal disconnection masquerading as a ghost story involving the discontent undead’s return via enigmatic websites, Kurosawa’s film captures the loneliness of a society splintered beyond repair by a reliance on intermediary technology rather than interpersonal interaction. Via a combination of protracted takes, a slate color palette and disquietingly fuzzy Internet imagery, the filmmaker generates an inescapable sense of the world slowly coming apart at the seams.


7. The Beat That Skipped My Heart (Jacques Audiard)

Substituting Fingers’s bleak psychosexual head games and emasculated machismo with a more straightforward take on a man’s warring allegiances to his parents, Jacques Audiard’s remake The Beat That Skipped My Heart deftly investigates the conflicting nature of masculinity and filial loyalty through a small-time gangster’s attempts to achieve his dream of being a concert pianist. Its bifurcated visual structure mirroring its protagonist’s opposing criminal and artistic impulses, this intimate character study has a restless energy and immediacy, as well as an intensely forceful performance full of pent-up jitteriness by Romain Duris.


8. Good Night and Good Luck. (George Clooney)

A complete artistic about-face from his superficial Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney’s sterling Good Night and Good Luck. casts Edward R. Murrow’s battle against Joseph McCarthy as a modern parable about media responsibility and popular dissent. With marvelous turns by David Strathairn (as the CBS broadcaster) and Frank Langella (as love-him-and-hate-him network boss William Paley) as its bedrocks, Clooney’s compact newsroom drama exudes a claustrophobic mood of repression and intimidation. And courtesy of Robert Elswit, the film’s smoky black-and-white cinematography beautifully visualizes its real-life tale’s central clashes between truth and deceit, facts and hearsay, image and reality.

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9. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)

Two sides of the same tarnished coin, the sexually abused protagonists of Mysterious Skin craft carefully constructed fantasies as a conduit for expressions of embarrassment and anger, and Gregg Araki’s film utilizes an array of childhood signifiers and womb imagery to create a real-and-yet-also-unreal aura of psychological dislocation. Less self-consciously showy than much of his past work, Araki’s film aches with the lingering pain of past traumas, a sensation heightened by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s astonishing performance as an emotionally remote, unbearably cool gay street hustler defined both by his hungry sexuality and self-destructive alienation.


10. Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie)

Rife with reverential references to, as well as imbued with the spirit of, its genre forbears, The Devil’s Rejects is a delicious Southern stew of ghoulish grisliness, bleak humor and unrepentant amorality. Schlock rocker-turned-auteur Rob Zombie exhibits a newfound directorial maturity and muscularity with this gonzo grindhouse-Western exploitation flick about the battle between House of 1,000 Corpses serial-killing clan and a vigilante sheriff. Equally ferocious and funny, the metalhead moviemaker’s cinematic sick joke is a gory blast, from the balls-to-the-wall chaos of its “Midnight Rider” opening to the down-in-blazes opera of its “Freebird” finale.


Honorable Mention

A History of Violence, Grizzly Man, Sin City, Kings and Queen, Tropical Malady, The Ice Harvest, Broken Flowers, Kung Fu Hustle, Red Eye and The Aristocrats.


Worst of 2005

Alone in the Dark, Dear Wendy, The Constant Gardener, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, A Sound of Thunder, Happy Endings, Don’t Move, The Thing About My Folks, The Island and Thumbsucker.

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