NATHAN RABIN
Top Ten
1. The Squid And The Whale
2. A History Of Violence
3. My Summer Of Love
4. Me And You And Everyone We Know
5. Grizzly Man
6. Broken Flowers
At some point, Bill Murray will probably have to stop playing wealthy, stoic, depressed misfits in delicately wrought, bittersweet comedy-dramas about complicated, inexpressive men wrestling with mid-life crises. But when the results are as consistently transcendent as Rushmore, Lost In Translation, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and this year's Broken Flowers, it's hard to begrudge Murray a character type that's paid such rich creative dividends. Jim Jarmusch's sadly beautiful road comedy-drama Broken Flowers takes Murray's late-period minimalism to lovely, lyrical new places, building slowly but surely into a powerful meditation on aging, the passage of time, relationships, and the fragility of human connections.
7. Brokeback Mountain
8. Kung Fu Hustle
Between Peter Jackson's King Kong and Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, 2005 might very well go down as the year critics and audiences alike learned to stop worrying and love CGI effects. Stephen Chow's deliriously fun, exhilaratingly kinetic kung-fu comedy brilliantly uses computer effects to expand the vocabulary and possibilities of action-comedy, creating a fusion of live-action silliness and surreal, cartoonish exaggeration the likes of which Frank Tashlin could only dream about.
9. King Kong
The eye-popping CGI setpieces and kick-ass fights featuring red-hot giant-ape-on-dinosaur violence might lure the masses into the multiplexes, but the quieter moments in King Kong resonate the strongest and linger the longest, from Naomi Watts trotting out her old vaudeville tricks to entertain the eponymous simian to the lyrical sequence in which Kong discovers ice. Who could have guessed that one of the year's most poignant cinematic relationships would be between a melancholy actress and a 25-foot ape with anger-control issues?
10. Nobody Knows
The Next Five
Along with the usual surplus of bloated monstrosities, American studios turned out a surprising number of stellar big-budget spectacles this year. Two of the best were Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's masterful, refreshingly dark resurrection of the venerable hero, and War Of The Worlds, an edge-of-the-seat triumph of old-school thriller craftsmanship and new-fangled technology courtesy of Steven Spielberg. The overachieving Spielberg also turned out Munich, a haunting examination of the consequences and nature of vengeance that's also an elegant allegory for the War On Terror. Judd Apatow and Steve Carell's "coming-of-middle-age" sex-comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin wasn't anywhere near as heavy, but it was unexpectedly tender and multi-dimensional, nicely balancing goofy sex gags with more character-based comedy. Lastly, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit brought Nick Park's beloved man-dog duo to the big screen with their low-key humor and distinctly British charm intact.
Performance Of The Year
As the incandescent, inscrutable beauty, Emily Blunt has by far the flashiest role in My Summer Of Love. Blunt's beguiling, self-styled "fantasist" propels the film to dizzying heights, but Nathalie Press, as the young woman drawn to her, carries Pawel Pawlikowski's haunting coming-of-age movie, investing her winning protagonist with equal parts vulnerability and strength, plus a deceptively sardonic sense of humor. In her own inconspicuous way, she's every bit Blunt's equal.
Overrated
Woody Allen once invited sky-high expectations, but these days the bar has been set so low that critics are ready to hail anything not as egregiously awful as Anything Else as a miraculous return to form. This year, Allen interrupted his long string of listless, unfunny comedies with the muddled half-comedy/half-drama/total disappointment Melinda And Melinda and the stiff, uninvolving, overrated drama Match Point, which deals with class in the same clumsy, ham-fisted, subtext-free manner in which Crash deals with race. Sure, it looks great, and Scarlett Johansson's performance is strong enough to make viewers forget she's reprising Anjelica Huston's role in Crimes And Misdemeanors, but Match Point does little to refute the notion that Allen has perhaps permanently lost his ability to create engaging, multi-dimensional characters or convincing dialogue.
Underrated
Neil Jordan's Breakfast On Pluto is the kind of quirky, self-consciously minor sleeper that tends to get lost in the shuffle unless it gets loaded with awards. Jordan's adaptation of Patrick McCabe's novel does little to hide its literary origins: It's less a streamlined narrative than a series of whimsical, episodic adventures united by an unforgettable protagonist. Cillian Murphy, so terrifying as the scariest Batman villain ever in Batman Begins, does a complete 180 as the film's pixieish lead, a sweet little transvestite who stumbles through funny-sad encounters with a colorful cast of characters, including Stephen Rea's sad-eyed magician, Brendan Gleeson's rage-filled theme-park employee, and an unexpectedly creepy Bryan Ferry.
Future Film That Time Forgot
What really needs to be said about a movie that begins with the world's longest explanatory crawl, plus a long expository flashback, and still manages to be wildly incomprehensible? Or a movie in which the casting of professional party-girl Tara Reid as a brilliant, bespectacled museum curator registers as its most plausible and realistic aspect? Only that it's the wonderfully awful Alone In The Dark, yet another mind-boggling, hilariously convoluted video-game adaptation from Uwe Boll, a Teutonic super-hack seemingly angling to become Europe's answer to Ed Wood.
Worst Of The Year
Are We There Yet? boasted a marginally more toxic nails-on-chalkboard quality, but it'd be hard to beat Monster-In-Law for brittle, ugly misanthropy. If Jane Fonda's sad return to acting after a 15-year hiatus were merely an awful, desperate, flailing, brutally unfunny Meet The Parents knockoff, it'd be depressing enough. But the film's reprehensible gender politics and raging misogyny are what make it the year's worst.
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