TASHA ROBINSON
Top Ten
1. Oldboy
Oldboy starts off with an irresistible premise—without explanation, unseen captors imprison a drunken lout in a dingy apartment for 15 years, then unexpectedly release him. South Korean director Park Chan-wook then turns the story over to his protagonist's obsessive, horrifically violent attempts to find and confront his captor. A near-overload of visual style, a viciously dark sense of humor, and a breathlessly unfolding story made this one of the year's most memorable and unnerving cinematic experiences.
2. Grizzly Man
Yet another in Werner Herzog's long line of films about reckless madmen who get lost in their dreams, this stunning documentary revolves around the extensive video footage that misanthropic wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell took of himself living among, discussing, and interacting with Alaskan grizzly bears, one of which eventually killed and ate him. Narrating his own life and unwittingly revealing the deep neuroses and personal contradictions that drove him into the wild, Treadwell makes his footage into riveting train-wreck drama, and Herzog frames and contextualizes his story expertly, with sympathy but without romanticizing Treadwell's fatal choices.
3. The Squid And The Whale
4. Pride & Prejudice
5. Howl's Moving Castle
6. Nobody Knows
The drama of this Japanese feature builds up slowly, as four young children abandoned in a Tokyo apartment attempt to survive on their own. It's far from the first film to follow children caring for themselves and each other, but the naturalistic, winning performances that director Hirokazu Koreeda wangles from his very young cast are breathtaking, and they lend powerful weight to the film's shattering melancholy.
7. Kontroll
8. Broken Flowers
9. Sin City
10. Munich
The Next Five
In spite of its unlikely false-uplift ending, Stephen Spielberg's War Of The Worlds was a vividly realized portrait of the panic, despair, and disassociation that come with war; the special effects were terrific, but the raw power of the human element made the movie. A similar humanism was also key to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which brought authentic pathos to its seemingly trashy, glib premise, and to the John Le Carré adaptation The Constant Gardener, which star Ralph Fiennes made into a deeply personal tale of anguish. The Aristocrats was a lively, entertaining discussion of how comedians all slap their own human elements into the dirtiest joke ever told. But humanity had little to do with the success of Nick Park's charming, lunatic claymation feature Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit; the dog-and-bunny elements were far more crucial.
Performance Of The Year
Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice has been adapted numerous times, but Joe Wright's luminous version brings it to fresh new life, and key to that life is Keira Knightley as the emotional cornerstone of her impoverished and at-times-intolerable family. Effortlessly flowing between pride, vivid young love, and self-righteous, wounded indignation, Knightley brought moderation but deep intensity and conviction to a complicated role that would have been all too easy to oversell or overplay.
Overrated
True, A History Of Violence features terrific, memorable performances from a stellar cast. But they're laboring against a generic potboiler plot that fails to either ramp up the stakes or allow insight into the characters; once the killing starts, it's just a rote exercise in set-'em-up, knock-'em-down all the way to the end.
Underrated
Critics savaged it and audiences completely missed it, but Liev Schreiber's directorial debut, Everything Is Illuminated, is worthy of notice as a quirky road movie that primarily serves to bring the English-challenged narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer's cult-hit novel to life. The film version pares the book down to essentials, losing a lot of its winning surrealism, but leaving behind a tight, richly comical story that's exquisitely shot and acted.
Future Film That Film Forgot
Expand a classic short story up to overblown feature size, run out of money to complete it, slap it halfheartedly together a few years later, throw in some random CGI beasties, ignore the gaping logical gaps, and you have A Sound Of Thunder, a science-fiction action feature that jumps back and forth millions of years through time, but can't keep plot points straight from 20 minutes back into the storyline. And hey, slap on a pretentious, self-satisfied tone and a lot of blithery pseudoscience for good measure. Why not? Who's actually going to see it?
Worst Of The Year
The year certainly featured crasser, clumsier, and just-plain-crappier films, but was any 2005 movie as disappointing and excruciating to sit through as Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown? Borrowing the most obnoxious character dynamics from Garden State (desperate, clinging need is cute; emotional constipation is almost noble; obsessive neurotics are charming) and further romanticizing the central relationship until it dripped with inauthentic sweetness and pretentious gravity, Crowe made the longest two-hour movie of 2005.
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