The A.V. Club's consensus choice for the best film of 2005, Noah Baumbach's semi-autobiographical The Squid And The Whale (Sony) looks back on his adolescence with a perfect feeling for Brooklyn in the '80s that stops just short of nostalgia. Baumbach isn't easy on himself or his family, and the result is a film with a resonantly funny, painful take on what it's like to be pinned between warring parents…
Philip Seymour Hoffman just won a Best Actor Oscar for Capote (Sony), for a performance that digs beneath Truman Capote's coy public persona, while commenting on his capacity for exploiting his friends and journalistic subjects. It's just too bad that director Bennett Miller chose to make Capote so stiflingly prestige-y, right down to the tinkling-piano-and-strings soundtrack and the pretty landscape photography…
Outside of the long-eclipsed Friends, Jennifer Aniston has shown an uncanny ability to stay in the public eye while rarely appearing in a good or successful project. To her growing rap sheet, add Derailed (Weinstein Co.), a sleazy thriller about an affair that leads to theft, sexual assault, and blackmail. If you can't see the big twist coming from the opening reel, then everything in your life must come as a delightful surprise…
Remember when Disney's animated films were lyrical, timeless classics, worth buying on DVD so they could be watched again and again? The main reason for buying Chicken Little on DVD is to store it somewhere as a 2005 time capsule. As an actual film, it's frenetic, loud, and paper-thin, with a cute story but little depth, and garish, simple animation that trails the state of the art by a good ways. But as a collection of of-the-moment ephemera, from pop songs to film references, it's hard to beat…
In a year that took close-up looks at the perpetrators of terrorist acts in films ranging from the small-scale, intimate The War Within to the dense, knotty Syriana to Steven Spielberg's mega-scale Munich, Paradise Now (Warner Bros.) had a hard time finding a unique identity. It falls right in the middle of that pack in both ambition and intimacy, and it veers between tones and genres capably and effectively, but still jarringly. Its greatest strength is simply in the personal, ground-level detail it brings to the story of two would-be Palestinian suicide bombers preparing for, then reconsidering their martyrdom. Even hostile viewers who resent the film's humanization of terrorists are likely to learn something about the process that goes into making them.