This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2005

http://www.oscars.org/publications/poster78/black_tuxedo.jpg

i liked:
War of the Worlds
Wedding Crashers
The Weatherman
2046

and that's all i can think of off the top of my head!

Off the top of my head, this year I liked:

Constant Gardener
Beat My Heart Skipped
Holy Girl
Grizzly Man
My Summer Of Love
Batman movie

I'm sure City Of The Future and Los Angeles Plays Itself would be in there, but I didn't get a chance to see either.

I hate making lists.

(x-post)

The gayest of any given award show can't be as gay as the least-gay Tony award show. Well, maybe the Daytime Emmys.

Did anyone see Where The Truth Lies?

xp a shame!

Death of Mr. Lazarescu
2046
The World
Tale of Cinema
Grizzly Man
Land of the Dead
Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance
The Squid and the Whale
Regular Lovers
History of Violence
Three Times

Stuff I still need to see:
Howl's Moving Castle
Mary
My Father is 100 Years Old
Tropical Malady
Kings and Queen
Keane
Last Days
No Direction Home
Syriana
Takeshis
Wayward Cloud

I seriously just had a dream where I was an ex-employee of a gigantic mutliplex and just wandered into various films on the way home from my new job. I peeked into the Sarah Silverman movie for a little while, and (having seen it already) left. I noticed while I was walking out that a group of special ed adults were giving me evil glares for walking out. Down the hall, I noticed that Where the Truth Lies was playing and I made like I was going to go into it, but it was just letting out and a number of families with little blond girls not unlike Dakota Fanning were all leaving, shaking their heads. The next show wasn't going to start until one in the morning, so I went and flinged butter topping at members of the audience for Walk the Line.

I saw Tropical Malady. It was a bit disappointing.

I wonder if Syriana will actually be good.

xp oh no, C0L1N!

I think it's mostly that the critics' screenings for both films are fairly late in the game. Long past the time Peter Travers would wish to post his first-outta-the-gate top 10. (I'd expect The New World to be on his list when the time comes, simply based off his predictability.)

Funniest movie I saw this year:
Green Street Hooligans (unintentional)

Best films:
Wedding Crashers
The Constant Gardener
Masculin-Feminin (re-release, obviously)
The Devil's Rejects
My Summer of Love
Serenity

Good, but not the best:
Good Night & Good Luck
Domino
The Island
Hustle & Flow
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Layer Cake
The Skeleton Key (shockingly enough)
The Longest Yard

Better than expected but still not very good:
Cry_Wolf
Lord of War

Disappointingly Mediocre:
Land of the Dead
Corpse Bride
Jarhead
Walk The Line

I watched it again for Nicole Kidman:
The Interpreter

Totally Overrated (but not necessarily bad):
2046
Broken Flowers
Oldboy
Batman Begins
40-Year Old Virgin
A History of Violence

Boy did these fucking suck:
Willy Wonka
Sin City
Bad News Bears
The Brothers Grimm

You saw The Island.

no, and it got buried so quickly in the US it's shameful. I really wanted to see it, just couldn't make it.

I didn't see too many movies out this year, and that was partly because, for the first time in a long time, I found myself really disappointed in movies. I don't know if it's jsut because I've reached some saturation point where I've realized "fuck this, this was NOT worth the $20 we just spent to see it" or what. But Me You And Everyone We Know? MEH. Broken Flowers? Gimmie a fucking break.

I liked:

2046
Wallace and Grommit
Walk the Line

that was about it.

I didn't even realize Where the Truth Lies had been released in the U.S. I was kind of keeping an eye out for it, but I guess not enough of one.

You like tv.

Pleasantly surprised:
Four Brothers
Tell Them Who You Are

wish I'd never bothered:
Crash
Sahara
Lord Of War
High Tension

What if luna asked you to?
-- Soledad (adamr...), December 2nd, 2005.

uhh....I'm scared.

And, yeah, for the record, I'd pretty much do what either Caveh or Luna asked me to do, including (but not limited to) taking a ridiculously large quantity of psychedelic mushrooms on camera or dropping trow for an underwear thread gone seriously out of control.

Funniest movie I saw this year:
TV Party

Best retro screenings at Oak Street (or elsewhere):
Late Spring
Mouchette
The Exterminating Angel
The Passenger
Seventh Heaven // A Single Girl

Best NEW films:
Kings and Queen
War of the Worlds
Land of the Dead

Good, but not the best:
Forty Shades of Blue
Cinévardaphoto
The Joy of Life
The World
The Best of Youth
The Devil's Rejects
Ma Mère

Better than expected but still not very good:
Capote
3-Iron
Clean

Disappointingly Mediocre:
Harry and Max
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe
Nine Lives
The Family Stone
Proof

I watched it again for Nicole Kidman:
Roll Bounce (still didn't see her)

Totally Overrated (but not necessarily bad):
A History of Violence
Grizzly Man
Kung Fu Hustle

Boy did these fucking suck:
I'll just say Crash since everything else was good in comparison

obligatory "TV buries movies these days" slumming:
"Noah's Arc" on Logo

Honeymoon and marriage is over but I'll still have sex on the sly:
Last Days

Passable:
Batman Begins
Constant Gardener
Jarhead
Cinderella Man

Poor:
Everything is Illuminated

Fewer Hollywood films than ever for me this year. I need to rent some obvious garbage just cuz there must be SOMETHING worse than Batman Begins.

Early cream o' crop, roughly in order:

The Joy of Life
2046
The White Diamond
Saraband
Kung Fu Hustle
L'Esquive (Games of Love and Chance)
Private

Schultze Gets the Blues
Chain
Grizzly Man
Los Muertos The Ice Harvest
Rize
Tony Takitani
Mysterious Skin

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
Tropical Malady
Cinevardaphoto
Gabrielle
A State of Mind
Midwinter Night's Dream
Head-On

Machuca
War of the Worlds
Clean
Save the Green Planet
Junebug
The Best of Youth
The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Good :
Primer
Last Days
Vital
Howl's Moving Castle
Land Of The Dead
2046

Harmless :
Willy Wonka
The Brothers Grimm

so many! my piece is due next friday so next week i'm going to press screenings of brokeback mtn & capote (still not out here, that one) even though i'm not reviewing them, just for possible top 10 purposes.

i'd also like to see the constant gardener, kiss kiss bang bang, & good night & good luck before deadline!

VERY GOOD:
the taste of tea (won't count for my list as it only festival-screened in montreal this year... but best movie i saw this year by far)
war of the worlds
squid vs. whale
la niña santa

GOOD:
syriana
kung fu hustle
sin city
batman begins
zorro
the devil's rejects
zathura
deuce bigelow 2
primer
hustle & flow

WORST:
elektra
star wars
casanova
be cool
the pacifier
racing stripes

2046
The Aristocrats
Broken Flowers
*Capote
Crash
*Grizzly Man
*A History of Violence
Howl's Moving Castle
Hustle and Flow
Kings and Queen
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Where the Truth Lies

i can't possibly choose a best-of yet (too much i didn't see) but the filmGOING experience of the year for me by far was the NYUFF showing of a family finds entertainment (which culminated in a guerrilla musical performance by the cast with all sorts of funky props, including a MASSIVE BALLOON STRUCTURE!!!) (the movie itself is hysterically art-wacky and all the better for it)

kinda enjoyed:
mr. & mrs. smith (but i still think it would have been better with will ferrell in brad pitt's role)
land of the dead

wish had been better:
jarhead

disliked:
thumbsucker
that stupid cameron diaz toni colette one

wish i'd seen/still have to see:
grizzly man
howl's moving castle
oldboy
rize

Nobody Knows
Mysterious Skin
Hana & Alice
Kung Fu Hustle
Batman Begins
A Bittersweet Life
Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Downfall
Corpse Bride
Mind Game
Crying Fist
Danny The Dog
Wedding Crashers
AV
Seven Swords
Howl's Moving Castle
2046
3 Iron
Clean
War Of The Worlds
Me And You And Everyone We Know
Gunner Palace
Layer Cake
Be Cool
House Of Fury
Assault On Precinct 13
Tropical Malady
Sin City
Crash
Hell On Wheels
1735km
Grizzly Man
Initial D
Rebound

After M&M, I bet it will be even longer until you see another Woody.

haha, i just watched that this afternoon! i didn't think it was terrible, but it was probably a failure. a not altogether uninteresting one, though. and i actually thought radha mitchell's perf. was quite good.

John Waters

1. Last Days
2. Palindromes
3. A History Of Violence
4. Grizzly Man
5. Saraband
6.Mysterious Skin
7. The Aristocrats
8. Broken Flowers
9. Head On
10. 2046

Amy Taubin

1. A History Of Violence
2. 2046
3. The Holy Girl
4. The Intruder
5. Blue Movie
6. Last Days
7. No Direction Home
8. Funny Ha Ha
9. Police Beat
10 Robert Beavers and Owen Land Retrospectives

Caught Funny Ha Ha on IFC (?) awhile back lead actress was especially good and the film OK, but it also featured a couple indie geek-hunk males (all emotionally crippled, obv) right up my alley.

Shmoly Girl!

(x=pst)

Which ones? This year's harder than last year for me. Nothing sticks out as being easy VV slam dunks like Sunset and Sunshine.

Eat my opinion!

2046
A History of Violence

Not slam dunks, no; and it depends how Malick is received.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/006454.html

A History of Violence -- probably #1, the Wong has a significant contingent of "it's no ITMFL"-ers... the only other major contender is:
Grizzly Man
The Squid and the Whale
The New World
Tropical Malady
2046
Match Point
Brokeback Mountain
Kings & Queen
Last Days

There are so many well-reviewed mainstream crowd-pleasers that I don't know which ones could break through: Kung Fu Hustle, 40 Year Old Virgin, even... Red Eye? Such is this year I almost think the Wallace and Gromit movie could sneak into the top 10, and probably will in the place I gave to Kings and Queen (on the guess that a FC cover story is enough to put it over the top).

god... i don't know!! primer?!?! hustle & flow?!! (no) zorro?!?!?

I Heart Huckabees
Batman Begins
Sideways

star wars 3
elektra
casanova
mindhunters
huckabees
racing stripes?
be cool
the pacifier
brothers grimm

I knew you were going to say that!

You know, Last of The Summer Wine.

A friend sez he's got a surreptitious huckabees tape to lend me of D.O. Russell going apeshit on the set, abusing the actors, etc -- anyone hear tell?

actually didn't it come out in 2004? so scratch it.

i thought sideways (also 2004) was mostly junk.

Huckabees had moments (mostly involving Mark Wahlberg) but 'shrill bad fake screwball stuff' is completely OTM.

Crash was monumentally wrong and bad.

xp I forgot about Freddy Got Fingered!

My wife likes some stuff I hate. She claims I hate everything.

I want you sons of bitches out of my house now.

If Hitler were alive, he'd tell you not to think about oil.

You're the Hitler!

And the whole Isabelle Huppert business is just divine.

I would dislike Samantha Morton whatever. Also my wife loves people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Orlando Bloom. People that I'd like to see buried in elephant phlegm.

We went tio Amalfi after watching it!

Ms. Breillat, meet Tom Green.

I liked The Talented Mr. Ripley, too.

Look at this:
http://www.csindy.com/csindy/2001-07-26/film-1.gif

"we don't have to ask those questions do we dad?"

Woah, I've just checked imdb and found before STM he did a short starring Bette Davis.

Crash was fine except for the ridiculous portentous score and the totally rubbish last 20 mins or so.

I think it's Danny Boyle's best film and one of the best family films in a while. It's really enjoyable and honestly touching. You'll be happy if you see it and I won't be surprised if it's in my top ten at the end of the year. That's how much I truly loved it. I'd like to see it again in first-run theaters.

I don't know anything about it.

xp I miss Lincoln Center! Christmas tree!

how about winged migration?

xp not seen either of those, cozen, but I very much want to.

I love French people and animals.

yes.

Think about that.

war of the worlds
syriana
batman begins
squid and the whale
old boy
sin city
la nina santa
history of violence
deuce bigalow european gigolo
the aristocrats
good night & good luck
les etats nordiques

...and still capote & 2046 to go tomorrow. WHO WILL NOT MAKE THE CUT. probably sin city, if i had to guess... and... i dunno!! this is going to be hard.

how come?

My Top Ten in no particular order (except the top two which were head and shoulders above the rest:

The Night Of Truth
Head-On
Hotel Rwanda
Somersault
Me and You and Everyone We Know
A History of Violence
Serenity
Sky High
3-Iron
The Transporter 2

Flawed but interesting:
Walk the Line
Kung Fu Hustle (I know, it just wasn't my thing)
I Heart Huckabees
Sin City
I predict Munich, King Kong, and possibly The New World will also fall into this catagory.

Didn't leave much of an impression:
Kingdom of Heaven
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

Please never make me watch that again:
Crash
Sideways

I liked Harry Potter but I think it goes in a special catagory.
I would also have seen North Country if it didn't have Charlize Theron in it.

just saw capote. will make the list, i liked it a lot.

Good. I also saw Le Squid et Le Whale the other night and liked it quite a bit.

Joe McCarthy and Andy Serkis? (will get at least 5 votes in the VV poll)

Nothing. See the movie.

Honorable mentions:
Three Rooms Of Melancholia
Head-On
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
Batman Begins
Forty Shades Of Blue
The World
Broken Flowers
Grizzly Man
The Squid And The Whale
Last Days

Great revivals:
Mouchette & Pickpocket
Winter Soldier
Harlan County, U.S.A.
The Conformist
Film Forum's "Essential Westerns" (especially the Budd Boetticher films)

The Smartest Guys In The Room
Domino
The Constant Gardener
The Squid And The Whale
New York Doll
Grizzly Man
Good Night, And Good Luck
Capote
Batman Begins
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

I'm seeing Match Point tonight, so this might get revised (also haven't seen Syriana yet)...

http://www.lafca.net/Home/News/2005_lafca_awards_winners.html

LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ANNOUNCE 2005 AWARD WINNERS

LOS ANGELES, DECEMBER 10, 2005

"Brokeback Mountain" was voted Best Picture of the Year, it was announced tonight by Henry Sheehan, President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA). The runner up was "A History of Violence."

LAFCA's 31st annual achievement awards ceremony will be held Tuesday, January 17 at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles. www.lafca.net

Other award winners are:

DIRECTOR: Ang Lee, "Brokeback Mountain"
- Runner-up: David Cronenberg, "A History of Violence"

ACTRESS: Vera Farmiga, "Down to the Bone"
- Runner-up: Judi Dench, "Mrs. Henderson Presents"

ACTOR: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, "Capote"
- Runner-up: Heath Ledger, "Brokeback Mountain"

SCREENPLAY: TIE:
"Capote" by Dan Futterman
“The Squid and the Whale” by Noah Baumbach

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Catherine Keener, "Capote", “Ballad of Jack and Rose”, “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “The Interpreter”
- Runner-up: Amy Adams, "Junebug"

SUPPORTING ACTOR: William Hurt, "A History of Violence"
- Runner-up: Frank Langella, "Good Night, And Good Luck"

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: "Caché" directed by Michael Haneke
- Runner-up: "2046" directed by Wong Kar Wai

DOCUMENTARY/NON-FICTION FILM: "Grizzly Man" directed by Werner Herzog
- Runner-up: "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" directed by Alex Gibney

PRODUCTION DESIGN: William Chang, "2046"
- Runner-up: Jim Bissell, "Good Night, And Good Luck."

ANIMATION: "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" (Nick Park and Steve Box)

MUSIC/SCORE: Joe Hisaishi, Youmi Kimura, "Howl’s Moving Castle"
- Runner-up: Ryuichi Sakamoto, "Tony Takitani"

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Elswit, "Good Night, And Good Luck"
- Runner-up: Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun Leung, & Yiu-Fai Lai, "2046"

NEW GENERATION: Terrence Howard

CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Richard Widmark

INDEPENDENT/EXPERIMENTAL: “La Commune (Paris, 1871)” directed by Peter Watkins

SPECIAL CITATIONS:
To Film critic Kevin Thomas for his contributions to film culture in Los Angeles.

To David Shepard, Bruce Posner and the Anthology Film Archive to honor “Unseen Cinema”, an eight-disc set DVD collection of avant-garde, underground films from 1894-1941.

Did it really take that long for La Commune to reach L.A.?

Well that'll get Down to the Bone in a few more theaters.

Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Crash
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Good Night and Good Luck
A History of Violence
King Kong
Munich
The Squid and the Whale
Syriana

I'll surprised if Jeff Daniels doesn't get some crix group thing with all the Squid popularity... his unflinching portrayal of a pretentious dick was rather fearless.

Exactly.

---

National Board of Review

BEST TEN FILMS OF 2005

Best Film: Good Night, And Good Luck

And, in alphabetical order:

Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Crash
History of Violence
Match Point
Memoirs of a Geisha
Munich
Syriana
Walk the Line

BEST FIVE FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILMS OF 2005
Best Foreign-Language Film: Paradise Now

And, in alphabetical order:
2046
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Downfall
Walk on Water

BEST FIVE DOCUMENTARIES OF 2005
Best Documentary: March of the Penguins

And, in alphabetical order:
Ballets Russes
Grizzly Man
Mad Hot Ballroom
Murderball

Best Animated Feature: Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
Best Director: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Best Actress: Felicity Huffman, TransAmerica
Best Supporting Actor: Jake Gyllenhaal, Brokeback Mountain
Best Supporting Actress: Gong Li, Memoirs of a Geisha
Best Acting By An Ensemble: Mrs. Henderson Presents
Breakthrough Performance Actor: Terrence Howard, Crash, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Hustle & Flow
Breakthrough Performance Actress: Q’Orianka Kilcher, The New World
Best Directorial Debut: Julian Fellowes, Separate Lies
Best Adapted Screenplay: Stephen Gaghan, Syriana
Best Original Screenplay: Noah Baumbach, The Squid and the Whale
Best Film or Mini-Series Made for Cable TV: Lackawanna Blues
Career Achievement: Jane Fonda
Career Achievement in Film Music Composition: Howard Shore
Outstanding Achievement in Special Effects: King Kong
Billy Wilder Award for Excellence in Direction: David Cronenberg
William K. Everson Award for Film History: George Feltenstein
Producer of the Year Award: Saul Zaentz
Special Recognition of Films That Reflect Freedom of Expression:
Innocent Voices and The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
Special Mention for Excellence in Filmmaking:

The National Board of Review, in keeping with its long tradition of recognizing excellence in filmmaking, is proud to salute the following films crafted by visionary artists, which demonstrate the creativity and determination always vital to the film industry.

(Listed Alphabetically)

Breakfast on Pluto
Cape of Good Hope
The Dying Gaul
Everything Is Illuminated
Hustle & Flow
Junebug
Layer Cake
Lord of War
Nine Lives
The Thing About My Folks
The Upside of Anger

zing

Thanks God someone has saluted Paul Reiser's edgy creativity, too.

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain
Best Director: Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee, director
Best Actor: Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon, Walk The Line
Best Supporting Actor: William Hurt, A History of Violence
Best Supporting Actress: Maria Bello, A History of Violence
Best Animated Film: Howl's Moving Castle
Best Screenplay: The Squid and the Whale
Best Documentary: Grizzly Man and White Diamond
Best Foreign Film: 2046
Best Cinematography: 2046

Looks like Baumach is gonna get Oscar nom'd, perhaps.

Yeah, I wonder how Brokeback Mountain could be that good. er, my suspicion is that perhaps it's very very good, but in a way that's also very very Hollywood and super conventional, which isn't my favorite thing.

has it actually been released in the states yet?

These are insane.

xp - it got released in major metros on Friday.

It's winning a lot of the same awards that Crouching Bullshit won... ie, from critics who hadn't seen any Asian swordplay movies, or Lonesome Cowboys.

Insane you say, broheems?

is this meant to be implying something besides general cheekiness?

SF critics go for...guess...

http://www.sffcc.org/

Marlon Riggs Award
for courage & vision in the
Bay Area film community:
Jenni Olsen
director of
"The Joy of Life"

YEAH YEAH YEAH!

Amy Adams was good in Junebug, but I liked Celia Weston (the mom) better.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements for 2005 will be presented on March 5, 2006, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 5 p.m. PST.

http://www.moviecitynews.com/awards/2006/top_tens/00_chart.html

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051218/COMMENTARY/512180302

1. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman)
2. Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
3. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache)
4. Amarcord (Federico Fellini)
5. The Last Detail (Hal Ashby)
6. The Mirages (n/a)
7. Day for Night (Francois Truffaut)
8. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese)
9. My Uncle Antoine (Claude Jutra)
10. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola)

1985. The Color Purple
1988. Mississippi Burning
1989. Do the Right Thing
1992. Malcolm X
1994. Hoop Dreams
1997. Eve's Bayou
2001. Monster's Ball
2005. Crash

and lasted 20 minutes each time.

His 200 runnersup bring to mind Armond W's crack that only Ebert can like everything (cept those WOTW TRIPODS!).

Morbius: yeah, Ebert's wife Chaz is African American. It was also recently revealed that he dated Oprah.

"March of the Penguins," about the responsibilities of parenthood.

He is the first I've seen to mention Schultze Gets the Blues, which I thought was better Wenders than Wenders has done in awhile.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1142135,00.html

Schickel, otoh -- ick.

and pretty much anything is better than what wenders has done in a while!

http://www.villagevoice.com/take/seven

My predictions scorecard:

A History of Violence
Grizzly Man
The Squid and the Whale
The New World
Tropical Malady
2046
Match Point
Brokeback Mountain
Kings & Queen
Last Days

One worse than last year (I think)... though I fluffed on the Malick and Allen films by a pretty significant margin. Hadn't a clue that there was that much support for the Jia.

I surfed through some Voice ballots, and the most startling vote I found was Jonathan Rosenbaum's for screenplay: Lord of War! Musta missed that review.

What's with the Maria Bello acclaim? She was OK, but it seems like the Oscars' "hot chick can act" Supporting Actress trend.

Why didn't you say so when I asked everyone (in Chicago) what they thought? I still really want to see it.

DVDs of the year poll: http://www.mastersofcinema.org/reviews/dvd2005.htm (makes me a little sad that one of my new year's resolutions is to quit buying DVDs cold turkey and just settle for the discs I land screeners for and Netflixing the rest)

It's going to be hard, but car payments will force me to stick to my guns on that resolution. Plus there's that little matter of the backlog of unwatched DVDs and DVD-Rs making any further additional DVDs foolish.

I agree with the second part of this, but thought Hathaway was too cartoony-stereotypey. I thought the cute one from Dawson's Creek was better.

A History of Violence
Mysterius Skin
The Squid & The Whale
Capote
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
The Chronicles of Narnia
Brokeback Mountain

http://www.slate.com/id/2133290/

Did anyone see the Joe Dante made-for-Showtime horror hour on Iraq btw?

And hmmm: Edelstein leaving Slate for New York magazine?

http://www.villagevoice.com/take/seven.php?page=comments

A couple faves (tho I skipped most about films I haven't seen):

A History of Violence is a perfectly OK thriller sandbagged by the notion that it says something interesting and difficult about violence. Unfortunately, this seems to be that (a) violence is a human perennial, lurking beneath the tweediest exterior, which doesn't seem that difficult, and (b) audiences are easily whipped into bloodlust at sights and actions that might repulse them in real life, which doesn't seem that interesting, especially since the violence is utterly movie-branded. Is it possible to "implicate" an audience quite at home with grisly TV torture-porn such as 24 with a few bloody close-ups? -B. KITE

Surely French New Wave masters like Resnais, Rohmer, and Rivette deserve a thearical release at least as much as Caterina in the Big City? If they made films about gay 18-year-olds having lots of sex, could they at least get two weeks at the Quad? -STEVE ERICKSON

http://indyweek.com/durham/current/movie.html

and the Slate Movie Club:

http://www.slate.com/id/2132498/entry/2133364/

Why do some critics seem to think that Spielberg is persecuted by other critics and fans? Don't all of his movies (pretty much) garner good reviews and big box offices?

http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2006/01/indiewires_top_1.html

Chain played 2 weeks in NY and is in my top ten right now, as the middle panel of Three Times would be. Eagerly awaiting Tsai's Wayward Cloud.

I don't see why his one comment is so upsetting.

I think B. Kite is sort of missing why people are fussing over A History of Violence--namely the issues of identity and cognitive dissonance the film raises. I'm not sure I'm as excited as other about it, but there's much more to the movie than what Kite's addressing.

The Intruder and Power of Nightmares, both of which I caught last week, are great, for very different reasons, obviously. They'd both probably make my final top ten, if I made one.

http://www.sagawards.org/PR_060105.htm

WGA
Original: "Cinderella Man," "Crash," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "The Squid and the Whale."

Adapted: "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "The Constant Gardener," "A History of Violence" and Syriana."

PGA: "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Crash," "Good Night, and Good Luck," and "Walk the Line."

http://www.nypress.com/19/1/film/topfilms.cfm

Good Night, and Good Luck
George Clooney

Crash
Paul Haggis

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee

Capote
Bennett Miller

Munich
Steven Spielberg

And 24 more picks from what the industry thought us yokels could handle in 2005

To choose the best movies of 2005 is to compromise. I limit my list of candidates to films that have screened in Chicago, but I could easily fill it with movies that haven't screened in the U.S. at all, and God knows what I've missed altogether. I'm at the mercy of studio heads, distributors, and publicists, whose decisions about what to release and when defy comprehension.

I saw Woody Allen's Match Point in Madrid in mid-November, believing the distributor's announcement that it would open in Chicago in December. Surprised at how much I liked it, I decided it probably belonged on my list, but then some industry executives decided that only the people in New York and Los Angeles should get to see it this year (in time for Oscar nominations), not the less discriminating moviegoers in the Chicago boondocks. I also couldn't consider other films that won't open here until 2006, such as Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

The people who run Disney spent a fortune sending critics and Academy members security-encoded DVDs with special "high end" players to view them on. Once we register the players we can watch the five films we've received so far as often as we like, though each time we do, according to the instructions, "the SV300 inserts a powerful, completely invisible watermark. It stamps the content with your player's ID number, and the time and date of the recording. If the playback is copied illegally to videotape, recordable DVD, or onto the Internet, Cinea will be able to analyze the copy and identify the player, the time, and the date on which the copy was made." Unfortunately, these players aren't high-end enough to be region free, and the version of Howl's Moving Castle they sent me is the same old dubbed one I'd already reviewed. The Japanese original with English subtitles won't be out commercially on DVD until March. I can't consider that version here because I haven't seen it, so I've grudgingly put the dubbed version on my list.

These complaints aside, 2005 was a good enough year that my top ten list expanded to 15 including ties.

1) The World. Not just the best film of 2005, Jia Zhang-ke's feature was better, or at least more important, than my first choices for 2004 (The Big Red One) and 2003 (25th Hour and Crimson Gold). Those earlier masterpieces lack its vital and complex vision of what the whole planet is like at the moment.

Jia's greatest film, Platform (2002), is about the Cultural Revolution; The World is a superb companion piece about China's recent capitalist revolution, set in a theme park outside Beijing with scaled-down models of the world's most famous tourist attractions and populated by visitors and workers. It's a kitsch monstrosity that Jia makes endlessly fascinating and suggestive -- in contrast to the cramped and unattractive "backstage" living spaces where the main characters spend most of their time when they're not working. The animated fantasies sparked by characters' text messages are often even more spacious and ethereal than the shots of the theme park. The play among all these spaces marks Jia as the most talented Asian director currently at work -- with the possible exception of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose hauntingly minimalist Cafe Lumiere will be playing at the Music Box in January.

2) Not on the Lips. At 35, Jia may be the youngest supreme film master working today. At 83, Alain Resnais is the second oldest working regularly, after 97-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, whovisited Chicago for the first time during this year's film fest. This exquisite film version of a 1925 operetta is Resnais' fifth cinematic effort to convey his love of musicals, and in some ways it's his most successful. A weird, ghostly farce about loneliness and emotional fragility, it's also an anachronistic history lesson, with its 1920s manners, 1950s MGM colors and lighting, and early-21st-century French racism and anti-Americanism. It also displays much of the formal mastery of previous Resnais masterworks, including Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Providence (1977), and Melo (1986). Fox Lorber never bothered to advertise this film, but it's been available on DVD since March, when it also screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

3) A History of Violence. I've yet to encounter a single attack on David Cronenberg's multilayered yet fluid meditation on violence in George Bush's America -- filmed entirely in Canada. The writer-director clearly knows what he's doing -- note the brilliantly worked-out sex scenes -- and though the film peaks well before its end, making the climax almost an afterthought, it's less a serious flaw than an indication of how lean and mean the earlier segments are.

4) Ten Skies. Here's an experimental film seen by many fewer people than the titles above, having screened only once at Chicago Filmmakers. This masterpiece by James Benning is an elaborately constructed montage of ten ten-minute takes, a mesmerizing study of time, light, movement, and moisture that traces the shifting relations between clouds and earth, nature and people. It had much more to say to me than most narrative films, though the subtly shifting patterns and textures of each shot provide plenty of narrative as they tellthe story of our own perceptions.

5) Tropical Malady. All three features to date by Thai writer-director (and School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate) Apichatpong Weerasethakul confirm that he's one of the most creative and unpredictable film artists now working anywhere. Each time out he becomes more ambitious, though Mysterious Object at Noon and Blissfully Yours were hardly modest efforts. Part one of Tropical Malady shows the budding romance between a soldier on leave and a shy country boy with a mixture of irony and tenderness. Part two turns folkloric and allegorical as the soldier travels through a dark forest, alternately stalking and being stalked by his lover in the form of a tiger spirit, with a talking baboon offering sage advice.

6) A tie between two kids' movies, Howl's Moving Castle and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, both based on well-known English novels. I especially value the first, Hayao Miyazaki's animated feature -- based on Diana Wynne Jones's book and the most commercially successful domestic release in the history of Japanese cinema -- for the radical fluidity with which people and objects undergo constant transformationand for the implied philosophical position: that wisdom doesn't so much succeed callowness as peacefully coexist with it. The same can be said for dreams and waking reality. The triumph of Tim Burton's delirious riff on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is more in the surrealist design and nightmarish dislocation than in some metaphysics. The off-putting aggressive mannerisms of Johnny Depp as chocolate tycoon Willy Wonka are a reminder that Burton has better instincts for the visual than for human behavior.

7) A tie between two literary movies, Yes and Capote, both highly unexpected successes. Yes, a post-9/11 love story about an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese surgeon working as a cook (Simon Abkarian), proved that contemporary world politics could be gracefully confronted in iambic pentameter. It's the best film Sally Potter's made since The Gold Diggers (1983), in part because she found something affirmative to say. Capote showed that Truman Capote's downfall could be partly explained by the ethical and emotional conflicts he went through while writing In Cold Blood. It had the advantages of a first-rate actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a highly focused script by Dan Futterman, and the economical direction of Bennett Miller.

8) A tie between two up-to-date works about art by old masters, Michelangelo Antonioni's 17-minute Michelangelo Eye to Eye (2004) and Ingmar Bergman's feature-length Saraband (2003). Michelangelo Eye to Eye, shown in 35-millimeter as part of the Onion City Film Festival at Chicago Filmmakers, used digital technology to show Antonioni, now in his 90s and confined to a wheelchair since 1975, walking through Saint Peter's in Rome, looking at and caressing Michelangelo's restored Moses -- one restored Michelangelo considering another. Saraband, a sequel to Bergman's 1973 Scenes From a Marriage, was shot in DV and shown that wayat Bergman's insistence during its commercial release. It's a kind of postcinematic effort by Bergman, now in his 80s, made with a new technology after a 60-odd-year career using film. The content is typically self-punishing, but I could only admire his willingness to record such barrenness using a technology that wouldn't grant it even a modicum of glamour.

9) A tie between two plaintive comedies about lonely fuckups, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. I could have made this a three-way tie and included Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, but once the shock of it wore off I didn't find its negativity as clarifying as I would have liked. Jarmusch's feature lacks the formal and moral complexity of his underrated Coffee and Cigarettes, and the fact that he edited it backward is apparent, because it starts out rich and ends up depleted. Bill Murray's narcissism bores me almost as much here as it did in Lost in Translation, but the other actors are delightful. July's compulsion to tweak Americans for their puritanism is also somewhat off-putting, but the characters are sweet, her direction deft.

10) A tie between two examples of not-quite science fiction, Hal Hartley's modest The Girl From Monday and Wong Kar-wai's almost Wagnerian 2046. Hartley's hilarious futuristic satire imagines a "dictatorship of the consumer," with citizens wearing bar codes on their wrists and regarded as "investments with growth potential," especially when they have sex. Wong's first film in 'Scope, a labyrinth of longing, begins in the last year of Hong Kong's economic and political independencebut is set mainly in the 60s and concerns his parents' generation.

The year's biggest disappointment was a marked decline in the quality and vitality of the documentaries released. In 2004 we were given Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, Los Angeles Plays Itself, and Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel. This year we got solid stuff -- Cinevardaphoto (a Block Films screening), Go Further, Grizzly Man, Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and William Eggleston in the Real World -- but fewer revelations. Even the most documentarylike items in my top 15, Ten Skies and Michelangelo Eye to Eye, are subversions of the form, as is Jem Cohen's memorable Chain.

Sad to say, none of the documentaries I saw about the war in Iraq seemed adequate to the subject. They all seemed too "embedded," too timid, too dependent on cross-referencing Hollywood fantasies like Apocalypse Now. It's obviously important for Gunner Palace to show that some innocent families in Baghdad whose houses were ransacked for weapons got sent to Abu Ghraib even though no weapons were found, but it's offensive to treat such information as incidental and secondary. Ironically, Joe Dante's crude, fictional Homecoming -- an angry satire about slain soldiers returning from their graves to vote the president out of office, which turned up on Showtime's "Masters of Horror" -- came closer to bearing witness to the war's true meaning.

Far too much fuss has been made lately about liberal-minded fiction films that make liberal-minded viewers feel sensitive and virtuous. As a first feature, Paul Haggis's Crash certainly has its high points, but fresh insights into the nature and ramifications of racism aren't among them, and the complacent Altman-esque ironies don't help. (Curiously, Jan Hrebejk's uncannily similar and equally accomplished Czech film Up and Down was ignored by critics.)I was moved by both Brokeback Mountain and Rent, but they still seemed overly contained. Steven Spielberg may have learned to think beyond Zionist reflexes, but Munich, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, is still supposed to make us feel good about the slaughter of Arabs, though we're now also supposed to feel bad about feeling good.

Ten other movies I liked, in alphabetical order: The Beat That My Heart Skipped; The Brothers Grimm; Fear and Trembling; Goodbye, Dragon Inn; Lord of War; Notre Musique; Or (My Treasure); Play; The Producers; and Safe Conduct. My annual F.W. Murnau award, given to the film that did the most to alter my sense of film history, goes to the wonderful, radical 1966 Jacques Rivette documentary Jean Renoir, the Boss: A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue. Unlike most of what I saw in 2005, it was blissfully free of compromise.

the wonderful, radical 1966 Jacques Rivette documentary Jean Renoir

Is this made up of the interviews I've seen on Renoir DVDs -- The Golden Coach, I think?

Caught Sympathy For Lady Vengeance the other night too - it looks good technically and I again liked the touches of black humour, but I found the story less engaging than the past two films. I'm not sure that I fully believed the film's premise to begin with.

Loved (that is, got to me in weird emotional and personal ways):
The New World
The Weatherman

Really Liked (admirable, intellectually or emotionally engaged, very entertained, etc.):
Munich
The 40-Year-Old-Virgin
War of the Worlds
Grizzly Man

Liked:
Wedding Crashers
Kung Fu Hustle
2046
Wedding Crashers

Shrug (should maybe see again, but not too motivated):
The Squid and the Whale
Batman Begins
King Kong
Walk the Line (good performances and music tho)
Sin City
Episode III

Just Bad:
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Crash

incidentally I saw both of these on dates and pretended to not hate them since my date LOVED them!

Still want to see:
assorted obscure indie and foreign films such as The World
A History of Violence
Brokeback Mountain

i see The Aristocrats made it -- even tho they destroyed the Gilbert Gottfried Friars telling by continually intercutting?

BEST PICTURE
1. Capote (Bennett Miller) – 12 votes (on sixth ballot)
2. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg) – 11 votes (on sixth ballot)
3. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai) (fifth ballot)

BEST NONFICTION PICTURE
1. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog) – 60 points
2. Darwin’s Nightmare (Hubert Sauper) – 27
3. Ballets russes (Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine) – 19

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE PICTURE
1. Head-On (Fatih Akin) – 26
2. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai) – 23
3. Caché (Michael Haneke) – 18

BEST DIRECTOR
1. David Cronenberg (A History of Violence) – 32
2. Wong Kar-wai (2046) – 26
3. Bennett Miller (Capote) – 23

BEST SCREENPLAY
1. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach) – 37
2. Capote (Dan Futterman) – 33
3. Munich (Tony Kushner and Eric Roth) – 14

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
1. 2046 (Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun-leung, Lai Yiu-fai) – 50
2. Good Night, and Good Luck. (Robert Elswit) – 16
3. The New World (Emmanuel Lubezki) – 11

BEST ACTOR
1. Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) – 68
2. Jeff Daniels (The Squid and the Whale) – 41
3. Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain) – 40

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Ed Harris (A History of Violence) – 27
2. Frank Langella (Good Night, and Good Luck.) – 22
2. Matthieu Amalric (Munich) – 22

BEST ACTRESS
1. Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) – 37
2. Keira Knightley (Pride and Prejudice) – 27
3. Vera Farmiga (Down to the Bone) – 18
3. Kate Dollenmayer (Funny Ha Ha) – 18

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Amy Adams (Junebug) – 33
2. Ziyi Zhang (2046) – 28
3. Catherine Keener – 22 (Capote, The Interpreter, Ballad of Jack and Rose, The 40-Year-Old Virgin)

EXPERIMENTAL AWARDS
1. SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968) and TAKE TWO ½ (2005), William Greaves’ remarkable investigation into the nature of the acting process and power relationships on a movie set.
2. 13 Lakes, Ten Skies, and 27 Years Later, the three 2005 productions of James Benning. Few have done more over the last thirty years to expand the sensory and temporal boundaries of moving pictures.

FILM HERITAGE AWARD
“Unseen Cinema, the 7-disc DVD box set collection of pre-1942 American avant-garde cinema assembled by Anthology Film Archives and Bruce Posner -- a massive and unprecedented undertaking made in concert with 60 other film archives and preservation organizations across the globe.”

SPECIAL CITATION
THE NSFC COMMENDS AND CONGRATULATES our colleague Kevin Thomas for his 44-year tenure as a movie critic at the Los Angeles Times, for his tireless championing in the heart of the world’s movie capital of the power and beauty of independent, experimental and foreign film, for his long and important service to moviegoers around the industry, the country and the world.

You tart!

I saw New World yesterday and despite my mixed feelings it's probably the best '05 studio film I've seen by quite a lot. I'll probably end up going to the newer cut when it comes out.

also i hadn't seen munich or brokeback mountain yet (i still haven't seen the latter).

let alone new world etc.

Film Comment's year-end issue just came in the mail, none of it's online yet; critic poll similar to the Voice's (save for some shifts, like Brokeback at #7 instead of 11). And they have some lists like Paul Schrader's (Saraband #1, I think) and Guy Maddin's (Batman Begins #2 :p ). And TWO articles on Match Point.

Would love to read your thoughts.

Morb: is The White Diamond out on DVD yet?

The Cinemarati blog is doing a countdown of their 20 Best, with someone writing 'dissents' on many of the films:

http://www.cinemarati.org

Boy was I underwhelmed with Saddest Music.

Why is it that the FC poll is inevitably two shades more middlebrow than its VV counterpart? I thought that FC was supposed to be two shades more vanguard?

I said in an earlier column that I am off critics, and to a certain extent I am, but I still like to compare lists to find out where certain movies that I like fall.

Maddin has wack taste in other people's films. Eric, Saddest was the first feature of his I found thoroughly satisfying since Tales of Gimli Hospital! (tho he followed [?] it swiftly with Cowards) ... were you not fond of Mark McKinney's Cagney hommage? or "The Song Is You"?

i still can't get grizzly man out of my head; there were so many unforgettable moments in that movie...

and then 5 minutes later i met isabella rossellini. which was awesome x 100.

White Diamond is...pretty fucking crazy!

xp !

There's wack taste (which he demonstrates nobly in his bi-monthly colums) and there's retarded taste. But I should talk. The only list collected in FC that has War of the Worlds at the top also makes room in its top 5 for Crash, Batman Begins and The Constant Gardener.

Still no sign of Armond White in the critics' choice grid.

were you not fond of Mark McKinney's Cagney hommage? or "The Song Is You"?

Not particularly and sort of, respectively. I didn't loathe it, but sometimes I think Maddin should stick to 5 minute shorts.

btw, Christian Bale gives a quiet, utterly effective perf in his 15-20 minutes in The New World.

And who liked Breakfast on Pluto? I've been dithering for a month about seeing it -- seems like the kind of widely disparaged flop I might like, esp given my high regard for Butcher Boy.

http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/JF06/2005poll.htm

http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/JF06/bestdocs.htm

Paul Schrader's list from the mag:

1. Saraband
2. Palindromes
3. Brokeback Mountain
4. The Aristocrats
5. Syriana
6. Thumbsucker
7. 2046
8. Pride and Prejudice
9. Me and You and Everyone We Know
10. The Upside of Anger

Monday night, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the Critics' Choice Awards...in the press room backstage - after "Crash" won the Best Acting Ensemble award... BRENDAN FRASER earned a special distinction in condescension when he told reporters " 'Crash' is a story that needs to be told and we did all the hard work for you."

Nearly any critics or cineastes worth reading or engaging like their share of stuff that appalls me, tho.

You may prepare the stocks and rotten fruit if you wish.

What should I watch tonight, the Golden Globes or Memories of Murder?

:(

sometimes they say "fuck"

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11077661/site/newsweek/

So many of your movies this year moved audiences to tears. Do you cry easily in movies?

CLOONEY: I cried at the premiere of "Batman and Robin." I cried for a week.

SPIELBERG: "Bambi." When I was a kid, I would actually get up in the middle of the night and make sure my parents were still alive.

This explains a lot!

PRO
Kings & Queen (Arnaud Desplechin)
Land of the Dead (George A. Romero)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) [2001]
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg)

pro
Best of Youth, The (Marco Tullio Giordana)
Cinévardaphoto (Agnès Varda)
Devil's Rejects, The (Rob Zombie)
Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs)
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
History of Violence, A (David Cronenberg)
Last Days (Gus Van Sant)
Ma Mère (Christophe Honoré)
Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)
Palindromes (Todd Solondz)
Red Eye (Wes Craven)
The World (Jia Zhangke)

mixed
2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
3-iron (Kim Ki-duk)
5 x 2 (François Ozon)
6ixtynin9 (Pen-ek Ratanaruang) [1999]
À tout de suite (Benoît Jacquot)
Ballets russes (Dan Geller & Dayna Goldfine)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
Capote (Bennett Miller)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton)
Constant Gardener, The (Fernando Meirelles)
Côte d'Azur (Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau)
The Family Stone (Thomas Bezucha)
Garçon Stupide (Lionel Baier)
King of the Corner (Peter Riegert)
Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow)
Match Point (Woody Allen)
Nine Lives (Rodrigo García)
Roll Bounce (Malcolm D. Lee)
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (Liam Lynch)

con
Army of One (Sarah Goodman)
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson)
Dear Frankie (Shona Auerbach)
Eating Out (Q. Allan Brocka) -- seeing Ryan Carnes naked wasn't the worst thing in the world, tho
Fun With Dick and Jane (Dean Parisot)
Harry and Max (Christopher Münch)
The Legend of Zorro (Martin Campbell)
The Man Who Copied (Jorge Furtado)
Proof (John Madden)
Syriana (Stephen Gaghan)

CON
Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan)
The Boys & Girl From County Clare (John Irvin)
Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (Adam Shankman)
Crash (Paul Haggis)
Cry Wolf (Jeff Wadlow)
Yours, Mine & Ours (Raja Gosnell)

Cruise, Holmes dominate especially bitchy Razzie noms:

http://www.razzies.com/default.asp

Worst Picture

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Dirty Love
Dukes of Hazzard
House of Wax
Son of the Mask

TEN BEST
(roughly in order of preference)

Munich (US, Steven Spielberg)
2046 (China-France-Germany-Hong Kong, Wong Kar Wai)
The White Diamond (nonfiction, Germany, Werner Herzog)
Saraband (Sweden-Italy-Germany-Finland-Denmark-Austria, Ingmar Bergman)
Kung Fu Hustle (China-Hong Kong, Stephen Chow)
L'Esquive (Games of Love and Chance) (France, Abdel Kechiche)
Private (Italy, Saverio Costanzo)
The New World (US, Terrence Malick)
Breakfast on Pluto (Ireland-UK, Neil Jordan)
Schultze Gets the Blues (Germany, Michael Schorr)

SECOND TEN

Chain (US-Germany, Jem Cohen)
Grizzly Man (nonfiction, US, Werner Herzog)
The Ice Harvest (US, Harold Ramis)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (US-UK, Miranda July)
Rize (nonfiction, US-UK, David LaChapelle)
Tony Takitani (Japan, Jun Ichikawa)
Land of the Dead (US-Canada-France, George A. Romero)
Mysterious Skin (US-Netherlands, Gregg Araki)
Cinévardaphoto (nonfiction, France, Agnès Varda)
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (UK-US, Tim Burton, Mike Johnson)

RUNNERS-UP

Tropical Malady (Thailand-France-Germany-Italy, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
A State of Mind (nonfiction, North Korea-UK, Daniel Gordon)
Head-On (Germany-Turkey, Fatih Akin)
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (UK, Steve Box, Nick Park)
Machuca (Chile-Spain-UK-France, Andrés Wood)
War of the Worlds (US, Steven Spielberg)
Save the Green Planet! (South Korea, Jeong Jun-hwan)

BEST LEAD ACTORS

Mathieu Amalric, Kings and Queen
Kate Dollenmayer, Funny Ha Ha
Dina Korzun, Forty Shades of Blue
Tony Leung Chiu Wai, 2046
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin
Cillian Murphy, Breakfast on Pluto
Liv Ullmann, Saraband

BEST SUPPORTING ACTORS

Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale
Robert Joy, Land of the Dead
Mathieu Kassovitz, Munich
Natacha Koutchoumov, Garçon Stupide
Michael Lonsdale, Munich
Oliver Platt, The Ice Harvest
Yuen Qiu, Kung Fu Hustle
Billy Bob Thornton, The Ice Harvest
Ziyi Zhang, 2046

BEST NON-ACTORS

Mark Anthony Yhap, The White Diamond
Timothy Treadwell's girlfriends, Grizzly Man (where were Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway?)

THE B LIST

Junebug, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Kings and Queen, Good Night and Good Luck, Turtles Can Fly, Forty Shades of Blue, Caché, Paradise Now, The Squid and the Whale, Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque, Hitler's Hit Parade, The Nomi Song, Memories of Murder, Garçon Stupide, The Aristocrats

BEST INTERNATIONAL TV RELEASED IN U.S. THEATERS

The Century of the Self (nonfiction, UK, Adam Curtis)
The Best of Youth (Italy, Marco Tullio Giordana)
The Power of Nightmares (nonfiction, UK, Adam Curtis)

"SAVE THE PIECES"

On the Outs, Wheel of Time, William Eggleston in the Real World, L'Intrus, Match Point, Travellers and Magicians, Brokeback Mountain, Nobody Knows

BEST UNDISTRIBUTED FILMS

The Joy of Life (US, Jenni Olson)
Los Muertos (Argentina-Fr-Neth-Switz, Lisandro Alonso)
the "A Time for Freedom" middle section of Three Times (Taiwan, Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Gabrielle (Germany-France-Italy, Patrice Chéreau)
Midwinter Night's Dream (Yugoslavia, Goran Paskaljevic)
Clean (Canada-France-UK, Olivier Assayas)
Aaltra (France-Belgium, Benoît Delépine, Gustave de Kervern)
Through the Forest (France, Jean-Paul Civeyrac)
We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen (nonfiction, US, Tim Irwin)

MOST LIKELY TO BE PROMOTED OR DEMOTED ON SECOND VIEWING
L'Intrus (France, Claire Denis)

MOST EFFICIENT, HOLLOW PRANK BY A SADIST
Caché

MOST CONSERVATIVE "REVOLUTIONARY" ROMANCE
Brokeback Mountain

MERDE!

Crash (Nothing else even close, not even Batman Begins, Ma Mere or Happy Endings)

BEST REVIVALS
(seen by me for the first time and in a theater)

Winter Soldier (Winterfilm collective)
The Fire Within (Malle)
Vengeance Is Mine (Imamura)
Wagon Master (Ford)
Spring in a Small Town (Mu Fei)
The Asthenic Syndrome (Muratova)
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos Santos)
Come Back, Africa (Rogosin)
The Furies (Mann)
Samurai Rebellion (Kobayashi)
The Small Back Room (Powell & Pressburger)
Donkey Skin (Demy)
The Two of Us (Berri)
Sound of the Mountain; Floating Clouds (Naruse)
Wanda (Barbara Loden)
The White Reindeer (Blomberg)
Strictly Dishonorable (Stahl)
The Gunfighter (Henry King)
Classe Tous Risques (Sautet)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHERS

Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun Leung, Yiu-Fai Lai, 2046
Agnès Godard, L'Intrus
Janusz Kaminski, Munich, War of the Worlds
Emmanuel Lubezki, The New World

MOST IN NEED OF COUPLES THERAPY
Sibel Kekilli, Birol Ünel, Head-On

MOST IN NEED OF SUBTITLES
the cast of Breakfast on Pluto
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain

THE "TARNATION" NARCI-CINEMA GOLDEN MIRROR: Andrew Wagner, The Talent Given Us

BEST LAUGHS
cathartic: Kung Fu Hustle, The Aristocrats
mordant: Breakfast on Pluto, The Ice Harvest

BEST FIGHTS
Kung Fu Hustle, Oldboy, Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior

BEST SLAP
Laura Linney to Jesse Eisenberg, The Squid and the Whale

BEST POP-RECORD SOUNDTRACK
Breakfast on Pluto

MOST INSANE SCREENPLAY (that isn't "Crash")
Jeong Jun-Hwan, Save the Green Planet!

BEST FILM BLOGS

http://daily.greencine.com

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com

http://slantmagazine.com/film/film_current.asp

SHOULD GET ALL OF MORGAN FREEMAN'S VOICEOVER WORK
Werner Herzog

Mark Anthony Yhap, The White Diamond

This is a vital inclusion!

Also can't agree enough on Adam Curtis and Winter Soldier.

I love the Green Cine blog but it's a little exhausting to take in sometimes, Cinemarati is decent too.

I also wish I could put Tropical Malady in my list, but I can't.

but other than that i like everything that you like, that i've seen. 82 new movies!! HOW?

TOP 15 ROUGHLY IN ORDER:

The Beat That My Heart Skipped
The Holy Girl
Head On
My Summer Of Love
Cache’
Constant Gardener
Kung Fu Hustle
White Diamond
Constant Gardener
Grizzly Man
Batman Begins
Layer Cake
The New World
Last Days
Yes

BEST REVIVALS
The Passenger
Winter Soldier

BEST DVD RELEASE
London/Robinson In Space

WANTED TO LOVE THEM BUT DIDN'T
Tropical Malady
Broken Flowers
2046
Syriana
History Of Violence
Nine Lives

BAD:
Crash
Sin City

STILL DESPERATELY NEED TO SEE:
LA Plays Itself
Cinevardaphoto
Chain
Innocence

dude just admit to yourself it's a dog

I bet your brother's got decent taste.

MOVIES
Candyman, Grizzly Man, other movies about men. Also, Ghost Dog, and possibly other movies about either ghosts or dogs.

xp

I still like you though.

The Dreamers wasn't amazing by any means, but I did enjoy it. Batman was great!

i did...we swapped movies!

Where? At Toronto?

Decent trio, jaymc.

I'll take the first two and I'll let the third one in the bedroom on a pass, as long as he holds the door for Jake Gyllenhaal, Eric Bana, and Topher Grace.

OMG Alfred, I thought about naming every single one of these on my list as well.

http://www.zelluloid.de/images/szenen/41610b8925c0c.jpg

Oh duh, add Celia Weston and Amy Adams to my supporting actors for Junebug.

I'm amused Morbius loved Me and You and Everyone Smug Idea We Ever Stole from David Byrne's True Stories and The Constant Gardener.

I wasn't expecting much from Miranda July and was pleasantly surprised, Alfred, but I haven't seen the Byrne movie in 20 years. (plus stealing good ideas can work) And I haven't seen TCG, that was someone else.

Looks good to me.

Morb, Yehuda was actually in Munich for about three seconds. He's the Israeli soldier who picks Eric Bana up at the airport for debriefing and shakes his hand.

Good to great, but it's not the same as catching them on their first run. I had to wait till November to rent Tropical Malady, for example.

Did anyone link the Film Comment readers' poll yet? They have Crash in their top 20.

1. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, U.S.) (1)
2. 2046 (Wong Kar Wai, China/Hong Kong/France) (2)
3. Good Night, And Good Luck (George Clooney, U.S.)(11)
4. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, U.S.) (7)
5. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, U.S./Canada) (5)
6. Capote (Bennett Miller, U.S.) (10)
7. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, U.S.) (6)
8. Match Point (Woody Allen, U.K./U.S.) (21)
9. Munich (Steven Spielberg, U.S.) (17)
10. The New World (Terrence Malick, U.S.) (25)
11. Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy) (4)
12. Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, U.S./France) (39)
13. Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, U.S.) (19)
14. Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, U.S.) (20)
15. The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, U.K./Germany) (32)
16. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, France) (3)
17. Crash (Paul Haggis, U.S) (—)
18. Last Days (Gus Van Sant, U.S.) (16)
19. Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, U.S.) (37)
20. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park & Steve Box, U.K./U.S.) (34)
21. Head-On (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey) (15)
22. King Kong (Peter Jackson, U.S.) (48)
23. Junebug (Phil Morrison, U.S.) (29)
24. The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, France) (31)
25. The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina) (12)
26. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, U.S.) (26)
27. No Direction Home (Martin Scorsese, U.S.) (50)
28. Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden) (13)
29. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand) (8)
30. Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan) (33)
31. Land of the Dead (George Romero, U.S.) (14)
32. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, South Korea) (36)
33. Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, U.S.) (41)
34. The World (Jia Zhangke, China) (9)
35. Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan) (27)
36. Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany) (40)
37. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, U.S.) (—)
38. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan/Taiwan) (22)
39. Walk the Line (James Mangold, U.S.) (—)
40. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, China/Hong Kong) (23)
41. Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, U.S./U.K.) (46)
42. Breakfast on Pluto (Neil Jordan, Ireland/U.K.) (28)
43. The Intruder (Claire Denis, France) (18)
44. March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, France) (—)
45. 3-Iron (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea) (—)
46. The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy) (43)
47. Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, Netherlands/Israel/Germany/France) (24)
48. Look at Me (Agnès Jaoui, France) (42)
49. War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, U.S.) (47)
50. Jarhead (Sam Mendes, U.S.) (—)

Eric, I take it you've seen Yehuda Levi in Yossi & Jagger (I missed) or that was an impactful 3 seconds.

The Oughties are striking me the way '90s music struck Stephin Merritt: best ever for reissues, worst ever for new stuff.

Let Viggo Mortenson rehash the tired clichés of fantasy and thrillers. Moviegoers with hearts, minds and eyes know that Paul Walker is a more significant movie icon. Walker confirms his movie star status with Eight Below.

I'd put K&Q in a rundown of the Respectable Overrateds like this one (thx for alerting me to him, Eric):

http://www.geocities.com/michaelsicinski/2005notgoodenoughformyexactingtaste.htm

Stephin M. is not remotely an idiot, even if he's wrong. I also would not take pop radio of '90-94 over any other era but '94-present. (obv since SM is of my generation, tho I was Indie Rock and he was not -- landing on Merge notwithstanding -- we're more apt to agree).

Alfred, first-time film viewings in pieces? Go to confession.

Terrible year.. There are not 10 movies from 2005 I've seen that I enjoyed. As far as I can tell, there are seven, and there might be more if I watched enough of what's been listed in this thread, but if you really have to dig to find stuff you like, then it's simply not a good year.

01 Palindromes
02 A History Of Violence
03 The Squid And The Whale
04 Sin City
05 Kung Fu Hustle
06 Broken Flowers
07 I Heart Huckabees

08 The Devil And Daniel Johnston

kidding, that was 2006

08 The Baxter

Something like an '05 top 10:

Kings and Queen
Munich
War of the Worlds
Land of the Dead
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
The Joy of Life
The Devil's Rejects
Forty Shades of Blue
Cinévardaphoto
Palindromes