Year in Review	At the Movies (and Not) by AV Film Staff

The Aristocrats

I could spend a few hundred words ranting about how the marketing of movies to teenaged boys continued to drive quality product out of theaters in 2005, but what’s the point? You all know that, and everyone doing a list like this complains about the same thing. Yes, much of the most creative work seems to be done for pay cable these days; yes, too many of the best foreign, independent and documentary films fail to get wide theatrical distribution, premiering instead on video or cable where they have to compete for your attention with a seemingly amount of dreck. Same old story this year.

With that out of the way, the following are the ten best films I saw in theaters in 2005, followed by more lists by AV film contributors George Sax and Girish Shambu. I don’t pretend to have seen everything that was released last year, and there are a few items that are technically 2005 films that have not been previewed locally (Terence Malick’s The New World chief among them). Still, I’m pretty secure that I haven’t missed anything that would be likely to make me reshuffle this list. In alphabetical order:

The Aristocrats—Comedians Paul Provenza and Penn Jilette document a hundred of their peers telling and discussing the same outrageous joke. Their goal was to compare the similarity of comic improvisation to be-bop jazz, though I don’t recall a single Coltrane solo that ever made soda come out of my nose.

Capote—As the author of In Cold Blood, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrait of a soul committing slow suicide is the performance of the year.

Crash—Paul Haggis’s mosaic film on the nature of racism as a scapegoat for the anger and frustration of urban life is filled with unexpected moments of discovery.

The 40 Year Old Virgin—A cast of actors skilled in improvisation amps up an already funny script (by star Steve Carrell and director Judd Apatow, who also wrote for “The Larry Sanders Show” and “The Critic”). I laughed so hard I cried: why can’t more movies do that?

Good Night And Good Luck—If you can’t see the relevance of George Clooney’s recreation of paranoia in the television newsrooms of the 1950s to current circumstances, you’d better start paying more attention.

Grizzly Man—Welcome back, Werner Herzog!

Hustle & Flow—Like the best American films of the 1970s, this independent feature about a Memphis pimp and drug dealer trying to become a hip-hop artist transcends the particulars of its main character’s situation.

Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noel)—France’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar (it’s been nominated in the same category for a Golden Globe) is one of the most effective anti-war films every made. Look for it in theaters later this winter.

Kung Fu Hustle—Pure kinetic eye candy from Hong Kong’s top box office star, Stephen Chow.

The Squid and The Whale—The best film about divorce since Shoot the Moon, with a performance by Jeff Daniels that will put every critic and academic who sees it on their best behavior for at least a few weeks after seeing it.

Honorable mentions

Broken Flowers, Brothers, Cinderella Man, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Island, King Kong, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Munich, Nobody Knows, Sin City, Stay, Syriana, Wallace And Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

The Worst of 2005

When I suspect a movie is going to be particularly awful, I either assign it to my long-suffering colleague George Sax or else ignore it altogether. (After so many lousy movies, I don’t see the need ever to subject myself to anything else starring Steve Martin.) So this lists represents films that at least stood some chance of being worthwhile, only to make me wish I’d stayed home to watch that “Seinfeld” rerun I’ve only seen seven times already: Be Cool, Bewitched, The Devil’s Rejects, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Elizabethtown, Fantastic Four, Melinda And Melinda, Monster-In-Law, The Pacifier, Robots, Sahara, Son of the Mask, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith, and Stealth. —m. faust

Good Night and Good Luck

Ripped From the Headlines

It’s become nearly obligatory this year, in discussing movie releases, to note how disappointing (The Island, Kingdom of Heaven) or just crummy (too many to cite an example) they were in the first eight months of 2005.

Then this autumn the tide turned, and things got better. To the extent they have, it’s been disproportionately because of several films that are based on actual lives and events, or address crucial public topics. Recent weeks have brought two particularly noteworthy reality-based works—films that recreate historical and personal events and circumstances with sharply focused but often low-key effectiveness.

Bennett Miller’s Capote hones in on its title character’s (author Truman Capote) famously fey and strangely seductive personality as it examines his behavior as he works on his non-fiction magnum opus about the murder of a rural Kansas family, In Cold Blood. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s acclaimed performance is crucial, but the movie around it is uncommonly skilled and insightful.

George Clooney’s restrained but dramatically charged reconstruction of Edward R. Murrow’s celebrated 1954 confrontation on CBS TV with the public conduct of Wisconsin’s junior Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy, Good Night and Good Luck, is both historically and more intimately convincing. It’s a shrewdly “small” and confined film that conveys the important elements of the occasion and its context with admirable balance and accuracy.

Two other “real-world” films are significantly more uneven, but each reaches temporary high levels of social and emotional acuteness. Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now follows two young Palestinians in the 48 hours prior to their scheduled suicide bombing mission against Israeli citizens. Assad’s accomplishment is to lend some rare semblance of human understanding to this kind of desperate political and personal warfare, as the film tries to get beyond the repulsive and frightening nature of this violent program. Paradise Now develops a painfully suspenseful narrative as it also constructs an unlikely mournful sympathy for the protagonists, until it founders on a couple of almost aphoristically explanatory sequences and then heads to its chilling resolution.

Niki Caro’s North Country renders the oppressively hardscrabble domain of northern Minnesota’s coal-mining region, and follows one woman’s (Charlize Theron) struggles to gain a secure foothold in the male-dominated industry, and find a way out of impoverished dependence. North Country, which is loosely based on a long legal contest, works well enough before it turns emotionally and politically “acceptable” in a summarily neat portrayal of her triumph.

Earlier in the year, Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (technically a 2004 release) offered a terrifying recounting of the almost unbelievably harrowing experiences of a Kilgali hotel manager who somehow managed to summon courageous responses in the face of a virtually unprecedented reign of terror. Don Cheadle portrayed the apolitical hotelier who succeeded in shielding hundreds of Rwandan Tutsis in his establishment as members of the majority tribal Hutus rampaged murderously outside and more than 800,000 of all ages perished. The movie’s pointed contrasting of this obscure man’s singular sanity and bravery as the hellish campaign swept Rwanda with the efforts of U.S. President Bill Clinton and other western leaders to ignore it is among its most striking elements.

—george sax

2046

Last Days

Missing in Action

10 movies That Never reached Buffalo

1. 2046. In the world of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, time and love lost can never be regained. But at least we have the consolations of art as compensation.

2. Last Days. Gus Van Sant’s fictionalized movie about the last days of Kurt Cobain is wonderfully anti-dramatic. He lavishes attention on the ordinary while foregoing all that is sensational. Oddly, it feels truer to real life than a documentary might have.

3. Kings And Queen. An utterly unpredictable French ensemble drama that is like a mirror of the emotional roller-coaster that its characters ride. By the director of the cult hit My Sex Life, Or How I Got Into An Argument, from a decade ago.

4. Funny Ha Ha. A laid-back slacker comedy that John Cassavetes might have loved. Loose, with an improvisational feel, it nails the free-floating lives of a group of post-college youths.

5. The Holy Girl. An Argentine coming-of-age film about a Catholic schoolgirl who lives in a hotel owned by her family. As important as the story is the attention to small details like sound, ambience and the quietest of emotional tremors.

6. The White Diamond. German director Werner Herzog is drawn as usual to larger-than-life obsessives in this documentary about a scientist who invents a helium-shaped balloon, the teardrop-shaped “white balloon,” to harvest pharmaceutical substances in the Amazon rain forest.

7. The World. Workers at a Beijing theme park find their lives caught up in China’s new headlong economic rush. The million little ways in which people pay the price of economic freedom.

8. Los Angeles Plays Itself. A three-hour documentary on how the city has been portrayed in Hollywood movies over the years, with some fascinating detours into architecture, film history and race relations.

9. The Best Of Youth. A six-hour engrossing Italian epic drama that entwines the rise and fall of a family with that of the country. You’ll be hooked from start to finish.

10. Darwin’s Nightmare. A chilling documentary about the ravages of globalization: while food is exported from Africa to the West, millions die in Tanzania of famine.

—girish shambu