CriticsTop10

In 2005, Brokeback Mountain became Ang Lee’s second film in just six years to top the yearly list (the other being Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

The Best of 2001 through 2005 pages of this site are taken directly from Engin Palabiyik’s wonderful top 10 compilation (criticstop10.net) which, unfortunately, is no longer available. I do not mean to take credit for the uncountable hours that Engin put into this, I’m just including it for completeness. The 2005 compilation includes 640 top 10 lists.

40. Head-On (47 lists, 5 top spots)

39. War of the Worlds (48 lists, 1 top spot)

38. Last Days (49 lists, 6 top spots)

37. Junebug (50 lists, 1 top spot)

At last, a movie about ordinary people. Or put it this way: Phil Morrison’s Junebug was the best non-geopolitical film of the year. In simply human terms, there was no other film like it. It understands, profoundly and with love and sadness, the world of small towns; it captures ways of talking and living I remember from my childhood, and has the complexity and precision of great fiction.
The story, written by Angus MacLachlan, involves Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz as Chicagoans who return to North Carolina to visit his family: His mother (Celia Weston), mercilessly critical of everyone; his father (Scott Wilson), who has withdrawn into his wood-carving; his brother (Benjamin McKenzie), who loves his wife but has been brought to a halt by his demons and shyness, and the pregnant wife (Amy Adams), who is a good soul.
Junebug is a great film because it is a true film. It understands that families are complicated, and their problems are not solved during a short visit, just in time for the happy ending. Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren’t solved, they’re dealt with. There is one heartbreaking moment of truth after another, and humor and love as well.  — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

36. Tropical Malady (50 lists, 5 top spots)

The first half of this supernaturally beautiful picture from Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who goes by Joe, for short) is a love story between a village boy and soldier. In the second half, a soldier — it may or may not be the same soldier — tracks a tiger in the forest, who may or may not be the reincarnation of the soldier’s lost love. “Tropical Malady” is a haunted dreamscape of memory and longing, its plot more like a piece of music than a conventional story.  — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

33. Downfall (51, 3 top spots)

33. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (51 lists, 3 top spots)

33. Millions (51 lists, 3 top spots)

The best family film of the year is by the unlikely team of director Danny Boyle and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce. Nine-year-old Anthony Cunningham and his 7-year-old brother, Damian (Lewis McGibbon and Alex Etel) find a bag containing loot that bounced off a train and is currently stuffed under their bed. With limitless imagination and joy, the film follows the brothers as they deal with their windfall.

Oh, and Damian gets advice from saints, real ones. St. Francis of Assisi, his favorite, provides advice that Anthony is sure will get them into trouble. Despite how it sounds, this isn’t a “cute little film.” The director makes hard-boiled movies, the writer has worked at the cutting edge, and this is what a family film would look like if it were made with the intelligence of adults. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

32. Oldboy (60 lists, 4 top spots)

This operatic picture from South Korean director Park Chanwook begins as a revenge fantasy and evolves into something much more complex and redemptive. Though it’s thrilling, violent and funny, it can’t be classified as an action picture or a comedy — it’s too infused with tragic poetry to be so conveniently buttonholed.  — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

31. Nobody Knows (61 lists, 3 top spots)

30. The New World (64 lists, 13 top spots)

He has directed four films in 32 years: Badlands in 1973, Days of Heaven in 1978, The Thin Red Line in 1998 and now this retelling of the romance of John Smith and Pocahontas — the crosscultural Adam and Eve, or Romeo and Juliet, of colonial Virginia. Like his superb earlier films, this one has a poetic, faux-naive narration and little dialogue to lead viewers through a story of small people in a gorgeous landscape. On landing in America, Capt. Smith (Colin Farrell) is intoxicated, beatified, by the new land’s abundance. “Here the blessings of the earth are bestowed upon all,” he declares. “None need grow poor.” Greed will be made obsolete amid such natural wealth. He is also stunned by the beauty of the Indian princess (Q’orianka Kilcher), whom he sees as a new and improved species of human. She and her people, he thinks, will create a fresh example for humanity. As you know from history, the Europeans were not immune from greed when they landed on this continent; and Smith’s aboriginal love story was to have a third character, the tobacco planter John Rolfe (Christian Bale). Malick doesn’t tell this poignant tale so much as he shows it. And what a show! Managing to make an epic film on an indie budget ($35 million), shooting in natural light — and, praise be, on the original Virginia terrain, not in Romania or New Zealand — Malick dramatizes the cultural collision with images of rapturous beauty. It may take a fresh set of eyes to discover this nearly abstract vision. But you’ll revel in the film if, like Capt. Smith, you surrender to the surroundings and… look closer.  -  Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

29. Broken Flowers (65 lists, 3 top spots)

28. Mysterious Skin (68 lists, 7 top spots)

Araki’s eighth and strongest film is the most unsettling and memorable of the recent movies about child abuse. After a Little League coach molests them, two damaged boys grow up to lead entirely separate lives: one of them entrenched in comforting fantasy, the other acting out his frustrations through a dangerous street life. –  John Hartl, MSNBC.com

26. Hustle & Flow (70 lists, 8 top spots)

26. Kings & Queen (70 lists, 8 top spots)

Arnaud Desplechin’s story of an unlikable woman (played by Emmanuelle Devos, with the fury and vulnerability of 12 Greek goddesses combined) for whom, by the end, we feel something more fiercely protective than love. In one of the finest performances of the year, Mathieu Amalric plays her ex, a haunted elf of a man who looks and acts as if he can’t afford to give away even the smallest bit of himself, and yet whose compassion turns out to be boundless. A complicated, fascinating picture — it left me exhilarated and devastated. — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

25. Murderball (75 lists, 7 top spots)

24. Me and You and Everyone We Know (77 lists, 3 top spots)

It’s a comedy about falling in love with someone who speaks your rare emotional language of playfulness and daring, of playful mind games and bold challenges. July writes, directs, and stars.
In her first film, she trusts a delicate sense of humor that negotiates situations that would be shocking if they weren’t so darn nice. Can you imagine a scene involving teenage sexual experimentation that is sweet and innocent and not shocking at all, because it’s not about sex but about what funny and lovable creatures we humans be? And when have you seen a woman seduce a man not with sex but with unbridled and passionate whimsy?  — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

23. Kung Fu Hustle (78 lists, 3 top spots)

For years, Stephen Chow was famous across Asia as the bad boy of Hong Kong comedy, and a bugger star, year by year,, than even Jackie Chan. Who knew that Chow was also a wildly gifted director, until this Buster Keatonesque martial arts comedy? In 1940s Shanghai, the Axe Gang, a vicious triad with a weakness for some West Side Story choreography, has scared everyone off the streets—everyone except the harder-than-jade residents of Pig Sty Alley, who help turn a mobster wannabe (Chow) into a Bruce Lee gotta-be. Chow wanted to explore and update the antique styles of kung fu, so he cast veterans of 70s Hong Kong action pics, among them Yuen Qiu (who’s a hoot as the Alley’s bullying landlady), Chan’s boyhood schoolmate Yuen Wah (as the henpecked landlord) and Bruce Leung (as the mild-mannered ultimate warrior, the Beast). But though Chow the actor doesn’t take center stage until the second hour, Chow the auteur is fully in change. Behind the movie’s frantic fun is a directorial eye so acute it makes most Hollywood directors seem myopic.  — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

22. March of the Penguins (80 lists, 1 top spot)

This is no National Geographic special, slapped onto the big screen in order to cash in on a few bucks. This is a year in the lives of a family of penguins – over a thousand – who march to the southern most part of the Antarctic, (who knows why?), during its worst season, each year – to mate, sit on the eggs until they hatch, see the chicks off, and then start all over again. You see, penguins mate for life. It’s the insight into their lives, though, that captures our attention and hearts most – the almost human emotions they evoke, when their chicks are stillborn, or, worse, when the egg cracks before its maturation. OK. It’s the closest film, sans humans, to “Terms of Endearment,” and we were endeared.  — Tim Nasson, Wild About Movies

21. Cache (83 lists, 7 top spots)

A surveillance videotape of a Paris home slipped through the front-door mail slot… an ominous phone call… a scrawled drawing of a bloody figure… The evidence seems disconcertingly simple. Someone is threatening Georges (the excellent Daniel Auteuil) and his nice family. To which Haneke says, Look closer. The Austrian director, now working in France, ranks as Europe’s most provocative film prankster. And his new work, which swept the European Film Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Director and Editing) this month, is both an exercise in motal suspense and an essay on the complicity between those who create disturbing images (moviemakers) and those who take pleasure from looking at them (us). Georges is not as blameless as he seems; his long-suppressed memories of an incident from his youth lead him into a labyrinth of personal and political guilt, and a confrontation startling in its violence. Till the very end of the film, the very last shot, you may ask, Yes, but whodunit? Who was the anonymous terrorizer? And as the closing credits appear over that final shot, I say that you can find an answer… if you look closer.– Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

20. Pride & Prejudice (85 lists, 4 top spots)

Joe Wright’s smartly, sharply condensed and intelligently imagined adaptation of Jane Austen’s work is a love story with a deep awareness of class boundaries. We know at a glance how much, or how little, money means to any given character: We can read anxiety or confidence in the cut of an overcoat, in the type of knickknacks that decorate a room, even in the set of a character’s shoulders. In this “Pride & Prejudice,” realism isn’t a punishment, but a kind of music. There isn’t a frame in the picture that doesn’t feel alive and immediate, instead of merely faithful.  — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

19. Walk the Line (87 lists, 7 top spots)

Biopics have been all the rage in Hollywood in recent years. You can put “Walk the Line” at the top of the heap, thanks to an Oscar-worthy performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the “Man in Black,” Johnny Cash. From the moment he steps up to the microphone and says, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” you believe him, and you never stop believing until the final frame. Reese Witherspoon is equally amazing playing Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash. The film is remarkable enough in its own right, but what moves it up a notch for me is the fact that Witherspoon and Phoenix did all their own singing. They’re not just good, they’re good, and that helps make “Walk the Line” one of the best films of this, or any other, year. — Paul Clinton, CNN.com

18: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (88 lists, 1 top spot)

Yes, there were many other traditional, er, Pixar and computer animated films this year, such as “Madagascar,” “Chicken Little,” “The Corpse Bride,” and “Valiant,” but none come close to the uniqueness and hilarity and brilliant screenplay that this film and these two characters – and friends – made out of clay, bring to life on the big screen. — Tim Nasson, Wild About Movies

17. Match Point (88 lists, 5 top spots)

It’s taken awhile, but Woody Allen has once again made a great film. Through a series of events — both lucky and arranged — tennis pro Chris Wilton meets a wealthy London girl named Chloe. She falls in love, takes him into her family, and her father puts him on the fast track to success. But Chris has a problem: He’s in love with his brother-in-law’s (Matthew Goode) ex-fiancée Nola (Scarlett Johansson). When Nola gets pregnant and demands they marry, Chris’ theories about luck and destiny are put to the ultimate test. The film is fast-paced, thoughtful, and will keep you guessing until the very end. — Paul Clinton, CNN.com

16. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (95 lists, 1 top spot)

15. Cinderella Man (97 lists, 11 top spots)

This Depression-era drama about the life of boxer James J. Braddock, dubbed “The Cinderella Man” by the press, starred Russell Crowe in the title role and Renee Zellweger as his loyal and long-suffering wife Mae. It’s an inspiring film about a man who went from abject poverty to achieving his impossible dream — and became an unlikely folk hero in his own time. Director Ron Howard created a remarkable story — with awesome performances from everyone involved — reminding us that nothing is impossible and heroes are always necessary.  — Paul Clinton, CNN.com

14. 2046 (97 lists, 18 top spots)

Apparently the great directors don’t care to abandon their favorite themes and stories. Like Herzog, Wong keeps making the same movie; his subject is love, how it hurts, and how beautiful a sight that pain can be. Like Bergman, he has made a sequel to a favorite earlier film. In the 2000 romance In the Mood for Love, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai circled each other in slo-mo for an hour and a half, and their almost-touching sparked more erotic heat than a dozen Jenna Jameson epics. In the new film Leung plays a harsher version of the same character, as he languishes in room 2046 of a Hong Kong hotel and half-heartedly courts a quartet of fabulous dames: a prostitute (Zhang Ziyi), a vamp (Carina Lau), a gambler (Gong Li) and the elfin girl of his dreams (Faye Wong). That gives the director four times as many chances to let furtive glances and plaintive words collide—which they do, to subtly spectacular effect. It’s a story of love and loss, beautifully designed (by William Chang) and shot (mainly by Christopher Doyle) in the smoky, smoldering Wong Kar-wai style. 2046 is the kind of picture an intelligent viewer can approach and ask, “Got a light?”– Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

13. Batman Begins (104 lists, 6 top spots)

Yes. We thought it was going to suck, like last year’s “Catwoman.” But how we were wrong. This Batman is the best ever and in no small way, Christian Bale helped, by making Batman human, unlike others who have donned the bat suit in years past. Director Christopher Nolan also deserves credit, as without him the film most likely would have looked like a comic book come to life as all other Batman films have, rather than the somewhat gritty, yet very human look we get this time. — Tim Nasson, Wild About Movies

12. Syriana (107 lists, 7 top spots)

Stephen Gaghan’s film doesn’t reveal the plot, but surrounds us with it. Interlocking stories again: There is less oil than the world requires, and that will make some rich and others dead, unless we all die first. The movie has been called “liberal,” but it is apolitical, suggesting that all of the players in the oil game are corrupt and compromised, and in some bleak sense must be, in order to defend their interests — and ours.
The story involves oil, money and politics in America, the Middle East and China. The CIA is on both sides of one situation, China may be snatching oil away from us in order to sell it back, and no one in this movie understands the big picture because there isn’t one, just a series of tactical skirmishes.  Syriana argues that in the short run, every society must struggle for oil, and in the long run, it will be gone. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

11. Sin City (109 lists, 8 top spots)

10. The Constant Gardener (149 lists, 8 top spots)

Rachel Weisz is extraordinary as a hell-raiser who gets killed trying to find out who’s using innocent Africans as guinea pigs for drug testing. And Ralph Fiennes is indelibly moving as her husband, a timid British diplomat who toughens up to search for her killer and finds hard truths that bring him closer to her and to Africa. It’s a love story between a man and a ghost. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) provides a political and emotional resonance that’s hard to shake.  — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

9. Munich (163 lists, 23 top spots)

Stephen Spielberg’s film may be the bravest of the year, and it plays like a flowing together of the currents in Crash and Syriana, showing an ethnic and religious conflict that floats atop a fundamental struggle over land and oil. Working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, Spielberg begins with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympiad of 1972, and follows a secret assassination team as it attempts to track down the 11 primary killers. Nine eventually die, but not before the Israeli (Eric Bana) who leads the team loses his moral certainty and nearly his sanity, and not before the film sees revenge as a process that may have harmed Israel more than its targets.
The film is not critical of Israel, as some believe, but a more general mourning for the loss of idealism in a region marching steadily toward terrorism and anarchy. In defending itself, can Israel afford to compromise its standards — or afford not to? Spielberg doesn’t have the answer. He has the courage to suggest that some of Israel’s post-Munich policies have not made it a better or safer place.  — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

8. Grizzly Man (164 lists, 10 top spots)

7. The Squid and the Whale (193 lists, 19 top spots)

The battleground here isn’t in a war zone, it’s at home — and though the wounds are emotional, they leave bruises. Writer-director Noah Baumbach puts us in the crossfire of his parents’ divorce. Dad (a never-better Jeff Daniels) is an academic. Mom (Laura Linney) is a writer. Their twelve-year-old son (the remarkable Owen Kline) is a serial masturbator. His sixteen-year-old brother (Jesse Eisenberg) — Baumbach’s surrogate — hits on a student (Anna Paquin) who’s sleeping with his dad. Forgive the laughs for sticking in the throat. The film is set in Brooklyn in the Eighties, but most children of divorce won’t have trouble acclimating. If there’s a braver, better acted, more brutally honest film about family life this year, I haven’t seen it. — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

6. Crash (197 lists, 32 top spots)

Much of the world’s misery is caused by conflicts of race and religion. Paul Haggis’ film, written with Robert Moresco, uses interlocking stories to show we are in the same boat, that prejudice flows freely from one ethnic group to another. His stories are a series of contradictions in which the same people can be sinned against or sinning. There was once a simple morality formula in America in which white society was racist and blacks were victims, but that model is long obsolete. Now many more players have entered the game: Latinos, Asians, Muslims, and those defined by sexual orientation, income, education or appearance.
America is a nation of minority groups, and we get along with each other better than many societies that criticize us; France has recently been reminded of that. We are all immigrants here. What is wonderful about Crash is that it tells not simple-minded parables, but textured human stories based on paradoxes. Not many films have the possibility of making their viewers better people; anyone seeing it is likely to leave with a little more sympathy for people not like themselves. The film opened quietly in May and increased its audience week by week, as people told each other they must see it. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

5. King Kong (215 lists, 28 top spots)

A stupendous cliffhanger, a glorious adventure, a shameless celebration of every single resource of the blockbuster, told in a film of visual beauty and surprising emotional impact. Of course, this will be the most popular film of the year, and nothing wrong with that: If movies like King Kong didn’t delight us with the magic of the cinema, we’d never start going in the first place.

Peter Jackson’s triumph is not a remake of the 1933 classic so much as a celebration of its greatness and a flowering of its possibilities. Its most particular contribution is in the area of the heart: It transforms the somewhat creepy relationship of the gorilla and the girl into a celebration of empathy, in which a vaudeville acrobat (Naomi Watts) intuitively understands that when Kong roars he isn’t threatening her but stating his territorial dominance; she responds with acrobatics that delight him, not least because Kong has been a gorilla few have ever tried to delight. From their relationship flows the emotional center of the film, which spectacular special effects surround and enhance, but could not replace.  — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

4. Capote (262 lists, 41 top spots)

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s colossal performance as gadfly author Truman Capote is a show in itself. But he’s not the whole show. First-time feature director Bennett Miller, working from a first-rate script by Dan Futterman, creates a movie that digs deep into an enigma and emerges as a striking meditation on the intersection of art and life. Capote leaves the cocoon of his Manhattan social life in 1959 and travels to Kansas to research and write In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel about the murder of a local family by two drifters. The work crowned his career and brought out all his demons. Hoffman takes you in close, and Miller doesn’t flinch. — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

3. Good Night, and Good Luck (265 lists, 22 top spots)

George Clooney, as actor, director and co-writer of this riveting look at TV news, has some people asking what’s the point of dredging up a fifty-year-old battle between TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn in a performance that deserves to be legendary) and the infamous commie-hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Everyone knows that TV news is impervious to bullying from advertisers and political opportunists. Everyone knows that Murrow’s fear about television was ungrounded — the box would never be used as an instrument to “distract, delude, amuse and insulate.” Clooney merits credit for the uniformly strong acting, notably from Frank Langella as the wittily imperious CBS chairman, Bill Paley, and Patricia Clarkson as Shirley Wershba, a reporter coping with working in a world of men. Clooney’s direction is so assured that only in hindsight do you realize the extent of his achievement. Shooting in black-and-white (cheers to cinematographer Robert Elswit) to evoke the Fifties, Clooney eases us smoothly through the hermetic world of the newsroom until we can almost inhale the cigarette smoke and the creative energy of journalists doing their best work under siege. As a piece of direction, it’s a tour de force. — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

2. A History of Violence (287 lists, 41 top spots)

The best movie of the year. Why? Because it stays with you the longest, stands up to repeat viewings and shoots out exciting ideas with a velocity and power no gun could match. Thank David Cronenberg for that, and for turning a genre film about a small-town husband and father (Viggo Mortensen), who may be a stone killer, into a study of how we wrap our jones for violence in God, country, family and any other excuse that’s handy. You know the drill. So does George Bush. Mortensen is so good that you don’t fully appreciate the gravitational pull of his performance until you take it home and let it live inside your head. Maria Bello is a force of nature as his lawyer wife, who is both frightened and turned on by the stranger she finds in the man she married. The acting is flawless, with a special nod to the mesmerizing, mind-bending William Hurt for a demonically funny portrait of evil. You won’t forget the words “Jesus, Joey” once you hear Hurt say them. What Cronenberg offers here is a master class in directing. The slaughter in the front yard is a scene for the time capsule. The man with a genius for locating what festers beneath fragile flesh in films such as The Fly, Dead Ringers, The Brood, Videodrome and Spider has never won an Oscar, or even been nominated for one. Jesus, Joey. — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

1. Brokeback Mountain (314 lists, 67 top spots)

Two cowboys in Wyoming discover to their surprise that they love each other. They have no way to deal with that fact. Directed by Ang Lee, it’s based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx and a screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. In the summer of 1963, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) find themselves one night on a distant mountainside suddenly having sex. “You know I ain’t queer,” Ennis tells Jack after their first night together. “Me, neither,” says Jake. But their love lasts a lifetime and gives them no consolation, because they cannot accept its nature and because they fear, not incorrectly, that in that time and place they could be murdered if it were discovered. Oh, what a sad and lonely story this is, containing what truth and sorrow.  — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times