Not a Top Ten List, but just an informal recollection of movies worth seeing from last year:
"Head-On" -- Deracinated Turkish immigrants in Germany re-enact "Sid and Nancy."
"Junebug" -- A semi-comedy ensemble effort in which a Chicago yuppie takes his cosmopolitan bride to visit his downscale family in North Carolina. Insightful and surprisingly sympathetic to all sides.
"Millions" -- Snazzy little family movie about a very religious little boy who finds a duffel bag full of cash.
"The Squid and the Whale" -- It's past time for Jeff Daniels, as egomaniacal novelist Jonathan Baumbach, to get his first Oscar nomination.
"2046" -- Probably my favorite movie of the year, with sexy, glamorous performances from Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Doyle ("Hero"), and a terrific soundtrack assembled by director Wong Kar-Wai.
"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"
"Yes" -- Yes, "Yes" is in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets.
"Crash" -- Too contrived to be a great movie, but a contrivance of a high order. And if Matt Dillon doesn't win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar ...
"The March of the Penguins"
Honorable mention:
"Capote" -- for some reasonPhillip Seymour Hoffman has never gotten an Oscar nomination.
"3-Iron" -- Inexplicable but nifty South Korean parable about a guy who breaks into people's houses and does their laundry for them. Is he a criminal? A saint? A performance artist? A ghost? A golfer?
"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" -- Amusing documentary.
"Look at Me" -- French comedy.
"Walk on Water" -- Israeli comedy-drama about a Mossad agent who has to pretend to be a tour guide for a New Agey German tourist so he can locate and murder the tourist's 100 year old Nazi grandfather.
"Cinderella Man" -- Solid uplifting boxing drama with Russell Crowe doing another amazing impersonation of a nice guy.
"Jarhead" -- There's no plot and the main character is a jerk, but if you watch it as if it was a documentary, it's hilarious and informative.
"Grizzly Man"
"Munich"
"The Producers"
"Constantine"
"Good Night, and Good Luck" -- The subject matter -- Edward R. Murrow's late hit on a Joe McCarthy already on the way down -- seemed trivial, and Murrow appears to have been a pompous bore, but I liked the camera work a lot. As a director, George Clooney has some chops.
"Eros" -- Just Soderbergh's unerotic but funny segment in this trilogy, with Robert Downey Jr. as a 1955 Madison Avenue executive and Alan Arkin as his psychiatrist. Together they invent the snooze alarm. There's no point in seeing Wong Kar Wai's segment unless you've seen "2046" and "In the Mood for Love." And the less said about the nonagerian Antonioni's nudie flick contribution the better.
Overrated movies of 2005:
"A History of Violence"
"Syriana"
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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