Best films of 2005.

An exceptional year. I couldn't find room for Tropical Malady, The Constant Gardener, and Downfall, or for compelling misfires like Walk the Line, Broken Flowers, Munich, and Wedding Crashers.

10. Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson.


Aslan and the final battle are not all they can be; how fortunate that the harrowing prologue (not in the book), Tilda Swinton (as a very cold and White Witch), and Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie are.


9. 2046, directed by Wong Kar-Wai.


Gorgeous nonsense, with paint-box cinematography, four of the most beautiful actresses in the world, Tony Leung doing Bogie-as-Philip-Marlowe, and an android.


8.Good Night, Good Luck, directed by George Clooney


A film with none of modern liberalism's worst flaws (tendentiousness, sentimentality) and most of its strengths (cogency, authority). Frank Langella and Jeff Daniels (in his second great performance this year) are the standouts in an outstanding cast.


7. The 40 Year-Old Virgin


Among other things, it's the best endorsement for those large, corporate electronic superstores (Circuit City and Best Buy) ever filmed. I mean, where can you buy pals like Andy Stitzer's? (and can I buy Paul Rudd an Oscar nod already?).


6. The Squid & The Whale, directed by Noah Baumbach.


Literary pretention (in the form of Jeff Daniels' insufferable novelist-professor) has never been skewered so mercilessly. Probably the best film about the damage wrought by divorce since Alan Parker's Shoot The Moon. It also proves that Laura Linney Can Do No Wrong.


5. Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog.


The year's most absurd collision of sensibilities: Herzog's posh German nihilism and Timothy Treadwell's unctuous New Age softheadedness. In the horror that Herzog (wisely) leaves offscreen, we are left no less dumbfounded than Treadwell's colleagues and girlfriends, unable to answer the most basic question: If we could live eternally, would our family and friends come any closer to understanding us?

4. Mysterious Skin, directed by Gregg Araki.


What I wrote on November 3.


3. Capote, directed by Bennett Miller.



The Writer as Monster: a lisping, queeny, ruthless sonofabitch. He can make a fabulous martini with one hand, compose a short story of surpassing delicacy with the other. He'll also watch you hang from the gallows.


2. Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee.


God, I don't want to write another word about this film. It's this year's Mystic River: a perfectly respectable piece of mainstream filmmaking, its symbolism telegraphed in advance for the femme-y boys, Jake-besotted girls, and "middle Americans" to whom this film is marketed. But look: it's nothing its slobbering publicity said it was (the perv in me wanted more sex, dammit), but it is a few other things we didn't expect. Far from fetishizing repression, the film shows how its tendrils curl around us before smothering the people we love, the horror of which comes alive thanks to Lee's exemplary supporting cast (bouquets to Kate Mara, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, and Roberta Maxwell). Then there are the leads. Heath Ledger's performance is for the ages. Jake Gyllenhaal -- awake and starlingly attractive, at last, after too many roles calling for anomic ardor -- registers the gradual decay of hope, in eyes as blue as the sky over his beloved mountain. My first thought -- an analogy to Max Ophuls' glorious Earrings of Madame De... -- no longer seems far-fetched. Like the earrings belonging to the titular heroine of the Ophuls film, Ledger's Ennis Del Mar holds his memories of transient happiness on Brokeback Mountain close to his chest, so in thrall to lust and love that he hardly registers their import; but Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist knows too well, and it brings only vastation. What an existence: thwarted in life and death. If ya can't fix it, you might as well forget to breathe.


1. A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg.


I still think this film tries to have it both ways: pulp and pulp that tries to transcend itself. Maybe that's why no one to whom I recommended this film liked it. Not one. But Cronenberg's direction works like a vise; the first 10 minutes were unsurpassed this year in the sureness with which they inspired pity and terror. Maria Bello and Viggo Mortensen, as the most adult couple Hollywood's seen in some time, transform marriage into a wager -- like the characters in Bruce Springsteen's "Tunnel of Love," they have too much at stake yet are willing to lose it. And William Hurt has to be seen to be believed.