Rejoice! Chances are this is the last time you’ll have to hear about 2005 from our end. Yes, time to put those 365 to bed, my friends. May ‘05 sleep well because it had a tough go of it.

So, I’ve missed a good amount of the year-end Important Film cavalcade (still haven’t seen “Brokeback Mountain,” “Cache,” “Capote,” “Grizzly Man,” etc.), but below are the best from a slightly more-than-your-average moviegoer’s POV.

Best Films of 2005

1. Oldboy
Park Chan-Wook’s twisted, Hitchcock-on-every-drug-imagineable mind blower features the best plot hook of the year, and then quickly becomes the most captivating film-going experience of the year. Oldboy is hypnotic and lurid and intense and fun beyond all reason. Plus, you’ll witness a slugfest that finally decides the age-old debate: what’s better in a fight — gun or hammer? Watch this one with grandma!

2. Munich
Spielberg finally gets his “serious” filmmaker side 100% right — Munich is maybe his finest effort after Jaws and Raiders. A bleak, exhausting, intelligent, artistic exploration of morality and violence and death and duty and identity that offers no answers, contains incredible performances from every single person involved, and still manages to be an edge-of-the-seat, A+ thriller. An extraordinary and essential accomplishment.





3. Nobody Knows
Inspired by a true story, this mannered, naturalistic, creepy look at the lives of four abandoned children living in a small apartment in a large, unnamed city is fascinating and compelling not for its obvious, sometimes strident condemnation of Japanese society, but for its strangely exhilerating depiction of absolute freedom. The world these children live in is so believable and palpable that it’s something of a jolt when the film suddenly ends. Another quiet and brilliant work from After Life’s Hirokazu Kore-eda.

4. Downfall
A fictionalized account of the last days of the Third Reich, Olivier Hirschbiegel’s epic film is about as big as these kinds of things tend to get. Balancing dozens of characters, a grandiose series of events, and huge action across a broad canvas, Hirschbiegel manages everything with the painstaking detail, breakneck pacing, and high drama of an accomplished historical novelist. And in the middle of all this, Bruno Ganz gives a shockingly human portrait of Adolf Hitler. A grand, unnerving, thoughtful entertainment.

5. Land of the Dead
George Romero, the man who created a genre, returns to what made him famous and accomplishes his best and most relevant film since, well, his last zombie movie. A smart, sharp portrait/satire of class warfare, Romero cuts his heavy-handed social commentary with massive doses of pulp humor, imaginative set pieces, and, of course, outrageous gore. A welcome return to form by an influential maverick.

Propers:
-History of Violence: First and foremost, Cronenberg’s film is a stunning genre exercise. But what genre, peoples?!? Noir? Horror? Western? Thriller? Family drama? Who cares. Even warts and all it’s a blast to watch unfold.
-Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: Entertaining, unpredictable, and two things you rarely find in film these days: clever and charming. In its own way, quite masterful. Nick Park has successfully created his own fully realized world.
-Howl’s Moving Castle: Miyazaki’s strange and wonderful piece of modern psychedelia suffers from too much ambition — it’s all over the place and, at the end of the day, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. However, the rapid-fire parade of imagery is breathtaking and unforgettable.
-Hustle & Flow: I may have enjoyed this more than I should have, but I really felt like these were fully realized characters with real problems who believed in and understood the redemptive power of art. You don’t see any of that too often these days. It’s also smartly written and ferociously acted. Great opening scene, too.
-Rize/The Devil’s Rejects: I couldn’t decide between either of these for the last spot here. Rize is a crazy and captivating look at an incredibly weird underground dance movement in South Central L.A. started by a birthday party clown — kids dancing like it’s the goddam apocalypse. In the well-made Devil’s, genuine auteur Rob Zombie broadcasts his intentions a bit too obviously sometimes (oooh, who IS the real villain?!?). But this is pure horror — bloody, bleak, stark, hopeless.

BLEAH:
-Madagascar:
Shrill and irritating to a shocking degree. Although I guess the committee that “wrote” this dull travesty was only following the template of all the other Dreamworks animated garbage, which means: A) obvious, warmed over pop culture references and dancing animals = comedy; and B) whiny and loud modern stereotypes = character. Exasperatingly terrible.

-Bewitched:
The only way I can describe Bewitched is somehow the stars aligned and deemed absolutely nothing in the film — which has a decent enough premise — would work. And that’s just compounded by the fact that the thing thinks it’s very smart and very clever and keeps patting itself on the back every 30 seconds. I watched this stinker on a plane and STILL felt like I wasted my time even though I nodded off about six times while it was on. Watch it if you dare. You’ll want to slap everyone involved.

Movie/TV