Best of 2005 - Movies

Happy New Year! And what does the new year bring? Best of the old year lists! Unlike, oh, Roger Ebert, or I usually make myself wait for the year to actually end before posting a top ten, though that's probably because he's seen everything under consideration, and I never know what will turn up in the last couple days of the year. So then....

I have a couple rules for this process. First - this end of the year list is comprised of the 10 best films that were shown in something resembling a commercial theater, in Boston (and environs) during the year 2005. This list is usually pretty stable, it doesn't change all that much. I usually see most of what I want to see in a year, though there are always exceptions: films that played a week somewhere and I missed them; a few films I ignored or put off on initial release that I discover on DVD later. These are very often kid's films - the archetype might be Babe: Pig in the City, which I ignored on release (like pretty much everyone), then saw a couple years later and was completely blown away). Still - those are exceptions. Some time in the future, when the stragglers have come in (all the Oscar bait playing NY and LA, all the foreign films, etc. - films like The New World, Cache, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, etc.), I'll try to post a more explicitly "best of 2005" list....

But enough of that.... here are the ten best films released in Boston in 2005:

1. Kings and Queen - Arnaud Desplechin
2. 2046 - Wong Kar Wei
3. Los Angeles Plays Itself - Thom Anderson
4. The Squid and the Whale - Noah Baumbach
5. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - Park Chan-wook
6. Memories of Murder - Bong Joon-ho
7. The World - Jia Jiang-ke
8. Nobody Knows - Hirokazu Kore-Eda
9. Grizzly Man - Werner Herzog
10. The Holy Girl - Lucretia Martel

And - an early crack at the best films made/premiered in 2005. I don't know how many of these would turn up on a best of 2005 list next year - though looking at it again, it's an okay crop of films.

1. The Squid and the Whale - Noah Baumbach
2. Grizzly Man - Werner Herzog
3. Last Days - Gus Van Sant
4. The Beat that My Heart Skipped - Jacques Audiard
5. Keane - Lodge Kerrigan
6. Mutual Appreciation - Andrew Bujawski
7. Murderball - Henry Rubin and Dana Shapiro
8. Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch
9. Forty Shades of Blue - Ira Sachs
10. The Talent Given Us - Andrew Wagner

Hopefully, in the next few days, I will work up similar collections of best performances, best directing, best scripts, etc. - as well as one of those "Moments out of Time" bits Film Comment used to do, and inexplicably stopped doing some time ago. Tragic! Irritating! Much missed, indeed.