2005: the year in movies - Wesley Morris

Amid talk of a shift in American moviegoing culture (where, oh where, were the audiences?), the movies themselves in 2005 responded, however belatedly, to the political and cultural moment. This year should be remembered, in part, as one in which more filmmakers and studios took risks that won't make anybody in Hollywood richer but that show a rare respect for viewers.

Several movies managed to entertain while having something on their minds -- from war (''Jarhead") and global politics (''Syriana," ''The Constant Gardener") to the ethical limits of journalism (''Capote," ''Good Night, and Good Luck") and racism (''Crash"). Even horror and action flicks (''Land of the Dead," ''War of the Worlds," and, heaven forbid, ''The Island") wanted to add their 2 cents, allegorically at least.

Not all of them worked (''Crash," for instance, insulted the very nonwhite minorities it sought to uplift), but it was a relief to see feature filmmakers catch up to their documentary peers, who seem better attuned to the country's political and social climate. Even seemingly throwaway junk found a way to be topical. ''Just Like Heaven" was the year's only romantic comedy to take on the right-to-life debate. (So brave!) And who will soon forget where ''The Exorcism of Emily Rose" stood in the religion-versus-science debate?

A lot of my favorite films of 2005 hailed from other parts of the world, but it was a heartening, even auspicious, year for the studios, too. There were still too many lobotomizing remakes and sequels. But some movies, including ''Fever Pitch," ''Wedding Crashers," ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin," and ''Fun With Dick and Jane," were smarter and more self-confident than anyone could have predicted. I hope 2006 was taking notes.

JARHEAD

When Sam Mendes's dismaying and intensely ironic adaptation of Anthony Swofford's Desert Storm memoir came out in November, folks carped that it was apolitical and anticlimactic. But the picture's lack of politics is a political statement in itself. Adapted by William Broyles, ''Jarhead" gives us a generation of Marines horny for the violence they've seen in other war movies. (''Apocalypse Now" is their touchstone.) What do they care about politics or valor? They're itching for a fight that never comes. The film is a series of brilliantly mounting anticlimaxes and surreal tableaux including an amazing sequence where it rains only oil. The war they wind up fighting is against boredom, existential misery, and military impotence. This is a more illuminating account of the soldier's condition than the brutalizing ''Full Metal Jacket" -- lightning to Stanley Kubrick's thunder -- and a key to understanding how futility and dislocation lead to episodes like Abu Ghraib.

HEAD-ON

Fatih Akin's blistering love story is about a match made in hell that fights its way closer to heaven. A suicidal Turk (Sibel Kekilli) asks an equally self-destructive man (Birol Unel) to be her husband so she can get out of her parents' Muslim home and into the sweaty thick of Hamburg's night life. The marriage of convenience turns into a tragicomic affair whose punk fury is unlike anything else. Akin is masterful with all his actors; Kekilli amazes and Unel is devastating.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE

Wes Anderson's buddy and collaborator Noah Baumbach has made a picture that thrives on what eludes Anderson's pretty, ordered ant farms: feelings. The subject is joint custody in a bourgeois Brooklyn family. The setting is the 1980s. The anger is real. And the performances of Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, and especially Owen Kline are searing. Baumbach borrows from the French New Wave and loads his soundtrack with '80s new wave; any hipster sensibility is held in check by its sense of hurt.

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED

The cool and coiled Romain Duris plays a thug having a terrible career crisis: crime or the classical piano that his late mother played, which he gave up to be a criminal like his dad? Jacques Audiard's film has style for miles (so does Duris), but the sexiness and blistering energy are in the service of a man psychologically stymied by his parents' influences. The film is a remake of James Toback's 1978 indulgence, ''Fingers," and Audiard turns pyrite to gold.

LOOK AT ME

Another keen group portrait of the less-than-perfect from the director Agnes Jaoui and her co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri. This one is loosely about an aspiring singer (Marilou Berry) whose pompous father (Bacri) treats her shabbily. The body language here could fill a dictionary, and the most casual comments leave a bruise. But the film's rousing achievement is Jaoui's intuition. A lot of directors have a sense of humanity. She is something rarer: humane.

THE HOLY GIRL

Lucrecia Martel's tale of an Argentine teen's erotic rapture is like Judy Blume set in space. The girl doesn't pick the hottie next door. She picks the homely doctor who brushes his crotch against her. In this sensual and hypnotically strange film, Martel fuses Catholic devotion and adolescent lust with a determination more probing than contradictory. If Lars von Trier had a heart, or a real belief in the transformative power of sex, he'd make a movie this genuine.

MEMORIES OF MURDER

Park Chan-wook is the South Korean director who hogged all the headlines with his ''Vengeance" trilogy. But Bong Joon-ho is the man to watch. His beautifully staged thriller, about three detectives trying to stop a serial killer, operates with such relentless surprise that by-the-numbers policiers will no longer do. Amid the death, Park doles out physical comedy. But the movie's clowning shouldn't be taken for weakness. For the exhilarated handful who caught this picture during its brief run at the Brattle Theatre, there was only one question: Who is Bong Joon-ho, and when will he be working again? Whenever it is, it's not soon enough.

KINGS AND QUEEN

Arnaud Desplechin's emotional blockbuster is just the story of a woman (Emmanuelle Devos), her crazy ex-husband (Mathieu Amalric), her dying father, her dead ex-boyfriend, and her pee-wee son. But if that's all it is, why does it feel big enough to have moons orbit around it? Like Paul Thomas Anderson, the French director has a fearless taste for cinematic and actorly excess (Devos is an opera unto herself). He swaps reality for magic realism: Dreams come to life, time is collapsed and protracted, allusions to movies and myth shadow his characters. Desplechin turns a glass of tap water into the Pacific Ocean.

PRIDE & PREJUDICE

As fizzy an adaptation of Jane Austen as one could hope for, with the coltish Keira Knightley performance we'd been dreaming of. Austen's 192-year-old romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy feels liberated from the page, and the embellishments by the screenwriter Deborah Moggach and the director Joe Wright only illuminate what felt timelessly modern in Austen's writing. Some revision is understandable, but who knew the result would be this exhilarating?

WAR OF THE WORLDS

The last 10 minutes or so are regrettably Spielbergian. Yet most of Steven Spielberg's alien-invasion movie is overwhelming in the way we demand our mega-budget summer movies to be. Tom Cruise proves again to be one of the least respected great actors in the history of movies. And Dakota Fanning is nothing less than Meryl Streep trapped inside a Cabbage Patch Kid. Watching her and Cruise together survive Tim Robbins and the end of world was high drama. And the movie's 9/11 allusions were vivid enough to send us home, spent, with nightmares of homeland insecurity.

15 RUNNERS-UP

Gus Van Sant's ''Last Days," Werner Herzog's ''Grizzly Man," Hirokazu Koreeda's ''Nobody Knows," Michael Haneke's ''Caché," Wong Kar Wai's ''2046," Andrew Bujalski's ''Funny Ha Ha," Gregg Araki's ''Mysterious Skin," Terrence Malick's ''The New World," Park Chan-wook's ''Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," Catherine Hardwicke's ''Lords of Dogtown," Judy Irving's ''Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," Miranda July's ''Me and You and Everyone We Know," Steven Spielberg's ''Munich," Lodge Kerrigan's ''Keane," David Cronenberg's ''A History of Violence."

21 GREAT PERFORMANCES

Heath Ledger in ''Brokeback Mountain" and ''Lords of Dogtown," Birol Unel and Sibel Kekilli in ''Head-On," Drew Barrymore in ''Fever Pitch," Gwyneth Paltrow in ''Proof," Javier Camara in ''Torremolinos 73," Jeff Daniels and Owen Kline in ''The Squid and the Whale," Steve Carell in ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Jennifer Connelly in ''Dark Water," Q'Orianka Kilcher in ''The New World," Damian Lewis in ''Keane," Zoe Saldana in ''Guess Who," Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix in ''Walk the Line," Emmanuelle Devos in ''Kings and Queen," Naomi Watts in ''Ellie Parker," Romain Duris in ''The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Keira Knightley in ''Pride & Prejudice," and Julianne Moore in ''The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"