2005: The year in movies - Ty Burr

The film industry got the glooms in 2005. Box office was down; the mere idea of going to the movies seemed exhausting to audiences burnt out on expensive popcorn and mediocre films. Anyway, why go out when DVDs, the Internet, and TiVo mean we can entertain ourselves to death without leaving home?

The studios, as is their wont, tried to lure us back with bigness, and a case could be made that they did a pretty good job. George Lucas brought the second ''Star Wars" trilogy to an unexpectedly compelling conclusion, the new ''Harry Potter" is the most emotionally powerful of the series, ''Batman Begins" jump-started a dormant franchise, and ''King Kong," ''The Chronicles of Narnia," and ''War of the Worlds" are all fascinating if uneasy mixtures of sensation and sentiment. ''Wedding Crashers" and ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin" were comedies that were broad and good.

That said, the year ended with a sense of missed chances. There are strong films out there -- ''Capote," ''Brokeback Mountain," ''Syriana," and ''A History of Violence" all have terrific performances and ambitious intentions -- but there were few that knocked it out of the park or felt truly necessary to the cultural conversation. Is it because we're a nation at war and movies can't help but seem a frivolity? Is it because the documentary renaissance continued to offer more provocation and emotion -- more entertainment -- than fictional fare? Will next year be business as usual, or will the movies seem even less critical a piece of the puzzle?

What follows is a more personal top 10 than usual, with a hazier border between them and the runners-up. In an ever-increasing buffet of media choices, these were the films whose aftertastes, for me, still linger.

PRIDE & PREJUDICE

Not the most groundbreaking film of the year, just the best time I had at the movies in 2005 -- the richest in human comedy, the most bursting with cinematic ardor. Confounding those who couldn't see the bother of a new version of the literary warhorse (and purists who like their Jane Austen tart rather than sweet), Joe Wright's compact telling is earthier and more sensuous than the beloved 1995 BBC miniseries. (Or is that sensual? Both, actually.) The movie catches the propriety of early-19th century society and the raw feeling that surges beneath it: the court and spark, as it were. The cast is excellent -- Keira Knightley comes of age, Donald Sutherland ages like wine -- but the whirling, brilliantly observant camerawork in the ballroom scenes serves notice that this is a director's movie. Pure joy.

GRIZZLY MAN

Timothy Treadwell hung around Alaskan grizzly bears for 12 years until -- surprise -- they ate him. Like a sculptor using borrowed clay, Werner Herzog has carved the environmental activist's hundreds of hours of video into a mesmerizing account of all-American reinvention and frontier megalomania. The bear footage, good as it is, remains a testament to the unknowability of animals, and Treadwell's true subject turns out to be himself -- very much the star of his own movie, he addresses the camera in increasingly untethered monologues over the years. With minimal but effective intrusion, Herzog lets his subject emerge as some kind of holy fool journeying upriver into the territory of Conrad and Melville.

2046

Some movies demand a little prep work, and if you wandered into Wong Kar Wai's mind-bending fever dream without having seen ''In the Mood for Love" and/or ''Days of Being Wild" -- two earlier films featuring the same characters, actors, themes, moods -- ''2046" probably made as much sense as a teleconference of ducks. As impenetrable as it may have been to outsiders (and those for whom gorgeous surfaces just aren't enough), this meditation on doomed romance was a grand, cinematic Rubik's cube for those who got on its wavelength. The many lost loves of Tony Leung's Chow Mo Wan unfold simultaneously in the past, present, and future, attended by spellbinding photography and music, all of it insisting that the heart is cursed to treasure what it cannot have. The great Ziyi Zhang performance you're looking for is here, not in ''Memoirs of a Geisha."

BROKEN FLOWERS

Oh, the livid e-mails and phone calls I got for giving this four stars and apparently sending a lot of people to their first Jim Jarmusch movie. Yes, it's distressingly empty -- Jarmusch makes movies about the things that happen when nothing else is happening, and the glimpses into the lives of Don Johnston's former lovers are infinitely telling for what they don't say. No, Bill Murray's character evinces none of the charisma he must have once had to attract the legions of women in his little black book -- the point is that he's an empty battery wanly seeking recharge. And, no, there's not much closure to Don's search for the son he never knew; those final scenes are Jarmusch and the universe having a good, healthy laugh at the character's expense. Best Zen comedy of the year.

MUNICH

Steven Spielberg's strongest since ''Saving Private Ryan," this isn't a factual re-creation of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and ensuing Israeli retaliation, but something simpler and more discomfiting: a study of the moral costs of revenge. Wisely avoiding star power, Spielberg casts the handsome, anonymous Eric Bana as the leader of the Mossad team charged with assassinating the terrorist planners of the attack -- or those who his boss (Geoffrey Rush) thinks were the planners. This is new territory for Spielberg: an international thriller in the mold of ''Topaz" or ''Z," but with the nagging realization that there can be no moral high ground in an undercover world where everyone uses everyone else (and the French use everyone). Containing sequences of amazing directorial bravado, it's kept from greatness only by Spielberg's Achilles' heel, an unconvincing ending.

TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE /WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT

You can take all the bland, shiny digital wonders of ''Chicken Little," ''Madagascar," and ''Robots" and drag-and-drop them to the trash -- here are the year's two best kiddie movies, fiction category (all votes for marching penguins and mad-hot-ballroom-dancing children will dutifully be acknowledged). Both ''Bride" and ''Were-Rabbit" offer the tactile pleasures of stop-motion animation; when you glimpse the whorl of a human fingerprint on Wallace's brow, that's the sign of a handicraft most of us had thought dead. More than anything, both films provide straight-up movie magic: ''Wallace & Gromit" spirits us away to a deeply silly plasticine England, while ''Bride" weds Edward Gorey-style wit to Mexican Day of the Dead pizazz. (Is ''Bride" appropriate for kids? Hold on, let me ask my daughters -- oh, right, it's their favorite film of 2005.)

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK

A long-overdue kick in the pants of a sold-out TV news media. Yes, George Clooney can direct (the six of us who saw ''Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" already knew that), but this is tight, smart filmmaking combined with unexpected civic seriousness. As befits a film made by an actor, the performances are terrific: the smoke of moral indignation (and many, many cigarettes) rises from the eternally underrated David Strathairn as newsman Edward R. Murrow, while Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, and Jeff Daniels make hard work seem sexy and Frank Langella broods upstairs as the godlike CBS head William Paley. Senator Joseph McCarthy adequately plays himself. Perhaps a little too inside-baseball for younger moviegoers -- so go do your homework already -- ''Good Night" is a call to renewed purpose for the television industry and the film business.

TOUCH THE SOUND: A SOUND JOURNEY WITH EVELYN GLENNIE

It played for a week at the Kendall and was gone, but this slim, patient documentary packs an emotional wallop out of all proportion to its theatrical impact. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer takes the same approach to deaf Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie as he did to artist Andy Goldsworthy in ''Rivers and Tides" -- he lets the creative act unfold in real time and dwells on the primacy of mystery. Glennie is less of a hermit than Goldsworthy, though, and her interactions with the world (including a deaf student she teaches to ''hear" music) are rich with cross-rhythms. Meditative and heartwrenching, ''Touch" does what all great films do: takes you somewhere you've never been and spins a marvelous tale.

HEAD-ON

The latest from the talented German-Turkish director Fatih Akin (''In July") comes on like this year's ''Run Lola Run" -- you get high just watching it. It's a tragicomic romance about a bitter, aging Hamburg punker (Birol Unel, looking as if every Ramones song is written on his soul) who marries a suicidal young woman (Sibel Kekilli) to help her get away from her immigrant family. He falls for her, of course, but Akin's incandescent visual style makes an old story feel blisteringly new -- the movie's bloody with love. The adorable, maddening, vibrant Kekilli gives one of the year's two stunning performances by an oddly-named newcomer . . .

THE NEW WORLD

. . . and 15-year-old Q'Orianka Kilcher gives the other as Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's strange, beautiful, complicated, and sure-to-be-misunderstood epic of early American settlement. The mysterioso filmmaker (''Days of Heaven," ''The Thin Red Line") goes way off the historical track here, positing a heavy-breathing teen romance between the Indian maid and Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell at his most Tiger Beat studly), and just when you think you can't take any more noble-savage frolicking, you realize that's the point. Off goes Farrell and in comes Christian Bale as John Rolfe, offering a more honest, hard-won union with Pocahontas. ''The New World" ultimately debunks the American dream of romanticized Utopia in favor of a deeper marriage of cultures, and it does so with clear-eyed dialectical lyricism. A film with big flaws that still goes places no other movie ever has. (Opens in Boston Jan. 13)

RUNNERS-UP

''The Aristocrats," ''Batman Begins," ''The Beat That My Heart Skipped," ''The Best of Youth," ''Brokeback Mountain," ''Capote," ''Cinderella Man," ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin," ''A History of Violence," ''Howl's Moving Castle," ''Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," ''Kung Fu Hustle," ''Los Angeles Plays Itself," ''Me and You and Everyone We Know," ''Murderball," ''Nobody Knows," ''Off the Map," ''Rize," ''Schultze Gets the Blues," ''Shake Hands With the Devil," ''Sin City," ''The Squid and the Whale," ''Syriana," ''Wedding Crashers," ''The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill."

THE 10 WORST

''The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D," ''Domino," ''The Legend of Zorro," ''A Lot Like Love," ''The Man," ''Modigliani," ''The Pacifier," ''Rent," ''Stealth," ''Underclassman."

THE FIVE MOST OVER-PRAISED

''The Constant Gardener," ''Crash," ''Hustle & Flow," ''Junebug," ''Walk the Line."

10 GUILTY PLEASURES

''Asylum," ''Beauty Shop," ''Derailed," ''The Devil's Rejects," ''Four Brothers," ''Just Friends," ''Monster-in-Law," ''Mrs. Henderson Presents" (opens in Boston Jan. 13), ''Sin City," ''The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants."