Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
2005
It changed what a mainstream American film could be about: Lee filmed twenty years of two men unable to say what they are, almost entirely in silence.
★ 7.7
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2005
Showing 12 films from 2005
Cache (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
2005 · France
The most quietly frightening film anyone has made about guilt: videotapes of a family's own front door start arriving, and Haneke cares far more about what nobody says.
★ 7.7
Grizzly Man
Directed by Werner Herzog
2005
A hundred hours of video shot by a man who camped among Alaskan grizzlies, edited by Werner Herzog, who disagrees with him completely: two views of nature, arguing across the cut.
★ 6.7
Batman Begins
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2005
Serious superhero films begin here: Nolan built the car for real, kept Gotham plausible, and treated a man in a bat costume as a psychological problem rather than a joke.
★ 6.3
Capote
Directed by Bennett Miller
2005
Philip Seymour Hoffman spent months on the voice and it never sounds like an impression: Truman Capote gets the book of his life out of two condemned men, and knows what that costs.
★ 5.4
Walk the Line
Directed by James Mangold
2005
Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon sang everything themselves after months of training: Johnny Cash's early years, filmed with the music treated as the argument rather than the soundtrack.
★ 5.3
The Constant Gardener
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
2005 · United Kingdom
Fernando Meirelles shot Kenya the way he shot Rio, handheld and saturated: a mild British diplomat starts pulling at what his wife was investigating, and Rachel Weisz took the Oscar for playing her.
★ 5.3
Sin City
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
2005
Rodriguez shot the whole thing on green screen and used Frank Miller's comic panels as storyboards: monochrome with single splashes of color, and Miller got a co-director credit for it.
★ 5.1
Cinderella Man
Directed by Ron Howard
2005
James Braddock was a broken-handed longshoreman on relief when he got a fight nobody expected him to survive: Ron Howard films the Depression as the real opponent, and Paul Giamatti steals it.
★ 4.1
Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin
2005
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn talk across each other at speed and the rhythm carries the film: two divorce lawyers crash strangers' weddings as a hobby, with rules they have written down.
★ 3.9
March of the Penguins
Directed by Luc Jacquet
2005
The American release swapped the French version's talking penguins for Morgan Freeman narrating, and it became a phenomenon: a colony walks seventy miles inland to breed in the Antarctic winter.
★ 3.3
Tsotsi
Directed by Gavin Hood
2005 · South Africa
South Africa's first Academy Award for a foreign language film: a Johannesburg gang member steals a car and finds a baby in the back, and the film gives him no easy way out.
★ 2.7