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
Browse by time · year
2005
Showing 110 works across all media 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
Gold Digger
2005 · From Late Registration
Foxx sang the Ray Charles hook fresh from his Oscar for playing him, and it held number one ten weeks.
★ 7.7
Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
2005
Cee-Lo cut the vocal in one take over a 1968 spaghetti western sample. Nine weeks at UK number one.
★ 7.6
Feel Good Inc.Gorillaz
Feel Good Inc.
Gorillaz and De La Soul
2005
Maseo's cackle, Danger Mouse at the desk, and a song Albarn dreamed up driving past California windmills toward Coachella.
★ 7.6
Postwar
2005 · 933 pages
Judt carries Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west in one story, showing a continent that rebuilt itself by forgetting the war and then defined itself by remembering it.
★ 7.6
Wake UpArcade Fire
Wake Up
2005 · From Funeral
A wordless chorus half of indie rock then copied, and Bowie sang it onstage with the band in 2005.
★ 7.4
We Belong Together
2005
Fourteen weeks at number one, two soul interpolations underneath, and Carey singing softly rather than belting.
★ 7.1
Illinois
2005
Stevens announced he would make one of these for all fifty states, then made two and stopped. One song is about John Wayne Gacy.
★ 6.9
Late Registration
2005
Kanye brought in Jon Brion, a film composer who had never worked on a rap record, and put a string section behind everything.
★ 6.9
The Painted Drum · 2005
1491
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
2005 · 560 pages
The hemisphere Columbus reached held cities larger than Paris, an Amazon farmed into orchard, and forests burned into pasture on purpose. What later settlers took for wilderness was a continent emptied by epidemics.
★ 6.7
Chicago
2005 · From Illinois
Sleigh bells, trumpets and a choir stacked into one crescendo, and Stevens cut five different versions of it.
★ 6.7
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
Welcome to Jamrock
2005
An Ini Kamoze sample under it, Stephen Marley at the desk, and verses answering the postcard version of Jamaica.
★ 6.5
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
Hate It Or Love It
2005
Cool and Dre's Trammps flip earned two Grammy nominations and stalled at two, blocked by 50 Cent's own 'Candy Shop'.
★ 6.2
Casimir Pulaski Day
2005 · From Illinois
Four guitar chords never change while Stevens sings a Bible study, a friend's death, and a question for God.
★ 6.1
I Turn My Camera On
2005 · From Gimme Fiction
Daniel wrote it late for Gimme Fiction, cut it first, and sang in a Prince falsetto over Eno's hi-hat.
★ 6.0
The Cold War
A New History
2005 · 333 pages
Gaddis lays the war's origins at Stalin's door, shows how nuclear terror kept the peace it threatened, and treats the outcome as a moral verdict. Forty-five years of standoff in one commanding volume.
★ 5.8
Hollaback Girl
2005
Courtney Love called her a cheerleader, so Stefani and the Neptunes built the taunt into pop's first million-selling download.
★ 5.7
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
2005 · 209 pages
How do you go about finding a thing whose nature is unknown to you? Solnit carries that question from Plato into deserts, ruins, and the blue of distance, making lostness a discipline.
★ 5.6
Girl
2005 · From Guero
Thirteen seconds of chiptune open it, and the Dust Brothers built the rest around Beck jamming acoustic guitar.
★ 5.6
Wake Me Up When September Ends
2005 · From American Idiot
Armstrong's father died in September 1982; by his account the words he said that day waited twenty years.
★ 5.5
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 Colbert Report · 2005
Temperature
2005
Rohan Fuller's Applause riddim, a Hot 100 number one, and dancehall running American radio through 2006.
★ 5.3
The Year of Magical Thinking
2005 · 227 pages
Her husband died at the dinner table while their daughter lay in a coma. Didion turns a reporter's eye on her year of grief and keeps his shoes, because he will need them.
★ 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
Be
2005
Kanye West produced most of it and J Dilla the rest, and Common's father closes the record talking over the last track.
★ 5.1
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