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2005

Showing 110 works across all media from 2005

Romantic drama · Drama

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
Hip hop · R&B

Gold Digger

Kanye West
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
Nonfiction · Political history

Postwar

Tony Judt
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
Hip hop

Late Registration

Kanye West
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
Novel

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Erdrich
The Painted Drum · 2005
★ 6.8
Nonfiction · History

1491

New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
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
Pop

Fix You

Coldplay
2005 · From X&Y

Consolation for Gwyneth Paltrow after her father's death, written on the keyboard he gave her, now a stadium hymn.

★ 6.7
Documentary

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
R&B · Hip hop

1 Thing

Amerie
2005

Rich Harrison looped a ten-second Meters breakdown, stacked go-go percussion on top, and Amerie chases the beat.

★ 6.3
Nonfiction · History

The Cold War

A New History
John Lewis Gaddis
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
Dance · Pop

Hollaback Girl

Gwen Stefani
2005

Courtney Love called her a cheerleader, so Stefani and the Neptunes built the taunt into pop's first million-selling download.

★ 5.7
Alternative rock · Rock

Girl

Beck
2005 · From Guero

Thirteen seconds of chiptune open it, and the Dust Brothers built the rest around Beck jamming acoustic guitar.

★ 5.6
Crime drama · Drama

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
Biographical drama · Drama

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
Drama thriller · Drama

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
Chicago hip hop · Jazz rap

Be

Common
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
Crime thriller · Crime

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
Hip hop

Candy Shop

50 Cent
2005 · From The Massacre

Scott Storch's synth strings borrow from Middle Eastern melody, and nine weeks at number one followed for 50 Cent.

★ 4.9
Sports drama · Drama

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
Romantic comedy · Comedy

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
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