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"Top 10" and "Best of" movie lists are a feature of the
closing of every year. Hollywood blockbusters get plenty of coverage, but
what about the less-marketed, less widely-distributed independent and
foreign movies? The LA Times reviewers' picks for top 10/best of 2005
movies contain an overwhelming line up of independent, foreign, and
documentary films from 2005. Most of their picks are movies that most
people will not have heard of or had an opportunity to see unless they live
in large metropolitan areas, but many are now released on DVD if you wish to
buy them for your collection or rent from
Netflix.com .
My personal favorite movie reviewer for LA Times,
Kenneth Turan, found it impossible to list just 10 picks, and titled his
"top 10 movies" list as "Ten
Just Isn't Enough", giving multiple picks of related genres in his list
of ten.
- Turan's first picks were described by him in a
Shakespearean quote as "untimely ripped" from the screens: "The
Best of Youth
  "
from Italy's Marco Tullio Giordana and "Duma"
from Carroll Ballard
- Middle-Eastern focus: "Paradise
Now"
and "Syriana"
- Family drama: "The
Squid and the Whale"
with "Brokeback
Mountain"
- Animated: "Howl's
Moving Castle"
and "Wallace
& Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit"
- Meditations on the nature of violence and its outcomes:
"A
History of Violence"
and "Munich"
- Documentary: "Los Angeles Plays Itself", "Born
Into Brothels," "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Gunner Palace",
"Occupation: Dreamland", "Grizzly Man," "March of the Penguins" "The Wild
Parrots of Telegraph Hill" and "Ballets Russes"
- Biographies: "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck."
- Blockbusters with auteur: "Batman Begins" and "King
Kong."
- Foreign language: "Head-On" "Saraband", "Tony Takitani"
(Japanese), "The World" (Chinese), "Look at Me", (French), "The Beat That
My Heart Skipped" (French), "The Holy Girl," (Spanish), "Machuca,"
(Spanish), "Lost Embrace" (Spanish), and "Torremolinos 73 (Spanish)
- Last, but not least, and on its own, Turan's pick for
10th place was "The Constant Gardener."
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Like Turan,
Carina Chocano found herself unable to limit her best 10 movies for 2005
to ten, listing the following 13 movies:
- "2046" (Wong Kar Wai)
- "Brokeback Mountain" (Ang Lee)
- "Capote" (Bennett Miller)
- "The Corporation" (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, Joel
Bakan)
- "The Edukators" (Hans Weingartner)
- "Grizzly Man" (Werner Herzog)
- "Head-On" (Fatih Akin)
- "Junebug" (Phil Morrison)
- "King Kong" (Peter Jackson)
- "Last Days" (Gus Van Sant)
- "The Squid and the Whale" (Noah Baumbach)
- "Syriana" (Stephen Gaghan)
- "Turtles Can Fly" (Bahman Ghobadi)
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