Culture Awards

The Year in Movies

Breakout Performance, Sexpot
You’ll never look at Walt Disney’s Pocahontas the same way after you see The New World (December 25), with Q’Orianka Kilcher’s sexy-poignant turn as the Indian maiden.

New York Movie Most True to the City
Noah Baumbach’s autobiographical drama ‘The Squid and The Whale’ filmed an instantly recognizable Brooklyn that put outer-borough fakery like Duplex to shame.

Best New New York Director
Phil Morrison, who worked in miniature in his naturalistic debut Junebug, dramatizing an utterly believable clash between city mice and country mice.

Best Industry Development
Screw you, Toronto
The revitalized Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting instituted new tax incentives this year, spurring more than $500 million worth of productions.

(Photo: Clockwise from top right: Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures; Courtesy of Universal Studios(2); Courtesy of TDG Distribution)

Best Survivor of Overexposure
Peter Sarsgaard
Still easy to like, even after a glut of performances in The Dying Gaul, Jarhead, The Skeleton Key, and, yes, the idiotic Flightplan.
—Logan Hill and Ken Tucker

The Year Genre Films Got Smart

(Photo: Courtesy of Dimension Films)

Since the beginning of cinematic time, Hollywood has made its bread and butter with genre movies—Westerns; the gangster saga; private-eye mysteries; sci-fi chillers. They were part of the mix, along with dramas and comedies. But in recent years, the industry has churned out so many bland comic-book adaptations, so many facile film noirs and self-spoofing horror flicks, that the bread seems stale. So it was with great gratification that 2005 turned out to be the year of intelligent (movie) design: genre adaptations with flair, wit, and, at their best, deep emotion.

Take just two examples. War of the Worlds spliced its H. G. Wells source material with state-of-the-art sci-fi destruction and themes Steven Spielberg has nurtured over decades, about the perils of parenthood, the fear of abandonment, and the uncontrollability of the universe. Spielberg also deployed the increasingly fascinating duality of his star, Tom Cruise—the way the actor can hold sunny boyishness and dark-side ferocity in the same character without losing control. The result was a spectacle with soulfulness. Sin City (with Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro) took a totally different approach to its primary source—co-directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez reproduced, onscreen, entire panel sequences from Miller’s graphic novel. But instead of hemming in their creative options, this strategy freed the filmmakers to create a go-for-broke fever dream of sin, revenge, and redemption. For once, using comic-book imagination didn’t make for childish morality or special-effects overkill. Instead, we got an art film disguised as a genre film, its images so stylized they bordered on abstraction.

Other 2005 genre movies that carried their weight with both grace and unpredictability: A History of Violence; Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; Serenity; and (minus the flat car-chase ending) Batman Begins. What distinguished all these movies was the conviction that genre films, because they arrive in such identifiable packages (we know the general shape of a sci-fi or a detective story), can become, like a poem written in a formal structure such as a sonnet or a villanelle, a field of play for the artists involved, capable of impudence and surprise—the shock of the new wrapped in the context of the familiar.
—K.T.

The Industry Award

James Schamus and David Linde, Focus Features
It was a good year for indie film: The Weinsteins found funding, ThinkFilm offended millions with The Aristocrats, and Sony Pictures Classics got ready-made Oscar bait with Capote. But more than anyone, Focus Features brought art films to the multiplex. Co-founders James Schamus and David Linde got NBC Universal’s backing three years ago; since then, starting with one breakthrough a year (The Pianist, then Lost in Translation, then Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), they’ve built on the Miramax model, using cheap, good genre films like Shaun of the Dead to pay for artier projects and preserve their autonomy. “It helps that the films do well—that they actually send a few nickels back to the mother ship,” says Schamus. “But it also helps that a lot of the personalities in the so-called Universal family get what we do, and get that that’s not what they do.” What Schamus and Linde did do was produce some of the most-talked-about films around. With The Constant Gardener, they reinvented the fast-paced thriller as a politically conscious journey of grief. With Pride & Prejudice, they turned a classic into a popcorn romp full of feminist sass. And with Brokeback Mountain, they created a truly moving gay love story whose buzz didn’t get the better of it. “There’s a definition to a Focus movie,” says Schamus. “Before we even make it, we know a lot of people are going to hate it. They’re not for everybody.” But they’re definitely for us.
—Jada Yuan