Oddly, although many film reviewers have been complaining 2005 has been a bad year for film, I’ve been enjoying it greatly. Here are my favorites of the year so far. There are no so-so films on this list. With some previous years, I’d have struggled to find ten that I’d actually recommend, but that was probably because I hadn’t seen as many films as this year. This year, I intend to own each of the top ten films, and I’d be happy to watch them many times.

Oldboy
Outstanding, and stomach-churning. Chan-wook Park is the ideal person to adapt any Iain Banks or Irvine Walsh novel. I could rave about this at length, but I’d rather just recommend that you see it, without reading any more about it (not that it’s spoilerific, just that you’d gain absolutely nothing from knowing more about it beforehand.)

Pride & Prejudice
Yup. Who’d have thought? I like Jane Austin’s books, and I really enjoyed the mini-series of Pride And Prejudice, but this one is gorgeous in cast, direction, cinematography and design, and manages to be deeply affecting. Also, I’m probably a bit soft on good romantic comedies.

Wallace & Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Inventive, frenetic, expressive, hilarious. Grommit’s eyebrows manage more expressiveness than I’ve ever seen before – witness his affection for his beloved marrow that absurdly manages to be sweet and sad – and the rabbits are delightful. Nothing will ever beat “Fingers” McGraw, but the rabbits come closer than I would have ever hoped for.

Serenity
I oscillate about this one. It’s certainly in my top ten for this year, but does it beat Kung Fu Hustle and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? Fuck it. The rankings are arbitary anyway: I love ‘em all, and Serenity is going to be a repeat viewer. I’ve seen it twice at the cinemas and been thrilled each time. Good SF, great characters.

Kung Fu Hustle
How could I rank this one so low? I don’t know. It hurts me like a knife in the shoulder. Make that two. Dear god, I laughed. Thanks to international flights, I have now seen this film about eight times. Pure comfort viewing.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Warning! Rampant misogeny! Actually, it’s so misanthropic you can just sit back and enjoy the nastiness of it all, like “Bad Santa”. Shane Black is a bad man who writes great dialogue. Penis cinema at its best.

Batman Begins
This is exactly what I would hope Chris Nolan would bring to the franchise. You can spot his dialogue from a mile away. The philosophical meditations so eloquently expressed no studio exec could possibly object, as they only take a few seconds of screen time. The unexpected sense and logic. Just don’t ask me about the water vaporiser. That whole farce cost the film at least three spots on the rankings, for what it’s worth.

Nightwatch
Clever and inventive: two attributes that are almost guaranteed to put a film on one of my top ten lists. Not very original in its grand setup – it treads the same ground as any number of other vampire/secret society films – but oh, what conviction it puts into it. The magic is dark and real and creepy and orthogonal to any logical sense, just as it should be. And I haven’t even mentioned the subtitles yet. Dammit, I was really hoping nobody would do that subtitle thing until I had a chance to with the big screen version of “Bullet Hole”. Oh well. I couldn’t wish it on a more deserving film.

Howl’s Moving Castle
Beautiful, strange, and mercurial. Very different from Spirited Away, so doesn’t really deserve the comparison that it “isn’t as good”. Still a keeper, and in many ways it’s vastly more ambitious. I suspect that after the first dozen viewings, this one will keep growing. I’d like to see the subtitled version, though. I realise it’s almost redundent with animated films, but the English dialogue is sometimes a little strangled to avoid Japanese references (which I have a decent chance of getting, nowadays) and to keep the lip-synching roughly correct.

Red Eye
Getting to the tail end of the list – this film is carried as high as it is on the charisma of the lead, Rachel McAdams. She’s brilliant. The story is fine, if a little straightforward, and the direction is decent. I just wish a bit more of the film could have stayed on the plane. The claustrophobia of that bit was great, and they did a great job of introducing the characters on the plane in a way that implied they might have had a bit more to do. Still, a good film well done, which rather caught me by surprise and therefore made the list.

Also…
Not in the top ten, but also particularly enjoyable were such films as:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The doll hospital almost pushed this one through onto the top ten. Wonderfully eccentric, though the Wonka was quite different to how I imagined him – much less in control, and more engaging with, and affected by, the children. I haven’t seen the first film, but apparently it doesn’t hold as closely to the plot as this one. This might have been even higher on the list if it had kept the momentum going when they get into the factory. The build-up to that point was just perfect, but the factory stuff isn’t quite as good. Still, a great film, and I’ve seen it four or five times now, again thanks to international flights.

The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
I’ve covered off how I’d change this film in the FF main body, but I don’t recall mentioning that I really enjoyed it anyway. The trip through the factory floor was lovely, and Trillian was cute, and Arthur wasn’t annoying, and there were enough new bits so that it wasn’t a complete retro-trip. In the end, I thought it was sweet and rather sad, which is about right.

Sin City
A quite astonishingly faithful and cinematically beautiful adaptation of the comics. The one thing keeping it off the list is the structure: this is set of short stories, and I got a little weary of the stop-start nature of it. I thought they missed a trick – interleaving the stories (and correspondingly deviating slightly from the text) might have been more interesting and would have given them a little more chance to thematically tie the stories a little tighter. I enjoyed the film, but I was a little let down at the same time.

Sky High
Aw shucks, a high-school movie just like I watched when I was a teenager. Fun! And in the same vein as Top Ten, or PS238 or Astrocity, which is nice. And it had a clever ending!

The Interpreter
It’s slightly sad that serious, well-made adult films don’t often make my top ten lists, earning honorary mentions. Still, it was tense and well done, if a wee bit too serious and relevent and dramatic. You know what it needed? Zombies. Yeah, zombies would sure have kicked it up a notch.

and I was unimpressed with:

Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith
Noooo!