The PEN15 Club

‘Cause it’s the end of December and everyone else is doing it.

Caveats: I have yet to see Match Point, The New World, Cache and any number of obscure South Korean action films that my own bored, overwhelmed biases prevented me from getting my shit together and catching during their three-day runs at the Brattle.

But of those that I did manage to check out this year, these ten linger the most, at least right now, as I’m writing this (alphabetically):

• Brokeback Mountain, the weepiest Oscar-baiting tale of thwarted love since The English Patient (that’s totally a compliment)
• Capote, with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s surgically unsettling portrayal of the collision of self-loathing and ego
• The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the most romantic movie of the year, as well as the funniest
• Grizzly Man, if only for the scene in which Herzog convinces Timothy Treadwell’s best friend not to listen to the recording of Treadwell being eaten alive by bears
• Land of the Dead, because it barely seemed far-fetched in June, and then Katrina happened and, well…that moment when the undead rise out of the water to hunt down their privileged oppressors went from “just scary” to “scarily prescient”
• Last Days (pictured), hypnotic, whether it’s a meditation on an artistic grace too delicate to exist corporeally, or just the story of a junkie whose time runs out, or both
• Look at Me, the even-handed human comedy that Hollywood doesn’t know how to make (although the underrated In Her Shoes came shockingly close)
• Munich, a riveting thriller, revisiting with fresh immediacy the theme of vengeance as virus
• Nobody Knows, with Kore-eda’s stunning compositions in the service of a heartbreaking coming-of-age story
• Palindromes, another bitter Todd Solondz mindfuck, this time finding dark hilarity in the slut-ification of American preteen girls, and its weird dovetailing with Christian fascism

Movies I’m sad I couldn’t find room for: Walk the Line, Pride and Prejudice, Dark Water (you heard me), In Her Shoes (that’s right), A History of Violence, The Squid and the Whale, Junebug, The Aristocrats, Broken Flowers, Mysterious Skin, The Dying Gaul