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"Bad year for movies, huh?"

If I had a nickel for everyone who said that to me in 2005, I could raise the money to buy back Dukes of Hazzard from Warner Bros. and have every last print recycled into a lifetime supply of banjo picks.

So, as much as I should encourage such talk, I am mystified by it. Yes, box office was down in 2005. That was the supposedly catastrophic news: Domestic box office was down 6 percent, expected to land somewhere shy of $9 billion for the first time since 2001. What all those stories about the slump failed to mention was that overall, worldwide studio revenue in 2005 was expected to be around $50 billion - an 8 percent boost from 2004.

And sure, it was a bad year for formulas: action pictures like The Island and Stealth, and cynical TV-to-movie transplants like Bewitched, which would have been guaranteed hits at one time, barely made a dent. But that's a good thing for moviegoers: The year's biggest films, without fail, were its darkest, most tragic visions to come out of mainstream studio filmmaking in years - Batman Returns, Revenge of the Sith, War of the Worlds, even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Meanwhile, a few genuinely uplifting pictures struggled to get noticed, like Cinderella Man and Hustle N' Flow - the latter featuring the year's most consistently brilliant actor, Terrence Howard. If you saw him at all, however, you saw him in Crash, the surprise hit of 2005 until, well, penguins marched all over the multiplex.

I will give you this:

Celebrities went nuts this year, leading a number of critics to wonder if celebrity gossip had in fact become more interesting than the films it was meant to pitch.

And it trickled down, too.

If Toledo wasn't in the news in 2005 for Kirby Dick's Oscar-nominated documentary Twist of Faith, it was all over the news for one word: Tomkat, the unlikely union of Toledoan Katie Holmes and the most famous dude on the planet, Tom Cruise.

But I can't agree that it was a bad year if you were actually paying attention to what was on the screen. When I tallied my Top 10, it wasn't a chore to find 10 worthy movies. It was a chore to whittle my list down from nearly 30 excellent pictures. I couldn't even place Steve Martin's Shopgirl or Woody Allen's Match Game among the 15 honorable mentions.

And if there are themes in the list below, they're thinly veiled metaphors for terrorism, complex studies of the ramifications of violence, movies that dig deep into what it means to be an American. Four pictures are about families torn apart. Two alone are from Steven Spielberg, who found the time to not only make a movie about the tenor of the times (War of the Worlds), but a critique of our reaction to those times (Munich).

You call that a bad year?

As usual, what follows are movies released in 2005 at least in New York or Los Angeles to qualify for the Oscars. If you haven't seen one, I include a hint at how you might seek them out:

10. The Family Stone. Like Curtis Hanson's warring-sisters picture, In Her Shoes, this deceptively cornball family-reunion holiday picture takes a teeming, elbowing cast of familiar faces and adopts what is accessible about big-family films for tougher ends, until finally asking: Why does a family-reunion holiday flick have to be angst-ridden before it can be taken seriously? Why can't it be, gasp, both sad and fun? (Currently in theaters.)

9. The New World. The fourth film from Terrence Malick, and if not his finest, definitely his most ruminative, the epic story of how John Smith (Colin Farrell) helped found the colony at Jamestown with tentative help from a native we call Pochahontas, charmingly played without a bit of self-consciousness by 14-year old Q'orianka Kilcher. It's history as absorbing love story, with grace notes pointing to the future. (Opens later this month.)

8. The Beat That My Heart Skipped. A kinetic and dizzying French update of an obscure '70s Harvey Keitel film Fingers, seen through the lens of another, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. If the original was pulp, this remake walks the line to tell the story of a punk with the skills of a concert pianist who's pulled between the easy violence of the street and the scarier allure of committing himself to an art. (Available on home video now.)

7. Millions. Taking a holiday from his steady diet of brain eaters (28 Days Later) and Scottish junkies (Trainspotting), Danny Boyle turns to the importance of virtue for a tale of two brothers who fret over how to get rid of a pile of stolen cash. Perfect holiday viewing, and truly deserving of that most overheated of movie-critic adjectives - "magical." (Available on home video now.)

6. A History of Violence. David Cronenberg's brilliant meditation on America and violence, ingeniously structured as a conventional action picture about a man defending his home and his family. So absorbing, we get a scenery-eating William Hurt almost as an afterthought. (Available on home video Feb. 28.)

5. The 40-Year Old Virgin. Sex comedies almost never turn out smart. They certainly never turn out both sweet and smart. And absolutely positively, have you ever heard of one that was sweet and smart and deliciously lewd without being mean-spirited or sexist? Within a broad framework, director Judd Apatow and star Steve Carrell take a one-joke movie and milk it with insight and delicacy, and a love for the way friends talk to their friends. It's also genuinely romantic. (Available on home video now.)

4. Junebug. Director Phil Morrison makes a graceful, deceptively simple debut with a film about what it means to come from a certain place. And how much being from that place will determine who we are. A great film about the complexities, and the inherent loneliness, of family life. (Available on video Jan. 17.)

3. Munich. A disturbing, intense study of the tit-for-tat relationship between terrorists and nations, and whether, in the end, anything is accomplished in the name of retaliation. As Spielberg gets older, he gets bolder - and better. (Currently in theaters.)

2. War of the Worlds. Exactly what a studio picture should do in 2005: Reflect the times, and entertain wildly. Spielberg delivers both, giving us the paranoid B-side of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an ode to the ominous underbelly of all those '50s sci-fi classics even as it reminds us the stakes have become way scarier, and more personal. Tom Cruise's Oscar-worthy performance on Oprah's couch may overshadow it - but only until the next gut-sinking headline. (Available on home video now.)

1. The Squid and the Whale. The funniest movies are always the most truthful, but director Noah Baumbach reminds they are also the most painful. He leaves no family member off the hook in this unsparing instant classic about a family of intellectuals behaving very badly. The film's triumph is how it reminds us to feel for every last one precisely because they are so impossible and hard to understand - most of all Jeff Daniels, who gives the best performance of the year. (Currently in theaters.)

And 15 other films that nearly made the Top 10 (in no order): Grizzly Man, Fever Pitch, The Best of Youth, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, The Aristocrats, Broken Flowers, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Kings and Queens, King Kong, Syriana, Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Batman Begins, In Her Shoes, Last Days.

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And finally, in the spirit of letting it all out and putting bad things behind, the worst of 2005. If there is often at least a sliver of something nice to say about even the lousiest picture, these test that rule. As for qualifications: I did not include those not-even-trying Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalows of the world or quick-hit remakes like The Fog, but pictures with some pretense that failed miserably:

10. Rumor Has It.

9. Casanova. Opening Friday. Think Benny Hill with austerity.

8. The Fantastic Four.

7. Chicken Little.

6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Read the book, you get it. Don't read it, and you're totally lost.

5. Happy Endings. When Sundance goes wrong it goes very wrong. Cloying self-importance.

4. Ladies in Lavender. Am I the only one bored with Judi Dench?

3. Stealth.

2. The Dukes of Hazzard.

1. The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl. On the heels of Sin City, director Robert Rodriguez, showing much chutzpah, allows his 7-year old son to write a screenplay, then films in a horrific 3-D process that renders everything the color of cement.

Literally unwatchable.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.

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