Ben Walters' films of the year

Continuing our end-of-year round-up, Time Out's deputy film editor Ben Walters lists his favourites of 2005.

Dec 20 2005

'2046'
Wong Kar-Wai's magnum opus had a notoriously difficult birth but serves as an exquisite summing-up of his work to date, drawing not just on its ostensible forerunner 'In the Mood for Love', but on elements of character, design and music dating back to his earliest work. Suffused with longing, dreams and memory, it also has an eroticism new to Wong's vocabulary.

'Last Days'
The daringly unhurried and elliptical observational mode Gus Van Sant applied to the landscape in 'Gerry' and high school society in 'Elephant' is brought to bear on the mysteries of individual identity in his attenuated account of the end of Kurt Cobain's life. Michael Pitt's mumbling, pantomimic performance added a valuable comic edge to an unashamedly unempathetic picture.

'Mysterious Skin'
After a couple of movies that had even die-hard fans wondering how much mileage was left in his trademark hyper-stylised LA nihilism, Gregg Araki threw a triumphant curveball with this disturbingly lush adaptation of Scott Heim's novel about the repurcussions of child abuse. Vivid visuals and unflinching yet non-judgemental characterisation yielded strange, marvellous fruit.

'The Night of Truth'
Opening before dusk at a meandering dawdle and building with terrible momentum to a conflagration that threatens to halt the dawn, this feature debut from Burkina Faso is at once a compendium of contemporary African ordeal and a compelling local tragedy with universal relevance, punctuated by flashes of humour and brutality – sometimes unnervingly juxtaposed.

'Tropical Malady'
The latest from Thai director Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethakul is an intoxicating fever dream of love and tigers set on the edge of the knowable world. The first of its two halves, a romance between two young men set against an indulgent society, is perhaps more easily digestible; the second is a mythic riff in which the rainforest becomes the backdrop for a tug-of-war of the soul.

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