Dave Calhoun's films of the year

The magazine's film editor declares his five favourite films of 2005.

Dec 23 2005

'Last Days'
Gus Van Sant offered a resolute (and successful) experimental approach to a genre that so often wheels out the same old rotten clichés: the music biopic. He harnessed haunting sound design, a possessed performance by Mike Pitt, a junkie's sense of time and place, and a hermetic location to confront the death of one of the late twentieth century's most considered pop icons, Kurt Cobain.

'Downfall'
You could call it a tricky topic... German director Oliver Hirschbiegel broke his country's cinematic silence over Nazi Germany with this bracing, detailed, intelligent account of the final days of Adolf Hitler.

'Sideways'
Alexander Payne gave us a funny and poignant road movie that affectionately and sensitively looked at middle-aged depression, friendship and romance.

'Innocence'
French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic's debut film was a smart and creepy study of pre-teen sexuality framed as a fairytale and set in a remote girls boarding school.

'Tarnation'
Very camp and by its nature confessional, Jonathan Caouette's debut film was an autobiographical documentary that looked at the filmmaker's quite extraordinary life via a collage of home movie footage.

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