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THE 3 BEST FILMS

Crash

Directed by: Paul Haggis

Genre: Drama

Starring: Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Michael Peña, Brendan Fraser, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillippe, Larenz Tate and Thandie Newton

"Not happier, not calmer, not even wiser, but better. Then there are those few who kill or get killed; racism has tragedy built in. Not many films have the possibility of making their audiences better people. I don't expect "Crash" to work any miracles, but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves. The movie contains hurt, coldness and cruelty, but is it without hope? Not at all. Stand back and consider. All of these people, superficially so different, share the city and learn that they share similar fears and hopes. Until several hundred years ago, most people everywhere on earth never saw anybody who didn't look like them. They were not racist because, as far as they knew, there was only one race. You may have to look hard to see it, but "Crash" is a film about progress."

by Roger Ebert in Chicago Sun-Times

"Eventually, though, Crash becomes too much of a Rubik’s Cube of a movie: We start looking for the shifts and patterns that will force disparate characters to interact with each other, usually in moments of stress. Haggis wants to tell us that racial conflict is always bubbling beneath the surface of contemporary Los Angeles—not a new thought, since we’ve learned that in everything from the Rodney King trial to the fiction of Walter Mosley. And the big-name, small-part, large-ensemble cast is a gambit that’s been used by directors ranging from Robert Altman to Spike Lee to John Sayles to (Haggis’s most obvious influence) Lawrence Kasdan, in the latter’s underrated Grand Canyon. It’s smart, therefore, that Haggis has written such novel, precisely observed, often unpleasant characters as the ones Bullock, Dillon, and Cheadle inhabit. And if Crash ultimately resolves itself around a series of sentimental familial tableaux (a child placed in danger; a grown son caring for his sick father; a wayward young brother rescued from grave punishment by his elder sibling), it also makes its social and political collisions resonate in our heads so as to leave them ringing. It’s a film you won’t stop thinking about, arguing over, debating, after the lights come up."

Ken Tucker in New York Magazine

The Squid and the Whale

Directed by: Noah Baumbach

Genre: Drama; Comedy;

Starring: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Anna Paquin, William Baldwin and Halley Feiffer

"Baumbach gives everyone humanistic dimension. Joan, who had affairs during the marriage, had her reason: Bernard's complete self-absorption. Even Bernard has his moments of relative decency. Walt, who takes his father's side in this moral battle, starts to see his father's faults and his mom's higher qualities, and Frank starts to descend from his peculiar orbit. The movie feels like it was written in the filmmaker's own sweat and tears. It's so brutally honest at times, you can almost sense the real Baumbachs squirming, twitching, tut-tutting and maybe even nodding their heads. Whatever their reaction -- and, goodness, what a spectacle that would be -- this story doesn't just belong to them anymore. This richly observed, sometimes heartbreaking movie has become ours, too."

by Desson Thomson in The Washington Post

"As with Baumbach's charming "Mr. Jealousy" and little-seen "Highball" (on which he used a pseudonym), "The Squid" demonstrates the scripter-helmer's razor-sharp character insights and his feel for life's absurd, unpredictable rhythms. He should also be commended for avoiding the temptation to resolve all (or even most) of pic's conflicts with a series of happy endings. Yet it's possible to feel, at the end of pic's exceedingly brief running time, that "Squid" might have plunged even deeper into certain facets of the story, particularly where Joan is concerned. Superbly cast, "Squid" is a feast of inspired performances, including from young Eisenberg ("Roger Dodger") and Kline, who capture the pain, uncertainty and terror of adolescence with uncommon grace. In a career-best turn, Daniels, looking like a worn-out carpet, imbues the misanthropic, sometimes hateful Bernard with a tragic, haggard dignity -- the aura of a man raging on the outside while crying on the inside."

by Scott Foundas in Variety

Brokeback Mountain

Directed by: Ang Lee

Genre: Drama; Romance;

Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway

"Ang Lee's unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It's a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who bring deep reserves of feeling to this defiantly erotic love story about two Wyoming ranch hands and the external and internal forces that drive them from desire to denial. Directed with piercing intelligence and delicacy by Lee, the film of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story — the unerring script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana is a model of literary adaptation — wears its emotions on its sleeve."

by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone

"Brokeback Mountain," based on Annie Proulx's 1997 story, is directed by Ang Lee in a style that pays attention to the nuances of expression, to the thoughts and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses. This is necessary, because cowboys don't do much talking. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play Ennis and Jack, respectively, who meet when they're hired to tend a herd of sheep in Wyoming in 1963. They're both tight-lipped fellows, but Ledger is the more closed off of the two. He adopts a manner of speaking that suggests repression, a pressing down of the vocal cords as though jealous of any word that might escape. It's up to interpretation whether he knows, at first, the thing that he's trying to hide. In any case, nature will out, and it does one night, with a suddenness bordering on violence, when the two men share a tent."

by Mick LaSalle in San Francisco Chronicle

BEST ACTING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR

Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain