The Longest Yard (2005)

Winding up in jail after a drunken car crash, an ex-football player and man-generally-making-a-giant-mess-of-his-life Paul Crewe (Sandler) is coerced by the prison warden to coach a football team made up of prisoners, but things become complicated in this remake of the 1974 original when this reluctant coach becomes torn between wanting his ragtag team of prisoners to win an upcoming game versus prison guards (and so redeeming himself after so much failure) and succumbing to pressure from the prison warden to let the prison staff win.

★★★☆☆

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House of Wax (2005)

There's some innovation in the endscenes as our heroes, feet sinking into stairs, run around a house literally made of (melting) wax but otherwise this is a mediocre teen slasher, just an episode of "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th" but with a backstory that tries to justify a patently ridiculous contrivance: the story takes place in a long-lost small American town made entirely of wax.

★★☆☆☆

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The Interpreter (2005)

The Interpreter has the distinction of being the first movie ever granted permission to be filmed inside the United Nations Headquarters but why Director Sidney Pollack thought such authenticity was needed is hard to fathom when so much else of what goes on in this political Sorry, Wrong Number (an UN interpreter overhears an assassination plot) stretches belief, like the earnestly expounded politics of made-up African nation Matobo; like the All-Access passes that supposedly allow interpreters to wander around UNHQ whenever and wherever they like, day or night; like the Dignitary Protection agents who fail to sweep bins for weapons...but Pollack ratchets up tension nicely and fits in some interesting ideas about words translated, whispered, and uttered in grief.

★★★☆☆

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The Fog (2005)

I think John Carpenter's The Fog, the 1979 horror film with its solid performance by 70s horror queen Jamie Lee Curtis and effective creepy effects deserves sequels and prequels, spin-offs and origin stories but then along came this vapid teeny-bopper remake: the imbecilic plot is front and centre right from the first scene - blah blah blah founding fathers blah blah blah contracts - and because the plot is so silly, other desperate things are thrown in: stupid how-does-The-Fog-do-that death scenes; a show-stopping we-are-being-hunted-down-by-fog-but-excuse-us-we-are-horny-teens shower sex scene; horror sequences conceived free from concerns for the plot that see a young boy give barely a minute of his attention to a man drowning at sea or that see an almost comatose, insensible murder suspect next spotted running around with a healthy complexion (presumably exonerated by an off-camera court case - "It was The Fog, Your Honour - my client is innocent!"); and repetitive dream sequences to really unnecesarily hammer home that silly plot...

★★☆☆☆

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The Jacket (2005)

There are delicious moments of time travel madness early on as returned soldier, asylum inmate and murder suspect Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) richochets between a romantic future and a miserable asylum incarceration in the present, but this isn't Twelve Monkeys (Jennifer Jason Leigh is the psychiatric doctor tagging along but just stares and mumbles no matter what happens - she's no Madeleine Stowe) and the thriller elements fail to survive to an ending that, after so much dark potential, collapses into something with a corny The Lake House vibe.

★★☆☆☆

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Capote (2005)

This isn't In Cold Blood but Truman Capote writing 'In Cold Blood', and it is painterly and utterly captivating in its evocation of the 1960s and in the way it contrasts the cocktail parties, soirees of New York with the bleak landscapes of rural Kansas, its scene of the now infamous Clutter family murders and its penitentiary stretched out across the flat, but the biopic remains frustratingly superficial about its subject, more snapshot than character study, touching upon - for a Capote Devotee maybe - but not wholly taking up - for anyone else - myriad points of interest including Capote's addictions (we just see him with a glass in hand, a mere signal for those in the know), his self-centredness (he cries, but we wonder why; he says he's done all he can (after a holiday in Spain) but we wonder if he actually believes it); the veracity of his journalism (we hear him repeatedly proclaim his near-perfect recall but wonder if it might be because he feels his credibility is/would be challenged); his deteriorating relationship with Harper Lee (she cools but we wonder what affect this has on him), and the freedom he had in his relationship with Jack Dunphy (there are hints at dalliances, and possibly even one with one of the killers, Perry Smith (according to some sources but not this film), but we are left wondering if he feels duplicitous...or anything at all).

★★★☆☆

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The Amityville Horror (2005)

Given the entire series is built upon the premise of providing a paranormal 'out' for a real-life family massacrist, I shouldn't be surprised Ryan Reynold's George Lutz gets such an easy reprieve for dog murder, a wanton and unnecessary Russian Roulette axe game, and emotional and physical spousal abuse ("It was just a bad bout of pinkeye, honey - I won't do it again," you can imagine him saying as the boat speeds away to the non-satanic side of the lake where men like him continue these behaviours of their own accord), but apart from this unchecked male violence, this update of the 1979 horror classic incorporates some great improvements: a thankfully truncated 89-minute runtime; a terrifically improved, gleefully sinister babysitter scene; a sculpted Ryan Reynolds waddling around in pajama bottoms (unless you prefer a sculpted James Brolin waddling around in his y-fronts), and gone is all that "I've gone blind," twaddle with the priest.

★★★☆☆

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Hostel (2005)

You'd have to be a huge fan of torture porn to excuse the other 85 minutes of this laboured and terribly acted 94-minute exercise in bad taste, and not even notorious torture porn director Eli Roth seems able to commit to his 'The Most Dangerous Game in a Slovakian hostel' story because no sooner is the full extent of the depravity befalling his backpacking homophobes revealed, he alleviates the horror with some gross-out and surgically impossible nonsense.

★☆☆☆☆

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Hostage (2005)

The Die Hard series went on hiatus between 1995 and 2007 once the awful Die Hard With A Vengeance (that dopey one with John McClane playing Simon Says with the Riddler) demonstrated no-one was very sure how to keep the series fresh, so in the downtime Bruce Willis decided to star in this 2005 movie adaptation of a Robert Crais book about a hostage situation in a smaller Nakatomi Plaza - the family home of a rich mob accountant - that needs a John McClane (reluctant hero cop Jeff Talley, upon whom family members' lives depend) and like the Die Hard sequels, it is overthought and nowhere near as good as the original Die Hard.

★★☆☆☆

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Flightplan (2005)

Jodie Foster plays a mother searching an inflight jumbo passenger plane for her missing daughter while the passengers and crew members around her believe she is delusional and doesn't actually have a daughter on the plane or anywhere, in this 'nobody believes her' thriller that takes Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes from a transEuropean train and puts it 35,000 feet in the air, but this turns out to be a much lesser film than that classic on account of it taking itself way too seriously, because the movie reveals its underwhelming hand too early, because the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and lastly because early scenes suggest a stark, dreamlike unreality which makes all that follows hard to care about.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Constant Gardener (2005)

A political intrigue involving British government officials and drug companies plays out in Africa in this mostly satisfying film adaptation of the John le Carré novel, with Rachel Weisz playing an aid worker who dies mysteriously after uncovering a conspiracy and Ralph Fiennes her diplomat husband left to fill-in the movie's two-hour run-time until an unlikely but convenient "reveal-all" letter is finally dug up.

★★★☆☆

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Constantine (2005)

Keanu Reeves need only don a black suit and tie and a movie starts earning rating stars, but unless you're a DC/Vertigo Hellblazer fanboy, this mix of dour Catholic exorcism horror, toony villains, and Matrix-style rock'n'roll action doesn't warrant any more.

★★☆☆☆

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War of the Worlds (2005)

Dakota Fanning screams alot when she needs to be quiet and is struck dumb when she needs to scream, but rather than feed her to the alien pods that have taken over the Earth, Tom Cruise valliantly carries her through this big budget Spielberg film version of the H G Wells novel, which includes an extended Hitchcockian basement scene and many scenes like those in Signs (2002) in which the human drama fills the foreground and the horror of an alien invasion takes place in the often unseen or only partially seen background.

★★★★☆

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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

This pulpy crime comedy has mismatched investigators, one an injury-prone small-time crook, the other a tough guy P.I., hilariously bungling their way through a seedy LA investigation involving long lost sisters, body doubles, setups, and an enormous body count, and features scenes and situations that play out again very similarly in the 2016 The Nice Guys, also directed by Shane Black and it too inspired to some extent by the pulp crime books of Brett Halliday.

★★★★☆

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Just Like Heaven (2005)

Sandwiched by a terrible first and really terrible last fifteen minutes is a likeable romcom, a role-reversed The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which teams up a ghost with the man now living in her apartment - they bicker at first but eventually work together to find out who she is (was) and why she isn't outright dead as a doornail.

★★★☆☆

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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

Once again, Depp sports a deathly pallor in a Tim Burton fable, appearing here as Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka but in a daring departure from the source material, Wonka is centre stage with an embellished backstory that explains, cleverly and with fitting wicked humour, the chocolatier's desire for an heir.

★★★★☆

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The Descent (2005)

If this gungho group of cavers didn't make such amateur mistakes at the outset of their underground expedition, their survival story might have been less irritating but as it is, with left-behind guidebooks and leaders making bad decisions in secret, it is hard to feel sympathy even when the caving drama gives way unexpectedly in its last half to supernatural horror.

★★★☆☆

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Match Point (2005)

A young man is offered financial security and social standing by one woman, passion and excitement by another, in a fairly conventional story of an affair that Woody Allen turns into a measured, mesmerising thriller that references Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

★★★★☆

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Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This Ang Lee movie is about two cowboys, Jake Gyllenhaal and a mumbling Heath Ledger, whose relaxed nudie, towel-whipping funtimes together at a favourite remote mountain spot are starkly contrasted with their separate and mostly unhappy lives back in society where respectively Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway keep their homes and families.

★★★★☆

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