Nonetheless, I felt somewhat obligated to catch up with some films that have appeared on other lists of the best films of 2005. What I did like about You and Me and Everyone We Know was that the film had real looking people with crummy apartments and dead-end jobs. One scene that worked quite well was when Miranda July sees the man she's infatuated with from to far a distance to know what he is saying to his ex-wife. We see the couple from July's point of view, with each person speaking July's imagined words of romantic banter. A second shot of the couple shows us what they are really saying to each other. While I found the use of a young boy as an internet lover questionable, July did make an interesting exploration of the difference between private and public personas, and the quest for reciprocal love.

The Beat that My Heart Skipped is less of a remake of Fingers than a reworking of James Toback's film. The character of Tom, played by Romain Duris is more fully developed than Harvey Keitel's Jimmy Fingers. Audiard adds more to the father and son relationship so that the film is about more than a part-time gangster with aspirations to be a concert pianist. While Audiard repeated several scenes almost as they were in the original, one major change is that he eliminated the character of the mother who is refered to but not seen. In both films, the mother was a concert pianist who has inspired her son to pursue music professonally. The deeper exploration of the dynamics between father and son, as well as scenes showing Tom's struggle to attain professional level musicianship distinguish the new film.

Head-On is an appropriate title for a film where one of the characters drives into a wall, and characters dive into love, hate, drink and drugs, without thoughts of the consequences. The film begins with two characters meeting in a mental hospital, both Turks living in Germany. Sibel insists on marrying Cahit primarily to get out of her parents' house. As expected, the two fall in love with each other in spite of themselves. After that, the film goes in several unexpected directions. The concept of direction by indirection was both literally and humorously explored in Alin's In July. Akin discussed Head-On in Indiewire. The actress who played Sibel, Sibel Kekilli has a promising career in spite of news about her previous screen roles. I was more shocked and saddened to read that this uniquely beautiful woman used her Head-On earnings to pay for a nose job.