2. MirrorMask
After years of waiting for Sundance movies to trickle down to my friendly neighborhood theater, 2005 marked my first chance to attend the festival. At the top of my list was the latest collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, the visionaries behind the twisted children's book, The Wolves in the Walls. In a cruel twist of fate, what should have been a Wizard of Oz-worthy story of a girl trapped in a dreamworld instead merely puts audiences to sleep.

3. Revolver
The Toronto Film Festival also brought its share of disappointments, most notably Guy Ritchie's new movie. I've been a fierce defender of the Lock Stock director, even as his detractors labeled him a shameless hack. This time he's gone too far. Ritchie's ambition gets the better of him in Revolver, and the flip rebel style that made his early heist movies so much fun — with their byzantine plots and renegade camera moves — makes this who's-conning-whom gag more trouble than its worth this time around.

4. Chicken Little
Disney was smart to start marketing their first in-house CG toon early. The character design was genius, as teased by both the must-have vinyl figurine and the bespectacled pop-art silhouette LA Eyeworks painted above their Beverly storefront. That kind of hipster-friendly marketing suggested the movie might upstage Shrek in its irreverent treatment of the old nursery-school standard, but instead, the inane end result aimed squarely at introducing kids to the studio's newest franchise character.

5. The New World
I take back every mean thing I've ever said about Disney's Pocahontas — at least whenever that movie starts contemplating the wind and the trees, the willows break out in song. Malick, meanwhile, offers another listless reverie grounded in his simpleminded view of America as an unspoiled Eden where the "naturals" frolicked hand-in-hand until the white man came along. Heavy with artful emptiness, Malick's treatment cares not for the natives, but only for fetching newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher.