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1. The White Ribbon
2. A Serious Man
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
4. Where the Wild Things Are
5. Revanche
6. Inglourious Basterds
7. Bright Star
8. The Informant!
9. The Hurt Locker
10. About Elly


Last Edit: 6-30-16

1. The White Ribbon
2. Antichrist
3. La Mujer Sin Cabeza
4. The Man from London
5. Revanche
6. Breathless
7. Still Walking
8. La Teta Asustada
9. Tony Manero
10. 24 City


Worst: Sin Nombre (Yes, it really is bad. Very bad.)

1. Revanche
2. The Hurt Locker
3. Up
4. Where the Wild Things Are
5. Public Enemies
6. Sugar
7. A Serious Man
8. Crude
9. In The Loop
10. Big Fan

Honorable mention: The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Inglorious Basterds, Up In The Air, The Girlfriend Experience, Coraline, Tyson

Fascinating failure: The Limits of Control

1. Tokyo Sonata
2. The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans
3. Triangle
4. The Informant!
5. In the Loop
6. Up in the Air
7. The Limits of Control
8. Adventureland
9. Moon
10. A Serious Man

1. Breathless (Yang Ik-Joon)
2. Where The Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze)
3. Avatar (James Cameron)
4. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
5. Revanche (Gotz Spielmann)
6. The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus (Terry Gilliam)
7. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
8. Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola)
9. Adventureland (Greg Mottola)
10. Love Exposure (Sion Sono)

(11-20:)

Magazine Gap Road (Nicholas Chin)
The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Up In The Air (Jason Reitman)
Two Lovers (James Gray)
Big Fan (Robert Siegel)
The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh)
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
In The Loop (Armando Iannucci)
Passing Strange (Spike Lee)

honorary mention:

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams)
Quick Gun Murugan (Shashanka Ghosh)
Coraline (Henry Selick)
Dai-Nipponjin (Big Man Japan) (Hitoshi Matsumoto)
The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
Humpday (Lynn Shelton)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
35 Shots Of Rum (Claire Denis)
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald)
The Class (Laurent Cantet)
20th Century Boys/20th Century Boys 2: The Last Hope (Yukihiko Tsutsumi)
Written By (Wai Ka-Fai)
Observe & Report (Jody Hill)
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
Coco Before Chanel (Anne Fontaine)
Tyson (James Toback)
Moon (Duncan Jones)
Thirst (Park Chan-wook)

new to me:

Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi)
Wild River (Elia Kazan)
Baby Doll (Elia Kazan)
Fat City (John Huston)
Bitter End Of A Sweet Night (Yoshishige Yoshida)

just plain fun/guilty pleasures:

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy)
Orphan (Jaume Collet-Sera)

pending:

Police, Adjective
Red Cliff
The Fantastic Mr. Fox

The Best:
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Inglorious Basterds
3. Up
4. Public Enemies
5. District 9
6. Coraline
7. Watchmen
8. (500) Days of Summer
9. The Box
10. The Hangover

Runners up:
Knowing, Star Trek, Away We Go, Drag Me to Hell, Nothing But the Truth, The Brothers Bloom, The Girlfriend Experience, Where the Wild Things Are, The Informant!, In the Loop, It Might get Loud, Bruno

Fun popcorn films: My Bloody Valentine 3D, Taken, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Fast & Furious, The Haunting in Connecticut, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Zombieland, Observe & Report

The Worst:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation, Push, Funny People, Adventureland, AntiChrist

Un Prophéte
The White Ribbon
35 Rhums
Antichrist
De Ofrivilliga
Mary and Max
Revanche
Man tänker sitt
Vals Im Bashir
The Headless Woman

Don't know if I'll get into updating this or not (I prefer to look back at the end of the year), but here goes…

1. Sugar
2. Don't Let Me Drown
3. Coraline
4. Moon
5. We Live in Public
6. Sin Nombre
7. Rudo y Cursi
8. The Cove
9. An Education
10. Humpday

EDIT: I embarrassingly typed in The Greatest when I meant An Education. The Greatest is terrible.

1. The Girlfriend Experience® (Steven Soderbergh)
2. Protect You + Me. (Brady Corbet)
3. Two Lovers (James Gray)
4. I am so proud of you! (Don Hertzfeldt)
5. Paper Heart (Nicholas Jasenovec)
6. Peter and Vandy (Jay DiPietro)
7. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
8. Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn)
9. Alexander the Last (Joe Swanberg)
10. Mystery Team (Derrick Comedy)


Worst Movie of the Year: Watchmen (Zach Snyder)

1. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
2. The Portuguese Nun (Eugène Green)
3. About Elly (Asghar Farhadi)
4. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Jacques Rivette)
5. Chloe (Atom Egoyan)
6. Knowing (Alex Proyas)
7. First of All, Felicia (Radulescu & de Raaf)
8. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray)
9. Watchmen (Zack Snyder)
10. Gigante (Adrián Biniez)

Itinéraire de Jean Bricard
Melancholia
35 Rhums
36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
Ne change rien
Two Lovers
La danse
The Man from London
Public Enemies
Phantoms of Nabua / A Letter to Uncle Boonmee
Coal Money
Profit motive and the whispering wind
Jerichow (Petzold, 2008)
La mujer sin cabeza
...Benjamin Button

I'm listing all I've seen in UK cinemas in order;

The White Ribbon
The Class
The Hurt Locker
Bright Star
The Milk of Sorrow
District 9
Let The Right One In
In The City of Sylvia
Two Lovers
Shirin
The Time That Remains
Broken Embraces
Milk
Il Divo
Chloe
Fish Tank
Antichrist
The Girlfriend Experience
Looking for Eric
In The Loop
Helen
(500) Days of Summer
State of Play
The Damned United
Coco Avant Chanel
2012
The Young Victoria
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

1. Bright Star
2. A Serious Man
3. Where The Wild Things Are
4. The Limits Of Control
5. Two Lovers
6. The Hurt Locker
7. The Messenger
8. Mary And Max
9. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
10. Up

01. Antichrist (von Trier)
02. The White Ribbon (Haneke)
03. Avatar (Cameron)
04. A Serious Man (J. Coen/E. Coen)
05. Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)
06. The Informant! (Soderbergh)
07. Revanche (Spielmann)
08. Where the Wild Things Are (Jonze)
09. The Beaches of Agnès (Varda)
10. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans (Herzog)

LAST UPDATED: 06/05/2024

Up In The Air
Up
Inglourious Basterds
Hurt Locker
About Elly
Limits of Control
35 Shots of Rum
The Cove
Beaches of Agnes
Bright Star

1 The White Ribbon
2 About Elly
3 Inglourious Basterds
4 35 Rhums
5 Fantastic Mr Fox
6 The Beaches of Agnes
7 The Informant!
8 (500) Days of Summer
9 Bright Star
10 A Serious Man

Honorable Mention: Where the Wild Things Are, Eden is West, Adventureland, Up The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Observe & Report, The Limits of Control, District 9.

(2011 edit- damn, 2009 was a good year for movies..!)

1. Mary and Max
2. Facing Ali -- fantastic doc of ex-pugs reflecting back on life and their glory days.
3. The White Ribbon
4. Men Who Stare at Goats
5. Sita Sings the Blues
6. A Prophet
7. A Serious Man
8. A Matter of Loaf And Death: W&G
9. talhotblond
10. Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell)



Hon. Mention:
District 9; Kameleon (Goda); The Informant!; Capitalism: A Love Story; Big Fan; 9; Cold Souls

I think 2009 had tons of very good smaller-scale films.

I'd really rec Mary & Max, Facing Ali and talhotblond -- all of which were largely overlooked.

I've started to clock up some interesting films, so I might as well log in.

The Good

Bluebeard (Breillat) - Another period piece, of a sort: a bifurcated fairy tale that explores many ongoing preoccupations with an impressive lightness and sureness. A wonderful achievement regardless of the difficult circumstances.

Morphia (Balabanov) - Another period film dealing with dark contemporary concerns. It's not as grim as Cargo 200 (though you could probably count the films that fit that bill on one maimed hand), but it does feature grisly surgeries and one of the most pitiless portraits of addiction you're likely to see for some time. But it's tied to a superb sense of time and place and filmmaking of considerable classical elegance.

Nucingen Haus (Ruiz) - Smart and stylish ghost film that does what Ruiz does best - plays knowingly with literary models to create a kind of narrative vertigo - and is a hell of a lot of fun to boot.

Goodbye Solo (Bahrani) - Moving indie that almost doesn't put a foot wrong.

Ponyo (Miyazaki) - Quite a return to form after the clunky Howl's Moving Castle, this, for the first hour at least, is a gorgeously whimsical movie with an impressive clarity and simplicity: ideal for the very young. The more mythical / mystical denouement gets a little cluttered, but not enough to derail the film.

Tuolumne: The Lights and Perfections (Clipson) - Exquisite Super 8 water and nature studies by a San Francisco filmmaker which utilise the limitations of the film format (24 fps and limited depth of focus) to generate poetic and pictorial possibilities. Patterns of light on water change faster than 24 fps can capture, rendering continuous motion as Brakhage / Lye frame-by-frame inscriptions, then continual, dissolved racked focus shifts through layers of foliage and wire create the impression of a perpetual forward motion through endless levels.

Also worth a look:
Red Cliff (Woo) - You're crazy if you don't want to see John Woo trying to top every other recent historical / fantasy action epic, though the end result is pretty much what you'd expect. Tony Leung gets one of the best 'movie star' reveals in a very long time.

Samson and Delilah (Thornton) - After the excellent short Green Bush, this great Australian Aboriginal filmmaker comes through with a fine debut feature. Grim and stylised, with superb sound design, the film is wordless for long stretches allowing Thornton's superb visual storytelling (including incongruous use of comic rhythms) to carry the narrative.


The Bad

Watchmen (Snyder) - Morbid curiosity led me into the theatre, but even I was amazed by just how leaden in all was. It's a big mistake to make an action blockbuster where most of the action comes in the form of expository dialogue and a bigger one to select a director who can't direct actors. Most of those dialogue scenes were shot and performed like a daytime soap.

My Suicide (Miller) - Embarrassing wannabe-cool filmmaking that doesn't even stand by its own meagre conceits. Woefully confused between the hip nihilism it wears on its sleeves and the hokey Sundance life lessons it hides up them.

Amreeka (Dabis) - Cookie-cutter Sundancer that wallows in every cliche it stumbles across. Randomly dial up a different ethnicity and you've already seen this film many times.

Home (Meier) - Initially promising (and Huppert and Gourmet are always watchable), but steadily gets weaker and weaker (while thinking it's becoming ever more edgy), stretching its short-film concept past breaking point.

Cold Souls (Barthes) - Sub-sub-Charlie Kaufman trainwreck that stumbles at every hurdle: it's not particularly clever, not at all funny (consisting instead of scene after scene of situations which look like they were found on some very lazy, hazy 'situations that are generally funny' checklist) and not even particularly weird, which, given that it's about people who download their souls and put them into storage, should have been the easiest thing in the world to deliver. The impressive cast left vamping in a vacuum (Paul Giamatti, Dina Korzun, David Strathairn, Emily Watson) represents the worst case of wasted talent I've seen in a long time.


The Ugly

Eleve libre (Lafosse) - Follow-up to the excellent Private Property is a misfire: doesn't really work as an entire narrative (it seems like he's trying to fudge implausibility with ambiguity), but there are some powerful and very creepy scenes nested within it. He's definitely one to keep watching.

Teza (Gerima) - A real mixed bag. Tremendous ambition (trying to deliver a national epic, a personal drama and an art film all at once) rubs up against some really amateurish execution and a lack of differentiation in emotional and stylistic tone (any crisis seems to manifest itself in melodramatic / psychedelic terms).

zedz wrote:Woefully confused between the hip nihilism it wears on its sleeves and the hokey Sundance life lessons it hides up them.

=D>

The very good:

Entré les murs/The Class (2009)/fr/Laurent Cantet
Hunger (2009)/UK-Ireland/Steve McQueen
Limits Of Control (2009)/US/Jim Jarmusch
Moon (2009)/US/Duncan Jones
L'heure d'ete / Summer Hours (2009)/FR/Olivier Assayas
The September Issue (2009)/US/R J Cutler
Bright Star (2009)/UK/Australia/Jane Campion
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)/US/Spike Jones
Inglorious Basterds (2009)/US/Quentein Tarantino
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)/US/Wes Anderson

The very good, but never viewed until this year:

Waltz With Bashir (2008)/Israel/Ari Folman
Let The Right One In (2008)/Sweden/Tomas Alfredson
Magnificent Obsession (1954)/US/Douglas Sirk
The Reckless Hour & Caught (both 1948)/US/Max Ophüls
Tarnished Angels (1958)/US/Douglas Sirk
The Loveless (1981)/US/Kathryn Bigelow

The reappraised favorably:
Saturday Night Fever (1977)/US/John Badham

The DVD revelation:
MoC Czech "Sunrise" BR

Cinematography:

Christopher Doyle for "Limits Of Control"

Production Design:

Janet Patterson for "Bright Star"

Sin Nombre.....awesome film, like a cross between El Norte (now on criterion) and Pixote/City of God.

Judging each in its own category, knowing the limits and strengths of that category, no order, with the knowledge that I am a promiscuous and sometimes an overly easy critic in some genres and directors and suspiciously and capriciously not so with others.

hollywoodland:

Duplicity (2009)/Tony Gilroy w/ Julia Roberts & Clive Owen

the big ol' world:

Hunger (2009)/Steve McQueen w/ Michael Fassbinder
The Class (2009)/ Laurent Cantet w/ François Bégaudeau

docs:

Valentino: The Last Emperor (2009)/Matt Tyrnauer w/ Valentiono

films that I have never seen before, so they are brand spankin' new to me in 2009 (although the rest of you probably have already seen 'em tons a times):

Funny Face (1957) / Stanley Donen w/ Audrey Hepburn & Fred Astaire

The best
-Los abrazos rotos
-Inglorious Basterds
-Up
-The Reader
-La teta asustada
-Gran Torino
-The hangover
-500 days of summer
-Whatever works

The worst:
-Bienvenue chez les chiti's
-Australia
-Benjamin -Forrest- Button
-Slumdog Millonaire
-Gordos

But my biggest surprise was the discovery of King's Row, what a dark melodrama masterpiece !

in rough order

Summer Hours
A Serious Man
Che: Part One
Che: Part Two
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Up
Two Lovers
Wendy and Lucy
Ponyo

Drag Me To Hell
Star Trek
Where the Wild Things Are
The Informant!