The Top 40 Films of 2009 (10-1)

File this under "Better Late Than Never." Just in time for the end of 2010, here are my picks for the Top 10 films of 2009.

10. Adventureland (Greg Mottola, US, 2009)





9. Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, US, 2009)





8. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, US, 2008)





7. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK, 2008)

Read my review here.



6. Night and Day/Bam gua nat (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2008)

5. Desert Dream/Hyazgar (Zhang Lu, Mongolia/China/France/South Korea, 2007)

4. You, the Living/Du levande (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007)

3. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/France/Netherlands/Germany/Spain, 2008)

A man working on an industrial freighter asks for leave while his ship is docked at port to return home to see his sick mother and the daughter he has never met.  Having been away for a very long time and essentially abandoning his family, he receives a decidedly chilly reception, especially from his father.  He gives his daughter some money, and takes off again, this time perhaps for good.  This is pretty much the entire plot of Liverpool, the latest (and greatest, so far) film by Lisandro Alonso, a stalwart of a crop of immensely talented filmmakers coming out of Argentina in recent years.  Alonso, to my mind, is perhaps the most intellectually and aesthetically rigorous of them all, his framing and editing as precise and as perfect as any I’ve seen.  His films, the previous ones being La Libertad, Los muertos and Fantasma, are not exactly the most accessible, although Los muertos possesses a frightening and mesmerizing intensity.  They make great demands on audiences, requiring them to pay careful attention to subtle details, and to stick with seemingly monotonous, mundane details, and trust that they will lead somewhere.  Liverpool represents the apotheosis of this strategy, compelling us to stick with the journey of its initial protagonist, a silent, solitary figure who interacts very little with others, and whose most constant companion is a vodka bottle he frequently takes swigs from.  His face is an impassive, impenetrable mask – he undoubtedly lives a harsh, lonely existence, but his expression gives us nothing.  He is a man resigned to his fate, and seems unwilling or unable to do anything to change it.

The film has a binary structure, and the second part of the film begins when the man we have been following disappears again from his daughter’s life, and from the film itself, which now refuses to follow him.  Instead, we stay with the man’s family, and their life on the farm.  The daughter seems to be mentally slow, and has a slight stutter.  The only thing she says to her father is, “Are you going to give me money?”  No emotional reunion here – it’s not that kind of film.  But the film ends on an exquisitely beautiful moment of tenderness.  Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s Alonso’s version of “Rosebud.”

2. My Dear Enemy/Meotjin haru (Lee Yoon-ki, South Korea, 2008)

1. 35 Shots of Rum/35 rhums (Claire Denis, France, 2008)

Read my review here.

One of the film's major highlights -- the beautiful dance scene late in the film:

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (15-11)

15. Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, US/South Korea, 2008)

Read my review here.



14. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly/Babi buta yang ingin terbang (Edwin, Indonesia, 2008)





13. Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani, US, 2008)



12. Still Walking/Aruitemo aruitemo (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2008)





11. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2008)

Read my review here.

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (20-16)

20. 24 City/Er shi si cheng ji (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2008)

Read my review here.



19. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, US, 2008)











18. Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2007)



17. Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung, Rwanda/US, 2007)

Read my review here.





16. Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan, 2008)

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (25-21)

25. Adela (Adolfo Alix Jr., Philippines, 2008)

A day in the life of the title character, rendered with exquisite sensitivity.  Read my review here.





24. Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat, Malaysia, 2007)

Read my review here.





23. Somers Town (Shane Meadows, UK, 2008)









22. The Beaches of Agnès/Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès Varda, France, 2008)

If The Beaches of Agnès is indeed her final film, as she has indicated, she couldn't have created a better swan song.  This is a glorious capper to a brilliant career, a memoir with saucy humor and heartbreaking poignancy.



21. Tyson (James Toback, US, 2008)

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (30-26)

30. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, UK/Austria/Netherlands, 2006)

Your friendly neighborhood Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek, is your irrepressible guide on this immensely entertaining trip through the hidden psychological wormholes of such films as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds; David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet; Coppola’s The Conversation; The Matrix (“I want a third pill!”); and many others. Zizek is beautifully staged by director Sophie Fiennes in both the actual locations of the films he discusses, or in soundstage recreations. Even after two and a half hours, you’ll be left wanting more; you’ll never see these films in quite the same way again.









29. Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK, 2008)

Terence Davies’ exquisite reminiscence of his native Liverpool is a lyrical return for this great filmmaker whom we haven’t heard from since 2000's The House of Mirth. Blending archival footage with newly shot scenes, Davies connects it all with his riveting voiceover, depicting his love-hate (but mostly love) relationship with his city, and how the elements that gave Liverpool its character are nearly gone. Along the way, he recounts his contentious relationship with Catholicism and his first homosexual stirrings. Of Time and the City is a master class in montage and the use of music, most notably in an incredible sequence concerning the Korean War, set to the Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Davies has a wicked and caustic sense of humor, for example in his description of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, or as he puts it, “The Betty Windsor Show.” And the way he dispenses of and dismisses the Beatles is priceless. Welcome back, Mr. Davies. You’ve been away far too long.


 

 
28. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (Peter Greenaway, Netherlands/UK, 2008)


Greenaway’s examination of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch is a compelling master class in visual analysis, art and political history, as well as a masterfully constructed detective story. Reviewed here.



27. Big Man Japan/Dai-Nipponjin (Hitoshi Matsumoto, Japan, 2007) 


Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto took six years to write and direct this inventive debut film, which takes the grand tradition of kaiju eiga to deliriously surreal heights. Reviewed here.



26. Yasukuni (Li Ying, Japan/China, 2007)


Li Ying’s documentary on the politically contentious titular shrine in central Tokyo puts the viewer in the perilous place where history, memory, and political agendas violently collide, with searing and indelible results. Reviewed here.

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (35-31)

Happy New Year! Now, on with the countdown.

35. Humpday (Lynn Shelton, US, 2009)

Showing up most of the other pop-culture depictions of so-called “bromance” for the shallow, witless exercises they are, Humpday concerns two straight men who, on a drunken dare, plan to have sex with one another on camera for an “art project” that is “beyond gay.” Shelton explores this concept with both uproarious humor and penetrating psychological insight. Despite being lazily lumped in with other low-budget American indies termed “mumblecore,” Shelton’s film spiritedly resists easy labeling. Much like her previous feature, My Effortless Brilliance, Shelton examines male friendship and the psychological games men play with one another with a sharp acuity that is only enhanced by the fact that she happens to be a woman. Ben (Mark Duplass), with a stable job and family life, and his long lost buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard), a self-professed neo-bohemian free spirit, have a lot to prove to one another, which leads to their ill-advised experiment. Ben, especially, feels a great need to demonstrate that he is not the staid square Andrew thinks he is (it is Ben who conceives the porn film idea), and that Andrew is not as free as he thinks he is. Ben’s wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) is an essential ingredient of this mano-a-mano one-upmanship; she reveals herself to be a different woman than her husband thinks. Shelton closely collaborates with her actors on character and dialogue, but the sensibility of her films remain uniquely her own; she is definitely a talent to watch in 2010 and beyond.





34. Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, US, 2009)

Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ indie-rock remix of Maurice Sendak’s classic is a kid’s movie for adults, expanding on Sendak’s spare, evocative text to create a somber yet visually exhilarating film. Young Max (Max Records) flees his troubled home life, which he has increasingly little control over, to become a little despot lording over the land of monsters he sails away to. The story’s psychological complexity, left latent in the original version, is fully brought to the fore in Jonze and Eggers’ interpretation.



33. Valentino: The Last Emperor (Matt Tyrnauer, US, 2008)

The perennial clash between art and commerce is vividly dramatized in this brilliant documentary on the iconic fashion artist Valentino, whose life path was set as a young boy when he saw Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Click here to read my review for Meniscus Magazine.



32. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, US, 2009)

Who would have thought Anderson’s most deeply human film would star a bunch of furry critters? His last two films The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited found him burrowing ever deeper into fastidiously art-directed wormholes. However, with Fantastic Mr. Fox, his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book, Anderson finally makes the leap into the sublime that has long eluded him. Stuffed with glorious bric-a-brac and demonstrating an eye for detail that recalls Jacques Tati, this film is a feast for the eyes, as well as deeply affecting.



31. Two Lovers (James Gray, US, 2008)

As fun as it was to watch Joaquin Phoenix’s whacked performance art pieces such as his David Letterman appearance and his attempts to perform hip-hop, it was a real shame that they overshadowed and perhaps doomed the commercial fate of Two Lovers, which contains one of his very best performances. Leonard (Phoenix), a mentally troubled, fragile soul, finds himself torn between two women (Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw), both alluring in their own ways. Gray makes a shift from the operatic expansiveness of We Own the Night to the much more intimate spaces of Two Lovers, his mastery of form remaining intact.

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (40-36)

With this post, my last of the year (and the decade), I begin looking back on the past year's best films. 2009 was an embarrassment of cinematic riches, so much so that I refuse to submit myself to the "tyranny of ten," as the estimable critic Jonathan Keifer terms it, since there were far more than ten films that deserve recognition as great achievements. So herewith, in a nod to the great Casey Kasem, begins a Top-40 countdown of the year's best films. Everyone has their own rules for inclusion, and here are mine: if a film had or began its commercial run, or played for at least a week in New York during the calendar year 2009, it was eligible. The vagaries of film distribution being what they are, many of the films on my list were not actually made in 2009. That said, here we go.

40. Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, US, 2009)/Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, US, 2009)

A double shot of exhilarating B-movie bliss. Fleischer picks up John Carpenter’s mantle and delivers a stylish, hilarious road movie that traverses a post-zombie apocalypse America, with breathless verve and invention. The denizens of this blasted landscape include: Jesse Eisenberg (who is also in another film much higher on this list), refining his virginal-neurotic persona, suggesting a younger Woody Allen; Woody Harrelson, aces as a swaggering zombie hunter with an acute hankering for Twinkies; and the cherry on top is a priceless Bill Murray cameo. Raimi interrupts his Spider-Man movie career to return to his roots with an appealingly old-school Gothic horror that has a dash of topicality (an ill-advised bank foreclosure decision sets the mayhem into motion), but is mostly an opportunity for Raimi to prove himself a master of shock mechanics and to fuck with our heads in the way only he can.

DRAG ME TO HELL: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: Drag_Me_to_Hell, David_Paymer, Justin_Long, Alison_Lohman, Jessica_Lucas, Lorna_Raver, Universal_Pictures, Horror, Sam_Raimi, DRAG_ME_TO_HELL

39. The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, US, 2009)

The curious case of Mark Whitacre: Soderbergh’s latest is a slippery object, at once mainstream star vehicle and odd experiment, at once parodic and subtly chilling. As unsettling and elusive as its protagonist (portrayed by Matt Damon in one of his best performances), The Informant! has an oddly anachronistic feel: even though the action takes place in the early 90’s, the wardrobe, production design, and Marvin Hamlisch score evoke the ‘70s, referencing such paranoiac cinema touchstones as Coppola’s The Conversation, which this film often seems like a bizarre parody of. This is the true(ish) tale of the whistleblower who dropped the dime on his employer Archer Daniels Midland, who perpetrated a massive industrial price-fixing scheme. Unbeknownst to his FBI handlers, Whitacre himself was just as deceptive about his motives and actions as his employers, if not more so. The film gives no ground to the viewer on which to stand as far as audience identification goes: almost everyone is just a different degree of a liar. As such, it perfectly reflects our post-economic collapse world.


38. Summer Hours/L’heure d’été (Olivier Assayas, France, 2008)

A sun-dappled, elegiac pastoral evoking the films of Jean Renoir, the spiritual grandfather of practically all the great French directors who followed him, Summer Hours captures the ephemeral nature of life and what we collect during it, even more accurately evoked by its French title. The death of a family matriarch (the wonderful Edith Scob) occasions a debate and familial conflict over the true value of art works, and what it really means when family heirlooms are put on display at a public museum. The grown children, who are scattered around the planet, deal with the severed family bonds in often diametrically opposed ways. As much as Summer Hours laments things lost, it is not without optimism; we are left with a strong hint that the youngest generation, who while at play in the family garden make their own life discoveries (often with a pop and hip-hop soundtrack), and who have the best hope at surviving in the current world, deciding what should be preserved and what should be discarded.



37. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US/Germany, 2009)

Regardless of their ostensible subject matter, all of Tarantino’s films are really about his all-encompassing and unabashed love of cinema, and Inglourious Basterds expresses this love on his largest, most elaborate canvas to date. A history-rewriting, wish-fulfillment fantasy that shoehorns within it many references to German cinema of the period, it may have ranked higher on my list if there were a bit more depth to its pyrotechnics. Still, it’s a tremendous achievement, and Tarantino reveals himself to be a brilliant Hitchcock acolyte in the way he gains maximum tension from very long dialogue-heavy scenes with tense undercurrents (e.g. the brilliant opening sequence).



36. Old Partner/Wonang sori (Lee Chung-ryoul, South Korea, 2008)

This beautifully constructed documentary about an old farmer and his work ox was a surprise sleeper hit in its native Korea, and opens this week at Film Forum. It actually had a run this spring at the Imaginasian Theatre, which almost no one noticed. Now that more people in this country are aware of this film’s existence, hopefully they will discover the charms and beauty of Old Partner, an intimate elegy to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.