We asked our writers for their top ten lists for 2009. Nine of us contributed to Movie Habit this year, and 7 of us submitted lists. We weighted those lists by the number of stories submitted by each writer, the “currentness” of those stories, and by rankings within the lists of the individual writers.
Below are our ranked also-rans for 2009. Below that are the individual contributions that went into making our Top Ten of 2009.
Also-Rans for Our Top Ten
Robert Denerstein
For 27 years, Robert Denerstein was the film critic at The Rocky Mountain News. Read more of Robert's reviews at Denerstein Unleashed.
- State of Play
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Sherlock Holmes
- Star Trek
- It Might Get Loud
- The Informant!
- Invictus
- Seraphine
- Paris 36
- Up
- The Girlfriend Experience
- 35 Shots of Rum
- The Exiles
- Bright Star
- Duplicity
- The Beaches of Agnes
- Fantastic Mr. Fox
- St. Nick
- Bad Lieutenant
- District 9
- The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
- Avatar
- Burma VJ
- The Cove
- Revanche
- Gran Torino
- Green Lantern: First Flight
- Paul Blart: Mall Cop
- Taken
- Not Since You
- X-Men: Origins
- A Perfect Getaway
- (500) Days of Summer
John Adams’ Top One, etc.
1. THE EXILES
The rest are a 12-way tie for second except LEFT BANK, which came in last.
Matt Anderson’s Top Ten
Precious: Willpower takes center stage.
-
State of Play: Russell Crowe as a crusading journalist? Write on!
-
Sherlock Holmes: Winner of one of filmdom’s most coveted honors: Matt’s Favorite Movie of the Year.
-
It Might Get Loud: It’s much more than three rock legends sitting around, chatting. Listen and learn.
-
Invictus: Rooting for the underdog – and Nelson Mandela – in a classy mix of filmmaking and sportsmanship.
-
Paris 36: Features a terrific musical-within-a-movie.
-
Up: The wordless sequence of a couple growing old together is cinematic perfection.
-
Duplicity: More zippy corporate intrigue from the writer/director of Michael Clayton.
-
A Serious Man: Everybody should be able to relate to the protagonist’s struggles to some degree or another.
-
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Terry Gilliam got a little help from his friends and finished his movie following the death of Heath Ledger. The revised approach is surprisingly sensible and fits into Gilliam’s latest fantastical world.
Andrea Birgers’ Top Ten
- The Fantastic Mr. Fox: inventive visuals and a plot that didn’t always take expected turn
- The Hurt Locker: great at showing rather than telling
- Anvil!: The Story of Anvil: truth is sometimes just as good as fiction
- In the Loop: sharp satire and snappy dialogue, never a dull moment
- Precious: tells an uplifting story without sugar coating it
- Sugar: how do you persevere when you realize your dream job isn’t working out
- Up: more nice visual storytelling
- Where the Wild Things Are: childhood angst, with cool monsters
- Inglorious Basterds: there’s more to Tarantino’s movies than violence
- District 9: good commentary on human nature while being entertaining
Robert Denerstein’s Top Ten
Condensed from The year in review: 2009’s best, from Denerstein Unleashed.
1. SUMMER HOURS: Director Olivier Assayas’ impeccably acted Summer Hoursdeals with things that matter to us all — or should: the deterioration of family bonds and the disconnection that can develop between generations. A mother passes away and her three grown children — two brothers and a sister — must decide what to do with her house and possessions. There’s no faux melancholy here, only the sadness that’s felt as time passes and the world as we understand it begins to vanish.
2. THE HURT LOCKER: Set in Baghdad, director Kathryn Bigelow’s combat-ready movie could have been No. 1 on my list, but this year I put love for Summer Hours over respect for Bigelow’s considerable achievement. The Hurt Locker builds unbearable tension as it follows a three-man bomb squad around Baghdad, showing how different soldiers react to the strains of war. Jeremy Renner does exceptionally fine work as a sergeant who finds both purpose and an undeniable high in defusing bombs. Bigelow works in a sparse, no-nonsense st
3. UP IN THE AIR: George Clooney excels as a man who earns his living by depriving others of theirs. Clooney’s Ryan Bingham works for a company that specializes in corporate dirty work. Too timid to downsize? Hire Bingham to let your people go. Funny and trenchant, director Jason Reitman’s ultra-loose adaptation of a novel by Walter Kirn tops my list of mainstream entertainments. Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick give Clooney able support, and — as he proved inThank You For Smoking and Juno — Reitman is much too smart to sabotage either a movie’s entertainment value or its ability to say something meaningful.
4. A SERIOUS MAN: Joel and Ethan Coen defy expectation with a profoundly serious comedy ba
5. IN THE LOOP: The year’s best satire deals with the way British and American bureaucrats talk themselves into an impending war in the Middle East. (Any resemblance to U.S. and British involvement in Iraq should be taken as purely intentional.) The result is compelling and arch, and just about everything in the movie rings true. The government officials that we meet are a venal lot, careerists who spend as much time jockeying with one another as they do advancing the interests of their respective countries. An ensemble cast shines, but Peter Capaldi earns special recognition as a ruthless, profanity-spewing PR man for the British prime minister.
6. THE INFORMANT!: Director Stephen Soderbergh denies us a strong rooting interest in this story of corporate corruption; Soderbergh does, however, make us wish that sanity might suddenly penetrate the movie’s intricate web of irresponsibility and greed. ba
7. SERAPHINE: A little-known painter who died in 1942, Seraphine de Senlis spent much of her life working as a domestic. A woman of mystical bent, Seraphine believed that God had commanded her to paint. She also believed that she had a winking, intimate relationship with the Virgin Mary. Not surprisingly, Seraphine wound up in an insane asylum. Director Martin Provost’s somber movie revolves around a great performance from the Belgian actress Yolande Moreau, whose portrayal of Seraphine is utterly unselfish and deeply committed. Plain and portly, Seraphine isn’t the sort of character who endears herself to us or to the residents of Senlis, the town in France’s Picardy region where she resides, but Moreau’s performance proves unforgettable.
8. 35 SHOTS OF RUM: French director Claire Denis’ look at an African father and his daughter quietly (and that’s a crucial word) reveals the subtleties of adjustment demanded by those making their way in a changing and increasingly multiracial society. Don’t look for screaming or abrasive conflict. Denis’ story deals with the great population change in Europe on the most intimate of levels. 35 Shots of Rum expands in the mind as you think about it, and, in some ways, can be viewed as a companion piece to Summer Hours, two movies about the shifting tone and tenor of life in Europe. If only we had American equivalents.
9. THE BEACHES OF AGNES: Ialways like to include at least one documentary on my 10-best list. This year’s spot goes to Agnes Varda’s reflective (and joyfully creative) look at her own relationship to a life in film. The 81-year-old French director remembers her childhood, her development as a still photographer, then as a movie director, and, of course, as the wife of directorJacques Demy, most famous for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Varda’s movie is at once arty and playful — serious without ever being solemn. Varda, who was 80 when her film was made, concludes by telling us that she’s alive and that she remembers. Good news for us on both counts.
10. BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS: OK, maybe it’s a bit of stretch to put director Werner Herzog’s helping of neo-noir nastiness on a 10-best list. And, yes, I have to admit that at times I was a little too aware ofNicolas Cage’s tendency to push himself as far over the top as possible. Cage plays a reprobate detective, a guy who seems to have crawled out of the muck of post-Katrina New Orleans. But Herzog, who usually makes films involving great physical challenges (witness Fitzcarraldo or Grizzly Man), accomplished something wholly unexpected. In telling the story of a corrupt New Orleans detective, he rediscovered American funk. Lord knows, our CGI-dominated culture could use more of it.
I’m going to cheat a bit here, and add one more movie to my list, the film I regard as the year’s best animated entertainment:
HONORABLE MENTION FOR THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX: Wes Anderson’s adaptation of a Roald Dahl story about a rebellious fox boasted the year’s best voice work in any animated feature, and, for me, stood out as one of the year’s most enjoyable entertainments. How about George Clooney (as Mr. Fox) and Meryl Streep (as Mrs. Fox) as couple of the year?
People sometimes ask me to name the best movie I’ve ever seen. Of course, I could pick a movie, but I always prefer to answer with hope rather than history: ”My favorite movie ever? I hope I haven’t seen it yet.”
Marty Mapes’ Top Ten
- Anvil
- Inglourious Basterds
- Up in the Air
- Sugar
- October Country
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Star Trek
- The Girlfriend Experience
- Bright Star
- St. Nick
Anand “Andy” Ramachandran’s Top Ten and Bottom Eleven
Top
- Star Trek – Apart from being a clever reinvention of the franchise, Paramount smartly cast relative unknown Chris Pine and didn’t try to jam someone unfit for command into the role of Captain Kirk.
- Gran Torino – Clint’s apology for Pink Cadillac.
- Green Lantern: First Flight – Let’s hope that the financially motivated casting of Ryan “look at my biceps” Reynolds doesn’t make this iteration Green Lantern’s first and only flight. For whatever it’s worth though, DC’s animated features are consistently better than Marvel’s
- District 9 – was only produced and not directed by Peter Jackson. Seriously, however, it was a surprisingly good movie vomit inducing handheld shots not withstanding.
- Paul Blart: Mall Cop – John McClane packs on a few pounds and rocks the cheesy 70s mustache to take on bad guys going after the Black Friday windfalls at the mall.
- Taken – was a Robert Ludlum st
yle international spy vs. smugglers. I watched this movie and thought that Liam Neeson would have made a much better Jason Bourne. - Not Since You proved that a movie doesn’t have to be expensive or stacked with big names to tell a compelling story.
- X-Men Origins – Wolverine had problems, but was overall enjoyable. It was not as rife with continuity errors as the Star Wars prequels nor did it raise more questions than it answered. It was a serviceable offshoot of the X-Men franchise which merits continuation with an X4 but can coexist with Wolverine having his own adventures separate from the team.
- A Perfect Getaway features Milla Jovovich in Hawaii. Need I say more?
- (500) Days of Summer was a cute, relatable little movie that successfully employed many cinematic and storytelling novelties while deconstructing relationship and break-up mythos.
The Bottom 10 of 2009
- G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra – This movie had flaccidity that even Viagra couldn’t rectify (pun intended). Knowing may be half the battle, but in this case ignorance would have been bliss.
- Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen – It was like Skylab or Mir getting its revenge. Both G.I. Joe and this movie rushed into development before the work freeze that accompanied the writer’s strike. It reminded me of Griffin Mill’s observation from The Pla
yer:
“I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here. It proved why or at least a vindication for writers and their removal from the creative process.”
- Land of the Lost – Too bad this movie didn’t disappear into an alternate dimension and take Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy with it.
- Angels & Demons – The DaVinci Code was deathly boring. What made Sony think we would want to know what happened before?
- Public Enemies – Naaah boyeee!
- A Christmas Carol (2009) – Why God? Why?
- Old Dogs – should be put to sleep.
- Inglourious Basterds – Tartantino can add this misspelled magnum opus to his long list of mediocrities.
- Bruno – Rent Borat and imagine a gay German in just about every scenario and you can give this movie a miss.
- A Night At The Museum – Battle for the Smithsonian – I hope the museum banked a good endowment from this abomination.
- Watchmen – Zach Snyder’s literal fr
ame for fr ame transc ription of the graphic novel to the big screen sans the Tales of the Black Freighter. Although technically ambitious, the film was only slightly more dynamic than the moving comic was. In addition it was needless and pointlessly pornographic for Silk Spectre and Nite Owl join the Sky High Club. The period music selections were uninspired and pointless.
Brad Weismann’s Top Ten
OK, this list may seem weird: there are some that might yet crack the top 10, but I have not seen them yet. Of what I’ve seen, in alpha order:
- Anvil! The Story of Anvil
- Avatar
- Burma VJ
- The Cove
- District 9
- The Hurt Locker
- Precious
- Revanche
- Star Trek
- Sugar