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The Best Films of 2009



1) Let The Right One In



Swedish director Tomas Alfredson adapted the bestselling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist for this darkly atmospheric vampire story about a 12 year old boy called Oscar and his friendship with an unusual young girl named Eli. As delicate, evocative and poetic a film as you are ever likely to see, the film�s complex ambiguities and haunting mood stayed with me throughout the year. A Hollywood remake is in the works. See it now, before they ruin it.



2) The White Ribbon

There are more scary kids in Michael Haneke�s Palme d�Or winning film about a black cloud of mysterious violence that passes over a Northern German village on the eve of WWI. Shot in stark monochrome and with a constant air of menace, The White Ribbon is extraordinarily gripping but frustratingly slippery, with Haneke deftly refusing to answer the questions he asks about family, community, faith and how they combined in the minds of the young people who would allow the Nazis to prosper. A singular film.



3) A Serious Man

The Coen Brothers follow the frothy caper Burn After Reading with this mordant, pleasingly pessimistic re-telling of the Book of Job as the story of a 1960s mathematics professor plagued by injustice and iniquity who attempts to find comfort in the teachings of his rabbis. A Serious Man is one of the very few films of 2009 that I watched twice.



4) Il Divo

Paolo Sorrentino offers a scathing analysis of former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, told with consummate style, wit and a towering central performance from Tony Servillo.



5) Up

The first twenty minutes of Pixar�s 3D animation Up are amongst the finest ever committed to film, an emotionally devastating thumbnail sketch of a quiet American marriage. The rest of it is pretty special too.



6) The Wrestler

Mickey Rourke had come a long way since his heyday in the 1980s, but the trajectory was mostly downward. By the time he was offered the title role in The Wrestler, Rourke had become a parody of himself. His director, visionary wunderkind Darren Aronofsky wasn�t doing all that better, smarting after the costly commercial and critical failure of The Fountain. The Wrestler saved them both: Rourke will play the baddie in this summer�s Iron Man II while Aronofsky is currently filming the thriller Black Swan.



7) Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle swept the Oscars with this rollicking rags-to-riches story about a young man from the slums of Mumbai who appear on the Indian version of �Who Wants To Be A Millionaire�. Breathless and beguiling, Slumdog Millionaire boasted the best final scene of the year; a Bollywood-style dance-off staged at Mumbai train station.



8) Mesrine I & II

Vincent Cassel excelled in this tough, stylish diptych about the life and crimes of notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine.



9) The Hurt Locker

Katherine Bigelow�s stylish and gripping war film told the story of a bomb-disposal expert as he completes a tour of duty on the streets of Iraq. Tightly focused, horribly claustrophobic and seething with anger and adrenaline, this is the best film yet about the war in Iraq.



10) Anvil: The Story of Anvil

The documentary of the year, this touching portrait of a failed Canadian heavy metal band was like Spinal Tap made real, up to and including the brilliantly redemptive finale.



The Next Ten Best:

Bright Star, Broken Embraces, District 9, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Gran Torino, Katyn, Moon, Rachel Getting Married.





The Worst Films of 2009



1) The Boat that Rocked

The Boat That Sank, more like. Richard Curtis� appalling comedy about a 1960s pirate radio station was noisy and busy and extraordinarily lengthy, but never funny. Not even once.



2) Love Happens

This ghastly rom-com about a relationship between a bereaved self-help author and a lonely florist is told as a series of fatuous homilies about �recovery�. This entire list could have been composed of failed, foolish American studio romantic-comedies.



3) The Ugly Truth

Like this one. Charisma vacuums Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler combine to losing effect for this charmless comedy black hole. See also: Bride Wars, Marley & Me, Couples Retreat�



4) Lesbian Vampire Killers

The stars of TV�s Gavin & Stacey squander their reputations on this lazy, puerile comedy homage to Hammer Horror.



5) Dragonball Evolution

Or, indeed, any film that has been adapted from a video game, ever. Unwatchable garbage designed to appeal to unusually dim-witted thirteen year old boys.



6) Triangle

A sailing-party of pretty young people are lost at sea and wind up wandering through a rip off of Kubrick�s Shining, brandishing shotguns and unresolved mommy-issues. Pointless.



7) Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

Limerick writer Darren Shan has written twelve Cirque du Freak books. The costly failure of the first adaptation, a cheap-looking, poorly-acted shambles, means it looks like we will be spared the rest.



8) Last House on the Left

Like the similarly pointless Friday The 13th, a glossy, gory remake of a 1970s horror that serves only to highlight Hollywood�s creative bankruptcy.



9) Transformers II

Micheal Bay fails to repeat the trick with his second film about shape-shifting space-robots. Eye-wateringly stupid and agonisingly lengthy. See also: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation.



10) Creation

The dullest film of the year, or any other year, Jon Amiel�s plodding story of Charles Darwin�s struggle to write On The Origin of Species saw Paul Bettany share a scene with an orang-utan, who acts him off the screen.



The best film book I read this year was Stephen Prince's keen analysis of the life and work of Akira Kurosawa in The Warrior's Camera. The worst was Robert Sellers' idiotic, priapic Bad Boy Drive. Away from the picture-house (although not that far removed) I really enjoyed reading Patricia Highsmith's quintet of Tom Ripley books.



Song of the year was RL Burnside's See What My Buddy Done from the album Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down.

The new Coen Brothers comedy A Serious Man is a jagged, absorbing and brilliantly acted fable about one man�s struggle when a seemingly endless rain of problems starts to fall on his head.

The film opens with a short prologue set long ago in a Polish shtetl, in which a man and his wife are visited by a kindly old man. The suspicious wife thinks the visitor is a dybbuk, a kind of Jewish zombie, and dispatches him without thinking. Has she saved their lives, or cursed countless generations forever? We never know for sure, but the suspicion remains.

Flash forward to an unnamed American city in 1967. Mathematics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is attempting to explain Schrodinger�s classic thought experiment to his bored students. A cat, he tells them, is put in a sealed box with some radioactive material that might kill it at any time. Until the box is opened, we can observe the animal exists in two states; alive and dead, saved and cursed. The students don�t really understand, but perhaps Larry isn�t explaining himself very well. He�s in an unstable box himself.

There is catastrophe - or worse, potential catastrophe - wherever he looks. At home, his marriage to the brash Judith (Sari Lennick) is failing, his son is preparing for his bar mitzvah by smoking pot and watching television and his teenage daughter is demanding a nose job. Then there�s the matter of his deadbeat (Richard Kind), a deeply annoying moocher with a mysterious medical condition. At work, things are no better; A South Korean student is bribing him for a better grade and someone has been sending unflattering letters about Larry to his superiors.

Faced with this onslaught of calamity, Larry seeks the comfort and guidance of three Rabbis, a series of uproarious consultations that provide the story with a firm backbone. Can any of these learned men help him stop his life from dissolving around him and help him become an upstanding person � the serious man of the title; a mensch? But what can Larry make from the ramblings of his religious leaders when he struggles to articulate his questions? �God doesn�t owe us anything,� Rabbi Nachtner tells him. �The obligation runs the other way.� But why, Larry wonders, won�t He fix any of life�s problems? �He hasn�t told me,� the rabbi responds.

A Serious Man is the first Coen brothers film with an autobiographical edge and it perfectly captures both the time and culture of growing up Jewish in the heartland of 1960s America. The film acts as a distillation of the themes and techniques that have occupied the filmmaking brothers for their entire careers; a witty, idea-packed script that tells a compelling and engaging story, filled with cinematic and literary references, visual winks, cultural touchstones and delightfully complicated dead ends. The film is brilliantly acted by the unfamiliar cast, predominantly stage actors, the standout being Stuhlbarg�s floundering Larry, a study in panic trying to understand why God has cursed him to suffer. Shot in luminous tones by their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and scored by their regular composer, Carter Burwell, A Serious Man is a darkly funny and wholly absorbing film that is deliberately, deliciously evasive, right up to the final scenes. It is one of the films of the year.

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke�s superb new film The White Ribbon is a stark and gripping period drama about a German town on the eve of WWI plagued by a series of violent incidents that act as a dark omen of the horrors to come.



The story, narrated by the film�s central character, a young schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), is structured around a string of misfortunes that befall the citizens of Eichwald, a rural village in Protestant Northern Germany. Half of the townspeople are dependent on the thunderous Baron (Ulrich Tukur) for work and the other half take their spiritual sustenance from the church minister (Burghart Klaussner), who wields the power of the pulpit with understated force.



The film opens as the local doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown from his horse by a tripwire, strung between two trees outside his home, and is badly injured. It was obviously no accident, but the culprits cannot be found. Not long after, a woman working in the Baron�s mill falls through a splintered wooden floor and is killed. Then, over a period of weeks, several children are taken from their homes and found severely beaten in the woods. Later, the Baron�s hay barn is set on fire. Who is behind these troubling events, and what possible motive could they have for destroying the peace? Carefully placed in between these horrors are glimpses of the daily life of the village: the brutal punishments handed down to the children for the slightest infractions, a little boy questioning his nanny about the nature of death, a boy nursing an injured songbird back to health, a sun-dappled courtship between the teacher and a sweet-natured girl (Leonie Benesch).



Photographed in lustrous black and white and stunningly composed with a rigidly static camera, Haneke constructs his story with surgical precision, revealing the dark spots of human behaviour with a delicate scalpel. The White Ribbon is like The Village of the Damned rewritten as Greek tragedy, except the Greeks had a reason for everything. Haneke�s story is not so much a whodunit as a �who didn�t� that contains elements of fable, morality tale and thriller. Like his earlier film Cache, Haneke steadfastly refuses to solve the mystery at the heart of his film. In the end, it doesn�t matter. The White Ribbon is an audacious parable about the psychology of fascism, a portrait of a dysfunctional society, built on mistrust, injustice and fear, which is headed for the chaotic destruction of the First World War. The society these characters have created will not survive the war, but Haneke�s film is about the world that follows after the defeat. Thier children will go on to create an evil and unjust society, built on arrogance, hatred, greed and violence. Where did they learn that from?



Winner of the Palme d�Or at Cannes this year, The White Ribbon is a bold and troubling film that exerts a powerful narrative hold. It�s extraordinary energy and exactitude confirms Haneke as one of contemporary cinema�s most provocative and perceptive minds.

Bright Star, writer-director Jane Campion�s first film in six years, tells the story of the English romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his relationship with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Their love affair was short and unconsummated, cut short by the poet�s death from tuberculosis in 1821, at the age of 25. She was just 18. Loosely based on Andrew Motion�s biography of the poet and the 40 surviving letters he wrote to Fanny, Bright Star is a sublimely lush and tender film about star-crossed love bolstered by a delicate treatment and exemplary acting performances.

His first book having been published to general indifference, the penniless Keats arrives in a leafy corner of Hampstead to stay at the house of his friend and patron Charles Brown (Paul Schneider). Fanny, the girl next door, is a quick-witted young woman who lives with her mother (Kerry Fox), younger brother Samuel (Thomas Sangster) and darling little sister Toots (Edie Martin). Fanny�s beauty and wit offers the young poet respite from days spent sitting in dark, smoky rooms narrating his poems in a near-trance to Brown. Dark-eyed and wan, Keats is lost in melancholy, distraught by the death of his younger brother and by his perilous financial situation. Fanny recognises his anguish and makes a determination to get to know him, and his work, arranging lessons in appreciating poetry and having him eat at her table. But Brown, who is footing the bill, sees Fanny as an unnecessary distraction, a nuisance whose incautious flirting will deprive the poet of the time he needs to write. At the same time, Fanny�s mother regards Keats as a charming houseguest, but without any means, an unacceptable match for her eldest daughter.

The standardised treatment for a literary biopic would be to concentrate on the poet�s struggle with his muse. Campion does something far more interesting with the material, she makes Fanny the focus of her story. The film opens, not with an inky quill crossing paper, but with a scene where Fanny sits at her bureau embroidering a piece of cloth. The young woman is a 19th century fashionista; a dedicated amateur seamstress who delights in clothing and style and boasts that hers is �the only gown with a triple-tiered mushroom collar in the whole of Hampstead.� When a jealous Brown offers a snide remark about her self-designed clothing (�It�s the well-stitched Miss Brawne�), she mentions that at least she makes some money from her craft.

Nothing of Fanny�s correspondence with Keats has survived, so the director is free to create a woman who would be, within the restrictions of the time she lived in, as inspired by fashion, stitching and needlework as her poet love is by words. Her emotional journey becomes the engine of the film, as the poet and his poems fill the wondrously detailed background. This delicate treatment extends to the intimate pacing, which is carefully graduated to allow the chaste lovers to come together naturally. We know their love affair will not last, but Campion presents their joy in each other in such a precise and vibrant manner, that knowledge doesn�t intrude on the story.

There are poetic graces too in the telling, with Campion�s static camera searching out stolen frames of everyday life in the household, piling on the detail to create an immersive world. These moments are counterpoised with grand dramatic sweeps that climax in heaving gulps, a sun-dappled kiss, a heavy loss, a long separation. Campion favours a striking image to a page of dialogue, so conversations are short and sparse. Saying that, there is a fascinating scene early in the story where Keats responds to Fanny�s sincere questions about the proper understanding of poetry that seems to capture the meaning of the film itself. �A poem needs understanding through the senses�, the poet tells her. �The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it�s to be in the lake. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought�. It�s not being overly lyrical to suggest that the same is true of Bright Star.

Writer and director Wes Anderson rebounds from the back-to-back commercial disappointments of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Ltd with his first animated film, Fantastic Mr Fox, made in the directors signature fastidious manner using old-fashioned stop-motion techniques. Roald Dahl's 1970 children�s book about a family of wily foxes and their woodland friends eluding the predatory attentions of the local humans has been transformed by Anderson, co-writer Noah Baumbach and a team of dedicated animators into an idiosyncratic, charmingly hand-crafted tale of family dysfunction and middle-class tedium.

The second talking-fox movie this year, following Lars von Trier's Antichrist, Fantastic Mr Fox opens at the same pace it maintains throughout, breakneck. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) and his beloved vixen wife (Meryl Streep) are out hunting chickens when they are caught in a trap. She chooses the opportunity to tell Fox she is expecting their first cub, and makes him promise to give up his dangerous, chicken-stealing ways and settle down. Twelve �fox-years� later, their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is a weedy, self-conscious teenager, further embarrassed by the arrival into the den of a talented, athletic cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson, the director�s brother).

In deference to his wife�s more refined tastes (she�s wears an apron and dabbles in landscape painting) Fox has foresworn his hunting instincts and taken a job as a newspaper columnist. But Fox�s instinctive appetite for pullet-poaching has returned. With the help of a dim-witted opossum (Wally Wolodarsky), Fox plans his �one last big job�, robbing the three nasty farmers, Boggis and Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon), �one fat, one short, one lean�, who live on the opposite hill. Tired of the impudent fox raiding their supplies, the farmers resort to increasingly desperate measures to capture and kill him, eventually putting all of the woodland creatures (including Bill Murray�s Badger and Willem Dafoe�s Rat) in danger.

This being a Wes Anderson film, much of the joy comes from tuning into the director�s unique visual sensibility. Unlike the seamless, polished image-making of the computerised animations, Fantastic Mr Fox pursues a roughly-hewn aesthetic that gives enormous energy and wit to proceedings; as stylized and inventive as anything Anderson has done previously. The stitch-perfect costuming, brilliantly textured character design and gloriously autumnal backgrounds aside, there are a plenty of highlights: Mr Fox and his chums burrow through geologically precise soil strata, our woodland chums hide from the humans in a vast cider-bottle warehouse, they stage their climactic shootout in a gorgeous facsimile of an Olde Worlde British village, complete with sushi bar and courier service.

It might be a cartoon, but Mr Fox is still a Wes Anderson film, through and through with the same attention to detail, eclectic soundtrack, airily witty dialogue and chaptered storytelling that have delighted his fan base in the past. They should be delighted again, even if younger audience members might find much of the precious chatter about existentialism, cr�me brulees and yogic meditation unfathomable. Incidentally when I met Anderson during the publicity tour for The Life Aquatic, he was wearing the same copper-coloured corduroy lounge suit that Foxy sports in the movie. If you share the director�s taste for fine retro tailoring, you might just like Fantastic Mr Fox.

Korean Park Chan-Wook�s Thirst is a variation on the horror-standard vampire origin story, imbued with the director's signature visual bravado, narrative contortion and deadpan comic touch.

Sang-hyun (Korea�s best known actor, Song Kang-Ho) plays a Catholic priest who follows a vocation to help people and travels to Africa to take part in a medical experiment investigating a strange blood disorder. It doesn't go well. After his life is saved by a blood transfusion, the priest gradually realises he�s been turned into a vampire. A good, God-fearing man, he finds himself unable to resist his new desires, particularly when he meets the beautiful Tae-Ju (Kim Ok-Bin), a married woman with an idiot husband and an interfering mother in law.

With all of his superhuman senses now awakened to the possibilities of life (while technically, undead), the priest falls in love with the girl and they conspire to find a way to be together forever. He is determined to fight his new-found desires and tries to cause as little harm as possible to the humans he feeds on, but she loves her new unnatural nature and enthusiastically pierces the neck of anyone who comes within her grasp.

Thirst might not be the greatest vampire movie ever made (it is certainly not the most coherent) but there is something utterly unique and unsettling about the way it is presented, performed and considered. A note in the press material reveals that Thirst is loosely based on Emile Zola�s �Th�r�se Raquin�. The reference would have passed me by, but the book is about a murderous marital affair and an interfering mother-in-law. More so than the narrative skeleton, Park seems to have been inspired by a note Zola made in the preface to the novel, where the writer explains his goal was to �study temperaments, not characters�. There is more here than mere blood-soaked fun and games. The clue to Park�s film is in the title. Thirst is about sensation, need and appetite.

Bold, brave and frequently beautiful, it isn�t quite in the same class as the director�s masterpiece Oldboy but it is still a million times more interesting and involving than the trendily fanged flirting of Twilight. There are, perhaps, deeper seams in the story than Park can mine in the finished film. Park�s priest never comes to deal with the philosophical question of being, or loving, one of the undead. More prosaically, the film feels too long, with Park spinning the central section into a repetitive dance around a single idea, allowing the attention to wander just at the time it is most required.

Fiction - and the imagination that dreams it up - is essential to the smooth running of society, from the little white lies of social etiquette to the bigger questions that can�t be answered, can�t even be properly formulated, without making an imaginative jump from one point to another. Ricky Gervais� second big-screen outing as male lead is a high-concept comedy, set in a horrible alternate world where everyone tells the truth.

In The Invention of Lying, Gervais plays Mark, a struggling screenwriter who is in danger of losing his job at the film studio where, in the absence of fiction, they make dreary historical documentaries, read out by actors sitting in armchairs. Even so, Mark is about to be fired. He has run out of things to write about. Broke and despairing, while standing at a bank counter one day, Mark has a brainwave. Instead of telling the cashier how much is actually in his account, he makes up a number. She hands over the cash without question, after all, Mark must be telling the truth. (Incidentally, this does not work in real life.)

So Mark tells another lie at another bank, and then another, and is soon flush with cash. Money and the confidence it bestows makes it a lot for Mark to woo the lovely Anna (Jennifer Garner), who had previously considered him �genetically inferior�. Mark goes back to work and presents his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) with a new script, a �real-life� epic, forgotten in the archives, about a 1st century between the massed armies of men, dinosaurs and space ninjas. Then Mark tells another story, this time to his mother (Fionnuala Flanagan) as she lies in a hospital bed. It�s a story about a wonderful place you go where you die, where all your family and friends are waiting and everything is great. But the yarn is overheard by doctors and spreads like wildfire. Nobody doubts that it couldn�t be true. Mark has accidentally invented God.

Like Moses on the mountain, Mark stand in front of a vast crowd of disciples and preaches a deviously complicated sermon about the rewards of living a good life. It�s a well-worked scene that plays to Gervais� strengths as a stand-up comic, blustering double-takes and exaggerated flop-sweats, but like his tablet-wielding inspiration, Gervais is leading us into a narrative desert. His elevation to messiah, however inadvertent and unwanted, tires badly when syrupy emotion and redeeming messages start to fill the space that should contain jokes.

A world where people can only speak the truth is an interesting notion for comedy, but in fact Gervais� characters don�t so much speak honestly as speak without self-censorship, which is not quite the same thing. It�s a narrative cheat that reduces the altitude of the high-concept but is less of an issue than Gervais casting himself once again, following Ghost Town, as an ordinary guy, touched by fate, who overcomes his misanthropy to use his powers to help those around him. If telling lies is a sin, vanity is too.

Opposite Gervais, Jennifer Garner overcomes the obvious lack of chemistry with her leading man to deliver a dryly amusing, well-rounded performance as the innocently offensive career woman with a heart of gold. There are funny moments too from an underused Tina Fey as Mark�s assistant and Rob Lowe as a slimy love-rival. Filling out the cast are comedians Jonah Hill and Louis C.K., as a suicidal neighbour and a boorish best-friend, but neither serves any purpose in the second half of the film other than to provide Mark with someone to save. With a tighter script and better direction, all the good ideas in The Invention of Lying might have coalesced into something special. As it stands, it�s just OK. Honest.