2009 Year In Review: Supporting Actor

As is often the case, I found the performances in this category to be among the most interesting. The number one performance here gets my vote for the best performance of the year. And I had to leave off some very strong performances by Richard Kind in A Serious Man, Stephen Lang in Avatar and Public Enemies, Alfred Molina in An Education, Anthony Mackie in The Hurt Locker and Paul Schneider in Bright Star. Lots of great work this year.

10. Michael Fassbender in Inglorious Basterds
I saw Michael Fassbender deliver four great performances in 2009 - two holdovers from 2008, the great Irish prison drama Hunger, and the disturbing horror film Eden Lake and an early screening of the upcoming film Fish Tank but for most viewers, his performance in Inglorious Basterds is most likely the first time they saw him, and he made quite an impression. His first scene is an hilarious send up of old Hollywood movies, being given a mission in front of a huge map of the world. But his great work is in the extended barroom seen, speaking in German. Fassbender is quick witted and smart, charming right up until the bullets start flying. A star is born.

9. Peter Sarsgaard in An Education
Sarsgaard has been one of the most interesting actors around for the last few years, and you are never quite sure what he is going to do next. In An Education, he plays the older man suitor to Carey Mulligan’s Jenny, quickly winning him over with his charm and his money. But underneath his cool exterior, he really is just a child with a very naïve outlook on life and sex. Sarsgaard has a dreamy look in his eyes for much of the movie, and whenever he is confronted by reality, he runs away. Sarsgaard does an expert British accent in the film, but his performance goes beyond that. Normally Sarsgaard plays lowlifes, and while to a certain extent his David is a lowlife as well, his performance gets under his characters skin, and as result gets under ours as well.

8. Burghart Klausner in The White Ribbon
As the authoritative pastor in The White Ribbon, Klausner delivers the performance that sticks out in my mind more than any other in Haneke’s brilliant film. He is a man who demands absolute obedience from his children, and punishes them severely when they do not live up to his expectations. The abuse is not only physical, but also psychological (witness the scene where he humiliates his daughter in front of her class). The movie, which is about the dangers of inflicting rigid, unyielding morality and religion onto your children relies of Klausner to be at the heart of the hypocrisy in the town. A great performance in a great movie.

7. Vlad Ivanov in Police, Adjective
Ivanov’s one scene performance in Police Adjective is utterly brilliant - as great as his one scene role as the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. As the main character’s supervisor, he dismisses his claims of conscience, and then coldly, calculatingly gets him to the read the definitions of conscience, law, morals and police from the dictionary, gradually breaking down his resistance. You would not think that a scene that contains reading aloud from the dictionary would be thrilling - but it is. Ivanov is the ultimate unfeeling, uncaring government bureaucrat out there. Ivanov has become one of the best actors in the world.

6. Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones
I’m not sure if Tucci or the makeup department should get the credit for his incredibly creepy performance in The Lovely Bones. This is a performance all about stillness, as Tucci is often motionless behind his big glasses and his pathetic looking come over. But when Tucci does speak, we hear that he has changed his normally sunny voice, into a low, guttural one at times barely above a mumble. We are creped out by him right away, but there is something about Tucci that makes this character – a child murderer – seem almost harmless at times. Stanley Tucci seems to be finally getting the appreciate he deserves.

5. Christian McKay in Me & Orson Welles
There can only ever be one Orson Welles. Despite how many great actors have played Welles over the years, there always seemed to be something missing in their performances. Whatever that something was, McKay completely nails it in this movie. His Welles is larger than life, a boisterous, egomaniacal tyrant who is still somehow capable of making everyone love him. His supreme confidence shines through in every scene. McKay gets the exact cadence of Welles’ voice down cold, and he looks uncannily like the real Welles, but his performance his more than just mere impersonation – he inhabits Welles from the inside out.

4. Woody Harrelson in The Messenger
Woody Harrelson plays a soldier who has been working for years in the causality notification unit, and has seen it all. He advises his new underling to stick to the script and not get involved. He talks constantly, trying to cover up his own insecurities with his constant barrage of words. Harrelson is an actor of tremendous gifts, and he hasn’t used them as often as I would have liked over the last decade. In The Messenger he gives a performance of tremendous emotional depth and wait. He feels guilty for not fighting himself - his age has kept him out of the real fighting - and that is why he tries to keep his distance. The dead soldiers got to make the sacrifice her never got to make. Harrelson is a great actor, and this is one of his best performances.

3. Fred Melamed in A Serious Man
I’m not sure that there is more imitatable performance this year than Fred Melamed’s brilliant turn as Sy Abelman in this Coen’s brother masterpiece. He plays the heroes’ friend, whose has stolen his wife away from him. He wants to get together and have a good talk about what is happening, and what the most rational course of action will be. He is so supremely calm that you want to punch him in the face. Melamed is just one of the many great actors that the Coens chose to round out the cast, but none were more memorable then him. A great performance by an actor I didn’t know before, but who I will now never forget.

2. Peter Capaldi in In the Loop
Peter Capaldi is unforgettable as the profane spin doctor in this brilliant political satire. Every other word out of his mouth is fuck. He uses it as punctuation, dressing down his underlings, and ripping to shreds everyone around him. He is not concerned about being right about the case for war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, but rather he wants to spin it so that everyone will support the war. Whether he is dealing with bumbling MPs, political rivals, American Generals, or American politicians who do not like to hear swearwords (Best line in the movie - “You F * * Cunt”). Capaldi rips into the role with gusto, and makes one of the unforgettable characters of the year.

1. Christophe Waltz in Inglorious Basterds
If I had to pick one performance as the best of the year, then it would easily be Waltz’s brilliant turn as Colonel Hans Landa, the Nazi Jew hunter. His first scene is perhaps the best of any this year - as he comes to a remote farmhouse and questions a French farmer about the whereabouts of a Jewish family. Switching back and forth between German, French and English, Waltz strips the farmer down to the bone. As the movie goes along, Waltz continues with his brilliant performance, continually outsmarting, and out talking, everyone else in the movie. Waltz is perhaps the most memorable Nazi in cinema history - pure undiluted evil, always trying to make the best deal for himself. A brilliant turn.

2009 Year in Review: Best Actress

Not a very strong year, at least for American actresses, as most of the great roles for women came from foreign movies. The great performances by American actresses also came from the most unexpected places. It’s too bad that Fish Tank and Mother were not released by the end of the year, because Katie Jarvis and Kim Hye-ja were better than almost anyone on this list. But then again, there’s always next year.

10. Sara Paxton in The Last House on the Left
I include Paxton on this list knowing full well that I am probably going to be crucified for it. But Paxton’s performance in this horror movie is brilliant – fearless and brave. As Mari, the innocent girl who ends up being raped and almost killed by a band of psychopaths for no reason other than that she is in the wrong place at the wrong time, Paxton is unforgettable. From her early scenes, where she creates Mari as an innocent who goes along with her friend against her better judgment because “something might happen to her if I don’t”, Paxton is unforgettable. In perhaps the most difficult to watch scene in any movie this year, Mari is raped, but not before she fights back. The shot of her face when she finally lets go of her white panties and accepts what is going to happen to her (thus, making the audience accept it as well) is like a punch to the gut. Paxton’s performance is utterly fearless – she rips your heart out in this film, and is proof that great movie acting can come from any genre.

9. Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer
I always love it when actors play with their screen image, and that is precisely what Deschanel does in this movie. For a number of years now, Deschanel has been portrayed as the ideal woman – quirky, funny, chirpy, sunny, clever and sexy. It was impossible not to fall in love with her on screen persona (I know I did). But in 500 Days of Summer, Deschanel shows us the other side of that personality – showing us first how you can fall in love with her, and then over the course of time how that personality can start grating on you if you have to live with it day in and day out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in love with Deschanel, but this is a performance that makes you see the person inside that persona.

8. Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience
Scoff if you want to at porn star Grey’s debut dramatic movie, but she delivers a wonderful performance in the lead role of Steven Soderbergh’s, low budget film. Grey plays a high class prostitute who specializes in delivering “the girlfriend experience” to her clients - going out on dates, listening to them talk, before, of course, going home and having sex with them. This is not an easy role for Grey - going back and forth between being on “dates” and faking with her clients, to trying to maintain a real relationship with her boyfriend, and also being a business woman. This is not as easy as Grey makes it look. I have no idea if Grey will be able to go onto a career in “legitimate” movies after her role here, but she plays this role as good as anyone else could have.

7. Gaborey Sidibe in Precious
Sidibe is a real find, and perhaps the most important element in order to make Lee Daniels’ film work as well as it does. At the beginning of the movie, Sidibe’s Precious is beaten down by life, rarely speaking up to her abusive mother, or her teachers or really anyone. She is lost in her own fantasies. But as the movie progresses, Sidibe becomes more vocal – opens her eyes wider to see the world as it really is, not how she imagines it to be. She takes charge of her own life. Precious could have been just another movie of the week, but Sidibe makes us feel for Precious. Sapphire, who wrote the book Precious is based on, said her goal was to break open a stereotype to find the real person inside. In terms of this movie, Sidibe is the most valuable asset.

6. Saorise Ronan in The Lovely Bones
Ronan has a nearly impossible role in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. She spends most of the movie in the after life, surrounded by special effects, and looking down at the major action in the film. She inhabits a world that is somewhere between a dream and nightmare, and Ronan somehow remains completely grounded and believable throughout. Her hugely expressive blue eyes carry her performance, and the movie itself. With everything going on around her, this could have been a purely visual experience, but Ronan grounds in its human story. A remarkable performance by a great young actress.

5. Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell
To many, I am sure that Lohman’s performance in Drag Me to Hell will be dismissed as yet another horror movie victim. And while Lohman is a perfect scream queen (god, can that woman scream), her performance is much more than just yet another horror movie performance. She starts out as an innocent young woman, but as the movie goes on, and she becomes more paranoid, her performance becomes deeper and more emotional. Remember the scene where she has to kill her cat? Or the scene where she meets Justin Long’s parents for the first time? These scenes rank among the best acted of the year - and Lohman does a brilliant job with her role.

4. Ok-vin Kim in Thirst
When we first meet Ok-vin Kim’s character in Chan-wook Park’s vampire film Thirst, we feel sorry for her. Forced to marry a constantly sick, idiotic man, being treated like a slave by her mother in law, and all around miserable, we respond to her gorgeous sad eyes as she looks at the “hero” of the movie. But as the movie goes along, she reveals a darker side. Sexually turned on by the fact that the hero is a priest, is only the beginning of her kinks. When she turns into a vampire herself, her playfully demonic side comes out in full force. For some reason, most critics have ignored the film, and Kim’s star making performance, but it is one of the most complex female roles of the year.

3. Tilda Swinton in Julia
There are few actresses as fearless as Tilda Swinton. There is nothing that she will not do. Here, she plays a drunken party girl well past her sell by date, she continues to swirl down the drain, losing all of her friends, unable to hold onto a job, and having nothing in her life except for the next night. She sees a chance to break free when a slightly off kilter woman she meets in AA tells her about her son that is being kept away from her by her evil father in law. Kidnapping the kid, she goes on the run hoping for ransom. But Julia is essentially about Tilda Swinton’s remarkable performance. She doesn’t waste time trying to make us like her, but instead simply completely inhabits her role. A remarkable performance by one of the best actresses on the planet.

2. Carey Mulligan in An Education
It is rare that you get to see a movie star born right before your eyes, but that is precisely what happens in this performance by Mulligan. She plays Jenny, an intelligent, 1960s English school girl who gets sucked up into a relationship with an older man. But what is remarkable is that Jenny is not a naïve little girl being taken advantage by an older man. She knows what she is getting into, but she it as the best of her alternatives. What are the other alternatives for a girl in her time? Sooner or later, she thinks she’s just going to wind up marrying someone, so why not choose someone who has money and is fun? You fall in love with Mulligan right from the beginning of the movie. She is a movie star, who will be around for a long time.

1. Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist
There are few actresses who would even be willing to attempt to go where Charlotte Gainsbourg goes in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. From the opening sex scene, through the scenes of almost unbearable grief, to the realization that she may not be as innocent as she appears, to her final, violent breakdown that involves genital mutilation, Gainsbourg is utterly unbelievably in the movie. She throws caution to the wind, and completely throws herself into the role, and ends up with one of the most unforgettable performances of this, or any, year.

2009 Year In Review: Best Actor

A strong year for performances in this category. Not only these 10 performances but Johnny Depp in Public Enemies, Colin Firth in A Single Man, Patton Oswalt in Big Fan, Sam Rockwell in Moon and Joseph Gordon Levitt in 500 Days of Summer were also excellent.

10. Willem Dafoe in Antichrist
As the man in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Willem Dafoe delivers his best performance in a number of years. His major sin is pride – he takes his wife out of the hospital, and is convinced he can cure her himself because after all, he is a shrink himself. The great thing about Dafoe’s performance is how supremely calm he remains throughout the movie (at least until he gets his testicles crushed, and a medieval grinding wheel drilled through his leg, at which point he gets understandably upset). In a strange way, his performance here reminded me of his work in The Last Temptation of Christ as Jesus. Dafoe is one of those fearless actors who will go anywhere for a director – the places von Trier asks him to go in this movie are extreme, but Dafoe handles it all brilliantly well.

9. Viggo Mortenson in The Road
Mortenson has a very difficult role in The Road. He is a man with no name taking his son across a barren, desolate American landscape on foot with all their possession crammed into a shopping cart in the hopes that the coast has so semblance of civilization left intact. He has honed his survival instincts, so that they can get through, but the things he must do in order to get them across maybe too much for his son to bare as he wants to ensure that they are still the “good guys”. Mortenson, his face hidden behind a scraggily beard delivers one of his best, most subtle performances to date. It’s all about that look in eyes - the false hope they try to give his son, the horror when they enter that basement, and the out and out struggle in minute after minute. Mortenson, who became a big star with the Lord of the Rings movies, has decided to concentrate on doing strong work, in dark, often difficult films. In The Road, he delivers one of his best performances.

8. Sharlto Copley in District 9
Copley’s role in this sci-fi epic is not as easy as it appears to be. At first, Copley has to play a dim, government bureaucrat who is put in charge of moving all of the aliens out of their homes and into a new area - a job for which he dangerously unqualified. But as the movie progresses, and he slowly starts becoming one of the aliens himself, Copley makes his terror palpable, becoming a like a paranoid, trapped animal. This is Copley’s first major role, and he knocks it out of the park on his first try. Definitely one of the break out stars of the year.

7. Ben Foster in The Messenger
Ben Foster is an actor who has impressed me quite a bit in the last few years with is over the top performances in 3:10 to Yuma, Alpha Dog, 30 Days of Night and Hostage. But The Messenger is a different kind of role for him – one that requires him to be understated and subtle, and he pulls it off brilliantly. He is a soldier who has back from Iraq with injuries to his leg and eye, who is simply trying to serve out his contract with the army, when he is assigned to the Causality Notification Unit – a job that essentially has him to the houses of family members of soldiers who have been killed in action and tell them what happened. Foster plays his cards close to his vest – he doesn’t let us know what happened until late in the movie, and the only hint of what he is thinking is behind those deep, dark eyes as he argues and befriends his superior (Woody Harrellson), deals with his ex-girlfriend (Jena Malone) or has the beginning of a new relationship with the wife of one of the soldiers killed (Samantha Morton). Foster’s performance in The Messenger isn’t flashy, but it rips your guts out just the same.

6. Matt Damon in The Informant
Damon is a major movie star, but I have always felt somewhat underrated as an actor. His brilliant turns in The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Departed prove that he can do more than just typical movie star roles. But I don’t think I have ever seen him better than he is in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant. Playing Mark Whitacre, a delusional corporate executive who thinks that he can work with the FBI to take down his company, and then become CEO, all without anyone figuring out his embezzlement schemes is pure gold for Damon. Packing on extra pounds, having that goofy grin on his face, and trying to talk his way out of every jam he finds himself in, Damon is the best thing about Soderbergh’s breezy film. Damon is a real actor, and The Informant should be all the proof you need on that score.

5. Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart
Everyone knows that one of the ways you win an Oscar is to play an alcoholic, but while Bridges plays drunk as well as anyone I have ever seen, his performance is more than just drunk theatrics. He gets under the skin of Bad Blake, a country music star who is on the down slope of his career - broke, playing in dives and bowling alleys for a fraction of what they used to make, and hoping for a comeback. Bridges does his own singing in this movie, and the pain comes through in his voice. He retains the mystic nature and charm of a star, and is able to win people over - for a short time anyway. Bridges plays the broken down star perfectly, and carries a movie that could have just been another cliché leaden drama, but becomes much more. A great performance.

4. George Clooney in Up in the Air
There is no one better at playing the “movie star” roles these days than George Clooney. In Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, he has been given perhaps the best role of his career - a corporate downsizing expert who spends all of his time traveling so he doesn’t have to have any real connection with people. Clooney is all full of charm and swagger in this role, but he finds the vulnerability underneath his exterior cool. Clooney always does quality work, but he has never been as good as he here. If we do not feel for his character, then the whole movie becomes an exercise in cynical cool, but Clooney provides the heart for this great movie.

3. Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker
Jeremy Renner has been doing great work for almost 10 years now, and no one seemed to notice. Finally, he gets the recognition he deserves for his brilliant portrayal of a bomb technician who becomes addicted to adrenaline and action in the war in Iraq. He seems like a typical Southern cowboy, but Renner goes deeper then the surface cliché. He is a man who loves his job too much, who needs to keep pushing himself further and further into danger, and drags his team along with him. Renner’s performance is mainly about his actions - his facial expressions as he spirals further and further down into his own world. Renner’s talent is no longer a secret.

2. Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man
Looking at his resume of IMDB, I realize I have seen Stuhlbarg several times before, but I didn’t remember him. I don’t think I’ll ever forget him now. He is at the heart of the Coen brother’s latest masterpiece A Serious Man. In the span of a few days, his entire world collapses all around him. He tries to remain calm throughout, but when he is tested like no one since Job, it is impossible. Stuhlbarg does a remarkable job on his spiritual journey that leaves him completely and totally confused more than anything else. Stuhlbarg tries hard to keep his cool, and do the right thing, until he can no longer take the pressure anymore. One of the great, unappreciated performances of the year.

1. Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans
There is no other actor working today quite like Nicolas Cage. There are few actors out there who have made as much crap as Cage, but there is no other actor who could have pulled off a role like this one. He plays a cop who moral compass is broken, who will take any drug under the son, is in extreme pain throughout the entire movie, and has a hooker for a girlfriend. Cage goes wildly, crazily over the top here, with his clipped voice and wild motions, and yet it is perfect for the film. Director Werner Herzog is one of the craziest men in the world, and he needs an actor willing to completely and totally let loose, and that is what Cage does so brilliantly well in this movie. Without this performance, the film could have been painfully bad. With it, it is one of the best of the year. When Cage is on his A game, there is no one better in Hollywood - and I’m not sure he’s ever been better than he is in this movie.

2009 Year in Review: The Top Ten

The best of the best. The ten best films of the year, and the ones that for me will define 2009 in terms of cinema. All of them are must sees as they will provide you with a lot to talk and think about.

10. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
Werner Herzog has finally found another actor as willing as Klaus Kinski to go batshit insane for him in a movie. I have no idea why it took Nicolas Cage and Herzog so long to team up, but I certainly hope they make more films like this pitch black comedy in the future. A remake, pretty much in name only, of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, this film follows Nicolas Cage’s Terrance McDonagh a New Orleans police officer who injures his back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He starts taking Vicodin to kill the pain in his back, and then he starts taking any other drug he can get his hands on. His girlfriend (Eva Mendes) is a prostitute, and he sometimes beats her johns down for money and drugs. He hangs outside of nightclubs and catches kids with drugs, and blackmails the girls into having sex with him as their boyfriends watch instead of taking them to jail. He is assigned a case of a murder of an entire immigrant family that he knows was drug related. But he doesn’t really care about any of it. His life is spiraling out of control, and he is lost in his own moral black hole. But the thing about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is that it is a black comedy. Cage hilariously goes on drug fueled rants about iguanas, beats up old ladies; his voice becomes increasingly high and pinched. Cage dives headlong into his role, and delivers the type of performance that we almost never see in the movies. Yes, he goes over the top, but every note he hits is perfect for the movie. Herzog’s camera captures the contradictions in post-Katrina New Orleans, the high rises and the ravaged neighborhoods. This is Herzog’s best non-documentary movie in decades, and one of the gloriously demented movies I have ever seen.

9. District 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
2009 was a very strong year for science fiction films, and District 9 was easily the best of the lot. The movie begins as a shaky camera, documentary style examination of the alien race (known derogatorily as prawns) whose ship stalled out above South African. In the decades since their arrival, they have been shoved into shanty towns, and treated poorly. Sharlto Copley stars as the unprepared government bureaucrat who has to go in and inform the aliens that they are being evicted and moved to another area to try and relieve tensions. These opening scenes flash between humor (Copley’s inept attempts at conversation), and social commentary – it is impossible not to look at the South Africa director Neil Blomkamp evokes and not think of apartheid. Things start to unravel for Copley as he gets infected, and slowly starts to become one of the prawns. His fear becomes real and he starts to rely on one “prawn” in particular for survival, and the two team up to try and find what they need. The last act of the film is virtuoso action filmmaking at its best – bloody as hell, but extraordinarily entertaining. Blomkamp’s film uses special effects to huge advantage here, but he uses them to support, not replace his story. This is intelligent science fiction, great action movie direction and over all one of the best, most exciting films of the year.

8. Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
Lars von Trier likes to shock his audiences, and Antichrist may just be his most shocking film to date. It opens with a couple fucking (and that’s the only world to describe it) in slow motion, gorgeous black and white photography, as their baby in the next room wonders slowly toward the window, and then crashes out of it, falling to its death on the snow covered sidewalk below. The couple, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, has vastly different reactions to their infant’s death. She spirals downward into despair, and he devotes all of his energy into curing her, eventually taking her to their cabin in the forest of Eden. The film is essentially the Book of Genesis in reverse, as these two represent Adam and Eve in a world created by Satan instead of God. The pain they inflict on each other, him emotionally, and finally her physically, is immense and tough to take. They live in a world without kindness or love, but just pain and hate. Dafoe is perfect as the egotistical man who believes he can cure her. But it is Gainsbourg, in one of the most fearless performances of the year is truly brilliant. By the time she has had enough of the pain he inflicts on her, and snaps crushing his testicles with a block of wood, then furiously trying to make it better, before punishing herself by cutting off her own clit, she has lost it completely, and Antichrist has transformed itself into some sort of demented horror film. Antichrist is not an easy film to watch, nor should it be. Some, perhaps most, will find it almost unbearable, but it is the film this year that provides the most material to chew over and debate as you walk out of the theater. If you can handle the film, then you will find that it is one of the best, most interesting films of the year.

7. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
It was only a matter of time before Wes Anderson gave into his obsession and made an animated film. In a way, he has been building towards it his entire career. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a brilliant realization of Anderson’s unique vision. Despite the fact that it is an animated film about taking animals, aimed at a children, it is still an Anderson film through and through. His concentration of the visual elements, the strange art direction, and costume design, the unique look of his characters in stop motion animation, the way their fur ruffles in the wind, their unique movements and the pop infused soundtrack (along with the great score by Alexandre Desplat) are all elements that come straight from his live action films. Yet, it’s the story, and yes, the real emotions, involved in the film that makes the film work wonderfully well. George Clooney gives the best vocal performance of the year as Mr. Fox, who is not very different from fathers of Anderson films past like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. He is distant from his own son, and he lies to his family in order to get what he wants. There is a scene of immense emotional pain in the film when his wife Meryl Streep scratches his face, and tells him that she never should have married him. Critics always concentrate on the terrific, very specific visual look of Anderson’s film, while almost willfully overlooking its content. His families are dysfunctional, yet love each other in their own way. Fantastic Mr. Fox is more than just a clever, hilarious animated film; it is also perhaps the best portrait of family life of the year.

6. Up (Pete Docter)
Perhaps the most consistent creative force in American movies for the last decade and a half has been Pixar, who makes brilliant animated films that look better than anyone else’s movies, and also always concentrate as much on storytelling as it does on the visuals. Their films are intelligent and touching, without pandering. Up opens with one of the very best sequences of the year - a montage that shows the life that Carl Frederickson (Ed Asner), and his wife shared right up until her death. It is a life full of love, but also of dashed hopes and dreams. Now alone, Carl simply wants to stay in his home and be left alone, but he is being forced from it. So, he decides to attach thousands of helium balloons to his house, and relocates it to Paradise Falls, in South America, the place that his wife always dreamed of going. What he doesn’t count on is an emotionally needy and very enthusiastic boy scout named Russell tagging along with him. At first Russell annoys him, but soon he breaks through his hardened exterior. The film starts off as an emotional drama, moves into an exotic adventure, and then becomes a thrilling action film in the final act. All of this is handled expertly by director Pete Docter, who never loses sight of his characters in his attempt to make a visually dazzling experience. Up will make you laugh, cry and cling to the edge of your seat. It is one of Pixar’s greatest achievements.

5. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is the best film yet about the war in Iraq, and one of the best war movies of the decade. It is an almost unbearably intense movie going experience where one scene after another has us gripping the edge of your seat. Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty are a team of bomb specialists who are called whenever there is a suspected IED on the side of the road. There job is literally one where split seconds and millimeters could cause death. Renner is amazing, finally making people see his immense talent that he has displayed in every role since his breakout in the title role in Dahmer (2002). His is addicted to danger, and gets off on it, and needs a constant feed of the adrenaline provided by his job. As the movie progresses, he takes bigger and bigger risks to get off. But the real star of the movie is director Bigelow, who stages one jittery, dangerous, intense sequence after another. She is a director who has always been drawn to action movies, and the fragility of the masculine ego, and in The Hurt Locker she has created the best feature of her career. If she does become the first woman to ever win the best director Oscar, it will be well deserved.

4. Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze)
Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best movies I have ever seen about what a confused state that being a child really is. Max, played brilliantly by Max Records, is a kid on the verge of adolescence, with no real friends and the product of a broken home, where the father is never around, and the mother is slowly moving back into her own life. Max tries to cling to his mother, and his older sister, but finds that he cannot hold onto them. One night, after a particularly nasty fight, he runs off into the cold winter night, and ends up in a world of his own imagination where he is king of the wild things, all of which represent a different part of his own mind. Carol (James Gandolfini, delivering a complex vocal performance) is the destructive force he holds inside, and has the same fears of abandonment he has. In Judith and Ira (Catherine O’Hara and Forrest Whitaker), he sees the type of committed, complex relationship he wishes his parents had. Douglas (Chris Cooper) is the type of ever loyal best friend he never had. KW (Lauren Ambrose) is the type of loving big sister he wishes was his was. And Alexander (Paul Dano) is the weakness in him that he hates. (Okay, I’ll admit I have trouble figuring out what The Bull represents). Every scene in Where the Wild Things Are is linked to Max’s mind, and the complex world he creates for himself is similar to the ones that all children create. Working off of Maurice Sendak’s brilliant book, Spike Jonze has created a masterpiece on the inner workings of a child’s imagination. Audiences were understandably confused, as this really isn’t a children’s movie - but rather a movie about childhood.

3. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon takes place just before the outbreak of WWI in a small German town that seems to be isolated from the rest of the world. The adults in the movie subject their children to a strict, absolutist moral upbringing, and then seem to be shocked when kids turn on them, applying the same moral code to their parents. The movie is about the danger of raising children in an absolutist environment. In doing so, Haneke implies that kids grow up to be able to become Nazis or Islamic terrorists. The film is huge in its scope. It feels like it based on an epic novel of the past, but it is Haneke’s own workings. Strange events open the film, as adults are attacked - killed, maimed whatever, but perpetrators that are unknown. Like the videos in Cache, this is simply a setup, a way to get us involved in the story. The film concentrates on five families - all of which are ruled by a patriarch defined by what they do. The most prominent one is the minister, who makes his daughters wear white ribbons in their hair to represent purity and innocence. But the adults do not live based on the same code that they force their children to, and they strike back. Haneke’s direction is masterful. Shot in brilliant, stark black and white by Christian Berger, the film is full of memorable images - a sequence where a child comes downstairs in the dark and sees things he doesn’t understand. The minister’s prized bird crucified with a pair of scissors. This is one of Haneke’s masterpieces - a troubling, dark, epic film that speaks to humanity at its darkest.

2. A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen)
The big knock on the Coen brothers has always been that they are too emotionally detached from their films (a criticism that I have never shared, but at least understood). What is surprising about A Serious Man is how invested they are in their film, and its characters. The film opens with a brilliant sequence in Yiddish that tells the story of inviting a dyybuk, or demon, into your house, before it moves onto the main story of the movie involving Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish Physics professor in 1967 Minnesota whose life crashes down around him, and sends him into a moral and religious spiral. His wife is leaving him for his friend - the new age philosophy spouting Fred Melamed who is so calm and reasonable as he insults you to your face that you want to punch him. His career is in jeopardy - he is on the verge of tenure, but someone is writing disparaging letters about him to the board, and a student is trying to bribe him to give him a better grade. His brother (Richard Kind), has some sort of mental defect, and spends his time trying to come up with mathematical ways to win at cards, and draining his cyst. His kids treat him like a cash machine or a TV repair man. He goes on a spiritual journey, talking to one useless rabbi after another. The film is like the Book of Job visited upon this man, as he faces one moral test after another, and as he struggles to do the right thing time after time, he becomes more and more lost in the moral void. He makes one bad decision at the end of the movie - one lapse of moral judgment, and it just may bring about a very American apocalypse. A Serious Man is perhaps the most serious of all of the Coen brothers’ films - the one that searches for moral and religious understanding and insight. One that questions our place in the world. It is among the best films the brothers have ever made - and an utter, one of a kind masterpiece.

1. Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
There has never been a filmmaker quite like Quentin Tarantino. He takes all that has come before in cinematic history, twists it all up in his warped little mind and comes up with something completely original and different. Inglorious Basterds opens with the best sequence of the year as Nazi Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz) shows up at a French farm where he is told that a family of Jews is hiding. Landa plays word games with the farmer, switching back and forth between German, French and English, whipping out his giant pipe, and toying with him. The film has a great Hitchcockian reveal of the Jewish family beneath the floorboards, before the massacre begins. From there, Tarantino spins together one great, extended sequence after another. A group of American Jewish soldiers led by Brad Pitt who have parachuted into France with the express mission of killing and scalping any Nazi they come across. A German actress and double agent (Diane Kruger) teaming up with a British spy (Michael Fassbender) to try and infiltrate a movie premiere thrown by Melanie Laurent, the lone survivor of the massacre that opened that film, who plans on getting her revenge. Tarantino’s film is about the power of cinema to change perceptions and the complexity of language. It is also the most gloriously demented alternate history movie in history, climaxing at the premiere where the Jews kill Hitler as the theater burns to the ground. Tarantino’s film is the best of his career, his most inventive, fun, original, and funny - brilliantly made and structured film. The final quote of the film, where Pitt looks into the camera and says “You know, I think this could be my masterpiece” could well me Tarantino winking at the audience. And while there is no modesty there, he isn’t wrong.

2009 Year in Review: Runners Up

Honorable Mention
As always, when I went to make up my list of the best films of the year, there were many films that I wanted to include that I didn’t have room for – even when I went overboard and included 25 slots. But I would gladly watch any of the following films again: Away We Go (Sam Mendes), Big Fan (Robert Siegel), Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders), Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar), Bruno (Larry Charles), The Children (Tom Shankman), Collapse (Chris Smith),Coraline (Henry Selick), The Cove (Louis Pishoyoas), Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell), Funny People (Judd Apatow), Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani), The Hangover (Todd Philips), Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (David Yates), The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel), I Love You, Man (James Hamburg), Invictus (Clint Eastwood), Julia (Eric Zonca), The Last House on the Left (Dennis Ilyiads), Lorna’s Silence (Jean Luc & Pierre Dardenne), The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson), Moon (Duncan Jones), Nine (Rob Marshall), Observe and Report (Jody Hill), Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki), Precious (Lee Daniels), The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements & John Musker), Red Cliff (John Woo), Revanche (Gotz Spielman), Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga), A Single Man (Tom Ford), Somers Town (Shane Meadows), Star Trek (JJ Abrams), Sugar (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden), Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas), The Sun (Aleksandr Sokoruv), Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola), 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis), Thirst (Chan-wook Park), Two Lovers (James Gray), Tyson (James Toback), 12 (Nikita Mikhalkov), Watchmen (Zack Snyder), Whatever Works (Woody Allen).

Runners-Up: 25-11
I considered every one of these films for a spot on my top 10 list, but sadly just did not have the room for them. They all deserve your attention though, so I put them here.

25. Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino)
Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo is a gangster epic in the vein of The Godfather series. The fact that the main character is not a mob boss, but is 8 time Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, brilliantly played by Toni Servillo, makes no difference. The film is overwhelming in its details about the backroom deals, and the trail of dead bodies he leaves behind him. If you are not familiar with Italian politics, the details are probably going to confuse you more than anything, but that really isn’t the point anyway. Sorrentino wants to show the wide ranging, epic scope of corruption that runs deep in Italian politics. Servillo plays Andreotti as a quiet, hunchbacked little man who never raises his voice. It doesn’t matter, though; he is a cold blooded murderer. Everyone knew it, but he kept winning elections anyway. He actually makes Berlusconi look good.

24. Zombieland (Ruben Flesicher)
One of the most out and out entertaining, enjoyable films of the year. Despite the presence of zombies - and all the gore that comes along with them - this really isn’t a horror movie, but rather a comedy. Woody Harrelson and Jessie Eisenberg play a mismatched pair of survivors in an American landscape where almost everyone has become zombies. They eventually team up with two sisters - Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin - to try and ride out the storm. The film starts off on a high comedic note and doesn’t let up for almost its entire running time. But it’s when they enter a certain celebrities house (who shall go nameless if you don’t know who it is), where the film really becomes something brilliant. I will probably watch this film more often than the most of the others on this list.

23. The Informant (Steven Soderbergh)
Matt Damon gives what could be the best performance of his career as Mark Whitacre, an executive for Archer Daniels Midland, who goes to the FBI with the biggest price fixing scheme in history. He turns out to have a lot of secrets of his own, and suffers from massive delusions of grandeur. Soderbergh directs the film as if it were left over from the 1970s - with desaturated colors and a number of great jump cuts. But at its heart is a performance by Damon that is brilliant in its contradictions and humor, as well as its somewhat tragic trajectory. He is one of the most fascinating characters of the year.

22. Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)
Sam Raimi’s return to horror was the best film the genre had to offer this year. Anchored by a great performance by Alison Lohman as a junior bank executive who in an effort to prove herself tough enough for a promotion, turns down an old woman’s request for an extension on her mortgage. She places a curse on her, that will result in her literally being dragged to hell in 48 hours. Raimi is a master at this sort of filmmaking, and after the lazy effort he put forth in Spider-Man 3, he seems to be reenergized here. Casting Lohman was brilliant - she is the perfect, blonde perky horror movie heroine - and has the best scream I’ve heard in years. The movie is scary, intense at times funny, but always a joy to watch. Great stuff.

21. Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper)
Jeff Bridges delivers one of the best performances of the year as Bad Blake, a former country music star now coasting on his prior fame, playing small bars and bowling alleys, while planning a comeback that doesn’t look like is going to happen. He is an alcoholic, and more often then not has to leave the stage early in order to puke. Then he meets a young woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her son, and decides it might be time to turn his life around. Crazy Heart is a fairly standard story - some critics called it The Wrestler of this year, and ones with longer memories remembered Tender Mercies (in which co-star of this movie Robert Duvall won his Oscar for). But Bridges carries the film with one of the most memorable performances of the year. Bridges, who has delivered many great performances over the past 40 years, does an amazing job, not just acting, but also singing. The music by T-Bone Burnett is memorable (The Weary Kind is easily the best song of the year). A great debut for director Scott Cooper.

20. The Road (John Hillcoat)
John Hillcoat is perhaps the only director in the world who could do justice to Cormac McCarthy’s great novel. No, it does not have the same impact of the book - which is disturbing in its sparse storytelling and dialogue - but it comes as close as any cinematic adaptation could. Viggo Mortenson gives one of his best performances as The Man, who along with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, great in his first screen role), head out on the road to get to the coast after some kind of cataclysmic event causes American to become a mainly desolate, barren wasteland. The father/son relationship between these two is the heart of the movie, but there are brilliant small roles throughout the film. Charlize Theron fleshes out the small role of The Man’s wife, seen only in flashback. Best of all though is Robert Duvall, who in one scene completely takes over the movie. The direction by Hillcoat, the spare art direction, and dark cinematography are all wonderful. One of the most underrated films of the year.

19. 500 Days of Summer (Marc Webb)
The year’s best romantic comedy, this intelligent, visually inventive film is a blast from beginning to end. Joseph Gordon Levitt gives a wonderful performance as an aspiring architect slumming it by writing greeting cards, when he meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a girl he thinks is the one. The movie flashes back and forth in time to show the before, during and after of the relationship. The film is entertaining, endearing and sweet without being overly sappy. A great debut film for director Marc Webb.

18. Police Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
The Romanian film Police, Adjective is certainly not for everyone. This is a film that literally climaxes with a scene involving a man reading aloud from the dictionary. But for patient viewers, Police Adjective offers a multitude of rewards. This is a quiet film about a cop two decades after the fall of communism, who is still torn between his personal morals and the law. His bosses do not care about his morals, they just want results. But he wonders if it is right to arrest a 16 year old kid for drug distribution for giving his friend a joint - something that will put the kid in jail for seven years. The film, for the most part a neo-realist slice of life, is also strangely hilarious at times. The cop has to go jump through a series of strange hoops to get anything done. The movie reminded of another great Romanian film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - where the simplest things are way too complex under Communist rule. Police, Adjective tells a similar story, even though decades have past. The scene involving the dictionary, the cop’s boss (brilliantly played by the great Vlad Ivanov) is the key to the whole movie. Most police movies are action oriented, but this movie is slow, yet steadily brilliant. A huge step forward for director Porumboiu).

17. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A middle aged man in Tokyo is fired from his job, but can not bear to tell his family about it. Instead, he leaves the house every day under the guise of going to work, but is really spending most of his time in the concrete jungle of Tokyo, hanging out with other unemployed businessmen, and the homeless men, getting in free food lines, and trying to land menial jobs. The other family members are also in denial, and are not being honest either. Kurosawa, best known for horror films, delivers a different kind of film this time - about the horror of an economy in collapse, and how being unemployed doesn’t necessarily ruin a family, but exposes the fault lines already there. The film takes a wild right turn in the final act, but it fits perfectly. A great family drama.

16. Avatar (James Cameron)
James Cameron’s Avatar will undoubtedly go down as the most influential film of the year. Cameron pushes special effects and 3-D filmmaking forward by leaps in bounds with his awe inspiring visual experience. The story is essentially Dances with Wolves in space, but we hardly care because the film is a visual wonder from beginning to end. The alien creatures, known as the Na’vi, are a wonder to behold. The action sequences prove that Cameron is still among the best action directors in the world. The performances are fine, especially Zoe Saldana who somehow creates a full character under all the special effects, and Stephen Lang one of the best villains in recent memory. Here’s hoping that next time Cameron has a story that matches his visual prowess - then we’ll have a masterpiece.

15. An Education (Lone Scherfig)
Carey Mulligan becomes a star right before our eyes with her brilliant performance in this film. As Jenny, a 16 year old school girl in 1960s England, she is tender, sweet and believable. She falls for an older man (Peter Sarsgaard), more because he can provide her with the type of lifestyle she wants then because she really loves him. As her father Alfred Molina is also wonderful, but this is really Mulligan’s film. Her sweet, open face, her natural delivery, her charming smile. She’s a star all right, and this is a great film for her coming out party.

14. The Messenger (Oren Moverman)
This film is about two different men who are assigned to the Causality Notification unit for the army. Ben Foster has just returned to Iraq, with an injured eye and leg, just trying to ride out his contract with the army, when he is told to report to Woody Harrelson. Their job is to go to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and let them know. The families respond in different ways, from anger to disbelief. One war widow, Samantha Morton, gets under Foster’s skin, and he finds himself returning to her again and again. The screenplay, by Oren Moverman, is wonderful - dramatic, moving and intelligent, and is brought to life by a great cast. Foster is brilliant as a man who plays everything close to the vest - never really revealing his true feelings until the films end. Harrelson is the opposite, continually talking trying to keep his demons at bay. And Morton is touching, and turns a difficult role into a great performance. A great, low-key directorial debut by writer Moverman.

13. Public Enemies (Michael Mann)
Michael Mann’s latest crime epic is a visually stunning, involving story about John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), who during the great depression captured the imagination of the nation. Depp is as charming as ever as Dillinger. He is a fast talking ladies man, who seduces everyone - from women to the prison guards to the people he robs. Christian Bale is also great as the FBI agent assigned to bring him in. As with most of Mann’s films, this is a movie about men who are defined by their actions and jobs. The film moves at a rapid pace throughout, and the digital photography by Dante Spinotti is brilliant. What elevates the movie though is Marion Cotillard’s great performance as Dillinger’s girl. Normally, Mann has no use for women, but Cotillard breaks through and makes her character a sexy, vulnerable, real woman. Her closing scene in the movie is an emotional powerhouse. One of Mann’s best films.

12. Up in the Air (Jason Reitman)
If there was an award for best movie of the moment, then Up in the Air would win that award for this year. This is a film about a man, played in a brilliant performance by George Clooney, who travels around the country firing people. His company hires him out to people who are too cowardly to fire their own employees. With the recession hitting hard, Clooney’s business is one of the few that are booming. Because he travels most of the year, he has become completely isolated from the rest of humanity - and that is the way he likes it. He gives “motivational” speeches about how family simply weighs people down. Then two women enter his life, and he changes his outlook. The first is a perky new hire in his firm, Anna Kendrick, who wants to revolutionize the way the do business - firing people via teleconference. He is ordered to take her on the road with him and show her the ropes. The other is a fellow road warrior, Vera Farmiga, who he meets for one of his many “one night stands”, that turns into something more. The two actually seem to start sharing an emotional connection. These two women draw Clooney back into the loop of humanity. Written and directed by Jason Reitman, who has made his third great comedy in recent years (following Thank You for Smoking and Juno), Up in the Air is the kind of comedy that Billy Wilder would be making today. It hides its sentimental heart under a surface of cynicism. Up in the Air is a movie made for our troubled times.

11. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)
Our leaders are idiots. That is the basic point of Armando Iannucci’s brilliant political satire. Tom Hollander’s Cabinet Member makes a gaff early in the movie saying that he thinks war is not foreseeable. This was not the company line he was supposed to tow, so the spokesman for the Prime Minister, the brilliantly profane Peter Capaldi, calls him in and screams bloody murder. But no matter what Hollander does to try to fix his mistake, he keeps digging himself in deeper. Obviously the movie is about the lead up to the war in Iraq, where British and American politicians wanted to invade Iraq, and just needed the evidence to make the case for the war. Young political aides write reports that are deliberately misstated by their highers up, military men threaten to resign if war is declared, and then cannot bring themselves to resign when their country is at war. In the Loop spins round and around making one dizzy with all the idiocy of all of on display. The movie is a triumph of writing - Ianucci and his co-writers spinning out their TV series The Thick Of It (sadly, I was unable to find the show on DVD here) - the movie has more swear words than a David Mamet movie, but still remains intelligent throughout. If you paid attention to the Canadian political landscape this year, you know that the leaders of all our political parties have proven themselves to be complete idiots. Yes, In the Loop is a brilliant, hilarious satire, but it is also sadly, all too true.