By two.one.five Staff  |  Send to Friend

Somewhere in the annuls of film lore, I suspect 2007 will go down as one of the more magical cinematic years in two decades. 2009? Not so much. Not there weren't some solid contenders, but let's just say the words "banner year" don't come to mind. Nevertheless, here are our picks for the best (and worst) of 2009.

The Top Ten Films of 2009

10. Precious
Dir. Lee Daniels
Set in Harlem circa 1987, 16-year-old Clareece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) lives in a treacherous terrain laden with crack cocaine, sex, violence and a failing education system. She navigates this ugly world with strength -- almost too calmly -- and doesn’t ask for much. New actress Sidibe produces one of the most successful debuts of the year with her astute portrayal. She infuses Precious with both a resigned detachment and an endearing sense of humor, which is a key component of the film's effectiveness. Lighter touches pepper the film and keep it from being unrelentingly dejecting, as in the scenes with Precious and her classmates at the alternative school or her interjectory fantastical daydreams. In these moments, Precious and her world even more tangibly authentic; the light helping to offset the dark.  -Janday Wilson
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9. Where the Wild Things Are
Dir. Spike Jonze
The wild rumpus soon devolves into a bit of a pity party, as the Wild Things (voiced by such luminaries as James Gandolfini, Catharine O'Hara, Chris Cooper and Forrest Whitaker) begin to exhibit too many of their king’s frailties. They bicker, become jealous, and begin to doubt Max’s kingly credentials. This melancholy dreamscape is a bit too wispy at times, lacking the continuity and meaningful plot points that make for a truly great story. But it is a figment of a child’s imagination, after all, and the nostalgia trip hits home with such heartwarming authenticity that it is well worth the somber tones and unconnected dots.  -Lance Duroni
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8. The Hurt Locker
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
Screenwriter Mark Boal has created a kind of war film/horror picture, with an almost unceasing crush of tension, and long, involved scenes of the three main protagonists searching through cavernous desertscapes and menacingly deserted buildings. The film hinges on William James, who remains fascinatingly inaccessible to us. Like Melville's Bartleby, he is at once separate from and creator of the narrative's thrust. We see him on his own, drinking, smoking, rassling with his compadres, shopping for cereal back at home with his young family, but never get more than a glance inside his head (where, one supposes, the closed-off pain the title suggests is all stored away).  -Piers Marchant
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7. An Education
Dir. Lone Scherfig
What sets this brilliant small film apart from its standard-sounding trappings is the intelligence and rectitude of its main character. Jenny might be young, but she is not so easily seduced. Part of David's insidious charm is he finds that which is most compelling to people and uses that against them. Jenny is a young woman who "wants to know things." She doesn't become something she's not, in the manner of a country mouse/city mouse fable, rather, she begins to experience all the things she will later come to find, but far too quickly. She takes a shortcut, in other words, not a detour.  -Piers Marchant
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6. The Limits of Control
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
Director Jim Jarmusch’s never really been one for the climatic, three-point, tried and true formula Hollywood film structure. Here, he further proves his plot defiance and again positions his family of characters around brief encounters and vague dialogue. In short, it’s everything you love about Jarmusch and, frankly, it’s pretty bad-ass.  Isaach, in his perfectly-pressed shark skin suits and stolid demeanor, travels a sturdy path between rendevous with personalities better suited for Cocteau’s experimental films; an always-nude nymph, the bohemian guitarist, the prolific actress and many ambiguous others that propel the story into a sort of mystery novel, dropping clues for both the viewer and the lead to figure out not only the film, but their destiny.  -Abigail Bruley
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5. The Class
Dir. Laurent Cantet
Despite the setting, though, this isn't a facile paean to the sublime power of teaching, a la Dangerous Minds or Dead Poets Society, rather Bégaudeau, who wrote both the book and screenplay adaptation, culls from his own experience, using a classroom filled with non-actor students (though not his own), to achieve something closely approximating documentary. Using mostly handheld cameras and keeping the lens in tight close-up to the characters, director Cantet dispenses with the standard classroom platitudes and clichéd arcs, to find something new and fresh to reveal.
-Piers Marchant
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4. Boy Interrupted
Dir. Dana Heinz Perry
If nothing else, the film really does an admirable job capturing the ups and downs of the disease of bipolar disorder, which tends to yo-yo its victims in a never ending surge and crash. The idea that Dana and her husband Hart were able to deal with their child’s death in order to make this film is almost beyond comprehension. At one point, Dana admits that she first went into the project seeking closure but, ultimately, it’s not what she wants you to get out of the film. “It’s not about who he was or what happened to him," she explains, "its about knowing that someone loved him enough for you to remember his name.”  -Robby Stillwagon
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3. Adoration
Dir. Atom Egoyan
At his best, Egoyan deftly delves through the dangerous depths of human feeling, the catacombs where many directors fear to tread, expertly  inspecting psychological causation in most unexpectedly effective ways. The film manages to mine issues of fault, circumstance, personal origins, and religious self-sacrifice within the miniscule confines of one family. The result is jarringly intimate. Egoyan has viewers exactly where he wants them -- on a tight leash -- throughout the film, a film noir-type exercise in mystery not so much concerned with whodunit but why, exploring both the ethics of terrorism and the allure of becoming a victim, where lies are rooted in lonely desperation and the simple search for human connection overwhelms nearly everything else.  -Alison Greenberg
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2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Dir. Wes Anderson
There are only a few summations that matter about the Wes Anderson puppet animation picture: The first thing you need to know? It’s just a masterpiece. Maybe not in the Pride and Prejudice manner, but rather in the way one hundred individually-snot-nosed adolescent boys could come together and form an angelic choir: It’s harmoniously constructed by several smaller, scruffier parts. There is the craftsmanship and fluidity of the stop-motion animation; the novel narrative arrangement that somehow manages to introduce and resolve several mini-plots without leading the viewer off track; and the Anderson golden main-stays -- like the grand aqueous pans of multiple scenes at once, the story-book character introductions and chapters, and of course, a reverent soundtrack filled with ‘60s rarities. Mr. Fox simultaneously manages to be a sweet, tender and complicated, larger-than-life action film.  -Abigail Bruley
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1. A Serious Man
Dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
Working along similar lines as the Talmud-like fable that opens the film, the subsequent narrative arc allows for simultaneous arguments for and against the methodology of the higher power. Regardless of your perspective, the brothers Coen have certainly lost none of their cinematic power. It also has echoes of some of their earlier work, including an exchange with Danny and his friends that, in pace and execution, spools out like something directly lifted from Lebowski, but rather than make another film out of these expertly honed details, one gets the sense they are digging a bit deeper into their own philosophical anguish. Whatever the case, this quiet film still builds into a startlingly moving crescendo. The Coens' stalwart lack of pity has never been more effective.  -Piers Marchant
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And the Bottom Five:

5. Amelia
Dir. Mira Nair
The disjointed scenes never really add up to much of anything as far as interpersonal dynamics go, and there's almost no sense of Amelia herself, transformed by her immense celebrity and the resolutely capitalist strivings of her husband. As an icon of feminine strength and resolve, the screenwriters give precious little for their Earhart to connect with, and even less to do, other than force everyone in her life to grant her the freedom she's forever rhapsodizing. The curious effect is to actually diminish what Earhart managed to accomplish in her life. By the time she and George reconnect after a separation amidst the crashing surf and rolled up khakis of a Viagra ad, you realize the film has almost nothing in its core.  -Piers Marchant
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4. Couples Retreat
Dir. Peter Billingsley
This film is the story of three boring white guys; their insanely hot, yet soulless wives; and a black guy who pretends to enjoy hanging out with douchey white dudes so that Vince Vaughn’s character will cosign for his new crotch-rocket. Worst yet, in her first major role since Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Kristen Bell again plays a bitchy woman dealing with relationship issues in paradise. Seriously, it's as if the actress never even left the island -- just sipped a margarita and waited for the next camera crew to show up. A chick flick in Old School clothing, it's the kind of insipid Hollywood trash that leaves you praying for earthquakes in the hope that vengeful forces of nature might demolish Tinseltown and allow us to restart the American film industry from scratch.  -Lance Duroni
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3. Angels & Demons
Dir. Ron Howard
It is not giving away much to say that the kidnapping scheme is only but a small part of a larger -- absolutely, spot-on idiotic -- caper that turns everything on its head at the expense of any conceivable plausibility. As for the Church, they come across far more benevolent and wise than in Brown's previous novel, culminating in an absolutely embarrassing monologue about the power of the Church by the acting Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) to the Cardinals deep in conclave. Not sense James Earl Jones asinine "the one constant is Baseball, Ray" speech in Field of Dreams has any mouthful of uttered dialogue rang as completely false and unjustified.  -Piers Marchant
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2. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
Dir. Tony Scott
It's a simple thing, really. We don't require much of our cinematic supervillains other than they have a plan that goes beyond something we could have come up with on our own, standing in the office cafeteria line. If, on top of that, they also manage to be believably intelligent, cutthroat and despicable, that's pretty much icing. So, here's your basic problem with casting John Travolta as the aforementioned bad guy: He can't pull off intelligence or believability. In fact, he can't even seem to find the right cadence to say "motherfucker" without sounding vaguely embarrassed, like someone's elderly aunt.  -Piers Marchant
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1. Taken
Dir. Pierre Morel
The film, co-written by Luc Besson, who should certainly know better, is inexcusably lazy, laying out a facile series of elements for Bryan to trail in order to recover his daughter, whom he rescues more or less by herself, leaving all the other poor daughters not lucky enough to have a skilled assassin for a pop to their own devices. If the film is trying to make a statement against Bush-era diplomacy, it's far too dimwitted to avoid getting caught up in the exact opposite, making a dubious case for achieving one's goal by any violent means necessary. Still, the film won't be hated by everyone, much as it may deserve; Dick Cheney will certainly like the cut of its jib.  -Piers Marchant
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