2009: We survived, and so did the cinema

What a glorious year for movies! The good ones found audiences (Hurt Locker) and the bad ones were panned, even by their hardcore fans (Transformers 2). I feel like that’s justice. To finish off 2009, here are the best films of the last year. See you in 2010.

— Michael Clawson

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10. The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is a talented actress. She so rarely gets to show that off, though. In The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock’s captivating human drama, Bullock presents the beautiful skills she’s been squandering in rom-com garbage. She plays a wealthy and white Tennessee socialite who plucks a poor and black teen off the street and adopts him. Race is a minor theme, as is football, but the movie has more important messages: it’s about the lengths people are willing to go to help those in need. Blind Side is also exceptionally cast with great performances by country singer Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron and child actors Jae Head and Lily Collins. It should also be noted that Blind Side is one of two movies this year — the other being Invictus — that did something I've been asking from sports movies for years: it showed the action on the football field without using omnipresent sports commentators. Audiences don't need voices to narrate sports, yet it's a Hollywood staple that is rarely ever absent from sports movies.

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9. Knowing
Instantly perplexing and feverishly debated earlier this year, Knowing was either loved or hated with no room in between. It stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who uncovers the fate of the universe in a string of numbers pulled from a time capsule. Besides being a convincing thriller, with some horror-type scares thrown in — not to mention a plane and a subway crash that are so realistic they’re scary — the film has actual dogma woven into its philosophical themes. Are events random, or are they part of a grander, more dreadful scheme? Knowing knows, but director Alex Proyas (Dark City) doesn’t bonk you on the head with the answer.

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8. Coraline/Fantastic Mr. Fox
Stop-motion animation is not going away. In fact, with these two films, it did better in 2009 than hand-drawn animation, which only had one release (The Princess and the Frog). Coraline, about a little girl getting sucked into a fake version of her own world, was creepy and a visual delight. And Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s quirky tale about a thieving squab-eating fox, was hilarious and intoxicatingly brilliant. Both films are based on children’s books, but both work because they don’t speak down to children. They speak up to them.

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7. The Hangover
No comedy from this year can even get close to The Hangover, a rip-roaring comedy powerhouse that sunk its teeth into our funny bone and never let go. Starring a bunch of underrated funnymen — Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper — the Vegas-set movie told a familiar story: men go to bachelor party, party too hard and then wake up with blurry visions of the previous night. As they retrace their steps the next day they come across Mike Tyson, a tiger, taser demonstrations and overacting goofball Ken Jeong. Classic comedies are few and far between, but this one made it look easy.

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6. Avatar
I wrote off director James Cameron for more than a decade. Who didn’t, really? But he proved me wrong with Avatar, his long-awaited, super-expensive sci-fi fantasy. Told using massive amounts of computer animation, as well as motion capture suits, Avatar is about a man who uploads his brain activity into the body of an alien being. And as that alien, called a Na’vi, he falls in love (with the sexiest of alien women), becomes a member of the tribe, rides a dragon and redeems his sins when man tries to mine the beautiful planet all this takes place on. The animation is incredible and awe-inspiring, the world is gorgeous, the characters are fully realized and complete, and the action is everything you’d expect from the guy that gave us Aliens and two Terminator films. James Cameron, you’ve proved me wrong.

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5. (500) Days of Summer
Relationships can get messy. It’s not pessimistic; it’s reality. (500) Days of Summer is the most realistic of romantic comedies, or maybe it’s a romantic drama. Featuring star players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Summer is an exploration on how fragile the human heart is, but also how resilient it is. It begins on Day 1 — or is it Day 500 — and jumps around from there to points through the 500 days our stars are in love. But a word of caution: “This is not a love story.” No, it’s so much more.

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4. Up
Pixar films make the world smile. And Up gives one of the biggest smiles. Carefully animated and expertly orchestrated — from characters and plot to music and laugh-out-loud gags — Up will make you look at the world with warmth and a little bit of adventure. Poor Mr. Ferguson, a widower facing an eminent domain fight, just wants to go to Paradise Falls. So he straps balloons to his house and flies it to South America. A little Boy Scout tags along, along with talking dogs and a female bird named Kevin, and the adventure soars. Up is a pure movie, as are all of Pixar’s movies.

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3. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s wordy and violent World War II film is a hilarious catharsis for everything that happened between us and the Nazis. Yes, Hitler is killed at the end, as is most of the German high command, but Inglourious Basterds is not meant to be historically accurate. It’s Tarantino’s version of events. Brad Pitt plays Aldo the Apache, a renegade soldier stomping through France butchering Nazis. There are other characters, too: Hans Landa, the sadistic Jew Hunter; Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew; and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a theater owner who plans to use film stock to decapitate the head of the Nazi party. Over-the-top and ridiculous, Basterds is Tarantino having a blast.

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2. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman is the next great director. After Juno no one was quite sure what to make of him: one hit wonder or bona fide filmmaker? Here we learn he’s legit, the real deal all the way. In the superbly written Up In the Air, he gives us George Clooney, a man who lives his entire life in airports, rental cars and from his suitcase. He’s hired to fire people for employers who don’t like firing people; and in this economy business is booming. The movie is so much more than that, though: he gets an energetic young apprentice, he falls in love with a female version of himself and he finds his shaky morals thrown off balance by the world that’s changing around him. A movie for our time, Up In the Air is also a terrific portrait of a lonely man.

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1. The Hurt Locker
I knew Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic and emotionally challenging war movie The Hurt Locker was my favorite movie of the year about 10 minutes into it. And that was in June, before so many other great movies would even be seen. Ignoring all the typical Hollywood action-film rules and choosing actors capable of realistic fear and anger, Hurt Locker stormed out of the gate with raw physical power. It knew what it was about, and it understood its characters in every way characters could be understood. It was about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s also about why men and women fight, how they cope, and why they second guess everything when they’re out there exposed to enemy machine gun nests, roadside bombs and sniper fire. This is an important film, a film we’ll be talking about many years after 2009.

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Honorable Mentions
Here are some films that almost made the list: Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex drama The Girlfriend Experience, the brutally honest Precious, John Hillcoat’s faithful version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the awesome Star Trek reinvention, the timely and appropriate military drama The Messenger, and Spike Jonze’s delightfully strange Where the Wild Things Are.