Some film fans like to make their Top 10 lists as early in December as possible; like checking off a Bingo card, they confidently assert that they've seen every relevant movie and are ready to weigh in. I envy their sureness, as it's taken me until the very last days of 2009 for my sense of the year in film to shift and settle. What was interesting about selecting my top ten movies, then, is how twinned they seemed, bound thematically, formally, and thrillingly. It may have been long in the making, but now that my list is in front of me, I couldn't have imagined it any other way.
Coraline (dir. Henry Selick)
Where the Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze)
Sure, Avatar's Pandora provided a gorgeous 3D spectacle, but the color-saturated world that really popped for me this year was the one that Henry Selick adapted from Neil Gaiman's novel in Coraline. Though it owes more than a fair bit to Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas collaborator Tim Burton (principally the riotous near-cartoon that is Beetlejuice) it's a testament to just how much imagination is unleashed that despite Coraline's influences, I felt myself continuously surprised by what came next. Part of Coraline's daring was in its willingness to go dark, and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are found similar rewards from mining the more fearsome aspects of childhood. It's a marvel that Dave Eggers could co-write both the year's worst film (Away We Go) and one of its best, but perhaps it helped that his potentially cloying sensibility was filtered this time through Jonze, an ineffable, inchoate, incredible auteur.
Antichrist (dir. Lars von Trier)
A Prophet (dir. Jacques Audiard)
Visually ravishing -- at least until you have to start watching it behind your fingers -- and emotionally punishing in every sense of the word, Lars von Trier's Antichrist also provided some of 2009's most shocking laughs, due in no small part to Charlotte Gainsbourg's central, bemused performance. (OK, the talking fox probably helped a little too.) Von Trier's obsession with misogyny becomes a very literal text in Antichrist, but Gainsbourg taunts Willem Dafoe in much the same way the actress must have tweaked the director. You want her to do what? OK, but don't blame her if she makes a mess. French director Jacques Audiard has indulged in some darkly comedic endeavors before (see his rude 2001 noir Read My Lips -- no seriously, see it) but it all felt like prelude to A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. Initially a claustrophobic prison tale, it opens up at the same time the world of budding gangster Malik (Tahar Rahim) begins to expand. A Prophet tells a familiar story, but the performances are crackerjack and the direction is kinetic. Audiard may be the most fluid shooter in film today.
Humpday (dir. Lynn Shelton)
Funny People (dir. Judd Apatow)
From I Love You Man to Sherlock Holmes, 2009 was surely the year of the cinematic bromance, and none were finer than Lynn Shelton's witty, giddy Humpday. Deftly setting up the highest of high concepts (two straight friends lock themselves into a bet where they must have sex with each other), then pivoting in unexpected directions, Humpday was an indie gem and a terrific showcase for mumblecore actor-auteur Mark Duplass, whose mid-movie monologue about a same-sex crush on a video store clerk simply couldn't be topped (ahem). The only other filmic friendship that could compare was the one between Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler in Judd Apatow's undervalued Funny People, which appropriated so many romcom beats -- they meet cute, court each other warily, come apart in a third-act blowup, then must reconcile -- that its eventual introduction of Leslie Mann feels all the more superfluous. Until then, though, Funny People is a dark, deeply felt dramedy that nails the competitive camaraderie of comics who jostle with their friends for dominance and then, upon attaining stardom, pine for the good old days of prank calls and tossed-off Thanksgivings.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (dir. Lee Daniels)
A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford)
Awards season can be an awfully dull, paint-by-numbers place, so how refreshing to have two riotously overblown films like Precious and A Single Man in the hunt. Each is a visual stunner that isn't afraid to go out on a campy limb, but neither's excess of style would work without career-best performances at their cores. Plenty has been written about Precious's Mo'Nique (and plenty more will be -- it's a tour-de-force for the ages), so I'll instead praise Gabourey Sidibe, whose Precious is almost thrillingly opaque but for the tiniest emotions and thoughts escaping before she has time to smother them. Her unlikely counterpart in A Single Man, Colin Firth, makes restraint seem just as riveting.
The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
The Messenger (dir. Oren Moverman)
Aside from Audiard's A Prophet, there wasn't a better shot film in 2009 than The Hurt Locker. There are so many Big Concepts surrounding the push for Kathryn Bigelow this year (It's time to celebrate a woman making a man's movie! And while we're at it, won't it be cute to see her go up against ex-husband James Cameron at the Oscars?) that I sometimes think the real reason's been obscured: The Hurt Locker is like a large-scale symphony made up of combustible instruments, and Bigelow is its unflappable conductor. (It's no coincidence that Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James shares the same Zen demeanor.) While The Hurt Locker gave us a man and a director who came alive in the theater of war, The Messenger excelled by chronicling the people at home who've been deflated by it. In scene after shattering scene, the film exposes the canard that the best way to pay tribute to the troops is to make them mythic -- and to look the other way when they die. They say that the best films about a war are made several years after it began. The Hurt Locker and The Messenger fulfill that maxim while reminding us that nothing has ended.