Panopticon Blog

I’ll begin with the same disclaimer that I always do when publishing a Top Ten List: I have not seen all the films that have been appearing regularly on other critics’ Top Tens, including In The Loop, The White Ribbon, The Cove, The Young Victoria, etc. etc. But what I have seen in 2009, after the relative quality wasteland of 2008 (how many great films from last year can you think of off the top of your head?), has been encouraging in its quality. I actually had a pretty tough time narrowing things down to ten (though I could have easily fit everything I’ve liked thus far this year into fifteen). This has been a great year for tough dramas, science fiction and, above all, animation.

10. Two Lovers

Joaquin Phoenix gives a remarkable performance, full of Method ticks that recall Brando’s great blue-collar roles, as Leonard Kratidor in James Gray’s thoughtful tale of a bi-polar man caught between two women – the deeply unstable Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the more reliable, family endorsed Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). This is mostly an actors’ showcase – Isabella Rosellini is also quite good as Leonard’s mother – as well as a charmingly miniature portrait of family, business, love and sex in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

9. The Informant!

In the year’s most underrated movie, director Stephen Soderbergh deftly deconstructs populist legal dramas – like his own Erin Brockovich – with a deceivingly goofy tale of an inept whistle blower, brilliantly played by a rumpled Matt Damon. What starts as a comic satire of corporate intrigue, complete with inscrutable voice-over and a jaunty score by Marvin Hamlisch, turns into a grand inquisition on the nature of The Truth.

8. Up

Up is Pixar’s most emotionally mature film to date, and also one of its goofiest. That the film keeps up both tones throughout is a testament to the brilliant storytelling of the Pixar team. The much-loved opening – a fifteen-minute, nearly wordless montage of an entire married life – deserves the hype, but the film’s second half, with scenery worthy of Miyasaki and scenarios (talking dogs flying planes!) worthy of Looney Tunes, is amongst Pixar’s most purely entertaining work.

7. Up in the Air

For most of its running time, Up in the Air is a whip-smart, up-to-the-second topical character study of a professional corporate downsizer who, more than anything, values his traveler’s lifestyle, to the point of practically fetishizing his frequent flyer miles. George Clooney, smarmy yet vulnerable, continues his run of great roles, but it’s really the film’s ladies – Vera Farminga as his kindred traveling soul and Anna Kendrick as an up-and-coming corporate downsizer – that really steal the show. Co-writer/director Jason Reitman keeps things snappy, funny and surprisingly sentiment free, for the most part. Even though the film becomes shockingly moralistic and excessively judgmental of its characters in the final few minutes, it’s still one of the year’s most entertaining films.

6. A Serious Man

Every Coen Brothers’ movie is inscrutable in its own way – usually they work within a well-worn genre and then explode it from the inside. I suppose A Serious Man’s genre would be memoir/religious/suburban satire, but this does not begin to do the film justice. Ostensibly a tale of seemingly undeserving abuse of a decent, mild-mannered physics teacher (Michael Stuhlberg, wonderfully exasperated), A Serious Man also deals with questions of fate, faith and rock and roll in the 1960s Midwest. A Serious Man really only belongs to one genre: Coen.

5. A Single Man

Some have accused Tom Ford’s debut film of being an hour and a half long perfume commercial, a claim that I reject completely. Yes, Ford’s direction is maximally sumptuous, but lets not mistake style with lack of substance. Ford’s meticulously arranged, austerely photographed film binds its protagonist, a homosexual man struggling to survive in the wake of his long-time lover’s death, within the social structures of his particular time and place. Colin Firth, in a devastating, Oscar-deserving performance, reveals all the pain, and the little moments of beauty, of a man with nothing left to lose.

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox

The 2009 film most destined to become a cult classic has got to be Fantastic Mr. Fox. Directed by Wes Anderson, in his finest work since Rushmore, this stop-motion gem falls between several genre cracks – it’s too talky for kids, it’s too cute for the cynical, it’s too weird for casual filmgoers. And while it may take a while to find it’s audience, I think that in time there will be legions of fans cherishing this caper film where Mr. Fox (George Clooney, hilariously loquacious) spurns his job as a journalist (!) to lead a chicken stealing heist. Blessed with the year’s finest, most quotable screenplay, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a future classic.

3. The Hurt Locker

War movies often lose the personalities of their characters within broad historical plotlines, clumsy political commentary and empty explosions. The Hurt Locker avoids all these traps by sticking with a very small, elite squad of bomb diffusers in Iraq. Yes, there’s nerve-racking suspense and bone rattling explosions. But there are quiet moments of character, especially between the live-wire Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner, in a star-making performance) and the steadier Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie, quieter but also terrific). Director Katheryn Bigelow keenly observes the intra-group dynamics with the same pitiless scrutiny in which she stages the film’s transfixing action sequences.

2. Coraline

In what was probably the finest year for animation ever, Henry Selick’s beguiling adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline was the cream of the crop. Lovingly crafted stop-motion puppetry and captured in sumptuous 3D (though the film is still brilliant in two measly dimensions), Coraline is an endlessly rewarding visual feast. The story, a Freudian dreamscape where our plucky heroine finds an ideal, identical (in most ways) world through a tiny door in her new home, may be a bit scary for a children’s film, but like many classics it evokes – Alice in Wonderland, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure – the film taps into the essential terror and wonder of late childhood.

1. Inglourious Basterds

It seemed as if Quentin Tarantino had painted himself into a retro-sploitation corner over the last few years – how did the once groundbreaking filmmaker end up a career rehasher of D-grade genre flicks? Not that this digression hasn’t yielded some fruit (I especially liked Kill Bill Volume 2) but the prospect of a grindhouse World War II film from QT hardly seemed like reason to sit up and take notice. And yet, Inglourious Basterds confounds expectations, both intra- and extra-textual. Full of impossible to predict plot-twists, white-knuckle suspense, soot-black humor and acid-tongued dialogue, Basterds is without a doubt QT’s best film since Pulp Fiction. Equal measures classically constructed and deeply offbeat, this two pronged revenge tale – one anchored by Brad Pitt’s hilariously hammy Lt. Aldo Raine and his “Natzee” killing basterds, the other by the wonderful Marie Laurent’s cinema owning, heritage hiding Shoshanna – dovetails in an explosive finale that above all celebrates the God-like power of cinema. Holding the two strands between his teeth is Christoph Waltz, whose performance as Hans Landa, the “Jew Hunter,” will go down as one of the great villains of the 2000s.