Saturday 3 April 2010

The Best Films of 2009, 20-11

20. The Cove
19. Encounters at the End of the World
The year's best - and most cinematic - ecological documentaries, though they probably wouldn't want to be billed as such. The Cove, Louie Psihoyos' gripping expose of the senseless slaughter of dolphins by Japanese fishermen, played out in the mode of an Ocean's 11-style heist thriller, complete with hidden cameras and tense night-vision set-pieces; Encounters... found mad Werner Herzog venturing up to the isolated McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, where he was to train his singular eye on people, rather than wildlife, although his film also found time to address the pressing issues of penguin prostitution and derangement. Both were enthralled by the prospect of individuals making a difference in their respective fields, whether that meant a former star of TV's Flipper lobbying the International Whaling Commission to step up sanctions against dolphin-killers, or research scientists gushing with laboratory zeal about parasitic worms living in the human anus.

18. Katalin Varga
Brit Peter Strickland's breathless breakthrough straddled two camps: it was at once a recognisable contribution to the recent renaissance in Eastern European cinema, complete with ominous landscapes, glowering locals and the grimmest of endings, and a pacy, 82-minute rape-revenge thriller after the manner of I Spit on Your Grave (or The Virgin Spring, if you want to go highbrow). Tremendous central performance by Hilda Peter, the expression on her face shifting like the clouds over a Transylvanian valley.

17. Thirst
Another thrilling hybrid, fusing the oversexed vampire movie with Therese Raquin to arrive at a wild Gothic melodrama all its own. Those who saw (and squirmed through) Park Chan-wook's Oldboy will know the bloody extremes to which this director is prepared to go, but Thirst derived its primary force from setting out its central love story against a comparatively mundane domestic backdrop, and from an acute awareness of the horrors that can follow whenever our affections begin to clot.

16. Pontypool
With the mainstream falling back on tried-and-tested franchises, and the major North American directors (Fincher, Mann, Tarantino) all delivering sub-par work this year, the field was wide-open for ingenious little genre movies such as this: nothing to do with the Welsh town, but the latest in a long line of conceptual Canadian horror movies, detailing a radio shock jock's attempts to piece together on air the chaos going on outside his studio - something to do with a virus carried by language, turning people into mindless, drooling zombies. Bruce McDonald's film has as much of Barthes and Baudrillard in its DNA as it does John Carpenter, boasts a terrific, anchoring turn from the underrated Stephen McHattie as the DJ under attack, and comes to make positively exhilarating the business of trying to save the world with words.

15. Timecrimes/Los Cronocrimenes
Spain, meanwhile, continued to throw out genre movies of a rare, casual brilliance: I liked the mathematical chamber piece Fermat's Room, too, but this was the standout, mashing up elements from Rear Window, Back to the Future, The Invisible Man and Run Lola Run as middle-aged schlub Hector (Karra Elejalde) attempts to prevent the murder he's spied through binoculars. It gets almost impossibly complicated and self-reflexive, and veers towards outright exploitation at times - the hero's redirection of the crime under investigation depends upon the repeated undressing of a nubile young woman, in effect according us multiple angles on the same nude scene - yet the underlying structure is as gorgeously classical as anything I saw this year: we get three acts, three Hectors, and three different outcomes, depending on what the character has learned along the way. I'm guessing the mooted U.S. remake won't be anything like as good.

14. Rachel Getting Married
All I'm saying is, if you're going to watch one Anne Hathaway wedding movie, don't make it Bride Wars. The most generous picture of the year, even towards characters who'd be a nightmare in real life, beautifully acted by its ensemble cast.

13. Milk
For allowing us to warm to Sean Penn. Unusually intelligent and engrossing as biography, and something of a continuation of Harvey Milk's own work, establishing a forum for passionate and stirring, even straight-friendly advocacy.

12. The Wrestler
It doesn't work quite as well on DVD as it did in the dark, where the new-found immediacy of Darren Aronofsky's direction handed us a seat in the front row and left us better placed to breathe in the film's top notes of popcorn and liniment, but there's no denying which was the most triumphant acting comeback of the year: however Oscar-worthy Sean Penn was in Milk, it's hard not to think Mickey Rourke's Randy The Ram woz robbed.

11. Sugar
Just pipping The Wrestler as the year's best sports movie, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's sensitively honed follow-up to Half Nelson serves as a latter-day immigration song, following a promising young baseball talent from the Dominican Republic as he ventures north to seek his fortune in the New World. It's an unusual film in taking as its subject no superstar, but a player not quite good (or not quite committed) enough for the major leagues - a journeyman, in every sense of the word - yet it remains an entirely affirmative experience, reverent about both baseball and religion, and finding genuine wonder in the first time the hero steps out in front of his (new) home crowd. The game scenes have the carefully cultivated veracity of the golf in Tin Cup or the gridiron in Friday Night Lights, but it's those funny, truthful encounters away from the pitcher's mound that stay with you: the protagonist's linguistic inability to order anything other than French toast in a diner, or the final, hugely touching pause for thought Boden, Fleck and leading man Algenis Perez Soto arrive at. (Footnote for cinema programmers: there's no pressing thematic reason to schedule this on a double-bill with my number 13 film, but don't you think the two titles would look rather fun next to one another on a marquee?)

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