After much deliberation, here’s my favourite flicks of oh nine. It’s a bizarre mix of kids films and gut-punchers; arthouse and mainstream. Full contrast ahead.

10. The Hurt Locker

Too much shaky cam but still pulls off many a tense set piece of bomb disposal and the whole thing just feels hella authentic. Review here.

9. Where The Wild Things Are

The best movie without a plot all year. Jonze and Eggars have perfectly adapted a ten page childrens book into a feature length film without artificially adding some quest for treasure or some capitalist baddie who wants to knock down the hero’s neighbourhood. They’ve miraculously managed to just enlarge the essence of what was originally there, like some fractal experiment. And created their own individual work at the same time, something Watchmen perhaps should have strived for.

8. Star Trek

Solid summer entertainment. It’s not in the upper echelons of cinematic art but just by not getting anything basically wrong it achieves some kind of awesomeness. And when the standard of blockbuster surrounding it is so low with films like Terminator Salvation and Transformers 2, you appreciate Trek even more.

7. Keith Schofield

Yeah this ain’t a film (though I would definitely watch one called that), he’s a promo director and he’s responsible for the two best music videos of the year. The first, for Justice’s remix of ‘Let Love Rule’ by Lennie Kravitz, is filling the movie void left by the end of the 80s and the ascent of the Coen Bros.

His other work of wonder, ‘Heaven Can Wait’, is the second entry in this list to feature Charlotte Gainsbourg, here doing a good Aimee Mann impersonation and fittingly Schofield does a great take on PT Andersons’s magical realism, Magnolia era. Each shot is a snatch of some bigger story but we move on just as you clock what’s going on. More ideas per second than, I dunno, some genius machine.

Watch both videos on Keith’s site here.

6. Watchmen

The greatest title sequence of the year. And one of the best opening scenes, ‘unforgettable’. The idea of adapting the most critically lauded and epic comic book of all time was damned from the start but they did about the best they could. It feels a little rushed in places, even at three hours but still offers up some amazing visuals and ideas. Certainly the strangest mainstream movie around and I salute it for that. Watching this without having read the comic first must be like eating WTF cake.

5. UP

Like Wall-E, the first twenty minutes are pure gold. Says more about life and time in that wonderful early sequence than Benjamin Buttons said in three hours. The rest of the film can’t quite live up to that first part but it’s still great stuff and brilliantly directed. So refreshing to see shots that have been carefully chosen and composed and allowed the time to play out that they demand. In a fucking cartoon. Shaky cam culprits I’m talking to you!

4. Antichrist

A true horror film, it gets to the misogynistic heart of what lies just beneath so many other entries in the genre. A genuine work of art, it is beautiful and it provokes. And that is all I ask for.

3. The White Ribbon

Not as thought provoking as Haneke’s previous high of Hidden (Cache’) but still a mighty work. Like Bresson with a dash of Von Triers and Kubrick. I’m also a sucker for black and white photography and movies set in a village where all is not what it seems. The precision of the cruelty in this film is the iciest since Haneke’s own The Piano Teacher.

2. A Serious Man

Perhaps the most Coenesque Coen Bros. film yet. From the hat in Miller’s Crossing to No Country for Old Men’s dream, they’ve always been masters of the ambiguous and often sudden ending. Here they may have out done themsel-

1. Inglourious Basterds

This gets the top spot for many reasons that you can read here but mainly because it remains my favourite cinematic experience of the year. I’ve only watched it the once, slightly nervous another viewing will not be as stellar but nothing can take away from the feeling of elation I had walking out of that first screening.

So it’s been a great year for movies, not quite as incredible as 2007 but still showing that cinema is in a better place artistically than at anytime since the end of the 70s.

Feel free to post your own top tens in the comments…

Bigelow has previously exclaimed her love for ‘heightened emotional states’ in movies and so the setup here seems like a dream project – what cold be more emotionally heightened than a team of guys trying to diffuse bombs in a warzone whilst having a personal conflict amongst themselves as well? She loves men too. She clearly is fascinated by the complex dynamic of the bromance, finding the latent femininity in the bravado of the most macho. It’s a shame things didn’t work out between her and former husband James Cameron, who seemed like her perfect mirror match – a male action movie director who found the kick ass warrior lurking in the Mother (Aliens, Terminator 1 & 2 etc). For me, one of the most tantalising what-if prospects of recent years is imagining what Terminator Salvation would have been like if directed by Bigelow!

This film basically consists of a series of unconnected suspense sequences that may or may not end with a kaboom, making for an episodic journey that feels quite random and sketchy. I guess that was a conscious choice, a way of reflecting the ‘reality’ of the Iraq situation the soldiers face and it works as far as it goes but is ultimately unsatisfying. The ending left me cold, especially the cheesy last shot but then I’ve never been much of a fan of circular narratives. Earlier scenes recalled Full Metal Jacket in terms of the black humour and disjointed pacing but that film had a very specific target in it’s sights that Kubrick lined up and hit without the audience even realising. Things are alot more fuzzy here. There seems to be some stylistic conflict going on. I think Bigelow makes great movies but here she wanted to make a FILM. So we get the Iraq setting (sans polemics and finger pointing thankfully, there’s good and bad on both sides here) and the verite’ implication of the Shaky-Cam, which feels at odds with the movie-movie suspense and occasional cinematic flourishes like slow motion cartridges cart-wheeling in the dust. One of the last shots in the movie abandons the Shaky-Cam for a tripod and a nicely composed, static frame. And boy, it made me wish the whole film had been shot like this, I think it would even have heightened the suspense. The faux realism of handheld camera work feels just as contrived now as whatever it was cats were trying to break free of when they first kicked over their tripods. Mercifully, Bigelow still knows how to delineate screen space in an action scene and the camera work never veers into nausea-inducing territory.

Whilst the ending dampened my enthusiasm for the movie, theres still alot to appreciate here from the seriously tense bomb scenes to the infectious male bonding of the barracks scenes. The most impressive aspect is perhaps the unnervingly realistic recreation of Iraqi streets that act as both hub of city life and treacherous warzone. All in, this is the least dry ‘Iraq War Film’ yet and for that it should be commended.

No, not a scene from the film but rather, what happens when you have a soft drink malfunction.