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…

As the above poster testifies, this is Tarantino’s most personal film yet – you don’t even need the title, just his name! (Okay, that decision was probably made for this tube poster due to the possibly offensive actual title but still, it’s pretty telling of the film itself.) The film is a virtual stand in for the man himself and his pre-occupations (which might put off some) what with the conversations about obscure movies, the dismantling of macho mythology, the assent of the empowered female and more than anything else the depiction of how films are made and exhibited.

But let’s be clear. Inglourious Basterds. If you don’t love this film, you don’t love film. It’s that simple. This is pure cinematic heroin of the highest order. I came out of the cinema reeling from so pure a hit. I found it a very disorientating experience. I haven’t reacted like this since seeing ‘There Will Be Blood’. And although the films are thematically and stylistically opposed, they both share some fundamental essence. Time and space as we know it (especially as we know it in film terms) get thrown out the window. Both films are massive, immersive epics that at the same time deal in microscopics, scenes play out in overwhelming length and detail, a dream like stasis is achieved only to be periodically blown apart by geysers of kineticism. I found it most apt to hear in this interview Tarantino talking of his admiration for TWBB and that he considers PT Anderson the peer to beat.

Tarantino is drawing inspiration for this technique more directly from Sergio Leone, whilst Anderson was feeding off Kubrick. He’s taken Leone’s approach to the set-piece (a long, slow build-up of tension crescendoing in a moment of abrupt violence) and taken it not only to the extreme but applied it to the micro and macro levels of the whole film. So that the film basically consists of a handful of long, tense scenes each climaxing with some violent catharsis and the film as a whole does the same thing, feeling like one, rising build-up to the mother of all climaxes. It’s incredibly effective and affective. This is the first film of his where I’ve laughed out loud and been brought to the verge of tears, constant emotional gearshifts that in this age of inert, pre-processed fodder, feels like real shock and awe.

And yet the film certainly isn’t perfect, whatever that means. There are dissonant notes struck along the way but any minor quibbles are washed away by the euphoria of the whole. I also have the sneaking suspicion that Tarantino is purposefully hitting the occasional wrong note. After becoming a household name with his first few films, so perfectly capturing the zeitgeist (or did it capture him?) that he ran the risk of becoming totally co-opted by the wider culture. His identity was no longer his. He went into virtual hiding and didn’t make a film for six years, re-emerging with the Kill Bills and a new aesthetic. After being canonized with just a couple of films, what else could he do to stop himself ossifying other than actively torpedo his own work? He doesn’t want to be an elder statesman of cinema, universally accepted and thus irrelevant. He often speaks of retiring when he’s sixty so that he doens’t end up like one of those directors who should have stopped while they were still hot. He wants to be the perpetual enfant terrible because the other option is being the inert relic, admired but not blowing minds. And man, that’s just not cool. (Pesonally, I hope he doesn’t retire at sixty and I think many directors continue doing great work to the very end, Welles, Kubrick, Leone, Ophuls etc.)

So, like, what’s the film about? It’s about film. It’s not about WW2, that war just provides the lexicon for the discussion. The real battle being fought is the war on film. The critical heat the film’s been getting is baffling and disheartening – that so many critics could be blind to the most heartfelt and touching love letter to cinema since ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Nowhere else does one get schooled so well in the history of cinema and in the production and projection of cinema. In years to come, when everything’s gone digital and perhaps even cinema houses themselves become obsolete, this film will be seen and people will learn of and yearn for the days when a beam of light shone over a crowd of strangers in a darkened room, nitrate frames blown up to terrifying sizes, an era when stars still had faces.

I risked getting my phone jacked taking this shot at 3am by Old Street.

(I’ve purposefully avoided revealing too much about the film, just go see it already. Some spoilers follow, so read the rest after having seen it.)

Feminists really need to get their shit together and get behind Tarantino. He’s their best bet in Hollywood today. IB continues his mission to tear apart cinematic male mythologies and replace them with some kind of female ubermensch. The supercool gang of pals at the start of Reservoir Dogs are revealed to be untrustworthy, psychopathic and ultimately unknowable. The mythical Bill turned out to be an annoying old man, no epic kung-fu showdown required, his killing was pure domesticity. The badass slasher killer of Death Proof turned out to be a whimpering pussy, no match for the film saavy group of hot chicks. And in IB, the men-on-a-mission stuff is just a front to draw you in only to reveal that the Basterds are really a bunch of inept sadistic Yahoos and that the real hero of the piece is actually a heroine – a beautiful, smart, sincere, focussed French heroine who is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice but doesn’t lose her humanity in the process.

This heroine, Shosanna, could be seen as Tarantino’s alter ego, his anima made flesh perhaps. Like him, she uses cinema to blow away the audience, to blow away history and therefore the rules, making good on Hitchcock’s threat to put a bomb under seat of the spectators. It’s no coincidence that the cinema gets blown up, while showing a (within the context of the film) historically accurate war film which Shosanna/Quentin has sabotaged with their own take on movie/history, while the film maker of said war film, Goebbels, is in the auditorium, with the most important critic, Hitler, also in the house. The terrorist film-maker has the last laugh on them all as the movie lives on after they and even him/herself are dead. Surely this whole sequence is Tarantino’s rebuttal to all critics of Basterds lack of reverence to real history and war movie history.  He gives us the ending that every other WW2 film wishes they could have given us but couldn’t because they were too busy making Nations Pride. Quentin had to destroy cinema in order to save it.