Examiner Movie Critic Sally Kline ranks her 10 best films of 2009 1. “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire” – The year’s best film was also its most moving. I felt changed on a deep level after viewing this drama of a girl’s modest transcendence above relentless abuse by her parents and the neglect of society. Marked by the fearless acting of Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique and the soulful direction of Lee Daniels, its characters are so human, so real. We are forced to rethink the concepts of hopelessness and evil by them.
2. “Up” – The year’s sweetest film, and best animated one, took an unusual buddy team on a grand balloon adventure of colorful spectacle, goofy humor and intergenerational bonding. This latest Pixar triumph idolizes a senior citizen eluding the retirement home and a fat kid from a broken home as its swashbuckling heroes! And a short silent film within the film, depicting a couple’s life together, is the most memorable movie nugget of 2009.
3. “Up in the Air” – The year’s most sophisticated film mixes adversity and wit with effortless finesse, thanks to director-writer Jason Reitman and his star, George Clooney. In a relevant tale of recessionary downsizing, modern travel culture and male commit-phobia, they find the lightness while not denying the darkness as a company man’s cold heart melts.
4. “Inglourious Basterds” – The year’s best thriller is a kick-butt, World War II revenge fantasy marked by some of the most tense, riveting set pieces ever staged by the notoriously idiosyncratic auteur Quentin Tarantino. And, as a major bonus, lots of Nazis die.
5. “A Single Man”/”A Serious Man” – The year’s two best films about existential angst, both set in the 1960s, are about good men trying to find meaning and rise above unrelenting heartache. Colin Firth portrays a grief-stricken single man with poetic restraint; the Coen brothers impart a hapless serious man with deadly dry humor.
6. “Julie & Julia” – The year’s most adorable love story wasn’t about the usual spring chickens. Rather, it featured a towering middle-aged cooker of such fowl. Meryl Streep — in a tour de force as Julia Child — was especially enchanting when depicting the famous chef’s passionate, late-in-life marriage to a short, bald smitten Stanley Tucci.
7. “An Education”/”Bright Star”/”Young Victoria” – The year’s most enjoyable coming-of-age films — coincidentally — all feature young English women in deliciously romantic and authentic period dramas. A pre-feminist student in the mid-20th century, an unassuming poet’s muse in the early 19th century and the newly crowned sovereign of an empire — they are each victims of their emotions until they gradually, inspiringly find inner strength.
8. “The Road” – The year’s most terrifying film didn’t need Hollywood-style serial killers, vampires or — shudder — John Cusack. It offered a bleak, chilling but plausible vision of the post-apocalypse. And despite the genre motifs, this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel with Viggo Mortensen kept an affecting father-son relationship as its meaningful focus.
9. “The Hangover” – The year’s funniest film turned the Vegas bachelor party cliche on its aching head. With a good mystery plot and gaggle of surreal sight gags — Mike Tyson, tigers and missing teeth, oh my! — it was just profanely, deliriously and ingeniously hilarious.
10. “Food Inc.” – The year’s best documentary exposed the corporate greed that determines the nature of our daily bread … and corn and soybeans. According to filmmaker Robert Kenner, the most basic stuff of life — what we eat — is unregulated, toxic, unethically produced, and making us fat and sick. A compelling, understandable true account of all of that? Nothing could be more important.
