Year in Review 2009 - InRO's Top 15 Films of the Year
![Feature by InRO Staff: James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi epic "Avatar" and Kathryn Bigelow’s gritty-real war movie "The Hurt Locker" have thus far dominated awards season. Neither is what you would call a typical prestige picture, and one might think other contenders would follow suit in this way. Instead, aside from Quentin Tarantino’s ballsy WWII revenge fantasy “Inglourious Basterds,” overly familiar and schematic films like Jason Reitman's inoffensive but dubiously breezy recession-minded dramedy "Up in the Air," Lee Daniels's poverty horrorshow "Precious," and Lone Scherfig's insipid coming-of-age fairytale "An Education" have been scooping up remaining precursor slots. Obviously, I can't speak for the entire staff when I voice my own ambivalence to dislike toward all three of these, but I can say that no InRO writer claims them to be Best of the Year contenders—and yet they continue to reap awards at ceremony after ceremony. This list, perhaps unsurprisingly, champions our many international talents, some of whom put out their most accomplished films to date. It's not particularly surprising to us that many of our favorites, from Japan's "Tokyo Sonata," to France's little seen "Home," to Chile's "Tony Manero"—all family-centric dramas, a theme in international cinema this past year—didn't get much attention from the masses. But what is surprising is that many strong English-language dramas were left to drift into arthouse obscurity. Is Francis Ford Coppola's "Tetro," reminiscent of opera in tone and structure, too audacious and idiosyncratic to thrill your average audience? Probably. But what excuse can be made for the muted reception of Jane Campion's period-romance "Bright Star"? Who can defend the criminal absence of "Two Lovers'" three exceptional performances from all the acting awards races? How is it that an ambitious comedy rich with pathos like "Funny People" finds itself upstaged by the frat-boy antics of "The Hangover"? And what do "Sherlock Holmes" and "Duplicity"—two of the year's most intelligent, devilishly funny entertainments—lack that made them underperform at the box office? We have no answers. All we can really do is extol the virtues of our favorites and hope maybe they appeal to you as well. Here's our Top 15 Films of 2009. [See our staff’s individual lists here.] Sam C. Mac


Director Hirokazu Koreeda's "Still Walking" is a modest but affecting portrait of a cross-generational Japanese family. It's the most personal of Koreeda's films thus far, based on the director's own familial experiences and dedicated to his late parents. "Still Walking's" debt to master craftsman Yasujiro Ozu is felt throughout, but Koreeda, who has been releasing similarly unassuming, character-driven dramas for over a decade, is wise enough to employ the master's subtle stylistic techniques without undermining the singularity of his own, more accessible aesthetic. Like Ozu, Koreeda rarely moves his camera, intent on capturing the emotional nuances of his characters with static compositions that observe their behaviors. There's a beautifully restrained quality to his films, a far cry from this country's reliance on quick-cut editing and frenetic cinematography; though with such a minimal aesthetic, it's essential Koreeda have a stirring story to tell. Thankfully, "Still Walking" is one of the year's most quietly moving films. A remarried man returns to his rural home for the yearly remembrance of a deceased brother, and Koreeda observes the intricacies of his relationship to his begrudging father and well-meaning but often over-bearing mother with a master's eye for details. "Still Walking" is both melancholy and joyful, a lovingly crafted slice of Japanese life that is universal in the way it portrays both familial compassion and tribulation. Jordan Cronk


"Two Lovers," is defined by its setting: the cramped apartments adorned with walls of family photographs, the seedy alleyways, rundown neighborhoods, and congested clubs. James Gray makes movies which examine small pockets of society, and in his latest he invests his Brighton Beach milieu with a pervading sense of nostalgia and melancholy. The film's central character, Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix in a towering performance), is defined by his losses, namely his recently deceased fiancé, and while his parents do their best to comfort him, his depression rots away at his soul. When two lovely women enter his life—one a reckless beauty (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the other a shy girl next-door (Vinessa Shaw)—Leonard's confusion only intensifies, compounded by his devotion to a third woman—his nurturing mother, played by Isabella Rossellini. The narrative progression of "Two Lovers" is nothing new, but the individual moments Gray delivers—casual conversations and wordless exchanges between his pining romantics—can be downright revelatory. Gray's film takes on the visual and emotional weight of a poem, sustaining a precise human alchemy that climaxes with one of the most tragic and beautiful embraces of the year. Chazz Lyons


“Bright Star” is perhaps Jane Campion's most accomplished film to date, detailing the virginal love affair between Romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbor, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Rather than approaching the film strictly as biography, Campion explores the love of this tragic couple in the same way the world first discovered it—through words. We understand the depth of their love not through histrionic declarations, but by becoming voyeurs to their intimacy: their long strolls through lavender meadows, discussions of Keats’s poetry, and naïve plans for a future that would never come. The sexual repression of the period has very little to do with the chaste nature of their relationship; rather, it's the sexual indifference between Keats and Brawne that makes their love affair so romantic. Campion’s vision is aided by uniformly accomplished technical achievements—the costumes, art direction and set design are typically immaculate—however Mark Bradshaw’s lovely, measured score is "Bright Star's" greatest asset. Add Greig Fraser’s equally oblique cinematography, alternating between long, roving takes and luminous close-ups, and “Bright Star” becomes more than just Campion’s vision or an interesting story. A period piece that's brilliant in both conception and execution, “Bright Star” is a mature romance that revels in the innocence and purity of a love unconsummated in life but immortalized in death. Luke Gorham


The first Iraq War movie to really strike a chord with the American public was, not surprisingly, the one that traded righteous indignation for apolitical pyrotechnics. Which would be a real bummer, were those protest picture predecessors not so flatly rhetorical, and were Kathryn Bigelow’s lean and tough action vérité not so brazenly unsentimental. A different kind of war movie for a different kind of war, “The Hurt Locker” predicates its “thrills” not on the slam-bang spectacle of gunfire and explosion, but on the fevered anticipation, the sick dread of such things. It swaps out the run-and-gun exhilaration of Vietnam and WWII combat epics for the bated breath intensity of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller. Bigelow, that mighty queen of late 80s/early 90s testosterone-fests, hones her shaky-cam on shaky hands, lingers on eyes and brows, pulls in close to catch every fleeting flash of emotion transmitted by her beleaguered band of brothers. For a while, the film unfolds as a nearly wordless barrage of set-pieces, spectacular sequences that derive their power not from post-‘Private Ryan,’ entrails-out explicitness, but from a total immersion in the frazzled headspace of the grunts on the ground. And if the return-to-action epilogue swaggers a bit too triumphantly to register as tragedy, it still posits a harrowing hypothesis: that fighting and dying may be the only thing this restless generation is built for. Wait, what was I saying about this being apolitical? A.A. Dowd


Carlos Reygadas's most recent film is a work of rigorous formal beauty that transcends the plainspoken yet exotic setting of a northern Mexico Mennonite community. Balancing formidable style with substance, “Silent Light” transforms an otherwise ordinary love triangle into a powerful meditation on the frictions between earthly pleasure and social responsibility. Johan, a common middle-aged farmer, is convinced he's found the woman he's meant to be with, and he contemplates leaving his wife and six children for her. Amid religious oppression and patriarchal entitlement, emotional tensions quietly simmer and an air of doom sets in, suggested through a pervasive sense of sadness. Throughout, Reygadas is less concerned with establishing narrative continuity than affirming his characters’ connection to their natural surroundings and their unwavering faith in their creator. Not unlike Reygadas's first two films, “Silent Light” is lensed with a careful eye for composition and well-judged patience, relying on long takes and natural sound, each frame displaying a divine elegance. Reygadas—a trained lawyer who abandoned his career after being inspired by Tarkovsky—pays tribute to Carl Th. Dreyer not only with an homage to the final scene of “Ordet,” but also through the fine details of ritual that give Dreyer’s films—and his own—such immense power. Kathie Smith


Tonally bleak yet thematically hopeful, Spike Jonze's “Where the Wild Things Are” is both insightful and sympathetic toward the trials of adolescence. The pensive screenplay by Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers, translating Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book about a boy who escapes to an island peopled by monsters of varying emotional temperaments, has given us one of the best and most underrated adaptations of the year. 'Wild Things' is a film that's both for kids and shrewdly about them, celebrating the joys and freedoms of an active imagination but acknowledging the emotional conflict that often comes with that. Child actor Max Records understands this fissure, and his debut in the lead role is one of the most affecting by a young star in recent memory. As a projection of his character's confused psyche, the Wild Things (most notably James Gandolfini, as the voice of Carol), take on a candid humanity, and become some of the most fully realized characters we've seen on screen this year. A far cry from the Hallmark children's stories we see so frequently, ‘Wild Things’ is an inventive, carefully considered character study, refracting one boy's emotional turmoil through the prism of an array of fictitious characters. The meticulous production design complements the creativity of Max's imaginings while remaining sparse enough to reflect his undeveloped mind, and Jonze never indulges in superfluous action or overly garish fantasy set-pieces. “Where the Wild Things Are” is played, for the most part, in a minor key, and its restraint and intimacy allow it to become one of the most heartfelt films of the year. LG


Werner Herzog once wrote of an “Ecstatic Truth,” one that was inherent to the cinema, and that could be discovered only by blurring the nebulous line between fact and fiction. This was a truth so complicated, so thorny and multi-faceted, that it required more than what “real” or fabricated stories could reveal—it demanded a merging of these pursuits. With “24 City,” a nervy fusion of documentary and narrative convention, Jia Zhangke comes close to realizing this mythical ideal. The title refers to a new high-rise apartment complex being built in Chengdu, the site of which was once a government-run factory. In prototypical Jia fashion, this destruction/construction plan, beautifully captured by the filmmaker’s panoramic compositions, symbolizes China’s rapid thrust into the post-modern world—out with the old, in with the new, damned be the lives that disappear into the chasm between. What’s excitingly fresh about this latest globalization screed is the manner in which it’s delivered: nine testimonials, five authentic and four scripted, painting a personal/anecdotal picture of a nation in the throes of change. Whereas Jia once kept an allegorical distance from his subjects, casting their frail human frames against scarred landscapes and enormous manmade structures, here he pulls them closer than ever before to his crystalline digital lens. “Still Life,” his previous high water mark, suggested that this gap might be closing, but it scarcely prepared us for such a full-on embrace of the power of storytelling. It’s not just a voice Jia affords the people of Chengdu, but a countenance—there’s more history, more ecstatic truth etched into these individual faces than there is in the architectural structures rising and falling around them. “24 City,” a mixed-mode triumph, boasts nothing less than the reclamation of the Empathetic Close-Up. AAD


While Michael Haneke's latest may be more accessible than his more polarizing works like “Funny Games” and “Cache,” it still stubbornly refuses to let its audience off the hook or give them the cathartic release they expect. Shot in the starkly beautiful black and white of a world slowly losing its soul, “The White Ribbon” takes place in a small German village just after World War I. It's a quiet little village that's deeply religious, and preoccupied with its simple farming lifestyle. But a mysterious string of seemingly random and violent acts puts inhabitants in a state of unease. Everything in this secluded little town is buried beneath the surface, hidden behind a veil of piety and custom. The film takes its title from the white ribbon that a preacher's wife ties around the arms of her children as a punishment and reminder of their wrongdoings. As such, Haneke's latest is a deeply disconcerting meditation on the social and sexual repression that fosters deep-seated anger and resentment in an entire generation, one that eventually leads to the organized hate and systematic murder committed by the Nazis. Haneke isn't trying to locate a single explanation for the Holocaust; “The White Ribbon” is an exploration of the roots of general evil, a look at how and why the seeds of hate are planted in the hearts and minds of the young. It's with this feeling of haunting uncertainty that Haneke leaves us, helpless in the face of a budding darkness. All evil begins somewhere; or, in the immortal words of Sondheim, “Careful what you say, children will listen.” Matthew Lucas


The gruesome violence and overt melodrama in Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" encourage viewers to grapple with this director's singular vision, and to form their own unique response to it. The provocateur has admitted to battling a debilitating depression during the film's production, and his internal conflicts are painted across the screen by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. We find ourselves struggling through multiple layers of disintegrating psyches, as we contend with the downward spiral of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, “She,” a mother dealing with the guilt-ridden loss of her child and the symbolic loss of her husband (Willem Dafoe), who takes on the unfortunate role of her psychiatrist. Throughout the first half of “Antichrist,” von Trier’s vision is one of pure, tragic beauty; the tension is relentless, as the director guides us down the path toward ever darkening mental instability. But the second half of the film brings even more insanity, as von Trier employs levels of excess beyond even those of his previous films. Yet he never lets “Antichrist” escape him; the film presents a deeply personal study on the four stages of grief. And rather than succumbing to exploitation or playing to the the sadistic crowds that’ve made torture porn a weekly staple, von Trier’s aims prove restorative and cathartic instead of purely vicious. LG


Götz Spielmann's "Revanche" is a slow burning revenge saga that avoids the precise rhythms of, say a Coen brothers thriller, and favors a more deliberate pace (especially in its back half), patiently observing its protagonist in the throes of moral crisis. It's an elemental film that bears the unmistakable influence of that most elemental of all filmmakers: Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. And just as Tarkovsky suggested a connective tissue between the themes of his "Solaris" and that film's contrasting landscapes—the warm embrace of natural surroundings giving way to the isolation of space—Spielmann too uses his central character's retreat from the confining sprawl of Vienna to the calming woods of the countryside as symbolic of spiritual rejuvenation. But not everything in "Revanche" is so heady; it's also a film of nerve-racking suspense, one that uses a voyeuristic device to both lend insight into its characters and build an overwhelming tension which earns the film its climactic release. "Revanche" can be a little too staid and its narrative architecture is supported by a pileup of overly convenient coincidences, but Spielmann's striking composition more than makes up for this. The director communicates a palpable loneliness and isolation with wide angle shots, allowing us to inhabit the same grubby spaces as his characters, and by using close-ups and obvious camera movement only when necessary. This formal control and the riveting intensity it generates insures "Revanche" to be one of the most aesthetically accomplished films of the year, heralding a very exciting (and relatively new) international talent. SCM


In “A Serious Man,” the thoughtful eccentricities that make up the DNA of Joel and Ethan Coen find root beneath the soil of 1960s Jewish Americana. Here, the Coens set their sights on the human tragedy that befalls humble physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). His wife leaves him for a pretentious opportunist; his bratty children are concerned with their own vices; and his brother is a hopeless mess. Due to Larry’s various misfortunes (bribery, blackmail and "defamation") his begins to seem like a world almost as grim as in “No Country for Old Men,” a world in which Grace Slick recites “Somebody to Love” like a doomsday prophecy. It's as if God has abandoned mankind to find its own salvation within suburban purgatory. Yet in the film’s context, it’s all devastatingly funny and philosophical; suggesting that, against the cruelties that test Larry, God’s sense of humor is, perhaps, as sardonic as the Coens’. The filmmakers continue to stir complex emotions through their schematics of black comedy, misanthropic farce, and deeply personal themes. But “A Serious Man” also proves an insightful rabbit-hole plunge into the pair of strange minds that have enticed followers for decades. From the film's macabre prologue in a Polish shtetl to the ominous “ending,” the brothers address questions of faith and human condition within a world where life’s random cruelties are met with reasons we cannot grasp. Through the mystery steers Stulhbarg’s earnest performance, as a man who, in a crisis of faith, poses the universal question: “Why must we suffer?” Kevin Vu


Near the end of Quentin Tarantino's piece de resistance, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) looks straight into the camera and says, "You know somethin' Utivich? I think this might just be my masterpiece." Of course, what he is talking about is the swastika he's just carved into Col. Hans Landa (the Jew Hunter)'s, forehead. But what we are thinking about is the film we just saw. “Inglourious Basterds” may very well be Tarantino's masterpiece, but any filmmaker who can pull off a grand production with such verve and ingenuity surely has more to come. The superlative accolades to be dolled out here are many—inspired casting, brilliant scripting, incredible acting and directing—but by far the most rewarding element of "Inglourious Basterds" is the film’s extraordinary sense of entertainment. Confidently taking the shoe off the Nazi aggressors and placing it on the Jews, Tarantino leaves his fan-boy distractions behind and carefully orchestrates a (sorta) historically-informed drama peppered with cinematic guilty pleasures. Brad Pitt and Christoph Waltz fight for character supremacy, ultimately leading to a draw between Pitt’s southern boy brilliance and Waltz’s suave Nazi self-possession. Every chapter of the film brings a new surprise, a new tone, and a new revelation. At least, until the curtains are thrown open on the grand finale and Tarantino indulges in over-the-top melodrama and eventually delivers unexpected catharsis. KS


There are no supernatural forces at play in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Tokyo Sonata”—no bone-white beasties staring out from glowing computer monitors, no ghoulish apparitions scuttling down darkened corridors. Still, make no mistake: this is a ghost story. And this Tokyo, quiet and windswept and withdrawn, is a ghost town. Here, it’s the ethereal spirit of Old Japan—the integrity of its social structures, the security of its traditions—that goes bump (and crash and burn) in the night. Kurosawa, that erstwhile Master of Horror, hasn’t abandoned the apocalyptic dread of his exemplary genre offerings. He’s merely redirected it, letting it operate as the grate through which he feeds his polemical outrage. If “Pulse” cast its paranormal phantoms as symbolic specters of a doomed generation, “Tokyo Sonata” flips the equation: flesh-and-blood men, downsized into occupational obsolescence, roam the empty streets like lost souls, trapped in a jobless purgatory. We hone in on one of these laid-off stiffs, living an aimless lie by day, playing the proud, dominant patriarch by night. His downward spiral of rage and shame and impotence, a raw-nerve corrective to Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out,” pulls the whole family into its careening orbit. While a mother withers quietly, lost in her own foggy nightmare of domesticity, a young son rebels in secret. The compositions close in slowly and tightly around this clan in crisis. And then, as in all of the auteur’s doomsday narratives, a fiery catharsis arrives, here in the form of parallel trials of darkness. Several of 2009’s superlative pictures, including several on this very list, channel the spirit of Ozu and his seminal family dramas. Yet none offer the cracked-mirror reconfiguration that “Tokyo Sonata” does—this is family, the writer-director screams in a hushed whisper, in our mad new millennium. It’s an ugly truth, charitably leavened by a blinding glimmer of hope, a transcendent coda with a redemptive hook: the meek will inherit the earth, finding escape through artistic expression, one day breathing new life into our ailing ghost world. Maybe Kurosawa should have called this one “Bright Future.” AAD


"Summer Hours" is the glistening golden highlight of a sub-genre of films defined by the loose concept of generational transference. These films often revolve around the tensions between the old guard and the younger generation, frequently triggered by feelings of financial insecurity. This includes Koreeda’s “Still Walking,” Kurosawa’s "Tokyo Sonata," and the other French masterpiece residing below here. Each is in some way attuned to the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, who saw the stubbornness of familial relationships as a push-and-pull divided along generational lines. As the second in a series commissioned by the Musee d'Orsay (the first was last year's best film, "Flight of the Red Balloon"), Olivier Assayas’s "Summer Hours" is meant as a contemplation of material transference—in the form of the economic vs. sentimental value of art. Assayas begins with an elegy: the passing of a wealthy family matriarch (Edith Scob, making a major impression during her limited screen time), leaving behind a family estate and three grown children with different ideas of what to do with it. Assayas' style has been known to veer into the manic rhythms of a B-movie (see: last year's "Boarding Gate"), but here the director, true to his Ozu-esque subject matter, lets his film float along at an unhurried pace, developing his Chekhovian story with a welcome civility. A conflict does develop between the siblings—divided by opinions of their estate’s "worth"—but Assayas gracefully balances animosity with compassion. Finally, “Summer Hours” arrives at a moment of pure transcendence: a vibrant house party filled with young people, during which the late matriarch’s granddaughter arrives at a sudden and meaningful reflection. Assayas suggests that our possessions and property inevitably change hands as sure as we'll all leave this earth, but with a new season of life comes the cleansing possibility of a new generation. SCM


At first glance, "35 Shots of Rum" appears to exalt routine. Establishing takes linger on Paris' suburban metro system, a Piet Mondrian transit-scape of oily black and streaking yellow. The rhythm of working-class urban life might have soothed us, but the lazy accordion strains overlaying these scenes are too weary. We're comforted by these images—by subsequent images of characters returning home from a day's work—but we're also set on edge. Claire Denis evokes the mood of routine, then proceeds to demonstrate routine's danger: our reliance on sameness constricts those around us. The story of her latest centers on widower Lionel (Alex Descas) and his grad-student daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop). Their lovely domesticity walls them off. Their intimacy is almost uncomfortably close, and Lionel's reliance on Jo keeps her suitor (Grégoire Colin) at bay, and relegates his own devotee (Nicole Dogue) to neighborly status. In Denis's world, familial routine is ground zero for a viral, existential loneliness, which is reified in the Sartrean figure of a subway conductor (Julieth Mars Toussaint) condemned to freedom upon retirement. "We all live such withdrawn lives," sighs Jo's aunt (Ingrid Caven), a sibyl character whose vocalization towards film's end helps to disentangle the father/daughter dyad. In an early scene, Jo neglects a rice-cooker she bought in deference to one selected by her father; it takes the length of the film for Lionel to grasp the appliance's symbolism, which the audience, for the most part, groks at once.
Denis renders the needy parent archetype in rich and dignified form. Relationship as a concept is at the heart of the film, not Lionel, who's just one of several fascinating characters in a study of distance within the confines of expectation (familial, societal, global). Human barriers are expressed not just in Denis's semiotics of glance and gesture, but in the production design itself. With the help of her longtime art director (Arnaud de Moleron) and cinematographer (Agnes Godard), Denis uses light and framing to emphasize the actual walls that background her players (her technique from I Can't Sleep is perfected here). The lighting design may seem everyday, even accidental at first, but it frames, spotlights or bathes characters with remarkable deliberation. This is the film that confirms Denis's acute sensitivity to color; she is the antithesis to Almodovar, using hues in such subtle gradations that we feel the shifting tones onscreen before we see them. Her dominant blues and blue-grays are fetching in their melancholy. And they're challenged by the warmer palettes in the film's centerpiece, a bar scene destined to be discussed for years. Using the structure of swapping dance partners to gauge relationship, Denis makes a cliché spank with novelty and allows relationships to modify with gorgeous subtlety over the course of a single evening out. Lionel, who could only pay lip service to Jo's autonomy until now, begins to privilege sight over words, as Denis herself would hope of her audience. It's an astonishing moment of acting for all involved, and an astonishing sequence of filmmaking among the best to ever grace the screen. Ranylt Richildis

Honorable Mentions: “The Bad Lieutenant—Port of Call: New Orleans” (Werner Herzog); “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Wes Anderson); “The Headless Woman” (Lucrecia Martel); “Munyurangabo” (Lee Isaac Chung); “The Sun” (Alexander Sokurov); “Night and Day” (Hong Sangsoo); “Julia” (Erick Zonca); “Funny People” (Judd Apatow); “Gomorrah” (Mateo Gorrone); and “Up” (Pete Docter)

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January 22, 2010
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