My Top 10 Favorite Films of 2009

10. Star Trek

When I was a kid, I loved the classic Star Trek, and this movie reminded me why.  It’s big, colorful, fast-paced and reasonably smart—although I wish the movie was just a little bit smarter.  Zachary Quinto is a fantastic Spock, and Chris Pine is a reasonably okay Kirk (there’s really no fair way to judge anyone who’s not Shatner in that role).  Karl Urban is absolutely phenomenal as Bones (always my favorite character), and if he’d had more to do, the film would probably be higher on this list.

9. The Princess and the Frog

There’s a full review coming, so I won’t say too much here.  In short, I was pleasantly surprised by how good this is.  The animation is gorgeous, the music is occasionally very good, and the politics are as good as could reasonably be expected.  I’ll definitely watch this again sometime, which is more than I can say for Avatar.

8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I’ve always loved scifi/fantasy stories that background the adventure in favor of believable characterization and drama.  Largely for that reason, this is my favorite by far of the Harry Potter series.  It’s a movie about good wizards battling bad wizards, sure, but more than that it’s a movie about being a teenager, and it captures the joy and confusion of that age perfectly.  All that, plus a fantastic turn by Jim Broadbent.

7. Up

Ed Asner is the gift that keeps on giving.  He’s been the go-to crusty old man for about 30 years, and he’s still alive and continuing to perfect the role.  In Up, he’s holds his own, voice-wise, with a cute little fat kid and probably the funniest canine character ever put on screen.  Of course, this being Pixar, there are also mindblowing visuals and an outside-the-box story.  There’s also a real emotional core to the film, particularly in that opening montage that makes everyone (everyone!) cry.

6. Drag Me to Hell

After the disaster that was Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi returned to his horror/comedy roots and proved he’s still got it in him.  This might be my favorite horror film of the past decade (the only other contender is 2008’s Let the Right One In, a film so different it’s hard to compare).  Drag Me to Hell is scary, suspenseful, occasionally disgusting, and frequently hilarious.  In other words, it’s everything a horror movie ought to be.  A moment of Satanic sunlight in a dark decade of reprehensible Torture Porn.

5. Moon

Wedged into this year of big, noisy, frequently dumb scifi movies comes this weird little cerebral piece, like a lost film from 1974, to show us what the genre is capable of.  The writing is unapologetically complex, the effects are excellent but never distracting, and Sam Rockwell blows it out of the water in an insanely demanding role.

4. Humpday

Lynn Shelton’s film deals with some heavy issues without ever feeling even slightly bogged down: gender, sexuality, friendship, art, the social divide between bohemian and bourgeoisie.  Josh Leonard, Mark Duplass, and Alicia Delmore all do a great job building their characters and their relationships with each other through extraordinarily believable (apparently improvised) dialogue.  This is also one of the best portrayals of awkwardness I’ve ever seen outside of any version of The Office, but unlike that show, it never makes you wince and turn away.

3. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Every inch a Wes Anderson movie, despite its cast of woodland creatures.  George Clooney does that thing he’s so good at, his cleverness and charm perfectly embodied in fox form.  Anderson regulars like Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray find their dapper inner animals as well.  Meryl Streep’s vocal performance is strangely lackluster (which is particularly disappointing after she totally nailed the Julia Child role) but passable.  The puppets and sets are beautiful, the animation is lovingly old school, and the plot has some depth to it while still appealing to children (or at least the ones I saw it with).

2. Inglourious Basterds

Big, sprawling, occasionally messy, but beautiful to behold.  A hell of a lot of talking, punctuated with people getting killed with guns and knives, baseball bats and bare hands.  A love letter to war movies, but also a film with something to say about war.  I get annoyed with film nerds who write negative reviews of Tarantino films that can be summed up as, “I get every one of your obscure cinematic references (behold as I list them) and therefore I hate you and your films.”  If Tarantino’s esoteric allusions were a problem, it would be the people who don’t get them that hate the films, which doesn’t seem to be the case.  I get maybe about half of them myself, but I just like watching what he builds out of such disparate pieces.

1. Where the Wild Things Are

I’m extremely impatient to see this film again.  It’s so unlike anything else I’m used to that I have a hard time trusting my opinion of it based on one viewing.  These are the things I do know:  It captures the spirit of the book perfectly.  The creatures are wonderfully constructed and beautifully acted.  It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen (including Spike Jonze’s other films, which I always found overrated).  Parts of it almost made me cry, but it left me feeling genuinely uplifted.  This was a movie I never would have thought (prior to seeing the trailers) could possibly be good, and yet it was basically perfect.  This movie makes me want to have kids, just so I can one day show it to them.