The Top 10 of the Year
1. A Serious Man - Ethan Coen, Joel Coen + Best Dramedy of the Year + Breakthrough Actor of the Year: Michael Stuhlbarg
2. I Killed My Mother/J'ai Tué Ma Mère - Xavier Dolan + Best Canadian Movie of the Year + Best Debut Movie of the Year (Xavier Dolan) + Sexiest Movie of the Year + Best Youth Movie of the Year
3. Coraline - Henry Selick
4. Precious - Lee Daniels + Best Adaptation of the Year + Best Independent Movie of the Year + Most Deserved Hit of the Year
5. City Island - Raymond De Felitta + Best New York Movie of the Year
6. The Cove, documentary - Louie Psihoyos
7. I Love You, Phillip Morris - Glenn Ficarra, John Requa + Best LGBT Movie of the Year + Best Romance of the Year
8. Drag Me to Hell - Sam Raimi + Best Horror Comedy of the Year
9. The Informant! - Steven Soderbergh + Best True-Story Movie of the Year
10. The Last Station - Michael Hoffman + Most Undeserved Flop Movie of the Year + Best Russian Movie of the Year + Best Drama of the Year
Other great movies of the year (in alphabetic order):
(500) Days of Summer - Marc Webb
Adventureland - Greg Mottola + Best Coming-of-Age Movie of the Year
An Education - Lone Scherfig + Best English Movie of the Year + Best Period Movie of the Year + Best Shooting Star Actress of the Year: Carey Mulligan
Broken Embraces/Los Abrazos Rotos - Pedro Almodóvar + Best Spanish Movie of the Year
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs - Phil Lord, Christopher Miller + Best Family Movie of the Year
Fish Tank - Andrea Arnold
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Män Som Hatar Kvinnor - Niels Arden Oplev + Best Danish Movie of the Year + Best Thriller of the Year
Glee - season 1 - Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk, Ryan Murphy + Best High School Title of the Year + Best Musical of the Year + Best New TV-series of the Year
The Good Heart - Dagur Kári + Best Icelandic Movie of the Year + Most Overlooked Movie of the Year
The Hangover - Todd Phillips + Best Comedy of the Year
In the Electric Mist - Bertrand Tavernier + Best Detective Movie of the Year + Best Louisiana Movie of the Year
It's Complicated - Nancy Meyers + Best Poster of the Year
My One and Only - Richard Loncraine + Best Mega-flop Movie of the Year + Road Movie of the Year
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done - Werner Herzog + Best Box Office Disaster of the Year + Shooting Star Actor of the Year: Michael Shannon + Best True-Crime Movie of the Year + Most Under-appreciated Movie of the Year + Worst $ Return of the Year: 0.03 times the cost
Oceans/Océans, documentary - Jacques Cluzard, Jacques Perrin + Best Nature Movie of the Year
Youth in Revolt - Miguel Arteta
Zombieland - Ruben Fleischer + Best Zombie Movie of the Year
Good, recommendable movies of the year (in alphabetic order):
17 Again - Burr Steers + Best Fantasy Comedy of the Year
30 Rock - season 4 - Tina Fey + Best Sitcom of the Year
A Single Man - Tom Ford
Antichrist - Lars Von Trier + Best Horror Movie of the Year
Applause - Martin Zandvliet
Avatar - James Cameron + Best 3D Movie of the Year + Best Adventure Movie of the Year + Blockbuster of the Year (2,787.9 mil. $ gross) + Most Profitable Movie of the Year (805.16 mil. $ range)
Away We Go - Sam Mendes
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans/Bad Lieutenant - Werner Herzog
The Blind Side - John Lee Hancock
Brotherhood/Broderskab - Nicolo Donato
Camping - Jacob Bitsch
Change of Plans/Le Code a Changé - Danièle Thompson
Cold Souls - Sophie Barthes
Crazy Heart - Scott Cooper + Best Music Movie of the Year
Dead Snow/Død Snø - Tommy Wirkola + Best Gore Movie of the Year + Best Norwegian Movie of the Year
Dogtooth/Κυνόδοντας (Kynodontas) - Yorgos Lanthimos + Best Greek Movie of the Year
Funny People - Judd Apatow
The Haunting in Connecticut - Peter Cornwell + Best Haunting Movie of the Year
The House of the Devil - Ti West
Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, documentary - Brigitte Berman
Hung - season 1 - Colette Burson, Dmitry Lipkin
In the Loop - Armando Iannucci + Best Political Movie of the Year
Inglorious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino
Land of the Lost - Brad Silberling + Best Huge Flop Movie of the Year + Most Expensive Flop of the Year (72.52 mil. $ range)
Nowhere Boy - Sam Taylor-Wood
Observe and Report - Jody Hill + Best Big Flop Movie of the Year + Best Dark Comedy of the Year
Oldboys - Nikolaj Steen
A Prophet/Un Prophète - Jacques Audiard + Best Crime Thriller of the Year + Best French Movie of the Year + Best Gangster Movie of the Year + Best Prison Movie of the Year
The Proposal - Anne Fletcher + Best On-Screen Couple of the Year: Sandra Bullock & Ryan Reynolds + Best Romcom of the Year
Saint John of Las Vegas - Hue Rhodes + Best Las Vegas Movie of the Year
The Secret in Their Eyes/El Secreto de Sus Ojos - José Campanella + Best Argentinian Movie of the Year + Best $ Return of the Year: 16.95 times the cost
(Untitled) - Jonathan Parker + Best Satire of the Year
The Bottom 10 of the Year
1. The Fourth Kind - Olatunde Osunsanmi
2. Sand Serpents, TV movie - Jeff Renfroe
3. 2012 - Roland Emmerich
4. Fanboys - Kyle Newman
5. The Limits of Control - Jim Jarmusch + Most Deserved Flop of the Year
6. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - David Yates + Most Undeserved Hit Movie of the Year
7. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - Stephen Sommers
8. Shrink - Jonas Pate
9. Sherlock Holmes - Guy Ritchie
10. Mr. Nobody - Jaco Van Dormael
Other mediocre, poor and/or failed movies of the year (in alphabetic order):
Black Dynamite - Scott Sanders
The Box - Richard Kelly
Confessions of a Shopaholic - P.J. Hogan
District 9 - Neill Blomkamp
Enter the Void - Gaspar Noé
Fantastic Mr. Fox - Wes Anderson
Fast & Furious - Justin Lin
Get Low - Aaron Schneider
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest/Luftslottet som Sprängdes - Daniel Alfredson
The Girl Who Played with Fire/Flickan Som Lekte med Elden - Daniel Alfredson
Harry Brown - Daniel Barber
Himlen Falder - Manyar I. Parwani
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) - Tom Six
Law Abiding Citizen - F. Gary Gray + Worst Poster of the Year
Life during Wartime - Todd Solondz
The Lovely Bones - Peter Jackson
Mammoth - Lukas Moodysson
Monsters vs. Aliens - Rob Letterman, Conrad Vernon
Mother/마더 (Madeo) - Bong Joon Ho
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian - Shawn Levy
Nine - Rob Marshall
Public Enemies - Michael Mann
Solitary Man - Brian Koppelman, David Levien
Splice - Vincenzo Natali
Star Trek - J.J. Abrams + Best Science Fiction Movie of the Year
The Twilight Saga: New Moon - Chris Weitz
[96 titles in total]
Notes:
The fourth update of the 2009 lists adds 21 titles to the selection, with one title breaching the Top 10 and none entering the Bottom 10 list.
The best of the year list has 5 masterpieces on
it: Jumping up the list in this edition to #1 is Ethan and Joel Coen's poignant and hilarious serio-comedy A Serious Man. Silver goes to Canadian prodigy Xavier Dolan's amazing indie youth debut I Killed My Mother, and bronze to Henry Selick's fantastically realized dark family adventure stop-motion animation Coraline. The list goes on with new entry Lee Daniels' affecting social realism drama Precious; Raymond De Felitta's terrifically constructed Long Island-set dramedy City Island; Louie Psihoyos' shocking and devastating dolphin slaughter documentary The Cove; Glenn Ficarra and John Requa incredible true-story romcom I Love You, Phillip Morris, Sam Raimi's superior and zany horror-comedy entertainer Drag Me to Hell; Steven Soderbergh's Matt Damon-vehicle and true-crime laugh riot The Informant!, with Michael Hoffman's marvelous Leo Tolstoy biopic drama The Last Station rounding off the list. Falling from the Top 10 in this edition is James Cameron's blockbuster adventure epic Avatar.
Truly delightful and great are also films of the year by Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank), Lone Scherfig (An Education), Pedro Almodóvar (Broken Embraces), Greg Mottola (Adventureland), Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and others. The year offered shocking European movies (Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth, and, though to a lesser degree shocking, Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow) and some American genre pleasures (Burr Steers' 17 Again, Ti West's The House of the Devil, Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland and Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds).
In the other end of the spectrum, Wes Anderson made his career's most negligible film to date with Fantastic Mr. Fox. But it isn't bad per se, and therefore cannot mingle with the worst of 2009:
Olatunde Osunsanmi's mockumentary sci-fi-horror The Fourth Kind is
without question the worst of the year seen so far, with Jeff Renfroe's abysmal war monster exploitation TV movie Sand Serpents taking silver, and with Roland Emmerich's inane 2012 apocalyptic disaster flick getting bronze in turkeytry. The Bottom 10 goes on with Kyle Newman's boring, unfunny and offensive Fanboys; Jim Jarmusch's art film bore The Limits of Control; David Yates' gloomy, overlong Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra; Jonas Pate's sad, pointless Shrink; Guy Ritchie's CGI-stupidity Sherlock Holmes, and with Jaco Van Dormael's art movie disaster Mr. Nobody rounding out the list.
Remarkable filmmakers who served sub-par output in 2009 include F. Gary Gray (Law Abiding Citizen), Richard Kelly (The Box), Peter Jackson (The Lovely Bones), J.J. Abrams (Star Trek),Todd Solondz (Life during Wartime), Richard Kelly (The Box), Lukas Moodysson (Mammoth), Bong Joon Ho (Mother), Michael Mann (Public Enemies) and Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void).
On the 2010 Oscars:
Hosting the show were the two male stars of the year's not nominated It's Complicated, Steve Martin, who had previously hosted in 2001 and 2003, and Alec Baldwin,
who had not hosted before. The ceremony's big change of the year was to
expand the Best Picture category from 5 to 10 nominees in a bid to
revitalize the show, a practice that had been discontinued in 1944. It
was a popular Oscar show, with 42 mil. US viewers, the best result since
2005.
The night's biggest winner was war thriller The Hurt Locker, which was nominated 9 times, equal to the year's big box office draw, Avatar. The competition was noteworthy also because the films' directors Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron used to be married. Hurt Locker won Best Picture, Best Director (Bigelow became the first woman to achieve this), Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Film Editing. Avatar followed with 3 Oscars: Best Art Direction, Cinematography (Mauro Fiore) and Visual Effects. Crazy Heart, Precious and Up (the only second animated film (after Beauty and the Beast (1991)) to be nominated for Best Picture) won two Oscars each: Crazy Heart won Best Actor (Jeff Bridges) and Best Song (The Weary Kind; Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett); Precious won Best Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher became the first African-American to achieve the honor) and Best Supporting Actress (Mo'Nique); and Up won Best Animation and Best Score (Michael Giacchino). Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for The Blind Side, Christoph Waltz Best Supporting Actor for Inglorious Basterds. Argentinian The Secret in their Eyes won Best Foreign Film, and The Cove Best Documentary. Star Trek won for Best Makeup, The Young Victoria Best Costumes. The short film Oscars went to Music by Prudence (doc.), The New Tenants (live action) and Logorama (animated). Honorary Oscars went to Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman and Gordon Willis. A memorial Oscar went to John Calley.
IMDb's users' most popular 2009 titles:
1. Inglorious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino
2. A Christmas Carol - Robert Zemeckis
3. Avatar - James Cameron
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - David Yates
5. Watchmen - Zack Snyder
6. The Hangover - Todd Phillips
7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Gavin Hood
8. Star Trek - J.J. Abrams
9. State of Play - Kevin Macdonald
10. The Lovely Bones - Peter Jackson
Highest-grossing films of the year:
1. Avatar (20th Century Fox) - 2,743.5 mil. $
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Warner Bros.) - 933.9 mil. $
3. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (20th Century Fox) - 886.6 mil. $
4. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Paramount) - 836.3 mil. $
5. 2012 (Sony Pictures) - 769.6 mil. $
6. Up (Disney) - 735 mil. $
7. The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Summit) - 709.8 mil. $
8. Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros.) - 524 mil. $
9. Angels & Demons (Sony Pictures) . 485.9 mil. $
10. The Hangover (Warner Bros.) - 469.3 mil. $
Biggest flops of the year:
[The
loss is based solely on the cost and box office earnings for the films.
Marketing costs and additional revenue (home video, TV rights and other
auxiliary profits) are not taken into account]
1. Land of the Lost - 72.52 mil. $ range
2. Nine - 58.4 mil. $ range
3. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - 54.04 mil. $ range
4. Oceans - 46.8 mil. $ range
5. Funny People 46.4 mil. $ range
6. Mr. Nobody - 45.6 mil. $ range
7. The Lovely Bones - 27.56 mil. $ range
8. Monsters vs. Aliens - 22.4 mil. $ range
9. Fantastic Mr. Fox - 21.44 mil. $ range
10. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - 20.84 mil. $ range
= Combined losses: 369.6 mil. $
Biggest hits of the year:
[The
gain is based solely on the cost and box office earnings for the films.
Marketing costs and additional revenue (home video, TV rights and other
auxiliary profits) are not taken into account]
1. Avatar - 805.16 mil. $ range
2. The Twilight Saga: New Moon - 234.4 mil. $ range
3. The Hangover - 151.96 mil. $ range
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - 123.76 mil. $ range
5. Sherlock Holmes - 119.6 mil. $ range
6. 2012 - 107.84 mil. $ range
7. The Blind Side - 94.68 mil. $ range
8. Fast & Furious - 60.24 mil. $ range
9. Inglorious Basterds - 58.56 mil. $ range
10. District 9 - 54.32 mil. $ range
= Combined profits: 1,810.52 mil. $
2009 titles still on the watch-list:
The String, From Beginning to End,
Giallo, Motherhood, The Maid, Tetro, Pandorum, Agora, The Young Victoria, Coco Before Chanel,
The Princes and the Frog, Logorama, The Lady and the Reaper, The New
Tenants, Kavi, Miracle Fish, China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of
Sichuan Province, Rabbit à la Berlin, The Last Campaign of Governor
Booth Gardner, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, The Most Dangerous
Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Which Way
Home, Ajami, The Secret of Kells, The
Milk of Sorrow, The Final Inch, A Christmas Carol, X-Men Origins:
Wolverine, State of Play, The Wind Journeys, Mother and Child, Daddy Longlegs, Gentlemen Broncos, Down Terrace
1993 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
1992 in films - according to Film Excess
What do you think of the 2009 lists?
Which 2009 films are your favorites and the bottom of the year in your opinion?
What important 2009 title/s is/are missing on the watch-list?
