The 20 Best Films of 2009
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15. Up
(Pete Docter)
Pixar grew up this year, making an intimate little movie about a reclusive old widower trying to cope with the suddenly very real (3D, even) prospect of his own mortality. Sure, there was a talking dog, a floating house, an aerial battle and a Skittles-colored emu, but Up's actually a superior, animated remake of About Schmidt.
Benjamin Sutton
16. Julia
(Erick Zonca)
Starring Tilda Swinton in a galvanic, often horrifying, lead performance as an aging barroom queen, Julia unfolds as both ludicrous character study and nutso thriller. But it's so committed to its wonky absurdities and ultimately so grounded in a great abyss of human need that it demands to be taken seriously.
Andrew Schenker
17. Night and Day
(Hong Sang-soo)
Gentler with age, Hong continues his Godardian-Rohmerian rumba through modern triangulated romantic warfare, this time relocating to Paris, following after a half-assed Hongian man as he dallies amid art students and experiences love as a series of painful and self-contradictory revelations. Kinda unforgettable.
Atkinson
18. You, the Living
(Roy Andersson)
Andersson builds both the desolation of his down-and-out urbanites and the darkly humorous nature of their plight directly into the letter-perfect framings of his miserablist tableaux. Music and dreams provide Andersson's grotesques with their only escape, but it's in showing us how to adapt an absurdist's perspective that the director teaches us how to accept our own world of woe.
Schenker
19. Revanche
(Getz Spielmann)
The blunt title translates as Revenge, and the plot pivots on a robbery gone wrong, but the pulp is merely the surface. Austrian writer-director Spielmann slowly, assuredly takes his smoldering film into unexpected terrain. This nominal scuzz effortlessly doubles as a study in the corrosive effects of revenge and guilt, triples as a nuanced character piece, etc.
Benjamin Mercer
20. Police, Adjective
(Corneliu Porumboiu)
Romanian filmmaker Porumboiu likes a challenge—or is that a gamble? After the dribbling on-air debates of 12:08 comes this longest of wind-ups: a police procedural reworked twice—first with the interminable imagery of surveillance, then with a dive into language and its grip on reality.
Nicolas Rapold
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