(i.) In Which I Guess I’m Supposed to Talk About How Good a Year 2009 Was for Film
Pretty goddamn good, all things considered. Even if there were few (or, okay, no) movies I would consider stone-cold masterpieces, there were more flat-out terrific pictures released in theaters this year than is typical. So many, in fact, that this list of movies that didn’t quite make my top 10 (which is forthcoming, pending a few catch-up viewings and re-viewings), would make for a far-from-embarrassing best-of all on its lonesome. So maybe don’t consider it a list of runners-up, even. Consider it more a list of terrific movies that were just not quite terrific enough to make it onto the even-more-terrific final tally, ultimately.

(ii.) The Rules
Only one, really. Film release dates, for the purposes of this list, have been determined by year of official U.S. release. Which means that there are a lot of films on this list and the top 10 that premiered at festivals or overseas in a year that was not 2009. And that there are some I’ve-no-doubt fantastic movies that premiered at festivals or overseas in 2009 that are ineligible because they haven’t been released yet here (and because they are, for the most part, still unseen by me). I’m not in love with this system, but it’s pretty much my only option.

(iii.)  (i.) Addendum
Actually, know what? Just go ahead and consider it a list of runners-up. Here it is, in rough order of preference.

11. THE BROTHERS BLOOM

Rian Johnson trades in po-mo genre deconstruction, but he’s no soulless film-school snarkster. His stunner of a debut, the teen noir Brick, exposed the lonely, bruised heart beneath its high-school setting and hard-boiled plot; it’s In a Lonely Place for the MySpace generation (that’s a compliment). The Brothers Bloom, Johnson’s follow-up, is even more stylized, a whimsical, primary-color con-game heavily influenced by Wes Anderson and Hal Ashby. But, as in Brick, Johnson is interested in far more than the surface of things, exposing an existential sadness within the emptiness of most con-man flicks. It’s also just a terrific movie, as in movie movie, joyful and genuinely surprising, with hilarious, razor-sharp dialogue and pitch-perfect performances; ten years from now, I’ll be pretending it was her exquisite work here that won Rachel Weisz her Oscar.

12. 35 SHOTS OF RUM

Familiar family relations are at work in 35 Shots of Rum, but as with all of Claire Denis’s work, the film’s power is not in the story but its telling. Denis is a master of revealing narrative through purely cinematic means, and every piece of 35 Shots of Rum‘s interpersonal dynamics is beautifully expressed through her (and ace DP Agnes Godard’s)  sensual visuals and editing rhythms. With the movement of trains as its structuring metaphor, 35 Shots of Rum expands its characters’ familial and romantic relationships into a lovely comment on how we hold on to the past and the painful necessity of moving on. It all climaxes with the film’s principals stranded in a bar during a rainstorm, quietly dancing to the Commodores’ “Night Shift,” as perfect a moment of cinema as played on screens all year. Of all the films on this list, this is the one that I most suspect could be catapulted into the top 10 by another viewing.

13. ANTICHRIST

Lars von Trier: Anti-Christ. That’s how the first two title cards of Antichrist read, and like so much of von Trier’s output, it’s an impish joke that’s still deadly serious. Antichrist was made by von Trier during a period of crippling depression, and it shows; I’ve never suffered from depression, thank Christ, but I imagine that it feels a lot like this movie, a suffocating blur that, when taken to its (il)logical end, can only result in misery and death. Cannes catcalls aside, von Trier’s dedication to Tarkovsky makes sense; Antichrist‘s evil Eden is the depressive dark side to Tarkovsky’s natural paradises. This is von Trier gutting himself on celluloid; he lashes out at nature, at God, at science and at religion, at his own reputation (he credits, tongue firmly in cheek, a “misogyny consultant” on the film), at himself. The film is a carrion cry of anguish, rage, and self-loathing, which of course carries with it a whole boatload of irresolvable contradictions. Critics who hate Antichrist are not wrong; this is a flawed picture. But its flaws are so inseparably tied to its achievements (which include some images of stunning beauty and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s distressingly committed performance) that it would not be half as unshakable, or unforgettable, without them. (It also – and I know this is extra-textual – but it also inspired one of the best bits of film criticism I read this year. Check it out. Now, preferably. I’ll wait.)

14. LORNA’S SILENCE

It’s getting a little hard to write impressively about the Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, what with their track record of staggeringly consistent excellence and the fact that most of their films mine similar territory in subtly different ways. The word out of Cannes on Lorna’s Silence was that it was yet another terrific disquisition on guilt and redemption from les frères Dardennes, this time marred somewhat by the uncharacteristic presence of a – gasp! – plot. Which, well, no. As if La Promesse and The Child didn’t have breathlessly compelling narratives. And as if Lorna’s Silence‘s storytelling weren’t just tremendously fucking great. The way the Dardennes’ manage expectations and dole out information (including a brilliantly disorienting bit of narrative elision around the halfway point) is so graceful, so unerringly confident and ultimately devastating, that you start to wonder why Hollywood studios haven’t come calling yet. Then you thank God that they haven’t.

15. THE HEADLESS WOMAN

Talk about disorienting. Maybe the most astonishing formal accomplishment of the year, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman places the viewer in the mindset of its amnesiac heroine by radically fragmenting screen space. Martel plays with shallow focus and violently composed frames that cut its bourgeois characters off at the, well, you know. It’s all a little hard to explain in words, and such an intense visceral experience that it’s easy to miss the social commentary hidden in the form of the lower-class workers and hired help passing by, forgotten, in the margins of the frame. Another film ripe for revisiting.

16. SUMMER HOURS

Like 35 Shots of Rum, Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours is a film that can seem minor in its graceful, leisurely pace and reserved, extremely French emotional tenor. But there are some big ideas at play in this disarmingly small movie, ideas about globalization and family and art and the objects through which we live our histories. It may not be as sprawling or blatantly Of the Moment as Assayas’s millennial Demonlover, but it’s twice as insightful and lovely. Even if it doesn’t have Connie Nielsen decked out in bondage gear.

17. 24 CITY

Only the second film by Chinese critics’ darling Jia Zhangke I’ve seen, and I must say I prefer it to his better-received Still Life. Whereas Still Life struck me as visually magnificent but dramatically inert (I need to see it again, I know), I found 24 City, a Herzogian pseudo-documentary about industrialization in China, almost endlessly moving and tender. Focusing on Chinese residents affected by the creation of a huge apartment complex, 24 City finds Jia pairing his formal mastery with a generous, empathetic humanism. It’s a film that demands a great deal of patience but rewards it tenfold. Now if only I could figure out why Jia chose to invent several fictional stories (featuring characters played by, among others, actresses Joan Chen and Zhao Tao) to mix in with the real ones. I’m looking forward to a second viewing, if it ever comes out on DVD.

18. PUBLIC ENEMIES

One of the most divisive studio pictures of the year, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was for me one of the most interesting and impressive. Mann’s experiments with digital photography aren’t for everyone (at least one critic compared it unfavorably to Bugsy Malone), but he strikes me as one of the few mainstream American directors doing truly artful things with the form. He gives the period-set Public Enemies a present-tense immediacy that connects to its themes of living in the moment and enhances its expressive romanticism. Exploring John Dillinger’s criminal superstardom through Johnny Depp’s movie-star posturing, Public Enemies mines Dillinger’s rise and fall with the rush of an old-Hollywood tragedy. Was there another sequence in a Hollywood movie this year as pure-cinema thrilling as Dillinger watching his last movie, then emerging from the theater to his death?

19. REVANCHE

If Götz Spielmann’s immaculately crafted Revanche sometimes seems a little too airtight, that’s because it doesn’t want to ever let the audience breathe. Spielmann grabs his audience by the throat from the beginning and never lets go; he builds tension from the very first scene, structuring his film as a series of placid situations simmering with violence just waiting to explode. The film is not especially deep or ambitious – just beautifully, relentlessly constructed.

20. UP

Everyone else has said it, so I might as well, too: the first thirty minutes of Up are a heartbreaking masterpiece. The silent montage that tracks the married life of Carl (Ed Asner) and his wife from their meeting to her death is the finest bit of self-contained filmmaking of 2009. And if the film goes slack in its last third (boy does it ever), there’s still so much beauty and giddy invention (Dug the talking dog being the best new character of the year) on display that its problems are easy to overlook. And when it comes back down to it, they’re simply nonexistent in comparison to that damn montage, and to my tears.

21. YOU, THE LIVING

Sort of a B-side to Roy Andersson’s Apocalyptic Songs from the Second Floor, his follow-up is nevertheless a frequently hilarious and beautiful look at how to survive in this crazy, miserable world. No one else is making movies like Andersson, whose long-shot, sight-gag tableaux recall Jacques Tati by way of Luis Buñuel. He’s a master of the dark, deadpan joke, but You, the Living has him in a (still warped) humanistic mode. His loosely connected, static one-shot scenes look at a group of lonely, unhappy people searching for happiness before the (for Andersson, literal) end of the world. Andersson suggests that if contentment is to be found, it should be by letting go of our own hang-ups and engaging with our fellow man. Or just in our dreams, as evoked through a stunning, beautiful setpiece in which one woman imagines her post-wedding bliss as a train-ride past throngs of celebrating friends.

22. HUMPDAY

If you can look past the shock-provoking premise – two straight college friends reconnect and decide to make a gay porn with each other – what you’ll find in Humpday is a perceptive, serious look at male gamesmanship and the tension that forms as we grow up between who we are and who we wish we would have become. Lynn Shelton’s direction isn’t much to look at, but her writing and skill with actors are a marvel. The (mostly improvised) performances are hilarious and empathetic; I was especially impressed with Alycia Delmore as Mark Duplass’ put-upon wife.

23. THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage are a match made in batshit gonzo Heaven. Herzog makes a strong case for the auteur theory by taking a script that reads like a bit of straight-to-DVD hackwork and turning it into a wacked-out black comedy – and a quintessential Werner Herzog film. Cage plays a New Orleans cop rapidly succumbing to drug addiction, sleep-deprived madness, and greed: Aguirre with a badge. Herzog stages yet another losing battle between man and nature, wringing a bizarre poetry from the sights, sounds and beasts of post-Katrina New Orleans. The reptile close-ups (you’ll just have to see it) show a reverence to the hypnotic mystery of nature – and they’re fuckin’ funny, to boot. So is Cage, in a spectacular return to inspired, go-for-broke insanity; I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of him hunched in a corner, menacingly brandishing an electric shaver, and I don’t think I ever want to.

24. THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE

Of a piece with his other terrific 2009 film, The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is a film very much of our economic moment. Where The Informant! approaches its topic with (occasionally too-thick) irony, The Girlfriend Experience is an abstract, experimental mood piece. The plot – an escort (named Chelsea and played by real-life porn star and horny-intellectual crush object Sasha Gray) tries to balance her job with a relationship – is unremarkable in outline, but Soderbergh gives it meaning by directing, shooting, and editing the hell out of it. He shoots the film in a gorgeously chilly pallet of whites and blues, and structures it as Chelsea’s fragmented search for freedom from her place as a commodity. Up in the Air is perfectly enjoyable, but it’s The Girlfriend Experience that is the real film for the depression.

25. DRAG ME TO HELL

I have nothing smart to say about Drag Me to Hell. Save your political readings, or your interpretation of it as the nightmare of a girl struggling with her eating disorder; sorry, I’m not buying it. What I am buying is that Drag Me to Hell is cheesy, campy, juicy fun, and a welcome return to Sam Raimi’s low-budget roots. It’s a horror comic-inspired collection of jump-scares, ridiculous set pieces, and funny jokes, all leading up to a hysterically black-hearted ending. I have nothing smart to say about Drag Me to Hell. That doesn’t mean I didn’t kind of love it.