Top 10 Movies of 2009

You've Seen The Rest—Now Check Out the Best of the Big Screen This Year

1. Up in the Air

 

With financial jitters on everyone’s mind and the nation’s unemployment rate pushing past 10 percent, you can’t fault Up in the Air for timeliness or lack of guts: George Clooney plays a shark-like corporate hitman hired to fire everyday people. Sharp, stylish and entertaining, writer-director Jason Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner makes Walter Kirn’s novel into a resonant, crackling satire of some of the things that scare us most these days. As the freewheeling, cocky, soulless hero, Clooney, in charming/nasty Cary Grant mode, crackles; he’s matched by saber-toothed Anna Kendrick as his young rival and by sexy, smart-talking, commitment-phobic fellow traveler Vera Farmiga, who tells him that he should think of her as himself “only with a vagina.”


2. The Hurt Locker

 

Mass audiences somehow don’t seem to want to know about director Kathryn Bigelow’s taut, nerve-wracking essay on masculinity, risk, duty and grace under the pressures of endless war. With a spare, you-are-there, handheld approach, Bigelow, aided immeasurably by journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, takes us into the brutality, danger and chaos experienced daily by soldiers on the front lines in Iraq. Never sermonizing or taking sides, this wrenching war cry is brutally well acted, most notably by an electrifying Jeremy Renner.


3. Up

 

Throw together a crotchety, isolated pensioner who looks like late-period Spencer Tracy and who rages against being displaced by “progress” from his longtime home and an aggravatingly perky, needy, inept Boy Scout and you might have the setup for a formulaic “heartfelt” movie—a mall nightmare. Instead, this latest Pixar wonder starts with a stunningly conceived, emotional gut-punch of an opening sequence—a flashback in which the old man is a young boy falling in love with a feisty young woman—and piles visual stunners atop one another, all the while creating a life-changing relationship story that is unexpectedly funny and moving.


4. A Serious Man

 

Joel and Ethan Coen’s acridly funny film about a meek physics professor who can’t win for losing is anchored by a wonderful performance by Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg. Equal parts fable, satire, childhood memory film and a sharp exploration of faith, the movie is set in suburban Minneapolis in 1967 and is redolent of pot, angst and the sounds of Jefferson Airplane; it feels as intensely personal as early Fellini or Woody Allen. The hero is losing his hold on his faith and sanity while beset by Job-like challenges—a wife on the brink of leaving him for a pompous ass, a son who goofs his way through Hebrew school, a daughter robbing him blind, a nude sunbathing next-door neighbor and an unemployed weirdo of a live-in brother who frequents unsavory bars. It’s a ferociously sardonic and powerfully moving film that warrants multiple viewings, if only for its ambiguous, deeply mysterious finale.


5. In the Loop

 

In this big screen expansion of the BBC series The Thick of It, British director Armando Iannucci savagely skewers the psychotic backroom politics and power abuses that drove Americans and Brits to invade Iraq. Shrewd direction, a pepper spray of profane, viciously hilarious dialogue and sterling performances (especially by Peter Capaldi) make this one unbeatable for those who consider most world political leaders a dangerous pack of incompetents, fools and dysfunctional children. As one character observes, “They’re all kids in Washington. It’s like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns.”

Next: Who Else Made the Top 10?