Also published on Cinescene.

CHRIS KNIPP'S 2009 MOVIE BEST LISTS

As usual I have made a list of the films I've seen in English that seem best, and those in other languages, and documentaries, and some other categories. But if I think of 2009 what comes to mind are only a few films, ones that somehow personally mattered most to me. Two Lovers, with Gweneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, is a very particular little love story, like a novel or short story, directed by a director I've always liked, James Gray, and it restores my faith that he can still make little, personal films rooted in his own experience in the Russian part of New York City. The same thing happened with Goodbye, Solo, a sad, unique tale rooted in the South where the Iranian American, Ramin Bahrani, comes from; I liked it very much better than his two much praised earlier films set in New York. And Jim Jarmusch's Limits of Control is a miracle of precision and elegance; only a few people saw it, and it was damned by most critics who did see it, except for a happy few; one of the most discerning rightly called it his best since Dead Man. Jarmusch works to please himself, and that's why his films are so good, but sometimes the result is a shocking lack of public attention.

Out of the New York Film Festival, where I admittedly have the most cinematic fun of the year, I found in this grimmest year for the series I liked the most harsh and shocking offerings on the slate. Some of them are not released yet: Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers and Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime. Watch for them. Only Korine could have made a movie that looks like a video found in a dumpster that you're afraid to watch because you think it may be a snuff film or something horribly real and obscene. I knew nothing about Solondz and now he is one of my favorite American independent filmmakers. The cinematography by Ed Lachman is beautiful, and the plot working with characters introduced in Solodnz's Happiness illustrates his way of working interconnectedly and his rapport with actors. This director people damn as dark and nasty is actually humanistic and kind (you can say that of the Coens in A Serious Man). I also admire von Trier's Antichirst and Lee Daniels' Sapphire. Both are somehow off as filmmaking and perhaps not utterly sincere, but they hold your attention and they're bold; they leave a mark on the psyche.

The NYFF relies heavily on Cannes and Cannes seems to have been right: their top two prizewinners seem to me the best foreign films I've seen all year. Number One, the Palme d'Or, is in US release, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, and the other, the Grand Prix, is Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, which is coming. It wasn't in the New York festival; I saw it in Paris, around the corner from the Café des Deux Magots. These are two of the best European directors at the top of their game. I didn't see any Asian films that were on that level this year. The White Ribbon has been called Haneke's most beautiful, most accessible, and best film. Its logic is inexorable and its mastery is awesome. A Prophet, about a very young French-Algerian mentored by a Corsican Mafioso (the marvelous Niels Arestrop) in a French prison and turned into a precocious capo, is so rich and intense it takes multiple viewings to begin to get all that's there.

There were many other good films that I loved (yes, including The Hurt Locker). But those are the ones that left the deepest impression.


MY 2009 LISTS
(Not ranked.)

FILMS IN ENGLISH
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog 2009)
Bright Star (Jane Campion 2009)
Disgrace (Steve Jacobs 2009) C-S
Goodbye, Solo (Ramin Bahrani 2009) C-S
Hurt Locker, The (Kathryn Bigelow 2009)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino 2009)
Limits of Control, The (Jim Jarmusch 2009
Precious (Lee Daniels 2009)
Road, The (John Hillcoat 2009)
Serious Man, A (Ethan, Joel Coen 2009) C-S
Somers Town (Shane Meadows 2008)
Two Lovers (James Gray 2009) C-S

BEST FOREIGN
35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums, Claire Denis 2008)
Anichrist (Lars von Trier 2009)
Divo, Il (Paolo Sorrentino 2008)
I'm Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo)
Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke 2008)
Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2009)
Sun, The (Alexandr Sokurov 2005)
Tulpan (Sergei Dvortsevoy 2008)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann 2008)
White Ribbon, The (Michael Haneke 2009)

SHORTLISTED
Adoration (Atom Egoyan 2009)
Adventureland (Greg Mottola 2009) C-S
Education, An (Lone Scherfig 2009)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson 2009)
Humpday (Lynn Shelton 2009)
Moon, (Duncan Jones 2009)
Séraphine (Martin Provost 2008)
Single Man, A (Tom Ford 2009)
Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola 2009)
Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho 2008) C-S
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman 2009)
Vanished Empire, The (Karen Shakhnazarov 2008)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES:
Beaches of Agnes, The (Les plages d’Agnès 2008)
Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore 2009)
Collapse (Chris Smith 2009)
Cove, The (Louie Psihoyos 2009)
English Surgeon, The (Geoffrey Smith 2009)
Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner 2008)
Garbage Dreams (Mai Iskander)
Herb and Dorothy (Megumi Sasaki 2008)
Tyson (James Toback 2009) C-S
Valentino: The Last Emperor (Matt Tyrnauer 2009)

BEST UNRELEASED IN US
Belle Personne, La (Christophe Honoré 2008)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold 2009) (now released)
Frontier of Dawn, The (La Frontière de l’aube, Philippe Garrel 2008)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont 2009)
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz 2009)
Mesrine, Part 1: L’Instinct de Mort (Jean-Francois Richet 2008)
Mesrine, Part 2: L’ennemi public No 1 (Jean-Francois Richet 2008)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa 2009)
Prophet, A/Un prophète (Jacques Audiard 2009) (coming Feb. 2010)
Stella (Sylvie Verheyde 2008)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine 2009)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.