Reeling

The 25 best movies of the decade 2000-2009

This was my first decade reviewing movies full-time, which means I saw a lot of films in the last 10 years (more than you, probably). That made compiling this list much harder than I anticipated. I was originally going to keep it to 10 movies, then 20, but finally had to go with 25 (+1). That was the number I was most comfortable with in terms of what got left out.

Here's the list, in descending order:

25) Talk To Her (Hable con ella) (2002): Out of all the latter-period Pedro Almodovar masterpieces, this one was the best, with Volver a close second.

24) Finding Nemo (2003): I'm a sucker for all things Pixar (except Cars; sorry, Oliver!), but Finding Nemo is the one that remains as fresh today as it did seven years ago - the textbook definition of timeless.

23) Dancer in the Dark (2000): In deciding between this and Dogville, I opted for Dancer in the Dark for the same reasons so many people hate it: Bjork's caterwauling, the discordant musical numbers, the last half-hour in which director Lars Von Trier puts you through such an emotional wringer you almost grow to hate him. Being shamelessly manipulated never felt so good.

22) Requiem For a Dream (2000): I have vivid memories of having to attend a screening of Darren Aronofsky's soul-wrenching drama about drug addiction the same night the last episode of the first season of Survivor was airing and not being happy about this at all. By the time the movie was over, missing Survivor didn't  matter quite as much. Another memory: I was sitting next to this huge (like 6'5) tough guy at the screening who was so pummelled by the film, he started groaning when Aronofsky began to turn the screws. And kept turning. And turning.

21) Zodiac (2007): The more you watch director David Fincher's recreation of the hunt for the San Francisco Zodiac killer, the more you become like the newspaper cartoonist played by Jake Gyllenhaal: Completely obsessed.

20) Almost Famous (2000): "The only true currency in this bankrupt world ... is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymour Hoffman).

19) Inglourious Basterds (2009): Quentin Tarantino's talky World War II fantasy is the most recent film on this list, and it is too early to tell how the movie will weather the years. My guess: It will become a classic.

18) In the Mood for Love (2000): The art of the mood film, amped up to delirious extremes.

17) The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005): The funniest comedy of the last 10 years gets funnier every time I watch it.

16) Match Point (2005): Woody Allen's first film in exile - on par with his best work from the 1970s - reawakened the director's spirit and creativity. Naysayers complained they liked this story better the first time he told it (in Crimes and Misdemeanors), as if filmmakers aren't allowed to revisit themes from different angles. Someone should inform Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Steven Spielberg and John Ford of this, pronto.

15) Cache (Hidden) (2005): It takes a while - or better yet, a couple of viewings - to fully appreciate the depth and complexity of director Michael Haneke's rich stew about the human instinct to repress the past in order to shun responsibility, all wrapped up in a corker of a thriller. Also: Best closing shot of the decade, which put the answer to the film's central riddle right in front of your face - literally - but many people still didn't see it.

 

14) Elephant (2003): Gus Van Sant's ethereal meditation on the Columbine shootings was less about the particulars of that tragedy and more about the sensation of high school - the sights, sounds, rituals, emotions.

13) Amores Perros (2000): Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu took the interlocking structure of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and used it for something far graver and more dramatic.

 

12) The Dark Knight (2008) / Spider-Man 2 (2004): How do you like your comic-book movies: Dark and brooding or bright and bouncy? Either way, these two superhero epics proved there is serious populist art to be had from those funny pages. _{(OK, so I cheated with this one. I just couldn't decide.)}

11) Spirited Away (2001): The great Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece is a work of pure unbridled imagination. One of the hardest movies I've ever had to review, because the magical spell Miyazaki weaves defies description.

10) Million Dollar Baby (2004): "Frankie, I've seen you at Mass almost every day for 23 years. The only person comes to church that much is the kind who can't forgive himself for something." - Father Horvak (Brian F. O'Byrne) to boxing trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood).

9) City of God (Cidade de Deus) (2002): Fernando Meirelles beat Martin Scorsese at his own game with this exhilarating - and terrifying - look at life in the most dangerous slums of Rio de Janeiro. The rare kind of movie that is once seen, never forgotten.

8) Brokeback Mountain (2005): I happened to be interviewing Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a hotel suite at the Toronto Film Festival when director Ang Lee burst in, clutching the Golden Lion statuette the movie had just won a day before at the Venice Film Festival. The three men traded hugs, congratulations and somewhat relieved smiles: They had a hunch, but until that moment, they still didn't know they had made a masterpiece.

7) There Will Be Blood (2007): "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people ... There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money [so] I can get away from everyone." - Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the performance of the decade.

6) Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) (2006): The fantasy genre came of age in this decade, demanding to be taken seriously with Peter Jackson's momentous Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Guillermo Del Toro's story of a little girl who disappears into a magical, terrible world to escape her dreary reality outdid even Jackson's phenomenal achievement in sheer imagination, adventure and drama.

5) The Departed (2006): Martin Scorsese has made weightier, more important films, but he's never made a better movie-movie - a more absorbing entertainment than this cops-and-robbers drama that dared to stomp on all the rules of the genre. Even if you had seen the Hong Kong original this film was based on, The Departed made every other crime drama of the decade seem lightweight and trivial.

4) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): "This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon." "I know." "What do we do?" "Enjoy it." - Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Jim Carrey) in the love story of the decade.

3) No Country For Old Men (2007): How do you make sense of a crazy, violent world that seems to have lost its bearings? The melancholy answer - according to Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Coen - is you can't.

2) Adaptation (2002): In turning Susan Orlean's seemingly unfilmable book The Orchid Thief into a film, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze built a cinematic hall of mirrors that gave me a profound, brain-tickling thrill unlike any movie I had ever seen. Adaptation got loopier and nuttier as it went along, but Kaufman and Jonze never lost control of their one-of-a-kind contraption. Here, truly, is a movie like no other.

1) Mulholland Dr. (2000): If you believe that movies, at their best, are the equivalent of dreaming with your eyes wide open, then there was no more hypnotic reverie this past decade than David Lynch's poisonous ode to Hollywood, the city of - yes - dreams. Reshaped from an unaired TV pilot into a Moebius strip of a film, Mulholland Dr. was beguiling, sensual, terrifying and elusive. Every time you watch it, it feels like a slightly different movie. In dreams, Lynch waits for you.

Review: ''Sherlock Holmes''

Not even Sherlock Holmes could make much sense out of the overplotted, murky mess that is Sherlock Holmes, although Arthur Conan Doyle's legendarily brainy detective would probably never buy a ticket to a movie as elephant-footed as this one (a Hitchcock picture or maybe Chinatown would have been more his speed).

This new reimagining of Sherlock Holmes, which was directed by Guy Ritchie (Snatch, RocknRolla) and produced by Joel Silver (The Matrix, Lethal Weapon), was made for people who have neither the patience nor the attentiveness that made the detective so formidable. The setting may be old London (rendered impressively grimy and bustling), but the mood is all smash-pow-bang - it's Fight Club time on Baker Street.

The sort of giant-budget blockbuster (like Wild Wild West and Godzilla) that bears the distinct scars and stitches of too many studio-imposed suggestions and ideas, Sherlock Holmes renders what should have been a captivating Victorian-era mystery with quasi-supernatural undertones (like the excellent Dan Simmons novel Drood) close to unintelligible. Right from the requisite opening action setpiece, Ritchie paces every scene at the same furious pitch, so the movie starts out in fourth gear and never downshifts. That may be fine for those who found Speed Racer fun and exciting. Others may be wondering what, exactly, martial arts and bullet-time photography are doing in the middle of a Sherlock Holmes picture.

Those anachronisms are the point, of course: The film aims to bring a dusty literary hero to hip, contemporary life. But why are these high-concept movies almost invariably so little fun to watch? The only real entertainment in Sherlock Holmes comes not from Ritchie's elaborate action sequences or the outrageous stuntwork but from a much more old-fashioned source: the performances by Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as his trusty assistant Watson.

Downey, still channeling the super-powered charisma he brought to Iron Man (how did this actor ever fall off the radar?), turns the detective into a rascally hero who drinks too much, flirts too much, enjoys a bit of bare-knuckle fighting from time to time and is still smarter and more observant than anyone in the room. Downey relishes the opportunity to gnaw on a British accent - at times, he lays it on so thick you literally can't understand what he's saying - but the actor is clearly having a good time, and he's the sort of performer with the gift to share that fun with the audience.

Working opposite Downey also frees something in Law, who turns Dr. Watson into a veritable superhero (or at least a respectable sidekick). Although he often comes across as a studied, self-conscious actor, Law is loose and energetic here and more than holds his own in his constant banter with Downey (I'd be curious to know how much of their dialogue was improvised). Although a subplot hinges on Watson's engagement to a young lady (Kelly Reilly) and Holmes falls for a client (Rachel McAdams) who has hired him to find "a missing midget'' - a case that leads to all sorts of demonic evildoing - Holmes and Watson bicker and argue like an old married couple and fight off their enemies like Batman and Robin.

Sherlock Holmes is a bloated, enormous mess, and I'm pretty sure the entire last half-hour exists mainly to set up the sequel, but the actors make it lively and watchable anyway, as if they simply ignored all the mayhem around them on the set and decided to just have a good time. Good idea, fellas.

Sherlock Holmes opens in theaters on Friday, Dec. 25.

Review: ''Nine''

Nine isn't so much a movie as it is a collection of standalone musical numbers, strung together by the thinnest of plots. Because that plot was inspired by Fellini's 8 1/2 - one of the greatest films ever made - the narrative portions of Nine are destined to suffer by comparison. How could they not? And although some of the musical numbers are exceptionally well-staged - Penelope Cruz's sexy solo atop a giant mirror and Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson's seductive Be Italian are standouts - the numbers still play out like commercial interruptions within the context of the movie.

In Chicago, his previous adaptation of a Broadway hit, director Rob Marshall integrated the music into the film so seamlessly you couldn't imagine one without the other. When the characters started singing, the effect was always exhilarating, because the songs actually advanced the story, and the music and dancing were sensational. At the screening of Chicago I attended, the audience often applauded after certain numbers, as if they were watching live theater. That never happened at the screening where I saw Nine: All I heard were stifled yawns and uncomfortable rustling in seats (mostly, I admit, my own).

The problem with Nine - which was adapted by screenwriters Michael Tolkin (The Player) and the late Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and has the sort of cast for which the term "all-star" was coined - is the same problem that plagues every misfire made by talented people with good intentions: a fatal lack of emotional engagement.

Guido is a genius paralyzed by a mid-life crisis, an artist who makes the mistake of assuming his muse is linked to something tangible in the real world. The movie is set in a magical Italy where everyone speaks accented English, and the women (or at least the ones in Guido's life) are prone to breaking into song-and-dance. Among them are his mother (Sophia Loren), his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Cruz), his costume designer (Judi Dench), his leading lady (Nicole Kidman), a prostitute (Fergie) and a reporter (Kate Hudson).

There's a thrill in watching so many talented actresses together in one film, but with such thinly written characters to play, Nine quickly starts to resemble a photo shoot for the annual Vanity Fair Hollywood issue. Like he did in Chicago, Marshall films and edits the hell out of the musical numbers, but Nike TV commercials look pretty cool, too.

The worst thing you can say about Nine is that the movie manages to make Day-Lewis - surely one of the most magnetic and dynamic actors on the planet - more than a little dull. Guido is charming and charismatic, and Day-Lewis has fun at playing up the character's arrogant attitude toward the press. But you never get the sense of Guido as an artist - he's not movie-crazy, the way the best directors always are - and you certainly don't like him. The same goes for this flashy, snazzy, hollow movie.

Florida Film Critics Circle falls for ''Up in the Air''

Up in the Air won Best Picture, Best Actor (George Clooney) and Best Director (Jason Reitman) honors from the Florida Film Critics Circle, which is comprised of 17 film writers and critics throughout the state (including The Miami Herald's Connie Ogle and I).

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, won three awards: Best Actress for Gabourey Sibide (who also won this year's Breakout Award) and Best Supporting Actress for Mo'Nique. Inglorious Basterds' Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor.

Best Screenplay went to Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber for (500) Days of Summer, while Avatar's Mauro Fiore won Best Cinematography. The Cove was named Best Documentary and Up won Best Animated Feature. Sin Nombre was named Best Foreign Language Film.

For more information on the Florida Film Critics Circle, visit floridafilmcriticscircle.webs.com

 

Review: ''Avatar''

Blue fairies and giant flying lizards: This is, in a nutshell, what Avatar -- James Cameron's eagerly awaited, self-proclaimed cinematic game-changer, the supposed future of movies -- boils down to. OK, so they're not technically fairies. They are a blue-skinned, 10-foot-tall race of vaguely feline aliens known as Na'vi who live on the planet Pandora and have a physical and emotional connection with the natural world. They can literally plug into animals and trees through the nerve endings of their braided ponytails, and they don't just hug trees: They actually meld with them.

 But really, all that's missing are wings and some magical powers to make the Na'vi into mystical beings worthy of Oz. The story of Avatar is rooted in science fiction and fantasy and, inevitably, in Joseph Campbell), but the movie emits a distinct la-la land vibe. If anyone other than Cameron were behind the camera, the film would probably be a disaster of Howard the Duck proportions.

But without Cameron, Avatar would not exist. Not even George Lucas is better than Cameron at incorporating new filmmaking technology into his pictures. Whatever faults Avatar may have -- and there are many -- the movie succeeds in immersing you in a photorealistic, painstakingly detailed world more fully than any science fiction movie before. Watching Avatar in any of its incarnations (the 3D version adds considerable depth and dimension to the image, although the glasses start to grow heavy after the two-hour mark) is an undeniably transporting experience -- a real trip, worth taking for anyone who cares about films. When the ride is over, though, you're still left hungry for a movie.

Like Titanic, Avatar is a 10-cent script writ large and awe-inspiring through sheer directorial vision, but this time, Cameron doesn't have historical events and two remarkable performances to fall back on. Instead, we get Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine who travels to Pandora via an avatar image that allows him to blend in with the locals. His human bosses -- a short-tempered scientist (Sigourney Weaver) and a short-tempered colonel (Stephen Lang) -- have differing motivations for helping Jake succeed in studying the far-flung scenery.

 On Pandora, Jake befriends a Na'vi warrior (Zoe Saldana) who teaches him the rules of her strange planet -- and also falls in love with him. The pacing in Avatar is surprisingly measured: Cameron takes his time introducing us to the wonders of the planet, gradually peeling back the layers while constantly inventing creatures and landscapes for your eyes to feast on. You watch the first half of Avatar in a state of blissful rapture, because Cameron has the directorial chops to go along with the special-effects trickery (this is an exceptionally well-edited movie). He doles out the eye-candy gradually, and the thrill of discovery sweeps you along.

After about an hour, though, the realization starts to sink in that the story of Avatar isn't going to live up to the complexity of its backdrop. Basically, greedy humans want a mineral found on Pandora and are willing to commit genocide to get it. Avatar is The New World in outer space, or Pocahontas with blue people: The entire movie is a long buildup to a climactic 30-minute action sequence that lives up to Cameron's uncanny knack for placing his heroes in seemingly unwinnable situations (he would have been great at making those old 1950 adverture serials -- but is still, in the end, just a gigantic action sequence,

The genre elements are all there: What critically wounds Avatar is Cameron's inability to write better characters. Most of the personalities in the film are lifted straight out of Aliens, including Michelle Rodriguez's tough Latina jarhead and Giovanni Ribisi's weaselly pencil-pusher. As the villain, Lang overacts maniacally, while Weaver's ill-defined role seems to have suffered in the editing process (Cameron had to whittle Avatar down to 160 minutes to accommodate IMAX theaters).

Worthington and Saldana fare best, even though more than half of his screen time (and all of hers) is spent underneath Cameron's emotion-capture process, which melds the actors' performances with computer-generated images. The love story in Avatar -- the element you'd assume would be the most half-baked -- turns out to be the strongest thread running through this epic picture, which constantly enthralls visually and delivers a number of thrills. But the movie doesn't engage your intellect - or your heart - enough. Cameron's accomplishments as a craftsman here are formidable, but this isn't quite the future of cinema. Avatar is more of a prologue -- evidence that you can trick an audience into surrendering to an artificial world without fixating on the seams. Now we just need a story worth all the trouble.

Avatar opens in theaters on Dec. 18.

Review: ''Did You Hear About the Morgans?''

In Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker are supposed to pass for a married couple, but they have all the chemistry of two actors who just met and shook hands moments before the cameras rolled. They don't even seem to like each other much - I'm fairly certain I saw Parker's nostrils flaring in one scene - which poses a bit of a problem for a movie that hinges on their characters working out their differences and living happily ever after.

Grant in particular looks bored and distracted and eager to get this silly movie done with so he can go back to England and live his movie-star life. Grant can be an effortless, likable charmer - his performance in the wonderful About a Boy is particularly underrated - but in Did You Hear About the Morgans?, even his trademark stammering feels forced. When an actor's heart isn't in his work, you start noticing all the wrong things. Grant looks like he's been hitting the gym, he's had a little work done, and he seems utterly bored by acting - or at least bored by the role of Paul Morgan, a Manhattan lawyer trying to reconcile with his estranged wife Meryl (Parker), who kicked him out after he cheated on her.

After an awkward please-take-me-back dinner, the couple witnesses a mob hit and is placed into a relocation program, which means moving to a flyspeck town in Wyoming and learning how to ride horses, milk cows and shoot rifles. Yee-haw! Yes, this is yet another one of those movies in which small-town folk teach big-city hotshots what really matters in life.

But writer-director Marc Lawrence, who previously worked with Grant on Two Weeks Notice and Music and Lyrics, gets passable work from everyone else in the cast, including Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen as the salt-of-the-earth couple who shelter the Morgans in their home, and Wilford "I Ain't Dead Yet!" Brimley as a local business owner who gets the movie's best line. (‘‘Think what you want." You have to hear it in context). In a handful of throwaway scenes, Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss, playing Meryl's tireless personal assistant, steals the movie outright from her famous co-stars: You wish the entire film was about her.

Even Parker, who will never again be able to play anything other than a relationship-obsessed New Yorker, fares well in the role of the city slicker forced to appreciate the charms of rural life and learn how to deal with the random grizzly bear encounter(her astonished delight at discovering the $9.99 sweater rack at the local Bargain Barn is genuinely amusing). Parker also pulls off one of the first - to my knowledge - Sarah Palin jokes to grace a major Hollywood picture. She's totally game, even if she can't entirely shake off Carrie Bradshaw.

Did You Hear About the Morgans? isn't as condescending as, say, The Ugly Truth or All About Steve: There's bona fide effort up on the screen. The problem is that you can see the effort - and in the case of Grant, you wish there were a little more. A lot more. If the leading man in a would-be comedy isn't having any fun, then how can we?

Did You Hear About the Morgans? opens on Friday, Dec. 18.

Golden Globes nominations are in

I have a hard time paying much attention to the annual Hollywood Marketers' Wet Dream Awards Golden Globes - watching the telecast can be fun, but the award itself is close to meaningless - but here is the list of this year's nominees, for those who care. Nice to see Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt ((500) Days of Summer) get some recognition.

Oh, and The Lovely Bones is officially dead now, as far as Oscars go. Stanley Tucci is great, yes, but no one's beating Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor. That's a bingo.

Quentin Tarantino's favorite films of 2009

Prefacing his list by saying he's leaving Inglourious Basterds out of it, and pointing out he still hasn't seen Avatar or The Lovely Bones yet, Quentin Tarantino compiles his list of his eight favorite films of the year. You can watch the video here. :

Interestingly, Tarantino did not include The Hurt Locker on the list. District 9 didn't make the cut either, a movie I would have guessed he'd love.

Here is his list:

1. “Star Trek”
2. “Drag Me to Hell”
3. “Funny People”
4. “Up in the Air”
5. “Chocolate”
6. “Observe and Report”
7. “Precious”
8. “An Education

Southeastern Film Critics Association goes for ''Up in the Air''

Up in the Air was named Best Film of the Year by the Southeastern Film Critics Association, which is comprised of 44 film journalists and critics from nine states in the southeast U.S. (including yours truly). The movie also won Best Actor for George Clooney and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner.

The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow was named Best Director. Julie & Julia's Meryl Streep won Best Actress. Like practically every other critics' group has done thus far, SEFCA went with Precious' Mo'Nique and Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz in the Supporting Actor and Actress categories.

(500) Days of Summer won Best Original Screenplay. Up won the Best Animated Film category. Summer Hours was named Best Foreign Language film and Food Inc. won Best Documentary.

Here is the list of SEFCA's Ten Best Films of 2009:

1) Up in the Air

2) The Hurt Locker

3) Up

4) Inglourious Basterds

5) A Serious Man

6) (500) Days of Summer

7) Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

8) The Messenger

9) Fantastic Mr. Fox

10) District 9

New York Film Critics love ''The Hurt Locker'' too

The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture and Best Director honors from the New York Film Critics Circle today, mirroring the votes by the Boston and L.A. critics' groups announced Sunday. George Clooney was named Best Actor for Up in the Air and Fantastic Mr. Fox, while Meryl Streep won Best Actress for Julie & Julia.

Once again, Precious' Mo'Nique won Best Supporting Actress and Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz was named Best Supporting Actor. The chances of these two not winning Oscars in these categories now appear to be less than zero.

In the Loop got Best Screenplay, Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours won Best Foreign Language Film and Fantastic Mr. Fox won Best Animated Film. I don't think the New York and L.A. critics, whose winners tend to rarely overlap, have ever had such similar results.

Here is the complete list of winners:

Best Film – THE HURT LOCKER
Best Director – KATHRYN BIGELOW for “The Hurt Locker”
Best Screenplay – IN THE LOOP
Best Actress – MERYL STREEP  for “Julie & Julia”
Best Actor – GEORGE CLOONEY for “Up In The Air” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox”
Best Supporting Actress – MO’NIQUE for “Precious”
Best Supporting Actor – CHRISTOPH WALTZ for “Inglourious Basterds
Best Cinematography – CHRISTIAN BERGER for “The White Ribbon”
Best Animated Film – FANTASTIC MR. FOX
Best Non-fiction Film – OF TIME AND THE CITY
Best Foreign Language Film – SUMMER HOURS
Best First Feature – HUNGER,  director Steve McQueen

Special Award - To ANDREW SARRIS for his contribution to film criticism

L.A. critics also go for ''The Hurt Locker''

Like their Boston brethren did earlier today, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA) named The Hurt Locker the Best Film of the Year (Up in the Air was the runner-up) and named Kathryn Bigelow Best Director.

Jeff Bridges was named Best Actor for his portrayal of a broken-down country singer in Crazy Heart (due to open in South Florida in January. Seraphine's Yolande Moreau (no, I've never heard of it either) was named Best Actress (An Education's Carey Mulligan was the runner-up)

Mo'Nique (Precious) won Best Supporting Actress and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) won Best Supporting Actor. The Beaches of Agnes tied with The Cove for Best Documentary. Interestingly, District 9 beat out Avatar for Production Design. Fantastic Mr. Fox won Best Animated Feature (take that, Pixar!)

Check out LAFCA's complete list of winners and runners-up here. The New York Film Critics Circle will announce their annual winners on Monday.

Boston Film Critics feel ''The Hurt Locker''

The Boston Society of Film Critics has voted The Hurt Locker the best movie of the year. The film also won Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow (who is looking more and more of a lock to become the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar next year), Best Actor for Jeremy Renner, Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

Julie & Julia's Meryl Streep was named Best Actress. Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor, while Precious' Mo'Nique won Best Supporting Actress. The Cove got Best Documentary and Up won Best Animated Film. Joel and Ethan Coen got the Best Screenplay prize for A Serious Man.

Here's the complete list of the Boston winners. The Los Angeles Film Critics are due to announce their 2009 winners later this afternoon.

The ten best movies of 2009

This morning, I had to send in my first of several year-end ballots for the critics' groups I belong to, which meant nailing down my top 10 list for 2009. Only one foreign-language film made the list and no documentaries. But the first four movies on the list are pretty much interchangeable: I liked them all equally and might have ranked them differently if I was compiling the list tomorrow. I wouldn't say it was a great year for movies, but the good ones were really good.

1) Up in the Air: The miraculous thing about writer-director Jason Reitman's third feature is that it is a timeless, classy Hollywood entertainment that also happens to be a precise snapshot of the mood and concerns of present-day America.

 

2) The Hurt Locker: Director Kathryn Bigelow's nerve-jangling drama about a squad of bomb-defusing soldiers in Iraq isn't only the best movie to date about that war: It's one of the best war pictures ever made, period.

3) Inglourious Basterds: Quentin Tarantino definitively proved he's much more than a walking repository of junk-movie references with this playful and outrageous reworking of world history that exudes a profound love for and command of filmmaking in every frame.

4) A Serious Man: The always-ironic Joel and Ethan Coen got personal, wrote their first autobiographical screenplay and came up with what is arguably their best film to date: The story of a man who doesn't understand why God won't answer the eternal questions - a man who hasn't yet grasped that God is in the questions. Also: The stunning final shot deserves some kind of special Oscar.

5) (500) Days of Summer: The best movie romance since Brokeback Mountain, a potentially generic rom-com about two twentysomethings that captured the exhilarating highs - and soul-crushing, life-changing lows - of falling in love for the first time. Bonus: The best musical number of the year (sorry, Nine).

6) Public Enemies: Director Michael Mann finished what he started with his Miami Vice film adaptation by distilling the crime-drama genre - this one the story of the hunt for the notorious 1930s criminal John Dillinger - down to its purest, barest essence. An impressionistic cops-and-robbers story - a cold, hard diamond of a movie.

7) In the Loop: The funniest movie of the year, director Armando Iannucci's riotous political satire about U.S. and British diplomats maneuvering over an unnamed war took the old-fashioned route: Conjured up a large cast of characters - each with their own selfish agenda - and then set them loose on each other. The incredibly profane, rat-tat-tat dialogue had the speed and rhythm of Ernst Lubistch, reimagined by George Carlin.

8) Up: The geniuses at Pixar hooked you in the first ten minutes, with that long, dialogue-free sequence depicting a lifelong romance between a couple from childhood to old age. Then the film really took off - literally - sending its protagonist, and the audience's imagination, into the clouds. At once humanistic and surreal, Up set a new standard for the heights animation is capable of achieving.

9) The Class: Half-documentary, half-feature film, Laurent Cantet's amazing story of one year in the life of a French schoolteacher and his students was a transcendent exploration of the immeasurable importance and significance of an arena we too often take for granted: The classroom.

10) Star Trek: In reviving a tired, worn-out franchise, director J.J. Abrams came up with the year's most invigorating popcorn entertainment, a movie that cannily played to the audience's sense of nostalgia while coming up with a slew of fresh twists and riffs on hoary cliches. Everything old is new again.

Honorable mentions: Adventureland, Afterschool, An Education, Avatar, The Cove, District 9, Duplicity, The Hangover, Julia, Moon, Precious, The Road, Sin Nombre, Watchmen, Whip It. 

This is not a review of ''Avatar''

20th Century Fox has requested that critics hold their reviews until Avatar opens next week, and I don't believe in biting the hand that feeds you. But I will say this: You have to give James Cameron credit for delivering what he promises.

After all the hype about Avatar's being a revolutionary work that would forever change the way films are made, the trailer released earlier this year suggested something far less radical: A gigantic geekfest.

And that is exactly what Avatar is: A mammoth, kick-ass spectacle about 10-foot tall blue aliens who ride around on giant flying lizards and commune with an entity known as the Tree of Souls. I acknowledge that premise is not going to sound all that appealing to a lot of people (basically, every woman I know; there's just no way this movie is going to come close to Titanic's grosses).

But Cameron - at a point in his career when he could literally make any movie he wanted - went deep and personal and made one from the heart. Whatever you may think of Avatar, you can't accuse Cameron of not dreaming big and taking huge risks. 

And although the movie's 3D strained my eyes after two hours, the computer-generated imagery really does trump everything that has come before (the finished film looks much, much better than it did in the trailers). After Titanic, Cameron was King of the World. With Avatar, he is now the undisputed King of All Nerds.

Butterflies

As expected, the Avatar reviews sprouted everywhere overnight, and from what I've seen, they are all raves. I've only scanned a few, but Variety's decidedly non-geeky Todd McCarthy calls it "a film of universal appeal that just about everyone who ever goes to the movies will need to see". The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt says "James Cameron has proven his point. He is king of the world."

And even the perpetually cranky, CGI-hating Jeffrey Wells is over the moon for Avatar. "You could call it a kind of visual opera -- a forest-primeval symphonic naturalist hard-on movie that technically knocks you flat, coheres emotionally, isn't afraid to be silly or simplistic, delivers visual CG wonder like nothing I've ever seen before (really) and pays off like a gotterdammerung Apocalypse Now meets Tarzan meets the best-special-effects-flick-you've-ever-seen insanity ride."

What is most exciting about Avatar to me - what makes it a bonafide event movie, as opposed to another Batman or Harry Potter picture - is that it promises to show me something completely new and fresh done on a gigantic, budget-busting scale. The fact that it was directed by James Cameron doesn't hurt, either. I haven't exactly been counting down the days until I saw Avatar, but I woke up officially psyched this morning.

I've already seen most of the big holiday films, and practically every one has been a disappointment. Here's hoping Cameron can rescue the season. I'll find out in three hours.