Reviews: Up In The Air; 44 Inch Chest; Still Walking and All About Steve

Up In The Air (4/5)
(Jason Reitman) 15A
44 Inch Chest (1.5/5)
(Malcolm Vinville) 18
Still Walking (4/5)
(Hirokazu Koreeda) IFI Club
All About Steve (1/5)
(Phil Traill) 12A

Up In The Air, the new seriocomedy from Juno director Jason Reitman, is a movie about coming back down to earth. The story, adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, is a familiar one: its backdrop is the boulevard of broken dreams of the past two years. Which is another way of saying this is a recession film. Which it is, though it comes with the Chesire grin of George Clooney, a man so smooth he could make the words ‘you’ve just lost your job’ sound like melted butter.
This is what Clooney’s Ryan Bingham does. He flies around America firing employees for a firm that is hired by craven employers. (His boss, played by Jason Bateman, can’t hide his glee. “It is one of the worst times in America. This is our moment!”) We meet a parade of faces throughout the film, ordinary Joes and Joanettes faced with the dire news. And Clooney’s voice seems to have adapted for the role. Its smoothness has deepened. He now speaks like a velvet shag pile rug. You can imagine naked women throwing themselves on top of it.
As with all Clooney characters, there is that silken smugness. But what makes this one of his finest roles is the way he allows the film to ruffle him up, to scrape against his own gloss. When he isn’t lounging in airports, or jetting his way towards his target of 10 million air miles, Ryan gives motivational speeches about being on your own. “Let everything burn and imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. It’s kind of exhilarating, isn’t it?” he preaches. He is a man with no ties, no family, no loyalty but to loyalty cards. He makes his life look like bliss, so wrapped up is he in his own self-denial.
This is unpicked delicately by two women. The first is Vera Farmiga’s Alex, another frequent high flyer. They exchange glances in an airport bar and soon they’re swapping loyalty cards (and cheek cells) like corporate soul mates. The moment reminds you of Patrick Bateman eyeing up business cards in American Psycho, and there is similar satire at work here: Reitman’s eye is cross-haired on the business class. He wants to know what it is like to be human in the midst of the inhuman. The world here is the colour of corporate: all drained blues. Laptops are put together to arrange a next date. On an airplane, Ryan is confronted by an air hostess with a soft drink on a tray. “Do you want the cancer?” she asks him. “What?” he asks. The film depicts the modern world as a kind of disease, eating away at what we call life.
Reitman captures Ryan’s slick travel routine with some neat editing: his slim suitcase is zipped, zapped and swizzled. And though Reitman’s style is clean and sharp, he doesn’t seek to break boundaries with his camera. Instead, he chips away at American pieties – notably the foundation myth about work and wealth creation. Reitman journeys towards what we might call real values: the gravity of family. But he’s not a sentimentalist and does not shy from disappointment.
It comes to weigh upon the face of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new employee at Ryan’s firm. She hits the job like a hurricane, with the naïve surety of an Ivy League grad. She spends her time doing up a flow chart on how to fire people, and pioneers a technique for terminating careers over the internet that would take Ryan off the road. Kendrick, a snappy young actress with a film future in the bag, begins to take on the weight of real life when she goes out on the road, meeting people face to face.
The film bubbles with gentle humour and there is a welcome complexity to Reitman’s characters. In some ways, he slots into the slipstream of director Alexander Payne, sharing the same quiet purpose. His eye is attracted to the incongruities of modern life and the grand failures of our small affairs. And he underlines without needing a bold pen. His theme is starting to look like disappointment.
In Juno, the heroine went through an entire film to learn that life doesn’t match our idealism. Here, Reitman shorthands that journey for Natalie in an amusing scene where, holding Ryan and Alex captive in an airport lounge, she bombards them with the entire outline of her dream man, all of which she has realised is a fiction. Ryan, too, comes to realise his life is a digression, a “parenthesis” in fact, and Clooney’s face sags with real ache, the Chesire grin wiped from his lips. I can’t imagine being called anything worse than that.
There’s a lot of name-calling in 44 Inch Chest, a film that swaggers like some kind of sexy beast. If only it were Sexy Beast. Screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who wrote Jonathan Glazer’s terrific Brit gangster flick, pair up again, while two of that film’s cast return in the shape of Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. Meanwhile, Ben Kingsley, whose explosive Don Logan made one of the great on-screen nasties, is exchanged for John Hurt, which is much like exchanging a stick of dynamite for a glass of brandy.
Winstone plays Colin, a burl of a man with eyes like black holes. He has just been cuckolded by a pretty-boy waiter and his response, along with his pals, is to kidnap the fella, tie him to a chair in a warehouse and shout at him, with the plan to kill him. In Brit gangster fashion, the men spend their time calling each other c**ts. Though the most ridiculous line falls to Stephen Dillane’s Archie, who unloads this mouthful into the ear of the gagged and bound hostage: “You f**ked his f**king wife you f**king wife f**ker”. Indeed. One would presume, then, that the f**king f**ker is f**king f**ked. Or is he?
In Sexy Beast, the violence was viscerally verbal. Its alpha male stand-off was as tense as any murderous heist movie. 44 Inch Chest wants to play the same game but ends up a boob. The script is over-stuffed and its verbal violence is spread evenly, rather than given focus in just one nasty character. It slugs it out on screen with the balletic poise of Bluto then pauses every five minutes to give us a lumbering anecdote, much like a Guy Ritchie movie but without the pyrotechnics. It feels like a stage play. First-time director Malcolm Vinville makes it look like a stage play too.
Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda nods at Ozu’s towering Tokyo Story and updates it in Still Walking, making family life in modern Japan that little bit more complicated. What if some of the grown-up kids want to spend time with their parents but find it difficult? What if the parents are a pain to behold?
Here, retired patriarch Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is an isolated, petty, childish man, while granny Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) is seemingly benign but quite the bitter slice – she bad-mouths her kids behind their backs. Koreeda kindly offers them a reasonable excuse: their eldest son drowned 15 years ago. Old age is seen to embitter rather than soften. Chinami (Japanese cult figure YOU) and her husband and kids smile at the pernicious parents, while Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) and his wife and stepson walk on eggshells. From plot particulars to some waist-height camera shots and pillow shots of passing trains, there are plenty of references to Ozu’s film. Koreeda’s script, which takes place over a day, is carefully observed and the dysfunction is shaped on screen with rare grace.
All about Steve, a Sandra Bullock comedy, should be basted and roasted upside down in the oven. Whatever reputation Bullock had left as a comedian is cooked. She plays Mary Horowitz, a crossword puzzle writer and simpering irritant who can’t find a man because, basically, she’s deranged. Her calling card is a pair of shiny red boots, so annoyingly bright, you begin to hope she’ll meet a bull and be gored magically off screen. Instead, she spends the film chasing after Steve, a TV cameraman who meets her for a blind date and spends the rest of the film running away from her. He’s played by Bradley Cooper, an actor in demand now after The Hangover and surely cursing his luck that this deeply unfunny film, made in 2007 but sitting on a shelf till now, ever got a release.

The Road (3.5/5)
(John Hillcoat) 16
It’s Complicated (3/5)
(Nancy Meyers) 15A
Treeless Mountain (3/5)
(So Yong Kim) G
It Might Get Loud (3/5)
(David Guggenheim) PG

You would think the world had ended in 2009, such was the collective hullabaloo. If there was any doubt in the new year that it hadn’t, along comes The Road to remind us what the end of the world really looks like. It should be required viewing for snivelling whingers: see how bad it could get? Now shut up.
The Road, then, journeys to the closure of humanity. The post-apocalyptic world is an ashen wasteland. The sun is dimmed to a crepuscular shade. The earth groans sadly. Telephone poles lie toppled as if they no longer have the strength to stay standing. Trees stand naked and dead, the wind a shivering sigh. What is left of mankind’s imprint lies ransacked and empty. Unlike most films where the plaintive music is spread thickly on top, Nick Cave’s score isn’t even needed: to just see this is to experience apocalypse wow.
The film, from The Proposition director John Hillcoat, follows almost to the letter the eponymous Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. This was a book so atmospherically powerful that I found myself buying tinned food after reading it, just in case. Its recreation on the screen is a depressing marvel. As in the novel, the nature of end days is never explained. We are just left to witness what becomes of man in its aftermath.
All that helter-skelter of the Hollywood doomsday picture is exchanged for a forlorn weariness. You can see it etched into the face of Viggo Mortensen, a character called the Man, who escorts his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) towards the coast. Mortensen is all taciturn and noble bearing. He has that raw manliness you need to guide you through danger and the intelligence to try and make sense of what can’t be made sense of. His voiceover is exhausted and leaden, for the world is almost empty. “How many people do you think are still alive?” the Boy asks him. “In the world? Not very many.”
They have a lot to deal with. They need food and shoes. They are so ragged, in one tracking shot, that the camera passes them slowly by and they cannot keep up. Mostly, they have to avoid becoming food themselves. They push a trolley full of odds and ends and a truck rumbles slowly out of a tunnel behind them, its engine growling like some kind of monster. But the only monsters here are what is left of mankind, and those on board the truck are cannibals prowling the wastelands for human meat.
The Road is all about the Boy. The Man asks a gang member what they are eating. He responds with a sly smile and a glance at the Boy: “Whatever we can find”. What keeps the Man going is a responsibility to his son: to keep him alive, to educate him, to teach him morality in the complete absence of it, to uphold the last vestiges of civilisation. But he also teaches him how to shoot himself, just in case. In a flashback, we see his mother (Charlize Theron) give up the fight, arguing with the Man about suicide.
This is a film without comfort, almost without reprieve, a desolate wasteland of despair. Out of the dimness and dismantling of humanity shines the occasional small joy. A wash and a brushing of teeth is a kind of bliss. A tin of found spam is a Bacchanalian soiree.
In his novel, McCarthy scratched off the veneer of civilisation and stripped mankind to bare bones. He wanted to see what was left: why do we want to keep on living when there is nothing to live for? What is the hold children have on their parents? These are ineffable mysteries, though McCarthy took us as close to the edge of understanding as we could hope to get. Hillcoat shows serious concern with the visual textures of the film. But little of the book’s philosophy bubbles to the surface.
If McCarthy’s book has reached the status of a modern classic, it is perhaps because the language itself is not a tool but is embedded in its meaning. The words reach around you with almost suffocating strength, beauty lurching out from death. Here, there is little beauty. Just a grim weariness you are glad to be shorn of.
Meryl Streep is all autumnal beauty in It’s Complicated, a rom-com from Nancy Meyers, director of What Women Want. What Streep’s Jane wants, or actually needs, is to loosen up. She’s divorced 10 years and runs a successful bakery, but her sex life is cooling in the fridge. Streep initially feeds off awkwardness and spends the first 10 minutes doing reaction shots: at her indifferent grown-up kids, at the diaphanous young wife of her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) or at a canoodling couple in a lift.
But can an ex ever be an ex after 20 years of marriage? Baldwin looks well-fed but his Jake misses Jane’s food. He purrs like a smooth cat and suddenly he’s an ex with benefits. Then Steve Martin’s architect Adam shows up and he has designs on her too.
Streep shakes Jane alive and is a lovely presence. She enjoys sex, smokes pot, and gets emotionally confused. She’s awkward in front of her ex with her body, but the film is never unkind to her. For It’s Complicated is a song of praise to women in middle age.
The pace, too, is middle-aged. There are times when it feels like it should nod off for a nap. Then there are the indulgent montages: Streep getting drunk, Streep having fun, Streep scratching her nose, Streep baking. (All that gorgeous food is an advertisement for the nice life. Don’t watch it on an empty stomach.) But there are moments too of twinkling comedy. I doubt that Baldwin’s brilliant “Home sweet home” line was even in the script.
It’s Complicated makes the case that older women are beautiful. It helps, obviously, when you have Streep in the lead role. There’s a gentle nod to The Graduate, but here, the older woman gets the man. The question is which man.
In Treeless Mountain, an Ozu-inspired film from South Korean writer and director So Yong Kim, the gaze adopts the point of view of children. It is a film so gentle it could come apart in your hands.
There’s Jin (Hee Yeon Kim), a seven-year-old moppet with a helmet of dark hair, and Bin (Song Hee Kim), her tiny sister. Their mother (Soo Ah Lee) is an addled woman with a tired face and can’t look after them any more. So they are dumped with an unloving, neglectful aunt (Mi Hyang Kim) who doesn’t feed them. “You two are a real pain,” she says.
Kim handles the slide into neglect with skill. She films the story with the kind of naturalism that looks misleadingly easy, while she draws a remarkable performance from Hee Yoen Kim. Where we are used to the look-at-me extroversion of Hollywood child actors, here, the performances are introverted yet full of spirit. What you understand about Jin is etched in her face.
True to her unforced style, Kim wants for an ending that feels natural. But where Ozu could open a door from an ordinary moment into something transcendental, Treeless Mountain remains underwhelming.
David Guggenheim’s affectionate documentary, It Might Get Loud, is ostensibly an homage to the electric guitar. It’s really about the attitudes and inspiration of three seminal players: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and Jack White of The White Stripes/The Raconteurs.
White is all gurning authenticity, recounting his formative days learning the blues in downtrodden Detroit. The Edge revisits Mount Temple School and fiddles with a delay pedal while facing the Irish Sea. And Page recounts his remarkable journey from skiffle to stadium stratosphere. The trio sit on a stage, chat and play riffs. The Edge looks uneasy off-the-cuff. White is all off-the-cuff. But the real star of the show is Page. He whips out the opening riff of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and the Edge leaps out of his seat to get a closer look. He stands with White, the pair grinning like smitten kittens.

Review: Avatar (3/5)

Avatar
(James Cameron):
Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, (Voice: Zoe Saldana). Running time: 162 minutes (12A) HHH

We were told about banks, during this Great Recession, that were “too big to fail”. Well, here’s a film that is “too big to fail” too – James Cameron’s long-anticipated sci-fi action-fantasy Avatar. It is a film, he has said in a moment of hubristic critic-baiting, that will change movies forever. And at a cost of $500m, its distributor 20th Century Fox will make sure the world will buy into it.
It’s certainly a film that will take your breath away, though not for the right reasons: this is a victory of ceaseless spectacle over innovative storytelling, a white-man-goes-native plot that is yawningly conventional and dumbed down to hell. After 162 minutes, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had just watched a very posh-looking, not to mention instantly forgettable, Michael Bay film.
The very dull Sam Worthington stars as Jake, a ‘Jarhead’ marine with a spinal injury. He travels to the distant planet of Pandora where an aggressive corporate enterprise wants the planet’s resources. They have to relocate a native, humanoid race called the Na’vi – intelligent indians who look like giant Amazonian Smurfs – away from their homeland. As part of the battle to win “hearts and minds”, Jake climbs into a pod and assumes his Avatar – a Na’vi body which he controls with his mind – and goes to live with the locals where they accept him as one of their own. There are sprinkled references to Iraq and Bush’s tenure, but the story takes a turn into twee environmental fable when Jake falls in love and turns against the villainous imperialists, preferring the intuitive, primitive life over shallow technology.
I’m with Jake on this one. While Cameron really wows you with gee-whiz technology, you’re almost blinded from noticing how the film’s emotional engagement is flatlining. Live action and animation are merged into a seamless fit. Pandora’s jungle and its exotic creatures are a lush spectrogram of colour. And while the 3D is a classy affair, I didn’t emerge from it feeling I had just experienced a revolution. Contrary to the plot, technology wins and heart and soul loses. The emperor James Cameron is not naked on his horse, but he is wearing little else but fancy underpants.

The Films of the Decade

(As appeared in the Sunday Tribune, 27.12.09)

The lifting of Russell Crowe’s iron mask in Gladiator with the words: “My name is Maximus Desmus Meridius, Commander of the Army of the North…”; the exhilaration of the passengers charging the hijackers in United 93; Sacha Baron Cohen’s naked hotel wrestle in Borat; the rabid sneer on the lips of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight; Daniel Day Lewis’ Daniel Plainview sucking on his metaphorical milkshake in There Will Be Blood; Maggie Cheung’s sensual, slow-motion sashay during In The Mood For Love; Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen’s conversation about pinot on the back porch in Sideways; Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham’s verbal volleying amid a halo of smoke in Hunger; Naomi Watts’ audition for a movie part that turns into a smouldering sex scene in Mulholland Drive; that grab-you-by-the throat moment in the swimming pool in Let The Right One In; that ending in Hidden; that beginning that was the ending in Memento; and that moment of sorrow on Tommy Lee Jones’ face in the last scene of No Country for Old Men.
The past decade is a trove of cinematic treasure. But how to choose its 50 best films from the thousands that graced the screens? For every list of 50 films, there is another list with an alternative 50 titles. There will be groaning and grumping. (Yes, Amelie is not on the list. Neither are any Bourne films, enjoyable as they are.) Everybody has their favourites. But to round up the best from a decade’s worth of movies requires something extra. These, then, are the films that raise the bar for filmmakers to come. These are the films that are the most beautiful and the most original, films that bristle with that exciting element of strangeness yet have the ability to connect deeply with audiences. These films speak volumes about who we are and the times we live in, yet will hold up and be watched by future generations, films you can watch again and again. So here are the top 10 films of the decade, in order only of year of production, followed by the next best 40...

Top 10 Greatest Films of the Decade

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
One of the great unconsummated love stories in the movies. Wong Kar-Wai’s poetic masterpiece (photographed by Chris Doyle) takes a moment in time between two spurned lovers – Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Hong Kong in the 1960s – and fills it with an aching, mute sadness and the regret of missed opportunity. It shimmers beautifully on the screen, while Cheung and Leung look and behave the way real movie stars should but rarely do.

Together (Lukas Moodysson, 2000)
Bergman called him a “young master”. Lukas Moodysson has since gone wayward, but with Together, his second film, he hit a level of humanist filmmaking worthy almost of the great work of Jean Renoir. A touching, hilarious and life-affirming tale of a hippy commune in 1970s Sweden to the soundtrack of Abba, all of life is held within Moodysson’s expert yet tender grasp.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Film noir, fever dream, Hollywood homage and movie hedonism, David Lynch’s mellifluous mindbender shows a master of the cinematic medium at full power. It also contains one of the great performances of the decade – the then unknown Naomi Watts changing dramatic register as if she were in five different movies at once.

Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
This story about a 1950s housewife made something very modern of something very old – Haynes’ salutation to the 1950s melodramas of Sirk and Ophuls. Headily expressive with divine compositions and craft – this is a cineaste’s dream. It is also Julianne Moore’s finest moment on screen.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
A film that makes a symphony of the small moments in our lives. Gondry’s film overcomes its patent absurdity to make a genuinely moving statement about the way we can’t live with relationships yet can’t live without them. Unsentimental but deeply romantic, like all great movies it connects with you in the gut, on a level you just can’t quite explain.

Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)
This road movie about two wine-sloshed mid-life slackers is Payne’s finest moment: a satire full of gently observed detail and log-fire warmth. Payne hangs the flaws of his characters on screen like dirty laundry but makes us love them anyway. Sideways is not just one of the golden comedies of the decade and a great piece of compassionate filmmaking, it was also so influential, it put a cork in worldwide sales of Merlot.

Hidden (Caché) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Daniel Auteuil lies down on his bed from the sheer weight of remorse and the rest of us could hardly move out of our seats such was our awe. Haneke packed arthouses with Hidden – a searing, slow-burning examination of historical and personal guilt and a whodunnit that leaves a vital piece of the puzzle deliberately missing.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
Breathtakingly sad, unsentimental and uplifting, Julian Schnabel’s transformational film about life and death has a spiritual charge that pulses through you, transporting you to the kind of height that leaves you exhilarated and appreciative for your own ordinary life. It is staggeringly inventive with a profound moral sense.

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Its greatness gnaws at you, long after you’ve seen it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s juggernaut is about oil and it is about America and it is one of the most cynical films about human nature ever made. It also added a great character to the film canon – Daniel Plainview, a perversely hilarious and monstrously amoral oilman unforgettably played by Daniel Day Lewis.

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
With his second entry in the top 10, Austrian Michael Haneke is the pre-eminent European film master at work. The White Ribbon – his most beautiful, complex and dazzling film – is a work of psychological brilliance. With a previously unseen tenderness and a vice-like grip, Haneke explores the tyranny of religious purity and the origins of Nazism in a small town with novelistic detail.

The Next Best 40

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
The martial arts movie is reborn. Ang Lee’s balletic Asian western fused magic realism with martial arts to form this electrifyingly romantic epic.

Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
Christopher Nolan’s dazzling debut has a beginning that is the end and an end that is the beginning. Oh, how we struggled to put the pieces together.

Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)
These three slices of life in modern-day Mexico City in Iñárritu’s powder-keg debut made the world sit up and take notice.

Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
Russell Crowe came, he saw and he conquered, while Ridley Scott reset the bar for what old-fashioned epics could do in the noughties – a strident swords-and-sandals swashbuckler.

Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
Cuarón’s vibrant road movie threw social commentary and eroticism into the mix and helped spur on the Mexican cinema revolution.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
This exotic, exquisitely-drawn flight of fancy from Japanese animation maestro Miyazaki is both a masterpiece and a children’s favourite.

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
It began as a sleeper hit but became a cult favourite. Kelly’s genre-bending, sci-fi puzzler found the perfect balance between revelation and restraint. It bent the space-time continuum and pleasingly warped our minds too.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2003, 2005)
They said it couldn’t be done. But the three films were better, bolder and more beautiful than anyone could have imagined. It showed Peter Jackson running rings around other Hollywood directors.

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
Almodovar had a glorious decade. This tale of obsession, loneliness and unexpected friendship shows the Spanish director at his most restrained yet poetic-passionate best.

Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman sends up the movies with this post-modern skit on movie writing. Hilarious, irreverent and clever-clever.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)
The danger, the heat, the bravado. And they were just kids. Brazil thrust itself upon the world with this flamboyant and flagrant gangster epic and the world lapped it up.

Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
Russian master Sokurov did the unthinkable by shooting an entire film in one take – a 96-minute steadycam shot. The result is a ghostly, mysterious and captivating ride through 300 years of Russian culture.

Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002)
If the cinema is clogged full of documentaries, then this is the film to blame: Michael Moore’s rifle blast to the face about gun culture in America. Who can forget that Charlton Heston interview?

Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Ceylan’s films graft the poetic neo-realism of Abbas Kiarostami with the emotional isolation of Michelangelo Antonioni. This stirring, profound work examines a man entombed in his own isolation and depression. It also helped set the agenda for a new breed of Turkish filmmaking.

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
What did Bill Murray whisper into the ear of Scarlett Johansson? Does it matter? Coppola’s dreamy, sensual love story set in neon-lit Tokyo seized a moment of shared tenderness amidst cultural and relationship alienation.

American Splendor (Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman, 2003)
Live action and comic-book art mingle in this hilarious and highly innovative biopic about blue-collar cartoonist Harvey Pekar.

Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, 2003)
Chan-wook Park fuses madness and mayhem with the operatic and the baroque to produce this ultra-stylish revenge fantasy – the pinnacle of the burgeoning Korean film movement.

Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)
Classical Hollywood storytelling at its best. But the real champion was Eastwood who, despite being in his 70s, produced knock-out film after knock-out film throughout the decade.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
Cronenberg takes a family revenge drama, injects it with hints of perversion and explosive violence, and scrapes the veneer off civilization to poke underneath at our more unsavoury evolutionary instincts.

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
Herzog sculpts found footage from Timothy Treadwell – a foolish, monkish outcast who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska only to be eaten by them – into a masterly documentary about his classic theme, that fine line between witless man and indifferent nature.

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2005)
A poignant film about a broken friendship. The film’s static camera captures time like vital moments being lost forever. It then hinges into a moment of transcendence. Hypnotic and profound.

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
Ennis del Mar puts his hand on the empty shirt of Jack Twist and audiences gasped. Ang Lee’s groundbreaking film – a tragic story of love and loss between two gay cowboys – was delicately handled yet had the power to smash through a near-century of Hollywood prejudice.

United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)
Paul Greengrass addressed the demons of 9/11 head-on by putting us inside that ‘fourth plane’. His breathtaking simulator-style cinema left out sensationalism and sentimentality right until that last harrowing blackout.

Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul Apichatpong, 2006)
Mysterious, beautiful, hypnotic, and utterly unique, a beguiling hybrid of installation art and Lynchian strangeness.

Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Guillermo del Toro’s anti-fascist parable exorcises Spanish civil war ghosts and blends brutal reality with fairytale fantasy in a marvellous and moving way.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006)
Sasha Baron Cohen as the mustachioed, fizzy-haired Borat takes shock comedy to new heights, dismantles political correctness, and lampoons shallow seriousness. The funniest film of the decade.

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
A beautiful, haunting picture about a nation under surveillance and the final, crumbling years behind the German iron curtain – a clambering frenzy of paranoia and forced treachery.

Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007)
A high-voltage screwball, but Knocked Up transcends its comedy to become an affecting story in which the slacker generation finally grows up. It also unleashed the Apatow comedic genre on the world.

No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
The Coen Brothers refashion Cormac McCarthy’s flinty, spare prose into images of spiritual simplicity – a serio-comic neo-western that is a lament for modern times. Beautifully shot, acted and edited, it is the Coens’ masterpiece.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
The pinnacle of the Romanian new wave, Cristian Mungiu’s film is a harrowing drama about totalitarianism and a stunning thriller about one student’s plight while trying to help her roommate get an abortion.

Couscous (Abdel Kechiche, 2007)
Abdel Kechiche invisibly and very beautifully knits a complex social portrait of a French-Tunisian community – a stunning reimagining of neo-realism.
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
Bob Dylan turns eclectic. This biopic is a unique response to the problem of pinning down a man who refuses to be pinned – a cinematical tour-de-force that explores the many faces of Dylan.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)
What’s the matter with kids today? Van Sant empathises with troubled teens in this lo-fi experiment about the affectlessness of youth. It almost climbs inside the mind of its teenage protagonist such is its subjective, dreamy, disconnected camera work.

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
A masterwork of visual, almost silent, poetry and a gentle love story between two robots set on earth and in space. And it does all this within the constraints of the family movie. The Citizen Kane of animation.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2007)
“This town deserves a better class of criminal,” says Heath Ledger’s The Joker. He did just that, while Christopher Nolan took the superhero movie to untrammeled new heights.

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
This Swedish vampire chiller leaves Hollywood for dead. A coming-of-age story told with the kind of atmosphere that ices your breath. The great horror film of the decade.

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
Michael Fassbender is unforgettable as Bobby Sands. A work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. A visceral thump to the senses.

Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008)
A political biopic that spills hot all over the screen with a flaming, bravura audacity. Imagine Tarantino and Fellini listening to techno.

The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)
Cantet’s film about a Parisian classroom poses major questions about multi-culturalism. It’s so naturalistic, you could be watching a documentary. Neo-realism evolving into extreme-realism.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2009)
Danny Boyle’s Bombay mix. An exhilarating epic and a triumphant, swooning fantasy about the rise of a slum kid in Calcutta, it juggles a handful of genres into something unique.

Close but no cigar...

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel), Inland Empire (David Lynch), The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu), Still Life (Jia ZangKe), Gosford Park (Robert Altman).

The Movies in 2009

What will 2009 be remembered for? At the cineplex, it was the year of 3D. Henry Selick’s creepy Coraline used it to take us deeper into its laby-rinthine fairytale, while Pixar’s Up used 3D to subtly enhance its lighter-than-air story in a film that even made grumpy film critics cry. Meanwhile, James Cameron’s Avatar, the self-prophesied revolution in 3D, finally arrived at the end of the year, wafting along on the vapours of its own hot air of hype.
JJ Abrams reinvented Star Trek for the OC generation; Watchmen, after innumerable failed attempts, finally hit the screen like a slap of cold porridge; while District 9, a sci-fi thriller from South Africa (with a little help from Peter Jackson), gave a healthy two fingers to Hollywood and tore a healthy hole too in the box office.
Funny man Judd Apatow disappointed with the eagerly awaited Funny People while shock comedian Sacha Baron Cohen split audiences right down the middle with Brüno. Meanwhile, a small comedy called The Hangover, with a list of actors few had ever heard of, became the smash hit of the year. Harry Potter 6 waved its magic wand but its spell was broken by New Moon, the Twilight sequel, which outdid Harry Potter box-office records, fuelled only by the spending power of teenage girls.
Mickey Rourke, bruised but not broken, jumped back into the ring with The Wrestler, while everybody’s favourite gunslinger Clint Eastwood bowed out from acting with guns firmly in holster with his swan-song Gran Torino. In Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz dialled the temperature to sizzling and reminded us why she is the most sensual movie star on the planet.
Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon wowed the critics at the arthouse but it was Danny Boyle’s swooning fantasy Slumdog Millionaire that crossed over into a massive mainstream hit. Meanwhile, a low-key vampire film called Let The Right One In staked a claim to the title of best horror film of the decade.

The best films of 2009
1. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Haneke’s latest is one of the great films of the decade – a sombre, disquieting masterpiece with a puzzle that goes unsolved. Shot in shivering black and white and with astonishing rigour, Haneke takes German society in the film’s grasp and pokes around its psyche in the years before WWI.

2. Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino)
Italian director Sorrentino takes the ambiguous story of the decrepit, shady former Italian prime minister Andreotti and turns it into a high-octane gangster-inflected biographical thriller. A rare example of stylistic excess and bravura filmmaking going hand-in-hand with content.

3. Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
This coming-of-age story set in the bleak, concrete environs of a Stockholm suburb in the 1980s is also the best vampire movie in years. It broods with icy atmosphere and an unusual tenderness. It’s also a cure for the attention-deficit-disorder Hollywood horrors have instilled in cinemagoers.

4. The Class (Laurent Cantet)
Laurent Cantet’s film is beautifully complex yet beguilingly simple. We spend a year in a tough Parisian classroom and it is so naturalistic, you wonder if you are watching a documentary. You don’t notice there is even a plot until you find your feelings all caught up in it. You could call it extreme realism.

5. Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)
A marriage of Hollywood with Bollywood; a high pitch of melodrama shot with a realist lens; a coming-of-age comedy that tangos with tragedy; a heart-thumping romance locking fingers with a thriller. Shameless and joyful.




The next best 10
Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
A Serious Man (The Coen Brothers)
The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
Two Lovers (James Gray)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Brüno (Larry Charles)

Worst film: Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
Runner up: Watchmen (Zack Snyder)

Best Irish film: Waveriders (Joel Conroy)

Most over-rated film: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Best male performance: Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino)
Runner up: Joaquin Phoenix (Two Lovers)

Best female performance: Penelope Cruz
(Broken Embraces)
Runner up: Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)

Best director: Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon)
Runner up: Laurent Cantet (The Class)

Best new director: Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In)

Best cinematographer: Greig Fraser (Bright Star)
Runner up: Chris Doyle (The Limits of Control)

Best documentary: Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi)

Best animation: Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson)

Most embarrassing cinematic moment: Watching Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character have an orgasm as she watches her young child jump out of the window in Antichrist. Somebody, please, take the camera away from the very pretentious Lars von Trier.

Most spine-tingling cinematic moment: Tomas Alfredson’s skilful and scintillating swimming-pool scene in Let The Right One In.