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2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001
1-20 of 531 articles from 2009 « Prev | Next »
Peter Debruge’s Top 10 of 2009
7 hours ago | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »
A rough year, you say? Maybe for your 401(k). Hollywood raked it in, enjoying record box office numbers, while the indie and foreign lineup (though spread between fewer companies perhaps) yielded an unprecedented number of treasures. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I had such a hard time cutting my best-of list off at 10. Surveying my choices, I’m hard-pressed to find a common theme. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I might even wonder what kind of critic can love a G-rated Japanese-animated cartoon and Lars von Trier’s genital-mutilation opus in the same breath, or reconcile the esoteric with the popcorn populism of James Cameron’s Avatar. But there you have it. Of the first-run and festival films I saw last year (that’s as many movies as qualified for Oscar consideration in 2009 - though not the same ones), the 10 best are »
- Peter Debruge
Bryce Dallas Howard Interview The Loss Of A Teardrop Diamond
12 hours ago | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »
Legendary writer Tennessee Williams is widely considered the most important American playwright of the post-wwii era, with many of his classic plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, adapted into classic films. The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is a rediscovered original screenplay from the 1950s, that has been brought to life by first time director Jodie Markell and actress Bryce Dallas Howard.
The daughter of successful actor-turned-director Ron Howard, Bryce has already developed quite a name for herself, working in some of the biggest film franchises (The Twilight Saga, Terminator, Spider-Man) and with some of the most intriguing filmmakers (Sam Raimi, M. Night Shyamalan, Lars von Trier, Kenneth Branagh, McG and now Clint Eastwood).
During the press day for The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, Bryce Dallas Howard talked about the experience of adding Tennessee Williams heroine to her resume and a lot »
- Sara Wayland
Year in Review Pt 1: Baffling Comedy and Over Cooked Drama
29 December 2009 7:04 PM, PST | FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news »
Part 1 of ??? (Possibly Many) Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
~"Rashi" according to A Serious Man.I rarely make time to rewatch movies (so many new and old films to see for the first time) which is a shame since a second look can be valuable. Some critics and civilians are loathe to admit that their minds are changeable or that their opinions aren't the be all/end all, but why? There's always new points of view to consider and life experiences that should shift your paradigms.
Huh?
Before I get to the movies I feel strongly about (i.e. worst and best), I thought I'd share the three which I'm not sure I "got": The Coen Bros A Serious Man, Lars von Trier's Antichrist (my gut reaction) and Jody Hill's Observe and Report.
All three verge on the deeply misanthropic which can be something »
- NATHANIEL R
Udo Kier: The Movieline Interview
28 December 2009 12:00 PM, PST | Movieline | See recent Movieline news »
Since being plucked from obscurity in the early 1970s by Factory filmmaker Paul Morrissey to star in a pair of avant garde monster flicks, German actor Udo Kier has evolved into a full-fledged cult icon. Oscillating comfortably between the art house and grindhouse, Kier's hypnotic and menacing ice-blue gaze has peered out from the dark corners of a vast number of low-budget horror films, countless indies -- including several by longtime friend and collaborator Lars von Trier -- and even the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. His current output is no exception: In the so-bad-it's-amazing Christmas Eve slasher Fall Down Dead, Kier plays The Picasso Killer, for whom murder is delicious kunst. (It just had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run, but several high-visibility L.A. billboards suggests a The Room - style afterlife might await it.) He follows that with a turn as a non-murderous acting teacher in Werner Herzog's true-crime drama, »
Top 25 Movies of 2009: Honorable Mentions and Movies #21 - 25
28 December 2009 10:31 AM, PST | Rope of Silicon | See recent Rope Of Silicon news »
Top 25 Movies of 2009 Introduction, Honorable Mentions and Movies #21 - 25
What's your overall opinion of the movies of 2009? I ask because moving into December I would have called it a downer year, and if you base your opinion of a year's worth of movies on the blockbusters of the year you may be a bit mixed. While films such as Star Trek, District 9 and Avatar found fans all around the world, films such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation, G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra, Angels and Demons and Watchmen were met with mixed-to-highly-negative reviews from critics and filmgoers alike. A lot of money was made, but I think we all know money doesn't always translate to quality.
There were some out of the blue surprises such as The Hangover and Paranormal Activity and Pixar again impressed us all with Up. Personally, it's the smaller to mid-level films »
- Brad Brevet
Director John Waters' Funky Picks for the Best Films of 2009
28 December 2009 12:14 AM, PST | firstshowing.net | See recent FirstShowing.net news »
Hearing the name John Waters, you should already expect this list to be quite eccentric, and that's exactly why I'm featuring it. We'll be seeing plenty of the big Oscar on all kinds of best of lists, so why not feature a few films that you probably haven't heard of or never saw? Waters posted his complete list on artforum.com (thanks to Anne Thompson for the link) with explanations for every film. For example, on why he included Whatever Works: "Gerontophilia never seemed so appealing. This time, Woody goes a little gay and lives to tell about it with lovely, comic success. I am so mad I don’t have this director’s career." Read on for his list! John Waters' Best of 2009: 1. Import/Export (dir. Ulrich Seidl) 2. Antichrist (dir. Lars von Trier) 3. In the Loop (dir. Armando Iannucci) 4. World's Greatest Dad (dir. Bobcat Goldthwait) 5. Brüno (dir. »
- Alex Billington
John Waters’ Ten Best List of 2009
27 December 2009 12:01 PM, PST | Thompson on Hollywood | See recent Thompson on Hollywood news »
When John Waters submitted his Guilty Pleasures list to Film Comment, he included movies like Woody Allen’s Interiors and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. So it’s not entirely surprising that his 2009 Ten Best list, published in Art Forum, includes Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces. Waters knows what he likes. Here’s his top five: 1 Import Export (Ulrich Seidl) The most sorrowful movie of the year is also the best. The miserable lives of Ukrainian immigrants in Vienna make this agonizing but brilliantly directed opus the cinematic equivalent of slitting your wrists. A new genre? Depression porn? Hey, I got off. 2 Antichrist … »
Film Weekly's top 10 movies of 2009
24 December 2009 3:50 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
In this special edition of Film Weekly, Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks sum up 2009 by counting down their respective top 10s of the year's best movies. There's also a competition for loyal listeners – up for grabs is a Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee prize pack, with a mug, DVD and poster signed by director Shane Meadows. Just listen to the montage of four directors who have featured in In the Director's Chair, identify them and email your answers to film.weekly@guardian.co.uk by 5 January 2010.
Looking back over the year, both critics agree that 2009 was a great year for small films that said big things, while Hollywood enjoyed huge commercial success but appeared to have nothing to say. The long-awaited release of Avatar signalled a change in format, yet did not change the way we see the world.
And then it's down to the main order of business: Jason and Xan's »
- Jason Solomons, Xan Brooks, Observer
No 'Tears' for Bryce Dallas Howard with 'Eclipse' on the way
24 December 2009 1:18 AM, PST | Hitfix | See recent Hitfix news »
It's no exaggeration to say that Bryce Dallas Howard has had quite a strange road to "stardom." Especially considering she's the daughter of Oscar-winning director Ron Howard. Her big break came in M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" and she followed that up by starring in Lars Von Trier's "Manderlay." She then reunited with Shyamalan for "Lady in the Water" which was "supposed" to take her to the A-list. Unfortunately, it was the biggest critical and commercial bomb of the filmmaker's career. She recovered bit with raves for her work in Kenneth Branagh's HBO adaptation of William Shakespeare's "As You Like it," »
pages from a cold island: Modern History
23 December 2009 11:18 PM, PST | The Auteurs | See recent The Auteurs news »
Above: Henner Winckler's School Trip.
Compiling a top ten European films of the decade is a tricky business—what do we mean by "European", by "film", or even by "decade"? My personal run-down of the truly outstanding feature-length, made-for-tv, world-premiered after 1st January 2000 comes to eleven titles, an awkward number in any sphere except the football pitch. For what it's worth, my "first XI" of favourites, in alphabetical order, reads as follows:
Control (2007; Anton Corbijn; UK)
Dancer in the Dark (2000; Lars Von Trier; Denmark)
Dead Man's Shoes (2004; Shane Meadows; UK)
Gunnar Goes Comfortable (2003; Gunnar Hall Jensen; Norway)
The Intruder (L'Intrus; 2004; Claire Denis; France)
Last Resort (2000; Pawel Pawlikowski, UK)
René (2008, Helena Třeštíková, Czech Republic)
Satan (aka Sheitan; 2006; Kim Chapiron, France)
The State In Am In (Die innere Sicherheit; 2000; Christian Petzold; Germany)
United 93 (2006; Paul Greengrass; UK)
Volver (2006; Pedro Almodovar; Spain)
Many of the above will be familiar to most The »
Bowing Down to Paul Bettany
23 December 2009 9:36 PM, PST | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »
British actor Paul Bettany has the dashing looks and commanding presence of a leading man, but his filmography bolsters the case that he's not a creature of vanity or easy paychecks. Whether comparing his drunken Chaucer in "A Knight's Tale" to his ruthless thug in "Gangster No. 1," or his hypocritical do-gooder in Lars von Trier's arthouse masterpiece "Dogville" to his self-flagellating albino monk in a splashy blockbuster like "The Da Vinci Code," Bettany continually proves himself an intelligent and versatile performer who's passionate about new career challenges.
In director Jean-Marc Vallée's luxurious new biopic "The Young Victoria," Bettany co-stars as Lord Melbourne, a Prime Minister who became the 18-year-old, freshly ascended Queen Victoria's self-serving political tutor. Set in 1837, the film portraitizes Victoria (Emily Blunt) as we haven't seen her: a progressive-minded, spirited beauty in the early days of her reign and her courtship with Prince Albert »
- Aaron Hillis
Films Of The Decade – Ed’s List
23 December 2009 5:17 PM, PST | FilmShaft.com | See recent FilmShaft.com news »
Each decade of celluloid is defined by its psychological preoccupations. Oh yes it is, don’t look at me like that. The 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington cast a long shadow over the first decade of the 21st century. The Nineties had been a relatively stable and optimistic era by comparison and was all the more moribund for it. Tom Sizemore’s speech in Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) summed up the emerging consensus – “everything’s been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every government’s been tried, every fuckin’ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?”
But it wasn’t quite the end of history after all. After 9/11 the zeitgeist became politically-charged once more as it had been in more polarised times. Entertainment was not immune from this effect, nor could it afford to be. With rare exceptions such as Paul Greengrass »
- Ed Whitfield
Best films of the noughties No 8: Dogville | Xan Brooks
23 December 2009 12:00 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
In his 2003 masterwork, Lars von Trier gave us America on a soundstage, stripped back to lay bare a culture of cruelty
Lars von Trier's Dogville gives us America on a soundstage and a Rocky Mountain township rendered in chalk marks on the floor. It is Von Trier's America and Von Trier's township, and this enraged some viewers who dismissed the film as a crude, blinkered diatribe from a man too timid (on account of his aversion to air travel) to actually visit the country for himself. And yes, Dogville is crude and arguably blinkered as well. But it is also electrifying, gripping and audacious: the work of a director at the peak of his powers.
Nicole Kidman stars as Grace, a peroxide Jesus on the run from a band of Depression-era gangsters, who takes refuge with "the good, honest folk of Dogville". Her chief protector is Tom – a wide-eyed, »
- Xan Brooks
The Best of the Decade: Musicals
22 December 2009 9:02 AM, PST | Cinematical | See recent Cinematical news »
Film musicals used to be some of the most popular cash cows in Hollywood, but sometime over the years, the musical fell out of vogue. I blame the '80s, when we got disco dreck like The Apple and Xanadu (guilty pleasures, I admit), or perhaps the '90s (in two words: Spice World). So it was heartening for this musical fan to witness the revival of the genre that happened during the '00s, when movie musicals re-entered the Oscar race and everyone from Tim Burton to Lars von Trier put a little razzle dazzle in their step!
Of course, this rebirth had its highs and lows. Rent was still annoying as ever, even when adapted for the screen. The Producers didn't really work, either. On the other hand, we learned that our friends and neighbors (and husbands and boyfriends) shared our secret love of song, of seeing A-list, »
- Jen Yamato
Best Movies Of 2009, By Kurt Loder
22 December 2009 3:50 AM, PST | MTV Movie News | See recent MTV Movie News news »
A pretty good year.
George Clooney in .Up in the Air.
Photo: Dale Robinette/ Paramount
It seems to be a critical tradition to bewail the awfulness of each year's movies. But how often is this really true? With the annual caveat that it's impossible (and meaningless) to designate one movie or filmmaker as the "best," here are a number of 2009 pictures I liked a lot in various aspects, with one entrant in each category selected, fairly arbitrarily, as the "best," and equally worthy contenders noted below them.
Best Picture:
"Up in the Air" A mainstream film with a complex heart and a brain, too. Not exactly a comedy, not precisely a drama, but as close to a perfect movie as any other this year.
Also really good: "The Hurt Locker": Can it actually have been seven years since Kathryn Bigelow's last picture? This scrappy low-budget film, with a breakthrough performance by Jeremy Renner, »
The M/C List: #15 - #11: Pixar, coming of age, and courting controversy
20 December 2009 3:47 PM, PST | Hitfix | See recent Hitfix news »
I think it's only in the runners-up that we have this many ties. Quite a few in part one of this article. Don't blame me. Blame all the filmmakers who did worthwhile and interesting work this year. In the top ten, each film had to fight for its own slot. Here, though, I'm trying to spread the love a little bit... #15 / "Anti-Christ" and "Love Exposure" Lars Von Trier was damn near attacked by the crowd at Cannes over his newest film, and trying to get a mainstream American distributor to pick up a four-hour film about a kid who »
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Orson Welles and ?
20 December 2009 6:02 AM, PST | Cinematical | See recent Cinematical news »
"Who is the new Orson Welles?" someone asked me after a recent screening of Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (64 screens). Certainly Christian McKay does a superb Welles in that movie, and if anyone wanted to have an Orson Welles-style narrator on a documentary, or a Moby Dick-style cameo in a feature film, McKay's your man. But what about Welles the director? Those are much bigger shoes to fill. Linklater is arguably one of the best American directors working today, but he's very much the opposite of Welles in style; laid-back and loose as compared to Welles' more stylized compositions.
The Coen Brothers (A Serious Man, 152 screens) are as visually formal as Welles, but they lack Welles' showmanship. They prefer to remain mysterious and nerdy and behind the scenes. Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, 96 screens) has a very vivid onscreen/offscreen personality like Welles, »
- Jeffrey M. Anderson
Antichrist: Review
19 December 2009 4:24 AM, PST | 24framespersecond.net | See recent 24FramesPerSecond news »
Director: Lars von Trier Review: Tim Irwin. You’ve probably heard a lot about the controversy surrounding "Antichrist," about its graphic content and obscene images. It certainly is provocative in its imagery and does not shy away from graphically displaying certain acts, but unlike a generic exploitation film it offers much more. In addition to being artistically presented it is also one of the most terrifying movies I’ve seen in years. There are only two speaking roles in the entire film. They are credited as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg). In the epilogue (named and titled, like all of the chapters in the film) they are busy fulfilling their marital duties. Unfortunately, they are too caught up in each other to notice their son as he steps out of the window and crashes to the ground. The entire scene is shot like an art film, entirely in slow motion black and white, »
Film 2009: The year in lists
18 December 2009 4:06 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Seven ridiculous film plots, five unlikely weapons and the five scariest children in film
Seven Ridiculous Film Plots
Physicists could have a quantum field day with the rebooted space opera's loose interpretations of black holes, supernovas, "red matter", etc – but relax, it's only sci-fi! Harder to swallow was the bit when Kirk was exiled to a barren, snowy planet, but luckily landed right outside the cave of Leonard Nimoy. Or the fact that Kirk and Spock could two-handedly overpower a 24th-century Romulan spaceship like it was a 60s Bond movie. Didn't those guys invent security cameras yet?
Ricky Gervais told us this was set in a world where nobody knew how to lie. He lied. In a lie-free world, there'd be no corrupt cops like Ed Norton's. There'd be no corruption. Or secrecy, bribery, exaggeration, artifice, or, in fact, crime. There'd be no cops at all, »
- Charlie Brooker, Pete Cashmore, Will Dean, Grace Dent, Priya Elan, Malik Meer, Steve Rose, Richard Vine
John Waters Lists His Top 10 Films of 2009
15 December 2009 9:30 AM, PST | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »
Yesterday, we brought you Quentin Tarantino’s Top 8 Films of 2009 and today we have John Waters, another film buff/director, listing his best of the year. I always find anything that Waters writes or says to be entertaining and his thoughts on these ten films are no different. Here’s what he thought were the Top 10 Films of 2009:
1. Import Export (Ulrich Seidl)
2. Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
3. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)
4. World’s Greatest Dad (Bobcat Goldthwait)
5. Brüno (Larry Charles)
6. Lorna’s Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
7. Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar)
8. The Baader Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel)
9. Whatever Works (Woody Allen)
10. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
To read Waters’ thoughts on each film, head over to ArtForum.
»
- Ramses Flores
2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001
1-20 of 531 articles from 2009 « Prev | Next »
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