My ten favorite (and one not-so-favorite) films of 2009 are now live at Time Out New York. As with my best of the decade list, I've reprinted the titles below with links to pieces that I've written on them or to other articles that I'm particularly fond of. Go through to Time Out, though, if you want to read my brief blurbs on each selection, as well as the lists from my colleagues David Fear and Joshua Rothkopf.

Ten for 2009

1. The Limits of Control
2. Night and Day
3. California Dreamin'
4. Two Lovers
5. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
6. Lorna's Silence
7. Public Enemies
8. A Christmas Carol
9. The Box
10. Inglourious Basterds

One not

1. A Single Man

By Matt Zoller Seitz

This is the third in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com.

By Ali Arikan

"Yousa people gonna die?"

In his introduction to Science Fiction Art: The Fantasies of SF, Brian Aldiss writes:

"Science Fiction is a romance with the near-possible. Fantasy is a flirtation with the near-impossible. But science fiction is a part of fantasy; and who knows any longer what is possible or impossible? We are left with romance. Here it is, in a riot of colour and imagination."

Avatar, writer-director-übernerd James Cameron's latest 300 million USD sci-fi/fantasy epic, is not just a riot; it's a full scale uprising of color and imagination. It's like staring at an "Astounding Science Fiction" cover for eight hours while somebody drips LSD on your eyeballs. It's almost impossibly, illegally, blasphemously gorgeous to look at. Which is a shame, really, because the story is utter bollocks, and its central themes are confused at best, trite at worst.

Cameron has always been a filmmaker with grandstanding ideas and magnificent zeal, and here he outdoes himself by creating a numinous and oneiric universe, complete with its own mythology, evolutionary biology, and language. The problem is that the two most essential facets of film, story and character, have taken a back seat here—in fact, they seem to be riding on a different car altogether. I was reminded of Richard Attenborough's eccentric billionaire in Jurassic Park, in complete awe of his creation even as things fall apart all around him, taking simple solace in his defensive mantra: "We've spared no expense." Continue Reading »

By Dan Callahan

[Editor's Note: Jennifer Jones passed away yesterday at the age of 90. This is the first paragraph of a piece originally published at the House on May 14th, 2008. Click here to read the full entry.]

In the middle of Vincente Minnelli's version of Madame Bovary (1949), Jennifer Jones' Emma is at a ball and surrounded by admiring men. The country girl who has read so many romance novels is now seemingly in the midst of one of her stories, and she behaves like a freed prisoner; after a flirtatious laugh, she catches sight of herself in an ornate gilded mirror, and Minnelli cuts to the sumptuous image she sees, then cuts back to a medium shot of her reaction. Jones' gentle, apple-cheeked face gradually becomes hard, proud, even calculating: it's a revelation of her narcissistic inner nature as a performer. She rationed this side of herself, so that in William Wyler's Carrie (1952), the director can only catch the briefest flash of low cunning on her face as she thinks over her options as a female object of desire. Lincoln Center has programmed Jones' best films from May 16-24, offering us a big screen opportunity to watch one of the more mysterious of screen presences, not quite an actress, not quite a star, but a source of unplaceable anxiety and half-buried, wanton instincts.

By Keith Uhlich

It's evident by now, if it wasn't already, that the man who gave us the Terminator movies, Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic and, um, Piranha II: The Spawning paints in ridiculously broad strokes. Yes, James Cameron tries to reinvent the wheel with each new effort, which isn't a knock on the writer-director's apparent preference for groundbreaking special effects over all else. But his narratives are bare-boned, reduced to the basic elements of action and performance. At their best, they come off like Neanderthal cave drawings, the captivating scribblings of an artist whose constant goal is to build a world—and an accompanying, society-influencing myth—from the ground up.

The much-hyped sci-fi actioner Avatar is the perfect showcase for Cameron's strengths...and his flaws. Every vista in the film's fictional setting—a lushly forested moon named Pandora, light years from an environmentally decimated Earth—was created in a computer. Pre-release spin suggested that this alien otherworld, populated by tall, blue-skinned creatures called Na'vi and now ground zero for greedy human encroachment, was so photorealistic it was as if Cameron truly hauled cast and crew to some distant galaxy. Although, in truth, it all looks artificial (half immersive video game; half astonishingly animated giant Smurf epic), that's not necessarily a bad thing.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

This is the second in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com.

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in "Stagecoach," and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in "The Third Man."—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

The poignancy of that quote comes from the implication that the novel's hero, Binx Bolling, is so alienated from his existence that films feel more real to him than life. But certain filmmakers—I call them sensualists—go Walker Percy one better. Through boldly expressive shots, cuts, sound cues and music, they suggest that we experience movies as moments because we experience life that way, too.

Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien—the decade's great sensualist filmmakers—accept this proposition as a given. Read a cable channel's one-paragraph schedule-grid summary of Mann's Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies; Malick's The New World (all three versions, each of which is a different and equally valid film); Wong's In the Mood for Love, 2046, "The Hand" (a segment of the omnibus Eros) and My Blueberry Nights; Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, or Hou's Three Times and Millennium Mambo, and you would never guess that the films' directors had anything in common.

But they share a defining trait: a lyrical gift for showing life in the moment, for capturing experience as it happens and as we remember it.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

This is the first in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. To read other entries in the series, click here.

What Michael Bay movie is that from?

In spirit, all of them. But to truly experience the above you'd need to read it while riding a roller coaster. The car would have to be equipped with strobe lights, sparklers, a half-dozen monkeys battering you about the head and shoulders with ping-pong paddles and a boombox blasting the "Here comes the cavalry!" orchestral stylings of Bay's court composer, Hans Zimmer. The director of Pearl Harbor (2001), Bad Boys II (2003), The Island (2005), Transformers (2007) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) doesn't make movies, he makes rides. He's the filmmaker every studio boss dreams of—the director as adrenaline pusher. He has a facile eye, staging terrific one-off sight gags (transfusion blood stored in Coke bottles in Pearl Harbor; the mini-droids morphing from kitchen appliances and Sam's brief trip to robot heaven in Transformers 2) and tossing off dozens, even hundreds of gorgeous widescreen tableaux that most filmmakers would be lucky to compose once in a career.

Yet Bay never respects the rhythmic integrity of any image, rarely holding a shot, any shot, no matter how lovely or functional or potentially powerful, for longer than three seconds, dicing hundreds of thousands of feet of 35mm film into celluloid shrapnel and firing it at the audience's face. One is tempted to say that you can't fast-forward through Bay's films because they're already on fast forward, but that's not accurate. They don't so much leave out what immature viewers call the "boring parts" (characterization, exposition, atmosphere) as destabilize and disorient the viewer by investing the "boring parts" with the same trashy momentousness as Bay's set pieces. The apple-pie-scented flashbacks to the heroes' childhoods in Pearl Harbor are staged and edited with the same apocalyptic brio as the titular act of infamy—hyped-up orchestral cues, jumpy editing, swooping crane shots, lens-against-the-tonsils mega-close-ups. The first quarter of Transformers, which establishes the hero and his dull suburban existence, recalls the analog era, Cheerios-and-Huffy bikes Steven Spielberg for about two minutes, after which point the charm vanishes and Bay brings in the editing WeedEater, the bathroom humor and the eardrum-rattling Dolby FX (not just for the noise of robots transforming, but for such ostensibly mundane sounds as doors closing and feet running up stairs).

The film theorist David Bordwell classified these tics as aspects of "intensified continuity," a type of commercial filmmaking that sacrifices classical Hollywood values—meticulously staged camera moves, judicious edits, a build-and-release approach to pacing—on the studio-hallowed altar of "energy." But such academic classifications, however accurate, don't capture Bay's relentlessness. The man doesn't do intensified continuity; he does pregnant-women-and-people-with-pacemakers-shouldn't-ride-this-ride continuity. His films go to 11.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

"Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody" debuted on the Muppets' newly inaugurated YouTube channel just three weeks ago. But nearly ten million views later, it already feels like a signpost that we'll look back on fondly—a goofy capper to a rotten decade, a bridge to whatever lies ahead, and perhaps a future time capsule, a reminder of what it felt like to be alive at this strange time. It's a pop culture upper in a league with two classic bubblegum chart-toppers that heralded the shift from '60s darkness to '70s hedonism: John Lennon's "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and the Captain & Tennille's cover of "Love Will Keep Us Together."

There's no world-shattering depth to those songs, just a straightforward reassurance that even though times are tough, as long as we're capable of having fun, things aren't quite as bad as they seem. "Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody" and the other offerings on the Muppets' YouTube channel are likewise (deliberately) simple and upbeat—little rainbows, like the one arcing through the broken soundstage roof at the end of "The Muppet Movie" (1979).