It was the year hand-drawn and stop-motion animation battled game-changing innovations in virtual realism, while Quentin Tarantino provided the cathartic ending that World War II was missing all along. In looking back on the movie year 2009, Scene film writers Mike D'Angelo, Noel Murray, Phil Nugent, Jim Ridley, Michael Sicinski and Ron Wynn find a Netflix queue stocked with movies everyone saw and movies no one saw—and all are worth seeing.

The Best Movies We Saw

AFTERSCHOOL Released only in New York and via video-on-demand (although it won a prize at this year's Nashville Film Festival), Antonio Campos' debut feature tackles head-on the key subject of the 21st century: unceasing mediation. Examining the aftermath of a high-school tragedy accidentally caught on video, it's the first and so far only film I've seen that recognizes how drastically the (developed) world has changed in just the last several years, and the extent to which we're now both starved for authenticity and dedicated to pretense. On top of which, Campos' formal command is nothing short of astonishing for a first-time director. A real stunner. D'Angelo

DRAG ME TO HELL Instead of using his Spider-Man clout to make some prestige picture reeking of mothballs, Sam Raimi dashed off this proudly disreputable splatter movie: a hilariously sick, hyperkinetic horror comedy about a gypsy curse visited upon an eager-beaver foreclosure officer. It was perfectly timed, in every sense—who wouldn't want to see callous bankers manhandled by the Cryptkeeper?—but it wasn't a hit. Now that it's on DVD, gather a couchload of your rowdiest friends, recreate the ambience of a moonshine-stoked drive-in circa 1981, and prepare for some of the best gotcha! scares since Michael Myers wore clown masks. Ridley

GOODBYE SOLO The year's most unlikely instance of screen chemistry could be seen in Ramin Bahrani's small but deeply affecting film, starring Souléymane Sy Savané, a transplanted West African making his acting debut, and Red West, a veteran of almost 40 years of stunt work and small parts in action films and TV who's best known for having been a real-life cornerstone of Elvis Presley's "Memphis Mafia." Savane' plays an irrepressibly high-spirited cab driver, while West is his cranky pet customer who one day asks him if, at some future date, he'll chauffeur him out to a high rock and leave him there. It wouldn't take many missteps for either of these characters to get on your nerves fast. What Bahrani and his actors do with them is transporting. Nugent

HUNGER British conceptual artist Steve McQueen entered the world of feature filmmaking with an unqualified triumph. Hunger shows how Margaret Thatcher's unwillingness to grant "political prisoner" status to IRA inmates led to a hunger strike in Britain's "Maze" Prison, resulting in the death of organizer Bobby Sands. But McQueen fragments life in and around the Maze into a series of synecdochal images, asking us to radically rethink not only how political cinema represents its subject, but how martyrs and other activists represent causes larger than themselves. In this way, Hunger is a challenge to our available categories for conceptualizing "the political" at all. Sicinski

THE HURT LOCKER It barely beat the commercial jinx that's enveloped every film property addressing the Iraq War—were you among the 10 people who saw The Messenger?—but it was perhaps the most geniunely suspensful work released in 2009. Kathyrn Bigelow's portrait of soldiers operating in unimaginable mental turmoil and impossible work conditions was elevated by exceptional performances from Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie. When disarming bombs proves the least of your worries, it's safe to say you're not exactly in friendly territory. Bigelow also showed that confrontational verbal sequences can be just as furious and scary as high-speed chases and firefights. Wynn

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS A blood-soaked fairy tale ("Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...") in which the entire apparatus of cinema—actors, projectionists, critics, exhibitors, even the celluloid itself—rises up collectively to purge itself of Ultimate Evil and its flickering propaganda machine. Detractors called Quentin Tarantino everything from a feckless punk to a Holocaust denier, but his expertly unfurled World War II epic hails from the same alternate universe as every movie that attempts to recapture history. His is just a little more up-front about the artifice—as when his Basterds dish Hitler the payback that the record sadly omitted. Ridley

INVICTUS There's been no shortage of inspirational sports movies this decade, and I can empathize with those who say enough already. But when the setting encompasses the demise of a historical evil like apartheid, and the participants include two superb actors in peak form (Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon) and a director at the height of his unfussy mastery (Clint Eastwood), then it's another matter altogether. The rise of South Africa's rugby team to championship status cemented a transformation and (if only for a short time) a victory for those who believe it's possible for people to appreciate each other as humans rather than individual members of distinct and warring groups. Wynn

JULIA The perpetually cool Tilda Swinton takes a flamethrower to her image in Erick Zonca's film, playing the sort of lunkheaded-loser role usually found only in Jim Thompson novels. A promiscuous, foul-mouthed alcoholic who's just been canned from her last-ditch real-estate job, the title character stumbles onto a ludicrous kidnapping plot and impulsively decides to grab the tycoon's kid herself, fleeing first into the L.A. desert and eventually across the border into Mexico, where even more jaw-dropping trouble awaits. It's a full-throttle carnival of black-comic mayhem, with Swinton all but tearing holes in the screen in what amounts to a hilariously grotesque caricature of motherhood. D'Angelo

PONYO This was a terrific year for animated features of all kinds, including the computer-generated Up (see below) and the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the living master Hayao Miyazaki showed that his classic style of hands-on, hand-drawn movies has plenty of surprises left with this magical variation on the "Little Mermaid" theme. Parts of the story are shaky (or maybe untranslatable), but right from the opening frames, the aquatic visual imagery, which manages to be both childlike and sophisticated, is enough to get your eyes drunk. At 68, Miyazaki is a fully mature master who also happens to be one of the few moviemakers who really does reconnect you with the wide-open creative imagination associated with childhood. Nugent

PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL 'PUSH' BY SAPPHIRE Yes, the misery index threatens to overwhelm you midway, and the relentless verbal abuse may be the most vigorous and expressive on screen since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But that's countered, or at least contrasted, by brilliant acting from Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique. Add effective portrayals from unexpected quarters (yes, that includes you, Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey) and a fine screenplay that retains the immediacy, poignance and anger of Sapphire's source novel, even as it condenses and tweaks the story for the cinema. Lee Daniels may get a directing Oscar to pair with his producing one. Wynn

PUBLIC ENEMIES If Michael Mann had made his John Dillinger biopic more thick-lined and action-packed, he might've had a bigger box-office hit. If he'd made it edgier and more revisionist, the film might've been more critically respected. But those two approaches wouldn't have yielded a movie as profoundly exploratory as Public Enemies, which mixes gangster mythology and docu-realist technique as a way of contemplating legends vs. facts, fame vs. anonymity, and even life vs. death. In short, Mann made a big-budget formalist experiment, and one in which he clearly didn't know the results before he began. Foolhardy? Definitely. Self-indulgent? Maybe. Thrilling? For viewers on Mann's wavelength, damn straight. Murray

A SERIOUS MAN The Coen brothers have the rare ability to explore genres and eras without falling back on clichés or conventions. While their version of a "1960s movie" features the usual assortment of squares and freaks (as well as a nod to the liberating power of rock 'n' roll), it all takes place in a suburban Jewish milieu specific to the Coens' own experience, and it encompasses the Coens' observations about how the faithful are good at seeing signs of divine will everywhere they look, yet terrible at interpreting them. Funny, funky and unusually compassionate, A Serious Man is a different kind of Coen brothers movie. But then, aren't they all? Murray

SUMMER HOURS You don't have to be the child of aging parents with a houseful of antiques to appreciate Olivier Assayas' quietly devastating family drama—but if you are, you probably spent the ride home emptying a box of Kleenex. A sober, subtle consideration of the worth we assign to objects, it offers the underlying message that all sentimental value inevitably dwindles to zero. But in the year's most elating ending, Assayas shows young people flooding an empty ancestral home with new life, new loves and new memories—the past as a renewable resource. Ridley

UP Because they violated all the commandments of 21st century animated filmmaking, the Pixar crew deserves mass praise. They focused a movie on a 78-year-old curmudgeon totally unfit to be made any type of top-selling action figure, and they explored such difficult themes as aging, alienation and obsession rather than churning out another collection of hipster types spouting pop-culture catchphrases. Like Wall-E, Up appealed to both the head and the heart, and also reaffirmed the legacy of great storytelling that's too often sacrificed these days to visual bombast and demographic expediency. Wynn

UP IN THE AIR George Clooney's natural charm turns off as many people as it dazzles, but when he gets a role where it's an asset he's probably the closest thing this century to Cary Grant. That he could use that skill to buttress a role where being a jerk would have worked just as well says a lot about his acting instincts. Up in the Air also further establishes Jason Reitman as a strong director, and Vera Farmiga as a sterling actress. Jason Bateman's not bad either, and while putting people out of work isn't exactly a laughing matter, the movie adroitly alternates pungent commentary and hapless comedy. Wynn

The Best Movies You Didn't See

ADVENTURELAND The poster that trumpeted this coming-of-age character comedy as being "from the director of Superbad" probably did the movie more harm than good. Set in the summer of 1987 and featuring a boss indie-rock soundtrack, Gregg Mottola's film is often very funny—especially when pipe-sucking scene-stealer Martin Starr is onscreen, perfecting a freshly imagined new image of the geek as smart, self-aware, self-fulfilling loser. But it's also bittersweet and well-observed, so much so that, with a less deceptive ad campaign, it might have been the date movie of the spring. As the teenage hero's elusive, troubled heroine, Kristen Stewart did get the chance to unfurl the full talent that the Twilight franchise barely uses. Nugent

DUPLICITY Perhaps because it came wrapped as light entertainment, with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen playing devious lovebirds engaged in wizard-level corporate espionage, nobody seemed to notice the intricacy and craft of Tony Gilroy's script—not just its clever time-shifting and sly withholding, but its attention to the power and import of the well-chosen word. Would that all exposition were delivered as deftly as the credits sequence, which distills the bitter rivalry between tycoons Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti to an uproarious slow-motion montage of lumbering beet-faced conflict. Ridley

HOME Buried in the section at Cannes (Critics' Week) that nobody bothers to attend and then thrown into New York and L.A. theaters with zero ad support, Ursula Meier's gleefully absurdist film never had much of a chance to get the public's attention. Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet play the heads of an eccentric household living in happy isolation alongside an unfinished stretch of highway; their world is turned upside down when traffic finally shows up. Working with ace cinematographer Agnès Godard (see any Claire Denis film), Meier pulls off a bracing amalgam of naturalism and abstraction, transplanting the typical French-language domestic drama into what amounts to a live-action version of Frogger. D'Angelo

JERICHOW German cinema is undergoing a renaissance at the moment, with the most vital directors displaying a crisp, grounded realist style and renewed political urgency. (Google "Berlin School film.") An unofficial leader of the movement is Christian Petzold, whose magnificent Jerichow was an underseen gem of '09. Set in a desolate backwater of the former GDR, Jerichow is a riff on a noir classic, given new sociological urgency through an examination of racial assumptions—the characters' as well as our own. When you notice that certain performances seem wooden, that's the point; we're trapped inside our genre scripts—until suddenly, we're not. Sicinski

JULIA Erick Zonca's thriller rates a second mention here because it never got the fighting chance it deserved with arthouse audiences. Tilda Swinton's performance as a desperate, unpredictable drunk is so astonishingly grand—at once funny, fearless, repellent and sympathetic—that it's practically scandalous that her name hasn't been bandied about when the talk turns to Oscars and such. The only logical conclusion? The members of various award-giving bodies never bothered to watch Julia. And that's a shame, because even apart from Swinton's turn, it's an excellent film, taking the story of an ill-advised kidnapping and twisting it repeatedly until the audience is on edge, unsure what the heroine will do next (and unsure if even she knows). Murray

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL It's a sad day when a Jim Jarmusch movie can't get a Nashville playdate—even more so when it's one of the director's most invigorating movies in years. Jarmusch's film entails only the thinnest of Seijun Suzuki-like narratives: An ambiguous international agent (Isaach De Bankolé) is on a mission in Spain, which takes him from operative to operative until he reaches his quarry. But Limits is really about narrative cinema's own limitations. Like many of the great avant-garde films of the 1970s, Limits is a cyclical enterprise, fixated on slight changes across multiple iterations of a single theme. In its surfaces and textures, it is primarily an experiment in luxuriating in what functionalist economies (narrative and capitalist) dismiss as boredom. Sicinski

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