Review and news hub for movies, music and video games

While many critics are rolling out or have rolled out their Top 10 movies of the year or even the decade, I found myself devising my own and realizing that they seem to be more or less similar to others'. Where the Wild Things Are, Inglourious Basterds, Up, The Hurt Locker, A Serious Man... These are great, great movies that have gotten their dose of attention, thanks to the names behind them. So what are the ones left in the dust?

The following movies are all considered 2009 movies by their US theatrical date. All of them, however, received only limited releases and never went wide. These are my favorites of the year that, if you haven't heard of them or was never given the chance to see them, I highly recommend hunting down on DVD. They are absolutely worth it.

• • •

Top Ten:

1. Medicine for Melancholy

Using the Before Sunrise model of a man and a woman exploring attraction in one day of romping through a city, the film's protagonists ponder what it's like to be proud black hipsters, in which the indie personality is far removed from their cultural identity. Professing a deep love for the city of San Francisco, it asks aloud what gentrification does to a neighborhood—and a person. Though I will never know what it's like to be black in America, the questions raised here are not so directly limited.

2. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

3. Goodbye Solo

Not wasting any time, from the first frame of the movie, Goodbye Solo tells us its premise and gives us a reason to care: an old white man charters a chatty Senegalese cab driver, who suspects the lonely old man of trying to commit suicide. The affable cabbie tries his best to befriend the impenetrable passenger, with shaky results. Contrasting the lives of these two very different people and their reluctant (on one side, anyway) friendship, Goodbye Solo is a quiet but intensely powerful story of reaching out. Despite a bittersweet ending, it remains the most hopeful movie of the year.

4. In the Loop

Hands down, no contest, undoubtably the funniest movie I saw this year. It makes every other 2009 comedy (yes, fellas, even The Hangover) pale in comparison. In the Loop presents a satirical look at how a modern-day war like Iraq came to be through the eyes of government employees. It absolutely destroys the glamor and importance of the politico world by showing them as a bunch of hapless day-to-day office workers stressing out over pieces of paper and arbitrary meetings that may just decide the fate of the world. More importantly, it has two laughs for every minute of screen time, much of it thanks to Peter Capaldi's insanely creative use of cuss words.

5. Antichrist

Due to the controversy surrounding the film's shocking gore, Antichrist may be one of the most talked about movies of the year in film criticism circles, but that drives people away as much as it attracts. Focusing on the title, explicit sex and brutal violence, one would miss out on the technical perfection, the captivating imageries, the mesmerizing acting and the mind-blowing turbulence this film instills in you. When the mechanical fox said, "Chaos reigns," it's not just a succinct summary of Lars von Trier's isolated apocalypse—it's also a challenge.

6. The Maid

I had no idea what to expect when I walked into the theater. I left unsure of what I saw, but definitely moved and thrilled by it. The Maid is an enigmatic yet fascinating character study of an emotionally unbalanced live-in maid who's stubbornly territorial with other maids even as she collapses from exhaustion. It's darkly comical at times and achingly sad in others, with a memorably haggard performance by Catalina Saavedra as the titular maid. The film has earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Foreign Film, which will hopefully increase its exposure and interest.

7. Moon

The most impressive feat in independent sci-fi to come in many years, Duncan Jones' Moon is mostly a phenomenal one-man performance by Sam Rockwell, who plays a lone worker finishing a years-long mission on the moon. But to label it so would be discounting the impressive miniature effects, the spot-on grime of the set design, and of course, Jones' own accomplishment as writer-director. Moon has a story that's both intellectually and emotionally engaging, making us interested in the mystery of what's going on, and at the same time connecting with Rockwell's intense isolation and frustration. It's like Beckett in space.

8. Somers Town

Shane Meadows' latest in his string of outstanding works (Dead Man's Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands) reunites him with his young This is England star Thomas Turgoose, who shows a different side in this freewheeling film about the working class neighborhoods of London, seen through the eyes of two teenage boys, one a homeless runaway from out of town and another the son of an alcoholic Polish immigrant. It evokes warmth and sunny joy in how the two make the most out of their troubled adolescence, even in the dank black-and-white-captured bleakness of their environment.

9. The Messenger

Following years of sappy, sentimental and politically inert movies about Iraq War soldiers, it was a great surprise to me that this year we got two very good ones. The Hurt Locker takes the action-suspense option in giving us the restless, consequence-tinged life of a soldier over there; but The Messenger brings a more tender, closer-to-home approach. The film follows the lives of Casualty Notification Officers, who have the tough job of informing the families of deceased soldiers. While those heartbreaking notification scenes show the burden war puts on American families, two remarkable performances by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson show how it affects the soldiers' minds, as well.

10. Two Lovers

After a stint of middling crime dramas like The Yards and We Own the Night, James Gray suddenly strikes a whopping blast to the chest with this old-fashioned romance. If this is really Joaquin Phoenix's last film role, he sent his career off on a high note, delivering a remarkable performance of a regressed mind trying to cope with life choices just dangling outside his grasp. Phoenix plays a grown man still living with his parents after a disastrous engagement made him suicidal. He eventually falls into a relationship with two women at the same time: one a nice, safe, reliable woman his parents matched him with, the other a kept mistress and drug addict he's madly in love with. A mature love story without any of the usual cutesy movie-world pretense. Just the unrestrained passion, unexpected disappointments and difficult compromise involved in modern relationships.

Five Honorable Mentions:

Humpday

Two straight dudes decide to have sex with each other for the sake of art—a hilarious and candid exploration of sexuality that scrutinizes the barrier between nurturing an open mind and crossing your personal comfort.

World's Greatest Dad

A wonderfully restrained Robin Williams stars in this thematically sad and darker-than-black comedy about being a father to a disgustingly obscene teenage boy, where the teary declaration of fatherhood begins with, "My son is a douchebag."

The Limits of Control

Artistic, tricky and full of mystique, this is the breaking down of the crime thriller concept into a series of bizarre unexplained moments and clues, beautifully shot and expertly edited together to form a mesmerizing story—if it even has one.

Adoration

Atom Egoyan's new film is a mysterious study of human connections and the way technology plays a part in either shaping or blurring those threads that lead us to one another, full of provocative discourse and seductive draw.

A Single Man

Colin Firth gives the performance of the year as a gay man in 1960's Los Angeles handling the tragic death of his lover, giving a vision of how loneliness manifests in the bomb-shelter era of uncertain fear.