This may be the personally oddest and most eclectic “Best Of” list I’ve ever compiled. Half is strongly art-house and indie minded, while the other half is not simply mainstream, it is firmly entrenched in solid blockbuster territory. How to explain it? Simple. These were my favorite films of the year. These were the ones that lingered with me the longest. These were the ones I couldn’t wait to revisit. After all, what is a “Best Of” list but an inventory of personal favorites? Still, if history is any guide, there is a certain sponginess to this list and some of these entries—most notably the first two or three—will flip-flop, as they already have been doing in my mind for the past several weeks. All I can speak for is how I feel right now.

1. A Serious Man: The Book of Job has always been a disturbing and controversial presence within Scripture for devout believers and curious bystanders alike. Job was never far from Joel and Ethan Coen’s minds when they set out to make A Serious Man, essentially a modern retelling of the Book of Job and, by extension, an examination of humankind’s relationship to omnipotence. They give their audience only two options: either God doesn’t exist and we’re wasting our lives trying to please him in a world ruled by randomness, or he exists and he is a vindictive monster out to annihilate us. Correction: not vindictive. Vindictiveness implies causality, which this film never infers. The Coens have always invited us to laugh at others’ misfortune. Now, perhaps, we are invited to laugh at our own. A Serious Man is an exquisitely, perhaps even flawlessly, realized piece of original art. If one were to say that the Coens have stopped evolving as filmmakers, it is only because one cannot improve upon perfection. Their technical mastery is above reproach.

2. A Single Man: A Single Man is a lavish and romantic examination of interrupted love, a chronicle of life and loss and everything that binds it together. Its mood is its truth and its imagery is all the narrative we need. Quite possibly, the best gay-themed movie ever made, it is one of the most beautiful things you will set eyes on all year. A Single Man marks the directorial and screenwriting debut of celebrated fashion designer Tom Ford. Rarely has a filmmaker’s designer eye been as evident in a film as here. Every deliriously beautiful frame is composed with the utmost care and broadcasts an abstract range of themes with conviction and cinematic eloquence. Ford conjures a textured, stylishly elegant look at a world of fetishistic set-pieces and architecture, luxuriating in an age when design meant precision and class. Colin Firth gives the performance of a lifetime—elegant, nuanced, and tonally perfect.

3. Inglourious Basterds: Inglourious Basterds is a piece of bravura filmmaking, a scrumptiously over the top revenge fantasy that melds high comedy with tragic melodrama for pure hypnotic effect. Quentin Tarantino’s films are always extraordinarily entertaining—self indulgent to be sure, but undeniably entertaining nonetheless. It has been said that Tarantino’s characters are in love with the sound of their author’s voice. But when they are given such words to say, can you blame them? Christoph Waltz, in his first English speaking film, is absolutely spellbinding, breathing life into a true villain for the ages. In this film, Tarantino gives us exactly what we want, a revenge fantasy we can feel good about. After all, if you can’t find satisfaction in killing Nazis, where can you find it? Tarantino feels no obligation to treat the Nazis any differently than he would any other characters he’s written over the years and he obviously feels no obligation to history either. This stance—which will disturb some and thrill others—is just the sort of balsy, audacious, foolhardy posturing that makes Inglourious Basterds one of the year’s most magnificent and controversial experiences.

4. (500) Days of Summer: Once in a while a film so wonderful comes along that you want to race up the highest building you can find and bellow its greatness from the rooftops, to wake all your friends in the middle of the night just to tell them how wonderful it is. (500) Days of Summer is that film. “This is a story of boy meets girl,” says the sardonic, omniscient narrator in the film’s opening sequence. “But you should know up front, this is not a love story.” While (500) Days of Summer is romantic and certainly very funny, it could more accurately be titled a romantic tragedy, a bittersweet tale of love found and love lost. There are plenty of films charting the ebb and flow of relationships until the moment at which love conquers all. But what about the other, perhaps even larger group of lovers, who begin with the best of intentions yet still end up with going their separate ways? (500) Days is their story. There are not enough words to describe how much I adored this magical, transcendent film. You are wrong sardonic, omniscient narrator. This is a love story. I am in love with this film.

5. Watchmen: Watchmen is astonishing. It is an instant classic, a lusty, no holds barred, laser precision adaptation that throws all caution to the wind, embracing both slavish reverence and dark satire with equal dynamism. The film transcends the superhero genre that gave it life even as it feeds off of it for sustenance. The result is a sophisticated intersection of heady philosophy, shocking violence and gratuitous sex. Watchmen is indubitably the most lavish adaptation of a graphic novel ever made and quite possibly one of the finest book-to-screen endeavors ever produced. It subverts the superhero archetype completely; to call the protagonists “heroes” is one of the book/film’s primary satirical joke themes. Using superheroes as a framing device within which to write a sweeping philosophical treatise on the inherent wickedness of humankind, the idealistic impossibilities of uncompromising moral rectitude and the abuses of unchecked power, graphic novelist Alan Moore created a world as dense as any philosophical text. None of the intellectual heft of the novel is lost in translation. Watchmen is wildly ambitious, a provocative, viscerally spectacular, intoxicatingly stylized, massive budgeted superhero epic that astonishingly delivers intellectually. Entertainment and intelligence. Might that be called art?

6. Up in the Air: Of every film that came out this year, I didn’t see a single one more assured, more confident, more utterly comfortable in its own skin than Up in the Air. I didn’t see one with characters who inhabited roles that felt more convincingly lived in, or a story more apropos to life as you and I live it. From the moment it lifts off to the moment it touches down, Up in the Air positively soars. The endearing and deeply pleasurable film marks director Jason Reitman’s third time behind the camera and his second withering dissection of corporate America. Reitman’s perfectly balanced, clean aesthetic positively sparkles. The script, adapted from Walter Kirn’s novel, bites one moment and inspires uproarious laughter the next. The cast is superb, effortless and graceful. There is more than a little Fight Club here, the idea that modernity has hoodwinked us all into elevating the worthless at the expense of the precious. However, the quiet and contemplative film recognizes that growing a heart can be painful and ugly.

7. Avatar: Early in James Cameron’s Avatar, a character utters the line, “You should see your faces!” as her aircraft navigates a vista of astonishing splendor. Without a doubt, Cameron was thinking of more than just the occupants of the on-screen transport when he wrote that line. He was speaking directly to every one of us. Avatar is one of those rare movies that can deservedly be labeled an “event film;” you will remember when and where you saw it for the rest of your life. And while its cinematic impact may not quite rise to the hubristic heights some have speculated, it is as bold and audacious a step in that direction as cinema has ever seen. Perhaps the most extraordinary testament to Avatar’s flawless, immersive power is that, rather than stare, slack jawed and drooling for the 162-minute running time, you acclimatize within the first few minutes. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, you forget that what you’re looking at is counterfeit and accept it so completely that your brain ceases registering surprise or wonderment. Avatar is indisputably the next step in cinematic evolution.

8. Away We Go: I’ve often said that we need fewer movies in which people fall in love and more in which we are introduced to characters already entrenched in devoted, complimentary relationships. Where is the movie that picks up after the romantic comedy ends? Away We Go is that movie, a beguiling dramedy both euphoric and heartbreaking. British director Sam Mendes has made a career out of examining what makes the American family tick. Sometimes he pulls it off as in the haunting American Beauty. Other times his analysis collapses under its own pretentious weight, as in last year’s overly serious Revolutionary Road. Away We Go shows us a side of Mendes he’s never before revealed — his sense of humor. Away We Go is a rare treat — a poignant, cliché evasive, idiosyncratic, sun-dappled comedy that hides bittersweet ruminations on love, parenthood and life in general within a rumpled open-ended narrative. Part laugh out loud comedy, part biting satire, Away We Go is a wise, effortless little film, intuitively aware that the line separating disappointment and tragedy as well as eccentricity and mirth is often a moving target.

9. The Brothers Bloom: Eat your heart out Wes Anderson. Ever since the sublime Rushmore, director Wes Anderson’s films have arrived on a slippery scale of diminished returns, visually transcendent but emotionally vacant. As if implicitly understanding that nature abhors such a vacuum, director Rian Johnson, who’s Brick was a bold and enthralling freshman masterpiece, borrows heavily from the Anderson aesthetic for his second outing, The Brothers Bloom, a magically effervescent film — the cinematic equivalent of champagne bubbles — that succeeds on its initial attempt where Anderson has so often failed. The Brothers Bloom’s bones come from 70’s cinematic influences, its heart beats with the panache of comedy classics like The Sting and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and its musculature is powered by quirky, emotionally resonant and sharply observed situations tinged with melancholy. The film is an existential comedy examining the manner in which we invent stories about ourselves and others. Storytelling isn’t simply a conduit for instruction or entertainment–it is a fundamental prism through which we comprehend our lives.

10. Star Trek: Director J.J. Abrams has done something nobody thought possible. He has terraformed a franchise on which life-support systems had begun to fail. The last several Trek films were disappointments and the most recent television series, Enterprise, was cancelled, ending a nearly two-decade run of back-to-back Star Trek series. Abrams had his work cut out for him — rally long-time fans and simultaneously lure new blood — and he has succeeded in spectacular fashion, rescuing Star Trek from self-imposed cultural irrelevance. Abrams followed the path of director Nicholas Meyer in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, taking the job despite not being particularly interested in or knowledgeable about the series. The lack of religious reverence for the Star Trek canon is what allowed both directors to take the risks necessary to step outside the established box of conventionality. Abrams may have been new to Trek, but he knew how to create a convincing universe, populate it with compelling characters and place them in a gripping narrative. As a result, this epic and moving film radiates an energy and dynamism the franchise hasn’t had since it first began. After years of stale storytelling, Star Trek is thrilling and sexy again. Abrams’ movie brings back something Star Trek has been lacking for a very long time — an exhilarating sense of wonder and awe.

Just Missed the Cut
11. Bright Star
12. Red Cliff
13. The Road
14. Summer Hours
15. The Hurt Locker
16. Me and Orson Welles
17. Up
18. An Education
19. Precious
20. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Honorary Mentions
21. Knowing
22. District 9
23. Two Lovers
24. Coraline
25. Where the Wild Things Are
26. Adventureland
27. The Informant!
28. Drag Me to Hell
29. Public Enemies
30. Sin Nombre

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.