Top films of 2009?

Inglourious Basterds is the best film of 2009 by an absolute mile

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Inglourious Basterds
Watchmen
Precious
The White Ribbon
A Christmas Carol
A Serious Man
Star Trek
Moon





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Thanks, oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx. I have only seen two on your list, so I will research the rest and maybe take a punt on some of them.

My own recommendations with my ratings:
A Serious Man Ethan Coen, Joel Coen 8.0
El Secreto de Sus Ojos 8.0
The White Ribbon Michael Haneke 8.0
A Prophet 7.0
Mother Joon-ho Bong 7.0
Tetro Francis Ford Coppola 7.0
A Single Man 6.0
Agora Alejandro Amenábar 6.0
An Education 6.0
Crazy Heart 6.0
Leaves of Grass Tim Blake Nelson 6.0
Persuasion 6.0
That Evening Sun 6.0
The Damned United Tom Hooper 6.0
The Disappearance of Alice Creed 6.0
Up in the Air Jason Reitman 6.0

I have also purchased, but have yet to watch:
Mammoth Lukas Moodysson
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo original Swedish version
Whatever Works Woody Allen
but am not expecting too much from them.

See my list below for some others you may be interested in

Have only seen about 10 of yours, and heard of a few others. Eclectic list. How did you come across these films?

Here are mine out of 69:

White Ribbon
The White Meadows
The Wind Journeys
Antichrist
Mr. Nobody
Dogtooth
The Time That Remains
A Serious Man
Broken Embraces
About Elly
Everyone Else
I Am Love

An Education
Valhalla Rising
White Material
Enter The Void
A Prophet
Precious
Police Adjective
In The Loop

HM

Capitalism, A Love Story
Last Train Home
Alamar
Fish Tank
Southern District
The Messenger
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Milk Of Sorrow
Moon
Map Of The Sounds Of Tokyo

Too violent for me. Pro torture too.

So you may have guessed it's not a normal top list. I targeted 2009 years ago as a year I wanted to take a deep dive into, so I've done a lot of research to find lesser known titles, stuff that only played on tv, stuff that was not released in any English language countries. I've been asking people for a long time for their 2009 lists and so I've generally seen all the films people respond with by now. Any time anyone posts any sort of list whatsoever, I'm scanning it for titles of 2009. Found 1 by Pater Sparrow by looking at a list of movies adapted from Stanislaw Lem stories. General Orders #9 from a hidden gems thread.

Some of these movies though I just literally have met no-one on here who has seen them, but I started doing crazy stuff like scanning >thousand entries for 2009 on Surrealmoviez. Then I got hold of all the individual ballots used to work out the poll rankings on the Sight and Sound and Film Comment magazines end of year polls, and am trying to see every film any critic brought up on those (151 unique films in the Sight and Sound ballots, 164 on Film Comment ballots).

I believe I came to watch The White Meadows from seeing your list before. I don't think anyone else here has actually seen it. It's just off the bottom of my favourite lists, a very fine film. I may rewatch and write a review as I'm trying to write reviews for all the good ones.

I basically wanted to assess whether the critical apparatus work, does the net catch all the good films, and the answer is, no it doesn't. Random stuff happens as well like a complete blindness to India, I haven't got round to them yet but two of the most popular movies of the year were Indian, by one of my favourite directors, Anurag Kashyap. So I need to watch all the massively high rated movies that no-one, for whatever reason, ever watched here, on FG.

As to the physical how, I have spent quite a lot of money on rare dvds, also been using torrents and file-shares where I can't work out how to get hold of them any other way. Latest purchases have been dvds of the highlights of the Ann Arbor short film festival from 2009 and 2010. There is stills tonnes more gold in them thar hills judging from my recent activities.

An interesting project, to be sure, and one I would be interested in undertaking if my circumstances were different.

Until 2010, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for roughly 15 years I dove into limited release (mostly non-English language) films at the local film festivals throughout the year, the UC Berkeley film archive (among the largest in the United States), art museums, and specialty theatres as much as I could (even used some of the sources you mentioned for reference, like Film Comment, Sight & Sound, and Fipreschi), and while I didn't see nearly as many "obscure" films in any given year as you have from 2009, some of the best films I did see during that period could never be found again (I actually bought a copy of White Meadows released on Global Lens video after seeing it in a theatre on the one night it played). Not sure if you know everything about White Meadows, but it was not only banned in Iran, but lead to the arrest of two top Iranian filmmakers involved with the film.

And I have basically come to the same conclusion as you regarding the number of extraordinary films that fall through the cracks every year, and never even manage to make it to dvd, at least in the United States.

I haven't heard of Anurag Kashyap (though I did come across the Gangs of Wasseypur recently, somewhere), but one of my favourite films of the past 15 years is by another Indian filmmaker, Shivajee Chandrabhushan, called Frozen (a title which has been used multiple times in the past 10 years) at a film festival in 2007.*

I have written a few reviews, but really need to watch a film twice before I can do it justice, and I can't get my hands on some of the films I am talking about. Maybe you need to turn me onto some of your internet sources. I have tried youtube with very few results, and often more problems than are worth my while.

Another conclusion I came to a while ago is that there are more great films being made in contemporary times than at any other time in film history, and I say that while taking a deep bow to the late 50's thru the early 70's. And that's because there are more filmmakers in more places in the world, with a greater understanding of movies- not only what they are, but with creative ideas about what they could be- than ever before.

The reason most people don't realise that is somewhat complicated, but one big reason is because so much good stuff simply disappears without really being discovered. Other reasons have to do with the fact that most of the really interesting films made in the past 30 years have not been made in English, and they often use a narrative approach that frustrates and confounds the typical film goer. Besides having subtitles, there are also a cultural issues that most film goers simply can't get through or make sense of. Yet another reason is because film types as much as film taste has diversified so much that it is almost impossible to achieve any kind of consensus about the best that is out there the way it was even 30 years ago.

Why 2009, if I may ask?

*A few other standout disappearances for me: The Perfect Circle (Kenovic, '97- one of the most devastating war films i have ever seen), Longing (Valeska Grisbach, 2006, highly regarded in Sight & Sound, but unheard of in America), At The First Breath Of Wind (Franco Piavoli, 2002), etc.