#10. ANTICHRIST - Dir Lars von Trier, Denmark

Perhaps it's easy to crassly dismiss this as a "big fat art-film fart", but there's no denying Lars von Trier's sheer daring and ability to stir up one hell of provocation in the modern landscape of cinema. Critically reviled and now considered to be the most walked-out movie in Cannes film history since Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Antichrist portrays misogyny, self-mutilation and domestic meltdown at its bleakest. Not to mention the controversial do-it-yourself clitoridectomy sequence, stomach-churning enough to make the Pope incumbent faint. Whilst many of the scenes are excruciating to watch, many seem to have forgotten Antichrist's central ethos - an extremist depiction of human agony in a godless alternate-reality. And what did we really expect of von Trier, who brought us Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, all of which are cinematic treatises to life? Jolly entertainment and show-tunes? Certainly not, for this dark, terribly elegant meditation on grief, human culpability and self-destruction only comes from an auteur who is fearless enough in allowing us to glimpse into the gloomiest side of our existence.

#9. BRIGHT STAR - Dir Jane Campion, UK

Jane Campion's return to form after a long artistic drought since her Oscar-winner The Piano is beautifully sublime. Not every film about an iconic poet remarkably handles this kind of material with such nuance, elegance and restrained beauty to match an artist's verbal poetry, especially John Keats' poetry. In the hands of a lesser director, Bright Star would have been mediocre, starchy and pretentious as many other stuffy period dramas. But in Campion's deft hands, this becomes a subtle, leisurely, often heart-rending, observation of a long-gone era of unabashed romanticism. Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish both deliver remarkable, understated performances, but it's Cornish's ultra-feminist Fanny Brawne that steals our hearts, and subsequently steals the entire show.

#8. [500] DAYS OF SUMMER - Dir Marc Webb, USA

The most delightful, totally unexpected sleeper-hit of the year. Depriving this from an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay is daylight robbery. Dumping run-of-the-mill romantic comedy tropes straight to the bin and favouring a non-linear narrative, [500] Days of Summer rethinks the 'boy-meets-girl' premise and delivers a genuinely effective screenplay that defies every clear-cut convention of the genre. The result is clever, funny, painful, wonderful and invigorating in a cinematic sense, conveying a self-conscious look into the nature of contemporary relationships, worthy of a latter-day Annie Hall. Despite of its perkiness, it does not even try to sugar-coat the central romantic trajectory, which leads us to the real clinch and bittersweet worldview of this film - that memory is fallible and that relationships are really like the seasons, they come and go.

#7. UP IN THE AIR - Dir Jason Reitman, USA

This smart, corporate satire is that rare thing that comes out from the meretricious, commercialist Hollywood arena once in a while. What seems to be a mere George Clooney vehicle is actually an engrossing, thoughtful, character-driven piece that has enough mainstream appeal without sacrificing artistic credibility, and, thank goodness, never insults our intelligence and emotional quotient. Director Jason Reitman of Juno fame manages to confront the material's heavy satirising and existential heft with an admirable lightness of touch, pitch-perfectly reflecting the central character's dilemma of his airborne existence, with Clooney's Bingham's mega-corporate bastard stuck in a limbo of human disjointedness. Fuelled by scathing humour, biting pathos and resonant perceptiveness, Up in the Air takes its place as one of American cinema's most memorable films in recent memory.

#6. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Dir Quentin Tarantino, USA

Historians, go pack your bags and take your moth-eaten history books away with you. Quentin Tarantino has just cinematically bastardised World War II albeit in gloriously entertaining and gripping fashion, perhaps in a way only a cheeky, sodding 'basterd' like Tarantino does. This historical reimagining of a Nazi-occupied France dismisses all mawkish memories and delivers a tightly-scripted, wish-fulfilment revenge saga that does not entirely undermine or totally disrespect the emotionality of the period, but rather creates its own self-aware celluloid universe that is giddily playful and simultaneously, cinematically flamboyant. Anyone expecting a war film ready to detonate in any minute in Tarantino's film will be disappointed indeed, as the real arsenal of armoury is rooted in its tense-as-hell dialogues, lovingly drawn characters (an exceptional Christoph Waltz as Satan-incarnate SS Col. Hans Landa, and a terrific Melanie Laurent as the avenging Jew Shosanna Dreyfuss), and a three-act narrative structured with art and almost maniacal dexterity.

#5. DEPARTURES - Dir Yojiro Takita, Japan

When this relative unknown and unheard of Japanese drama clamped down on the Oscar Best Foreign Film last year, many eyebrows were raised as it elbowed out other superb international films such as Israel's Waltz with Bashir and France's The Class. Departures may put-off a subtitle-phobic audience, but once seen - you'll never underestimate its haunting power. Quite rightly so, that Oscar was very well deserved, and this fascinating, deeply poignant, heartfelt work has the gentility of a sonata but with an emotional force of a requiem. For all its morbid subject matter (this is a tale about an ex-violinist taking up an encoffiner job via employment detour), it manages to be altogether light, tender, deep and profound, almost miraculously. Director Takita infuses grace in the art of sending-off with such a beautiful precision, reminding us that death is not for the dead but for the living. What's more remarkable is that for a film which is largely about dead-end jobs, death and dying, this is wonderfully life-affirming stuff. You'll weep buckets.

#4. AN EDUCATION - Dir Lone Scherfig, UK

On paper, this feels familiar. A coming-of-age tale of a girl learning her lessons from the 'school' of life, which does not really involve books and Shakespeare and Austen. Thanks then to an apt and sophisticated direction by Danish director Scherfig, allowing An Education to shake off from its narrative trappings and reach a subtler, wiser ground. Perhaps being pitched directly at the threshold of pre-sexual revolution Britain keeps this film resonant and alluded with the sexual politics of the time, with themes of rebellion, adultery and self-awakening prods the fringes of the storyline without crammed with an on-your-face depiction. This restraint is a wise choice, and it remains focused on the nucleus, the central beating heart that keeps this film emotionally and exhilaratingly alive in the form of Carey Mulligan. It's a gracious, charming and tactile performance as the ever-precocious Jenny, wise beyond her years yet as foolish as the last mistake she had made. Indelible and satisfying.

#3. THE HURT LOCKER - Dir Kathryn Bigelow, USA

Here's the greatest cinematic lesson of the year: Kathryn Bigelow teaches ex-husband James Cameron how action films are done, with aplomb. The Hurt Locker is so thrillingly orchestrated to adrenaline-rushed levels that it almost makes you sweat watching it; the desolate, dust-beaten hell of Baghdad, and just around the corner, a half-concealed network of bombs that could blow off at any moment. It is compellingly tense, and Bigelow makes the most out of the Hitchcock principle of thrill-cinema. But this could be just any other Iraq-war picture, except that it isn't. Possibly the most superior movie ever made about the Iraq excursion, and now catapulted into one of the finest war movies, precisely because it's not really about war. Bigelow eschews geopolitics, hectoring and 'war-is-futile' melodrama to ruthlessly portray men and masculinity in the face of situations bigger than their egos. That at the hint of recklessness, everything can go wrong. That at the absence of conflict, they are just common civilians defunct of their capabilities. Jeremy Renner delivers one the year's best male performances, veering from heedless idiot to villain to hero to an existentially pained human being. "War is a drug", and that perhaps gives us more insight than most recent headlines we ever read.

#2. THE WHITE RIBBON - Dir Michael Haneke, Austria

Michael Haneke's latest work is without a doubt the year's most enigmatic, chilling and teeth-gnashingly maddening. At its core, it's as a whodunnit yarn without the obligatory concluding exposé, a puzzling riddle without a solution and a ghost story without ghosts. Yet it's darkly haunting, exceptionally pitched and never presumptuous enough to dare to answer its own questions. This may be an antithesis to the commercialist, mainstream spunk (it's a nearly three-hour film, wholly filmed in austere black-and-white with a cast of unknown), but you've got to admire Haneke's masterful orchestration of the elements he pull off in this film - the vignette-like narrative strand, the slow-burning mystery, the rigour and meticulousness of his framing and cinematography. Above all, as a typical Haneke film never undermine his audience's thinking power, we are left to ponder where does evil really come from? Maybe it stares at you in the face of innocence. Maybe they give out homilies among the crowd whilst punishing their children at home. Maybe they inspect their daughters with a stethoscope and molest them in the process. Or maybe they are those who love deeply yet never once reciprocated. Evil has a face in The White Ribbon, and it is human - half-consciously harbouring revolt and vengeance, kept at bay yet ready to instigate the sins of their fathers to the next generation. A powerfully and profoundly disquieting portrait of decaying humanity.

#1. UP - Dir Pete Docter, USA

How could an animated film about a helium-buoyed house possibly make it as the number one film of 2009? It's really simple. Pixar's Up is worthy for its sheer simplicity, for its exceptional ability to make us smile, laugh, cry with delight, weep into our tissues and emerge from the odeons like a newly-reinvigorated individual; for squeezing an entire lifetime in a beautiful, wordless five-minute prologue yet never sacrificing an inch of depth; for carving a totally unexpected hero out of a grumpy, curmudgeonly widower and for making us care for this old guy so immensely that for the entire running-time, we forget Carl Fredricksen is just a computer-generated conglomeration of pixels. This may not be flirting around a WALL-E ground-breaking status, but Up is on an almost entirely opposite scale. Where WALL-E is a romantic story of robots who have more humanity than Darwin's species, Up is a love story of humans in a slowly-becoming robotic world. Not to mention that the other counterpart of the love story is deceased does not really enliven things up. But Pixar does this miraculously and immaculately, and this is perhaps the studio's most mature work to date, with the nature of ageing, death, terrestrial loneliness and emotional baggage serving as the film's undertow. And don't even get started with those talking puppies and bonkers prehistoric bird - they are whimsical yet appropriate nods to the Arthur Conan Doyle serials of the 20's, providing Carl's zeal for adventure. It's really a wondrous tribute to anyone who hasn't given up on something. Especially those people whom this recent generation has chucked into elderly homes, ignored, neglected in abodes or shunned from the streets. Most supremely, this is their generation's vindication, teaching us mere younglings to respect our elders. As Carl Fredricksen epitomises, his entire house tethered on his back, that love can transcend even mortality whilst never overlooking those who are still left with us.

Catch you all again soon, next year. Rock and roll, 2010.

The Moviejerk (c) Janz : February, 2010.