May I option 1 and 2? I’d option 3 too if Dano could be a tailor about to inherit his father’s business in Minnesota/Iowa/ etc, especially with that title.

Despite its indie schmindie credentials I liked Adventureland a lot. I think Jesse Eisenberg is a decent actor, limited to slightly nerdy roles though he is. Rodger Dodger was great and Zombieland this year was a nice bit of cheap and cheery fare. The Facebook movie seems like a poor choice though…

Only just seen it and haven’t quite digested it but the White Ribbon has impressed me. I kept having flashbacks to Heimat which it is like a some superficial respects but otherwise completely different. Shouldn’t have seen it the day after A Serious Man though (also excellent). Especially after spending a day reading the transcript of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. And if you have the choice of the Lighthouse over IFI Screens 2 or 3 take the Lighthouse ANY day.

In terms of Irish films (though I don’t know if some had a release):

Savage was very nicely produced and directed, looked good. The underlying story, like Harry Brown, was hung on such a negative and scaremongering portrait of Dublin that it kind of stuck in my craw. Hoodies are eeeevil and must be stopped (using a lot of violence). Ended with more ambiguity than The Killer Caine though.

One Hundred Mornings was pretty good. Again it looked great, acting was top notch. What made the situation seem particularly torturous was the set of characters who you wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon with never mind 100 mornings.

The Secret of Kells gets my nod for best Irish Film by a mile and I think maybe my Film of the Year. Absolutely beautiful film, I could lap it up all day. It had story structure problems for a kids film (when I saw it the kid 2 rows over was hugely upset that the Aisling character was gone and kept asking for her back). Still though, a brilliant achievement for Irish animation and I wish Cartoon Saloon every success. Coraline and Up get a runner up prizes in Animation

WTF of the Year: Zonad. What WAS that? Why?

Best Sci-Fi: Moon over District 9 for me.

Let The Right One In gets a special commendation

Up & Inglourious Basterds glued me to the cinema seat. Away We Go made me want to tear it apart.

The film that suprised me by how much I liked it was 10 things I hate about Summer…or whatever it was called. Perfect for what it was.

Dear Jesus, what does it say about the community of commentators here that we are as excited about the cod-films listed as those actually released during the year? ‘Buckaroo’ has set me drooling to the detriment of the keyboard. Any truth to the rumour I have just made up that Eli Roth is to film ‘Operation’?
For geographical reasons, I am practically dvd-dependant so my experience of this year’s releases is severely limited. Apologies for all worthy omissions.

1. Let the Right One In – I confess, I am a horror-nerd, however this is the pearl that justifies my diving through oceans of schlock over the years. Also, one of the rare examples of the film being better than the book.

2. Inglourious Basterds – Brilliantly convulsive film-making. May seem superficial and decadent however there is a serious engagement with ideas there underneath all of its surfaces. Granted, that may not be Mr. Tarantino’s intention, but I was gripped, despite and because of its flaws.

3. In the Loop – Excellent expansion of the t.v. series – the claustrophobic atmosphere of Whitehall is part of the point, but is a little restrictive. The emigration of its petty bickerers to Washington was the right move to make. And it has the best joke arising out of the word ‘purview’ we are ever likely to hear.

4. Gomorrah – Gangster films of the last thirty-odd years tend to portray their subjects either with a classical elegance, (‘The Godfather’) or a sort of kitschy elegance, (‘Goodfellas’). ‘Gomorrah’ supplies a bracing naturalistic corrective to an established trend. I can’t remember seeing organised crime treated in the manner of a Ken Loach film before, however, if anyone knows of any similar films, I would be grateful for your recommendations.

5. Doubt – I think most reviews found this film rather staid and obvious. Maybe I am easily pleased but I thought it was dynamic and sensitive to ambiguity. Fair enough, I would have to discount Meryl Streep, who acted as if poor Amy Adams was her own personal flying monkey, but Philip Seymour Hoffman, well, the man could make me sit through Eli Roth’s ‘Operation’.

No order:

-Fantastic Mr Fox. A wonderful animation, faithful to its source. Not cheesy like Up.
-500 Days of Summer. A regeneration of the romcom genre with outstanding direction and performances.
-A Serious Man. Funny, dark and quirky, it makes a valid case against religion. Memorable!
-The Damned United. What a great film. Pity I only saw it once!
-The Hurt Locker. Liked it, thought it was sharp.

Top Five –

An Education
Let the Right One In
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Milk
Up

Guilty Pleasures –

• Iron Maiden: Flight 666. In the cinema. Turned up to eleven.
• The Spy Who Loved Me. The new digital print in the Lighthouse meant it probably looked better than it did in 1977.
• Zombieland. Sure, it’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it was probably the most enjoyable ninety minutes I spent in the cinema this year.

Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean…

• Away We Go. A dreadful, contrived faux-indie road movie with the most insufferable bunch of people on the planet. Yes, please do go away, before I slash the screen.
• The Boat That Rocked. An anachronistic, borderline misogynistic, Benetton-clothed version of the sixties that lasted almost as long as the decade itself and was utterly devoid of charm or humour. If we were judging films in terms of how bad they were in proportion to how much they actually cost, this really must be the worst film of the year.
• Dorothy Mills. A laughably bad, French-financed, would-be psychological horror, filmed in Ireland, starring Dutch starlet Carice Van Houten, who really should have known better. Rarely has one film provided so much fodder for The Blizzard of Odd’s “Made in Ireland” section, if only it were still on the air.
• Law Abiding Citizen. Presumably because we get turkeys at Christmas, we have to endure this ludicrous thriller. At least Crank 2 knows it’s nonsense, whereas this is completely, shamelessly straight-faced. How is this getting a cinema release, when films which deserved a broader audience (Telstar springs to mind) went straight to DVD this year? Grrr.
• Rachel Getting Married. I’ve no grievance with Anne Hathaway “going indie”. It was everyone else in this film that irritated the hell out of me. Like the famous joke about The Deer Hunter, “The wedding goes on for so long, you feel guilty for not bringing a present”. Now, where’s my DVD of Stop Making Sense?

Dishonourable mention –

Hamlet 2. You can’t please all the people all the time, but this tragically unfunny Steve Coogan vehicle was clearly dredged from the distributor’s bargain bin to be the Surprise Film at the JDIFF and, to paraphrase Garfield, was met with a large round of indifference.

That’s right Mr Citsale.

A few things strike me about the comments so far. I’m surprised everyone seems to hate Away We Go quite so much. Yes it was indie, woolly-hat a go-go. But I didn’t think it was significantly worse in that regard than (500) Days, which everyone seems to love.

The real surprise here, though, is the Major picking The Secret of Kells as film of the year. It’s a fine piece of work. But better than Up? Better than Let the Right One In? I’m not sure even Tomm Moore and his admirable team at Cartoon Saloon would agree with that.

500 Days was pretty damn terrible, hinging, as it did, on the thesis that listening to British rock from the eighties makes you a very interesting person in itself.

My top 5, in no apparent order:

Moon
Anvil!
District 9
The Hurt Locker
Zombieland

Oh, and the Godfather, which I’m counting because I only saw it for the first time last month at The Lighthouse.

Honourable mentions to Up and Coraline.

Most disappointing was a hard-fought battle between Inglourious Basterds and Synecdoche, New York. Synecdoche shades it for its sheer monstrous, outrageous, pretentious fuckwittery.

Hey Barbara. Where the Wild things Are is not released here until December 11th. I haven’t actually written a review of it yet. I did write around it on the Fantastic Mr Fox feature.

The On the Record five flicks I remember best from occasional trips to the cinema

(1) Up
(2) The Hurt Locker
(3) Milk
(4) The Damned United
(5) Sin Nombre

The worst film I saw this year was Passing Strange, the Spike Lee musical. Utter unmitigated shite.

I didn’t think I was being so perverse! The Secret of Kells struck me as far more beautifully realised than Up. Coraline struck me as more pleasing to watch too. That’s probably a matter of personal aesthetics, I wouldn’t try and argue someone into liking a painting and I’m not making any claims to objectivity. I don’t need to sing Up’s praises, I thoroughly enjoyed it, much as I did Wall-E and to a lesser extent the Incredibles. Perhaps I’m getting a little comfortable with the idea that this sort of film can be expected every so often. Secret of Kells was something else entirely and the artwork blew me away. I’ll remember it more than Up, and that’s what it comes down to personally, despite the overwhelming consensus on Up

And whatever I think, Ice Age 3 is the top animated box office earner this year, and 15th in the all-time box office earnings league.

It’s all very abitrary in the end isn’t it? I think I could as easily say Let The Right One In is my film of the year if I got out of the other side of the bed. And I’ve yet to see Where the Wild Things Are, Nine, The Girlfriend Experience and of course, Avatar!

I would go with:

Up
Moon
The Limits of Control
The Damned United
Milk
Anvil
Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
The Class

Disappointed with Looking for Eric

Always like the Truman Show. Also “1984″.

Top Six:

‘The Class’
‘Anvil!’
‘Drag Me To Hell’
‘Inglourious Basterds’
‘District 9′
‘Let The Right One In’

Most overrated film: ‘In The Loop’

Not As Good As The Book: ‘The Damned Utd’

Most Disappointing: ‘Looking For Eric’

Worst Film: ‘Antichrist’

Doddery windbag that I am, I forgot to include the turkeys of the year.

2012 – Wherein John Cusack tries to cure his congenital boredom by witnessing the end of the world as represented by cartoons of buildings and suspension bridges falling into drawings of holes. Unfortunately, his condition turns out to be incurable. However, the director astutely demonstrates physical ruin and disastrous tragedy by the casting of George Segal, the star of ‘Loving’, ‘Born to Win’ and ‘California Split’ now reduced to occupying spaces tenanted by Red Buttons thirty-odd years ago.
While the disaster-movie genre in the seventies generated some energy from its odd constellations of stars, (e.g. Helen Reddy dressed as a nun serenading an ailing Linda Blair in ‘Airport ‘75’), ‘2012’ has Stephen McHattie dressed, it appears, as Grand Moff Tarkin. It is much too restrained an example of the genre, (Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character only exclaims “My God!” twice in the entire film), to be successful. What it really needs is Beyonce Knowles dressed as a Tridentine bishop serenading a mute Miley Cyrus.

Antichrist – A mysterious film mystifyingly preceded by an unnecessarily explicit commercial for a range of upmarket shower-units, ‘Antichrist’, (Old Norse for “That’s the women for ye”), wends its way to the misty glades and eldritch heart of Tarkovskania where an ancient evil lurks. As with ‘2012’, there is a cameo from a practically superannuated star. This time it is Foxy from ‘Wanderly Wagon’, grown even shabbier with age and granted only one line, which is a reading of a doom-metal band name emblazoned on the t-shirt of a nearby grip. Another soporific fog descends and…hmm? Charlotte Gainsbourg did WHAT? Jesus. What time is the next showing of ‘The Proposal’?

this needs some thought

(500) Days of Summer
Moon
The September Issue
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Martyrs

Punisher: War Zone is easily the worst film I’ve seen thanks to Dominic West ruining all the goodwill he built up in the Wire. Aidan Gillen can hang his head in shame for 12 Rounds too.

Am I the only one who though Gomorrah was completely overrated?

I loved Let the Right one in too.

Let The Right One In

More love story than horror film.

Oh and one more thing. Am I right in saying the most divisive entry is Inglourious Basterds? It’s appearing in both the best and worst column.

I didn’t see La journée de la jupe, Barbera. I missed it at a few festivals and there is currently no UK/Irish release date.

Oh I like the Julie/Julia bifurcation, Bill. You’re absolutely on the money: the Streep stuff was great; the Adams stuff was poo.

Another vote for Coco. mind? Beats me.

My list so far…

Let The Right One In… Best movie of the year… Loved it. Love it. Will love it.

- Inglorious Basterds. I cant uderstand all the hatred! it was so much fun!

- Up. Beautiful…

- Hush. i was shocked at the review the irish times gave it… one of the best horror movies of the year!

- Disrtrict 9. Absolutely great! original, stays with you, future classic.

- Revolutionary Road. Maybe just because i loved the book, but the movie was top class… HEAPS better than Away We Go

others i liked…

Fantastic Mr Fox, Cold Souls, star trek, drag me to hell.

Worst:
can i just say how appaling Fish Tank was. Drivel!

So… no one saw Il Divo then?

Worst film has to be Land of the Lost, for sheer inanity. Though Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen wins most of the bad awards, such as “Most racist”, “Biggest plot holes” and “Most pretentious title”.

That’s gas. So you wrote a post decrying authenticity in an inauthentic way. To start a debate. Hehe. Don’t know if you were that successful. There’s irony. Love it. Also loved Startrek this year about the only one so far didn’t see that many good ones. None that stuck that much with me. Anyway you got a few authentic replies. So there you go its catching is authenticity. Write about what you know. Dont lie. If you can at all avoid it. Seems to be about it. Whether you’re some millionaire rockstar (they must be billionaires now JK Rowling is a billionaire children’s author don’t tell me U2 aren’t up there with her yet) or some half-mad artist starving in a garret or whatever passes for one these days the corner of a housetop sometimes its better to be in one than a wide house whether you’re a bluejean billionaire or a bluejeans is what you wear because you can’t afford owt better the formula’s the same i should say.

Peter @ 34: “Am I the only one who though Gomorrah was completely overrated?”

And I thought I was the only one! It was good alright, but I found it hard to connect or care about any of the characters…though maybe I wasn’t meant to. Either way it didn’t make for very engaging watching.

Saw Ajami during the Cork film festival, and while it took a similar approach in intertwining a few different stories of people affected by crime, it was just much more engaging and the characters were a lot more interesting. Great film.

Top films (in no particular order):
Moon
Thirst
Ajami
In the Loop
District 9
Frost/Nixon (released here in 2009 – does that count?)

I saw most of these films in the Kino, Cork, so I can imagine my list next year is going to be significantly less interesting following its closure this weekend.

Worst film: Harry Brown. Dear God that was atrocious. Fascist film-making at its worst. It was like Lord of the Rings set in a housing estate. Michael Caine: a saintly king. Everyone else: evil, mindless, 1-dimensional orks. Slay them all Sir Michael! They even had a scene with a particularly goblin-looking heroin dealer who had a swaztika tatooed on his forehead, smoking crack from a hand-gun in a weed factory which doubled up as his home and a gun shop, while he played a video of himself raping a junkie-girl (who lay passed out on a couch) in the background. I’m not sure but I think he might’ve been the bad guy. Well Michael Caine killed him anyway so that’s all that matters. And as for the ‘twist’ at the end, just like everyone else in the cinema, I turned to my friend next to me – “who the fuck is Syd??” Hope I didn’t spoil things for anyone there. It won’t matter though – you’ll be asking the same question even if you read this.

Biggest Disappointment: The Invention of Lying – this (nearly) killed Ricky Gervais for me. Overly-sentimental (he just wouldn’t stop welling up every 10 minutes) and a concept that got old as soon as the opening credits finished rolling. Actually it was pretty much past its sell-by date as soon as the trailer finished. Here’s hoping Stephen Merchant will save Gervais from Gervais in their next film.

Another disappointment: Terminator Salvation. Wasn’t expecting miracles but the trailer looked impressive and it had Christian Bale in it. What could go wrong? Everything.

Hmm. Can’t quite remember which movies were 2009 and which 08 but I’ll rattle off my impressions of what I’ve seen.

Up. Magnificent, as usual pixar show pure class.

Gran Torino. Also terrific. Films about gruff old men developing new relationships are so hot right now. are so hot right now.

District 9. Great. The office meets aliens. As a low budget action movie, it’s amazing. But probably not serious enough to go anywhere oscar-wise. (not that oscars are an accurate judge or anything)

The Hurt Locker. I didn’t ‘get’ it. Sure it kept me gripped until the end but I didn’t really get the impression this random collection of set pieces was going anywhere.

Inglorious. Shockingly haven’t seen it yet. Buying it first day dvd release. High expectations.

Star Trek. Enjoyable but no revelations.

Moon. Great, space Odysseys natural succesor. (apart from wall e obviously)

Transformers 2. 100% muck. Regret paying to see this. Hideously terrible and still popular. Only bad movie I’ve seen this year.

Avatar. Whether it’s awful or great, I’m still excited.

Great year for films.
In no particular order:
‘Up’ – the short film before it was also brilliant. Although I may be a hard bastard it made me feel all gooey.
‘Synedoche, New York’ – weird,quirk but utterly engrossing.
‘Frost/Nixon’
‘Milk’ – for once the best actor oscar went to right person.
‘Gran Torino’ – made all the more poignant as it was Clint Eastwood’s final acting performance.
‘The Class’
‘Inglourious Basterds’ – triumphant return to form for Tarantino. Brilliant opening scene in farmhouse.
‘The Hurt Locker’
‘Fish Tank’ – beautifully shot.
‘The White Ribbon’ – mesmerising.
‘A Serious Man’ – the Coen’s masterpiece. Looking forward to seeing it again.

Honourable mentions:
‘Tulpan’; ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’; ‘Mesrine Killer Instinct’; ‘Sugar’ ‘Che Part 1′

Biggest disappointment:
‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’

Big thanks to the Lighthouse Cinema – beautifull building and great to have a cinema for adults who love film. Keep up the good work.