CORALINE (US, Henry Selick)
Selick's stop-motion picture is so flawlessly animated that at times it feels like CGI. Points taken away for the dialogue, which occasionally panders, but that's all I could find wrong with it. The design is fantastic, the story is tight and wonderfully creepy, and even the 3D - so far the only use of "contemporary" 3D that doesn't depend on digital imagery - works.

TOKYO! (Japan/France, Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon Ho)
Omnibus films don't often work, but this trio of featurettes by hip filmmakers setting their sci fi-ish stories in the Japanese capital is very interesting. Gondry's segment is sweet, Bong's is intriguing, but Carax pulls off the strangest, most exciting piece of cinema I saw all year, with his story of a leprechaun-like maniac.

TOKYO SONATA (Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
We stay in Tokyo for this poignant family drama, a departure for Japan's creepmeister Kurosawa (known for the horror-ish titles Pulse and Cure). When a middle-class dad loses his job, he hides it from his wife and children even as he hides himself from their crumbling lives. A weird third act doesn't derail the film, but instead sets up the most affecting climax I've seen in years.

THE HURT LOCKER (US, Kathryn Bigelow)
I am obviously not alone in praising Bigelow's nail biter about a small team of American bomb disposal experts at work in Iraq; it was the most critically acclaimed film of 2009. But what those who haven't seen the film may not fully understand is that this isn't a "political" movie or a "deep" movie, it's a suspense picture, one of the tensest ever made. You'll be on the edge of your seat the whole time.

HUMPDAY (US, Lynn Shelton)
Two old friends in Seattle who haven't seen each other in years get drunk at a party one night and vow that they will make a gay porn film together to enter into a local hipster erotica contest. The catch: neither of them is gay. The subject matter probably turned off a lot of people, but there isn't a single homoerotic moment in Shelton's unfailingly truthful comedy about the pressures of being hip.

THE COVE (US, Louie Psihoyos)
This perfectly plotted documentary about the secret slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese community carries just the right combination of outrage, tension and beauty. It is a political film. It is a nature movie. It is a great story about heroes (the activists who sneak in to the heavily fortified cove in order to film the killings) and villains (the smarmy government officials who cover it up).

DISTRICT 9 (South Africa/New Zealand, Neill Blomkamp)
Every once in a while, you go to a cinema and see a movie so exciting and new that you leave feeling like you just discovered something big. District 9 is such a movie. Although the script is formulaic at its core and the film owes its sheen to Peter Jackson's money, it was still a huge surprise, introducing us two at least two great talents: Blomkamp and first-time actor Sharlto Copley.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (US/Germany, Quentin Tarantino)
Though I've never exactly hated Tarantino's work, I also never thought I would list any of his films among my ten favorites of any year. But in departing from his usual riffs on '70s exploitation trash from America and Japan and going deeper into the past, the writer/director matures in both his storytelling and his visual style. Cast and cinematography are perfect.

BRONSON (UK, Nicolas Winding Refn)
This blackly comic portrait of Michael "Charles Bronson" Peterson, a colorful character whose brief life outside bars as a small-time crook paled in comparison to the legend he made for himself as Britain's most violent prisoner, is brought to life not only by Refn's wild directorial stylizations, but by star Tom Hardy's no-holds-barred performance. A great find.

THE WHITE RIBBON (Germany/Austria, Michael Haneke)
Writer/director Haneke always makes unsettling films, but his latest, a period piece shot in gorgeous black and white and set in a small German village in 1913, reveals an increasing subtlety in his work, even as he depicts the cruelties of - and to - a group of children whose haunted faces remind you that they are the ones who will make possible the later dominance of the Third Reich.