What’s coming up in 2009 for movies? Cameron, Tarantino, Mann, fresh fan-fare for Trekkies and Sherlockians, new Watchmen, an X-Man, more Jurassic Park, Rambo, Transformers, Terminator and HP sauce. Those are the franchise blockborers and half-blooded sequels.

 

What about 2009’s films? The ones that take chances, don’t cut corners with F/X, are more acting than action, flirt with boredom while trying to seduce us into a strange new mood? Hunt down these secret-intelligence 2009 releases—they’ll fast-forward from being Sundance-worthy or Cannes-goods to the screen at Metro or EIFF, the shelf of your nearest alt-film rental store or the desktop of your DVD-burner.

 

Let’s start at home. Torontonian David Bezmozgis, renowned for story collection Natasha, was a documentarian, and he now turns to feature-film making with his ’80s suburban-immigrant-teen story Victoria Day, premiering at Sundance this month. Also at Sundance is Before Tomorrow, from Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu (still photographer and actress in Atarnajuat: The Fast Runner), about an Inuit grandmother and grandson’s tragic trip away from their clan in the 1840s. Look for both on screen or shelf later in the year, along with Margaret, starring Winnipeg-born Anna Paquin as a bus-accident survivor in You Can Count On Me director Kenneth Lonnergan’s second film.

 

Border-smuggling thriller Frozen River, from first-timer Courtney Hunt, crosses cultures and country lines around a Mohawk reserve straddling Quebec and New York. It was acclaimed on release stateside and due on disc in February, while Nick Broomfield’s (Biggie and Tupac) harrowing Iraq war docu-drama Battle for Haditha comes to DVD this month.

 

Another Brit, one of the best directors this decade (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum), Paul Greengrass takes us into Green Zone alongside a reporter (Matt Damon) following two CIA agents looking for those elusive WMDs in Iraq. Countryman Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart), possibly the decade’s most prolific and versatile director, offers Genova, starring Colin Firth as a father who, shell-shocked by grief, moves with his daughters to Italy. Usually political Ken Loach comes out of left field, tackling a different famously violent French soccer star, Eric Cantona, in Looking For Eric. Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Irish prisoners’ strike film Hunger will see its beautifully harsh light of day on this side of the Atlantic. And Shane Meadows’ Eurostar-sponsored Somers Town, following a runaway in the neighbourhood around King’s Cross station, zips over here soon.

 

Frenchman Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) crosses the Channel for London River, a family-drama take on the London bombings. Erick Zonca’s Julia, lauded mostly for Tilda Swinton’s performance as a kidnapping addict, should hit disc. After getting the highest mark at Cannes and topping year-end honour rolls, Laurence Cantet’s Paris school-drama The Class, makes it here in February. Documentary-weaver Agnès Varda gazes beautifully back on her past in Les plages d’Agnès.

 

Be on the lookout for Staircase documentarian Jean-Xavier De Lestrade’s first feature, thriller Welcome Home, and better-than-Woody-Allen Agnès Jaoui’s comic drama Let It Rain. Masterful impressionist Claire Denis’ father-daughter story 35 Shots of Rum should reach our shelves even as she wraps White Material, set in Cameroon and starring 2009 Cannes jury head Isabelle Huppert. Leading director of the French “New Extremism” movement, Bruno Dumont brings Hadewijch, about a nun whose ecstatic faith forces her from the convent. And while Aardman (Tortoise vs Hare) and Pixar (Up, 1906) have new animated features, Triplets of Belleville creator Sylvain Chomet returns to his drawing-board with The Illusionist, based on a Jacques Tati story about a fading entertainer.

 

Spaniard Pedro Almodóvar, another of the decade’s best directors, returns to the ring with Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos), a four-way-love-crossing noir with Penelope Cruz that will splash onto screens near year’s end. José Luis Guerín’s nearly dialogue-free Strasbourg romance In The City of Sylvia made 2008 lists in the States—look for it on disc soon. The Latin world, always football-obsessed, sees Alfonso’s brother Carlos Cuarón, writer of Y Tu Mamá También, reunite that film’s stars, Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal, for his debut Rudo y Cursi, a comedy about soccer-playing brothers trying to kick and sing their way out of their family’s banana ranch.

 

A too-true South American tale, Crude, is Paradise Lost documentarian Joe Berlinger’s chronicle, three years in the making, of the “Amazon Chernobyl,” where five Ecuadorean native groups fought Chevron in court after the company dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in the rainforest. A more-recent disaster, the morass in Iraq, has been best covered by duo Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, whose third film on the subject is a clever homage to Albert Maysles’ seminal doc Salesman—Bulletproof Salesman, soon on shelves, follows armoured-car salesman Fidelis Cloer in his latest market. Another doc due on disc is Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s book The End of America. And for some much-needed comic and political relief, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno return with their straight-faced satire-sabotage with The Yes Men Fix The World.

 

On the barely fictional side of the political tracks, David O Russell’s (Three Kings) shot Nailed, a satire co-written with Al Gore’s daughter. Andrew Jarecki moves from bizarre-but-true Capturing The Friedmans to the surreal world of New York’s upper-class with detective drama All Good Things. American Movie director Chris Smith’s floating first fiction film, The Pool, will see DVD release up here after hitting screens down there to raves. Anchored in the Mississippi delta, Lance Hammer’s acclaimed debut Ballast comes to Metro in February. Following Half-Nelson, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck throw another off-speed pitch with their lyrical baseball drama Sugar. And reclusive auteur-dreamer Terrence Malick plants his Tree of Life in theatres come November.

 

Also flying in, à la Paris, Je T’Aime, are two more city love-letters: anthology New York, I Love You falling in spring (contributors include Andrei Zvyagintsev, Fatih Akin, Mira Nair and ... Scarlet Johansson?!?), and three-storied Tokyo! (with an offering from Michel Gondry). Come February, get ready to be whacked on disc by Italy’s mob-mad Gomorra; political drama Il Divo sneaks in later. Social-realism masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne voice another moral dilemma with Lorna’s Silence in May. Coming later, Michael Haneke’s (Caché) newest chiller, The White Ribbon, unfurls in a rural school in Germany in 1913. Cannes favourite Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys will swing by, as will Ji-Woon Kim’s madcap, Leone-esque horse-opera The Good, The Bad and The Weird. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Ozu-like story Still Walking will see some form of release, along with animation-maestro Hayao Miyazaki’s possibly final film, watercoloured fish-tale Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. Iranian wunderkind Samira Makhmalbaf’s Two-Legged Horse, where a poor Afghani boy is made to carry around a rich boy, may be too hard-hitting for release, but track it down online.