Bad Romance
2009
Written on a tour bus in Norway and premiered at Alexander McQueen's last show, all nonsense syllables and appetite.
★ 8.7
Browse by time · year
2009
Showing 113 works across all media from 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2009
Christoph Waltz plays four languages and makes every one of them frightening: Tarantino builds his scenes as long conversations where somebody at the table already knows too much.
★ 7.9
Up
Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
2009
The four-minute marriage montage is the most devastating thing Pixar has ever done, and it is wordless: after that, an old man flies his house away on balloons.
★ 7.8
A Prophet
Directed by Jacques Audiard
2009
The best prison film of this century, and it works like a business education: an illiterate nineteen-year-old walks into a French jail and starts learning very fast.
★ 7.6
The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2009
Bigelow made war feel like an addiction rather than a duty: a bomb disposal sergeant works without much fear, and every defusal is stretched until the room turns physical.
★ 7.3
A Serious Man
Directed by Coen Brothers
2009
The Coens' most personal film and their least forgiving: a Minnesota physics professor's life comes apart for no reason at all, and nobody in it will explain anything.
★ 7.3
Empire State of MindJay-Z
Empire State of Mind
2009 · From The Blueprint 3
Two songwriters homesick in London started it; Keys and a Moments piano loop made Jay-Z's first lead-artist number one.
★ 7.2
My Girls
2009 · From Merriweather Post Pavilion
An arpeggio out of Chicago house, a sample from the Cassini Saturn probe, Lennox wanting only a home.
★ 6.9
You Belong With Me
2009 · From Fearless
Banjo, fiddle and mandolin under a scene Swift wrote after overhearing a touring musician's phone call with his girlfriend.
★ 6.8
Two Weeks (Grizzly Bears)
2009
Chris Bear started the piano line on a Cape Cod weekend; Victoria Legrand's stacked harmonies make the rest glow.
★ 6.3
1901
2009 · From Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
A fantasy of Belle Epoque Paris, handed out free online, that then spent thirty-one weeks climbing to alternative number one.
★ 6.2
Feel It All AroundWashed Out
Feel It All Around
2009
Bedroom pop in the literal sense, a Gary Low disco record slowed to a crawl, and chillwave had its template.
★ 6.2
Little Lion Man
2009
Banjo hammering under a chorus that needed a radio edit, produced by Markus Dravs and voted Australia's song of 2009.
★ 6.1
Up in the Air
Directed by Jason Reitman
2009
Reitman cast people who had actually just been laid off and filmed them reacting for real: a man who fires strangers for a living has arranged his whole existence around not landing.
★ 6.0
Woods
2009 · From Blood Bank
Four lines, no instruments, one voice stacked through Auto-Tune into a choir Kanye West later built a song from.
★ 5.8
Merriweather Post Pavilion
2009
There is no guitar anywhere on it, which for a rock band was the point. It is named after a Maryland concert amphitheatre.
★ 5.7
The Secret in Their Eyes
Directed by Juan Jose Campanella
2009 · Argentina
The camera drops out of the sky into a packed football stadium and does not cut for five minutes: an Argentine investigator reopens a case he could never leave alone.
★ 5.7
Lisztomania
2009 · From Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Heine coined the word for Liszt's swooning fans, and Philippe Zdar gave these guitars their chrome shine.
★ 5.5
A History of Christianity
The First Three Thousand Years
2009 · 1188 pages
Christianity as a three-thousand-year argument, beginning with Greece and Israel long before Christ. MacCulloch refuses to tell it as a Western story: after eight centuries, Baghdad looked a likelier capital than Rome.
★ 5.5
Let the Great World Spin
2009 · 400 pages
In August 1974 a man steps onto a wire between the Twin Towers. Below him McCann gathers the whole city: an Irish monk living among Bronx prostitutes, Park Avenue mothers grieving Vietnam.
★ 5.4
Party in the USA
2009
Jessie J wrote it with Claude Kelly, passed on singing it, and Cyrus took it to number two.
★ 5.3
Forever (Drake)
2009
Boi-1da's beat was first meant for Kardinal Offishall; Kanye, by his account, rewrote his verse for two days after Eminem.
★ 5.2
Avatar
Directed by James Cameron
2009
Cameron waited more than a decade for the technology to catch up to his script, then made the highest-grossing film ever released: whatever you make of the story, nothing had looked like this.
★ 5.2
Need You Now
2009
Four writers, one late-night phone call, and a chorus that took Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys.
★ 5.2
The Red Book
2009 · 582 pages
Jung induced his own visions and argued with the figures he met there, then set it down in medieval script and painted mandalas. He said everything he wrote afterward was mere elaboration.
★ 5.2
Amazing (Kanye West)
2009 · From 808s & Heartbreak
Recorded in Honolulu for 808s & Heartbreak with Jeff Bhasker co-producing, Auto-Tune propping up bravado that keeps slipping.
★ 5.2
My Struggle
2009 · 448 pages
Six volumes of one man's life recorded to the last cornflake and cigarette, and at the center a father who drank himself to death, leaving a house his sons had to scrub clean.
★ 5.1
Mary and Max
Directed by Adam Elliot
2009
Adam Elliot spent five years making it, fifty-seven weeks of that shooting clay frame by frame: an eight-year-old in Melbourne writes to a middle-aged New Yorker, and they correspond for twenty years.
★ 5.0
Star Trek
Directed by J.J. Abrams
2009
J. J. Abrams solved the reboot problem by making the new timeline canon rather than a replacement: the crew meets young, the casting is uncanny, and Star Trek became a summer action film.
★ 5.0
The Cave
2009
Written at a soundcheck in an Edinburgh pub, open-D guitar and banjo climbing into a stomp that drew four Grammy nominations.
★ 4.9
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
Lawrence Weschler
2009 · 336 pages
The artist Robert Irwin gave up the image, then the frame, then the object, until only seeing was left. Weschler recorded three decades of his talk, and reading it retrains your eye.
★ 4.9
(500) Days of Summer
Directed by Marc Webb
2009
The split screen between what he expects and what happens is the best scene of its decade: a romantic comedy scrambled out of sequence that keeps insisting it is not a love story.
★ 4.7
Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart
2009
Synth pitched somewhere in early-eighties Prince territory, with Keys singing insomnia as though it were a physical condition.
★ 4.6
First Inaugural Address of Barack Obama · 2009
2009
The Hangover
Directed by Todd Phillips
2009
It withholds the night itself and works entirely on reconstruction: four men wake in a wrecked Las Vegas suite with the groom missing, and piece the evening back together from the evidence.
★ 4.3