To reference Homer, there’s lotsa movies that can only be described as boooring coming outta ’09. Despite everything, there will be good movies. Deputy Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY previews some centrestream wheat from the chaff. Additional text by TIM WONG.

Film Society 2009: While the full line-up has yet be finalised, I’m stoked at the chance to see French master Arnaud Desplechin’s La Sentinelle. Dean Spanley: With the clunky, patchy No. 2, Toa Fraser had quite some way to go as a film director. Still, the guy has potential, and the aging, magnificent Peter O’Toole is worthy in the trailer. The Lovely Bones: He’s retreated, Randolph William Hearst-like, into Xanadu (um, the Wairarapa). The Lovely Bones has been repeatedly delayed, etc. But there’s no denying Peter Jackson’s record, particularly Heavenly Creatures. The Road: Maybe they could say sorry for Baz Luhrmann’s camp trainwreck, piling up every Downunder kitsch cliché, and rename scorching The Proposition as Australia. John Hillcoat’s follow-up, The Road, looks weighty. Cormac McCarthy’s novel enjoys an even bigger, deeper rep than No Country For Old Men.


Zach and Miri Make a Porno: Can Seth Rogen be dislikeable? The other appealing star in Kevin Smith’s latest: Elizabeth Banks. Shutter Island: Can Martin Scorsese make a bad movie? Even Gangs of New York had plenty of good points. Shutter Island, hurricanes and rioting criminally insane, is based on a 2004 novel by literary hardman Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, The Wire). Gran Turino: Clint Eastwood’s purple patch promises to continue with Gran Turino. It’s gonna be decades before he stops sorting the ‘hood and goes out to pasture. Miracle at St Anna, The Class and Synecdoche, New York: The latest from Spike Lee, Laurent Cantet and Charlie Kaufman. Black World War Two soldiers, the French education system and the NYC theatre scene. Public Enemies: Michael Mann delivers exciting, entertaining action, spiked with socio-political commentary. Stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, probing the 1933-34 Crimewave that accompanied the Great Depression, baptising the FBI. Religulous: Bill Maher and Larry Charles take on religion. Whatever Works: The finest of homecomings, no doubt. Woody Allen finally teams up with Larry David as his leading man. Presuming both men are on form, what more could you ask for?—Alexander Bisley

Treeless Mountain: Korean-American So Yong Kim, who debuted with 2006’s superb, minimalist In Between Days, follows through with the Nobody Knows-esque saga of two abandoned young siblings. Carries high praise from Toronto. Summer Hours: Olivier Assayas’s best picture since Irma Vep (although I have a soft spot for demonlover) finds the restless director in cahoots with the Musée d’Orsay. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, Summer Hours observes the domestic rhythms of a close, mostly functional French family, but with rare delicacy and poignancy. Also stars Juliette Binoche. Tokyo Sonata: A possible reinvention for Japan’s master of malaise, whose recent missteps (Doppelganger, Loft) signalled dimishing returns. The modern horror of Pulse, Cure and Charisma make way for the story of a salaryman who tries to hide his redundancy from his wife and two sons. Still Walking: By accounts another humanist triumph from the director of Nobody Knows. Fingers crossed the New Zealand International Film Festivals secure this one early (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s previous film, the quietly subversive samurai drama Hana, eluded our screens). Wendy and Lucy: Kelly Reichardt’s film about a girl and her dog promises the same simplicity and sincerity of 2006’s Old Joy, that serene, aching meditation on two blokes in solitude. White Material, 35 Shots of Rum: Poet laureate Claire Denis returns to Cameroon with the peerless Isabelle Huppert in tow. Also due, the Ozu-gesturing 35 Shots of Rum, lensed by Denis’s longtime imagemaker, Agnes Godard.—Tim Wong