Cine: what not to miss in 2009
Che
Steven Soderbergh has always been a confident director, and this is a startlingly ambitious two-part movie about Che Guevara, the Argentine medical student turned legendary Marxist guerrilla. The first movie shows the two high points of Che's life: his place in the 1959 Cuban revolution and his radical-chic appearance at the UN in 1964. The second movie shows the drawn-out, agonised endgame in the Bolivian jungle, where he was to meet a violent end.
• Released 2 Jan and 20 Feb.
Frost/Nixon
Opinions may be divided on the point of adapting Peter Morgan's award-winning stage play, but no one could doubt the outstanding performances. This is the great small-screen duel in 1977 between David Frost and ex-president Richard Nixon. Landing a punch on Tricky Dicky wouldretrieve Frostie's sagging career - and avoiding the blow might decontaminate Nixon's reputation. Great performances, particularly Frank Langella as Nixon.
• Released 23 Jan
Revolutionary Road
Ten years after their tragic tryst aboard the Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are reunited in a more grown-up screen relationship. They play a couple in prosperous suburban America who yearn for something more in their lives, and astonish their neighbours with a plan to move to Paris. Their frustration opens their eyes to the true nature of their marriage. Director Sam Mendes's version of the classic 1961 novel by Richard Yates.
• Released 30 Jan.
Three Monkeys
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the great masters of arthouse cinema, and his latest film is an intriguing and beautiful noir drama. A politician with secrets begs his driver to take the blame when he is involved in a car accident, and while the driver's in prison, his son drifts into trouble and his family's life starts coming apart. Ceylan has always been interested in the thriller genre, and this is his first real excursion into it. Opinions are divided, but this is arresting cinema.
• Released 13 Feb.
The Class
Laurent Cantet's docu-realist story of a teacher in a tough French school was a sensation in Cannes, winning the Palme D'Or - the first French movie to do so in 20 years. The idealist teacher reaching out to the tough kids ought to be the biggest cliche imaginable, and yet Cantet triumphantly transcends it. François Bégaudeau, the teacher who wrote the original novel, appears playing himself, and the children are all non-professionals. Powerful, exhilarating stuff.
• Released 27 Feb
Star Trek
Since the Phantom Menace debacle we've learned to be cautious about retro-novelty event films, but this is still a gripper. It is the back-to-basics Star Trek movie with Chris Pine as young Kirk, Zachary Quinto as his young Vulcan-human No 2 and Leonard Nimoy in a cameo as the old Spock. John Cho from the Harold and Kumar movies plays Sulu and Simon Pegg tries out his Scottish accent as Scottie, powering up dilithium crystals.
• Released 8 May.
Synecdoche, New York
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a theatre director in Charlie Kaufman's metaphysical comedy. Disenchanted with the middlebrow nature of theatre and all that polite society calls "art", he takes over a rundown city block in New York - and employs actors to improvise lives in these apartments over months and years with no audience but themselves, creating a thrillingly authentic art-event-happening.
• Released 15 May.
Bruno
It's that man again. The great prankster Sacha Baron Cohen now confers feature-film status on his other creation - Bruno, the gay Austrian fashion journalist who boldly quizzes unsuspecting creative types and somehow misses the point. Fans of the "Funkyzeit Mit Bruno" slot on his HBO show will be aware how horrible his misjudgments can be, and Bruno has already crashed super-cool runway shows for this film. Expect embarrassment, lawsuits and big laughs.
• Released 29 May.
Broken Embraces
Pedro Almodóvar has in the last few years ascended to the absolute heights of world cinema: he is the most important Spanish director since Buñuel, and is certainly the only director who could get away with referring to himself just by his surname in the credits. His new film stars his great muse Penélope Cruz and is a tough, noir-ish thriller about a plastic surgeon seeking revenge on the man who killed his daughter.
• Released 21 Aug.
Avatar
Another post-Titanic landmark. Its formidably confident director James Cameron - who has been contenting himself with nature documentaries - returns with his first mainstream film since his great ocean-going tragedy. It's a mind-bending virtual-reality adventure using state of the art 3D and digital technology. A disabled soldier from the future inhabits the body of an alien being and leads its planet's insurrection against the Earthling oppressors.
• Released 18 Dec.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/30/films-guide-best-2009
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