I assure you we’re not just being contrary, and I’m frankly as surprised as anyone that Pontypool has ended up as Fast Forward Weekly’s consensus pick for the best film of 2009, but that doesn’t mean Bruce McDonald’s clever, unsettling zombie picture is anything less than deserving. The Canadian sort-of-zombie film is notable on a number of levels. It epitomizes efficient filmmaking, building an atmosphere of horror out of a claustrophobic setting and secondhand reports of mysterious events. It slips in commentary on topics from disease to Canada’s linguistic divide to the very nature of human communication, all with a never-wavering naturalism. It deftly blends genres, introducing moments of levity without sacrificing its overall tension. Best of all, though, it’s a Canadian film that can be recommended without the usual “good-for-a-Canadian-film” qualifier.

The rest of the list this year is, admittedly, a bit more conventional. As with last year, almost half of the list could be described as blockbusters. Some of the films wholeheartedly embrace that status — J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek revamp boldly ramps up the adventurous underpinnings and still respects the series’ well-established mythology — while others subvert the format gloriously. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds exemplifies the latter approach with its guns-blazing climax, blending the ultimate in cinematic wish fulfilment with clever jabs at its own propagandistic underpinnings. Basterds also features one of the year’s best performances (and one of the most memorable cinematic villains of the decade), a riveting turn from Christoph Waltz as an alternately ebullient and icy Nazi officer.

Another of the year’s best performances came in The Wrestler (which came out in some markets in 2008 but didn’t hit Calgary until January of 2009). Mickey Rourke’s Oscar-nominated turn as a washed-up pro wrestler would be heartbreaking enough on its own. Couple it with the parallels in Rourke’s own life and the hard-luck story becomes all the more poignant. Slumdog Millionaire beat it out for the best picture Oscar, but odds are The Wrestler and Rourke’s performance in particular will stick with audiences for longer.

Three children’s movies made this year’s list — Up, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are — although only one of them seems to be explicitly aimed at children. Pixar’s Up continues the studio’s remarkable winning streak, borrowing liberally from classic adventure serials to tell the story of a crotchety old man, a chubby boy scout and a house borne by thousands of balloons. Oddly, even though Up’s rhythms come closest to those of a traditional kids’ movie, it also contains the most mature sequence of the bunch. The film’s intro, which tracks the old man’s life from childhood to the death of his wife, is one of the most well-considered and genuinely affecting looks at love and mortality ever captured on film, efficiently conveying the cumulative cost of the small sacrifices we all make as we go through life.

Wes Anderson’s Mr. Fox and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things, on the other hand, are kids’ movies in name only. Anderson’s is the more fun of the two by a wide margin, but it still resides squarely in the director’s usual playground. It contains as much ennui, confusion and melancholy as The Royal Tenenbaums, albeit with stop-motion animals and a cartoon sensibility. Jonze’s take on Maurice Sendak’s classic book neatly avoids any elements of nostalgia to provide a deeply introspective (some even say soul-crushing) examination of what it means to grow up. Some found the lack of joy off-putting, but no one can deny the film’s technical achievement in capturing the look of Sendak’s illustrations.

That just leaves the list’s three more offbeat films. It’d be a stretch to describe Oscar-winning filmmakers the Coen brothers as obscure, but it’d be equally off-base to say they’re in any way tailoring their films towards the mainstream, and A Serious Man might just be the brothers’ least welcoming film since 1991’s Barton Fink. It’s also an instant masterpiece, an intermittently hilarious and philosophical reflection on a question fundamental to most religions: Why do bad things happen to good people?

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is equally unfriendly to its audience, but in an entirely different way. The movie uses tension as a cudgel, forcing viewers to feel every moment of anxiety in the daily routines of a bomb squad in Iraq. Humpday, meanwhile, fell victim to a marketing campaign that seemingly tried to sell it as a gay panic comedy à la I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, when it’s actually just an insightful examination of male friendship which happens to revolve around the concept of two straight guys making a gay porn film together.

The list:

1. Pontypool (dir. Bruce McDonald) — A mix of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and modern linguistic theory, the film is frightening, funny and probably the best thing McDonald’s ever done. (PETER HEMMINGER)

2. Inglourious Basterds (dir. Quentin Tarantino) — If Basterds isn't Tarantino’s best, it is at the very least his cleverest. (KYLE FRANCIS)

3. Up (dir. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson) — Every development, no matter how ludicrous, is brimming with so much imagination and charm that it’s impossible not to be taken in. (PETER HEMMINGER)

4. A Serious Man (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen) — Highly moving, unusual and morbidly funny, A Serious Man is both a departure and welcome surprise. (JESSE LOCKE)

5. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (dir. Wes Anderson) — Don’t let the cute stop-motion animals throw you. This is an Anderson movie through and through, from the soundtrack to the superhuman attention to detail and the themes of alienation and confusion. (PETER HEMMINGER

6. Star Trek (dir. J.J. Abrams) — A thoroughly original, loving adaptation of the classic themes and ideas that manages to unburden itself of decades of continuity and yet somehow still feel definitively, absolutely, 100 per cent Star Trek. (KYLE FRANCIS)

7. The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky) — The matches are full of kinetic grace, while also dredging up real pain and gore, from simple punches to razor blade-and-staple-gun wounds. (BRYN EVANS)

8. The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow) — So perfectly crafted and so God damn macabre that getting through the entire 130 minutes without a break is a test of mental fortitude. (KYLE FRANCIS)

9. Humpday (dir. Lynn Shelton) — It may be the first commercial film in which it’s not entirely outside the realm of reasonable possibility for a straight guy to consider having a homosexual experience. (PAUL MATWYCHUK)

10. Where the Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze) — It’s not a burst of nostalgic bombast; it’s a thoughtful take on the confusion that comes from growing up. (PETER HEMMINGER)