The 20 best films of summer 2009 | Film

 Posted on March 25, 2024  |  8 minutes  |  1690 words  |  Jenniffer Sheldon

The 20 best films of summer 2009

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw's selects the 20 best films on the big screen this summer

@PeterBradshaw1

Tue 16 Jun 2009 19.01 EDT First published on Tue 16 Jun 2009 19.01 EDT

  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

    Out 19 June Director Michael Bay is reportedly peeved at the new Terminator film borrowing some visuals from his 2007 Transformers film – but this ­sequel should work off some of his vexation. The sinister ­Decepticons are back, on a mission to return to earth and take prisoner their feisty human opponent, young Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBeouf – now tipped as a future heavyweight lead in the manner of Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks

  • Katyn

    Out 19 June The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, in the winter of his career, tackles his nation’s great tragedy: the slaughter, during the second world war, of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet forces in Katyn forest – a grisly crime long ignored in this country, it is alleged, in deference to our gallant Soviet ­allies. The victims included Wajda’s own father, and this project is profoundly important to him

  • North by Northwest

    Out 19 June You should need no excuse to ­revisit Hitchcock’s great suspense classic, but here it is again, 50 years on. Cary Grant gives the performance of his career as the sleek, worldly New York City ad exec – the original “Mad Man” – who is mistaken for a US ­intelligence agent by malign ­foreign spies and chased across the country. The crop-duster plane scene has the freshness and clarity of a nightmare

  • Year One

    Out 26 June It has been billed as the union of an old-guard comic genius and the new generation. Harold Ramis, a veteran of the 80s Ghostbusters era, co-writes and directs this wacky stone age spoof, which stars Jack Black and Michael Cera. They play two fur-clad, mud-smeared hunter-gatherers dismissed from their clan for failing to hunt or gather, who must go on a journey of self-discovery through the ­prehistoric landscape

  • Public Enemies

    Out 1 July Michael Mann’s big-screen ­version of Miami Vice got a mixed reception, but anticipation is nonetheless keen for his account – co-written by Ronan Bennett – of the life and times of Depression-era wiseguy John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp. Marion Cotillard plays his girlfriend Billie Frechette; Stephen Graham plays Baby Face Nelson, and Christian Bale is the implacable FBI man Melvin Purvis

  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

    Out 1 July Not many of Hollywood’s wise-acre animations are much use for very young children, but the Ice Age franchise has always been a very good bet for little kids, while offering amusement to older ­children and their parents. Scrat, the pop-eyed critter on the hunt for an acorn, returns in this third movie, and even finds some ­romance with a winsome sabre-toothed squirrel called Scratte

  • Brüno

    Out 10 July Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t the only Austrian to make it big in Hollywood: there is also a certain horrific fashion correspondent called Brüno, with a gift for asking precisely the most inappropriate question. Sacha Baron Cohen unveils his latest situationist prank-persona, astonishing and annoying the great and good in the glitzy world of fashion. Are these soft targets? And are they in on it anyway? Who knows? Laughs are pretty well guaranteed

  • 35 Shots of Rum

    Out 10 July Claire Denis is a director who can challenge and discomfit her audiences. Interestingly, her latest picture tackles that most unusual of subjects: the happy family. Mati Dop plays Josephine, a young woman devoted to her train-driver father Lionel, played by Alex Descas. Father and daughter have an easy, loving ­relationship, captured by Denis in various set-pieces, and the film has already been adored for its richness and warmth

  • The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

    Out 10 July Rebecca Miller adapts her own novel to create a droll, serio-comic movie about an older, ­successful publisher, played by Alan Arkin, and his much younger wife, Robin Wright Penn. She is uneasy when he insists that they up sticks to a suburban ­retirement community, and ­begins a flirtation with a younger man (Keanu Reeves)

  • Soul Power

    Out 10 July From Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the ­director of When We Were Kings, the 1996 documentary about the legendary “rumble in the jungle” boxing match between Ali and Foreman, comes this movie about the three-day concert in ­Zaire that preceded the bout. The participants, ­pulsing with energy and sweat, include Sister Sledge, BB King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and James Brow

  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

    Out 15 July We are now nearing the end of the most extraordinary epic in popular storytelling. Harry Potter, played by an increasingly rangy and grown-up Daniel Radcliffe, ­begins his sixth year at Hogwarts, and though he is now captain of the Quidditch team, the young wizard is suffering various ­romantic agonies and tensions ­relating to a certain book of spells. Dumbledore is rumoured to face a terrible fate

  • Frozen River

    Out 17 July An unexpected Oscar for Melissa Leo brought this blue-collar indie picture to the world’s ­attention; Leo plays a woman whose gambling-addicted ­husband has taken off to Atlantic City with the family ­savings. After a chance encounter with a woman who works at a local bingo parlour, she gets ­involved in the lucrative, horrible world of running illegal immigrants into the US across the St Lawrence river on the ­Canadian border

  • Antichrist

    Out 24 July After years of lying low and ­reportedly suffering from ­depression, legendary arthouse provocateur Lars Von Trier has come storming back with this ­extreme horror nightmare that gave everyone at Cannes a fit of the vapours. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a ­grieving couple who retreat to a woodland cabin to come to terms with the death of a child. A spirit of evil emerges from the undergrowth. You’ll need a strong stomach for the final 20 minutes

  • The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

    Out 24 July Here is a remake of the 1974 ­suspense action thriller that was an inspiration to Tarantino. Tony Scott directs, bringing what will undoubtedly be a lot of alpha-male sweat to the job. Armed bad guys hijack a subway train, holding the passengers to ransom. Denzel Washington and John Travolta star as the subway dispatcher and criminal mastermind respectivel

  • Coco Before Chanel

    Out 31 July Audrey Tautou gets a chance to deepen and broaden her gamine image in this biopic of the ­fashion legend Coco Chanel, ­wittily ­suggesting that her childhood in a Catholic orphanage influenced her later, simple designs. Tautou has won much praise for this film, which shows Chanel’s hectic, glamorous life as an adult in 20s Paris – but the film stops short of the second world war

  • Mesrine: Killer Instinct & Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1

    Out 7 August and 28 August Jacques Mesrine is a crime legend in France – the equivalent of our Ronnie Knight, Ronnie Biggs and both Kray twins all rolled into one. This colossal two-movie epic tells the story of his sinister pre-eminence in the 70s French underworld. Vincent Cassel plays Mesrine himself, who defies the cops and his criminal rivals with breathtaking chutzpah. Gérard Depardieu is Guido, a glowering mob boss

  • The Yes Men Fix the World

    Out 7 August Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t the only prankster in the cinemas this summer; the Yes Men are the ­anarcho-hoaxers making sure that the corporate bad guys get well and truly punk’d. This film shows them taking aim at Dow Chemical, the entity that took over Union Carbide, whose plant catastrophe at ­Bhopal, India, in 1984 ­became a human and environmental nightmare. The Yes Men pose as spokesmen for Dow, promising a proper cleanup and compensation on live TV – and Dow’s stock-price plummet

  • Scarface

    Out 21 August Say hello, once again, to his little friend. Brian De Palma’s classic remake from 1983 of the 1932 gangster film has Al Pacino as Tony Montana, the Cuban refugee wiseguy in Miami who intends ruthlessly to build a drug empire in the United States. This film has become a classic of 80s cinema

  • Broken Embraces

    Out August 28 Pedro Almodóvar’s latest will ­entrance his fans, and very ­possibly bring fresh believers to the congregation, though it perhaps does not offer anything madly new. The dependably ­gorgeous Penélope Cruz plays the mistress of a wealthy financier and film producer, whom she drives into a jealous rage by ­falling in love with her director

  • Funny People

    Out 28 August Director Judd Apatow’s boldly self-referential new movie will ­either crown him as Hollywood’s king of comedy – or cause his stock price to tumble. Adam ­Sandler plays a wildly successful comedian whose terminal disease makes him re-assess his life and mentor some up-and-coming comedians. The cast ­includes Seth Rogen, Jason Schwartzman and, interestingly, Eric Bana, who himself started out as a comic
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