New Year Holiday for Movie Lovers

Here is the selection of the 2009’s best Hollywood films from TimesOnline, altered by ShanghaiExpat. We hope it’ll give you more fun for your New Year Holiday at home.

If you have any comments or recommendations, just post them in our forum.

Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (July)
Harry Potter fans will already have a fairly good idea of what happens in this, the sixth film in the hugely popular boy wizard film adapted from JK Rowling’s all-conquering books. It was an early script draft of this film that prompted Rowling to ‘out’ Dumbledore while promoting the final Potter book.

Public Enemies (July)
Creator of Miami Vice Michael Mann guides the apparently tireless Christian Bale (who appears to be in every movie of any note these days) and Johnny Depp in a period gangster romp about the FBI’s search for John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd that is perfectly timed to chime with the new Great Depression.

Terminator Salvation (June)
The long-awaited ‘future war’ segment of the Terminator saga, previously only hinted at in the first three movies, dominates proceedings in Charlie’s Angels director McG’s bold reawakening of the killer robot franchise. Christian Bale, fresh from his spectacular triumph as one fanboy hero in Dark Knight essays another - John Connor, charismatic leader of the anti-Skynet forces who the Terminators have been trying to eliminate for the last three films. Roland Kickinger will be the principal Terminator this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is said to be too busy running California to appear as the iconic cyborg killing machine and Anton Yelchin, Sam Worthington and Helena Bonham-Carter are along for the ride.

Frost/Nixon (January)
"A historical fraud, a mind-boggling travesty of the truth. Let me hasten to add, however, that it is without doubt the most gripping, entertaining, dramatically clever and fascinating fraud I’ve ever seen" – Cosmo Landesman

Inglourious Basterds (June)
Quentin Tarantino returns with an eclectic cast (Brad Pitt, Mike Myers and star of Hitcock's The Birds Rod Taylor) and another one of his playful reinventions of 1970s genre cinema. This time he moves from the American underworld to World War 2, with a team of Jewish-American special forces operating behind German lines, terminating Nazi commanders with extreme prejudice. Anyone who likes Tarantino, war movies in the vein of The Dirty Dozen or Nazis getting their comeuppance will undoubtedly love this movie. Fans of correct spelling may be less thrilled.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May)
Hugh Jackman’s back for an X-Men prequel set 17 years before the action of the first movie.The film traces the early career of Logan, the indestructible mutant who will one day be X-Man Wolverine. Cameos from future X-Men and the chance to see how Logan acquired his deadly claws and curious hairdo give the film a geek power that will set the internet buzzing ahead of the premiere. It will be interesting to see how this performs after the third X-Men movie was seen by many to be something of a mis-step in the X-franchise.

The Informant (September)
Matt Damon and Scott Bakula star in Steven Soderbergh’s promising black comedy based on a true story about the ostensibly dull world of agribusiness price fixing. If you enjoyed The Insider and would like to see much the same film again, but this time laced with some mordant humour and featuring a bipolar hero, this might be just the movie for you.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (June)
The inevitable sequel to last year’s surprise hit features more action, more laughs, and more shape-shifting robots. Michael Bay and Shia LeBoef return as director and star respectively with the astoundingly attractive Megan Fox as Shia’s love interest, a more international battleground and the eagerly anticipated introduction of fan favourite Soundwave.

Coraline (May)
Cult author Neil Gaiman’s dark fairytale gets a faithful adaptation which will entrance anyone who enjoyed Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas or, indeed, anyone who has ever escaped through a secret door in their bedroom that leads to a mysterious parallel version of their own home.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (January)
Brad Pitt leads the cast of this fable taken from an F.Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who is born in his seventies and ages in reverse. Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton feature in a story that spans a lifetime.

Avatar (December)
James Cameron’s long-awaited high-technology blockbuster shares some basic ideas with The Surrogates (Humans use humanoid remote drones, in this case to explore an alien planet) and some with Planet 51 (we are the invaders). In terms of technological ambition and cinematic reach though, this movie should be without equal. Sigourney Weaver, who combined so well for Cameron in the past reunites with her Aliens director As long as Cameron doesn’t allow the story to become too cerebral for mainstream audiences Avatar stands a fair chance of being the biggest movie of the year.

2012 (July)
Master of disaster Roland Emmerich (The Day after Tomorrow, Godzilla, Independence Day) assembles an impressive cast including John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover for an apocalyptic epic based on a 7th Century Mayan prophecy. Never one to do things by halves, Emmerich will apparently open the film with the end of the world as we know it and let things escalate from there.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (July)
Playing fast and loose with the accepted chronology of the age of the dinosaurs this third instalment of the CGI school holiday favourite has the primitive mammal heroes of the first two films somehow getting mixed up with a ‘lost world’ of surviving dinosaurs trapped beneath a glacier. John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, and Denis Leary provide voices for the computer created critters. Certain to both entertain undemanding under-fives and infuriate palaeontologists in equal measure, this has the air of being the last film in the series.

Sherlock Holmes (November)
Some extraordinary casting distinguishes the umpteenth Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. as a tough, sword-flourishing Holmes and Jude Law as an even tougher, no-nonsense Watson in Guy Ritchie’s ‘reimagining’ of the ultimate sleuth. Based on Lionel Wigram’s comic book about the consulting detective rather than directly upon Conan Doyle’s books, the film also features Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, the captivating femme fatale introduced in an 1891 Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia.

Dorian Gray (November)
The classic Oscar Wilde fable retold by an impressive collection of British thespian eye-candy including Colin Firth and Emilia Fox. Ben Barnes, little known outside the Narnia cognoscenti or the few remaining fans of doomed boyband Hyrise, plays the dissipated fop with the magical portrait.

Knowing (March)
A teacher (Nicolas Cage) opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some of events that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are due to unfold.

Nine (December)
In a year packed with remakes, this is perhaps the bravest of all: taking on Fellini’s hugely influential 8½ but going just that little bit further, it’s the behind-the-scenes story of an Italian movie director featuring a stellar cast (Including Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sophia Loren, Penelope Cruz and Dame Judi Dench), some of whom will be singing. The purists will be furious, the rest of us merely sceptical. Mamma Mia it isn’t.

Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian (May)
A repeat of 2006’s ‘museum comes to life’ cameo jamboree with more or less everyone except Robin Williams back at the end of May to ham it up for the entertainment of young and undemanding cinemagoers. The film will need something very special in terms of advance reviews to give it any commercial visibility in what promises to be a very busy month at the movies. Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Owen Wilson and Ricky Gervais are already crossing their fingers.