Ten best lists are the bunk.

Think about it. What one person can view all the roughly 500 movies that come out in one year, both the domestic releases as well as the minimal number of imports? And what person has such an expansive taste in movies that she or he can assess and weigh the best of films that have subject matter as diverse as Iranian domestic tales and Japanese anime and Romanian political dramas? And then there is the vanity of the whole thing. Who relies on just one person to give them the word on all of one year’s best films?

Having said that, there is a certain value in any given writer’s 10 best list. It’s an insight into their interests, biases, blind spots, and obsessions. With a 10 best list you get a pretty good idea whether that person is compatible with your own tastes. Even a person whose favorites are diametrically opposed to your own has value, because sometimes the writers you like least are the ones who are the most helpful, if only as a counter example.

There is one reviewer who is invariably wrong about comedies: if the writer likes it, the film is awful. And vice versa. Needless to say, the writer is a dependable barometer. And on a practical level, a good 10 best list is an aide de memoir, or at least something to help with a Netflix queue.

I am the perfectly imperfect 10 best list keeper. I saw hardly any movies this year; I selectively viewed only films I thought I might like or which interested me for their genre elements, and I didn’t see a lot of things that a responsible movie reviewer should have seen (Nine the musical, 9 the animated apocalypse movie, Nine the Thai horror film, Cloud 9 the German art house film, Nine Miles Down the desert thriller).

Nor did I go to the Cannes or Toronto festivals, so I didn’t see the most discussed films of the year, such as The White Ribbon or A Prophet. And my opinions and likes and dislikes are petty, biased, and half the time irrational — just like everyone else’s.

Thus, in the absence of a lot of other imports, when it came to the controversial Lars von Trier intellectual horror film Antichrist, I found I was in favor of it. Antichrist may be the best film of the year. It is certainly the first truly great art film since The Lives of Others.

By contrast, the non-intellectual horror film Orphan was equally great, with a superb cast, beautiful photography, and a clever, twisting story. Yet the bulk of the movie reviewers chose to view it as yet another bad off-the-rack horror film, grasping none of its unusual sociological interest. Orphan in fact makes for an interesting parallel to Antichrist.

As the writer of a couple of books on Tarantino, it was probably ordained that I would add Inglourious Basterds to the list. And, though the film ended up not being as advertised — a series of interrogations rather than a Dirty Dozen style action film — if seen clear it is a fascinating contemplation of the marriage of movies and Nazism, a subject earlier explored in Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler.

Who’d think that they would have run out of new ideas for a zombie film, but Zombieland managed to create a horror tale that was funny and also one of the best love stories in some time.

Another not-so-obvious love story disguised as a thriller is A Perfect Getaway, another good and twisty tale from the always reliable but unheralded David Twohy.

Love and lust clash in An Education, an unexpectedly fine coming-of-age tale set in the early 1960 with a star-making performance by Carey Mulligan.

The first great film of the year was Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker. Bigelow specializes in tales of bands of roving male outsiders (Near Dark, Point Break), and this film is perfectly in concert with her past work.

Now that the year is almost over, and after three viewings, some of its narrative flaws (a predictable death, a long digression through the streets of the city) are apparent, but the complex performance of the James Cameron-looking Jeremy Renner results in one of the most powerful last few minutes of a movie in years, a sequence that is virtually silent.

A last minute entry is Ti West’s The House of the Devil, an effective horror film that is mostly all build-up, but which pulls off the remarkable feat of really looking like a ‘70s horror film — the kind that everyone else is remaking these days.

That is the first tier of good films from 2009. A secondary list would include the wildly unusual documentary — more a one-man show monologue — Tyson, the two anti-humor comedies Observe and Report and World’s Greatest Dad, and the credit sequences from Watchmen and Wolverine.

I would also include on the list the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. I hated the movie when I first saw it, but it is also one of the few films that stuck with me a long time after seeing it. Any film with that kind of tenacious mental longevity has got to be one that I underestimated or it is a film that raises issues that disturbed me in ways I didn’t want to confront.

Films on a worst list should represent major disappointments, ambitious dashed. It’s useless to list tired programmatic comedies such as Old Dogs on a worst list, since everyone going to see it already knows the film is bad and don’t care.

And there were also some truly bad movies this year from people we otherwise depend upon. Among them were Jane Campion’s British heritage film about John Keats and unrequited love, Bright Star, the terribly overrated and predictably popular District Nine, and the well cast but disappointing The Men Who Stare at Goats.

One hates to end on a down note, so here is a short list of films that I wanted to see but missed before this deadline, and which I assume or hope would have made it onto my 10 best list: The Korean vampire film Thirst, Werner Herzog’s remake, Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call, with what appears to be yet another over the top performance by Nicolas Cage, Up in the Air with George Clooney and Vera Fermiga, who are said to have rare screen chemistry, and of course James Cameron’s Avatar.

D.K. Holm is The Voice’s cinema critic and author of several recent and forthcoming books, including Film Soleil.