Idle Hands

It's that time at Texas Monthly when we're on deadline and, unfortunately, I'm sitting here with nothing to do. It's not a good feeling because it means that all hell will break lose in a couple of days, when I'm here for 30 hours in a row.

Since I'm no good at sitting on my hands, I decided to put together a list of must-see movies, based on A.O. Scott's New York Times 20 best films of 2009 list—basically films I want to be sure to rent on DVD soon. A few, like Avatar, Goodbye Solo and Up, I've already seen (though I can't believe that Goodbye Solo is ranked up there with James Cameron's half-a-billion-dollar masterpiece), so I'm not including them. Here they are, in no particular order:

Up in the Air (George Clooney lives out of a suitcase)

The Hurt Locker (a bomb squad deals with the chaos of war in Iraq; this is already winning awards)

Precious (black girl from Harlem suffers abuse but perseveres)

An Education (romance blossoms in 1960s London)

A Serious Man (philosophical conundrums from the Coen Brothers)

In the Loop (political satire starring James Gandolfini)

Summer Hours (three siblings sort out their inheritance in this quiet "extraordinary" French film)

Of Time and the City (documentary about the filmmaker's birthplace of Liverpool)

Bright Star (Jane Campion's period piece about Keats and his lover, Fanny Brawne)

Medicine for Melancholy (low-budget film about outsiders in San Francisco)

Coraline (animated film about an adventurous girl; wait...did I see this already? that's not good)

Sugar (sports movie about a baseball player from the Dominican Republic)

Gomorrah (a "snapshot of hell" that takes a fictional look at organized crime in Italy)

The Baader Meinhof Complex (explores a West German terrorist group of the '70s)

Tulpan (a coming-of-age film set in Kazakhstan)

The Beaches of Agnes (autobiographical film about a French filmmaker)

Beeswax (third film from Mumblecore director Andrew Bujalski)

The Informant (a "deadly serious comedy about corporate malfeasance" starring Matt Damon)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson's stop-action animated film, proudly in analog)

The Sun (in English and Japanese, this is the third in Hirohito's trilogy about dictators)