You may have seen the five worst films of 2009, but I did my best to avoid them. Instead, at year’s end, I’d rather recap my five biggest disappointments – movies that promised the world and delivered a fraction of their potential.  To me, that’s far more upsetting than a bad movie, because they’ve squandered the opportunity, and now no one can go back and do it right. You probably won’t agree with my choices (maybe you went into Where the Wild Things Are expecting to be annoyed and came out enraptured – that actually happened to me with co-writer Dave Eggers’ other 2009 release, Away We Go). These picks were meant to be personal, but I’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to share your biggest let-downs after the list, which you’ll find just after the jump…

A rough year, you say? Maybe for your 401(k). Hollywood raked it in, enjoying record box office numbers, while the indie and foreign lineup (though spread between fewer companies perhaps) yielded an unprecedented number of treasures. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I had such a hard time cutting my best-of list off at 10. Surveying my choices, I’m hard-pressed to find a common theme. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I might even wonder what kind of critic can love a G-rated Japanese-animated cartoon and Lars von Trier’s genital-mutilation opus in the same breath, or reconcile the esoteric with the popcorn populism of James Cameron’s Avatar. But there you have it. Of the 274 first-run and festival films I saw last year (that’s as many movies as qualified for Oscar consideration in 2009 – though not the same ones), the 10 best are listed after the jump:

Considering the worldwide phenomenon Wallace and Gromit have become, it’s something of a mystery that the stop-motion duo’s latest adventure, the Hitchcockian “who-donut” A Matter of Loaf and Death, would go straight to home video in the States (as opposed to overseas, where the BBC debuted the film to through-the-roof ratings on Christmas Day). The upside of the arrangement is that it gives American fans an excuse to snag the entire W&G collection on Blu-ray, complete with commentaries, extras and a host of “Cracking Contraptions” shorts.

As it turns out, Loaf and Death is actually something of a letdown, trading the retro-styled charm of their three previous shorts and feature-length adventure Curse of the Were-Rabbit for faster pacing, a fair amount of CG and a bunch of recent blockbuster references (after operating in a 1940s-style time capsule all these years, does the series really need references to Aliens?). It seems unfair to complain, given the overall quality of any given Aardman effort, but chock it up to the fact that W&G creator Nick Park and his team got it so right with 1993′s The Wrong Trousers. More after the jump:

If you think of the Criterion Collection the way I do – as something of an ongoing film education - then In the Realm of the Senses is probably the first film by Japanese director Nagisa Oshima you’ll ever see. It’s certainly his most famous project, and in that respect, it’s a logical place to start. The Criterion guys have even made the introduction easier on audiences by featuring a new commentary by Japanese film scholar Donald Ritchie on both the DVD and Blu-ray editions that functions more as an overview of the director’s career than a direct essay on the film itself.

But as luck would have it, the release coincides with a traveling Oshima retrospective organized by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, which helps put the film in context. And a good thing, too, because In the Realm of the Senses is an extreme case – the story of an amour fou between a hotel owner and one of his maids that builds to strangulation, S&M and the most personal of keepsakes (perhaps the only art film capable of challenging Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist in the genital-mutilation department) – and I’d hate to imagine going through life thinking all of Oshima’s films were like that. My full write-up after the jump:

Has there ever been a movie with a less boy-friendly title than The Princess Bride? (I mean, no wonder a wary Fred Savage wrinkles his nose and asks, “Is this a kissing book?” when grandpa Peter Falk starts to read.) It’s something of a miracle that the younger me — two months shy of my tenth birthday — even saw it as a kid, but as memory serves, I was there on opening weekend, and now, with all the sophistication and insight that supposedly accompanies my decade-plus of experience as a film critic, The Princess Bride remains the one film I’d salvage in a desert-island scenario. Not Raiders, not Star Wars, but this, a mushy “kissing” movie.