Did more than 500 feature films actually screen for the public in Memphis in 2009, at theaters, museums, the Orpheum and other venues?

According to my records, yes — making the past year the most movie-packed of the first decade of our new century, thanks not just to the people who made the movies, but to the organizers of such events as the On Location: Memphis, Indie Memphis and Outflix film festivals, and the arts lovers at Live From Memphis.

Michelle Williams as a vagabond Wendy helped make the low-budget "Wendy and Lucy" our choice for No. 1 film.

Struggling poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) carries on an unwise romance with neighbor Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) in ''Bright Star.'' Director Jane Campion gives viewers the feeling of a privileged look through a window into a bygone world.

In this film publicity image released by The Weinstein Co., Brad Pitt is shown in a scene from, "Inglourious Basterds." The film was nominated for a Golden Globe award for best motion picture drama, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009. The Golden Globe awards will be held Jan. 17 in Beverly Hills, Calif.

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Last weekend, the combination of “Avatar,” “Sherlock Holmes,” a Chipmunks “squeakquel” and the Memphis-inspired word-of-mouth phenom “The Blind Side,” among others, combined for a record U.S. box office take of $278 million. Yes, ticket prices are higher than in the “Gone with the Wind” era, but the crowds at local theaters — hey, even I couldn’t get in to see “Avatar” a second time this past Sunday afternoon at the jam-packed Paradiso — demonstrate that people still love going to the movies.

A lot of great movies played in Memphis in 2009. Looking over the past year’s releases, I came up with about 40 titles with the potential to make my annual Top 10 and Second 10 lists.

Here are my choices, some of which you’ve probably seen, some of which you may not be familiar with. As always, I’m limiting my selections to movies that played in the Memphis area in 2009, even if some of them (“Gran Torino,” for example) opened in New York and Los Angeles in 2008.

Some of the movies are still in theaters, while most of the others are available on DVD.

The Top 10

Movies are listed in order of preference, with some “double feature” cheats:

1. “Wendy and Lucy”: Is Kelly Reichardt the most humane filmmaker working today? This low-budget feature, her third, is prosaic and mysterious, timeless and particular as it immerses us in the hardscrabble-by-choice life of a vagabond young woman (Michelle Williams) stranded in a leafy Oregon neighborhood with her beloved companion, Lucy, a mixed-breed retriever with a “friendly face.” Wendy’s dilemma becomes emblematic of the universal problem of finding a home in a world that is indifferent and sometimes hostile yet redeemed by compassion (a Walgreen’s security guard is an unlikely semi-savior) and beauty (even when its scenery is viewed hobo-style, from a box car).

2. “Bright Star”: The most perfect film of the year, Jane Campion’s depiction of the passionate if unconsummated love affair between 19th-century English Romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and neighbor Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) reminds us of Keats’ famous line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” No mere period pageant or museum piece, the movie is so convincing it seems to offer a view into a bygone world, even when Campion’s ideas tend toward the symbolic, as when she has Fanny cultivate a bedroom filled with exquisite, fragile butterflies that, like Keats, dazzle for a moment, then die.

3. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Coraline”: The most magical of movie processes, stop-motion animation (which essentially invests inanimate objects with life), was the perfect medium for these stunning modern folk/fairy tales, filled with wit and wonder. Wes Anderson’s foxy celebration of “wild animals with true natures and pure talents” (artists and children?) is his best film since “The Royal Tenenbaums,” while Henry Selick’s spooky “Alice in Wonderland” update offers an “other mother” with literal button eyes, a sly talking cat and the feistiest young heroine of the year.

4. “Let the Right One In”: Stealthy and chilling, the arguable Best Horror Movie of the Decade is also a devastating coming-of-age tale, as a sensitive, bullied schoolboy — as pale as the snowy suburban Stockholm landscape he inhabits — discovers his new neighbor, who agrees to “go steady” and admits to being “12, more or less,” is a vampire. Director Tomas Alfredson approaches this potentially sensationalistic material the way a cat creeps up on a live meal: with quiet patience and cunning.

5. “Gran Torino”: His pants as high as the front porch from which he surveys the supposed decline of “the old neighborhood,” septuagenarian Clint Eastwood is a growling, comic totem of American masculinity, intolerance and, ultimately, redemption in this old-fashioned piece of moviemaking about change we can believe in: the renewal of America’s promise as a melting-pot land of opportunity. The Eastwood-directed “Invictus” covered similar themes, but this is the filmmaker’s most artful rejection of the movies’ favorite problem-solving device: violent revenge. Its bluntness, sincerity and even corniness — plus, the undistracted momentum of its storytelling — are like splashes of cold water in a face gone slack from a surfeit of irony and sophistication.

6. “Inglourious Basterds”: Did somebody mention “violent revenge”? Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie-mad fantasy is — to use co-star Eli Roth’s term — a “kosher porn” celebration of cinema as time machine (why else cast Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill?): A device that can erase the years (dead people live again in old movies) and, on a more imaginative level, rewrite history, as when Brad Pitt and his Jewish Nazi-scalpers do more than just heil right in der Fuehrer’s face.

7. “The Hurt Locker”: Wired by director Kathryn Bigelow like a ticking time bomb, this thoughtful nail-biter about three soldiers in an Army bomb-disposal unit trying to survive its final 38 days of field rotation in Iraq is the concensus Best Film of the Year, according to the more discerning polls (the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Village Voice national independent film critics poll). When a soldier dons the type of protective body suit that most of us see only in movies about outer space, the message seems clear: This is not a place we were meant to be.

8. “A Serious Man”: Every element in a Coen Brothers feature seems the product of intelligent design, and this highly personal and very dark comic rewrite of the Book of Job suggests why: The Coens became the most godlike of filmmakers in response to a realization that the world outside of art is random, chaotic, godless. Michael Stuhlbarg stars as a beleaguered physics professor in 1967 Minnesota whose quest for Big Answers from rabbis and other thoughtful men brings only despair and confusion; the film’s (self-hating?) satire of its Jewish-American milieu is ruthless and fascinating.

9. “Up” and “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”: These two wonderful computer-animated films ask us to keep watching the skies. The first, the latest in an unbroken string of winners from Pixar, is a Jules Verne-meets-Frank Capra adventure that contains perhaps the most heartbreaking passage-of- time montage in movie history (in a cartoon, yet); the second is an “Apocalypse Chow” comedy that works as both a cautionary tale about “Frankenfood” and a wildly inventive disaster movie spoof.

10. “Goodbye Solo”: A nice bookend with “Wendy and Lucy,” this similarly regional slice-of-underclass-life independent film from Iranian-American writer-director Ramin Bahrani stars Souléymane Sy Savané as a chatty Senegalese cab driver in North Carolina whose immigrant enthusiasm is challenged by the suicidal stubborness of an old man, played by former Memphian and Elvis crony Red West. An undervalued actor, West’s gruff gravitas and Sad Sack saucer eyes suggest a deglamorized, proletarian Robert Mitchum.

The Second 10

Listed in alphabetical order:

1. “Avatar”: James Cameron’s 3D science-fiction love story/action epic/eco-fable reminds us of the power of moviegoing as communal spectator sport — an event that can’t be reproduced at home, even in front of a “big” screen in high-definition.

2. “The Class”: A year in the life of an inner-city middle-school classroom in Paris is depicted with clarity, sympathy and heartbreaking realism: The multiethnic performers in the movie are actual teachers and students, enacting fictionalized versions of themselves for director Laurent Cantet’s handheld cameras.

3. “Drag Me to Hell”: “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi returns to his “Evil Dead” roots for an eye-popping, ear-smashing screamfest that is scary, spoofy, gooey, and even timely (the selfish denial of a bank loan begets a gypsy curse). It borrows liberally from two high points of 1950s horror: EC comic books and Jacques Tourneur’s masterpiece, “Night of the Demon.”

4. “Lovely by Surprise”: Shot in Memphis in 2006 but unseen here until this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival, this beautifully conceived and stunningly shot and designed debut feature from native Memphis writer-director Kirt Gunn stars Carrie Preston (of HBO’s “True Blood”) as a possibly unhinged author whose characters appear to “escape” into the real world. As a traumatized used-car salesman, Reg Rogers, his voice as warm as a blanket, creates perhaps the most memorable movie character of the year.

5. “Observe and Report”: Part “Taxi Driver,” part “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” director Jody Hill’s ambitious, aggressive and confused tale of a gun-obsessed, wannabe-hero rent-a-cop (Seth Rogen) is a comedy with a foot on the neck of the Zeitgeist, and it’s this pressure that crushes the laughter in our throats.

6. “Public Enemies”: Michael Mann’s dreamlike crime film imagines the Depression-era “Golden Age of Bank Robbers” as the final, sputtering flame of American lone-wolf integrity and contrariness, extinguished by a lethal squall of FBI bullets and the windstorm profit margins of modern organized crime. Johnny Depp is John Dillinger as a killer, media darling and folk hero whose death beneath a cinema marquee seems inevitable.

7. “Sugar”: Not your typical baseball movie, this second feature from the writer-director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck follows a young pitcher (played by Algenis Perez Soto) from his impoverished home in the Dominican Republic to “the states,” where sugar cane is replaced by cornfields and dreams collide with reality.

8. “Two Lovers”: A bipolar Brighton Beach dry cleaner’s son (Joaquin Phoenix) unwisely falls for a privileged blond shiksa (Gwyneth Paltrow) in a romantic yet realistic 1970s-style character drama from director James Gray, who rejects the catharsis of a Scorsese film for violence that is emotional, self-directed — interior.

9. “Where the Wild Things Are”: Spike Jonze’s live-action labor of love locates the loneliness, heartache, anger and fear embedded within the crosshatch illustrations and mere 10 sentences of Maurice Sendak’s classic 1963 picture book about a boy who travels to an island of threatening, welcoming monsters.

10. “Whip It”: Debuting director Drew Barrymore’s whip-smart coming-of-age fable of female empowerment through roller derby provided Ellen Page with a worthy post-“Juno” star vehicle and moviegoers — the relatively few who checked it out — with a great time. The year’s most underappreciated film.

Runners-up: “Adventureland”; “Alexander the Last”; “Chéri”; “District 9”; “An Education”; “Gomorrah”; “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”; “Humpday”; “The Informant!”; “Julie and Julia”; “Me and Orson Welles”: “Ponyo”; “Revolutionary Road”; “St. Nick”; “Star Trek”; “That Evening Sun”; “Up in the Air”; “Watchmen”; “The Wrestler”; “Year One.”

Dogs of the year

“All About Steve” (Sandra Bullock, stalker); “Angels & Demons” (a budget of $150 million, but too cheap to spell out “a-n-d”); “Bride Wars” (female moviegoers should sue for defamation of gender); “Imagine That” (hard to imagine: Eddie Murphy once had a career); “New in Town” (where are the tar and feathers when you need ’em?); “Nine” (nein); “Old Dogs” (to quote the New York Post, it “does to the screen what old dogs do to the carpet”); “Paper Heart” (so “cute” you’ll want to stake it); “The Pink Panther 2” (please, no more); “Planet 51” (nothing to see here); “Post Grad” (egad); “The Stepfather” (bad dad); “The Ugly Truth” (ugly is right).