As always in an economic downturn, attendances around the world are up, but otherwise 2009 has been a disappointing year in some respects, especially when it comes to the blockbusters. The hangover from the 2008 writers' strike didn't help, nor did severely trimmed studio budgets, but many of the films hotly tipped to storm the box office this year turned out to be disappointments.

Take Watchmen, for instance. Based on the acclaimed graphic novels of Alan Moore, and set in an alternative 1980s in which Richard Nixon still clings to power and superheroes have been driven underground, Zach Snyder's big-budget adaptation was all set to be 2009's Dark Knight -- until it got released. Boring, overlong, confusing and deeply pretentious, it missed the boat both critically and commercially.

That, it turned out, was only the beginning of a grim procession of big-budget stinkers that lasted through our rainy summer. Though Ron Howard's Angels & Demons (budget: €105m) was a considerable improvement on its predecessor The Da Vinci Code, that is faint praise indeed. At least this instalment in the adventures of Dan Brown's entirely uninteresting hero Dr Robert Langdon had a comprehensible plot, but it was pretty risible stuff all the same as he raced to save the Vatican from blowing up.

The Terminator franchise was revived this year in Terminator: Salvation (budget: €140m), but after sitting through this grey, dour and deafening film most people were probably wishing the producers had left well enough alone. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (budget: €140m) was no great shakes either, as the hokey charm of the 2007 original was largely squandered in endless fight scenes involving giant robots.

Other blockbuster shockers included GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (budget, €119m), an inane attempt to transfer the American version of Action Man to the big screen, and Roland Emmerich's 2012 (budget: €140m), a ridiculously overblown apocalyptic yarn about a planetary alignment that triggers a global catastrophe.

All of which proved yet again that money can't buy you a good film, but there were a couple of notable exceptions to the summer drought of decent blockbusters. The remarkable consistency of the Harry Potter franchise continued with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth and darkest of the series thus far.

The best summer film by some distance, though, was JJ Abrams' revival of the Star Trek brand. Completely ignoring the original Leonard Nimoy/William Shatner film series, Abrams had the brilliant idea of taking the story back to basics, and the first meeting between Spock and Kirk at space academy.

Spock is a priggish swat, Kirk a reckless tearaway, and the pair can't stick the sight of one another until they're assigned to the same mission. Star Trek was clever stuff, with a bold visual style and a wry sense of humour that the year's other blockbusters in the main sadly lacked. It would be late December before another worthy blockbuster would swagger into the ring in the shape of James Cameron's revolutionary 3D animation Avatar. It looked very impressive.

On the action front Michael Mann returned to form with his handsome crime drama Public Enemies, which evoked the hardboiled style of the classic 1930 gangster pictures and featured an outstanding performance from Johnny Depp as soulful hoodlum John Dillinger. Even better, though, was Jean-Francois Richet's Mesrine films, two compelling dramas based on the life of charismatic Parisian gangster Jacques Mesrine, who was memorably played by Vincent Cassel.

After the gratuitous nastiness of Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino delighted fans with his playful and inventive war film Inglorious Basterds, which starred Brad Pitt as the Desperate Dan-like leader of a group of Jewish-American soldiers who parachute into occupied France to wreak revenge on the Nazis.

War was examined in a more serious and unflinching manner by Kathryn Bigelow in The Hurt Locker, a visceral and deeply disturbing account of a US army bomb squad's experiences in Baghdad.

Clint Eastwood had a funny year, and it might have been a much better one if his studio had pushed the right film as an Oscar contender. They backed Changeling, an estimable but imperfect and overlong period drama, but the one they should have poured the publicity money into was Gran Torino. Shot in Detroit in less than a month for a modest €23m, Eastwood's film told the compelling story of a bigoted Korean War veteran who becomes the unlikely saviour of an Asian family who've been targeted by a street gang. This was a lean, mean film, and Eastwood should have been nominated for his performance as equal opportunities racist Walt Kowalski, who made the simple phrase "Get off my lawn!" sound like a death threat.

While it wasn't a vintage year on the comedy front, there were some films of note. Todd Philips's The Hangover might have sounded like another dumbass movie about men behaving badly in Vegas, but it turned out to be considerably cleverer than that, as a group of amiable idiots led by Bradley Cooper wake up in a trashed Vegas suite and try to figure out what happened to them the night before.

Adventureland used the 1980s as a backdrop for its charming story about a young college graduate who falls in love while working in a tumbledown amusement park in Cleveland; Jesse Eisenberg starred. Bandslam had an equally geeky hero, as Gaelen Connell played a teenage misfit who finds acceptance when he moves to a new school. I have an aversion to zombie films, but Ruben Fleisher and his stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Bill Murray managed to send up the genre most effectively in Zombieland. And Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds scored a more conventional hit in the likeable and old-fashioned romantic comedy The Proposal.

The best science fiction film of the year by a country mile was Neill Blomkamp's District 9, a brilliantly inventive drama about a group of prawn-like aliens who are rescued from a huge spaceship that comes to a halt near Johannesburg and become a problem when they're herded into a ghetto. Film-maker Oren Peli spent the grand sum of €10,400 shooting the horror film Paranormal Activity, shooting in his own home and using unknown actors. To date it has made about €104m worldwide.

Another year, another Pixar classic, and this time it was Pete Docter's charming animation Up, about an old man who uses helium balloons to fly his house to South America. And Wes Anderson did a wonderful job of adapting Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox into a thoroughly charming stop-motion animation. But the year's stand out animated movie was Henry Selick's Coraline, a delightfully dark fantasy about a little girl who does battle with a shape-shifting witch.

Danny Boyle's colourful and flashy Indian drama Slumdog Millionaire grabbed most of the attention at the Oscars, but was nothing like as good a film as Gus Van Sant's 1970s biopic Milk, or even Ron Howard's political drama Frost/Nixon. Jonathan Demme's blackly comic, fly-on-the-wall drama Rachel Getting Married was a very strong film also, and later in the year Richard Linklater's delightful Me and Orson Welles managed to capture the essence of Welles's swaggering persona.

But on the serious drama front it was the Coen brothers who impressed me most with their sombre 1960s drama A Serious Man, a modern take on the Book of Job.

Pedro Almodovar added to his impressive oeuvre with Broken Embraces, a deeply personal film about a blind film director and a doomed love affair. And Italian director Paolo Sorrentino released the political drama of the year in Il Divo, an inventive and witty retelling of the tortuously complex life of slippery three-time prime minister Guilio Andreotti. But the best foreign language film of 2009 was Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, a lovingly crafted black and white drama set in a German village on the eve of World War I.

And the year's low point? For me it was provided by Danish iconoclast Lars von Trier, and his redundant and deeply unpleasant sub-Freudian drama Antichrist, which featured a most regrettable collision between a clitoris and a pair of rusty scissors. That's gotta hurt.

pwhitington@independent.ie