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Here it is, friends. We have officially caught up to the present. It's been a lot of fun telling you about all of the great movies you haven't seen over the last several years, and hopefully giving a little bit of attention to the overlooked great films of the decade. We have now reached this year's BOP Calvin Awards, which were the reason I decided to start writing this series of articles. When I looked at the award and saw that my fellow staff members had chosen The Hurt Locker as the Best Overlooked Film of 2009, I was a bit flabbergasted. This was a movie that had made more than $10 million at the box-office and gotten loads of attention from critics and film writers. In addition, it was already performing well on DVD and was on a path to winning six Oscars, including Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing!... What, do you not get as excited about sound as I do?

So I decided to start looking at what the seriously overlooked films were of the last few years. Films that I love and none of my friends have even heard of. I lowered the cutoff from $25 million to $5 million, and automatically disqualified any film that had won a major Oscar. As I've now made it up to this year's award, this will be the last chance I have to write about the most criminally overlooked films of the year... So I'm Raising The Stakes! Again! What, cutting the box-office cutoff by four-fifths not good enough for you? I'll cut it by four-fifths again! That's right, for this article I'm only focusing on films that made less than $1 million at the box-office. Some of these films got such a tiny release that box-office data isn't available for them, but I'm just guessing that they weren't smash hits on Video On Demand.

The Dardenne brothers kick off the list at number ten with their latest brutally realistic film, Lorna's Silence, which only made $338,000. This Belgian filmmaking duo follows up their acclaimed hit L'Enfant by continuing to challenge viewers with their depictions of the marginalized members of European society. Lorna's Silence won an award for its screenplay at last year's Canne Film Festival, telling the story of an Albanian woman who gets involved in a sham marriage to become a Belgian citizen. As is typical of a Dardenne film, everything goes horribly wrong, and the results are heartbreaking. Newcomer Arta Dobroshi is superb as Lorna, giving a performance so complex and powerful that you can't help but be moved.

A much less sympathetic character stars in my number nine film, the documentary Tyson. This biodoc tells the story of the infamous boxer's childhood, rise to fame and fall from grace. Although it was made by James Womack, who is a friend of Tyson's, this documentary pulls no punches (pardon the pun) and is starkly honest in its depiction of its subject's dark side. 2009 was a great year for documentaries, and it's a shame that so many of them got so little attention, as this film made just under $890,000.

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