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For a while in 2010, it seemed the art house and the foreign market were the only places one could find a decent movie. At multiplexes, the premiere offerings included Tim Burton’s garish “Alice in Wonderland,” and the dystopian drabfest “The Book of Eli,” but at smaller theaters, viewers could see gems like Andrea Arnold’s scarily authentic “Fish Tank” or the Italian history-challenger “Vincere.” This ever-common trend of quality coming with small budgets and subtitles continued throughout the year, with thrifty near-masterpieces like “Winter’s Bone” and rich international fare like “White Material.”
But at a certain point, Hollywood sputtered to life, too, and by year’s end, major studios had released at least three grade-A triumphs — one a layered mind-bender, one a buzzsaw-sharp assessment of the business of human connection, and one made by Ben Affleck, of all people. There’s hope yet for major mainstream movies, and I’m proud a small handful of them landed on my list of the year’s Top-10 films. I’ve also included two special runners-up and a few more titles worth mentioning, for a grand total of 25 movies: The best of 2010.
Honorable Mention: “127 Hours;” “The American;” “Dogtooth;” “Eyes Wide Open;” “Fish Tank;” “For Colored Girls;” “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work;” “Please Give;” “Rabbit Hole” (see Dec. 30 Review); “Shutter Island;” “Tangled;” “Vincere;” and “White Material.”
Runners-Up: “Animal Kingdom” and “The Kids Are All Right.”
The Town
Easily the year’s most thrillingly pleasant surprise, Ben Affleck’s “The Town” dodges every potential disappointment and swats off its cops-and-crooks clichés to emerge as one of the great urban crime sagas of recent years. Nearly Scorsesian in its grit and lack of compromise, the movie catapults its maker into a class you never thought possible. So complete is Affleck’s command of his elements that he even makes an actress out of Blake “Gossip Girl” Lively.
Marwencol
Maddeningly fascinating and so well-made you hardly notice, the outré documentary “Marwencol” drops you — smoothly and without judgment — into a post-comatose artist’s mind, which just happens to spill out into his backyard in the form of a one-sixth scale town populated by dolls. Amazing to the final revelation, it is the most moving and unique doc about sheltered eccentricity and lost, repurposed dreams since “Grey Gardens,” its comparable kindred spirit.
A Prophet
A flawless merger of the mob movie and the prison film, “A Prophet” offers the year’s single most accomplished instance of character development, following a French teen from the streets to prison and back again and watching intently as he wholly metamorphoses along the way. Sprawling, supremely engrossing and terribly well-acted, it’s loss of innocence at its unnerving best, and it leaves you feeling changed, too.
Black Swan
Along with his verité and high-wire stylings, director Darren Aronofsky mixes high and low art in “Black Swan,” a sophisticated psychodrama-cum-lurid potboiler-cum-twisted nightmare-cum perverse comedy. The gorgeously-rendered film succeeds in every way it sets out to, and at its center is Natalie Portman in the performance of the year as a bonkers ballerina. It’s haute delirium.
Blue Valentine
If you’ve ever even begun to feel a relationship’s pulse fading, you’ll surely feel the bitter, brutally honest sting of “Blue Valentine,” Derek Cianfrance’s poetic, devastating debut. Tracking the crumbling marriage of a young couple (the marvelous Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams), it flips-flops through time and trades allegiances until all that’s left is a fair and tragic analysis of a love’s lifespan. It’s naked, straight-from-the-gut filmmaking, and it’s the love story of the year.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The directorial debut of Banksy is as deliciously elusive as the street artist himself: Funny, yet provocative; serious, yet self-skewering; celebratory, yet lamenting; truth-telling, yet quite possibly one big hoax. The year’s best documentary, “Exit” constantly evolves as it dives into the world of street art, makes a monster of its own hero and sticks it to modern consumerism.
Inception
Christopher Nolan, the man behind “The Dark Knight,” works the very essence of his brilliant craftsmanship into the bold design and narrative of “Inception,” his dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream thriller that requires — and rewards — your complete surrender. Can anyone remember the last time big-budget, popular filmmaking was this gloriously heady and ambitious? I certainly can’t.
Winter’s Bone
The year’s best American independent, “Winter’s Bone” uses the rawest of materials to power a story whose thorough believability and looming sense of dread engulf you and nail you to your seat. The astonishment of Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough performance only enhances the directorial achievements of Debra Granik, whose instincts yield an air-tight thriller with affecting, sap-free familial themes.
I Am Love
To get drunk on pure cinema, there was only one elixir this year: Luca Guadagnino’s sweeping, staggering Italian melodrama, “I Am Love.” Drawing you into the inner sanctum of a Milanese textile dynasty then releasing you from it like a bird from a cage, it’s a soaring sensory feast, stimulating your eyes, ears and even taste buds like few films have before. Starring the limitlessly gifted Tilda Swinton, it serves up billowing emotion like an indulgence, garnished with an all-encompassing style to die for.
The Social Network
As another film writer recently observed, praising a movie for capturing the zeitgeist is tricky business, since the zeitgeist shifts with the breeze. So let’s focus instead on the surefire lasting power of “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s overwhelmingly terrific Facebook movie that’s about so much more than Facebook. Sure to join “Citizen Kane” in the canon of grand pictures about complex anitheroes and their relationships with the world, it’s an instant classic, written, directed and acted to a perfection that’s exhilarating and extremely rare. Without contest and without question, it is the smartest, coolest, wittiest, speediest — and, indeed, best — movie of the year. SPR
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