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Top 10 - 2012
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2012 offered an embarassment of cinematic riches. This was the first year I visited the theater almost weekly, at one point even making the trip 11 weekends in a row, from about mid-September to the end of November. Almost every film I saw impressed, in one way or another, and I was finally left with a huge slate of quality movies I had to tragically whittle down to 10. Rarely have I realized just how small a number that is.
If one thing stood out to me as a unifying characteristic of the varied achievements in film this year, it was vision. There was so much vision in movies this year, so much technical, thematic, authorial uniqueness and individuality, that each picture seemed to vibrate with the richness of a distinct voice. This went hand in hand with ambition - so many of the year's movies, from big to small, were nothing if not wildly ambitious endeavors. From Leos Carax's completely one-of-a-kind freakfest to Joe Wright's dizzying and experimental rendition of a Tolstoy classic to Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis' head-spinning Cloud Atlas, an "unfilmable" novel put thrillingly to screen, audacity proved it still survives in the movies. That's something we need to cherish.
Without further ado, the Top 10 films of 2012 as I saw it (saw Amour too late, so I include it in my runners-up, but it's certainly worthy of this list):
10. Les Misérables / Tom Hooper
Some people saw fit to criticize Tom Hooper's unorthodox version of the popular stage musical, as if its filmmaking flaws were somehow the death knell of an otherwise hard-hitting, stunningly acted picture. Not me. Hooper's extreme closeup approach is admittedly hit-and-miss, at times keeping us too close to the actors' faces when pulling back and letting us settle into the geography of their surroundings would have been appreciated. But when it does work, it works in spades - Anne Hathaway's rightly vaunted "I Dreamed a Dream" and Eddie Redmayne's stirring "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," both largely shot in that tight closeup, are the film at its best: rousing, emotionally intimate, and galvanizing in their larger-than-life results.
9. Silver Linings Playbook / David O. Russell
A screwball comedy brought into the 21st century, Silver Linings Playbook was probably the biggest crowd-pleaser of the year, an infectious romance inside a deeply moving portrait of a messy family. Above all, though, beyond its refreshingly non-condescending view of mental illness and its refreshingly unconventional character dynamics, it is a testament to community, to the spontaneous, miraculous moments of life where, with the help of others, order can arise from chaos. Grounded in the beautifully rendered performances of Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro, as well as a motley crew of other bit players, it is necessarily grubby and irresistibly charming.
8. Cloud Atlas / Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
It took three directors to wrangle the massive, heady six-story cosmic opera that is Cloud Atlas. Not only did they succeed in committing the sprawling source material to the screen, but most amazingly, they made a hell of a movie out of it, and a coherent one at that. Utilizing a small army of actors that range from Hugh Grant to Halle Berry, Tykwer and the Wachowskis ingeniously have them all appear as multiple characters playing multiple roles throughout all six time-spanning stories. Wearing myriad kinds of insanely transformative makeup - some silly, some astounding - it is a veritable burlesque show, but one with real ideas. There wasn't a more purely gratifying visceral experience in theaters during 2012, or a more grandly ambitious one.
7. The Perks of Being a Wallflower / Stephen Chbosky
High school movies are often not very good. They're conventional, saccharine, cliché-riddled cheese fests that are cringingly raunchy when they're not simply trite. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, adapted by Stephen Chbosky from his own novel, manages to avoid every one of these traps. Instead it is one of the most tender, plainly heartfelt and truthful teenage movies in many a moon, with a ridiculously well-cast ensemble that move and behave like real people. Like any movie that taps so heavily into nostalgic territory, it may be a romanticized vision, but the heart of it rings loud and authentic. Becoming the inspiring anthem of our lovingly misfit characters, David Bowie's "Heroes" will never sound so good again.
6. Zero Dark Thirty / Kathryn Bigelow
A step up from The Hurt Locker in virtually every way possible, Zero Dark Thirty is a genuinely riveting procedural made with white-knuckle intensity and bravura technical prowess. What puts it over the top, though, is its intelligently judged content. What might have been jingoistic, patriotic, gung-ho US glorification is instead anything but: a truly, deeply apprehensive and critical look at the brutal lengths our country is willing to go to in order to meet an end. And what is the end, anyway? What price liberty? There is no triumph, just continued questions. Bigelow's craft here is impeccable, but her weary considerations are what really resonate.
5. Moonrise Kingdom / Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson finally finds the perfect synthesis of form and function, making this, along with 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, his most complete cinematic achievement. But Moonrise has its own charm, and one that can't be overstated: from the warm, mustard and grass palette to the gorgeous whimsy of the dollhouse-esque sets to the perfectly wide-eyed, mischievous resolve of the kids at its center, every beat of this film is a piece of joy. But it's melancholic, too, and that subtly growing atmosphere of disenchantment is the key to its surprising power. It may be all retro spark on the outside, but inside is a man who realizes there's only so much of childhood we can hold onto.
4. Lincoln / Steven Spielberg
Lincoln is everything an historical epic should be: involving, immersive, authentic, informative, and most importantly, alive. Every line of dialogue and every spool of conversation in Tony Kushner's incredible script crackles with the energy of passionate debate. Talk is not just talk in this movie, but rhetoric and politics, delivered excitingly among many in the House of Reps and profoundly among one or two in various well-dressed venues. Nothing really more needs to be said of the otherworldly Daniel Day-Lewis, but it bears repeating that his portrayal of the 16th president is all you could ask for and more, a fully lived-in portrait of an amazing man who managed to unite a nation with pragmatic words and biting strategy.
3. The Master / Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson's opaque double character study was the brainteaser of the year, as well as the most thought-provoking. Its images, with their stunning 70mm clarity, burn themselves in your mind with a primal power not seen in many movies today. "But what is it?", people ask. Well, it's many things. It's a treatise on post-WWII American disillusionment. It's a battle between the Id and the Superego. It's a love story between two personalities that prohibit themselves from ever staying together. It's about the false hope of religious institutions. Most fascinatingly, it's an elliptical portrait of the necessity of subjugation and submission in society. Masters require servants, don't they? Teachers need apprentices. But what happens when one becomes the other, or, more dubiously, when the roles aren't so cleanly defined? Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix learn the answer, volcanically.
2. Holy Motors / Leos Carax
Talking limousines. A fully clothed body suit sex scene in a motion capture studio. An entire theater of sleeping patrons. A man(?) who chomps down on everything he can get his mouth on, from flowers to money to a woman's hair. Leos Carax's Holy Motors is sensationally, brazenly, unimaginably bizarre, defying expectations with each successive scene and leaving the audience in a state of dazed wonderment. Incredibly, it's not as inscrutable or arthouse-mystifying as you would think; as it progresses, its true intentions gradually blossom like a dream becoming increasingly lucid. This is a movie that is literally about an actor acting, but it also becomes a movie about anyone and everyone who devotes at least a part of themselves to a craft, asking what motivates one to express and, most importantly, asking what makes us want to create in the first place.
1. Sister / Ursula Meier
Of all the emphatically big, bold and audacious movies from 2012, my favorite film of the year was this small unassuming gem from Switzerland. This one has it all in its deceptively tiny package: wonderfully nuanced characters, sensitive and achingly human direction, and arresting employment of environment to convey social and economic strata. Kacey Mottet Klein, playing a boy who travels up to a wealthy ski resort every day to steal and sell gear so he can get by with his destitute sister, is absolutely brilliant, a child performer with the wit, agility, and emotional depth of a seasoned actor. He creates a character that we come to profoundly connect with and care for. A mid-film twist, meanwhile, throws our entire understanding of him and his familial relationships into disarray. It's a brave move for a brave movie, one that adds whole new layers of meaning to a disarming tale of childhood endurance.
My fabulous runners-up, all of which are fully worthy of the list above:
Amour, by Michael Haneke, with its stately elegance, unflinching objectivity, and completely unsentimental but entirely human perspective.
The Impossible, by Juan Antonio Bayona, with its staggering recreation of the Thai Boxing Day tsunami and the most heartwrenching depiction of a family torn apart I think I've ever seen.
Anna Karenina, by Joe Wright, with its elaborate mise-en-scène that must have been a pain-in-the-neck to direct and its impossibly luxurious, luxuriant, lavish artistry.
Life of Pi, by Ang Lee, with its great picturesque 3D and elemental folktale storytelling.
Brave, by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, with its majestic animation and moving story of a mother and daughter relationship.
Skyfall, by Sam Mendes, with its electric Roger Deakins cinematography and high-octane action thrills, Bond is reinvented all the while remaining the guy we know and love.
Argo, by Ben Affleck, with its unfettered speed and Hollywood lampooning, an escape movie that's also a satire and a politically relevant drama.
Top 10 - 1999
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1999 is generally considered one of the greatest years for film, or at the least, one of the greatest in the last couple of decades. Whether I agree or not is up for consideration, but I do acknowledge the wonderful wealth of diverse, memorable, and influential cinema that was brought to the world in this last year of the millenium. Among the best, for me, were Paul Thomas Anderson's biblically tragic, epic character drama, Spike Jonze's deliriously surreal and utterly bizarre headtrip, Lynne Ramsay's grim but beautiful Scottish miniature, and David Lynch's atypically normal but deeply moving man-on-a-tractor road movie. There's more, still! Look on down below to see what else resonated for me in 1999.
The Best Films of 1999
01. Magnolia
02. American Beauty
03. Being John Malkovich
04. Ratcatcher
05. The Talented Mr. Ripley
06. Boys Don't Cry
07. The Straight Story
08. Toy Story 2
09. The Green Mile
10. The Matrix
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11. Sweet and Lowdown
12. Tarzan
13. The Sixth Sense
14. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
The Overrated Award of the Year: FIGHT CLUB. There's a lot I like about this gritty, fast-paced 20th/21st century treatise, including Brad Pitt's iconic anarchist (not a character to be idolized, however) and the way Fincher wrings social commentary through an acidically sardonic narrative. But it's all too frenzied, too stylized and stylish for its own good. This is the kind of movie that knows it's cool, and the kind college kids feel cool liking for its coolness.
Top 10 - 2000
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2000 wasn't my favorite movie year, yet it still managed to provide me with some of my very favorite films of the decade: Stephen Daldry's irrepressible, ebullient live-your-dream childhood drama; Steven Soderbergh's sprawling, breathtakingly kaleidoscopic character epic; the charming warmth and humor of Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand, Billy Crudup, and more in a brilliant music-focused semi-autobiography; and the dazzling balletic wuxia martial arts of Ang Lee's blockbuster Taiwenese crossover. And I still haven't gotten to a scorching Mexican film or a certain thrilling - yet bloated - gladiatorial action film. Here's how the year played out for me:
The Best Films of 2000
01. Billy Elliot
02. Traffic
03. Almost Famous
04. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
05. Amores Perros
06. Code Unknown
07. Quills
08. Gladiator
09. In the Mood for Love
10. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Overrated Award of the Year: WONDER BOYS. I appreciated Michael Douglas's graceful, understated work and the drolly humorous script, not to mention Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning tune, but the film simply failed to draw me in on any significant emotional or intellectual level.
Top 10 - 2011
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Here we are, at last. As almost everyone else has long been done with their 2011 Top 10 lists, let alone finished with the year itself, I finally come to reflect on it. And what did I come away with? A list I'm extremely proud of, one compiled top to bottom with what I believe to be extraordinarily memorable, lovingly crafted films that have all in one way or another made a veritable impression on me within the last year. I didn't get to see everything, but what I did see almost uniformly impressed me - this was certainly a large step up over the more middling (but still quality) 2010. When I have to leave off the list as many movies as I did this year, and when I feel so bad about it too, I know it was a truly stellar 12 months at the cinema.
(Films I still need and want to see: Carnage, A Dangerous Method, The Iron Lady, My Week with Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin).
I'll begin with the runners-up, all excellent films that would have been worthy entries in the Top 10 but didn't quite make it. These include War Horse, A Separation, Pina, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2, Take Shelter, and Hugo.
(Ones in bold are movies I saw too late that might have cracked my actual Top 10 had I seen them when I initially compiled the list).
Now, the all-important Top 10:
10. Martha Marcy May Marlene / Sean Durkin
A debut film as assured and as elegantly crafted as the best of them, Durkin's first feature film is an ingeniously structured, highly unnerving account of a girl who lives her post-cult life in a paranoid frenzy of personality shifts and time jumps, meshing current realities and scarring memories in ways that take us directly into her disorientation. Elizabeth Oslen, as the young lead, gives a startling performance - along with director Durkin, it's her first cinematic excursion.
9. The Descendants / Alexander Payne
The Descendants is a drama, and it's a very moving, often very sad one. But it's also just as much a comedy, and in its greatest moments it mixes the two effortlessly, if not somewhat uncomfortably - all on purpose, of course. George Clooney gives one of his best performances as disheveled dad and pressured landowner Matt King, who has to contend with a land deal while also managing his unruly daughters AND his cheating wife who lies in a coma. The journey the characters go on is wonderfully enjoyable, unpredictable, and finally enriching.
8. Midnight in Paris / Woody Allen
Woody Allen's best and funniest film in quite some time, this sweet, impossibly clever nostalgic romp packs the artistic and literary references in tight, transporting us to jazzy 1920s Paris and letting us marvel at some of the most famous international icons at work. Owen Wilson serves as a brilliant Woody stand-in, and his romantic, sunny-eyed nostalgia is the perfect entrance into the near magical world set up here. In the end, we've fallen appropriately in love with the past, but we've also learned to enjoy our surroundings in the present.
7. Young Adult / Jason Reitman
Charlize Theron gives the greatest performance of the year in Jason Reitman's bitter but surprisingly tender comedy. She snarls, she makes belittling comments, she drinks (a lot), and she's deluded herself into believing she can steal back her ex-boyfriend who's happily married and with a newborn child. But somehow this character never feels wrong, never over-the-top or overly abrasive, never despicable or alien. Theron is so deft and so exacting she manages to carve a bold and relatable heart for this character, a woman who has never quite moved on from her high school heyday and longs to recapture a time when she was happy. Her desperate pleas for attention may not be so defensible, but what they mask is something beautifully, agonizingly human.
6. The Adventures of Tintin / Steven Spielberg
The other Spielberg film from 2011, this adaptation of the classic Hergé comic strips is a ridiculously fun, nonstop sensory spectacle that is as thrilling and as purely entertaining as anything else the director's ever made. The jaunty two-dimensional credit sequence is lovely, but when you get your first glance at the jaw-dropping motion capture animation Spielberg has utilized here, you never want to look back. All 100 minutes or so of this film are just unadulterated joy, action set pieces orchestrated with a visual inventiveness practically unimaginable anywhere else. A downhill chase in Morocco, captured in a single magnificently kinetic take, will leave your eyes sparkling with delight and your mouth on the floor.
5. Drive / Nicolas Winding Refn
I initially didn't know what to think of this pulpy, violent, unsettling mash-up of 70s crime noir and flashy 80s kitsch. It was certainly memorable and well made, but to what end? The more the days wore on after seeing it, however, the more I thought about its ambient after-hours queasiness, its calm, underwater atmosphere interrupted by explosions of gunfire and muscle, its pulsating soundtrack, and that enigmatic, endlessly cool (anti)hero Driver, so stealthily well played by Ryan Gosling. I kept replaying scenes in my head, like the "elevator scene" or "the shadow fight," and before long I had fallen under its hypnotic spell. Hero origin stories are rarely this visceral, or haunting.
4. Moneyball / Bennett Miller
Bennett Miller's follow-up to his great 2005 debut Capote is a sports movie that is also just as much, if not more, about business, leadership, value, redemption, and the very nature of the game, on and off the field. In the lead role is Brad Pitt, who's frankly never been as uninhibited and lean as he is here, moving through conversations with scouts and players with a cocky ease that's as domineering as it is susceptible to inevitable failure. But failure is not what this film is about, and neither, exactly, is success - the ending wisely gives us a large dose of melancholy with the triumph. Billy Beane may have not saved his team, but he did something far more important for himself, his daughter, and the legacy of the game. Sometimes it's not all about the numbers afterall.
3. The Artist / Michel Hazanavicius
It's easy to call Michel Hazanavicius's utterly charming silent film homage a lark or a trifle, but that would be to ignore its myriad considerable artistic achievements: the slick editing, the silky smooth B&W photography, the glorious sets and costumes, the fabulous ensemble performance, and the long list of classic visual devices all employed here to spectacularly clever - and occasionally self-aware - effect. This isn't some slight piece of fluff, but a fully formed, uniquely crafted paean to cinema as an art, the fragility of its existence and its creators, but mostly to the ultimate resilience and adaptability of its form. More than anything, The Artist shows by example that long extinct artforms can still live, and resonate beautifully, today.
2. Melancholia / Lars von Trier
There may have not been a more heavy or depressing film all year. Indeed, Melancholia portrays nothings less than the end of the world as we know it, briefly if painfully glancing upon the miserable life that inhabits it, noting that no one will miss it when it's gone, and then dropping the curtain on it all without a hitch. It sounds completely dire, yet through all the lugubrious foreboding and hopelessness is a ravishing, grimly bewitching human drama framed through the mystical and the philosophical. As a portrait of depression, it is brutally, astonishingly truthful in the way it conveys its massive, suffocating omnipresence as well as the way it becomes inadvertantly used as a defense mechanism against pain. As a rumination on science and faith, logic and emotion, romanticism and reality, it provokes endlessly. With the exception of my #1 film, no movie shook me more and implored me to think as cosmically as this one.
1. The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick
No surprise, perhaps, but from the minute I walked out of Terrence Malick's galvanizing and transcendent opus last June, I knew there wasn't a chance any other film could top it. And no film did. Malick has only made five films within the last 38 years, but every time he does it's an event - with The Tree of Life he's made a masterpiece of the cinematic form that is the perfect summation of all that he's expressed in the past: man's place within the grander scheme of the universe, the spirituality of living things, the coexistence of humanity with nature, birth and death, goodness and evil, compassion and indifference. Whatever one thinks of these concepts, or if you even do at all, I can't imagine how it's possible to take in the images Malick is giving us here and not feel overwhelmed by their staggering breadth and beauty, not to mention the simply unparalleled depiction of childhood, all its discoveries and hardships so amazingly in place you feel as if you are literally experiencing life for the first time all over again. This is an enormous achievement; technically, thematically, emotionally. It says and does things mere words cannot demonstrate - this is the power of the movies.
Top 10 - 2001
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2001: A year of fantasy, a year of science fiction, a year of innovation and a year of whimsical oddities. Those descriptors can sufficiently sum up about eight of the films on my Top 10 list, and the two they don't quite apply to are not your average films, either. Despite a somewhat wan set of Oscar winners, this was a year characterized by endless imagination and visual panache. These are the films that did it for me, including the first installment in my all-time favorite film(s), and dizzying, mind-bending work from David Lynch and Christopher Nolan.
*NOTE: As I travel further backwards chronologically, there will (often) not be the usual extra four or five films listed after my top 10. This is because I have generally not seen as many films from some of these older years.
The Best Films of 2001
01. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
02. Mulholland Drive
03. Memento
04. In the Bedroom
05. Amélie
06. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
07. The Man Who Wasn't There
08. Moulin Rouge!
09. Y Tu Mamá También
10. Monsters, Inc.
The Overrated Award of the Year: *TIE*, between THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and GOSFORD PARK. The Wes Anderson picture I find fairly suffocating, the characters within so artificially rendered and self-aware nothing about them registers as human. The Robert Altman film, while laudable in many ways, is ultimately too sluggish for my tastes.
Top 10 - 2002
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2002 was a movie year packed with rich, dense films. Rather unusually, I think, it was also one where all the primary Oscar contenders were the very best of the year. At the top of the list for me was Stephen Daldry's beyond elegant and extremely moving Virginia Woolf-through-the-ages story. Shortly behind were top efforts from Scorsese, Jonze, Mendes, Spielberg, and Polanski, not to mention the second brilliant installment in Peter Jackson's trilogy and Miyazaki's most imaginative and sprawling animated feature yet.
The Best Films of 2002
01. The Hours
02. Gangs of New York
03. The Pianist
04. Adaptation.
05. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
06. Chicago
07. Road to Perdition
08. Minority Report
09. Spirited Away
10. Punch-Drunk Love
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11. About a Boy
12. Catch Me if You Can
13. Morvern Callar
14. About Schmidt
The Overrated Award of the Year: FAR FROM HEAVEN. Far from a bad film - in fact, not bad at all, especially in response to its gloriously saturated cinematography and shimmering performance from Julianne Moore. Still, I find the film perplexingly overpraised. For all its aesthetic beauty, the content itself is unexceptional, the 50s Douglas Sirk throwback a nice novelty until it becomes simply staid.
Top 10 - 2003
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2003, as you know by now, was the year of 1/3rd of my favorite film of all time. But that wasn't all the year had to offer, not by a longshot. Also from 2003 was a beautiful, intimate masterpiece from Sofia Coppola; Pixar's (still) best and funniest film; an epic seafaring adventure with Russell Crowe at his best; a cryptic, mythic Russian picture; and a remarkable slew of sensationally depressing features that still amaze me in how they were all released within the same 12 months. All I can say is: thank goodness they were.
The Best Films of 2003
01. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
02. Lost in Translation
03. Monster
04. The Return
05. Finding Nemo
06. City of God
07. Mystic River
08. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
09. The Triplets of Belleville
10. 21 Grams
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11. House of Sand and Fog
12. Kill Bill Vol. 1
13. In America
14. Whale Rider
15. The Last Samurai
Top 10 - 2004
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2004, yet another wonderful year for film, and interestingly enough one where sequels and blockbusters were among the best of the pack. Although while I was watching some spectacular superhero films (one from the comics, one from some very creative minds at Pixar), the Oscar season would soon present some of the films that would help form my cinematic taste, including the irresistible grand spectacle of what was then my new favorite Scorsese picture. Also included was perhaps the most singularly original work of the decade, a gut-wrenching tearjerker from Clint Eastwood, and two terrific pieces of Eastern Asian cinema.
The Best Films of 2004
01. The Aviator
02. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
03. Million Dollar Baby
04. Sideways
05. Kill Bill Vol. 2
06. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
07. House of Flying Daggers
08. The Incredibles
09. Finding Neverland
10. Spider-Man 2
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11. A Very Long Engagement
12. Vera Drake
13. Collateral
14. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
15. Being Julia
Top 10 - 2005
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2005 gets rather unfairly dismissed as a poor year for film. Why this is, I have no clue. For it was a year so unusually rich in socially resonant, zeitgeist-y filmmaking, from the politically charged American films to an abundant indie scene, excellent foreign language cinema and equally worthy Academy-bait (yes, I like Crash!). I was 14 in 2005, and perhaps the year also struck me on a more personal level, too. This was when I was really getting into cinema in a major way, discovering aspects of it beyond the action blockbuster, and so it was kind of revelatory to me. Still, my #1 on the list definitely speaks to that early teenage mentality - even as I can well admit there were better films that year, none wowed my senses as much as Jackson's Lord of the Rings follow-up. I still adore the picture today.
The Best Films of 2005
01. King Kong
02. Brokeback Mountain
03. Thumbsucker
04. Caché
05. Munich
06. Capote
07. C.R.A.Z.Y.
08. The Constant Gardener
09. A History of Violence
10. Crash
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11. Good Night, and Good Luck.
12. Millions
13. Walk the Line
14. The Squid and the Whale
15. The New World
The Overrated Award of the Year: JUNEBUG. A magnificent star turn from Amy Adams didn't change the fact this was a dull, humdrum southern soap opera with an overtly indie sensibility. Critics loved it - I was unmoved.
Top 10 - 2010
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2010 was an odd year. It started off with a typically dull first quarter, but was then victim to an uncharacteristically lackluster summer filled with (mostly) unmemorable blockbusters and sorry retreads. It was up to the fall and winter seasons to deliver the quality, then, something they do pretty much every year. Did they in 2010? In some ways yes, although a creeping feeling of disappointment still pervaded me even as I completed my Top 10 - it just wasn't a very strong year. But that's not to say there weren't some excellent standout films, even ones from those dreaded summer months. If it wasn't a particularly rich year for earth-shattering cinema, it was one quite satisfying in other areas, and the great films it did give us are the worthy contenders in the list that follows. Starting with...
RUNNERS-UP
- THE KING'S SPEECH
Sweet, handsome, well-acted biopic.
- THE ILLUSIONIST
Fluid, lively animation paints a world filled with beauty and melancholy.
- BLUE VALENTINE
Gripping dissection of a marriage falling apart, with blazing performances.
- EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
A documentary, or a hoax? Either way, a masterwork of fiction-bending and art-exploring.
- ANOTHER YEAR
Expansive character study with a final, heavy emotional current. Lesley Manville is unreal.
- CERTIFIED COPY
Kiarostami in particularly fine form, delivering his most thought-provoking puzzler yet.
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SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD / Edgar Wright
When I saw this wildly energetic comic book adaptation back in August, I certainly didn't expect it to pop up on my year-end Top 10 list. But here we are, and here it is, in all its frenetic, kinetic, Gen Y-charged glory, at spot #10. Michael Cera has perhaps never been better matched with the material at hand than he is here, perfectly embodying the dorky-yet-empowered title character with brio. His bouts with his girlfriend's Seven Evil Exes perfectly utilizes the manic aesthetic of video games while always remaining wholly original, and the visual stylizations surprisingly never grow old; this is fresh, inventive teenage cinema the kind rarely bestowed with such quality.
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127 HOURS / Danny Boyle
Almost equally as fast-paced as the previous title, 127 Hours manages to make an immobilized individual's experiences enthralling and sensationally moving. Based on the true story of Aron Ralston, who after having his arm pinned under a boulder for over five days managed to amputate himself to freedom, the film is a heart-pounding 90 some minutes of unfettered human will power overcoming nature's physical limitations. The very premise doesn't necessarily lend itself to the cinematic form, it would seem, and the entire film hinges on the performance of the guy who for the last half of the picture is the only one to occupy the frame. But with sprightly direction from Danny Boyle and powerful work from James Franco, it becomes a thrilling and life-affirming journey into a particularly life-altering situation.
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TRUE GRIT / Joel and Ethan Coen
Ever the defiers of expectation, and ever the masters of offbeat, pitch black eccentricity, I was initially a little bit befuddled with the Coen brothers' latest. It wasn't weird, it wasn't goofy or dark, and it wasn't especially profound or deeply insightful either. It was just a well crafted, solid adventure film that harkened back to the classic American western of the past. But as the days passed, it stayed in my mind. Jeff Bridges' towering, grueling Rooster Cogburn; a bright and natural performance from newcomer Hailee Steinfeld; the gloriously expansive, bleached cinematography of Roger Deakins; and that ending, subdued and haunting, as Mattie Ross disappears slowly out of sight to the hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." It may not feel like a Coen brothers film on the surface, but their touch still rings throughout; from the deliciously spiky dialogue to the sharp spurts of violence, this is perhaps more traditional work, but none the worse for it.
7
RABBIT HOLE / John Cameron Mitchell
In Rabbit Hole, a mother and father mourn the loss of their young son. That's what we know from the start, and it honestly reads rather overdone, clichéd even. We come into it expecting a certain thing, but in the case of this one it astounds us with how much it isn't like that thing. No: as the film unfolds ever so gracefully and with as little sentimentalism as possible, a fairly complex portrait of human coping tactics blossoms out of a beautifully layered script. Nicole Kidman is vulnerable and heart wrenching, and through her we see a wounded woman gradually change as she comes to understand - and even accept - the sadness around her. By avoiding antagonism and sappy manipulation, the movie succeeds by being a fully compassionate, exceedingly humane portrait of people who merely need the support of each other to confront their greatest pains.
6
BLACK SWAN / Darren Aronofsky
With the vérité textures of Aronofsky's previous The Wrestler, the woozy surrealism of David Lynch, and the sense of Kafka-esque entrapment exhibited by, well, Kafka, Black Swan is a swirling nightmare into the obsessively driven pursuit of artistic "perfection." Natalie Portman gives one of the finest, most memorable performances of the year as ballerina Nina Sayers, who from the start we see is already on shaky mental ground. Her mind wandering between the suffocation of her oppressive stage mother and the constant threat of replacement by a rival dancer, she becomes the increasingly unhinged psyche to which we are unrelentingly made a part of. The resulting experience is by turns horrific, opulent, even funny, and the climactic moments of transformation simultaneously show the dizzying heights of artistry, while also balancing the innate torment of the craft.
5
TANGLED / Nathan Greno, Byron Howard
I didn't have more fun in a movie theater all year. The lastest Disney animated film - rendered in miraculous, plush CG animation that can easily stand up to the visual class of any of the studio's traditional 2D outings - is an insanely enjoyable and hilarious musical comedy with a real emotional punch. And how affecting it is; with some of the most pitch-perfect voice work since Jeremy Irons became the snarling Scar in The Lion King, Tangled works its acting skill to a state of elation. The expressiveness of the bright fluid animation and the ace line deliveries of Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore, among others, turns this into something truly special, and by the end we've become so invested in these three-dimensional characters it's hard to believe they're not flesh and blood. The showcase sequence, a romantic interlude between our two heroes among a sea of floating lanters, is the scene of the year.
4
INCEPTION / Christopher Nolan
If it's at times irritatingly literal-minded or unnecessarily expository, Christopher Nolan's twisty sci-fi action heist caper is still a hell of a time, as heady as it is completely riveting. His direction of a very elaborate script is something to be in awe of, taking the elements of this high concept universe and bending them into something both intelligible and exciting. But let's focus on what really makes this thing work, outside of Nolan's precision and the outstanding technical virtuosity. The film ultimately achieves greatness not because of its original premise or its labyrinthine narrative, but because inside of the high-velocity action scenes are compelling philosophical ideas wrapped around a human core. The film is all about the dazzle, but it doesn't forget where its real interests lie.
3
THE FIGHTER / David O. Russell
The greatest ensemble cast of 2010. Made up from a marathon of rambunctious, colorful near-caricatures in a poor Massachusetts town, the picture is practically flowing over with people who can't seem to be contained. The electricity created between the actors is so terse, so tense, natural and free-flowing, it starts to ride up your spine and send chills through your body. The relationships are venomous, just as they are hysterical in their unexpected moments of levity. We can't help but delight from afar at the familial circus antics, but somehow we find room for empathy too. The Figher is so satisfying, finally, precisely because the world and people it enlivens are injected with such rousing life, culminating in a final knockout punch that's a stand-up-and-cheer worthy moment.
2
TOY STORY 3 / Lee Unkrich
The two most moving films of the year happened to both be animated Disney flicks - who would have thunk it? The one that takes the cake, however, is the one that brought such fun and poignant closure to the beloved trilogy of Toy Story. With this third outing, Woody and the gang once again find themselves in crisis, first at the mercy of a tyrannical daycare center and its maniacal tots and then contemplating real adult issues like the transience of time and growing up. It's that last part that makes the film almost unbearably emotional, as we see protaganist Andy ready to leave for college and no longer in need of his toys. Both parties must come to terms with moving on, and the way PIXAR deals with the departure is through a galvanizing finale that hits you square in the chest. An ode to childhood while also one that recognizes its inevitable passing, Toy Story 3 is as sweet and heartrending as they come.
1
THE SOCIAL NETWORK / David Fincher
I don't CARE how boring this choice is. I don't care that every critic in the known world (and probably the unknown ones, too) chose this as the best film of the year. I don't care because I personally didn't see a better film all year, none as intelligent, probing, or masterfully crafted as The Social Network, and I knew right from when I saw it in early October it would be a tough act to beat. And it was. With a top-drawer script, lean, confident direction, moody atmospherics, and brilliant performances from some talented young performers, the (*fictional*) story of Mark Zuckerberg comes to pulsating digital life in a cinematic work that really does having something to say about the times we live in. At its heart it's an elemental story of betrayal and greed, however it manages to take these human failings and update them to a modern domain through the guise of Facebook, something over 500 million people can relate to.
So what has the internet done to us? I'm not sure if it's changed us, really, but it's certainly changed the way we react (or don't) with each other. It's changed the environment we live in. It's changed how we communicate (or, again, don't), how we work, and how we conduct business. But I think The Social Network argues it hasn't actually changed the people. It says that humans are frail, susceptible to great destruction but also great success. It says that social networking, being yet another construct of man, has taken with it all the natural foibles of humankind and funneled them through an outlet of worldwide exposure. It shows us how interconnected we can be while also being so desperately alone.
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About the Author
Jonathan Leithold-Patt is a 21-year-old film student at Columbia College Chicago. Besides watching lots and lots of films and writing about them, he is an avid painter.
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