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Provisional list of the best 26 movies from 2010Sep 16 '11 (Updated Jan 29 '12) Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line prophylactic anti-depressants could be recommended for most of these and something to increase ability to suspend disbelief There will always be possible contenders for a best of the year list that I have not seen. Possible contenders for 2010 of which I am aware but have not had the opportunity (or, in some cases, the will) to see are (in alphabetical order): The Fourth Portrait 127 Hours Animal Kingdom Black Venus Blutiful Carlos Cave of Forgotten Dreams Dogtooth (Kynodontas) Everyone Else Frozen Gallants The Gatherers Greenberg Des hommes et des dieux (Of gods and men, reversing the order in French) Illégal Inside Job Kisses Lebanon Life During Wartime Mademoiselle Chambon Monga Mother and Child The Princess of Montpensier Secrets of Lisbon Shi (Poetry) The Strange Case of Angelica Toy Story 3 Under the Hawthorn Tree Waste Land Getting to the list, there are the acclaimed films that I thought overrated and didn’t much like (even though acknowledging some good work of one sort or another in them). In descending order of my esteem: Jûsan-nin No Shikaku (13 Assassins) Inception The Road to Nowhere Winter’s Bones Inspector Bellamy Blue Valentine Black Swan Les amours imaginaries (Heartbeats) Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass) In a Better World (Hævnen) (Oscar best foreign film winner) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Cannes Palm d'or winner) There seemed to me that an inordinate number of the most acclaimed 2010 movies had grim stories about loss, especially death in the family stories (I gather this extends to the Korean masterpiece “Shi” which I am reluctant to watch). Until my final push this month, I wondered if I was going to make a best-7 or best-8 list. (Two of my top ten just became available on Netflix this week.) I don’t think that 2010 was a great year for movies, but there was definitely a lot of superb acting of often tortured roles. With no further ado, onto my list! (1) and (2) Best picture awards were split between “The King’s Speech” and “Social Network.” between “The King’s Speech” is really an award magnet: a period piece and a disability movie with fine performances of actors with substantial bodies of work: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham-Carter, all of whom were superb. “Social Network” is also a period piece, albeit the piece is much more recent and the setting elite but not royal. It had some superb performances by younger and thus less-heralded actors including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Max Minghella. My nod goes to Aaron Sorkin’s “Social Network.” (3) The only feel-good movie on the list (and possibly the only 2010 movie that actually made me feel good was "Made in Dagenham" with Sally Hawkins playing Sally Fields—I mean Norma Rae. OK the movie was set on the River Thames with some phrases and accents that made me turn on subtitles, but I have found Sally Hawkins too perky (in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Luck”) in the young Sally Fields tradition. Her character has to mobilize against their union bosses as much as against the Ford Motor Company for pay equity in a 1968 walkout. The movie also has Bob Hoskins at his piexiest best and Daniel Mays as a husband trying to be supportive. (4) “Rabbit Hole” has Aaron Eckhart, who does not have a history of playing sympathetic characters (try “In the Company of Men,” for instance) delivering a great performance as a father trying to get through his own grief and to support his bitter and withdrawn wife, played superbly by Nicole Kidman in “Rabbit Hole.” Their inability to get over the death of their four-year-old son is painful to watch, but there is some humor and a very fine supporting cast headed by Dianne Wiest. David-Lindsay Abaire adopted his Pulitzer Prize-winning play in a way that does not seem stagy, and/or John Cameron Mitchell (Short Bus) made it cinematic. (5) “Incendies” has multiple griefs from the ethnic cleansings/civil war of Lebanon during the 1970s. The Canadian film, directed by Denis Villeneuve has a pair of Arab Christian twins in Montréal commissioned by the starling last will of their mother to find their father and their brother. They were raised believing their father was dead and had never previously heard of a brother, but that is not really even the tip of the iceberg of what they don’t know about their heritage. I think the construction of the movie is unnecessarily confusing a mix of flashbacks and attempted inquiries. (Placenames are superimposed at the start of sections, but the viewer has to sort out what is past and what is present—in a place where the past is even less past than in Faulkner’s Mississippi.) How anyone, let alone a majority of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members, could believe “In a Better World” superior to “Incendies” shocks me (and I question their wisdom on a regular basis, so should be beyond being shockable…). Lubna Azabal especially stands out in the cast (and, indeed, in the class of devastated female characters in 2010 movies). (6) The family of “The Fighter” is dysfunctional without any tragic deaths or national catastrophes. The exploitation of the titular boxer (Mark Wahlberg) by his mother and older brother (Melissa Leo and Christian Bale, both of whom were rewarded with Oscars for their flamboyant performances) is often painful to watch, too, and the fight scenes are not especially great, but it’s a family movie, not a boxing movie IMO. And on our aging boy’s side is Amy Adams (Doubt). Director David O. Russell ("Three Kings" also with Wahlberg) drove the proceedings at a nearly manic pace. (7) Johnnie To usually makes five or six movies a year and astonishingly made zero in 2010, but his elegiac “Vengeance” did not reach North America in 2009 (from Macau). It has family loss (the leitmotif of the year, at least on my list) and a bravura final battle scene. And perhaps the best performance of the Hong Kong icon Anthony Wong. Casting a French protagonist (Johnny Hallyday in an homage to Alain Delon’s “Le Samourai”) is an odd way to make a movie "in English," but Johnnie To provides another fatalistic and darkly humorous gangster masterpiece. (8) I found the road movie with coffin Israel/Romania coproduction "The Human Relations Manager" directed by Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) quite moving as the never-named title character, played with gravitas and faith by (Mark Ivanir) deals with one bureaucratic absurdity after another in two countries, trying to get the victim of a suicide bombing "home." Along the way, he bonds with the dead woman's son (Noah Silver) and borrows an armored vehicle. (9) Like all the other movies higher on my list, “Hesher” was superlative acting — by some young actors who are already veterans (Natalie Portman, David Gordon Levitt, Rainn Wilson), a new-comer (Devin Brochu), and an unusually benign Piper Laurie (she was benign half a century ago in an Oscar-nominated turn in “The Hustler” but has been less than nice on a number of occasions in intervening years). (10) Ben Affleck has returned from being a joke to being an interesting writer-director (Gone, Baby, Gone, 2007). I thought “The Town” was quite good. It’s a heist drama starring Affleck, Rebecca Hall (Please Give), Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) and Joe Hamm (Mad Men) in the Charlestown part of Boston that awkwardly mixes action-thriller and romance, and goes on for too long, but has some visceral emotional and action scenes. (BTW, Affleck is directing himself in a thriller not written by himself titled “Argo.”) (11) I didn’t think that “Hors la loi” (“Outside the Law”) was as good as Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 “Indigènes” (released in English as “Days of Glory”) with the same leads: Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila, this time as brothers rather than companions in arms, with Bernard Blancan as their antagonist rather than champion. “Indigènes” showed Algerian Arabs fighting for France in World War II. “Hors la loi” follows some Algerian Arabs to the slums of Nanterre (working for Peugot) after the war and into the Algerian war for independence which had huge tolls of civilians in both Algeria and France. The heartbreak of the family is increased by knowledge of what a non-utopia independent Algeria has been. Though something of an epic, the focus is narrower than Pontecorvo’s great “Battle of Algiers,” which also made me wonder if anything could be worth the cost of Algerian independence (I am obviously mindful of the hideous violence of ethnic cleansing since then elsewhere, for instance see #5 above, and the transfer of populations after France granted Algeria independence were less bloody than the fissions of the British colony of India or of Yugoslavia.) (12) Peter Weir is an auteur who has only made three movies since 1993 (the previous one was the 2003 “Master and Commander”). “The Way Back” is a stunningly shot (in Bulgaria, Morocco, and India) movie of an escape from a Siberian gulag and desperate trek across forests and deserts and a not insignificant mountain chain called the Himalayas, and it has great performances by Ed Harris and Colin Farrell and good ones by a cast drawn from some of the best European movies of the millennium. It doesn’t attain greatness and I’m not entirely sure why. (From earlier in Weir’s oeuvre, I’m not sure why “Mosquito Coast” fell so flat.) “The Way Back” doesn’t lack heroes, but they are not historical figures on geopolitical stage like, say, Roland or Lawrence of Arabia. (13) The concept of a contemporary high school in which everyone is a virgin required very strong willful suspension of disbelief, a challenge exacerbated by someone “taking the name” without “playing the game. “Easy A” riffs on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, though herein scarlet letter worn by Emma Stone’s character should have been “F” for fornication rather than “A” for adultery, I thought that I found the supporting cast quite entertaining too, especially Day Byrd as Brandon. I thought that Bert Royal’s screenplay followed out the rumor comedy in hilarious and poignant directions. (14) There’s splendid acting (Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo) in “The Kids Are All Right” and considerable wit, though the basic premise seems false to me (which may also be the problem with “The Way Back”). (15) When I heard of the Coen Brothers’ intention to film True Grit (again) I though “another totally unnecessary remake,” (like, for instance “The Ladykillers”) but then I saw their “A Serious Man,” and saw some sense in returning to the west of “No Country for Old Men” (never mind that the novel is set in Arkansas and the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma!). The Coens denied they were producing a “remake,” but in ostensibly returning to Charles Portis’s novel True Grit and found many of the same things (even camera angles) that are in the 1969 Henry Hathaway adaptation that got John Wayne an Oscar. Good as Roger Deakins’s cinematography was, by the day after watching the movie, I remembered fewer images of it than from what Lucien Ballard shot for Hathaway. The movie has a harsh look and outstanding performance by Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. Rooster Cogburn is not as much a change of pace for Bridges (who has played plenty of slackers with substance dependencies) as it was for John Wayne, and I prefer the original. But The Coens’ “True Grit” is vastly superior to “The Ladykillers” and “A Serious Man,” for certain. (16) I enjoyed “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” More for the endearingly nebbish Michael Cera than for the CGI effects. Having to fight the seven evil exes amused me, what can I say? (I also enjoyed the pretty silly "Kick-A_s_s.") (17) “Please Give,” written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing) has some darker wit and delightful performances by Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, and Rebecca Hall. (18) “También la lluvia” (Even the Rain) is, like “The Way Back,” more worthy than satisfying. The absurdities of producer Costa (Luis Tosar) and director Sebastian (Gael García Bernal) making a movie about Columbus in landlocked and impoverished Bolivia, but the moviemaking is gradually eclipsed by a struggle against the privatization of water in which the movie’s indigenous lead, Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri) is in mortal danger. (19) I guess that “The Concert,” directed and cowritten by Radu Mihaileanu (whose “Live and Become” moved me greatly) is a feel-good movie, but requires more suspension of disbelief than I can muster. Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) musicians from the Bolshoi Orchestra whom maestro Andreï Filipov refused to fire reunite 30 years ago to impersonate the Boilshoi Orchestra for an engagement at Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet which a superstar violinist (Mélanie Laurent) joins for a performance of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. (Tchaikovsky had a good year in movies, also carrying Natale Portman to an Oscar in “The Black Swan.”) (20) I thought that Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” should have been better (as with “The Way Back”). I thought that Pierce Brosnan was good as a Tony Blair character with Olivia Williams as his wife (the brains in the family), Kim Cattrall as his secretary and mistress, and Ewan McGregor as the titular writer brought in to make the former PM’s memoir readable. Not a bad paranoid thriller with a stunning beach house and a turn by Eli Wallach. (21) “My Name is Khan,” directed by Karan Johar, has some stuff dragged in from Hurricane Katrina that runs afoul of my limited ability to suspend disbelief, but the stubborn Rizwan Khan (Shahrukh Khan), a Pakistani-San Francican man with Asperger syndrome who wants to tell the president (who changes from Bush to Obama during his attempt to go talk to the president), “My name is Khan and I’m not a terrorist.” That the Secret Service only hears the last word does not require any suspension of disbelief. (22) I was entertained by Romain Duris as “L'arnacœur” (The Heartbreaker), a professional breaker-upper of relationships. Managed by his sister Mélanie (Julie Ferrier), Alex (Duris) is hired to keep Juliette (Vanessa Paradis) from marrying an English twerp. Of course a romantic comedy is going to have antagonists fall in love and marrying the wrong man will be averted (as in” It Happened One Night,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “The Graduate” to mention only three predecessors). (23) “I Love You Phillip Morris” is less formulaic (more a crime comedy than a romantic comedy), but also required more suspension of disbelief than I could manage. I thought that Ewan McGregor was hilarious as the too-trusting Southern gay man, and Jim Carrey was quite funny as his con man lover. Leslie Mann was more poignant as the spurned wife in this movie co-directed by first-timers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. (24) I didn’t think the blending of illness (Parkinson’s) weepie and romantic comedy in “Love and Other Drugs” was a good idea, all the more so since both were formulaic, but they were enlivened by brave performances by Jake Gylenhall and Anne Hathaway (re-paired from “Brokeback Mountain,” supplied a phony happy ending this time…) (25) Claire Denis’s “White Material” had a brave, totally unglamorous turn by Isabelle Huppert as a coffee-grower in an Africa extruding white landowners and Isaach De Bankolé as a charismatic rebel icon. with no shortage of black-on-black violence. On the Criterion DVD edition, Denis, Huppert and Bankolé convinced me that the harshly shot movie was better than I thought while watching it. (26) The Peruvian low-budget “Contracorriente” (Undertow) is ghost-driven (providing more obstacles to suspending disbelief) but poignantly comic romantic triangle set in a repressive coastal village. (I'm tempted to include the technically 2009 "La Mission" with standout performances by Benjamin Bratt and Jeremy Ray Valdez in the repressive Latino Mission District of San Francisco—out my window—, since it showed (briefly, in a few places) in 2010. I was intrigued by another ultra-low budget movie from the right coast, Todd Verow's "Deleted Scenes.") Also, 2010 provided two fascinating documentaries about the art establishment: “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and “The Art of the Steal,” two worthy Afghanistan documentaries “The Tillman Story” and “Restrepo,” and, reputedly, two about garbage and scavenging that I have no seen: “Waste Land” and “The Gatherers.” +++ I have also posted lists of the ten best movies ever, my favorite movies, the best non-English-language movies by country; best movies of the 1940s, the 1970s, the 1980s, 1939, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.  |
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by Stephen_Murray
by carstairs38
by lindaohio by jeff_wilder78
