Year in Review – Best Films of 2010

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I was fully prepared to start out this post calling 2010 the worst year for film in my moviegoing lifetime. Part of that stems from the fact that many Hollywood movies were really bad in 2010. Terrible even. But there’s also this: I’ve had to sit through an Oscar season where good but not great films like The Social Network, True Grit, and The Fighter are being heralded as masterpieces, along with high art torture porn like Black Swan. By time I got around to even thinking about this post, I was exhausted and frustrated.

Then I looked at my running list of 2010 movies screened. Going through all the great films I’ve seen this year, I realized that it wasn’t a bad year for everyone… just American narrative film (docs excluded). That sounds really pretentious, I know, but my annual top ten lists aren’t heavy on foreign flicks. This year, the American movies that are being enshrined in critical and industry time capsules are just wildly out of sync with the world we live in, so much so that it borders on denial. I’ll have more on this in the coming weeks when I get down to finally putting the thoughts all together.

Until then, here are my top movies and performances of 2010:

1. Carlos (dir. Olivier Assayas)
2. Dogtooth (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
3. I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
4. Toy Story 3 (dir. Lee Unkrich)
5. Restrepo (dirs. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger)
6. Winter’s Bone (dir. Debra Granik)
7. Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan)
8. The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper)
9. A Prophet (dir. Jacques Audiard)
10. The Ghost Writer (dir. Roman Polanski)

Honorable Mentions

• Exit Through the Gift Shop (dir. Banksy)
• Mademoiselle Chambon (dir. Stéphane Brizé)
• Waiting for Superman (dir. Davis Guggenheim)
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (dir. Edgar Wright)

Best Male Performance: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech
Best Female Performance: Tilda Swinton, I Am Love