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Slant magazine - Best of 2010: Film
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906
7.3
7.3
Dogtooth (2009)
This exhilarating Greek surprise package is a high-wire act of batshit absurdism and disturbingly visceral shocks. Director Yorgos Lanthimos's elegantly blunt scenario of three twentyish adult children imprisoned by a crypto-dictatorial father on their lush estate, force-fed an incorrect vocabulary and myths of menacing housecats, reads just as well as a gloss on the permanent baggage of family as it does a metaphor for the ruthless daddyism of political strongmen. Dogtooth establishes this household's level of deadpan normality with Father's delivery of a hapless menial for Son's sexual needs, sibling sex play and knifings, a spastic sister-act dance, and a musical message on the turntable from their grandpa, Frank Sinatra. Its world comes to seem as inevitable and convincing as those of Buñuel and John Waters. BW
nimimerkillinen's rating:
1336
7.1
7.2
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Survival in a wolfish world has been Roman Polanski's career-long theme, and this impeccable, Nabokovian comedy of menace finds the controversial auteur in insinuating fine form, his traumas and foibles embossed in every foreboding widescreen composition. The narrative's vaudeville of intrigue and politics is handled with black-velvet elegance, but it's as a sly and delicate personal allegory that the film most lingers and stings (is Polanski Pierce Brosnan's house-arrested celebrity in legal trouble, or Ewan McGregor's exiled artist who insists on investigating despite having been assigned to an impersonal project?). Wily and wise, The Ghost Writer might be the director's own A King in New York, a shot-in-Europe acid love-letter to an America full of shadowy trails and people who can't resist entering them. FC
nimimerkillinen's rating:
62
6.9
6.9
God is at once omnipresent and frustratingly absent in Lourdes, Jessica Hausner's rigorous, wrenching portrait of faith in all its multifaceted sincerity, intensity, phoniness, and hypocrisy. An opening shot that descends from God's to man's perspective encapsulates the POV of this aesthetically and tonally controlled tale, in which wheelchair-bound Christine (a magnificent Sylvie Testud) travels with other "pilgrims" to the holy sites of Lourdes in search of divine healing. The desperation of the suffering is palpable, but so too is an undercurrent of pettiness, selfishness, and disingenuousness, as Hausner scrutinizes not only the notion of faith, but those who peddle it. An apparent miracle further expands Hausner's mysterious, magnificent critique of believers, non-believers, and the Almighty himself, one that abounds with proclamations about heavenly benevolence that never quite materializes. NS
nimimerkillinen's rating:
60
6.5
6.6
Everyone Else (2009)
This richly playful, intuitive, and frank romance ponders a deceptively simple question: Is respectability necessarily a sign of maturity? The answer lies in a heartbreaking scene from Maren Ade's Everyone Else, during which Birgit Minichmayr's Gitti enters a store and, feeling defenseless, allows a clerk to apply makeup to her face, which she promptly scrubs away a scene later with the ferocity of someone upchucking a night's worth of booze. That moment is a realization for both the character and the audience, when it becomes absolutely clear that Gitti is obscuring her uniqueness by bending over for class snobbery, comes a little later for Lars Eidinger's Chris, during a euphoric scene that, like many before it, is at once horrific and comic—a reminder that love means never having to pretend to be someone that you're not. EG
nimimerkillinen's rating:
537
7.8
7.7
Anchored by the powerhouse turn of Kim Hye-ja in the title role, a florid mix of manically flawed movie moms from Barbara Stanwyck to Ruth Gordon, Bong Joon-ho's feverish melodrama Mother begins as transgressive farce and finds its way to stranger-than-life tragedy. A druggist and acupuncturist apt to dash into the streets of Busan at any real or perceived danger to her grown, mentally challenged son, Mother rises to the challenge of conducting a surreptitious investigation when the seemingly helpless man-child is arrested for the murder of a schoolgirl. Rekindling his dramatic chops after the immensely popular but uneven monster-fantasy The Host, Bong uses Kim's relentlessly physical, intuitive performance to uncover a multigenerational abyss of guilt, regret, and mournful acceptance beneath the antic snooping and operatic
nimimerkillinen's rating:
2931
7.3
7.5
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
The year's most underrated auteurist work, Edgar Wright's third directorial effort, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is both his most effervescent and energized to date. Adapting Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic-novel series with whip-smart digitized verve, Wright reimagines twentysomething romance as a battleground of Nintendo-esque proportions, all Dance Dance Revolution courtships and Street Fighter showdowns. The screen splits, screams, and explodes in pixilated mayhem, refracting its brew of love, desire, and self-discovery through the techno-filtered worldview of Michael Cera's alternately sweet and selfish protagonist. Forced to engage in mortal combat with the seven exes of beauty Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), his Scott hurtles toward maturity and self-awareness at hyperdrive, with Wright's fleet, funny film embracing modernity's media-saturated paradigm without losing sight of the humanity that stands at its core. NS
nimimerkillinen's rating:
124
7
6.9
Vincere (2009)
Both an act of historical remembrance and an interrogation into the methods of history's representation, Marco Bellocchio's operatic tour de force Vincere unearths the well-buried story of Mussolini's pre-war mistress, Ida Dalser. Drawing on stock footage that represents the official record of Il Duce's Italy, the director juxtaposes his own set of counter-images, switching the focus from the fascist leader to his abandoned lover, who remains determined to the end of her life to win official recognition of her status as Mrs. Mussolini, even as she winds up incarcerated in a mental institution. If, as Bellocchio shows through jingoistic newsreels, the film image can be a powerful tool for propaganda, it can also serve more positive redemptive and recuperative purposes, the former illustrated through Ida's joyful self-projections while watching Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, the later through the Italian director's own bold act of cinematic remembrance. AS
nimimerkillinen's rating:
141
6.6
6.2
Wild Grass (2009)
Leave it to Alain Resnais, pushing 90, to resurrect the French New Wave's brand of youthful, form-stretching invention with this exquisitely confounding psycho-farce. As the center of a maelstrom of schizoid stalkers, frizzy aviatrixes and befuddled cops, André Dussolier and Sabine Azéma anchor this serene derangement of romance, male pride, and genre conventions, where movie theaters literally glow and the titular verdure of irrationality perpetually cracks the cement of reason. Boasting in any given minute a more stirring sense of dreams at play than the entirety of Inception, Wild Grass stands as Resnais's half-melancholy, half-wacky testament and a tribute to cinema as a medium still capable of beguiling, unsettling, and, as expressed in the film's breathtakingly mercurial finale, transforming itself. FC
136
7.4
7.6
Olivier Assayas's jittery epic on the ascent and dissipation of the Venezuela-born '70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal keeps its dizzying procession of splashy crimes, revolutionary debate, and global political theater spinning to a late-punk, new-wave song score, from headline-making coups to the Jackal's ignominious, anticlimactic capture. Édgar Ramírez's embodiment of the ambitious killer begins as sexy and dogmatic—he vows to a skeptical lover that he will deliver "behind every bullet, an idea"—and, after exile turns him puffy and nihilistic, spirals into the amorality of contract arms-running, and the shrunken status of an insubstantial fly in world capitalism's ointment. Despite some nerve-frying sequences, like the 1975 hostage-taking of OPEC ministers, what Assayas drives home throughout Carlos is the banality and incoherence of the Jackal's desire for "la gloria" through asymmetric warfare. BW
965
6.7
7.1
Matt Reeves's remake of Tomas Alfredson's visually commanding adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In has no right to be as excellent as it is. Alfredson's film was made two years ago and is more than strong enough of an adaptation to stand on its own two feet. And yet, somehow, Reeves made the better film. Reeves impresses his already jaded audience with stark images that reveal the story to be about impenetrability of the teenage mind, about finding a new language forged from exhausted images, and about combating inevitable world-weariness with fantastic violence and brutal romance. With an exceptional cast, especially Richard Jenkins and Elias Koteas, Let Me In announces Reeves as a major talent. SA
nimimerkillinen's rating:
123
7.7
7.5
Secret Sunshine (2007)
God bless IFC Films. Arriving in U.S. theaters more than three years after its Cannes premiere, Secret Sunshine isn't just an actor's showcase. Yes, Jeon Do-yeon's towering performance as a piano teacher who moves with her young son to her deceased husband's hometown is a nuanced, emotionally bracing portrait of grief and spiritual yearning, but the film is also a sterling reminder of how cannily Lee Chang-dong illuminates the power and effect of conformist cultures on the soul of the individual through his fixation on social minutiae. Neither saints nor sinners, Lee's characters are still very much victims of societies in which male violence thrives and goes unchecked, and this is his bravest act of humane commiseration yet. EG
18
7.5
7.1
Ne Change Rien (2009)
Who would have guessed that the year's most transporting musical would come courtesy of Pedro Costa? The Portuguese tableaux-master here documents a variety of rehearsals, recordings, and live shows performed by actress Jeanne Balibar, the one-of-a-kind Jacques Rivette favorite who, humming and rasping one drone-rock number after another in static close-up, provides the solitary light in a universe of inky chiaroscuro. Hypnotic, willfully repetitious, and often suggesting an imaginary Nico biopic starring a young Shelley Duvall, Ne Change Rien is Costas's stark portraiture wondrously attuned to his muse's grooving rhythms, with such moments as Balibar's performance of the theme from Johnny Guitar offering visual and aural pleasure intense enough to challenge anybody's definition of the project as "minimalist." FC
6
7.5
6.9
October Country (2009)
Sopping with detached narcissism and unprocessed disappointment, October Country is close to what we'd presumably get if we gave one of the tangential interviewee-hicks from the annals of Errol Morris's America a camera and unprecedented editorial control over his own story. Donal Mosher, playing off-screen documentarian in his own backyard, lyrically confronts the blue-collar heartache of his screwy, upstate New York kin by allowing their implosive discursiveness to bristle against their lushly pastoral environment. Revealingly contradictory, Faulkner-esque colloquialisms flow from the mouths of, among others, a disillusioned veteran, a chain-smoking grandmother, a ghost-hunting aunt, and a molested daughter fighting for custody of her illegitimate child. But co-directors Mosher and Michael Palmieri never mistake these for unsung American archetypes. They're something much more vital: lost souls arbitrarily encumbered with universal regret. JJL
122
6.4
6.1
In making Amer as cold, calculating, and totally transfixing as they have, Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have manically constructed what may very well be the Super Giallo. Full of free-floating signifiers of victims watching killers, killers watching victims, and victims becoming killers, the film is essentially an academic's tract on how the Italian giallo functions as a genre. And yet, it's edited so masterfully and filmed with such a sadistically attentive eye for detail that it never feels intractably stiff. Every scene has a new color scheme, a new way to visually process sexual identification. Catte and Forzani prioritize their roles so that they impress us as visual artists that also happen to be capable theorists. The film's narrative progression—the first act is Bava, the second is Fulci, and the third is Argento—is subsequently relentless while its dazzling kaleidoscopic aesthetic calls attention to its filmmakers' brash know-how. It's the ultimate cinematic fetish object—all close-ups, no mercy. SA
nimimerkillinen's rating:
47
6.2
6.2
Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl comes on like a daintily pathos-driven sketch—in both the Guy de Maupassant and the SNL senses of the term. As long-faced thirtysomething Macário (Ricardo Trêpa) bullets from Lisbon in a charter bus, he regales an eager, motherly co-passenger with his tale of ruin; we flash back to a Portugal-as-a-Napoleonic-era stage where nubile blondes like Luísa (Catarina Wallenstein) drive the poor apprentices of fabric salesmen to distraction, and lovesick quests for wealth, with fan-abetted coquettishness. De Oliveira's texture-hungry camera observes the romantically invested performances with an impartial intransigence; it's the straight man in this diaphanous farce. And yet for all the cosmic cruelty they shoulder for their infatuations, de Oliveira continually confirms his Promethean affection for these characters by granting them the gift of comic timing. JJL
1145
6.9
7.2
Winter's Bone (2010)
Way down in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, Debra Granik's sophomore feature uses the mystery-suspense genre to survey the damage of rural drug culture on family and community. As 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) shakes off clannish intimidation to search for her missing crank-dealing father, whose absence has endangered the home she struggles to maintain with two young siblings and a near-catatonic mother, Winter's Bone's bleak tale unfolds with classical precision and benefits from lived-in, flinty character work by John Hawkes and Dale Dickey. Drawing parallels between gutting an edible squirrel and bucking the cruelty of the local outlaws, Lawrence's unyielding heroine tells her brother with both compassion and severity, "There's a bunch of stuff you're gonna have to get over bein' scared of." Bill Weber
nimimerkillinen's rating:
12
5.8
7.1
Prodigal Sons (2008)
A heart-wrenching portrait of family dysfunction, transformation, madness, and forgiveness, Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons rebukes your average hermetical reflection on gender identity—a too-prominent fixture of the doc-film circuit. Reed, born Paul McKerrow, returns to her hometown of Helena, Montana for her high school's reunion, reconnecting with the community that knew her only as a basketball-playing jock. Her crisis of self-definition soon collides with that of her mentally ill adopted brother, Marc, who learns he's the biological grandson of no less than Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, in effect throwing Reed's notions of queer identity for a dizzying loop. By the film's openhearted finale, Rosebud is given a whole new meaning. EG
32
6.1
7
We're introduced in Samson and Delilah, as if waking from a hard sleep, to a village in a hyper-sensualized Australian outback, and lulled into its circadian rhythms—the painfully sharp sunbeams, the inebriating aroma of petrol, the lazy ska rehearsals chopping through the aridity. And we watch, as if from a nearby tin shack, the brain-dulled Samson (Rowan McNamara) court local beauty Delilah (Marissa Gibson), but the kid can't even build a fire; we shake our heads when the two clumsily steal a truck and light out for the city after a violent altercation. But we eventually realize that the post-colonial crack left on aboriginal culture (c.f. Nick Roeg's Walkabout) has formed an endemic fault line. Tribal heritage has become so alien that its denial is apolitical—and the guns, FM country stations, and paint thinner are wearily anesthetic consolation prizes. JJL
38
6.4
6.7
Hadewijch (2009)
There's no point in Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch that viewers can feel completely safe in the knowledge that they know what's coming next. The emotional tumult that Julie Sokolowski's teenage Celine subjects herself to is, after a point, indecipherable. Celine's age and privilege make her a prime target for all kinds of predators but her conviction prevents attentive viewers from patronizing her as a babe lost in the secular woods. Sex, religious crisis, and the omnipresent threat of imminent violent conflate to the point where the film threatens to implode at every turn. Dumont courts cynicism at every turn because of his immediately distant treatment of Celine's unfathomable secular pilgrimage to find faith in the physical. Impenetrable and devastating, the film is a real modern mystery play. Simon Abrams
nimimerkillinen's rating:
11
5
7.1
45365 (2010)
Brothers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross are literally transfixed by the idea of communication as the essence to rural life in America. In their quiet hometown of Sidney, Ohio—zip code 45365—they freely skulk around capturing poetic glimpses of people simply going about their everyday lives. Essentially a series of fragments, 45365 begins with fireworks lighting up Sidney's sky and ends with snow dusting its ground. In between, a football season and political campaign runs its course, a cop hilariously assesses a disgruntled man's cable connection, and an Elvis impersonator takes to the stage at the local carnival. Gorgeously scored, intuitively filmed, this condescension-free documentary finds something gloriously alive in seemingly mundane Americana. Ed Gonzalez
11
8.5
8.2
Ghost Town (2009)
An essential addition to the Chinese cinematic project of documenting the collateral damage of the country's massive economic transformations, Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town chronicles a dusty southwest village utterly left behind by the nation's shifting focus toward its coastal-based economy. While a statue of Mao in the town square recalls the questionable legacy of the country's past, Zhao's tripartite doc takes in an estranged father-son pair of Christian priests, an alcoholic ditched by his wife and child and a 12-year-old kid forced to fend for himself after being left behind by his parents. Abandonment is the watchword here, as the country's neglect of its former provincial centers is mirrored by the rifts between family members and between contemporary life and ancient tradition that play out daily on the town's streets, a set of circumstances that Zhao captures in striking digital imagery, most memorably in a fiery ghost-exorcism ritual led by the preteen that speaks eloquently to the boy's will to overcome the privations brought about by his inherited past. AS
33
7.8
7
How do the circumstances of a film's production affect the content of the finished product? How much of a role do happy accidents play in the construction of a movie? And where does one draw that ever-elusive line between fiction and documentary? These are three of the many questions Miguel Gomes asks in his provocatively offbeat second feature, Our Beloved Month of August, a film that could be described as chronicling the making of itself, if there weren't so many tricky ambiguities involved to complicate such a relatively straightforward summary. Sent to the Portuguese countryside with a massive script but no actors or funds, Gomes instead turned his camera on a local musical festival and the area's residents themselves. These telling semi-docu-glimpses of rural life make up the film's first half before giving way to a movie-within-a-movie whose tale of music, romance, and incest draws its immensely satisfying power from the way it seamlessly incorporates the previously glimpsed facts and people of the region into its fictional edifice. Andrew Schenker
3554
7.3
7.8
Awe and uncertainty reverberate equally throughout The Social Network, David Fincher's fictionalized take on Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of Facebook. Spearheaded by Jesse Eisenberg's commandingly nuanced lead performance, Fincher's latest is a sleek, scintillating portrait of intellect and ambition, a snapshot of a particular time and place, a stinging class-hierarchy comedy, and a universal story of trying to fit in. As Aaron Sorkin's rat-a-tat-tat script psychologizes its programming-prodigy subject, Fincher's enthralled camera swings, pops, and speeds alongside the meteorically rising Zuckerberg, all while sumptuously evoking the Ivy-League privilege that his protagonist both coveted and ultimately circumvented on his way to billions. Thrillingly electric and yet quietly tragic, it's a keenly observed film about genius, technology, and social desires that's rooted in ambivalence. Nick Schager
nimimerkillinen's rating:
403
6
6.1
Greenberg (2010)
If Noah Baumbach is, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has suggested, Renoir to Whit Stillman's Rohmer, then Greenberg is both his Boudu Saved From Drowning and his Golden Coach; we're invited to see past the palate-cleansing kitsch of southern California, where the titular misanthrope (Ben Stiller) takes a long post-breakdown vacation in his absentee brother's upper-class villa. But Greenberg's aged interloping inadvertently reveals the perverse strength rather than the hypocrisy of his sterile surroundings; he coldly pounces on his brother's assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), not realizing that her Valley dorkiness is a more effective emotional shield than his Manhattan causticity. They painfully, and hilariously, grope at each other's aversion to intimacy amid L.A.'s lonely, mile-long city blocks. And Baumbach, unafraid to rescue multiple lives from the brink of death, hesitantly unspools the milieu's plaintive magic. Joseph Jon Lanthier
nimimerkillinen's rating:
40
7.5
7.3
To The Sea (2010)
Straddling the line between fiction and documentary with as much tenderness and sensuality as Robert Flaherty's works, Pedro González-Rubio's micro-budget coastal idyll flows by like a seaside breeze. Set in the Mexican-Caribbean reef of Chinchorro, it spends time with a real-life father and son who don't so much "play" themselves on screen as add their innate essences to González-Rubio's vivacious play of nature, people, and camera. Among Alamar's valuable vérité spectacles are lambent views of underwater crustaceans, the boy's graceful bond with a white egret, great barracudas splashing seawater at the lens, and the poignancy of estranged human beings briefly reunited in a world as vast and fluid as the ocean. It's a cinematic vision André Bazin would surely have dug. Fernando F. Croce
"Call it the Year of the Woman, as 2010 featured more standout lead female performances than any 12-month stretch in recent memory. Whether that was just a fluke or denotes a sea change in the industry's gender-power dynamics remains open for debate. There's no question, however, that from domestic stars Michelle Williams, Jennifer Lawrence, and Natalie Portman, to foreign thesps Do-yeon Jeon, Sylvie Testud, Hye-ja Kim, and Isabelle Huppert (among many, many others), there was an avalanche of striking turns by outstanding actresses willing to push boundaries in daring, emotionally arresting roles.
If women commanded the cinema's spotlight, they were joined there by The Social Network, David Fincher's ultra-timely Facebook origin story, a superior mainstream entertainment whose style, wit, and substance elevated it above the crushing middlebrow pap of many other studio awards contenders. The economy was a predictably hot topic, and one confronted more astutely through nonfiction (Inside Job) than fiction (The Company Men), a situation generally true of a year that practically overflowed with riveting documentaries (Prodigal Sons, October Country, 45365, Marwencol). The heartfelt Toy Story 3 and empty-headed Inception dominated a largely dreary summer season, in which underwhelming tent poles reaped financial windfalls while Edgar Wright's dazzling Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was met with polarizing critical notices and moviegoer apathy.
From overseas shores came superb efforts by stalwarts Roman Polanski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Lee Chang-dong, and Neil Jordan, as well as two standout works courtesy of Germany's Maren Ade (Everyone Else) and Greece's Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth) that plumbed the warped dysfunction of romantic and familial relationships. Like the best 2010 had to offer, they afforded profound insight into the human condition, rather than the omnipresent 3D spectacles that merely offered a view of Hollywood's limitless desire to fleece customers via technological gimmickry. Nick Schager.
Ed Gonzalez:
1. Everyone Else
2. Secret Sunshine
3. The Ghost Writer
4. October Country
5. Prodigal Sons
6. Winter's Bone
7. Mother
8. 45365
9. The Social Network
10. Ondine
Honorable Mention: Around a Small Mountain, Bluebeard, The Crazies, Easier with Practice, The Human Centipede (The First Sequence), Let Me In, The Milk of Sorrow, Piranha 3D, Samson and Delilah, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Nick Schager:
1. Lourdes
2. Everyone Else
3. Dogtooth
4. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
5. Secret Sunshine
6. Mother
7. October Country
8. The Social Network
9. Prodigal Sons
10. Winter's Bone
Honorable Mention: 45365, Bluebeard, Carlos, Enter the Void, Inside Job, NY Export: Opus Jazz, Ondine, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, The Strange Case of Angelica, White Material
Joseph Jon Lanthier:
1. Samson and Delilah
2. Greenberg
3. And Everything Is Going Fine
4. The Killer Inside Me
5. Dogtooth
6. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
7. A Prophet
8. Marwencol
9. White Material
10. Applause
Honorable Mention: Amer, The Ghost Writer, How to Train Your Dragon, The Human Centipede (The First Sequence), Mid-August Lunch, October Country, Rabbit Hole, Shutter Island, Wah Do Dem, and Waste Land
Andrew Schenker:
1. Our Beloved Month of August
2. Lourdes
3. Vincere
4. Ghost Town
5. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
6. Inside Job
7. The Ghost Writer
8. Hadewijch
9. Blue Valentine
10. Around a Small Mountain
Honorable Mention: 45365, Alamar, Boxing Gym, The Kids Are All Right, Last Train Home, The Milk of Sorrow, Mother, Ne Change Rien, The Strange Case of Angelica, and The Temptation of St. Tony
Bill Weber:
1. Wild Grass
2. Dogtooth
3. Mother
4. Carlos
5. DDR/DDR
6. Have You Heard from Johannesburg
7. The Illusionist
8. Everyone Else
9. Ne Change Rien
10. Vincere
Honorable Mention: Boxing Gym, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Ghost Town, The Ghost Writer, I Love You Phillip Morris, Let Me In, Lourdes, Marwencol, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Winter's Bone
Fernando F. Croce:
1. Wild Grass
2. Ne Change Rien
3. Carlos
4. The Ghost Writer
5. Vincere
6. Alamar
7. Exit Through the Gift Shop
8. Vengeance
9. Let Me In
10. Last Train Home
Honorable Mention: Amer, Bluebeard, The Crazies, Everyone Else, A Film Unfinished, I Am Love, Lourdes, Mother, Restrepo, and White Material
Simon Abrams:
1. Dogtooth
2. Amer
3. Let Me In
4. Oceans
5. The Ghost Writer
6. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
7. Hadewijch
8. Life During Wartime
9. Lourdes
10. Black Swan
Honorable Mention: Anton Chekhov's The Duel, The Crazies, The Eclipse, How to Train Your Dragon, The Human Centipede (The First Sequence), Mid-August Lunch, Never Let Me Go, The Paranoids, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
If women commanded the cinema's spotlight, they were joined there by The Social Network, David Fincher's ultra-timely Facebook origin story, a superior mainstream entertainment whose style, wit, and substance elevated it above the crushing middlebrow pap of many other studio awards contenders. The economy was a predictably hot topic, and one confronted more astutely through nonfiction (Inside Job) than fiction (The Company Men), a situation generally true of a year that practically overflowed with riveting documentaries (Prodigal Sons, October Country, 45365, Marwencol). The heartfelt Toy Story 3 and empty-headed Inception dominated a largely dreary summer season, in which underwhelming tent poles reaped financial windfalls while Edgar Wright's dazzling Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was met with polarizing critical notices and moviegoer apathy.
From overseas shores came superb efforts by stalwarts Roman Polanski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Lee Chang-dong, and Neil Jordan, as well as two standout works courtesy of Germany's Maren Ade (Everyone Else) and Greece's Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth) that plumbed the warped dysfunction of romantic and familial relationships. Like the best 2010 had to offer, they afforded profound insight into the human condition, rather than the omnipresent 3D spectacles that merely offered a view of Hollywood's limitless desire to fleece customers via technological gimmickry. Nick Schager.
Ed Gonzalez:
1. Everyone Else
2. Secret Sunshine
3. The Ghost Writer
4. October Country
5. Prodigal Sons
6. Winter's Bone
7. Mother
8. 45365
9. The Social Network
10. Ondine
Honorable Mention: Around a Small Mountain, Bluebeard, The Crazies, Easier with Practice, The Human Centipede (The First Sequence), Let Me In, The Milk of Sorrow, Piranha 3D, Samson and Delilah, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Nick Schager:
1. Lourdes
2. Everyone Else
3. Dogtooth
4. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
5. Secret Sunshine
6. Mother
7. October Country
8. The Social Network
9. Prodigal Sons
10. Winter's Bone
Honorable Mention: 45365, Bluebeard, Carlos, Enter the Void, Inside Job, NY Export: Opus Jazz, Ondine, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, The Strange Case of Angelica, White Material
Joseph Jon Lanthier:
1. Samson and Delilah
2. Greenberg
3. And Everything Is Going Fine
4. The Killer Inside Me
5. Dogtooth
6. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
7. A Prophet
8. Marwencol
9. White Material
10. Applause
Honorable Mention: Amer, The Ghost Writer, How to Train Your Dragon, The Human Centipede (The First Sequence), Mid-August Lunch, October Country, Rabbit Hole, Shutter Island, Wah Do Dem, and Waste Land
Andrew Schenker:
1. Our Beloved Month of August
2. Lourdes
3. Vincere
4. Ghost Town
5. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
6. Inside Job
7. The Ghost Writer
8. Hadewijch
9. Blue Valentine
10. Around a Small Mountain
Honorable Mention: 45365, Alamar, Boxing Gym, The Kids Are All Right, Last Train Home, The Milk of Sorrow, Mother, Ne Change Rien, The Strange Case of Angelica, and The Temptation of St. Tony
Bill Weber:
1. Wild Grass
2. Dogtooth
3. Mother
4. Carlos
5. DDR/DDR
6. Have You Heard from Johannesburg
7. The Illusionist
8. Everyone Else
9. Ne Change Rien
10. Vincere
Honorable Mention: Boxing Gym, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Ghost Town, The Ghost Writer, I Love You Phillip Morris, Let Me In, Lourdes, Marwencol, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Winter's Bone
Fernando F. Croce:
1. Wild Grass
2. Ne Change Rien
3. Carlos
4. The Ghost Writer
5. Vincere
6. Alamar
7. Exit Through the Gift Shop
8. Vengeance
9. Let Me In
10. Last Train Home
Honorable Mention: Amer, Bluebeard, The Crazies, Everyone Else, A Film Unfinished, I Am Love, Lourdes, Mother, Restrepo, and White Material
Simon Abrams:
1. Dogtooth
2. Amer
3. Let Me In
4. Oceans
5. The Ghost Writer
6. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
7. Hadewijch
8. Life During Wartime
9. Lourdes
10. Black Swan
Honorable Mention: Anton Chekhov's The Duel, The Crazies, The Eclipse, How to Train Your Dragon, The Human Centipede (The First Sequence), Mid-August Lunch, Never Let Me Go, The Paranoids, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
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