Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2010

The last year of the first ten or the first year of the next ten, 2010 finds the state of our motion pictures as an awkward, yearling thing, finding purchase in the aftermath of the fear and nihilism of the post-9/11 state in something as dark but perhaps now more purposeful than despairing. If the best films of the immediately-after are represented by stuff like No Country for Old Men and Synecdoche, NY, the best films of this liminal year are pilgrims in search of a (doomed) idea of perfection and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. Is that explanation in part for the rise of geek culture (The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Kick-Ass), this gradual empowerment of the weaker position? While examinations of vengeance and solipsism continue to be tough themes to shake, they've begun taking the form of marginal uplift as opposed to mostly-undiluted nihilism.

2010's best films are marked by a tension between nostalgia and the desire to be free from nostalgia; between being stained ineffably by the atrocities of the past and yearning to be born again, innocent, into a new world. American cinema is in good shape, with singular voices like the Coens', Aronofsky's, Fincher's, and Sofia Coppola's in fine feather even as ticket prices surge and the 3-D fad promises to produce more low points before it fizzles out into that green dot on the digital horizon. Ben Affleck cements his surprise status as a filmmaker of note while Pixar finishes a trilogy with a movie that contemplates mortality in the way Japanese anime has for decades…but still. France rises again with young mavericks like Gaspar Noé and Olivier Assayas, while South Korea maintains its status as the best place for film that largely escapes the popular conversation.

The amount of reality-testing films (Shutter Island, Inception, The Killer Inside Me) this year–an echo of '99 (The Matrix, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense)–could be an indication that we're on the cusp of another cataclysm of faith, or that we haven't entirely embraced the idea that we've crossed back over a threshold into some simulacrum of normalcy again. But I can't shake the notion that we're on the verge of another period of introspection–another American '70s, where distinct auteur voices speak and Terrence Malick's next film inspires as much excitement as, if not more than, the next instalment of some Hollywood behemoth. A few of the films on this list are distinctly inspired by Malick, others are touched by that era's Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula (others still by '70s-era Dario Argento and Eric Rohmer and Roman Polanski)–testament to the power of cinema from that decade that its ripples stretch into another period in which even the worst of what the medium suffers (like Avatar; like Tron: Legacy) are monuments to our past, and hopeful about our future.

Also: There's a lot of cunnilingus in 2010. I'm just saying.–Walter Chaw

                    WALTER CHAW                    

IAN PUGH

10. Iron Man 2 (d. Jon Favreau) If the original film warned us about the perils of maintaining appearances in the name of self-preservation, then the sequel presents a world in which those warnings have gone unheeded. Talk about biting the hand that feeds: Favreau presents Tony Stark, Iron Man, Iron Man, Marvel, and America as placatory icons destined to be exposed, challenged, and, inevitably, reinstated. In an age of corporate personhood, it's an important meta-text. And if its offhanded missive about privatized police forces renders the Avengers movie unnecessary, well, that's just the way it goes.

9. Somewhere (d. Sofia Coppola) Not a chronicle of bourgeois misery but a stark reminder that we are all subject to the passage of time and the loss and regret that attend it. For a tale told with an almost cruel distance, it boasts an astounding attention to detail, but what makes it unforgettable is the cautionary tale that's difficult to miss: look at your daily life with a disaffected eye and you'll soon turn that same gaze on something (or someone) important.

8. Marwencol (d. Jeff Malmberg) Every frame of Marwencol is haunted by its central tragedy and mourns for what its subject has lost, but a survey of artist Mark Hogancamp's fascinating body of work brilliantly dissects the countless reasons why human beings create in the first place. It's an incredibly hopeful film–not least for this idea that art, personality, and individuality are so deeply ingrained in the mind that they exist beyond the brain's physical limitations. It's practically spiritual.

7. Mother (Madeo) (d. Bong Joon-ho) It begins with the concept of love as a violent and primitive impulse, and from there, Mother becomes a harrowing ordeal once it suggests that even the best aspects of human nature are poisoned by the worst. Call it a reversal of Psycho that tinkers with Hitchcock's fundamental themes–a brutally frank presentation of the defense mechanisms that prevent us from learning too much about ourselves.

6. The Other Guys (d. Adam McKay) Accomplishing the impossible task of making buddy-cop movies relevant again, The Other Guys takes all the cynicism of the 21st century and feeds it into a complex fantasy of how the world should work and how problems should be solved. Overwhelmed by the state of modern society? Corporate corruption getting you down? Can't get laid? No problem! It's hilarious for the same reason most of McKay's movies are hilarious, but in its madness lies an examination of misdirected rage and the quiet ignorance of atrocity.

5. Valhalla Rising (d. Nicolas Winding Refn) Refn wears his insanity on his sleeve, an important quality when chronicling such a thoroughly insane expedition. On the surface, there ain't much to it, but the whole damned thing is built on a foundation of visceral pain…and why not? The film speaks to deep fears of what exists beyond our understanding–the subtle implication that God and the Devil are one and the same, and that Hell exists within every single one of us.

4. I'm Still Here (d. Casey Affleck) Not a "hoax" so much as a screaming match between an artist and an audience of consumers…and each participant cranks up the volume when they can't get what they want. By forcing everyone to accept the truth of his elaborate fiction, Joaquin Phoenix didn't just give the performance of a lifetime–he outlined the hypocrisies and prejudices inherent to the entertainment industry. Naturally, the film was met with relentless hostility when it promised to fill in the blanks, but that only goes to prove Affleck's point about our love-hate relationship with celebrity culture.

3. Greenberg (d. Noah Baumbach) It's terrifying enough as a discussion about the bridge between young adulthood and middle age, but Greenberg inflicts its deepest wounds in its discussion of how one generation influences the other. Bound by a mutual sense of helplessness and disappointment over squandered potential, the major players have the ability to look for solace in each other but lose themselves in a sea of bad advice and passive-aggression. Life goes on with or without you; not an original thought, but one that Baumbach demonstrates as easy to forget. It touches on the universal desire to fit into the grand scheme, but more importantly, it explains why our inevitable failure to do so cannot be greeted with passive acceptance.

2. Black Swan (d. Darren Aronofsky) At first glance, Aronofsky's magnum opus is another film about artists bound by their predetermined roles, yet Black Swan reaches its deepest levels of horror when it portrays a successful breakaway–a fragile consciousness tearing itself apart, piece by piece, in service to someone else's vision of perfection. It's uniquely affecting in how it depicts the power of our influences and the bitter truths that hide behind metaphors (the transformations of "Swan Lake" are positively nauseating in a less romantic setting), but every piece of this puzzle betrays an intimidating comprehension of art and the most basic elements of its creation.

1. True Grit (ds. Joel & Ethan Coen) After producing a trilogy destined to become legendary in its bleakness, the Coens throw another curveball and find something life-affirming in the work of Charles Portis. Of course, they can't help but relish in a story of drunken madmen who use pseudo-philosophical banter to sublimate their bloodlust. But while this may be another movie about how everyone is destined for the same lonely end, the filmmakers acknowledge that there's something noble about the struggle that precedes it. True Grit is cinema in its most undiluted form–and it's probably the best joke these nihilistic rascals ever played.

Notably Missed: Four Lions; Carlos; Enter the Void; Dogtooth; White Material

Honourable Mention: The American; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I; Inception; Exit Through the Gift Shop; Due Date

Dishonourable Mention: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (an onanistic piffle made by smart people blinded by nostalgia); The Ghost Writer (Chinatown as a supermarket novel–and it comes complete with Polanski's inexplicable self-pity); Everyone Else (meandering, condescending); Shutter Island ("What a twist!"); Rabbit Hole (an awful lot of effort for such a piss-poor allegory)

BILL CHAMBERS

10. The American (d. Anton Corbijn) Finally, a self-described spaghetti western that's not wanting for the genre's laconic temperament and compositional sense. Fair warning: looking at Violante Placido scrambles my brain so much, I wouldn't entirely trust the film's presence on my list.

9. Black Swan (d. Darren Aronofsky) Derivative yet intoxicating all the same, which is no easy feat.

8. Blue Valentine (d. Derek Cianfrance) If it's often an actor's workshop, it's a riveting one. Though Everyone Else might be better wired to the woman's point of view, it lacks Blue Valentine's brio and the sheer magnificence of Ryan Gosling's performance.

7. Exit Through the Gift Shop (d. Banksy) A slow-motion instant replay of yet another "indie" movement's cynical commodification. For a faceless, voice-scrambled host, Banksy is utterly charming–and so bemused by his subject that you hardly notice the film's a tragedy.

6. Somewhere (d. Sofia Coppola) Like some real-life Eloise, Coppola effectively grew up in hotels. Now she makes movies about the same–this one, with a famous father and his precocious daughter at the centre, the most transparently personal. But even if it's not, it's the most soulful of a trilogy that includes Life Without Zoe and Lost in Translation.

5. Dogtooth (d. Yorgos Lanthimos) A jet-black comedy about the dangers of insularity, featuring three adult-aged children who've been brainwashed not to cross "the wall" (i.e., the fence outside their home) more convincingly than the kid clones of Never Let Me Go. It's nuts, and not for the squeamish, but it also impresses as pop anthropology. And while one character's victory over her parents' impossible logic may be Pyrrhic at best, I couldn't help but give her a little fist pump.

4. Greenberg (d. Noah Baumbach) I want to take a moment here to lament that I voted in two critics' groups this year and both times neglected to single out Rhys Ifans's lovely performance as the only person still speaking to Ben Stiller's surly, Bartleby-esque Roger Greenberg. He comes across as so disarmingly kind and tolerant that his ad hoc review of Lindsay Lohan's Just My Luck ("Kinda funny; she's charming") made me hate myself for being so hard on it. Greenberg itself is instantly one of the great L.A. movies; hard to believe this was Baumbach's first time shooting there.

3. Marwencol (d. Jeff Malmberg) The biggest compliment I can think to pay Marwencol is that it's like reading one of Oliver Sacks's case studies. Marwencol itself–as in the little WWII-era Belgian town populated with action figures–appears to be shedding its metaphorical pretense (becoming ever more Caden Cotard-ian in the process), and I suspect it will be quite some time before we know whether this is a good thing for curator Mark Hogancamp. In any event, Marwencol is the rare profile of an outsider artist that can hold a candle to Crumb–a fucking beautiful film about a beautiful fucking man. Was there a more bravura sequence in 2010 than the heroic rescue of Mark's alter ego from the SS by three Barbie dolls?

2. Life During Wartime (d. Todd Solondz) A more traditional but no more conventional sequel than his previous Palindromes, Solondz's mordant but melancholy Life During Wartime effectively goes back, like Rob Zombie's incredible Halloween II, to finish the job on the moderately hopeful survivors of Happiness. Perhaps because it lacks the epic length of Happiness, not many of its characters get a chance to transcend caricature (or duck self-parody), but by the end I was as devastated by the palpability of their anguish as Rich Pecci's Jewish cynic is humbled by a child's hug.

1. True Grit (ds. Joel & Ethan Coen) The Coen Brothers, Charles Portis, Jeff Bridges–what do you need, a roadmap?

Notably Missed: Enter the Void; Another Year; Valhalla Rising; Secret Sunshine

Worst Trend: Instant, dogmatic cultdom and the hectoring attitude and absolute suffocation that attends it. (See: the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World fundamentalists.)

Notably Missed: Enter the Void; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; And Everything is Going Fine; Life During Wartime

Notably not Missed: Wild Grass; The Fighter

25-11:
25. Everyone Else (Alle anderen)
Lukas Moodysson + Ingmar Bergman, but not bad for all that.
24. The Crazies
Smart thriller better than the Romero; also miles better than this year's own Romero.
23. Sweetgrass
Husbandry as poetry.
22. The Ghost Writer
A perfectly-crafted architectural thriller that isn't interesting until, literally, its final shot.
21. Blue Valentine
Harold Pinter set to hip indie misery, but affecting all the same. Cunnilingus.
20. Carlos
Moments of greatness undone to some extent by pacing issues in its last two hours. More cunnilingus.
19. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I
Puberty as lovely war idyll with secret weapons Nick Cave and Alexandre Desplat.
18. I Am Love (Io sono l'amore)
The Tilda Swinton Show marches on to a tick-tock drum with a closing shot for the ages
17. Toy Story 3
Ambitious, mordant, courageous climax and epilogue bolster a lacklustre first act.
16. A Prophet (Un prophète)
The best Nicolas Windig Refn film that Tom Tykwer used to make. Good razor violence.
15. Amer
An Argento highlight reel married to Antonioni. Again good razor violence.
14. The Town
Rock-solid if not quite transcendent, '70s-era Lumet crime/character study, rich in story of place.
13. The Social Network
Verbal emoticon avatar for the Year of the Dork.
12. Kick-Ass
Physical emoticon for the same and best John Woo shrine of the year.
11. Around a Small Mountain (36 vues du Pic Saint Loup)
Offers an epilogue to a career, with circus performers at metaphysical play in the land of the post-modern that Jacques Rivette, of all the French masters, handles with the most grace.

(It should be mentioned that the just-awesome The Good the Bad the Weird previously made an appearance on an amended 2008 list I wrote for our blog a while back when it was unclear that it would ever get a U.S. release. Still in limbo is the same director's excellent A Bittersweet Life. What a blessing region-free DVD players are.)

10. The American (d. Anton Corbijn)
Jean-Pierre Melville by way of George Clooney, who, whatever the crimes of his early career and the Ocean's flicks, has provided for us genuinely reverent, smart genre flicks like this and Solaris that pay tribute to guys like Melville and Tarkovsky. A cold-war thriller banking on sex and mute menace like The Ipcress File and Eye of the Needle, The American is a mature film for adult audiences in its reduction of sex and murder-for-hire to the same masculine creative instinct. "Mr. Butterfly" (M. Butterfly?) is a craftsman–an identity and an attitude he carries into every aspect of his life. When he enters into an agreement with another professional–hooker Clara (Violante Placido)–to set aside the masks that make them ciphers passing through real people's lives, he becomes vulnerable to the consequences of existence. It's at once a brilliant subversion of genre and a brilliant honouring of the same–and proof, like Solaris, that the best films of most years are often misunderstood in their time. Cunnilingus.

9. Marwencol (d. Jeff Malmberg)
Synecdoche, New York as proof of a certain therapeutic strategy, Marwencol follows the recovery of photographer Mark Hogancamp, who, after receiving a vicious beating for a drunken confession in a backwater drinking hole, begins to create a miniature WWII world using toys bought at the local hobby shop, complete with avatars for all his friends and acquaintances. Director Jeff Malmberg documents Hogancamp's re-enactment of his tragedy, his Burroughs-like fantasies of an alternate reality offering alternate futures, and finally how his miniature representation has itself begun to construct a miniature reality. It sees the inward construction of memory as the palimpsest articulated by Thomas De Quincey over two hundred years ago and discovers that the outward manifestation of grief can begin to look the same. Astonishing.

8. Dogtooth (d. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Deadpan, despairing, bleak, Yorgos Lanthimos's film is a Beckett-esque Theatre of the Absurd piece heavy with serpentine wordplay and considerations of the nature of parental power at war with the corrupting nature of popular culture. It raises a multitude of questions–the big ones–but it presents them more as touchpoints than as speaking points, wholly to its credit. Violence and sexuality are shown as opposite sides of the same human coin while a few sequences (an after-dinner dance, an uncomfortable deflowering, the price of a final escape) are transcendent in their ability to discomfit for profit. "Courage" is a word generally reserved for starlets agreeing to get naked or men agreeing to kiss other men onscreen, yet Dogtooth fascinates because it is in part a discussion of why it is we think that kind of thing is brave. Also: cunnilingus.

7. Greenberg (d. Noah Baumbach)
An attack against pretension that could at first be taken as the height of pretension, Noah Baumbach's film is a filmmaker hitting his stride as he continues to discuss the peculiarities of his upbringing and the meaning of suffering even in rarefied air. Emotionally intelligent and packed with moments that flower in memory, it's a conversation at its heart about self-worth and the nature of the disguises we wear to meet the world. A perfect companion piece to his Margot at the Wedding, it's Baumbach at his most confident in a picture that grows huge in the rear-view. Cunnilingus.

6. Mother (Madeo) (d. Bong Joon-ho)
Bong Joon-ho's film about family fidelity presents the performance of the year in the great Kim Hye-ja as an over-protective mother of a simpleton son who's late been accused of murdering the town pump. Her tireless sleuthing on his behalf resembles a holy war waged in an unholy land, and a climactic scene in which she visits another suspect in the case is the most harrowing, and heartbreaking, of the year. Bong has a gift for balancing farce with pathos; this is his best film since his first, Barking Dogs Never Bite, though I like them all.

5. Animal Kingdom (d. David Michôd)
Another ferocious mother anchors Australia's tremendous crime drama Animal Kingdom as young Josh Cody (James Frecheville) is placed on the horns of a dilemma when presented with a choice of a life of crime or a shallow grave by the demonic Pope (Ben Mendelsohn). The resolution isn't as important as the quiet moments of discovery as Josh learns of loss and loyalty and comes to an altogether unexpected conclusion about the direction for his life. With a visual style part Malick, part Michael Mann, newcomer Michôd's best trait is his unusual patience and extreme comfort with quiet.

4. Black Swan (d. Darren Aronofsky)
Aronofsky talks about art and the artist in a work that's almost pure image and allegory. It's an impassioned cry–a continuation of the concerns of The Wrestler and The Fountain–and the announcement at last that Natalie Portman is good. Maybe really good. For all his stylistic flourishes, it's Aronofsky's work with actors that might prove to be his lasting legacy. Cunnilingus.

3. Somewhere (d. Sofia Coppola)
An unofficial adaptation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", it's Sofia Coppola's most mature, most confident statement on her childhood and, because it occurs where it does in her development (and ours), the most optimistic as well. A film about decisions and existential crises that works in vicissitude and shorthand, it nevertheless has a direction to it, an arc that suggests if not progress at the end, then at least the understanding that some questions need to be asked along the course of an examined life. Cunnilingus.

2. True Grit (ds. Joel & Ethan Coen)
A near-perfect adaptation of Charles Portis's prose–not just the book that it's based on but as a whole; I look at True Grit as a Rosetta stone of sorts for deciphering the Coens' true genius as literary interpreters. The performances are perfect, the craft is perfect, the film, in many ways, is perfect. Completely enjoyable, but it's the echoes that truly compel–the sense that there's a lot more on the film's mind than a good yarn told well in the classical style. And those last fifteen minutes are maybe the best fifteen minutes of 2010.

1. Valhalla Rising (d. Nicolas Winding Refn)
Minimal one word for it, "magnificent" a better one. Refn takes the Tom Tykwer wunderkind crown for last year's bombastic Bronson and this, something completely different, a remarkable bit of Terrence Malick-infused naturalism-as-history-of-man. Mads Mikkelson exudes Toshiro Mifune's warrior masculinity in a tale of essential spirituality distilled to its animal, manic motions. A new myth for the New World, as well as an excoriation of clothing animals in robes of religion, it's the only film of 2010 I've watched more than twice. I've… watched it five times, in fact, and still haven't had my fill.

CONSENSUS: FILM FREAK CENTRAL'S TOP 5 OF 2010   1. True Grit 2. Black Swan|Greenberg (tie) 3. Somewhere 4. Valhalla Rising 5. Marwencol