With my usual half-year delay, by now I’ve seen almost every well-noticed film of 2010, going by rankings such as the top 50 in the Film Comment critics poll, and here I distill them into four categories of consumer advice. Since almost all are out on DVD by now, you should find something here for your Netflix queue. For fuller commentary, use the search box at the top of this page to find my personal review, which in turn will link you to the respective Metacritic page surveying other critical opinion.
Exhortations, which I urge you to see: For sheer ambition, my choice for best film of the year is Carlos, the three-part epic by Olivier Assayas, which illuminates the international franchising of political terror from the Seventies on, and may ultimately rank with The Godfather Saga. I share the general enthusiasm for The Social Network – let’s just say I “friend” it. And I also share the enthusiasm of the cognescenti for Winter’s Bone, the Ozark indie thriller that’s a cross between horror film and documentary. Into this exalted company I would admit the HBO biopic, Temple Grandin, with its transcendent performance by Claire Danes as the autistic expert on animal behavior.
Recommendations, which I advise you to see: Here I’ll start in the mainstream and branch out into various tributaries. I like The King’s Speech and True Grit as much as most people do, and Toy Story 3 much more than I anticipated.
Polanski’s Ghost Writer is a very effective political thriller, and three foreign crime dramas reward the effort to watch their grisly violence – the Red Riding Trilogy (like Carlos a three-part series originally made for television) tracks the long and convoluted case of the Yorkshire Ripper; Animal Kingdom follows the decline of a Melbourne crime family ruled by an Aussie lioness of a mother; A Prophet shows in intimate gory detail how an Arab youth in a French prison comes to depend on the Corsican mob that runs the joint and much else besides.
The relationships amongst family, friends, and lovers are examined from many angles in an international array of worthy films. The American indies Mother & Child and Please Give weave together the stories of several families -- Roderigo Garcia with an excellent cast led by Annette Bening and Naomi Watts as a mother and daughter separated at birth, and Nicole Holofcener out of a cross-section of Manhattan neurotics surrounding Catherine Keener. From Britain, Mike Leigh does not disappoint but does not top himself with Another Year, and Never Let Me Go tells a surprisingly thought-provoking dystopian fable about some attractive young people at a boarding school that is not what it seems. From Italy, the operatic and sensual family drama of I Am Love is anchored by Tilda Swinton. From France, The Father of My Children meticulously examines the lead-up to and fall-out from a family tragedy. From Germany comes the step-by-step break-up of a mismatched couple on a Mediterranean vacation in Everyone Else.
Appreciations, which I consider worth seeing: I would cite both The Fighter and The Town for knowing portrayals of rough’n’tumble Massachusetts working-class communities. Among the other Oscar nominees, I like The Kids Are All Right less than many do, but 127 Hours more than I expected, though neither strikes me as a legitimate contender for “Best Picture.” The rest of this category is a mixed-bag of little-known films, each of which found some support in critics polls, except a couple I would point out as suiting my particular (peculiar?) personal taste – Neil Jordan’s selkie fable Ondine appeals to me for its local Irish flavor and the un-star-like performance of Colin Farrell, and I appreciate the relatively serious portrayal of Darwin by Paul Bettany in Creation. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling enact a winsome romance and lacerating break-up in Blue Valentine. Highly-charged historical situations are depicted, again from a variety of nations -- Lebanon looks at the 1982 war from the perspective of some raw Israeli recruits confined to a tank; White Material takes in an African civil war from the perspective of French coffee plantation owner Isabelle Huppert; Vincere looks at the rise of Mussolini from the view of the woman and son he discarded on the way up the ladder; and Four Lions is an unlikely terrorist comedy about a half-assed group of British Islamicists. Alamar is sui generis, quietly following a young mixed-race boy as he goes to spend a summer with his father in the natural paradise of the Mexican coral reefs.
Equivocations, which I leave to your discretion: Two critical favorites that I halfway appreciated, but cannot recommend, are the Noah Baumbach-Ben Stiller acerbic comedy Greenberg and the Korean murder mystery Mother. I have high expectations for Sofia Coppola’s films, which were severely disappointed by Somewhere. For a while I was under the spell of Black Swan, but when the spell was broken by sheer over-the-top implausibility, I turned against the film rather violently. I never fell under the spell of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, and wound up fast-forwarding through both. Two highly praised and highly offbeat foreign films I stubbornly refused to get were the Greek family fable Dogtooth and Alain Resnais’ weird and not-so-wonderful Wild Grass.
Documendations: Inside Job won the Oscar for best documentary feature and came in #7 overall in the Film Comment poll, but this recapitulation of the financial collapse of 2008 was not my favorite of the year’s nonfiction films. Among the nominees, I was more impressed with Restrepo, with its intimate you-are-there feel for a remote military outpost in Afghanistan at the furthest extension of the American empire (the co-director was subsequently killed in action in Libya); Waste Land, about a project by the international art star Vik Muniz set in the largest garbage dump in Rio; and Gasland, a D-I-Y exploration of the environmental disaster-in-waiting that is “fracking” for natural gas. For understanding of America’s political and economic crises, I would turn to Alex Gibney, whose Casino Jack and the United States of Money was truly illuminating and enraging about the lasting toxic influence of the cadre of College Republicans led by Karl Rove, while his Client 9 detailed the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer in a way that was virtually as informative as Inside Job in fingering the culprits of the financial meltdown. The Oath offered surprising access to the inside of Al-Qaeda by following Osama Bin Laden’s ex-bodyguard, who is now a taxi driver in Yemen. The Tillman Story showed how truth was one of the casualties of the Afghan war, and Last Train Home put the face of one family on the immense impact of huge internal migration in China from the countryside to the cities. On nonpolitical themes, standouts of the year included Sweetgrass, a nearly wordless meditation on a great sheep drive to grazing in the wilds of Montana, and a late work by cinema verite pioneer D.A. Pennebaker, Kings of Pastry, about chefs vying for a French medal of honor. One quirky outlier that has its detractors as well as advocates, Catfish, finds another proponent in me, as it takes a highly personal approach to exploring the implications of social media. Some will tell you that Exit Through the Gift Shop was a great look at contemporary street art, but for art from an outsider perspective, I much prefer Marwencol.
So all in all, 2010 definitely goes in the book as a year of worthy films. Take a look for yourself.
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