Top 10 Movies of 2010

Without question, 2010 was a better year for films than 2009, but that's really not saying much at all. In fact, I could have said nothing and that would have already been better than having said that this past year was superior to 2009.

There were years prior to the advent of the camera that were superior to 2009.

But never mind that now.

1. Dogtooth (director: Giorgos Lanthimos)

Judgment remains reserved for the film's unique parenting concept, if only

because it would be hypocritical for someone in a movie audience to decry

influence, itself the prime outcome of our desire. Settling into what is

tantamount to an alternative universe-three teenagers raised entirely in the environment of the family estate, warned not to cross the boundaries, taught or brainwashed (whichever you like) solely by their parents-Lanthimos' masterful slow burn isn't just successful in establishing the all-encompassing nature of this unconventional upbringing, he also prods us with internal dialogue by leaving the parents' stated intentions completely out of the picture.

Only when it is too late, do we get clues and, even then, only the

vague kind: Bad influences = bad personalities. Intriguing to the last, it is

the subtext about the persuasion of outside forces and their ripple-effect – in this case, cinema, by way of rented videocassettes-that really hits home: No matter how much of which control you exercise, definition comes from within.

2. Winter's Bone (director: Debra Granik)

Atmosphere is king. I could have watched the unfolding of everyday life among the Ozark tweekers until my teeth fell out. This eerie, bubbling cauldron of confused family loyalties, rampant meth addiction, abject poverty, survival instinct and backwoods tradition could have-in my estimation-supported nearly any narrative arc tossed its way. As it is, Granik's tale of a young woman's quest to produce physical proof of her father's whereabouts in order to retain her family's home (and support her siblings and mentally ill mother) is an incredibly affecting one, challenging nearly every presupposition we can make, particularly in the blurry line between The Family and The Family Business.

Playing the unflappable Ree Dolly, Jennifer Lawrence is a spitfire of persistence and unassuming maturity. Ultimately, the key emotional center of the film lies in her interaction with Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes channeling, uncannily, Harry Dean Stanton), at times loving, at times vicious, at times just plain messy. Herein, the eccentric kinship of these two subverts the adage relating to blood's thickness (when compared to water, that is), providing more questions than answers and, more importantly, eluding black and white conclusions of any kind.

3. Everyone Else (director Maren Ade)

Brazenly confrontational, but always introspective, Everyone Else argues that posturing-Chris (Lars Eidinger) is a seemingly ambitious architect hiding fear of failure behind the pretense of perfectionism-reveals itself as the evil dividing line in that pish posh relationship notion known as "opposites attract." Chris' wife Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) wears her "self" on her sleeve and the film acts as a microscope, teasing out and carefully observing the calibrations each character makes to compensate for the other. To complicate matters, Ade pits them against another couple, Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and Sana (Nicole Marischka), who are similarly different-Hans a boorish but successful architect and Sana, who is newly pregnant and mousy and conforming and ordinary-establishing that not only have Chris and Gitti not yet chosen their roles, but seem to realize the fruitlessness of these roles and, perhaps, their connection in general.

Like The Forest For the Trees, Ade's other clock-cleaning study of how things appear and how they really are, Everyone Else draws some pretty stark conclusions about our social conventions, all of which feel fresh, severe and urgent, so much like the world we live in.

4. The Fighter (director: David O. Russell)

Bale's wiry turn as ex-boxer "Dickie" Ward might be the year's most exciting performance, nestled among a cast of deeply authentic Massachusettites, deeply contradicting family values and David O. Russell's magnificent command of perspective. The Fighter's crowning achievement (and what recommends it wholesale) is its ability to earn emotional crescendos with sudden, jerking reversals. The Full Frontal-esque prism of perceived realities examines the contents through television boxing commentators (who are brutal and spare), HBO documentary filmmakers (who let their cameras draw the conclusions for them) and, of course, the meat of the thing, the grand slant of Russell's  "based on a true story" credit. The liberty-taking feels written off as the subjective, a place where we bring our own neuroses to bear, only to be told, pointedly, that another set of eyes sees a radically different take.

Riffing on reality television's limitations, the film dodges concrete moral judgments, flipping them over, making them outright, tearing into gravity with whimsy and coasting on a slick momentum. Bale turns in nothing but great performances these days, but this is one of those displays that transfers its energy and its madness onto the viewer, leaving us stuck with his tics long after the film has ended. Perhaps because they both recently had such publicly broadcast meltdowns on movie sets, Russell and Bale found some kind of synergy in their passion?

5. Enter the Void (director Gaspar Noé)

At once cinematica psychadelica-stopping to enjoy animated fractals in the haze of an MDMA hallucination for, at one point, ten minutes-and a cautionary tale with no real moral, Noé's thinking may have been something like this: The profundity of the masterful sequence where the newly dead Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) experiences - at random - highlights from his life can only be framed by excess, as if nestling the film's prime dilemma among a sea of gorgeous distraction. More often than not, Enter the Void requires very little of your input, unfolding in a blur of colorful camera wizardry, euphoric daydreams and a great deal of sex.

Its treatment of the afterlife is an interesting one, to be sure, but even when my codifying mind tries to hang its summating hat on the constant push of human desire to spectate, the "a-ha!" I'm fudging disappears in my lap with a poof. Its kind of an odd trick-and one I'll likely need to get my head around during a second viewing-to put us in the mind of "2001: A

Space Odyssey" (the colors, the floating around, the space in which to think) and not really elicit any of the rumination or meditative satisfactions of that film. In short, it's perhaps the most enticing mixed bag of cinematic pleasures in recent years.

6. Greenberg (director: Noah Baumbach)

Temperamental doesn't scratch the surface (a-hole does, though) of Roger

Greenberg's manic psyche, itself a grown-up version of director Noah Baumbach's neurotic, autobiographical Walt Berkman (the teenage son in his 2005 masterpiece The Squid and the Whale). Forced to endure-or forcing his demons upon-his brother's assistant (a confoundingly flighty Greta Gerwig) while deliberately doing nothing with his summer (following his own nervous breakdown), there is no moment where this character has control, but the sum total of his madness seems to belie a clarity about our glass half empty world that seems almost sagacious by comparison.

Where this seemed to be the year of multiple perspectives, Greenberg succeeds because its perspective is so singular, so disarming and so

completely and utterly awkward. I'm always interested to see films where a

genuinely loathsome character elicits a measure of sympathy, but I typically find that measure of sympathy differs greatly from the intended effect of the writer. Not so, apparently. While in his own life, Baumbach may not have entered the throes of chaos to quite the degree Stiller's Greenberg has, its clear that this is, personally, a fairly brave and risky venture for him (at least where Roger, in contrast to Walt, is concerned).

Stiller is far from being one of my favorite actors, but he readily invests the character with the same sad mantra LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy drenches the soundtrack with ("Talking like a jerk/except you are an actual jerk/and proof that sometimes friends are mean").

7. Inception (director: Christopher Nolan)

The Chinese Box's Chinese Box, to be sure, with DiCaprio either fading into reality or deliberately skirting it, volleying with a gallery of supporting heavies whose purpose moves in and out of focus. The grand idea isn't as immediate or piercing as Nolan's other head trips (Memento, The Prestige), but it tackles self-doubt with a hearty ambition, and has the added bonus of being massively engrossing. Layered with the same sort of bluntly shaped ideas that court interpretation almost as a obligation, the film is also willing to indulge perspective, setting its own labyrinthine rules, cleverly explained to us by a deeply unreliable narrator. I wound up abandoning my theory-making plans while watching Inception, favoring instead to lose myself in its fog and wait until it was over to engage my mind in the debate carried on by nearly everyone with whom I spoke.

Films like this-designed to warm the brain matter-aren't often full of terrific action set-pieces, which is why Nolan is clearly one of the best mainstream American filmmakers working today: He's accomplished at delivering nearly every outcome of focus group strategists with the vigor of an auteur who has earned Final Cut. This, of course, is why, in the same breath, one can question whether the top is still spinning and, also, fist-bump the zero-gravity fight sequence's seamless execution of thrill ride mechanics.

8. Black Swan (director: Darren Aronofsky)

Expert at driving a tiny pin into our vulnerable little nerves, Darren Aronofsky clearly has a marvelous time cornering an unsuspecting movie audience (us) into rooting for (but really against) the frail and talented Nina Sayers, a ballet dancer coping with the stress of landing the lead role in demanding ballet director Thomas Leroy's (Vincent Cassell) new, "stripped down" (ha-ha) Swan Lake. (Cassell, by the way, is in prime scenery-chew mode, eliciting both the "want" of women and the "want to be" of men, a feat of sorts, methinks, as he's playing a BALLET DIRECTOR.) Playing on our natural instinct to cheer on the underdog in this sort of film - by casting angelic Natalie Portman in the lead role and allowing her to casually, improbably, reap the part - Aronofsky, instead, takes the idea of giving oneself over to one's art and wields it like a sharp object. Cranking the intensity like a volume switch, the film is never out of Portman's headspace, eshewing any and all cut aways that don't feature her or her point of view, and gradually transferring her ensuing madness onto us: She can't get away from herself and we can't get away from her. The denoument-which I won't spoil-is as fraying to our sensibility as anything in Aronofsky's cherished Requiem For a Dream, but here, its for fun-like a scare flick-not didactic, never cautionary and, often, just flat-out impressive.

9. A Prophet (director Jacques Audiard)

Although standard for a prison tale (man survives hard time by becoming gopher to Corsican gangsters)-even one set in Paris-A Prophet is told from the perspective of France's red-headed stepchild-an Algerian serving time for brawling with cops. Though illiterate and clearly on the downside of opportunity both inside the prison and out, Tahar Rahim is plainly likable, with a matinee-idol-of-ages-past sort of presence, navigating violent waters with cautiously ambitious fervor. Chock full of staggering moments of clarity, A Prophet takes a page from the book of Goodfellas (massive compliment alert!), emphasizing the mastery of the black market (as opposed to using it to get clean). In fact, just putting the titles of both films in one sentence, it occurs to me that it has been a long, dry spell since I saw a film about organized crime that didn't feel rote or stale. This is perhaps the first and last word here: Audiard recasts the mold, creating from social realism and racial schism a work of potent genre entertainment.

10. It Might Get Loud (director: Davis Guggenheim)

The pursuit of original, ear-shredding guitar sounds spotlights the energy of its players, all seemingly chosen as if to satisfy my craving to see that energy in the plucking. It opens with Jack White making a guitar out of a glass coke bottle. The Edge, his craft fueled by the fumes of Brian Eno, spends hours and hours with foot pedals and effects boards attempting to attain sonic perfection.

And Jimmy Page, who fused the blues guitar into the birth of heavy metal, mumbles drip-drops of wisdom while trying not to slip on Jack White's drool. I will submit that it is just fun to watch passionate guitar players prattle on about their craft, their love of the loud, and how they've forged their own unique signatures. I can't speak for the laymen, but Page's guitar heroics, White's innovation and The Edge's science lab pursuit were just more fodder for my fix: Subjectively, I submit, I watched this film wide-eyed, moreover, because I love these artists.