Best of 2010: The 10 Best Films of the Year

by Tony Dayoub

Last night's electrifying fuck-it-all performance by Ricky Gervais as host of the Golden Globes has prompted me to start closing the door on the cinema of 2010. This past year, I was fortunate enough to see most movies relatively early (still yet to see: Blue Valentine, Enter the Void, Four Lions, The Illusionist, Mother, A Prophet, Restrepo, Sweetgrass, Tiny Furniture). Last week, online mag Wide Screen published my top 23 films of the year; an odd number, yes, but this was a good year for movies. I encourage readers to check the article out, where my fellow writers (including editor Glenn Kenny, The New York Press' Simon Abrams, MTV's Kurt Loder, Self-Styled Siren Farran Smith Nehme, The Village Voice's Vadim Rizov, and feature writer Karl Rozemeyer) and I discuss the recurring myth that the past year was a bad one for cinema (as well as peer into what 2011 looks like from here).

After the jump, you'll find a preview of my list highlighting the top 10 entries. When possible, I link to my past reviews of each film. More thoughts on each movie can be found in the newest issue of Wide Screen.

Blu-ray Review: Solitary Man (2010)

by Tony Dayoub

There's a certain kind of "indie" film—your Little Miss Sunshine, or Slumdog Millionaire, or Crazy Heart—films which challenge their audience a bit more than the average mainstream film, but not too much. I put "indie" in quotes because the film is not the true independent from back in Cassavettes' day. It still benefits from the positioning a major actor or a cast of major actors provides. It still gets funding (at least on the tail end of the post-production/marketing stage) from a smaller shingle overseen by a big studio, or what they sometimes call a mini-major like a Lionsgate Films. This year's trendy film in this category is The Kids Are All Right, the one with Julianne Moore and her wife (Annette Benning) meeting their kids' biological father (Mark Ruffalo) whose sperm was used to inseminate each of them. These movies are usually pleasant enough I find. And I usually venture into them with an open heart, predisposed to liking them because of the alternative they offer to "the same old shit." But I usually leave feeling betrayed, for any number of reasons. Either the film's conclusion holds a "message"; or a contrivance is offered in the course of the film to goose up a narrative which hardly seemed evident through the first two-thirds of the film; or in the case of The Kids Are All Right, some annoying alt-rock soundtrack is married to the film in order to tell me how I should be feeling every step of the way (see Away We Go). What a true pleasure it is to encounter a film such as Solitary Man then—a movie which I went into feeling fairly guarded after the number of times I'd been burned—and finding a true gem.