By Roderick Heath

I did resolve to do a more thorough and serious “confession” this year than those of previous years, in part because this piece will look at several of my favourite films for the year that, for various reasons, I’ve been unable to write up in the more traditional Ferdy on Films template. I doubt what follows lives up my lofty ambitions. It’s been a year, in terms of general quality of movies, both better than it seemed at first and yet also riddled with crushing disappointments. I doubt too many will argue with the proposition that there have been precious few great works, or ones that even tried for greatness. Greatness requires flashes of rebellion against what’s already been proven as reliable and sturdy, whereas today’s cultural centrifuges work to assert a pulverising sameness. That any art form can, and should, offer up many different paradigms of style and story at once has, oddly, never been a popular notion, and even those who claim to want something different often merely settle for repeated versions of something different. A film like The King’s Speech is no less formulaic than the average dim-witted action flick or rom com, and I’m surprised so few seem to notice.

As I’ve said in years past, I’m usually happier raking the debris of cinema culture rather than admiring its shiny new bastions. And at a time when contemporary Hollywood’s directors would benefit from relearning some rigorous classicism in their approach to storytelling and cinematic technique, I’m also finding more than ever that there’s a depressing homogeneity and surface-level pseudo-insight that’s infected the screenwriters in Tinseltown, and elsewhere, too. They’re all so reliant on the most predictable, by-rote, class-taught story structures, and producers have rarely been so fond of the notion that all you have to do is assemble certain disparate pieces in the correct order, and you’ll have a colossal hit. That sort of thing made itself particularly apparent in obscene chimeras throughout the year, in blockbuster fare like Clash of the Titans, The Wolfman, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Robin Hood, as well as would-be serious dramas like The King’s Speech and Hereafter. On the other hand, easily illustrated by the likes of Splice and Black Swan, self-appointed auteurs often think it’s enough that they came up with a pile of provocative ideas, and leave most of the actual work to the audience in a patent search for cult status: if you didn’t “get” the movie, then you simply weren’t the right audience for it. If Christopher Nolan’s Inception was admirable for anything, it was that it was plainly the product of a singular aesthetic and artistic sensibility that wasn’t afraid to think big; and yet it, too, belonged in all aspects to this second category, except in terms of its budget and box office. One obvious reason for the giddy reception of Black Swan in some quarters is that whilst its story basics are hackneyed and characters numbingly clichéd, as filmmaking, it’s something far beyond the everyday.

In any event, I achieved a personal record in terms of the number of films released in the U.S. or Australia in the 2010 calendar year that I’ve managed to catch, but still not all that many by the standards of a professional critic. In the past few weeks I’ve had repeated conversations with esteemed colleague Marilyn Ferdinand about the year’s well-thought-of films which we’ve been working our way through at a time when we’ve had sharply diverging tastes and expectations about them. Marilyn’s been hungry for films with positive and expansively humanistic sensibilities, which have, sadly, been pretty thin on the ground. I’ve found myself, on the other hand, responding enthusiastically, or, at least, with a certain empathetic recognition, to the oft-brutal and misanthropic mood exhibited in so many films. Movies seem to be channelling the repressed rage that many have felt in the past years of mismanaged wars and economies, the impatience with officialdom and low-burning unrest in our info-bombarded zeitgeist. Occasionally, the zeitgeist even provides its own revealingly mangled rhymes. One of the major screen heroes of the year was a bisexual Swedish female nerd fond of exposing malfeasance on the internet and brutally punishing rapists; one of the most controversial real-life figures of the year was an ambisexual Aussie nerd fond of exposing malfeasance on the internet and accused of rape in Sweden. One of the most “fun” films of 2010 featured a prepubescent girl butchering adults in a calculated but slyly passionate jab at the ever-more cloying, hermetic middle classes whose anxieties are usually the bread and butter of all big commerce, Hollywood included. Prime award-bait piece Rabbit Hole presented a great long wallow in the fallout of when the cult of suburban cocooning fails.

At the heart of that misanthropic streak, perhaps of the most interesting, continually recurring figure in this year’s more prominent works has been the antihero who, variously treacherous, criminal, reprehensible, even downright psychopathic in their war with the world, who find themselves finally, painfully, destructively tethered to their remaining human affections and emotions. Such a description roughly fits John Hawkes’ Teardrop in Winter’s Bone, Mads Mikkelsen’s One-Eye in Valhalla Rising, Eddie Marsan’s Vic in The Disappearence of Alice Creed, Casey Affleck’s Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, George Clooney’s Man with Many Names in The American, Olga Kurylenko’s Etain in Centurion, Ben Mendelsohn’s Pope in Animal Kingdom, Nicholas Cage’s Big Daddy in Kick-Ass, and even, in their less flashy fashions, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and Pierce Brosnan’s Adam Lang in The Ghost Writer. In contrast, the need and will to escape, whether it be from literal captivity, oppressive lives and crushing weights, in defiance of whole social hierarchies or merely of a daily grind or tragic memory, saw hapless but determined Everymen and women rise in counterpoint to the general run of bastards on screen. Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island and Cobb in Inception, Jim Carrey’s Steven Russell in I Love You Phillip Morris, Katie Jarvis’ Mia Williams in Fish Tank, Aggeliki Papoulia’s Older Daughter in Dogtooth, Gemma Arterton’s Alice Creed, Keir Gilhcrist’s Craig in It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Angelina Jolie’s Evelyn Salt in Salt, the hapless heroes of Predators and The Town and Centurion and even, in their way, Stephen Dorff’s Johnny Marco in Somewhere and the unfortunate couple in Rabbit Hole—all were fighting against things as seemingly benign as the suffocating sponginess of consumerism or an inability to find their true selves, or very real, very dangerous corporeal enemies, and dread existential abysses. Even Serge Gainsbourg, as portrayed in Johann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: vie heroique, is chased around by the literalised ogre image of the anti-Semitism that terrorises and inspires him to the end of his days.

Some of these characters fit into both categories: does not One-Eye, in his wordless way, flee the lingering ghosts of the men he’s killed in search of a transcendence he finds in the most unlikely of places? Is not Teddy Daniels both killer and victim, quarry and pursuer? Doesn’t Mia nearly kill a small girl in her anguished attempt to protest her betrayal and limited life options? The American even trundles slowly to a dead halt, painted in his own blood, in a final effort to escape a life in which he is advised not to make friends—to be, therefore, dead whilst still alive. The young walking organ bags of Never Let Me Go did not try to escape physically, but they did try to establish their own identities and make their own pathetic protests against the inevitable. Their rebellion is to be much more human than the film’s imagined alternate society expects them to be. Steven Russell flees lives, sexual identities, and law enforcement with the panicked speed of a man desperately trying to keep hold of the one thing that gives his self-destructively consumerist lifestyle some specific gravity.

Many of those cinematic monsters, walking wounded, and wayward warriors had been raised virtually since birth to be the creatures they are, sometimes obeying their ingrained purposes to the letter, others rebelling and seeking out their own raison d’être. There’s a certain irony in this theme, insofar as there’s probably never been such a time in human history in which people are less required to master certain survival arts than today. But perhaps there is both the reaction to and commentary on the growing panic in which children are shoved into the rites of growing up and preparation for an ever more paranoiacally competitive world. Mindy “Hit-Girl” Macready, Evelyn Salt, and Etain are brought up as creatures of dynamic savagery to avenge murdered family members. Teddy Daniels and the Bostonian heavies of The Town are steeped in regulation American machismo and class warfare, struggling against all ingrained presumptions to think of another way out of their jams. Ree Dolly, as a backwoods, squirrel-shootin’, back-talkin’ Lady Liberty, advises her young siblings, “There’s a lot of things you’re gonna have to learn to stop being afraid of.” Nina Sayers of Black Swan is the product of a lifetime regimen of training and preparation for a great future that may never come unless she learns to rebel against precisely what has pushed her so far. The children of Dogtooth enact a perverted version of arch patriarchal, bourgeois fantasies of keeping children socially sterilised against pernicious, uncontrolled forces. Future king Bertie (Colin Firth) in The King’s Speech has been twisted into incoherent knots by the firm upbringing designed to make him strong and resolute, yet it turns out that’s exactly what was needed to fight the dirty Hun. Harry Potter lurched ever closer to the fate awaiting him since infanthood. Even the original gangster himself, Robin Hood, made a cursory outing, passing rapidly through alternate social ranks to finally discover he is the common ancestor of Winston Churchill and Glenn Beck.

If Hit Girl’s rampaging violence represented a kind of giddy fantasy of unleashed anarchy, Never Let Me Go examined the exact opposite world of existential entrapment, and Dogtooth remained balanced precariously and thrillingly between the two, all three nonetheless presented variations on this same theme of who we were are raised to be and why. The notion that, in the end, all behaviours and actions are both futile and infinite, resounds. The notion that the mind is its own deep well that contains entrapping depths and stygian nightmares, whilst hardly novel, again rose up to swamp many of these heroes and heroines. Shutter Island and Black Swan offered up male and female archetypes—the über-macho film noir hero and the innocent, fragile maiden—who take long trips through their own psyches, becoming their own enemies, soothsayers, and spirit-guides. Teddy and Nina are both disintegrating psychos who destroy themselves for a principle, and that principle is love in differing forms. Love also vibrates beneath the harsh, violent, taciturn surface of Valhalla Rising, where One-Eye’s affection for the child he adopts leads him to sacrifice himself to a tribe of Native Americans his mind has reconfigured into avenging demons, on the edge of all human existence.

A couple of more random notes:

—It was a good year for British directors, whether overseas or at home.

—If films like Inception, Black Swan, and The Social Network, in their differing fashions, tried to choke the audience with exhibitions of their own glib brilliance, The American, Dogtooth, Valhalla Rising, and The Disappearance of Alice Creed proved how little you need to compel an audience.

—Will someone buy Leonardo DiCaprio a decent razor?

2010 in Fragments

Even if films aren’t great or even that memorable as a whole, so many offer up glorious little bits that are worthy and make being a cinephile the fun business it really is. One of the great scenes in 2010 featured former boy wonder Harry Potter having the bleakest of Christmas Eve homecomings. He finds the graves of his parents and grotesque monsters wearing the guises of helpful humans whilst locked on the frozen exterior of a cozy world, the yuletide songs of that world emerging muffled from within the warmth of civilised security and all its stable assumptions. Our heroes are enacting some dark duties indeed these days to satisfy our sense of truth.

Another great scene, in Dogtooth, presented a dialectical opposite: in the nominal balm of her family living room on a celebratory eve, a young woman brought up on a scant diet of seemingly randomly absorbed pop culture moments amidst a sea of context-warping disinformation, attempts madly to please her parents with a grotesque aping of Flashdance’s iconic dance routines.

Teddy Daniels, in one of his psychotic dreams, imagines a smiling beauty covered in blood, cheerfully asking for and receiving his help in bundling away her murdered children’s bodies. In another, he stands amidst a shower of papers, denying a hideously wounded Nazi a quick coup de grace by pushing away his gun.

Wonder warrior Hit Girl finishes up beaten to a pulp by her arch nemesis and murderer of her parents, mobster Frank D’Amico, only for the baddie to be fired out the window on the end of a rocket by Hit Girl’s adoptive brother, with the advice, “Pick on someone your own size” trailing him. Truly, love expresses itself in some strange ways.

In Somewhere, Johnny Marco and his daughter Cleo bond over Guitar Hero, competing to see who can play the worse fake rock god. In Gainsbourg: vie heroique, a genuine rock god and momentary amour Brigitte Bardot celebrate sex and life with a joyous impromptu performance of their pop-art hit “Comic Strip” in a scene straight out of an old-school musical.

In Detective Dee and The Mystery of the Phantom Flame, the titular hero and his gang of oddball aides battle their nemesis in an underground city, huge spars of wood spearing a sunless sea as our heroes enact a ballet of superhuman motion, wire-fu dynamism, and lysergic imagery in the most intricate synchronisation. In Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Scott defeats an army of henchmen after he earns the Power of Love, sees a samurai sword spring from his body, his enemies’ bodies disintegrate into piles of arcade game-feeding quarters, leaving him standing on a field of victory decorated by piles of glittering silver. In Green Zone, Matt Damon’s all-American hero seems to defy the efforts of heaven and hell to stop the truth getting out, chasing down the Iraqi general who holds the key to Pandora’s Box and battling soldiers from both sides on the way in an astounding marathon for both actor and filmmakers.

In The Killer Inside Me, Lou Ford beats a woman’s face to a shattered pulp even as she moans, “I love you.” In Winter’s Bone, Ree’s quest to find her father leads her to the emotional and physical abyss, where she has to hold his rotting corpse’s hands out of the water so that they can be cut off with a chainsaw. The American commences with the ultimate act for a star looking to change his image: George Clooney shoots the woman he just made love to in the back of the head.

In Centurion, after killing another Roman in her unceasing quest to avenge atrocities, Etaine releases a scream of frustrated rage that echoes only with the unfillable void that endless slaughter provokes. In Never Let Me Go, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) releases a similar scream when he realises how hopeless his dream of escaping a slow death of being hacked up to keep other people alive has been. In Valhalla Rising, the lost Celtic would-be holy warriors devolve into hysterical mutual battery and desperate prayer, appealing to a God that doesn’t answer, squirming in the mud and howling at the wind. In I Love You Phillip Morris, Phillip, believing his lover Steven has died, receives a visit from his lawyer, who proves to be Steven. Faking your death from AIDS, he informs us, is quite a tricky feat.

Scott Pilgrim follows Ramona Flowers into her mystic abode, seeming to skate upon thin air. The American goes down on his favourite prostitute, to her utter surprise and swiftly captured affection. Black Swan‘s Nina, deep in a dug-addled fantasy, grasps her rival-cum-friend Lily (Mila Kunis) for the most ecstatic of erotic revels: the moment of seeing Nina give into lust with real joy made a refreshing contrast (even if it’s just a wet dream) to a spectacle like that of Greenberg’s Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) and Florence (Greta Gerwig) fucking in so pathetically uninspired a fashion that even they can’t be bothered sticking it out to the end. Perhaps better than Black Swan’s Sapphic onanism was the moment, both hallucinogenic and tender, when The Runaways’ Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) kisses Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) when pumped full of drugs in an infernal nightclub, the fetishist drone of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” blaring. Rarely has young lust seemed at once so innocent and so dangerous.

Some things that are remarkable about movies aren’t even so specific. The moody, hazy, blasted Beckettesque sands of coastal New England in The Ghost Writer infuses the drama of that film with an almost existential angst that almost convinces you you’re not watching a great filmmaker wasting his time on go-nowhere pulp. The equally devastated landscape of Winter’s Bone is dotted with the refuse of a civilisation that reached a high water mark and then retreated, leaving only stains and debris. The wondrous landscapes of Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame burned with exactly the right kind of fantastic beauty, in the sort of film that the people who made the likes of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Clash of the Titans remake, and Iron Man 2 should be forced to watch on a constant loop until they forget their names and start speaking Cantonese.

Actors

When one talks about award-worthy performances these days, it’s hard not to take for granted that such acting usually come wrapped in crappy films. Two of this year’s best feats of acting, Natalie Portman’s in the cheesy if giddily entertaining Black Swan and Colin Firth in the stolid The King’s Speech are both elegant testimonials to both actors’ rise through wayward careers to the peak of their craft. Portman’s advance from the fetchingly sassy young outcast of Leon, The Professional to Black Swan’s anguished, ardent Nina caps off a fascinating trip, and if any human element gives material force to the trippy, dippy rush of that film, it’s her splendidly heady, overwrought presentation of a repressed girl who ruptures at the seams and learns to revel in it. Costar Mila Kunis wasn’t so far behind her, either. Firth comes across like he put himself in real physical and psychological pain to present King George VI as anything but the honourable cipher he’s always seemed to be. Just as dynamic and physically convincing was Eric Elmosnino in Gainsbourg: vie heroique, a sustained incarnation of one of pop culture’s most protean figures, even if the film around him finally proved unable to take its reinvention of the biopic quite far enough. The late Lucy Gordon’s hypnotically beautiful contribution to that film only reinforced the tragedy of her death. After years of trying to establish his credibility as a serious actor, Jim Carrey finally achieved a near-brilliant synthesis of his comic talents with a meaty role in I Love You Phillip Morris: it’s as close as he’ll ever come to his Monsieur Verdoux.

Jennifer Lawrence’s incarnation of Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone, on the other hand, is the sort of performance that sends a fledgling career into the stratosphere. Lawrence got to speak several of 2010’s most memorable tough-guy lines, sometimes with a bloody lip. Just as important, if not more so, were John Hawkes’ and Dale Dickey’s respective contributions: both long-seasoned actors, it seemed hard nonetheless not to believe they’d been born the people they played. This year’s Hot Brit Miss, Gemma Arterton, who seemed to be in every other movie released in 2010, spent much of The Disappearance of Alice Creed tied to a bed, and yet her performance, riddled with an equal mixture of immediately engrossing fear, survivalist cunning, and spoilt party girl learning a few harsh truths, was my pick of them. Even better was Eddie Marsan’s incarnation in the same film as a gay ex-convict trying to project ferocity but ending up crucified by the one thing he loves: tossing Alice the keys that set her free was one of the most humane moments of the year. Miranda Otto’s turn in South Solitary presented a woman of advancing years and amazingly little good sense with the kind of utterly guileless quality that only the shrewdest actors can radiate. Ditto Greta Gerwig in Greenberg, whose fuzzy-headed distraction proved a defence system so resilient nuclear weapons would deflect off it. From the exact opposite end of the aggressive scale, Katie Jarvis’s excellent debut in Fish Tank provided exactly the right kind of shaded progression from jumped-up brat to newly wise existential wanderer; the clear indication that she’s older at the end of the film than her character’s mother ever will be is thanks entirely to Price’s elegant evolution. Michael Fassbender, her costar, continued moving from strength to strength, both in Fish Tank and Centurion. Mark Ruffalo likewise had a great one-two punch with Shutter Island, with his policeman’s act learnt from bad TV shows, and his unexpectedly affecting hipster douchebag in The Kids Are All Right.

Thekla Reuten’s contribution to The American as the liquid-nitrogen-cold assassin with whom the title character does business and then battle, is one of those innately convincing, utterly poised bits of acting that can make or break movies and yet rarely get noticed. George Clooney’s performance was just about as good a piece of star acting as I ever hope to see, revealing the weight of the film’s buried emotionalism almost entirely through his eyes. Similarly, Mads Mikkelsen, an intelligent actor of the highest calibre, embodied the ferocious One-Eye of Valhalla Rising with a primal grit by never speaking a word. Olga Kurylenko somehow compelled the eye with her equally wordless female equivalent in Centurion. Max Von Sydow, at age 80, actually managed to steal two huge movies this year (Shutter Island and Robin Hood) with finely pitched emeritus performances. In Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona Flowers was unique for a Dream Girl in a youth flick—she emerged as a credible, even haunted young woman with a nice line in martial arts moves. 2010 was also the year of the preternaturally mature adolescent girl: Elle Fanning’s gossamer presence in Somewhere and Chloe Moretz’s galvanising enthusiasm in Kick-Ass gave my favourite performances of the year as basically the same person in wildly different guises. Older in body, if not in mind, Aggeliki Papoulia delivered an epic performance in Dogtooth as a young woman who learns in the course of the narrative, how to bully and bribe, please and perturb, give and get orgasms, and finally, how to manipulate everything she’s been told about the world.

So, lists (stop sighing!) in alphabetical order:

My Ten Favourite Films of 2010

The American (Anton Corbijn)

Corbijn’s film version of Martin Booth’s novel “A Very Private Gentleman” was never going to win awards for originality, but it’s the film’s restrained, taciturn evocations, full of both sensuality and despair under the surfaces of the crisply described Italian setting, that made it pack a deceptive emotional punch. The American lived up to the legacy of great assassin films like Le Samourai and The Day of the Jackal it so patently wished to join.

Centurion (Neil Marshall)

There’s a lot of things wrong with Centurion—too much drive-in gore and a script awkwardly poised between providing a minimalist thrill-ride and something more meditative—but few films this year have stuck as firmly in my head. It’s a gamy, vicious, high-tensile riposte to the sloppiness of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood as far as historical action films go, and the compelling vision of warring societies on the frontier of history actually bore the weight of parable, whilst the eccentric rhythm manages to be simultaneously cynical and yet riddled with a curious spirituality. It kicked large quantities of ass, too.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed (J. Blakeson)

I watched Alice Creed just before The Ghost Writer, and there was no mystery for me which was the superior film. In spite of Polanski’s efforts, the hints of sexual satire and emotional gamesmanship in that otherwise timid thriller remained mere hints, whereas Alice Creed, whilst losing its grip at a couple of points, constructs a fraught situation that plays out with exhilaratingly nasty, yet strange, emotionally telling twists. If, as I saw it described, The Ghost Writer is “Nabokovian”, Alice Creed would only take a few slight tweaks to become a Harold Pinter play.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark)

Tsui Hark hasn’t made a good film in a long time, so his resurgence with this inspired action-adventure movie, apparently made after bathing in LSD and watching a bunch of his old movies, could be the pinnacle of the modern Hong Kong wu xia genre with a dash of steampunk, as the titular hero and his team of weirdo assistants battles secret supervillains and state-sponsored terrorism. It isn’t just Hark’s aesthetic riposte to Zhang Yimou’s Hero; it’s also a political one, insisting that loyalty to a society’s rulers must have its moral dimension.

Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos)

Safer ground for me here, as most serious critics loved Dogtooth. I’ll point out a couple of hesitations: the basic idea, far from being unique, seems rather influenced by Australian director Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby, if essayed in a completely different fashion. Also, there’s getting to be a bit too many of these arthouse movies that make a gag out of pathetic characters’ stilted attempts to reenact scenes out of iconic Hollywood movies. But that’s pretty minor in the face of a film that manages to be exactly grotesque, queasily funny, interpretatively ambiguous, and finally bizarrely beautiful.

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughan)

Another film with a lot of things wrong with it, Kick-Ass nonetheless claims its place on this list for excellent filmmaking, and for being provocative and blissfully entertaining all at the same time.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Edgar Wright)

In years to come, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World might, I hope, look like one of the few films our era has offered that can rank with the likes of A Hard Day’s Night and Singin’ In The Rain as a film that seems perpetually, giddily in love with the possibilities of youth, art, and cinema. Edgar Wright’s third film transcends his brilliant, but comparatively familiar niche of satires that blend genre tropes and humdrum truths, to present a film high on the notion that anything might happen.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)

A minor film by Scorsese’s standards, nonetheless, the drenched Technicolor nightmares and the incipient hysteria that cranks up with no good place to release itself except in tortured self-realisation proved be the kind of minor film that only a great filmmaker can produce. Unfortunate enough to come out at the year’s start, 11 months later, it looks better than ever.

Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn)

This film perhaps might also be subtitled “Where’s Werner?” But I forgive Danish-American cult director Refn’s obvious emulation of Herzog and Tarkovsky if only because that’s at least a road less travelled when it comes to homage, and because this film’s deeply weird, yet remarkably lucid final vision of the very dawn of the modern world is quite original. When a Viking killing machine and a gang of Scottish religious warriors find themselves stranded on the shores of North America, the question is not will they get home again, but, how does a human react to being confronted by their own insignificance. Stylistically vivid and thematically obscure, it nonetheless grows green in the memory.

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)

I weighed up whether to put this or The Killer Inside Me on this list: Michael Winterbottom’s film is less uneven than Granik’s, but it’s also a more purposefully remote one. Granik’s, on the other hand, remembers the cardinal rule of the westerns and film noirs it channels: it excites.

Worthy

Agora (Alejandro Amenábar)
Another Year (Mike Leigh)
The Eclipse (Conor MacPherson)
Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
Easy A (Will Gluck)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
Gainsbourg: vie heroique (Johann Sfar)
The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (David Yates)
I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra, John Requa)
The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom)
The Runaways (Floria Sigismondi)
Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
Tamara Drewe (Stephen Frears)

Better Than Expected

Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton)
Green Zone (Paul Greengrass)
Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek)
Predators (Nimrod Antal)
South Solitary (Shirley Barrett)
The Town (Ben Affleck)

Worse Than Expected

Aftershock (Xiaogang Feng)
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)
Casino Jack (George Hickenlooper)
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev)
Inception (Christopher Nolan)
The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)
The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper)
Nowhere Boy (Sam Taylor-Wood)
The Social Network (David Fincher)
Splice (Vincenzo Natali)

Fail

Animal Kingdom (David Michod)
Hereafter (Clint Eastwood)
Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau)
Robin Hood (Ridley Scott)

Unfortunately Unseen

Biutiful; Certified Copy; Toy Story 3; Vincere; White Material; etc.

My Year of Retro Wonders: The Best Older Films First Seen in 2010

Abismos de pasión (Luis Bunuel)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Burn, Witch, Burn! aka Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers)
Celine and Julie Go Boating / Duelle – une quarantaine (Jacques Rivette)
Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes (Walerian Borowczyk)
Election (Johnny To)
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! / Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer)
Intimacy (Patrice Chéreau)
La graine et le mullet (Abdellatif Kechiche)
Lady Snowblood (Toshiyo Fujita)
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin)
Night Tide (Curtis Harrington)
Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó)
Osaka Story / Sisters of Gion / Women of the Night / Sanshô the Bailiff / Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi)
The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has)
Sex and Fury (Norifumi Suzuki)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors / Sayat Nova / The Legend of Suram Fortress (Sergei Paradjanov)
Shock Corridor / Verboten! / The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller)
Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini)
The Tales of Hoffmann (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
The Trip (Roger Corman)
The Trojan Women (Michael Cacoyannis)
Trouble Every Day / 35 Rhums (Claire Denis)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jirês)
Vampyres aka Daughters of Darkness (José Larraz)