Films of the Year: 2010

We're back again with the Top 25 films released in the U.K. between 1st January and 31st December 2010. There's been a lot of choice this year so its been fairly arduous compiling the list.

25. Mary and Max

A bit of a quaint one to start off with an offbeat adult animation in the vein of Wallace and Gromit about a depressed eight year old girl living in Australia and a middle-aged New Yorker with Asburger's Syndrome. The film has a warm feel from start to finish partly due to the use of music and score and partly because Barry 'Dame Edna' Humphries is the film's narrator. Mary and Max also boasts two strong vocal turns from Philip Seymour Hoffman as Max and Toni Colette as the grown-up version of Mary. The film isn't for everyone but for me I found it incredibly funny, very warm and at times extremely moving. To be fair it is a bit predictable in places but overall I found this to be a splendid little gem of a film.

24. Four Lions

As you will see from the list, I thought this year was a great year for British films and this is the first of many in the list. I think everybody expected that the debut from Chris 'Brass Eye' Morris wasn't going to be a small romantic comedy but not many were expecting a film about suicide bombers. But rather than present the suicide bombers as a smart bunch they are all presented as rather bungling or over-the-top. That is apart from Riz Ahmed as Omar who anchored the film with a superb breakout performance portraying a family man who realises he has a greater purpose and has to try and rally his team of misfits together. The film also has some really laugh-out-loud moments and one is particularly shocking but this is a comedy that makes you think possibly more than it makes you laugh, which can only be a good thing.

23. The Maid

While not always thriling, this character study from Chile is a great little comedy-drama about family and belonging. Catalina Saaverda puts in a top notch performance as Raquel a maid who has been with the same family for 23 years and whose position feels threatened when her employers decide they want to hire an assistant for her. The film definitely has splapstick comedy elements which feature around Raquel trying to get rid of the other maids in the house but there is also a sweet story of a woman who doesn't fit in without outside society and isn't entirely happy with her lot. Sebastian Silva expertly puts the film together making every scene count and I thought Saaverda's performance was one of the best female leading turns I have seen in a while.

22. Cemetery Junction

As close friends know I've never been a big fan of Ricky Gervais' work, while I enjoy both The Office and Extras I find both, especially the former, very overrated and I also found his first work as writer/director, The Invention of Lying, very uneven indeed. Imagine my surprise then that I found his latest work, co-written and directed with Stephen Merchant, very enjoyable indeed. While the story of three lads in their early 20s growing up in a small Reading town pretty cliched it was well put together and flowed very nicely indeed. The whole thing has a nice retro feel to it and the three young actors shone throughout however it is Emily Watson as Ralph Fiennes' put upon wife who stole the show for me and I though even Gervais was pretty good in it.

21. The Disappearance of Alice Creed

I often find that the one genre that Brits never seem to do well is that of the thriller however this year with The Disappearance of Alice Creed I think they got it spot on. This film works as its incredibly well-executed and tense relying on three strong characters rather than a lot of explosions and car chases. All three actors, especially the always excellent Eddie Marsan, make the story worth following and the film's final third is edge-of-your-seat stuff. The films first 10 or so minutes are also acted in complete silence which means you get hooked straight away without having to worry about what people are saying. This is a thriller about actions rather than words, very simple and utterly rewarding if only British thrillers were always this good.

20. Catfish

2010 was the year in which we were presented with documentaries which may or may not be entirely true. There was Baksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop (which almost made the list) and Casey Affleck's doc about Joaquin Phoenix - I'm Still Here. However my favourite was Catfish, a film about a photographer who starts chatting to a family on Facebook after he is sent a painting of one of his photos by the family's 8 year old daughter. He soon finds himself in a virtual relationship with the girl's half-sister but when he, his brother and their other filmmaker friend dig a little deeper they start to realise that things aren't what they seem. Some of the elements of the story and the discoveries that are made almost seem too far-fetched to be 100% real and as this is a film about cover-ups and lies it would be ironic if the 'documentary' wasn't entirely genuine. Despite that it is still a compelling story and is very relevant in a time in which we spend more time texting and talking on Facebook than we do conducting face to face conversations.

19. The Illusionist

For those who feel that in 2010 that films aren't seen as pieces of artwork any more need look no further than Sylvian Chomet's perfectly drawn film about a down-on-his luck French magician who goes to Scotland and forms a strange relatioship with a young girl. The film relies almost soley on its visual presentation but despite containing hardly any dialogue at all this is a character study about what happens when people believe in something your not and the unexpected relationships that we form throughout our lives. Despite not being real I found the character of The Illusionist one of the most genuine of the year and the film's final scenes almost had me in tears. Although animation in the 21st century is almost dominated by computer animation, I think hand-drawn animation still has its place and feels a lot more real.

18. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

Turning from an animation that felt very real to a live action film that didn't really have its place in reality, Edgar Wright's adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Graphic Novels had a style all of its own. The story focuses on the titular drop-out, played by Michael Cera, who finds out that in order to date the woman he loves he has to defeat her seven evil exes. Each of these battles is utterly hilarious and all have different elements to keep them a little bit fresh. The film is one stark scene after another everything is full of action and there is also a lot of laughs to be had throughout. While Michael Cera's performance anchors the film it is the support cast who provide most of the laughs namely Kieran Culkin as Pilgrim's roommate and Chris Evans as one of the exes. The film slightly slips when it has to explore the character's emotional sides but overall this was possibly the guilty pleasure movie of the year.

17. Winter's Bone

Some films rely heavily on their backdrop to create character and Winter's Bone did this throughout. The film involves 17 year old Ree Dolly desperately trying to find her father in order to keep her family's home in the Ozark Mountains. The film is part road-trip and part coming-of-age story as Ree tries to get to the bottom of the conspiracies that haunt the area's small community. I found the film utterly involving and Ree's story particularly harrowing thanks mainly to a strong script and a realistic performance from Jennifer Lawrence who is sure to be a big star following this film. An intriguing and original tale and one that still sends chills down my back when I think about it.

16. Up in The Air

Although Up in The Air is techincally a 2009 film, it didn't arrive over here till January and that's why it features in this list. Despite the film dealing with very modern topics like the recession and computers doing the jobs of men an women this is very much a story that would've fitted in during Hollywood's Golden Agea nd that's mainly due to the appearance of one George Clooney as Ryan Bingham a man who goes around the country firing people and spends most of his time flying around. Although Clooney is very good the film wouldn't be anything without its two female leads Vera Farmiga as Clooney's love interest and Anna Kendrick as the girl he is reluctantly showing the business to. After Thank You For Smoking and Juno, Jason Reitman has really established himself as a director who knows how to tell a story and Up In The Air was certainly a story worth watching.

15. Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up together for the first time since the Oscar winning The Departed. Although Shutter Island was a different piece of film-making all together, as Scorsese made a homage to the classic noir genre with a bit of a modern element thrown in. The island in question houses a mental institute where one of the patient has escaped and DiCaprio's CIA agent Teddy Daniels must get to the truth. This film was pure escapist enjoyment with a huge gazumping score and some fine classic actors like Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow completely hamming it up. While this might be seen as a bit of a kitsch film it was still highly enjoyable and was made with the high standard that you would expect from Scorsese.

14. The Kids Are All Right 

With Kathryn Bigelow picking up the Best Director Oscar this year it finally marked the recognition of female directors and strong female voices within cinema. This is probably best highlighted through Lisa Cholodenko's work about a lesbian couple with two children from the same sperm donor and what happens when they meet said donor. It was very refreshing to see that the film didn't wholly focus on the fact that two lesbians were raising children but instead treated them like any other family with their dysfunctions and arguments. This film also boasted fine five performances from its ensemble cast most prominently from Annette Bening as Nic, the older of the two women and certainly the more reserved of the two. There is one scene in particular in which Bening discovers something that she shouldn't which is just heartbreaking and this scene alone should win her the Best Actress Oscar that's alluded her so far in her career. This film is both funny and sensitive but never is it preachy or over-sentimental.

13. Restrepo

After the success of The Hurt Locker, this year we were presented with Restrepo which some dubbed - 'the Real Life Hurt Locker'.The documentary is highlights of the year that journalist Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington spent in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley following the lives of the men in the 2nd Platoon for a Vanity Fair assignment. The Restrepo of the title is the outpost that the platoon were fighting to defend for the majority of the film and was named after the medic who tragically died before the film started. The film is eye-opening in its exploration of war, why the men are still in Afghanistan and most importantly their relationship with the Afghans themselves. But what really strikes you is the relationship between the men and how quickly they come become friends when they're thrown together in extreme circumstances. There's warmth, humour and unsurpringsly a lot of tragedy but this for me is one of the best stories of the year and certainly the Best Documentary film by a country mile.

12. Another Year

For his last film, Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh left his trademark bleak storytelling behind and instead produced as a light-hearted comic piece. While not as light as that, Another Year certainly has a lot of laughs but mainly explores human relationships and how we react to certain situations. Centred around four seasons of the same year it follows Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen's happily married couple as they encounter difficulty with their friend Mary, meet their son's new girlfriend and have to deal with a tragedy in the family but reacting to it all in their same matter-of-fact way. I found the film to be very British and highlighted a lot of the nuances that make us human. The film's best point though is Lesley Manville, who as Mary, goes through a complete turn around as Leigh brings out the real side of this seemingly cheery individual. Overall this proves once again that Mike Leigh is one of Britain's greatest living film-makers.

11. Easy A

Just missing out on the Top 10 is this High School comedy which many have compared to Mean Girls or Clueless but for me its closer in tone to Jason Reitman's Juno as it boasts both a witty script and a very smart and clever central performance. That performance comes form Emma Stone, who has previously been seen as a supporting player in films like Superbad and Zombieland, as Olive a socially-invisible girl who gets spun into a web of lies and starts lying about her sexual conquests. Like Ellen Page's Juno, Stone's Olive sees herself as a tough girl who has used sarcasm as a way of making her way through High School but under her exterior their are emotions that come out quite naturally in the film's final stages. There are plenty of things to like in this film - the story, Stone herself and a supporting cast that includes Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Thomas Hayden Church and Malcolm McDowell. It's very hard to make a film about High School that is this good but somehow Eay A has done it.


10. Skeletons

Starting off the Top 10 now with the first of two films that see people going into other people's subconcious to discover their secrets. I'm sure you can guess what the second one is as most people flocked to see that over the summer, but not many saw Skeletons Nick Whitfield's delightful comedy about Bennett and Davis two men who are hired to explore the skeletons in peoples wardrobes which they do quite literally. The imagination behind the whole thing is astonishing and it is a pretty high-concept film but at the same time it shows that you don't have to have a massive budget to make films with these concepts. Whitfield makes sure that the film retains its Britishness so there's plenty of scenes on trains and at railways as well as Jason Isaacs' turn as 'The Colonel' the boy's boss who is as British as they come and also sleeps in a very comical fashion. Skeletons explores the themes of family, loss and belonging has lots of laughs along the way and a very heart-warming but unsentimental ending.


9. The Secret in Their Eyes

Many were shocked at this year's Oscars when an Argentian film that not many people had heard off beat favourites like Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and a French film on this list to the Best Foreign Film prize. However Juan Jose Campanella's film does feel like it has elements of Ameircan crime movies in it, which may be explained by Campanella's work on shows like House and Law and Order. The film focuses ont he re-opening of a case that has dogged a legal counsellor for years as he consults with his lost love as he writes a book about it. As well as having a very strong script and plot, some of the films visual sequences are extremely striking and in particular one at a football game gets you right into the action. The film's ending is both shocking and fullfilling giving an original conclusion to a film that could so easily have ended in cliche. While it may not have been the best film out of the five contenders at this year's Oscars, after everybody saw the film there wasn't as many complaints about the outcome as there was at the time of the awards themselves.


8. Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll

While it's not the highest placing given to a British director, Mat Whitecross' biopic about the life of Ian Dury is the top British-set film in the list. While I am a fan of the music of Dury, I didn't really know that much about the man himself and this depicts his arkward relationship with his father, growing up tormented in a boy's home and his failure to be a good family man and husband. However Whitecross and writer Paul Viragh have refused to present a linear narrative and have instead presented the story in flashback and flash-forward having scenes interspersed with musical performances from Andy Serkis as Dury. Serkis' Dury then acts as both subject and compere and the actor himself gives a career-best performance as the troubled rocker. A great supporting cast including Naomie Harris and Son of Ramob's Bill Millner add depth to a film full of style and one that subverts the genre of the musical biopic and gives it a bit of a kick up the arse.


7. The Girl With The Dragon Tatooo

Although the adverts would have you believe that it is a 'International Phenomenon', Stieg Larsonn's Millenium Trilogy were simply three very-well written mystery novels transported to the big screen, two of which debuted on Swedish T.V. While those two films were average at best, the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo film was one of the best of the year as it sort of came out of nowhere and gripped me from start to finish. Most of that credit can go to Noomi Rapace who gave possibly the character of the year in the tatooed, often mono-syllabic Lisbeth Salander, a girl who finds it hard to trust people but is incredibly intelligent at the same time. While the plot itself may be a standard whodunnit it style mystery it is the characters that give the film its greatness and as well a Rapace, Michael Nyqvist must take some credit for portraying Mikel Blomkvist who sort of ties the whole thing together. As well as being the most tightly-plotted of the three films, it is also very cinematic especially the scenes involving Lisbeth's motorcycle chase in the film's final stages. Niels Arden Opley did such a good job with the film that it seems a shame that David Fincher seemed to feel the need for an American-language remake. But Rooney Mara will never do Lisbeth justice the same way as the brilliant Rapce has done.

6. A Prophet

The film that lost out to The Secret in Their Eyes as the year's best Foreign Language Feature is, for me at least, the year's best that isn't in the English language. Although I found Jacques Audaird's film baggy in places, and not quite as good as his masterpiece The Beat That My Heart Skipped, I thought it was one of the best films set in prison of all time. Tahar Rahim's central performance as a young man trapped in the middle of a war inside prison was just superb and the scenes set inside the institution felt entirely real. Audaird was able to show a frank and unflattering portrayal of prison life and give us a character we enjoyed to follow no matter waht actually happened to him. I did feel that the film possibly could've been cut down a tiny bit but the story was so good that I didn't mind the film's slower moments. Overall a triumph that did deserve the Oscar that it didn't get.

5. Toy Story 3

As previously stated this year's films have been of a very high standard that the third and final film in one of cinema's greatest trilogies only enteres the list at Number Five. As of late Pixar have been dealing with rather deep character-based films and Toy Story 3 was filled with plenty of darker moments to counterbalance the light comedy which was given an added twist with the addition of Little Miss Sunshine's Michael Ardnt to the screenwriting team. The film combined screwball elements and some clever satire with a story about growing up and saying goodbye to childhood. While I didn't cry buckets at the film's ending like others have admitted to doing I still thought that the ending was the right way to go and that Woody and Buzz et al had a fitting send-off.

4. Monsters

The first of three British directors to hit the Top 5 despite their films not being set in the U.K, Gareth Edwards' first full length cinematic feature sees him follow an Ameircna photo-jounalist entasked with making sure his boss' daughter gets back from Mexico to America safely. This is made harder by the fact that their route will see them cros an 'Infected Zone' in which a NASA space probe crashed six years earlier and where monsters are seen to attack. Edwards film is part sci-fi, part road movie with a love story thrown in and the chemistry between leads Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able feels genuine as they were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time of shooting and are now married. While some have been annoyed that the film feature hardly any actual monsters, the monsters are simply a backdrop to a story about war, greed, the media and ultimately what we care about most. Edwards' is able to create a very real, subtle and emotive piece of work which trascends genres and is a truly great watch.

3. The Social Network

If this list were based on screenplay alone than The Social Network would find itself very firmly at the top of the list. That's thanks to Aaron Sorkin who has written a very witty and insightful script about Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook and the ends he went to to get to the top, but would you expect anything else from the man who bought as The West Wing? The performances from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield and even Justin Timberlake as Napster's Sean Parker are just stunning and despite all the flashbacks and flash forwards the film runs along nicely and tells us a interesting tale about the online tool that most of us now use everyday. The Social Network is a story about jealousy, paranoia and how some of the greatest inventions of our generation can come from the oddest of places. At the same time its not particularly cinematic and that's why I have only awarded it a bronze medal here. Saying that I thought this was a well acted and a well written piece that the academy will lap up and I wouldn't be surprised if it nabbed Best Picture at next year's Oscars.

2. Kick Ass

I have to say I'm not a massive fan of comic book movies I often find them overlong and over-indulgent although there is the odd exception, Iron Man (but not the sequel), I just think they take themselves too seriously. I think that's why I enjoyed Matthew Vaughn's Kick Ass so much a film about an outsider and comic book fan who decides he wants to become a superhero himself. After tackling the fantasy world with Stardust Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman look at the superhero film and turn it on its head creating a vivid New York city and turning the standard superhero fights into something special indeed. Aaron Johnson followed up his John Lennon role in Nowhere Boy with the lead donning an American accent and really performing well in a cast that also included Mark Strong and Nic Cage. However it was Chloe Moretz as the 12 year old foul-mouthed Hit Girl that caught everyone's attention and unshockingly outraged The Daily Mail. But for all its bravado, colour and broad humour, Kick Ass still has a lot of heart its about growing up, its about fathers and sons and fathers and daughters and what it really means to be a hero. Kick Ass was a very striking and unforgettable piece of film-making that just happened to be based on a comic book.

1. Inception

And I'm afraid that my Number One, like so many other people's, is Inception mainly because I've been a Christopher Nolan fan ever since I saw Memento almost ten years ago. Nolan brings elements of all of his previous works together for what will probably be considered his masterpiece - the sort of methodical nature of Memento, with the twists and turns of The Prestige, the stark settings of Insomnia and the big scale epicness of his Batman films. But more than anything it proved that you can have an intelligent grown-up plot to a summer blockbuster and you can give ingenious reasons why people are being shot at and why explosions are happening. The performances were also all very good while there's too many to mention here I would single out Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard the latter of whom did a great job portraying Leonardo DiCaprio's wife a role that was sort of half villain half tragic heroine. I think that Inception caught everybody unawares and still has everybody talking almost six months after about that ending...

And now for the duds...
Most Disappointing Films of The Year:

Alice in Wonderland -Once my favourite director and a man that could do no wrong, Tim Burton seemingly can do no right as of yet and his Alice in Wonderland was embaressing, slow and made worse by the retro-fit into 3D. Its worrying when one of the best things in your film is the voice of Barbara Windsor.

The Killer Inside Me -Although I don't always enjoy them, I find Michael Winterbottom's films interesting if nothing else. But for me The Killer Inside Me was a violent film not a film about violence, I felt the story lacked depth and that Casey Affleck do a lot better.

Robin Hood -I don't know if it was Russell Crowe's Yorshire-Australian-Irish accent or the fact that there was too much walking around but Ridley Scott's Robin Hood just didn't do it for me.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -Why wasn't Michael Douglas in it more?


Top 5 Worst films of the Year:

5. The Bounty Hunter: Midnight Run as a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston as a journalist. Where could it possibly go wrong? Aniston and Gerard Butler are not for one minute believable as a couple and to say the slapstick segments are unfunny is to do dishonour to the word itself. 

4. Grown-Ups: This film probably would've been funnier if Adam Sandler and his comedy pals had simply gone on holiday and filmed what they got up to. Instead a weak script full of the usual gross-out gags and innuendos topped off with hardly any resolution to speak of meant that this was an unfunny dud and did a disservice to Sandler's career following the brilliant Funny People. 

3. Jonah Hex: Although only 70 minutes long, Hex still felt overlong, baggy and ultimately pointless. 

2. Eat Pray Love: Julia Roberts goes around Italy, India and Thailand looking pretty, eating and not putting on any weight. Ryan Murphy is glad that people still like Glee or his career would be over after directing this tripe. 

1. Dear John: It made me want to vomit repeatedly it ruined most of Damien Rice's music for me but at least I learnt something about coins.

See you all back here in 2011.