Hollywood saved the best for last … again! The studios tend to hold back their highest quality merchandise for awards-time consideration at year’s end. After a summer full of overhyped blockbusters that underwhelmed critics and underperformed with audiences, this last quarter redeemed 2010 with a diverse slate of winners. All memories of “Iron Man 2,” “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” “Shrek Forever After,” “Jonah Hex,” “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “The Last Airbender” have been purged. Mercifully, multiplex projectors and blue-ray players can whir in bliss in the wake of 2010 — thanks to a geek drama, a royal rouser, an extreme sports adventure, an animated romp, a stylish western, some family yarns and creepy thrillers.
Let’s hope we won’t have to wait eight months for a happy new movie year!
1. The Social Network: The year’s most fascinating offering, a masterful drama of the campus and the boardroom, turned the teenaged nerd who invented Facebook into an icon and a villain for the ages. It shed light on the dehumanizing side effects of the virtual environment that Mark Zuckerberg created and embodied. Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin captured everything precisely from class resentment and young male sexual desperation to the essences of greed, technology and genius.
2. The King’s Speech: Colin Firth reigned supreme as Prince William’s great-grandfather, King George VI, an unforeseen heir to the British throne who overcame a speech impediment just in time to inspire a nation at war. At once hilarious and dignified, the gorgeously designed period drama made aristocracy approachable and history personal.
3. 127 Hours: There were some who mistook filmmaker Danny Boyle’s meaningful hiking odyssey as a gruesome wallow about a guy who had to cut off his own limb to free himself. To the contrary, the fact-based stunner illustrated with forceful suspense how love and the survival instinct make an invincible combination. Single-handedly — and single-armed — James Franco carried this exhilarating piece.
4. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo … Who Played With Fire … and Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: Based on the late Steig Larsson’s international bestsellers, this is the riveting Swedish television miniseries of his “Millennium trilogy” thrillers. It was released here this year in spring, summer and fall as three separate feature films. But they work best as one terrifying (but then cathartic) whole about a violent old guard in the forbidding North. Naomi Rapace gave a tour de force as one of the most tormented female heroes of all time.
5. Toy Story 3: Our old buddies returned, as brilliantly entertaining and beautifully animated as ever. The third installment mixed lively “Great Escape” adventure and touching empty nest angst with Pixar’s usual refinement and character-focused levity.
6. The Kids Are All Right: The year’s other wonderful empty nest comedy-drama showed what happens to a bohemian couple after 20 years together when their kids’ biological father shows up. Filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko’s witty peek at a modern family found a way to be quirky, racy, and universally relatable at the same time.
7. The Fighter: This sports-related family drama recreated the complicated clan dynamics that both helped and hindered the career of real-life light-welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward — aka Mark Wahlberg. With a staggering supporting cast, including Christian Bale as a well-intentioned crack addict and Melissa Leo as the mother of all mothers, its exciting boxing brawls were almost as vicious as its wacky domestic ones.
8. Black Swan: Is this psychological horror about Natalie Portman’s ballet dancer character going nuts, being possessed by something supernatural, or subsuming her identity profoundly into her art? That’s for you to decide in this challenging, disturbing delve into erotic awakening and creative madness.
9. True Grit: Faithful to the traditional western in look and feel, but with a wry streak of Coen Brothers’ idiosyncrasy, this redo was even better than the late 1960s John Wayne classic. Stellar players Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld saddled up for a PG-13 shoot-’em-up with mass appeal and cinematic sophistication.
10. “Waiting For Superman” and “Countdown to Zero”: These two represented a great year in crucial, impacting documentaries. With a partial focus on our local D.C. system, “Superman” exposed the special interests eroding America’s public schools by honing in on a handful of heartrending young students. “Countdown” called attention to the ultimate cataclysmic threat — the shocking vulnerability of the world’s nuclear material to accident and terrorism. What could be more important than that? [“Waiting for Superman” was produced in association with Philip Anschutz’s Walden Media. Anschutz also owns The Washington Examiner.]
