Top 21 Movies of 2010

[ flick crit picks ]

12th & Delaware

Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing train their cameras on two establishments located across the street from each other in Fort Pierce, Fla.: the pro-life Pregnancy Care Center and the abortion clinic someone calls the "competition," A Woman's World. Everyone has a story and no one feels easy, as clients, counselors and providers all make hard choices each day. As doctors feel threatened by protesters, young women are regularly traumatized. —Cindy Fuchs

Carlos

Olivier Assayas' biopic of '70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal is epic in length — five-plus hours — but breathlessly compelling, infused with rich detail and precise character study. Its subject is a narcissist and sociopath even as he sees himself as an idealistic freedom fighter. Édgar Ramírez lends the title role an intense physicality, but Assayas surrounds him with a geopolitical history depicted through players whose self-interest takes on a global scale. —Shaun Brady

Catfish

Critics be damned: This is the year's best Facebook movie. The Social Network leaves enough space for viewers to read their own insights into it, but Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's doc actually does the work, exploring just how the explosion in online interaction is redefining what it means to be someone's "friend." —Sam Adams

Certified Copy

Beginning with a lecture arguing for the validity of imitation in art, Abbas Kiarastomi's playfully profound examination of life and aesthetics, marriage and art focuses on two characters whose relationship is constantly redefining itself. The great Iranian director thus creates an ever-renewing present informed by pasts real or invented — and ultimately, what's the difference? —S.B.

Dogtooth

Read it as a political allegory, an essay on the dark side of helicopter parenting or simply a modern-day horror story, it's the most unsettling movie of the year, for the captive children's boneless posture alone. —S.A.

Enter the Void

Overlong, excessive, indulgent, bordering on ridiculous — Gaspar Noé's first-person account of a murdered junkie's Tibetan-inspired afterlife travels is all of these, and they may not even be its bad points. Enter the Void is a gritty, hallucinogenic head trip whose sentimentality is as extreme as its provocations, and seizes the potential of image-making as an act of visual assault. —S.B.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Real or fake? Wrong question, or rather, wrong answer. The first feature from street-art provocateur Banksy introduces us to — or, if you like, creates — his doppelganger, Thierry Guetta, a fannish disciple turned pretender to the throne. Those who assume it's all a put-on underestimate how credulous the art world can be. — S.A.

Four Lions

Destined, or doomed, to be a cult classic, Chris Morris' bittersweet satire straps an IED to the war on terror's sacred cows — or is it sheep? Winning fans on both sides of the aisle, the film skewers the blinkered lunacy of Islamic extremists, then mourns the West's inability to outsmart idiots. —S.A.

I Am Love

Gloriously overwrought and overwhelmingly sensual, Luca Guadagnino's splendid pageant takes chances that shouldn't pay off — but do. —S.A.

Last Train Home

Planning their holiday journey home, factory workers Chen Suqin and Zhang Changhua are hardly happy. When they left their village 16 years ago, they left their children with their own parents. Now their daughter Qin, 17, is resentful, and the parents' sacrifices seem for naught. Lixin Fan's remarkable film reveals the pain of all parties, as well as the complexities of so many different truths. —C.F.

Mother

Kim Hye-ja walks the line between maternal devotion and simple obsession in the story of a mother who will go to any length to clear her mentally challenged son of a murder charge. Bong Joon-ho never makes the same movie twice, but each feels like the product of years of preparation. —S.A.

The Oath

Laura Poitras' extraordinary film begins as a portrait of former jihadist Abu Jandal, currently driving a cab in Yemen, parenting his young son and looking back on the fate of his brother-in-law, detained at Guantánamo until the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration. It turns into a series of reflections on documentary truths, subjects and performances. Brilliant and subtle, it's the year's best feature film. —C.F.

The Social Network

Written with the velocity and snap of a screwball comedy and directed with the urgency of a psychological thriller, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's account of the founding of Facebook unfolds with the immediacy of modern communication. Yet there's also something classic in its turns of betrayal and power, even dressed up in hoodies and flip-flops. —S.B.

Splice

Changing shape as seamlessly as the lab-spawned offspring of scientists Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, Vincenzo Natali's hybrid sticks every landing.  —S.A.

Sweetgrass

Who knew sheep would be so fascinating or so beautiful? Tracking a herd through Montana mountains, over three months and covering 150 miles, this superb film is part parable, part poetry, observing daily labor and attending to emotional details. As the herders ponder their lots, the sheep keep moving. —C.F.

The Tillman Story

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary, about the NFL star-turned-soldier whose death at the hands of gung-ho comrades was turned into a PR charade, will enrage you to your core, and serves as an object lesson in the difference between "supporting the troops" and respecting them. —S.A.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The fantastic and the mundane share a table in this Thai film. The title character's slowly impending death from kidney failure opens a passageway between living and dead. But that's already too concrete a description of a film that is more concerned with the sensuous tinge of memory than with anything resembling narrative. —S.B.

War Don Don

Taking the Special Court for Sierra Leone's war crimes trial of Issa Sesay as a point of departure, Rebecca Richman Cohen's doc considers not only legal mechanisms, but also how the law is refracted in media. Literally, the film shows multiple screens and monitors, the various ways Sesay is portrayed by accusers and defenders. Metaphorically, it looks at the relative meanings of morality, the effects of politics and poverty on judgments and expectations. —C.F.

White Material

Set in an unnamed African nation devolving into chaos, Claire Denis' film captures the sense of confusion and constricted vision inherent in rapidly changing conditions. Isabelle Huppert plays a French coffee plantation owner whose refusal to acknowledge the dire state of her surroundings extends from the cultural to the familial. Told with elliptical concision, White Material suggests that those seemingly closest to us can become as unknowable as true strangers. —S.B.

Wild Grass

Alain Resnais' latest indulges the octogenarian director's penchants for obliqueness and whimsy through the distortions of a lovesick man, a fanciful cinephile — or both. His obsessive romance is thus either an anarchic passion or a stalkerish prelude to violence. The kinked narrative seems to follow a wholly interior (il)logic, amplifying tangents and finally abandoning its characters for a self-immolating final swerve. —S.B.

Winter's Bone

Debra Granik's meditation on family is somber, witty and strangely hopeful. Traipsing through her far-flung Ozarks community, a 17-year-old girl discovers her missing father's past has left his kin deeply in debt and at risk. As adults abandon her, she's determined to keep the cabin where she lives with her siblings and incapacitated mother, so she solves a series of grim, neo-noir mysteries. And she survives. —C.F.