TOP 10 FILMS OF 2010

Ignoring how 3D is slowly ruining cinema and the odd financial tragedy (farewell UK Film Council), 2010 has been a pretty decent year in terms of the quality of films on offer. I have seen some truly excellent films and I know I've missed a few as well (I'm yet to see Another Year, Of Gods and Men, The King's Speech, The Kids Are Alright, Winter's Bone and Black Swan).

In my list I have a few films which, asides from being great, are interesting in how they were conceived. Christopher Nolan proved with Inception that multi-million dollar Hollywood films don't have to be dumb in order to reach a mass audience. It is one of the most complex and demanding blockbuster movies I have ever seen, and also one of the best. Another British film-maker, Gareth Edwards, decided to rewrite the alien invasion movie rulebook with his sublime feature-length debut, Monsters. It is an original and startling piece of work that he made on his laptop for a few hundred grand. In my review I suggested it could be a bigger game changer than Avatar, and I still genuinely believe that. Even more impressively, David Fincher not only managed to make an interesting film about Facebook; he managed to make an exhilarating modern masterpiece, confounding all expectations.

In the now over-crowded 'digimation' category, Dreamworks had some huge successes with the likes of How To Train Your Dragon and Megamind, as did Universal with Despicable Me, but for me their efforts fail to move like the almighty Pixar's films do. Toy Story 3 proved once again, effortlessly, that no other film studio (animation or otherwise) makes films as clever, funny and emotionally involving as Pixar. The film concluded arguably the best film trilogy of all time.

Below are my Top 10 films of the year (released in the UK in 2010) with brief explanations as to why I feel they deserve to be there. Enjoy/criticise.

10. The Bad Lieutenant - Port Of Call: New Orleans

Two words: Nic Cage. When on form, this man owns the screen - Face/Off, Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation, Con Air. And you can now add Werner Herzog's barmy not-officially-a-remake of Bad Lieutenant to that list. The story itself is inconsequential, needless to say that drugs play an important part. What is brilliant about this film is Nic Cage hamming it up to unprecedented levels as the corrupt and verging-on-the-insane cop on the edge, Terence McDonagh, and the addition of talking iguanas. Being a Werner Herzog film, it all makes total sense. It is at times hilarious in the darkest possible sense (one of the best scenes of the year involves McDonagh swearing profusely at an ill old lady whilst threatening her with a gun in her retirement home. Even more frightening given the fact it was apparently improvised). So good that I'm almost willing to forgive cage for National Treasure and The Wicker Man. Almost.

9. Buried

Ryan Reynolds. Buried. In a box. For the entire duration of the film. As are the audience. Sounds like a bit of a rubbish idea for a film doesn't it? It doesn't help that Reynolds hasn't really been in anything good prior to this. But Buried turns out to be an innovative and gripping piece of work with a stellar performance from Reynolds. It literally involves a guy, Paul Conroy (Reynolds), a US contractor working in Iraq, waking up in a box underground, having no idea how he got there, trying to call various people on his mobile phone. As boring as this sounds, by the end I couldn't watch due to the tension reaching unbearable levels. Credit must go to director Rodrigo Cortes for managing to somehow make his camera swoop into every possible area of the box apart from Ryan Reynold's mouth. Warning: if you are at all claustrophobic or don't like snakes then this film is not recommended.

8. The Town

Ok, yes, this is pretty much a homage to Heat (a film that has yet to have been topped by any other crime thriller since), but Ben Affleck clearly has so much love for that film that it doesn't feel like a rip-off. Instead it is a well-written, expertly directed and brilliantly acted Boston cops 'n' robbers movie which confirms that Affleck, despite his many past mistakes, is a real talent. In my opinion this is even better than his excellent debut feature, Gone Baby Gone. Jeremy Renner and Rebecca Hall excel and there is great support from the likes of Jon Hamm (from Mad Men fame), Pete Postlethwaite and Blake Lively. This is a crime flick with real characters, real drama and riveting shoot-outs that Michael Mann himself would be proud of. It may take itself a bit too seriously but Affleck clearly doesn't want to mess about anymore.

7. Monsters

An extraordinary experiment in minimalist film-making, Monsters was made on a laptop by some British bloke and is an astonishing achievement. For my full review click here.

6. Kick-Ass

The most fun you could have in the cinema this year undoubtedly came with watching Matthew Vaughn's brilliantly chaotic Kick-Ass. It's pop-culture savvy script, extreme violence and political in-correctness make it a superhero movie with a difference and one not for those that think the idea of an 11 year old girl stabbing people and saying the dreaded 'c' word is a little bit wrong. The story concerns a high-school nobody, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), who decides to become a superhero even though he doesn't have any super powers. Cue foul language and a lot of blood as he teams up with father-daughter superhero duo Big Daddy and Hit Girl (Nic Cage and Chloe Moretz) and Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to fight Mark Strong's mob boss, Frank D'Amico. The casting is superb with top performances from everyone (Nic Cage is again at his demented best) but Moretz steals the show as the potty mouthed Hit Girl. Above everything else though, the best thing about Kick-Ass is that it was directed by a British film-maker and features a mostly British cast (see how many people you can spot from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) but has a decidedly un-British sense of manners and politeness.

5. Toy Story 3

For me, a great trilogy has to not only consist of three excellent films, but to also be progressive, in terms of characters and story, with each instalment being different, maybe in terms of tone, from the previous offering whilst retaining the unique identity it has built up. The Lord of the Rings trilogy pretty much managed this but the ending of the final part was a little, er, long. The original Star Wars trilogy fell apart at the end as did the Back to the Future and The Godfather trilogies. Toy Story 3 is the third and, hopefully, final part of Pixar's magnificent and revolutionary animated achievement. I say 'hopefully' because all three films are such utter perfection that the slightest dip in quality would render the franchise ruined. All at once this film is a hilarious family comedy, exciting prison-break adventure, heart-breaking tale about childhood and parenthood, and scary-for-young-kids horror movie. It's all done so seamlessly and appears effortless when really it must have taken bloody ages to write and create. How Pixar will top this I don't know.

4. Shutter Island

Leonardo DiCaprio is a clever man. In the last decade or so he has turned himself from a pretty-boy actor, starring in tosh such as Titanic and The Man in the Iron Mask, to a mesmerising screen presence choosing more demanding projects such as The Aviator and Revolutionary Road. In 2010, not only has he starred in two of the best films of the year (Shutter Island and Inception, made by two of Hollywood's most gifted directors) but he has also given two of the best performances. Some view Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's latest, as a minor work in his repertoire. But for me this is a director at the top of his game. It's a big budget yet old-fashioned psychological thriller set in the 1950s about a mysterious island which is home to a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) has been sent to investigate the disappearance of one of it's patients. It is completely OTT (in the vein of Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear) and has a goth-horror feel to it. The supporting cast of Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley and Michelle Williams are exemplary.

3. A Prophet

This French gangster masterpiece was released in the UK right at the beginning of the year. When I saw it I doubted I would see a better film all year. I was almost right. It is directed flawlessly by Jacques Audiard and features one of the most horrific murder scenes I have ever seen. But A Prophet is so much more than a violent crime flick, and that blood-soaked scene is a necessary one and shows the turning point in the life of main protagonist, Malik (brilliantly played by newcomer Tahar Rahim), as he begins his journey from bullied inmate in a brutal French prison to a Michael Corleone-esque fully fledged gangster. Malik is forced to work for the 'Don' of the prison, Cesar (Niels Arestrup), and ends up working for him inside and outside of the prison. The performances by Rahim and Arestrup are two of the best of the year. It is an epic saga about power, violence, guilt, race, religion and corruption and reaches operatic heights of intensity without descending into an OTT melodrama.

2. The Social Network

David Fincher is one of Hollywood's most exciting talents. His back catalogue (onwards from the messy Alien 3 and up to the stunning Zodiac) is one that many of his peers would be jealous of. But then came The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Which is rubbish. Things didn't look like they were going to get any better when it was announced his next project was going to be a film about Facebook. Turns out that Fincher is even cleverer than anyone thought as The Social Network is quite likely to be viewed as a seminal piece of film-making in years to come. There hasn't been another film released in the 'noughties' that sums up the 'decade of selfishness' so well. Because, of course, The Social Network isn't really a film about Facebook; it's a film about greed and being disconnected from society.

Jesse Eisenberg plays anti-hero/anti-villain Mark Zuckerberg (a co-founder of Facebook) as an awkward genius and loser in a pitch-perfect performance. He and everyone else in the film including Eduardo Saverin (Zuckerberg's best friend, played by Andrew Garfield) and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (spoilt Harvard twins both played, thanks to some subtle CGI, by Armie Hammer) are wholly unlikeable. Even Justin Timberlake, playing the rich play-boy Napster founder Sean Parker, manages to come across as a pathetic loser by the end of the film (another unexpected thing is how good Timberlake is). These characters are primarily only after power and money, so they are completely unsympathetic. But thanks to arguably the best screenplay of the year by Aaron Sorkin and Fincher's uniquely engrossing and atmospheric style of film-making (normally reserved for his films about psychopaths and sociopaths), The Social Network is never anything less than riveting. The moral of the story is apparent in the very first and the very last scenes; you can have all the money in the world, but that doesn't mean that anyone's going to like you. If it doesn't win any Oscars then there is no justice in the world.

1. Inception

Christopher Nolan is a proper film director. And by 'proper' I mean 'not Micheal Bay.' And by 'not Michael Bay' I mean not someone who makes multi-million dollar works of absolute toss that are badly scripted, badly acted, badly everything, yet inexplicably manage to make shed loads of money at the box office. It's enough to make you think 'wow, people really are stupid.' Nolan clearly doesn't think this. His ridiculously brilliant magnum opus, Inception, shows that he respects his audience. Here is a film that is basically a $200 million art-house project. It is mind-bogglingly complex in the best possible sense. It is a stunning visual tour-de-force. It features another extraordinary performance by Leonardo DiCaprio. It has a booming and brilliant soundtrack by Hanz Zimmer. IT. IS. AMAZING. Audiences worldwide flocked to see it, which is enough to make you think 'ok, so maybe people aren't that stupid.'

The story, in simple terms, involves Dom Cobb (DiCaprio); a thief who specialises in the art of extraction - stealing information from inside the minds of people when they are in a dream-state. He is asked by wealthy businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) to do the opposite and implant an idea into the mind of one of his enemies. If he does so successfully then Saito will use his power to allow Cobb to see his kids again (who he is estranged from as he has been accused of murdering his wife). Cobb assembles a team, which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Ellen Page, to plan their way into the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to plant the idea in his head that his father, a millionaire oil tycoon, doesn't want him to take over the business when he dies. So on one level it works as a exciting heist thriller. But oh how the levels go deeper. In the end it's actually all about Cobb - his guilt, his loss, his redemption, his reality. It's the kind of film that lives long in the memory after viewing, creates endless discussions in internet forums and demands to be seen again and again.

Inception is rumoured to have been a decade in the making and it shows. One can only imagine how Nolan managed to write the screenplay let alone make the thing and turn it into blockbuster entertainment. If other Hollywood directors put in half the effort he does then the world would be a much better place. If he tops this then I'll eat my hat. Speaking of tops, if you're wondering, the totem really isn't as important as you might think it is...