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2010 Year End Wrap Up

10 Best Films of 2010

What follows are Nathan’s picks of the best films of 2010. 

1. Black Swan

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky

Premise: A dancer (Natalie Portman) descends into paranoia and madness as she buries herself in the lead role of the ballet Swan Lake.

Why It Made the List: Many of the films this year dealt with the plastic nature of reality, whether it took the form of an imaginary dream state, revelations regarding our biological or sexual identity, or experiencing social relationships on a digital platform. Black Swan represents the pinnacle of this theme in 2010’s crop of films. This is a story working in many dimensions at once, with each of these dimensions intertwined with each other. Firstly, Black Swan is an exploration of the relationship between art and the artist, as the storyline of Swan Lake becomes the storyline of the dancers and their director. While this parallel is fairly obvious, the filmmakers use it to realize a sometimes problematic relationship between our life and the art we create or consume. In Black Swan the distinction between art and life erodes away and from that a new reality emerges. Secondly, Black Swan is a study of ambition and the pursuit of perfection. This is where Natalie Portman’s performance impresses the most, as she embodies a person who has forgone all other needs in the pursuit of perfection. The story of Black Swan puts Portman’s character through an emotional and physical gauntlet; watching the emaciated Portman literally rehearse her body to death and observing how the deterioration of her body occurs in tandem with the collapse of her mind is a frightening and tragic display. Lastly, Black Swan is a tale of lust, jealousy and sexual awakening. The commitment that Portman’s character makes to her art is all consuming, restricting her own emotional development, which has the ironic effect of limiting her ability as an artist because she is unfamiliar with her own feelings and desires. As Portman’s ballerina immerses herself in the role, she is transformed by her art physically but also emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually and by the time the curtain falls on her final performance, Black Swan takes her and the audience to places of great beauty and great horror.

2. The Social Network

Directed by: David Fincher

Premise: Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, the film is a dramatization of the founding of Facebook and the legal battle that ensued between those involved.

Why It Made the List: Few films have defined life in the digital age as well as The Social Network. This film is partly a going-into-business plot and a coming-of-age story but there is a lot more going on in it just below its surface. Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have made the story of the creation and litigation of Facebook into a microcosm of where American culture has shifted in the past decade. The Social Network tracks the evolution of Facebook from a campus fad to a global juggernaut and its creators from naïve idealists to corporate CEOs. But the film is no Horatio Alger success story, and something The Social Network does in an exemplary way is to force the characters to face the perils of victory and succumb to the isolation and paranoia that financial success can bring. The Social Network also shows how the culture has been changed by online communication from the way we write to the way we speak. The film also captures the nastiness that faceless digital communication fosters and makes the audience sympathize with the targets of that antisocial behavior. There are a number of standout performances here but the acting revelation in The Social Network is Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Einsenberg is on fire in this movie, constantly delivering Aaron Sorkin’s sharp dialogue with an appropriately patronizing and arrogant tone. Yet, Eisenberg also captures the subtle sadness of his character. As presented in this film, Zuckerberg is a brilliant computer programmer and a shrewd businessman, but there is also a nagging loneliness about him and an irony to his narrative that raises The Social Network up from a coming of age story to the realm of tragedy. Zuckerberg’s story is in many ways one of the defining stories of our time: wealth at the cost of integrity and synthetic associations as a substitute for authentic human connection.

3. Creation

Directed by: Jon Amiel

Premise: A dramatization of Charles Darwin and his family as Darwin writes his book On the Origin of Species.

Why It Made the List: Charles Darwin’s discoveries about evolution were not controversial simply because they contradict mythological stories. Evolution has been controversial –and continues to be in some quarters—because it has implications for our very identity. Creation takes the struggle between faith and reason, and the comforts and shortcomings of each, and puts it on display in Charles and Emma Darwin’s grief over the death of their daughter, connecting their sorrow at the loss of their girl with Charles Darwin’s effort to complete his text. These two sources of Darwin’s struggle are linked but the story smartly sets the production of the book in the background and instead foreground’s Darwin’s strained relationship with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and the health woes of their surviving children. With this grieving start, Creation sets its characters on an ambitious but ultimately successful path of not only facing their guilt and sadness but of coming to a new place spiritually and achieving a new understanding of their world. Between the start and the conclusion of the film, Creation sets the comfort that religious belief can provide against the intellectual impotence and emotional abuse that religious dogma can foster. At the same time, Creation pits the truth of science against its own lack of emotional warmth or the consolation of absolutistic morality. The dual nature of each of these belief systems is played out quite effectively throughout the movie, leading to a conclusion in which the characters are forced to confront new and difficult truths. Admirably, the ending of Creation does not settle for the intellectually disingenuous excuse of the “middle way” where “anything is possible” but instead brings the characters and the audience to the reality of a post-Darwin world and leaves us to figure out how to redefine ourselves in it. 

4. Restrepo

Directed by: Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger

Premise: A documentary about a platoon of American soldiers stationed in the Kornangol Valley in Afghanistan. 

Why It Made the List: 2010 was an odd and in some ways frustrating year for those following the wars in Afghanistan. It was the year of the highest death toll among American soldiers since the start of the war but it was also the year of the lowest level of reporting on the war by the mainstream media. It was in this void of coverage that Restrepo was released, one of the most interesting war documentaries ever made. Co-directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spend the film’s running time embedded with the soldiers at one of the most dangerous posts in Afghanistan and capture a year of gridlock, advances, and setbacks. Restrepo characterizes the soldiers in the field during their day-to-day tasks, their interactions with the Afghan population, as well as fire fights and other operations. Using no narration and presenting no agenda other than to assemble a portrayal of reality, Restrepo is a refreshingly honest portrayal of the war. While not an endorsement of the United States’ military activities it also is not a partisan or polemical piece. There is nothing wrong with subjective and activist pieces, but Restrepo bucks the trend in recent documentary filmmaking and in that this film achieves something unique in the genre in the past decade. The film does not fetishize soldiers the way a lot of rightwing media do nor does it recoil or condescend in the way some leftwing media have a habit of doing. This documentary captures the banality and fear of warfare and it presents the soldiers of Restrepo as human beings, flawed but doing their best and acting professionally in a difficult situation. When they achieve success the film reveals the rewards of their efforts but when their comrades are killed the film does not cut away from the soldiers’ grief. These kinds of scenes make Restrepo an important film not just in the current political and historical context but an important footnote for war reporting a whole. As a piece of truly journalistic documentary filmmaking, Restrepo does not do the audience’s thinking for them and demands that viewers think about its content. And in doing so, the filmmakers behind Restrepo have created a cinematic document about contemporary warfare and those who fight it that will stand as a landmark of this time period in the same way that Hearts and Minds captured the Vietnam era.

5. The Kids Are All Right

Directed by: Lisa Cholodenko

Premise: The children of a lesbian couple (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening) seek out the man who was their parent’s sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo). When the kids bond with their biological father, his presence causes a disturbance in the family.

Why It Made the List: The past few years have seen a number of films, such as Brokeback Mountain and Milk, addressing homosexual issues. Up until now many of these stories have been about members of the gay community attempting to survive in a homophobic culture. Taking Brokeback Mountain as the first step, addressing the tragedies of homophobia, and viewing Milk as the pushback against that homophobia, The Kids Are All Right is post-revolutionary. Although homophobia has not been quashed, it has been shamed into the same corner as racism, creating a safe social space for gay culture to coexist and meld with heterosexual culture. It is within this space that The Kids Are All Right takes place and the film presents the implications of fluid conceptions of sexuality and family and thereby questions our own sense of identity. While The Kids Are All Right doesn’t provide many answers to the questions it raises, that ambiguity gives the film its most interesting content.  Some critics have objected to The Kids Are All Right, accusing it of trafficking in homophobic stereotypes. This criticism largely misses the point of the film and why it is an important and excellent story. The Kids Are All Right dramatizes the complex new reality in which we live, where traditional definitions of gender or sexuality have to be adjusted or even discarded. This story asks what it means to be a man or a woman, how sexuality, family, and associations shape our sense of self, and what it means for us to live, both individually and as a community, in this new reality. And in that, The Kids Are All Right is a film of tremendous insight and sensitivity.

6. The Town

Directed by: Ben Affleck

Premise: A Boston bank robber (Ben Affleck) falls for a woman (Rebecca Hall) employed at the bank he just held up. As he tries to find a way out of his lifestyle, the people around him, including a psychotic friend (Jeremy Renner), force him into taking one last job.

Why It Made the List: Ben Affleck continued the reinvention of his career with The Town, an excellent heist picture on par with Bonnie and Clyde, The Departed, and Heat. The film is excellently shot and edited and director Affleck has a keen sense for how to tell a lean story while still adequately shaping the characters and subplots. Unlike some other heist films, The Town is at all times credible in its robberies, chases, and shootouts. The film does not overreach in an attempt to be too clever for its own good, as some bank robbery films are prone to do. Instead the focus is on the characters and the environment in which they live, and the actors deliver very impressive performances. The standout roles of The Town belong to Rebecca Hall and Jeremy Renner. Hall is sweet and vulnerable but the film fleshes her out into a full character with dignity and intelligence. Renner has the most ostentatious role in the film, as he is the most violent, but like Affleck, Renner provides his character some sense of decency or at least an internal code of ethics that he rigidly stands behind. There are some smaller supporting roles (glorified cameos really) by Chris Cooper as the incarcerated father to Affleck’s character and the late Pete Postlethwaite as the local crime lord. The two men contribute a lot to the film in the little bit of screen time that they are given and their presence opens up the film to a new theme: the way violence and criminality are passed from father to son. This underlying theme, and the struggle of Affleck’s character with it, gives The Town a deeper and more complex meaning underlying its cops and robbers surface. 

7. Toy Story 3

Directed by: Lee Unkrich

Premise: When their owner prepares to move to college, the toys are donated to a daycare center. Once there, they are subjugated by stuffed bear Lotso (voice of Ned Beatty) and his gang. Woody (voice of Tom Hanks) leads an escape attempt to reunite the toys with their owner. 

Why It Made the List: Animated motion pictures have proven to be a reliable source of entertainment and films from Disney’s Pixar studio have consistently ranked among the best pictures of each year. 2010 was no different as the final chapter of the Toy Story series was among the best films the studio has ever produced. Like other Pixar films, the animated performances transcend the limitations of the medium and render characters of emotional depth that rival performances of flesh and blood actors in other movies. But Toy Story 3 is distinguished by the way it takes on mature themes. This film is bolder than a lot of other animated fare. The story is structured very much like a prison film and it incorporates some of that genre’s themes and scenarios. It also breaks out of the playroom settings of the previous Toy Story films and takes some risks with its story. This is a more complex and emotionally charged picture than either of its predecessors and the filmmakers deserve credit for not dumbing the film down to appeal to overprotective notions about what kind of intensity children can tolerate. By pushing the threshold of intensity just enough, the film goes beyond being an animated adventure about plastic toys and is a story about growing up, coping with change, and even facing mortality. Its intelligent storytelling, emotional but not schmaltzy mediations on life, and overall fun makes Toy Story 3 is one of the most satisfying send offs of any Hollywood franchise.

8. Easy A

Directed by: Will Gluck

Premise: A teenage girl (Emma Stone) tells an innocent lie about losing her virginity and is labeled as a slut by the high school rumor mill. Rather than denying it, she owns her assigned identity but finds that as rumors go on they start to become the truth.

Why It Made the List: Easy A is an exceptional high school comedy. Building on the foundation established over twenty years ago by John Hughes, Easy A takes themes like teenage identity, social status, and sexual awakening to a new level and pushes the teenage comedy to a more sophisticated plane. This is a film aware of the politics of its genre, namely the way romantic comedies, especially those with teenage characters, demonstrate but also subtly create our understandings and expectations about sexuality, social interaction, and gender identity. Easy A addresses this through the lead character played by Emma Stone, whose life is turned upside down by the high school rumor mill. Stone does a wonderful job both as the lead character and as the story’s narrator. The script gives her character a very layered and nuanced portrayal, allowing her the sarcasm common to contemporary youth characters but it also gives her a level of intelligence and emotional range that is rare. Stone is fascinating to watch as her character tries to take control of her public image but finds that her attempt to manipulate the rumor mill creates a reality of its own. The film deals with the double standards and varying pressures that men and women face regarding their sexual activity and the movie makes its points nicely without harping on them. The cold castigation of Stone’s character by her peers is done very effectively without unnecessarily dwelling on it but equally effective is the way the film deals with the pressures on the young men. Credibly exploring men’s sexual anxieties is uncommon in the sex comedy and the film does not dwell on it too deeply, but the ground Easy A manages to cover is impressive. And all the while Easy A deals with this mature and sophisticated subject matter, it also tells a funny story with engaging characters. 

9. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Directed by: Edgar Wright

Premise: An adaptation of the graphic novel. Independent rock band member Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) must fight and defeat the six evil ex-boyfriends of his new love interest in order to live happily ever after with her.

Why It Made the List: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the latest from director Edgar Wright, a filmmaker known for subverting the conventions of film genres while simultaneously fulfilling them. But Scott Pilgrim is even more ambitious than his previous work. Where Shaun of the Dead sent up zombie films and Hot Fuzz parodied buddy cop pictures, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World takes on multiple film genres including action films, teen romances, video games, and super hero stories and mashes them together in an explosion of pop art. Although this collection of elements might have overwhelmed a lesser filmmaker, Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall have a firm grip on narrative and character and keep the film surging through all of its elaborate set pieces. Even as the film bombards the audience with non-diegetic elements, piling in sight gags, one liners, and allusions, it keeps chugging forward with Wright’s characteristically furious editing and shooting style. The film is also assisted by Michael Cera in the title role. Cera gives a performance typical of his work in films like Juno and Superbad but as Scott Pilgrim he is at his shuffling, mousy, and emasculated best; the story demands that Cera actually do more than mumble his way through his scenes and the actor rises to the occasion, giving a complex portrayal of a young man who must learn to take responsibility for his actions. Cera is accompanied by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his character’s love interest and Ellen Wong as his former flame. Like Cera, the two actresses play it real despite the fantastic nature of the story world and ground the interpersonal drama of the film. And that is what makes Scott Pilgrim vs. the World so extraordinary. The film incorporates the elements of its various genres to create a surrealistic story world that is a kaleidoscope of pop culture and then sends its hero on a very real emotional journey through it.

10. Inception

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Premise: In the near future, technology has been developed that allows people to enter the dreams of others and interact with their unconscious mind to retrieve secret or forgotten information. A team of extractors is commissioned to do the opposite: to implant an idea in someone’s unconsciousness.

Why It Made the List: At a time when many films are remakes, sequels, or adaptations, Inception was a relief: an excellently executed original film with a novel premise. While it draws on some conventions and concepts from science fiction films and heist pictures, the familiar elements give the audience a way to put the complex ideas of the film in a familiar and understandable context. In much the same way that Blade Runner took ideas about humanity and identity and couched them in a noir detective thriller or The Dark Knight addressed issues of justice and heroism within the context of a superhero film, Inception concretizes abstract notions of reality by giving the intellectual and philosophical ideas a physical representation. Inception is part of a small but distinguished category of films that play with the audience’s perception. When films like this are done well, such as Sunrise, Vertigo, The Matrix, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Memento, they are exciting examples of the possibility of cinema. What Inception does is to take some of the techniques and concepts we’ve seen already in this category of subjective cinema and bring them to a new level. The visuals of the film are revealed as entirely plastic, and this has all kinds of implications, some that are psychological, others that are political or ethical, and still more that are aesthetic. Inception is, in a very real way, an important example of life in the digital age in all of its fractured, synthetic, and post-modern glory.

Honorable Mentions

What follows are films that were either runners up to the Top 10 list or other pictures that came out in 2010 that are worth mentioning.  

The A-Team – A fun adaptation of the 1980s television show.

Agora – A smart and prescient film about religious intolerance set in ancient Alexandria. 

The American – A great looking film with a strong performance by George Clooney.

Best Worst Movie – A documentary about the fan appeal of the cult classic Troll 2.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer – This documentary about the former governor of New York is a fascinating story of money, sex, greed, and hubris.

Fair Game – This true story of CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson was an important dramatization of recent history.

The Fighter – An above average boxing film with terrific performances by Christian Bale and Amy Adams.

Green Zone – One of the best fictional films about the war in Iraq. 

Greenberg – Ben Stiller shows a much more complex and interesting side in Noah Baumbach’s latest feature.

How to Train Your Dragon – Among the better animated films of recent years.

I Love You, Philip Morris – Jim Carrey gives a great performance in this witty film.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work – A very good documentary on the nature of celebrity and the pursuit of fame.

Kick Ass – One of the better comic book films of late.

The King’s Speech – Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush star as King George VI and his speech therapist, respectively, and the film tells a compelling historical story in a contemporary style. 

Machete – A smart social commentary disguised with the veil of a silly action film.

Morning Glory – One of the best romantic comedies of the year includes great performances by Rachel McAdams, Diane Keaton, and Harrison Ford. 

Rabbit Hole – A fairly average film about grief with above average performances by Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman.

Solitary Man –  A story of a formally rich and influential car magnate whose life begins to unravel as he faces old age. Michael Douglas gives one of the best performances of his career.

Temple Grandin – The true story of an autistic woman who became a top scientist in the field of livestock, played wonderfully by Claire Danes.

TRON: Legacy – The sequel to the 1982 film was one of the most visually stunning films of the year.

True Grit – The Coen Brothers remake of the 1969 John Wayne film is among the brother’s best work and has great performances by Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon.

Valhalla Rising – A cerebral take on sword and shield films that ought to find cult appeal.

Waiting for Superman – This documentary about the American educational system is an important film that is an essential argument about who we are as a country and where we may be going.

Winter’s Bone – A great tale of discovery and emerging adulthood.

You Don’t Know Jack – This dramatization of the life of Jack Kevorkian was a fascinating study of a complex issue and a difficult person and includes a terrific performance by Al Pacino.

Good Buzz List

These are films that were released in 2010 and have strong word of mouth, and in some cases award nominations, but Nathan was unable to see them in time for the year end summary, usually because they did not open here.

127 Hours – James Franco has been acclaimed for his performance as rock climber Aron Ralston.

Another Year – Was nominated for several British Film Institute Awards.

Biutiful –Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest film has been nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film and the performance by Javier Bardem has been given high praise by film critics.

Blue Valentine – The performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams have been praised by critics and the film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money – A documentary about disgraced Washington DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.  

Get Low – This story about a man who throws his own funeral while he still alive was nominated for Independent Spirit Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Inside Job – A documentary about the 2008 financial meltdown.

Never Let Me Go – This story about young women growing up in British boarding schools was nominated for British Independent Film Awards and Independent Spirit Awards.

Please Give – The cast has been recognized with many nominations, including the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards.

The Tillman Story – A documentary about the football star and Iraq war casualty was one of the most controversial films of 2010 and was nominated for several awards.

Great Performances

This is a list of some of the great performances in 2010, although not all of them were in great movies. 

The American – This throwback to 1970s thrillers features a strong performance by George Clooney.

Black Swan – Natalie Portman gives a great performance as a ballerina suffering through a mental breakdown. 

Country Strong – An otherwise average story of self-destructive celebrity but with very satisfying performances by Gwyneth Paltrow, Garret Hedlund, Leighton Meester, and Tim McGraw.

Creation – Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly play Charles and Emma Darwin and in their roles play out the existential crisis brought on by the implications of Darwin’s discoveries. 

Cyrus – John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, and Marisa Tomei give great performances in this film. 

Easy A – Emma Stone is great as a precocious teen who manipulates the high school rumor mill to her advantage.

The Fighter –Christian Bale and Amy Adams give terrific performances.

Greenberg – Ben Stiller shows a much more complex and interesting side in Noah Baumbach’s latest feature.

I Love You, Philip Morris – Jim Carrey gives a great performance in this witty film.

Kick Ass – Nicolas Cage does much to elevate this film and provides a backbone for its delicate credibility. 

The Kids Are All Right – The entire core cast make very strong contributions to this film.

The King’s Speech – Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush star as King George VI and his speech therapist, respectively.

Leaves of Grass – Edward Norton convincingly plays twin brothers. 

MacGruber – This otherwise questionable film has amusing performances by Kristen Wiig and Val Kilmer.

Morning Glory – One of the best romantic comedies of the year includes great performances by Rachel McAdams, Diane Keaton, and Harrison Ford. 

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Although Michael Cera is essentially playing the same kind of character that he always does, in Scott Pilgrim he does it better than any other role.

The Social Network – Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, and Jesse Eisenberg all make great acting contributions to this film.

Rabbit Hole – A fairly average film about grief with above average performances by Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman.

The Runaways – An average Hollywood success story with terrific performances by Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, and Michael Shannon.

Solitary Man –  A story of a formally rich and influential car magnate whose life begins to unravel as he faces old age. Michael Douglas gives one of the best performances of his career.

Temple Grandin – Claire Danes does a wonderful job playing an autistic woman.

The Town – Rebecca Hall and Jeremy Renner give standout performances in this heist film.

True Grit – The Coen Brothers remake of the 1969 John Wayne film has great performances by Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon.

Winter’s Bone – Jennifer Lawrence makes this movie with her sensitive and mature performance.

You Don’t Know Jack – This dramatization of the life of Jack Kevorkian includes a terrific performance by Al Pacino.

Bottom 10 Films of 2010

What follows are the very bottom of the cinematic heap for 2010. 

1. The Last Airbender

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Premise: An adaptation of the animated television show.

Why It Made the List: Even at the beginning of his career, M. Night Shyamalan’s filmmaking was suspect and with each successive film, Shyamalan has proven his critics correct. The Last Airbender may very well seal Shyamalan’s reputation as a hack, as the film is among the most poorly conceived, incompetently written, and sloppily made major studio tent pole films of all time. At every turn, the picture demonstrates no grasp of how to tell a story. Throughout, The Last Airbender stops dead to lay out exposition through awful dialogue and then picks up with action scenes that are supposed to inspire awe or excitement, but the action is terribly staged and filmed. It is hard to believe that in this era of exemplary genre pieces that a major studio production could so mishandle a fantasy piece like this. But The Last Airbender crashes its way through precedent to an ill distinguished place between The Golden Compass and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen among the worst big budget fantasy films ever made and the worst film of 2010.

2. My Soul to Take

Directed by: Wes Craven

Premise: A group of teenagers begin to suspect that one of them is the reincarnation of a serial killer.

Why It Made the List: Wes Craven is a director who has had a very checkered career, including highs with horror classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream and lows with debacles like Deadly Friend and Shocker. Unfortunately, My Soul to Take sits in the latter category and is among the worst films Craven has ever made, even failing as a basic slasher film. The film isn’t scary and the frights are staged so incompetently that it is nearly impossible to tell what the hell is happening on the screen.

3. Cop Out

Directed by: Kevin Smith

Premise: A pair of police detectives (Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan) unwittingly uncovers a criminal network of drugs and murder.

Why It Made the List: Kevin Smith’s career threatened to have jumped the shark with Clerk’s II but recovered with Zach and Miri Make a Porno. But with Cop Out, Smith makes the biggest debacle of his career. This film is a mess from start to finish, mixing goofy physical comedy in once scene with hard edged violence in the next. Tracy Morgan is completely unconvincing as any kind of police officer and Bruce Willis is wasted in a retread of his usual hardboiled cop routine. This film is barely a shadow of Smith’s earlier work.

4. Grown Ups

Directed by: Dennis Dugan

Premise: A group of elementary school friends and their families reunite for a weekend at a lake.

Why It Made the List: Apparently Adam Sandler and other former Saturday Night Live alumni decided to turn their summer vacation into a tax exemption by bringing a movie crew along. That is the only way to rationalize how this waste of film ever got made. Grown Ups would have audiences believe that it is celebrating family or the great outdoors but this is just a random collection of shenanigan by late middle aged men who ought to know better.

5. Killers

Directed by: Robert Luketic

Premise: An assassin (Ashton Kutcher) falls for a woman (Katherine Heigl) and leaves his line of work.

Why It Made the List: Killers is a retread of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, recapitulating that film’s basic premise and some of its gags. Unfortunately for Killers, that is where the comparisons end. Ashton Kutcher is the most unbelievable spy since Woody Allen in Casino Royale and Katherine Heigl is never funny, just annoying. Killers makes its greatest offense in the ending, which is among the worst conclusions to a major motion picture in recent memory.

6. The Other Guys

Directed by: Adam McKay

Premise: A mismatched pair of detectives (Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg) investigate a corrupt financier.

Why It Made the List: The Other Guys feels as though it were two movies smashed together: one a send up of the buddy cop genre and the other a satire of recent financial scandals. This film fails at the most basic attempts at comedy and suffers from miscasting. About the only nice thing to say about The Other Guys is that it isn’t as terrible as Cop Out.

7. Skyline

Directed by: The Brothers Strause

Premise: Aliens invade Los Angeles and begin abducting the population.

Why It Made the List: If a talented editor were to have made a Youtube mash up of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Ridley Scott’s Alien, and Ray Harryhausen monster movies like It Came from Beneath the Sea, that would probably have been much more entertaining than watching Skyline. The Brothers Strause manage to rip off of all those other films while missing every quality that made them work.

8. Devil

Directed by: John Erick Dowdle

Premise: A group of strangers are trapped in an elevator and begin to suspect that one among them is a demon.

Why It Made the List: The filmmakers behind Devil carry on like this is an episode of The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents but the film really has more in common with Tales from the Crypt. The whole premise of Devil is pretty stupid and the film’s intended message about reconciliation falls flat because the narrative lacks the most basic storytelling skills.

9. The Switch

Directed by: Josh Gordon and Will Speck

Premise: An unmarried woman (Jennifer Aniston) decides to get artificially inseminated. Her platonic male friend (Jason Bateman) swaps the sample with his own sperm.  

Why It Made the List: The Switch has a serious problem: when the lead male character, in a fit of drunken jealousy, tricks his female friend into getting inseminated with his baby, he is, essentially, sexually assaulting her. Far be it for me to attack someone’s sense of taste, but the filmmakers behind The Switch are too ignorant to even recognize the violation of this woman’s body and will by the drunken stupidity of this man. While trying to be edgy, The Switch fumbles its Chasing Amy aspirations and ends up as a film as insulting and patronizing as Porky’s.

10. Legion

Directed by: Scott Stewart

Premise: God has lost his faith in mankind and sends his angels to destroy the world.

Why It Made the List: Legion is such an utter disaster of a movie that it is nearly a text book example of what not to do in a film. And while there is plenty wrong with it, the most egregious error is taking a compelling idea—that God might not like us—and only using it as an excuse for scene after scene of anonymous, possessed people being mowed down by machine gun fire.

Trends of the Year

Awkward or Off Beat Movies
There were a number of film released in 2010 that featured unusual mixes of drama and comedy, to mixed effect. 

Buddies in Action
Action films made a comeback in 2010 and many of them were throwbacks to the buddy cop films of the 1980s.

Dark Historical Films
A few filmmakers took a new approach to sword and shield film, bringing dark and intimate elements to it. 

Extreme Grotesque
While the torture films of the past decade have largely declined in number, there were quite a few films including extremely gory imagery, sometimes seriously and other times for gross laughs. At least a few of these films may qualify as among the goriest and most disturbing films ever made. 

Formalistic Cinema
Several films of 2010 used medium of film to manipulate audience perception of time and space and convey the experience of the lead characters. 

Russian Villains
For some reason, a number of films featured evil Russian characters in their stories. 

Satirical Action Films 
While action films made a come back in 2010, many of them were self reflexive or had other satirical qualities. 

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