I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)
Luca Guadagnino, Italy

The kind of Italian film they don’t seem to make any more – a tale of passion set amid the narcissistic, frigid upper class, a subject that harks back to the great days of Italian cinema dominated by Antonioni, Fellini and Visconti.

The Ghost (The Ghost Writer)
Roman Polanski, France/Germany/UK

A welcome return to form for Polanski, with a cunningly constructed tale of dirty deeds in high places, which irresistibly invites one to speculate on the connection with recent political events. Shot on a bleakly evocative wintry coastline, with a terrific performance by Ewan McGregor as the eponymous ghost writer, it’s a film with old-fashioned solid virtues.

White Material
Claire Denis, France/Cameroon

Isabelle Huppert (superb as always) is the owner of a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country, threatened with disaster by the chaos around her during a civil war. A disturbing film, its characters are menaced by forces neither they nor we can really understand.

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

The latest of Leigh’s studies of happiness and the lack of it. Generous yet not indulgent to its characters, it’s a film during which one can find oneself changing one’s mind about which characters are most to be pitied and most to be admired. Ironic that the UK Film Council should have saved the best for last.

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Dave Calhoun
Time Out London, UK

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Banksy, UK

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

The Mouth of the Wolf (La Bocca del lupo)
Pietro Marcello, Italy/France

Highlights:

A memorial screening at the Berlinale of Eric Rohmer’s Pauline à la plage, introduced by Michel Ciment and Frédéric Mitterrand; a late-night screening of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, also in Berlin; Ken Loach’s rousing keynote speech at the LFF; the Fellini exhibition at Paris’s Jeu de Paume gallery; Andrew Kötting’s ‘Swandown’ exhibit at the UCA campus, Farnham – a taster, hopefully, of a new film with Iain Sinclair; Ronald Harwood’s talk on screenwriting at BFI Southbank; the release of Roman Polanski; the re-establishment of direct links between government and the BFI; the eating in I Am Love; the ecstatic lunacy of Black Swan; and the strange allure of a pregnant Isabelle Carré in Le Refuge.

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Dylan Cave
Curator (Fiction), BFI National Film Archive, UK

Black Death
Christopher Smith, Germany / UK

Smith and writer Dario Poloni’s gruesome tale about medieval crusaders is an honourable addition to British cinema’s folk-horror heritage. As with Smith’s previous film Triangle (2009), the action, tension and horror keep the viewer glued, but it’s the sticky moral universe that really involves.

Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich, USA

Pixar took full advantage of our affection for familiar characters, manipulating it shamelessly. Ageing Woody and his friends by 15 years was a cruel master-stroke, reminding us that we’re all getting older – and making the inevitable final farewell ring unbearably true for any grown-up who once had a favourite toy.

The Market A Tale of Trade (Pazar)
Ben Hopkins, Germany / Kazakhstan / UK / Turkey

A morality play about a young trader trying to navigate entrepreneurial success with a wavering moral compass, Hopkins’s Turkish-Azerbaijani drama finally got a UK release this year. It proved, yet again, the vitality and creativity of his unique imagination.

Man on a Motorcycle
John Maclean, UK

By shooting this short on a mobile phone, Maclean gave a fresh look to a familiar tale about a day in the life of a bored London courier. The resulting cramped and blurry aesthetic was surprisingly apt, conveying the courier’s heady rush as he travels around the city.

Highlight:

The BFI National Archive was 75 this year and the anniversary celebrations included a revival of an annual lecture given in honour of the archive’s first curator. S&S contributor Christophe Dupin gave a fascinating introduction to the event, but it was Paolo Cherchi Usai who reminded us of the Lindgren Lecture’s significance, introducing an insightful and provocative manifesto on the role of film curators in the 21st century.

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Tom Charity
Vancity Theatre program coordinator, Canada

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz)
Patricio Guzmán, France / Germany / Chile

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Poetry (Si)
Lee Changdong, South Korea

Certified Copy (Copie conforme)
Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Belgium

Highlights:

What’s old is new again – in Arcade Fire’s interactive video ‘We Used to Wait’ the band patched into Google Maps Street View to connect the song’s lament for snail mail with each individual fan’s nostalgia for home. A brilliant stroke (even if it only got me within half a mile of the house I grew up in).

In the trailer for Tron: Legacy, Jeff Bridges comes face to face with his own youth – not a clip from the 1980 movie (which I never saw), but the actor’s digital avatar. The implications are dizzying. Maybe actresses will stop mutilating their flesh now. Maybe we won’t need any new actors at all. But I bet Bridges will be more compelling acting his true age in True Grit.

Watching Gorillaz in concert in Vancouver with my 12-year-old son, he was wowed by the non-stop sub-Miyazaki anime that screened over the band (including cameos from Bruce Willis and Snoop Dogg). Fun, but no match for the sight of Bobby Womack right there on stage.

Seeing 127 Hours after waiting two hours in line at the Toronto International Film Festival – because not all digital projectors are created equal, apparently. Maybe the wait actually improved the movie? With Toy Story 3, this was the best Hollywood movie of the year.

Seeing – and hearing – Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera with live accompaniment from the incomparable Alloy Orchestra. Reflecting that the child born in the explicit birth scene must over 80 now, if he survived the 20th century, and wondering if he ever saw this most modern of films. And if he did, did he know himself?

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Ian Christie
Professor of film history, Birkbeck, UK

Mysteries of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa)
Raúl Ruiz, Portugal

Ruiz returns triumphantly to the baroque dream world he creates better than anyone.

How I Ended This Summer (Kakya provel etim letom)
Alexei Popogrebsky, Russia

An elemental cat-and-mouse psychodrama set in the frozen north, by one of Russia’s brightest new talents.

Robinson in Ruins
Patrick Keiller, UK

The third instalment of Keiller’s Robinsonade moves away from cities and docks to probe the English landscape with a steely yet moving intensity.

Tetro
Francis Ford Coppola, Argentina / Italy / Spain / USA

Crazy and uneven, to say the least, but a reminder of what made Coppola so exciting as a ‘movie brat’, and a wonderful reinvention from a veteran.

The Nail in the Boot
Mikhail Kalatozov, 1931, USSR

One of this year’s Pordenone Festival highlights – the banned and believed-lost early feature by Kalatozov, famous for The Cranes are Flying and I Am Cuba. Here was the same delirious cinematography already present in a propaganda piece that pulls out all the stops to hammer home its point.

Highlights:

The soundtrack of Scorsese’s Shutter Island came as a total surprise, even to someone who’d followed the film’s making. An amazing anthology of 20th-century avant-garde music accompanies Teddy’s soul-searching mission, giving the paranoid imagery even greater edge and depth.

Another unexpected treat was the climax of Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière presentation at the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato festival. Louis Lumière always believed film should be in colour and stereoscopic, but actually to see the 3D projection he finally achieved in the 1930s, recreated on the Piazza Maggiore giant screen, was to be reminded that 3D is hardly a recent novelty – more like how it was always meant to be.

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Michael Ciment
Positif, France

The Ditch (Jiabiangou)
Wang Bing, Hong Kong / France / Belgium

The famous documentary filmmaker (West of the Tracks) brings his sense of reality to depict the harrowing conditions of the life of the prisoners in this powerful rendering of the re-education camps in Mao’s China.

Poetry (Si)
Lee Changdong, South Korea

Confirming the exceptional talent of the South Korean director – and the vitality of Far East cinema – Poetry for me deserved to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes.

Silent Souls (Ovsyanki)
Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia

A poetic vision of life which testifies to the new surge in Russian cinema.

Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux)
Xavier Beauvois, France

Recreates with warmth and gravity the fate of seven monks decapitated in an Algerian monastery.

Mysteries of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa)
Raúl Ruiz, Portugal

One of two great films originally produced for television this year (the other being Carlos), Mysteries of Lisbon is a masterpiece by Ruiz, shortened to four-and-a-half hours. Adapted from a 19th-century novel by Castelo Bronco, it would have made Visconti jealous. A rake becoming a monk, an anguished bastard child, a tortured wife and a castrating father are the protagonists of a romantic-surrealistic melodrama shot in gorgeous colours and constantly surprising by the twists of its plot and the inventive mise en scène.

Highlight:

A box-set of five DVDs distributed by Arte Editions brings back to life the films made in the 1980s by Pierre Etaix, a worthy heir of the slapstick tradition of Keaton and Tati.

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Roger Clarke
Critic, UK

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Poetry (Si)
Lee Changdong, South Korea

Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt, USA

Down Terrace
Ben Wheatley, UK

The Kids Are All Right
Lisa Cholodenko, USA

Highlights:

Sitting down to watch a VHS of Fred Kelemen’s Frost (1997) after finding it when moving house. I believe it’s still at the centre of litigation and remains unreleased, a forgotten masterpiece held to ransom by ownership issues.

Seeing a late-night Friday screening of Noé’s Enter the Void was the most extraordinarily hallucinogenic and emotional experience, created by an appreciative younger audience.

Happening to be at a private screening of Let Me In with the author John Ajvide Lindqvist – he had only seen it for the first time a few hours before, and sat down to watch it again. I couldn’t help sneaking glances to check on his pretty rapt expression.

The documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within took me back to the few days I spent with him in Kansas, and how we nearly went to shoot guns at a target range – until a Southern Gothic heatwave brought the winged insects out in swarms, covering the windows of the Civil War Hotel where I stayed in Lawrence.

Seeing the restored version of Edward Yang’s four-hour epic A Brighter Summer Day (with no intermissions) remains my top highlight. It’s quite something to believe that a film only made in 1991 was in danger of being completely lost until Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation stepped in.

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Pam Cook
Academic, UK

The Killer Inside Me
Michael Winterbottom, USA / UK / Sweden / France

The Road
John Hillcoat, USA

A Prophet (Un prophète)
Jacques Audiard, France / Italy

A Town Called Panic (Panique au village)
Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar, Belgium / Luxembourg / France

Tetro
Francis Ford Coppola, Argentina / Italy / Spain / USA

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Kieron Corless
Sight & Sound

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Mnemosyne
John Akomfrah, UK

Putty Hill
Matthew Porterfield, USA

Festival
Jean-Claude Rousseau, France

Im Schatten (In the Shadows)
Thomas Arslan, Germany

Highlights:

Any one of Larry Cohen’s hilarious introductory narratives to the films in his retrospective at the Viennale – great stand-up as well as a great filmmaker. Sample: “I’d leave your mobile phones switched on if I were you, so you can talk to your friends during the boring bits.”

k-punk: the most incisive, stimulating writing on culture and politics on the internet.

Stuart Comer’s film programming at Tate Modern – constant surprises and delights.

Hong Sang-soo, Paradjanov and Paskaljevic retrospectives at the BFI Southbank.

The ongoing miracle of Manoel de Oliveira.

The Gábor Bódy video-magazine show at Southend’s excellent Focal Point Gallery, curated by George Clark – brilliant idea.

Doc’s Kingdom at Serpa in Portugal, which is unquestionably my favourite festival anywhere. Showing just a handful of superbly programmed films on a particular theme (this year it was ‘The Archive Image’) allowed for two-hour Q&As with the directors afterwards. The session with Hartmut Bitomsky – lucid, nuanced, eye-opening – was my absolute cinemagoing highlight of this past year.

Patrizio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light was my most overwhelming experience in a cinema. A film that belongs in a category all by itself.

The Harun Farocki retrospective at Tate Modern (and his gallery show at Raven Row), curated by the always-fascinating Otolith Group – masterpiece after masterpiece, a revelation. As well as affording an opportunity to hear the great man speak, he also introduced us (or me at least) to another great German documentarian I’d never come across before, Klaus Wildenhahn.

Uncle Boonmee winning the Palme d’Or. Rumour has it we have Victor Erice to thank. And of course Simon Field and Keith Griffiths, British producers who actually work with foreign directors – incredible! Were they absent from school when the parochial pills were being administered?

Cinema Scope. I do love a Mark Peranson polemic/tirade in print, and the one prompted by this year’s Cannes outdid even last year’s.

Best rediscovery: Paulino Viota’s Contactos (1970).

Best short: A History of Mutual Respect (Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt, Portugal).

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Mark Cousins
Filmmaker and critic (Prospect), UK

Film socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France

Stupid in love, solitary, misanthropic, spitting fury. As wildly energetic as Kick-Ass (which I also loved and which, I thought, was a great Jewish comedy. Jean-Luc, rent it from LoveFilm and order pizza).

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Which loves people as much as Godard doesn’t. Leigh’s most Ozu-like film.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

In which people split in two, in which death is a soft membrane (if only), and in which the shots are as great as the cuts in the Godard film.

Certified Copy (Copie conforme)
Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Belgium

Juliette Binoche, you were made for movies, like Falconetti or Louise Brooks or Anna Karina. Kiarostami’s gossamer delight.

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

My home city, Edinburgh, lifted off the ground by film.

Highlights:

I spent more time making than watching films this year, and my movie memories of 2010 are all over the shop: I wore a kilt and climbed to the Hollywood sign at dusk (it bangs as it cools). I spent time with Stanley Donen and argued with him about his film Two for the Road. For months I relished the arrival of Terrence Malick’s new movie Tree of Life, but he has kept us waiting. I cried – I know, what a jessie – at the beauty of Claudia Cardinale in Girl with a Suitcase (La ragazza con la valigia, 1961), which I saw for the first time at the Telluride Film Festival. I made a little cinema in a village in Iraq and showed films to kids – and saw my boyhood in their euphoria.

The big lowlight of my movie year was the death of my friend, the film-book author John Orr, who wrote like Godard cuts.

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Chris Darke
Critic, UK

White Material
Claire Denis, France / Cameroon

At Ellen’s Age (Im Alter von Ellen)
Pia Marais, Germany

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
Sophie Fiennes, France / Netherlands / UK

Content
Chris Petit, UK / Germany

Film socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France

Highlights:

June 2010. A tiny studio tucked away in a corner of BBC Television Centre. Director Grant Gee calls “Cut,” and Sir Andrew Motion looks suddenly blitzed. “That,” he says, “was intense.” Everybody in the darkened boxroom releases a breath, sensing that something special has taken place. We inhale the memory of his friend, W.G. Sebald. Is testimony part of a soul’s slow transmigration? Who even uses the word ‘soul’ anymore? But that was what we were about, in that oddly confessional space: watching and logging the soul that Sebald’s words had lodged in those we interviewed.

2011 is the tenth anniversary of his untimely death and Patience (After Sebald) will be part of the ongoing testimony to the influence and importance of this most missed of writers. I’ve been close to the film as it’s taken shape over the last year, doing interviews, brainstorming with Grant and producer Gareth Evans, and watching its layered, tapestry-like form take shape. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve been involved in and I look forward to seeing what its life – and afterlife – will be. The world premiere is in Aldeburgh on 28 January 2011.

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Thomas Dawson
Critic, UK

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Neds
Peter Mullan, UK / France / Italy

Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux)
Xavier Beauvois, France

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Highlight:

Nothing in the cinema this year moved me as much as the wordless ‘Last Supper’ sequence towards the end of Of Gods and Men. Despite being ordered by armed Islamic rebels and the military and civilian authorities to flee their monastery, the French monks have collectively chosen to remain and continue their mission, thus effectively condemning themselves to death. Having shared Holy Communion, the brothers settle down on a wintry night to a meal in their spartan dining quarters. Their resident medic (Michael Lonsdale) unexpectedly produces a couple of bottles of red wine and puts a cassette of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake into a tape recorder. To the strains of this sublime musical accompaniment, cinematographer Carole Champetier’s camera passes over the initially jubilant faces of the men while they savour the alcohol and their fraternal unity. As the music progresses, however, we see – in a series of close-ups – the characters overcome by tears.

The poignancy here partly derives from how writer-director Beauvois has patiently established the essential humanity of the monks over the preceding 100 minutes: from the outset they are engaged with the local Muslim community, and they entertain genuine doubts about the purpose of their self-sacrifice. The choice of Tchaikovsky’s music – used for very different purposes in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan – obviously heightens the atmosphere of tragic fatefulness. And the sequence itself is a reminder of one of the medium’s most enduring ‘special effects’ – the profound expressiveness of the human face.

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Maria Delgado
Academic and critic, UK

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz)
Patricio Guzmán, France / Germany / Chile

In the dry heat of Chile’s Atacama desert, astronomers look up at the skies to examine the origins of the universe. Close to the observatory, families of the disappeared search in the bleak heat of the desert for vestiges of their loved ones, victims of Pinochet’s brutal regime. Brilliantly juxtaposing what at first may appear to be diverse subjects to mesmerising effect, this extraordinary film is as much about the unknown and the unknowable as it is about Chile’s traumatic past.

The Peddler (El ambulante)
Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano & Adriana Yurkovich, Argentina

A trio of directors follow intrepid, self-taught filmmaker Daniel Burmeister as he arrives in a sleepy Argentine town and embarks on a modest genre pic with a group of locals. A wonderful, hugely entertaining documentary that juggles observations on small-town life with reflections on why film matters and how it can make a difference.

The Mosquito Net (La Mosquitera)
Agustí Vila, Spain

This dark, bitter tale of a bourgeois Catalan family’s multiple neurosis offers a brilliant indictment of a world where children are treated like adults and adults behave like teenagers.

What I Love the Most (Lo que más quiero)
Delfina Castagnino, Argentina

Another small gem from Argentina that captures the shifting dynamics between two friends over a Patagonian summer with a less-is-more approach, as Castagnino’s fixed camera observes what is said and what lies between the lines.

Biutiful
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Spain / Mexico

The most impressive performance of the year came from Javier Bardem as a contemporary Ulysses wandering the streets of an invisible Barcelona of migrant labour and petty crime.

Highlights:

Talking to González Iñárritu about the mechanics of filmmaking; finding DVDs of all Martin Rejtman’s majestic black comedies in Buenos Aires; watching the ghosts of Basque film history flicker on the walls of José María de Orbe’s family house in the elegiac Father (Aita); raising a glass to Luis Miñarro, Spain’s most ambitious independent producer, who was involved in three of my favourite films of the year: Uncle Boonmee, Father (Aita) and The Mosquito Net.

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Mar Diestro-Dópido
Sight & Sound

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz)
Patricio Guzmán, France / Germany / Chile

Mnemosyne
John Akomfrah, UK

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

Father (Aita)
José María de Orbe, Spain

La vida sublime (The Life Sublime)
Daniel V. Villamediana, Spain

Highlight:

Sharing a reindeer soup with Jonathan Rosenbaum and Andrei Khrzhanovsky, director of A Room and a Half, in a teepee near the Arctic, surrounded by 300 huskies howling at the sunset.

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The Ferroni Brigade
aka Christoph Huber & Olaf Möller
Critics, Austria / Germany

The Ragnarök of modern comedy and the surprise find of the year: an apocalypse-themed huis clos so outrageously weird it reportedly left its creator dumbstruck. Imagine a mix of South Park at its most vulgarly surrealistic and Ferreri at his loosest, least inhibited, directed by an assortment of porno hacks and featuring dazzlingly acting-challenged talents. Should by all means be shown with David O’Reilly’s animated short The External World, which Chatman co-wrote.

Ödipus Monument Test 01
Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria

Durs Grünbein liest die dritte Satire des Juvenal
Klaus Wyborny, Germany

Two avant-garde studies for truly radical (re-)readings of Greek and Roman classics. From the construction site of a world cinema apart.

Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux)
Xavier Beauvois, France

Man dies. Ideas continue, develop, live on. John Ford would approve.

Wall Street Money Never Sleeps
Oliver Stone, USA

Oca (Father)
Vlado Skafar, Slovenia

Broker and broken, world trade and family ties, cold cynicism and hot-hearted hope. Stone’s portrait of high finance as a self-obsessed, Darwinism-keyed clique of social killer mutants merrily working away towards self-extinction was seemingly too subtle, sardonic, sinister for folks wanting a quick, clean condemnation of bankerdom – it ain’t that simple. This might go down as the most misunderstood Hollywood masterpiece of 2010 (followed closely by Joel Schumacher’s similarly reviled Twelve).

Skafar’s prose poem, then, is the proletarian, low-budget, emotionally exhilarating answer to Wall Street: a sketch of people whose lives are destroyed by global capitalism going berserk – which, again, is like saying that Au hasard Balthazar tells the sad tale of a donkey’s life…

Vapor Trail (Clark)
John Gianvito, USA / Philippines

A monument to all poor who refuse to see themselves as imperialism’s collateral damage, erected in humble solidarity.

Highlight:

Meeting Miguel Marías in Bologna – finally. Truly a soulmate in cinema.

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William Fowler
Curator, BFI, UK

Robinson in Ruins
Patrick Keiller, UK

It’s a strange moment when a filmmaker who’s effectively been prevented from making films engineers a return to the frame just as the former obstacle – the UK Film Council – is decreed null by the government. Intelligent, beautiful and beautifully paced – there have to be more of these.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
Yony Leyser, USA

Formally and structurally conventional, this documentary is also rich, compelling and filled with reflections that are both articulate and emotionally sensitive. If you judge a man by the company he keeps, Burroughs was clearly quite something.

The Pickers
Adam Chodzko, UK

Artist Chodzko deserves considerable praise for working some hundred years of societal change through an encounter that’s human, immediate and self-reflexive. Migrant Romanian strawberry pickers review archival footage of hop pickers on their computer. It’s brilliant.

Four Lions
Chris Morris, UK / France

The collisions of extreme ideology – Islamic Jihad – with the minutiae of domestic living are the cause of a lot of great humour here, as well the moments of pathos.

The Futurist
Emily Richardson, UK

Navigating an empty cinema auditorium, arcing slowly towards images projected at an incredible speed, a question is posed: what’s moving in real time here, the film’s camera or the projection? I was confused – alienated even – caught in a collision of the serene and the frenetic, lost in an unsolvable conundrum.

Highlight:

Questioning the modest yet politically and morally assured Michael Moorcock after a Flipside screening of The Final Programme, the 1973 adaptation of his novel. I then read his radically structured book of the movie The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle which, tying itself to the punk names we all know and love, worked totally.

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Philip French
The Observer, UK

Inception
Christopher Nolan, USA / UK

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

The Kids Are All Right
Lisa Cholodenko, USA

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Highlights:

The year’s great revival was the near-definitive restoration of Lang’s Metropolis (1927). I’ve been watching ragged versions in uncomfortable venues since I was a teenage cinephile in the early 1950s: it’s now available on DVD for home viewing. The most revealing revival was Leo McCarey’s 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow (Eureka Blu-ray), a Depression classic that must have been Ozu’s model for Tokyo Story.

The most illuminating film book that came my way this year was Susan Compo’s Warren Oates (University Press of Kentucky), appropriately subtitled A Wild Life. It’s a frank, fascinating biography of a dedicated character actor who moved in the less fashionable Hollywood circles and appeared in some of the key movies of his time.

A defining cinematic event? Our coalition government’s decision to scrap the UK Film Council is, if not exactly a tragedy, then a stupid, ill-considered decision, characteristic of the Establishment’s attitude towards our cinema and our movie industry over the past 80 years, whether the aim was to curb or encourage. Harold Wilson in the 1940s, Thatcher in the 80s, Brown in the early years of this century – it’s all much the same.

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Chris Fujiwara
Critic, USA

Ying Liang’s short Condolences is built around the stubbornness of a woman’s body as it stays in a chair, while all around her an official ceremony of forgetting is taking place. Across the duration of this unflinching image, tragedy and irony trade off, neither one willing to abandon the field to the other, and neither one able to assert clear title to it.

Rosalinda
Matías Piñeiro, Argentina

Made as part of the Digital Project of the Jeonju International Film Festival, this short revitalises a kind of dialogue with theatre that cinema used to engage in more frequently (sometimes with the brilliance of To Be or Not to Be, Les Enfants terribles, The Golden Coach, The Honey Pot or Opening Night). Taking as its starting point a series of rehearsals of As You Like It, it’s one of the most interesting Shakespeare films to emerge since the death of Orson Welles.

O Estranho Caso de Angélica (The Strange Case of Angelica)
Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / Spain / France / Brazil

Toujours moins
Luc Moullet, France

Studying the recent history of the replacement of human workers by automation, Toujours moins is a film of supreme elegance and wit, as masterful as Manoel de Oliveira’s latest.

Festival
Jean-Claude Rousseau, France

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Graham Fuller
Critic, USA

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Assayas skipped the psychology of terrorism in favour of depicting the Marxist assassin-hijacker as the star of his own 21-year action movie – a man whose need for sex and liposuction confounds the notion of revolutionary asceticism.

Father of My Children (Le Père de mes enfants)
Mia Hansen-Løve, France / Germany

Hansen-Løve explored “the cruelty of cinema” in her second feature, which claims as its martyr-victim an urbane producer of risky arthouse ventures. The scene in which his grieving family moves from darkness to light during a power cut is a sublime metaphor for carrying on.

Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt, USA

A ‘slow cinema’ first for the genre, Reichardt’s revisionist-feminist western reveals how pioneer families went astray on a waterless branch of the Oregon Trail in 1845. Starkly poetic, it punctures both the racist masculine aggression of Manifest Destiny and Fordian nostalgia.

Revanche
Götz Spielmann, Austria

This impressive anti-thriller morphs from sleazy noir to serene Christian parable as it follows a bank robber from Vienna to the countryside and leads him from revenge to redemption.

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

According to Fincher’s putative zeitgeist classic, Facebook was the spawn of rejection, spite, loneliness and betrayal. Hail Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, the geek god of disconnection – this decade’s Charles Foster Kane!

Highlights:

Watching Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary Shoah on its 25th-anniversary rerelease in New York put everything else I saw into perspective. Who can comprehend the backwards look of the train driver at his ghostly cargo, the throat-slitting gestures of warning to the trapped Jews, the horror of the song taught to new arrivals at Treblinka?

Elsewhere, it was a banner year for Powell (Black Narcissus DVD, Peeping Tom revived), Lang (Dr Mabuse and M DVDs, Metropolis restored), Hitchcock-as-icon (Double Take) and Clouzot (Inferno).

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Charles Gant
Heat magazine, UK

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Credit to Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher and co for creating a truly vital mainstream film from the most unlikely subjects: computer programming, business ethics and legal process.

Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich, USA

Catfish
Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, USA

Two emotional rollercoaster rides from opposite ends of the budgetary scale: the latter documentary at times appears to be so outrageously exploitative, the only credible explanation seemed to be that it was in fact a scripted drama. Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman push the audience to the edge of outrage, then row back in the nick of time.

Tabloid
Errol Morris, USA

More straightforwardly enjoyable than Catfish – though also exploitative of its deluded subject – is Errol Morris’s giddy Tabloid.

Monsters
Gareth Edwards, UK

For its capacity to surprise with its collision of road movie, indie romance and sci-fi.

Highlight:

I first saw The Social Network at a London press screening, but a couple of weeks later I was in New York the day it opened at US cinemas. Seeing it again on opening night, at a packed AMC megaplex on 42nd Street – right film, right place, right time.

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Leonardo Garcia-Tsao
Critic, Mexico

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

A feat of narrative tension sustained through a 333-minute thriller that is essentially a perceptive meditation on the shifting ideologies of world politics.

Chicogrande
Felipe Cazals, Mexico

An inner epic and a lucid critique of US interventionism, done in the form of a classic western. Even the genre themes of loyalty and camaraderie are there.

My Joy (Schastye Moye)
Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / Germany / Netherlands

An unpredictable and at times baffling road movie into Russian darkness, past or present. One of the few true revelations of the year.

Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese, USA

Against most expectations, Scorsese regained his wild and crazy mojo in this nightmarish recreation of his protagonist’s mind.

Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich, USA

For once a box-office hit that deserved its popularity. Wit, nostalgic emotion and craftsmanship in one smooth Pixar package.

Highlights:

2010 for me was the year I finally had my fill of the shabby minimalist trend which, after a ten-year run, has become in its own way as formulaic, convention-ridden and self-indulgent as any mainstream movie. So allow me to make a pitch for maximalism. Go for baroque, guys! Don’t let the legacies of Von Sternberg or Welles be forgotten.

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Charlotte Garson
Cahiers du cinéma, France

La Vie au Ranch (Chicks)
Sophie Letourneur, France

Post Mortem
Pablo Larraín, Chile / Germany / Mexico

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Highlights:

David D. Williams is a painter and cinéaste who teaches film at the University of Virginia. His two masterpieces, Lillian (1993) and Thirteen (1997), are included on a French-release box-set that gives us the opportunity to witness the synthesis of three aesthetics – experimental, documentary, fictional – in two piercingly beautiful female portraits. In giving barely fictionalised roles to his black neighbours and using his own home as set, Williams gives new meaning to the expression ‘home movie’. Despite his selection at Sundance at the start of the 1990s, his lyricism – carried by the muted colours of 16mm – never set a trend. But he remains, with Charles Burnett, the most beautiful example of American ‘folk cinema’.

Plus: Mad Men; the best song heard in a movie in a long time – the autobiographical lament sung by artist / madman Jean-Marie in Antoine Boutet’s French documentary Le Plein pays; Jean Narboni’s stimulating little book on The Great Dictator, Pourquoi les coiffeurs? Notes actuelles sur Le Dictateur (Capricci éditions, France); Edward Yang’s restored A Brighter Summer Day.

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Ryan Gilbey
New Statesman, UK

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

A fine companion piece to Fincher’s most exacting film, Zodiac. Like that picture, it’s a forensic study of an enigmatic outcast remaking the world according to his own desires and specifications – and of the people left behind him to clear up or make sense of the mess. In the case of Zodiac, it was a serial killer. Here, it’s the only marginally more likeable Mark Zuckerberg. Stand-outs include a creepy-sad piano / synth score (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and the mighty-beyond-his-years Andrew Garfield, wearing all the movie’s pain in that worried face.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Apichatpong uses film language we’ve encountered before, but assembles it in such a way that we have the sensation of stumbling upon a previously undiscovered and uncorrupted tongue.

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / Spain / France / Italy

In a delicious reflection of the main character’s central conundrum — what did I do? — the audience is left asking, over and over, “What did we see?” Like Lynch or Antonioni, it’s a mystery with an infinite shelf life.

Greenberg
Noah Baumbach, USA

In common with Fincher’s film, this is also a comedy (of sorts) about an East Coast Jew hitting California without the benefit of any discernible social skills. Here’s an arbitrary measure of this haunting movie’s success: even Rhys Ifans is good in it.

Gentlemen Broncos
Jared Hess, USA

The Peddler (El ambulante)
Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano & Adriana Yurkovich, Argentina

I’m cheating by smuggling two films into fifth place, but these are snug bedfellows, both of them in love with the DIY ethic and the unruly joy of imaginative storytelling.

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Jane Giles
Head of content, BFI, UK

Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé, France / USA / Germany / Italy / Japan / Canada

Blinking marvellous, with one of the best-ever opening credit sequences. Totally immersive cinema.

A Prophet (Un prophète)
Jacques Audiard, France / Italy

Truly terrific, nothing more to say.

The Runaways
Floria Sigismondi, USA

Criminally underseen, it barely scratched the box office, but this gorgeous 1970s romp should be on the syllabus at the Girls’ Own School of Rock ’n’ Roll Film Studies.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Werner Herzog, USA / Germany

My expectations for The Bad Lieutenant were raised too high to deliver, but this cheered me up no end with its dream cast and flamingo hostages.

I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)
Luca Guadagnino, Italy

It’s fascinating to see how the ‘women’s picture’ looks 50 years on, particularly as the BFI prepares for a major season reappraising the melodrama.

Highlights:

A nearly perfect night watching Peckinpah’s The Getaway in NFT1 as part of the Steve McQueen season – it surely trumps The Killer Inside Me in the Jim Thompson adaptation stakes.

Seeing BFI Flipside go from strength to strength, with Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush becoming the BFI’s fastest-selling DVD release ever.

Judging the Edinburgh Film Festival award for Best British Short Film and being worried for days by In the Meadow (directed by Dave Alexander Smith) – Marcel Marceau meets Michael Haneke.

Being moved to tears by John Krish’s description of filming They Took Us to the Sea, which screened on the opening night of the BFI’s ‘Boom Britain’ post-war documentary season.

Realising that the world wouldn’t end with the death of Dennis Hopper.

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Carmen Gray
Critic, UK

Aurora
Cristi Puiu, Romania / France / Switzerland / Germany

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Andrei Ujica, Romania

While the cinema of the moment may have shifted to Thailand, for me the year was still all about Romania. My experience of these two films was heightened by seeing them with a packed and responsive local audience at the excellent Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj. Puiu’s bleak, blackly absurdist meditation on the human will to kill is nothing short of a medium-pushing masterpiece, while Ujica’s reconfiguration of archival propaganda material, quietly needling out its intrinsic irony and the seeds of its own unravelling, is just as stunningly innovative in the realm of documentary.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Trash Humpers
Harmony Korine, USA / UK

How to Make a Book with Steidl
Jörg Adolph & Gereon Wetzel, Germany

Brilliantly witty, unique documentary about German publisher Gerhard Steidl.

Highlight:

The resurrection of the extended Metropolis, also screened in Cluj, with live music.

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Peter Hames
Academic and critic, UK

How I Ended This Summer (Kakya provel etim letom)
Alexei Popogrebsky, Russia

Popogrebsky’s atmospheric psychological drama set in a meteorological station in the Arctic Circle was a deserved festival favourite. Compelling atmosphere and beautifully acted. A pity his second film Simple Things missed out on a UK release.

White Material
Claire Denis, France / Cameroon

Denis’s profound account of the life of a white coffee planter (Isabelle Huppert) caught up in the realities of an African civil war. A highly original narrative powerfully evokes ambiguities of feeling, and Huppert gives a stunning performance.

Surviving Life
Jan Svankmajer, Czech Republic / Slovakia

Svankmajer’s latest film uses cut-out animation, combining real actors and their photographs to produce some striking collages. The story of a man who wants to preserve his dream reality, it’s also a great deal of fun.

My Joy (Schastye Moye)
Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / Germany / Netherlands

From stories told to him while working on documentaries in Russia, Loznitsa has produced a compelling and disturbing road movie reflecting the present and past traumas of ‘European Russia’.

Pouta (Walking Too Fast)
(Radim Spacek, Czech Republic / Slovakia)

Strikingly visualised, this disturbing tale of the Czech secret police provides a compelling portrait of moral and social corruption. It’s ultimately more disturbing than The Lives of Others.

Highlights:

The Frantisek Vlácil retrospective season at BFI Southbank produced not only some remarkable films, but revealed that such journeys of discovery can even command audiences.

I was also delighted to catch up with Wojciech Jerzy Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) and the full version of Visconti’s The Leopard (Il gattopardo, 1963).

Nils Gaup’s Kautokeino Rebellion, which I saw in Gdynia, tells the suppressed story of the Norwegian Sami rebellion of 1852. Introduced by Gaup, himself a descendant of one of the leaders, it’s an epic of substance.

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Nick Hasted
Critic, UK

The Road
John Hillcoat, USA

A Prophet (Un prophète)
Jacques Audiard, France / Italy

Oil City Confidential
Julien Temple, UK

Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore, USA

Agora
Alejandro Amenábar, Spain

Highlights:

My most unpleasantly memorable surprise in the cinema was watching the fatal beating of Jessica Alba’s character in The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom’s scrupulously well-intentioned, awful moral and tonal misjudgement. The happiest was De Niro in Everybody’s Fine, finally playing the convincing ordinary man he’d said he was aiming for in 1970s interviews. A great actor’s unremarked return, it was more magically nuanced and personal than any fiction Scorsese’s managed lately.

My offscreen highlight, though, was meeting Filippo Timi. Known here for playing Mussolini in Bellocchio’s Vincere, in Italy he’s a major star and bestselling author, a sudden phenomenon at 35. In his films he combines bullish masculine power and delicate sensitivity. I was still more eager to meet him when Gabriele Salvatores, who directed him in As God Commands, mentioned that Timi has a terrible stammer and eyesight so bad he’s “almost blind”. “He can’t see and can’t speak,” he told me, “the two things an actor needs most. But he has an iron will.”

The wiry, attractively bohemian Timi waiting for me at his London distributor’s office was unrecognisable from the combustible actor on screen. There it’s his physical presence that gets you, and he memorably told me why: “I believe more in the body than the thought. If someone compliments me, I don’t trust them unless they hug me. And the same if someone’s angry – I don’t trust them unless they punch me. If we were to have an argument, I’d have a huge conflict in myself not to beat you up… But if you produce something wonderful from this interview, one day when we meet again I’d probably kiss you!”

I got a massive hug, not a punch, as I left.

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Sophie Ivan
Critic, UK

Neds
Peter Mullan, UK / France / Italy

Devastating, witty kitchen-sink drama laced with magic realism and echoes of Truffaut, Peter Mullan’s long-awaited third feature is one of 2010’s biggest reasons to be cheerful about British cinema.

The Secret of Kells
Tomm Moore, France / Belgium / Ireland

In another strong year for Ghibli and Pixar, this 2D Irish animation was an unlikely Oscar contender. Based on, and styled after, a medieval illuminated manuscript of the Gospels, it is also a uniquely beautiful, charming treat.

Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue)
Catherine Breillat, France

Breillat’s first (though somehow inevitable) foray into fairytales was playful, enigmatic and provocative – a perfect pairing of filmmaker and subject.

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece

Brilliant, bizarre and utterly compelling philosophical and psychological study of familial dysfunction, Lanthimos’s film plays like Haneke with belly laughs.

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
Frederick Wiseman, France / USA

Wiseman’s documentary works as a neat companion piece to his follow-up, Boxing Gym, but is set apart by its masterful structure and exquisitely photographed, transcendent dance sequences.

Highlights:

Battersea Art Centre’s 32-hour Twin Peaks weekender, during which the entire venue was transformed into Lynch-land (including Log Lady life-drawing, the Black Lodge and an inexhaustible supply of doughnuts), fully immersed viewers in the series’ many dimensions.

The highlight of another innovative programme of live music commissions for silent cinema from Birds Eye View, Warp Records-signed composer Calix’s palette of found sounds, insect noises and synth melodies provided a suitably enchanting accompaniment to Lotte Reiniger’s groundbreaking silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

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Kevin Jackson
Critic, UK

Highlights:

Having spent most of the year in libraries researching a book about the year 1922, I hardly saw any new releases at all, though I am now much more familiar with the likes of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, Alan Dwan’s Robin Hood, Lang’s Dr Mabuse der Spieler, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, Murnau’s Nosferatu and other great hits of the annus mirabilis of literary modernism.

When not locked into the early 20s, I have enjoyed viewing and re-viewing a motley bunch of DVDs, including features by Alberto Cavalcanti (Champagne Charlie is a booze-sodden hoot, and Dead of Night even better than I recalled); glorious colour experiments by Len Lye (thank you, BFI!); Barney Platts-Mills’s 1971 Private Road, starring an impossibly handsome young Bruce Robinson (thank you again, BFI!); and – after many years of expectation – Guy Debord’s melancholic, apocalyptic essay-poem In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978), which – almost despite itself – is some kind of masterwork, and unexpectedly moving. In 2011, I will try to pay more attention to the present.

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Nick James
Sight & Sound

The most intelligent mainstream American movie made for some time. Aaron Sorkin’s script fizzes with insight, despite his professed ignorance of online social networking.

Aurora
Cristi Puiu, Romania / France / Switzerland / Germany

This quotidian portrait of a man contemplating violence builds in your mind even after you’ve devoted three hours to watching it. Cinema’s own Crime and Punishment.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
Sophie Fiennes, France / Netherlands / UK

This hardcore documentary about artist Anselm Kiefer’s landscaping of a studio site in Barjac in the South of France made an awe-inspiring pleasure of the artist’s aesthetic rigour.

Mysteries of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa)
Raúl Ruiz, Portugal

Sumptuously conceived, seemingly in the opulent style of late Visconti but actually with terrific economy, this flashback-based slippery narrative of progeniture and changing fortunes in 19th-century Europe combines the pleasures of Dickens and symbolist poetry.

Le quattro volte (Four Times)
Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / Germany / Switzerland)

Few films feel as completely achieved as this adroitly staged meditation on life cycles in rural Italy.

Highlights:

Standing briefly outside the bounds of journalistic propriety, my absolute highlight of 2010 was watching (on television) my wife Kate Ogborn win a television Bafta for Best Single Drama as the producer of Samantha Morton’s excellent film The Unloved. On a more professional level, talking about the cinema of the last decade with a roomful of Hungarian film-makers and cinephiles at the delightfully modest Titanic Film Festival in Budapest was another high point, even if the Icelandic ash cloud did mean I had to come home on a bus that took 27 hours to reach London.

I got a kick out of the ‘slow cinema’ debate we at Sight & Sound initiated, though a look at these poll results will show there was a deal of devil’s advocate about our questioning of its dominance. It was a great pleasure also to present the extraordinary Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as the S&S screening at the LFF. It would be in my top five if not for my wanting to give Le quattro volte a boost after noting that most of my team colleagues had voted for Boonmee.

I had the most fun in the cinema watching The Kids Are All Right in Berlin (relief during an otherwise weak festival) and The Shop Around the Corner at the BFI recently, and on TV watching 30 Rock (the last repository, I argue elsewhere, of the ‘Lubitsch touch’).

The maddest moment was hearing about the abolition of the UK Film Council while queuing for the videotheque at the Sarajevo Film Festival. The best news would include Clio Barnard’s double prize win at the LFF awards for The Arbor – and the completion of finance for Terence Davies’s first drama film for over a decade, The Deep Blue Sea.

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David Jenkins
Time Out London, UK

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
Frederick Wiseman, France / USA

Wiseman employs his primitive, humanist observational mode to present dance as an abstract form of communication. A master on top form.

Alle Anderen (Everyone Else)
Maren Ade, Germany

A ‘slow death of love’ movie every bit as nuanced and blissfully maddening as Scenes from a Marriage.

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

Chomet’s fond appropriation of Tati is an old-fashioned, artisan-built heartbreaker. Every frame hums.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Andrei Ujica, Romania

A despot executed with his own pistol. This rigorously assembled ciné-collage illustrates the Sturm und Drang of Ceausescu-era political propaganda, and also demonstrates how the recorded image can darken with age.

Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt, USA

One of America’s finest working directors delivers a deliciously opaque range western with philosophical undertones by the wagonload.

Highlights:

Seeing Mizoguchi’s 1933 silent The Water Magician with benshi narration and live koto score at the Barbican added a novel new dimension to the cinemagoing experience.

Jafar Panahi’s poignant ode to the necessity of creative freedom The Accordion – made before his imprisonment – played at Venice to a lengthy standing ovation. Also, the Lubitsch retrospective at Locarno reminded me what a sublime, mischievous talent he was. I was particularly smitten by the midnight screening of The Shop around the Corner. Best DVD release: Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973).

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Kent Jones
Critic, USA

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Earlier this year, Olivier Assayas and I did a talk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He’d been asked to discuss a film he admired, and he chose Zodiac. Early on, he said he was struck more than ever by the way that Fincher’s film found its structural and dramatic inspiration in reality itself. This is a hallmark of Carlos and The Social Network and of the three other films listed below – each in its own unique way.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Andrei Ujica, Romania

Boxing Gym
Frederick Wiseman, USA

Film socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France

Highlights:

For me, the great filmgoing event of this past year was Bruce Goldstein’s 3D festival at Film Forum in New York. Apart from Dial ‘M’ for Murder, which I’ve seen many times before, the highlight of the series was Inferno (1953), directed by the recently deceased Roy Ward Baker. It crosscuts systematically between Robert Ryan, a wealthy businessman left alone in the mountains with a broken leg, and his wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan) enjoying the pleasures of a swim, a well-cooked meal and a bottle of wine in air-conditioned comfort. The 3D accentuates rock formations, cacti, taut lengths of rope, Robert Ryan’s big, long body edging one crag at a time down to the desert floor and on toward civilisation. A tough, spare movie, a little grandiose but exciting, it doesn’t take any shortcuts getting Ryan off the mountain.

Best acting of the year, hands down – Ruth Sheen’s staggering performance in Another Year. I was hanging on every gesture, just as I was 22 years ago when I saw High Hopes.

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Philip Kemp
Critic, UK

City of Life and Death
Lou Chuan, China / Hong Kong

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

Highlights:

The restored version of Lang’s Metropolis, the revival of the year. The 25 minutes of rediscovered footage are a revelation. True, the story is still sententious and frequently sappy, but at least it now makes dramatic sense.

Note: This entry came in too late to be counted for our print edition and therefore the published top 12 films tally.

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Edward Lawrenson
The Big Issue, UK

Aurora
Cristi Puiu, Romania / France / Switzerland / Germany

Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé, France / USA / Germany / Italy / Japan / Canada

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Andrei Ujica, Romania

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz)
Patricio Guzmán, France / Germany / Chile

Mama
Yelena & Nikolai Renard, Russia

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Mark Le Fanu
Academic and critic, UK

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (En cand vreau sa fluier, fluier)
Florin Serban, Romania / Sweden

A magnificent prison-and-hostage drama. Being Romanian, the film takes its time to unfold. Its mastery of mise en scène is one thing; its wisdom and humanity are even more impressive.

Medeni mesec (Honeymoons)
Goran Paskaljevic, Serbia / Albania

Paskaljevic is one of the great European directors. A recent season of his films at BFI Southbank this year has helped to make him better known to British audiences. Honeymoons, his latest, shows all his characteristic sensuousness and pessimism – one of the best films in recent history about the movement of people across boundaries.

Na putu (On the Path)
Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia & Herzegovina / Austria / Germany / Croatia

Its subject couldn’t be more topical: the lure of Islam in the face of contemporary Western secularism. How delicately and bravely the director handles the matter. No cheating, no clichés: the film is dialectically intelligent and psychologically penetrating.

My Queen Karo
Dorothée Van Den Berghe, Netherlands / Belgium

A libertarian commune in Amsterdam during the 1970s is viewed through the eyes of a child who ‘suffers’ the experience morally, in the depths of her little soul. But what an incredible child – and what an extraordinarily conceived set-up. The energy, colour and inventiveness of the playing lift this movie to a very high level.

Ajami
Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani, Germany / Israel

In my opinion, the best of the crop of excellent Israeli films that have been hitting our screens this year. I preferred it to Lebanon (good in a different way). It does a difficult thing, consummately, by seriously addressing both sides of the most intractable conflict of our time.

Highlights:

For me this was the screening at Pordenone’s Giornate del Cinema Muto of a freshly rediscovered John Ford movie, Upstream (1927). It’s not every day such films turn up, and in such wonderful condition too. The movie belongs to the time when Ford was working at Fox, and Charles G. Clarke’s photography glistens with the lovely chiaroscuro we have come to associate with that studio, at that period – the last great epoch of the silents. In case you’re wondering, the story and acting are pretty good too. It’s a comedy set in theatrical digs, with a splendid cast of characters, lovingly delineated. Eighty years on, this minor film strikes one as perfect of its kind – a vintage work from one of cinema’s old masters.

I’ve been following the discussion in the pages of Sight & Sound about ‘slow cinema’. Part of me doesn’t need to be convinced: in order to say anything interesting, one needs to have the space, and the time, to do it in. And this is best guaranteed (other things being equal) by the kind of long-take cinema which anchors you in the presence of the actors – and keeps you there over a measurable period of time. On the other hand, there are no absolute formulas, and intensity of expression can come in many guises: it can also be swift, brutal, staccato. The key matter is integrity, and having something to say that’s worth listening to.

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Colin MacCabe
Academic and critic, UK

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux)
Xavier Beauvois, France

Tamara Drewe
Stephen Frears, UK

I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)
Luca Guadagnino, Italy

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Highlight:

The screening of a restored print of Visconti’s The Leopard at Cannes. The film was once again superb, but the meditation on time passing was given several extra turns of the screw by its presentation by the only two members of cast and crew still living: Alain Delon, startlingly beautiful as he approaches 80, and Claudia Cardinale, dissolving into giggles like a young girl.

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Geoffrey Macnab
Critic, UK

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky, USA

Aronofsky’s foray into ballet is a deliriously overcooked psychodrama. There’s nothing restrained about the filmmaking, which has much of the same energy as The Red Shoes. Natalie Portman brings a febrile intensity to her role as the self-destructive dancer.

Boy
Taika Waititi, New Zealand

A tough, lyrical and often very funny film about an 11-year-old Maori kid: imagine a cross between Once Were Warriors and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. Writer-director Waititi excels in front of camera too as the boy’s delinquent dad.

Silent Souls (Ovsyanki)
Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia

A Russian road movie / shaggy-dog story reminiscent of As I Lay Dying, about a newly widowed man and his friend taking the body of his dead wife on a thousand-mile road trip to say goodbye to her according to the rituals of the ancient Merja culture. It’s the combination of melancholy, humour and surrealism that makes the film so winning.

A Letter to Elia
Martin Scorsese & Kent Jones, USA

This tremendous film about Elia Kazan is galvanised by Scorsese’s passion for his subject. He doesn’t become bogged down in the arguments about Kazan naming names in McCarthy days, but instead concentrates on the director’s work. In the process, he makes us realise just how dynamic and brilliantly acted Kazan’s movies were.

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

This animated feature shows Scotland in a magical light and also succeeds incredibly in capturing the spirit of Tati, though there’s a bleakness to the storytelling that stops it from ever seeming kitsch or maudlin.

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Lee Marshall
Critic, Italy

Le quattro volte (Four Times)
Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / Germany / Switzerland)

I’m finding increasingly that the films that move and interest me, at least outside the documentary format, are ones that channel the otherworldly quality of the cinematic experience. This was one: a laconic, sceptical, almost silent film about a dying shepherd, a lamb, a dog, a tree and a steaming mound of charcoal, it dramatised the natural circle of life and death without recourse to cute lion cubs or talking meercats.

Silent Souls (Ovsyanki)
Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia

One of those rare films that takes the world we live in and makes it strange and new. With its blend of invented folk traditions, free-floating symbols and sympathy for people and places on the margins, it reminded me of a Borges short story. Not drama, not mockumentary, definitely not realism, it seemed to inhabit a whole new genre.

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

Not least because of Jennifer Lawrence’s riveting lead performance, this was one of the best quest movies I’ve seen in years, its dark fairytale tests all the more compelling because they are faced by a 17-year-old girl in a dirtily real Ozarks setting.

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

Chomet’s film has meticulously observed rural Scottish and Edinburgh locations, but the fact that it’s animation once again makes the familiar strange (as in Miyazaki’s imagined European cityscapes), adding another layer to a poignant tale of illusions, both of the conjuring and of the human variety.

Attenberg
Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece

While I recognised the fashionably quirky nature of Tsangari’s Venice competiton entry, I also surrendered completely to its oddball portrait of intense father-daughter relationships and small-town life and friendships in the shadow of the local factory.

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Adrian Martin
Academic and critic, Australia

Certified Copy (Copie conforme)
Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Belgium

Film socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France

Poetry (Si)
Lee Changdong, South Korea

Vincere
Marco Bellocchio, Italy / France

Wild Grass (Les herbes folles)
Alain Resnais, France / Italy

Highlights:

It actually snuck in at the very end of 2009: the special screening of two 35mm films by Carmelo Bene, Our Lady of the Turks (1968) and Salomé (1972), at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. They were made under impossible conditions, through the sheer force of Bene’s considerable artistic will, during the seven-year period in which he devoted himself to cinema and more or less abandoned the theatrical experiments he had pursued since the late 1950s, and to which he returned until the end of his life in 2002.

All the dazed cinephiles who stumbled out of these big, loud screenings grasped, at the end, for the predictable comparisons: Fellini, Welles, Anger, Jarman, Schroeter, Pasolini, Kubrick, Ruiz, Jack Smith, João César Monteiro… But no combination of the known reference points will suffice. Bene is utterly unique. As both performer and director, he pulverised language, revelled in what he called the “surgical imprecision of montage”, casually scandalised every standard of conventional morality and lit a bonfire of the classical traditions which he nonetheless knew and respected deeply. Bene is an avant-garde superstar in parts of Europe, but is virtually unknown in any English-speaking film culture. Cinema history still hides its finest gems.

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Demetrios Matheou
Sunday Herald, UK

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

This bitter, brutal, mesmerising backwoods drama premiered at Sundance, establishing a very high bar for fiction that few films reached.

Blue Valentine
Derek Cianfrance, USA

With phenomenal performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, this depicts the top and tail of a relationship – the rapturous first meetings and the eventual, premature death throes – with heartbreaking conviction.

Attenberg
Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece

The new wave of Greek cinema announced by Dogtooth was confirmed by this weird but profound investigation of family, sex and society, at the heart of which is an enormously touching relationship between a young woman and her dying father.

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Banksy, UK

This epitomised the current, intriguing blurring of the lines between documentary and fiction. Posing as biography, it was in fact a very tricky construct that left a delicious feeling of having been had – yet still offered much food for thought about the commercialisation of art.

Le quattro volte (Four Times)
Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / Germany / Switzerland)

Another ecstatic tiptoe between fact and fiction, with the unlikeliest of heroes – a herd of goats, running amok in the Calabrian hills.

Highlight:

Nathalie Portman’s transformation into the black swan. At the climax of Darren Aronosfky’s bravura psychodrama Black Swan, Portman’s mentally fragile ballet dancer finally loses her mind – but, ironically, finds her feet – as she performs Swan Lake. And in the moment that she conquers the role of the black swan, Aronofsky has her transform physically before us, in a kinetic flurry of dark, metallic wings. The moment was, for me, the year’s most thrilling, ecstatic piece of pure cinema.

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Sophie Mayer
Academic, UK

This Quality
Rosalind Nashashibi, Egypt

Part of the LUX / ICO Artists’ Moving Image programme, Nashashibi’s mysterious, engaging, thoughtful work repays repeated viewings as a film about the act (and art) of looking. Apparently simple, the complex moment of looking at a woman in public space takes on resonance when followed by shots of draped cars in Cairo’s streets.

Budrus
Julia Bacha, Israel / Occupied Palestinian Territory / USA

Rough around the edges cinematically but incredibly thoughtful in its editing and iconography – and utterly necessary in its representation of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Double Tide
Sharon Lockhart, USA / Austria

Cinema as stillness, as labour and as meditation – like a cool glass of water in the middle of the hectic London Film Festival.

Working Girls
Dorothy Arzner, 1931, USA

Arzner’s ‘lost’ film screened as part of a deeply enjoyable retrospective at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It’s a fast-talking and more liberated precursor of screwball comedy, but harder-edged (despite its sentimental ending) in its intimations of single motherhood and prostitution.

Highlights:

On 10 February 2010, in the shadowy space of London’s Horse Hospital, filmmakers, critics, academics, visual artists, sound artists, poets and cinephiles stood united to celebrate Vertigo as not just a magazine for the moving image, but a community committed to making, sharing, considering and advocating it. Although the event was a wake for the print magazine, its spirit lives on in a digital archive, as well as (if not more so) in the continuing connections and interactions between the people who gathered around and through its pages. Gone but not forgotten.

The Agnès Varda season at the BFI and on MUBI – for the opportunity it gave to mingle and compare Varda’s elegantly quirky body of features with her lesser-known documentaries and shorts, Mur murs (1980) being a stand-out.

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Hannah McGill
Film writer, UK

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

I think this is a very important and a truly original film. It’s very rare to see work that is this formally ambitious but still retains such a pure and forceful emotional connection to its subject. It made me feel angry, sad and exhilarated.

The Mouth of the Wolf (La Bocca del lupo)
Pietro Marcello, Italy/France

This was my favourite piece of storytelling this year: a beautiful love story, an unforgettable character study and a highly sophisticated blend of documentary and imaginative elements.

Monsters
Gareth Edwards, UK

Edwards is the British fiction breakout of the year. For a genre piece Monsters is very low-key, but that’s what impresses - the tenderness and the attention to visual and emotional detail.

Kawasaki’s Rose (Kawasakiho ruze)
Jan Hrebejk, Czech Republic

What every family saga about concealed romantic and political skeletons should be: intelligently scripted, exquisitely well-cast, entirely gripping on the level of character.

How I Ended This Summer (Kakya provel etim letom)
Alexei Popogrebsky, Russia

A properly thrilling thriller doesn’t entirely explain itself: as well as responding to the slow-burning psychological drama and the stunning use of landscape here, I loved the fact that the pivotal decision is not quite explicable.

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Henry K. Miller
Academic, UK

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Edgar Wright, USA / UK / Canada

Greenberg
Noah Baumbach, USA

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Banksy, UK

Highlights:

Frank Kermode, who died in August, wrote very little on film, but his extensive work on, and defence of, the canon is especially pertinent at this time of year. The terrible proliferation of lists – not exactly thin on the ground through the rest of the film calendar – might lead you to dismiss the canon, and the seeming availability of nearly everything might make it seem irrelevant, but the canon is more than a top ten. It’s a conversation, in part, and as Kermode says in History and Value, it’s finally inescapable. “If we want the monuments, the documents we value, we must preserve them in spite of their evil associations, and find ways of showing that their value somehow persists in our changing world.”

That “seeming availability of nearly everything” is, of course, just that, but there are still more superb DVD releases in a year than I can absorb (or afford). The Lux’s John Latham Films 1960-1971 is beautifully put together. I was also very glad to see three of Thorold Dickinson’s films – Queen of Spades (1949) and Secret People (1951) in particular – put out by Optimum. Dickinson came into the film business as an apprentice of the director George Pearson; Judith McLaren’s reconstruction of his Ultus quartet (1915–17), presented at BFI Southbank, was an exemplary work of scholarship, drawing on multiple archives to bring to light something unseen since its release in the age before repertory film culture.

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James Mottram
Critic, UK

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Assayas’s 333-minute terrorist drama destroyed all comers. Never mind the full-length version was meant for French television, this was an encapsulating cinematic experience dominated by a charismatic turn by Édgar Ramírez.

I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)
Luca Guadagnino, Italy

Sumptuous Italian melodrama, the most assured directorial debut of the year.

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Another year, another Mike Leigh film – but what a film. A searing study of friendships and family, it may be familiar territory for Leigh, but it proves particularly fertile here. Arguably the best ensemble cast of 2010 – the performances from Leigh regulars Lesley Manville and Peter Wight were nothing short of extraordinary.

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky, USA

You need guts to take on The Red Shoes. Aronofsky’s ballet drama may come off second best, but this mash-up of psychological horror, coming-of-age story and backstage drama kept me hooked.

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

How do you make a film about Facebook? Aaron Sorkin’s dazzling script showed how. A true Geek Tragedy.

Highlights:

While 2010 was hardly a vintage year, there were still some moments to treasure. As revivals go, Barney Platts-Mills’s ‘lost classic’ Bronco Bullfrog (1970), given an extended run at the BFI Southbank, was an unexpected delight. Even more so, however, was the Q&A with the delightfully eccentric Platts-Mills himself, following a screening of his other forgotten gem, Private Road (1971), which features a dashing young Bruce Robinson clearly pinching plot-points for Withnail & I.

On a more personal level, my Venice encounter with Two-Lane Blacktop’s Monte Hellman – now 78 – proved to be a major highlight (even if his baffling film Road to Nowhere was not what I’d hoped). Modest to a tee, and a true gentleman.

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Lisa Mullen
Critic, UK

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
Sophie Fiennes, France / Netherlands / UK

A ravishingly hypnotic record of the work of landscape artist Anselm Kiefer, who carves haunted spaces out of earth, air, fire and water and fills them with troubling and enigmatic objects: new relics planted carefully into new ruins. Addressing, almost wordlessly, the interdependence of work and practice, Fiennes finally appropriates Kiefer’s conceptual wonderland to ponder the relationships between film, art and truth. Masterfully done.

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky, USA

Searingly intense gothic melodrama with Natalie Portman giving the performance of her life as a virginal ballerina desperate to get in touch with her dark side. Exhilarating and exhausting: not since Powell and Pressburger has the world of ballet looked this blood-poundingly visceral on screen.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor)
Niels Arden Oplev, Sweden / Denmark / Germany / Norway

The definitive film adaptation of Steig Larsson’s first and best book, with Noomi Rapace bringing unexpected vulnerability to punk hacker Lisbeth Salander. The Swedish title, which translates as “men who hate women”, tells you everything you need to know about its violent plot, but the chill winds of time and regret also blow through its snowscapes, to brilliantly atmospheric effect.

Predators
Nimród Antal, USA

Producer Robert Rodriguez has his fingerprints all over this devastatingly efficient splatterfest, which strips the man-hunting-alien concept back to its cold-hearted genre essentials by parachuting a mixed bag of flawed humans on to the suffocating jungle planet that the predators call home.

Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore, USA

The exasperated outburst of a tattered revolutionary, Moore’s latest diatribe lacks the nimbleness of the director’s key works but still packs political punch. He may not quite bring himself to say the word ‘socialism’ out loud, but at least he’s brought the obscenity of ‘dead peasant insurance’ to the public’s attention.

Highlight:

Went the Day Well? (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s unsettling propaganda piece about a sleepy village invaded by Nazis in disguise, returned to the big screen this summer to unsettle a new generation with its subversive take on the English rural idyll.

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Kim Newman
Critic, UK

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Metropolis
Fritz Lang, 1927, restored

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos)
Juan José Campanella, Spain / Argentina

The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans
Werner Herzog, USA

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Hannah Patterson
Critic, UK

Shed Your Tears and Walk Away
Jez Lewis, UK

Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt, USA

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

A Prophet (Un prophète)
Jacques Audiard, France / Italy

Highlights:

Alan Bennett discussing his life and work at BFI Southbank; the Branchage International Jersey Film Festival, for its intimate and imaginative one-off events staged in unusual local settings; a host of illuminating documentaries and Q&As at Sheffield Doc/Fest (in particular, Marwencol and The Battle for Barking).

Sloping off alone to watch Streetdance 3D in a morning screening (dance movies, a guilty pleasure) and finding three others in the audience – all teenage boys – who proceeded to dance in the aisle throughout; Man of Aran at Union Chapel with live soundtrack by British Sea Power; bizarrely complementary double bills of Wall Street Money Never Sleeps and The Social Network, and Precious and Mugabe and The White African.

The anticipation of seeing Joanna Hogg’s new film Archipelago at the London Film Festival, and being unexpectedly moved by It’s Kind of a Funny Story.

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Vic Pratt
Curator, BFI, UK

Greenberg
Noah Baumbach, USA

My favourite film this year contains various chillingly close-to-the-bone insights into the damaged psyches of men of a certain age, succinctly articulated through a brilliantly plausible performance by Ben Stiller.

Tucker & Dale vs Evil
Elijah Craig, Canada

Country hicks Tucker and Dale are nice guys who play Scrabble, until a string of unfortunate bloody accidents lead teen townies to believe they’re crazed killers in this ingenious backwoods horror parody. Inexplicably, it remains unreleased in the UK.

Mavro Livadi (Black Field)
Vardis Marinakis, Greece

Greece, 1654. A wounded soldier is held prisoner in a convent until he escapes to the forest with one of the sisters. Hypnotic, dreamlike, strangely erotic and lushly resonant with the sights and sounds of the undergrowth, this striking debut feature still bothers me.

The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans
Werner Herzog, USA

It’s hardly Aguirre, Wrath Of God, and at times it veers dangerously close to becoming a TV movie, but it’s still good Herzog, with a rich, sleazy role for Cage, bumper lizard content and a splendidly overlong, grandiose title.

Whatever Works
Woody Allen, USA / France

Similarly, it’s hardly Annie Hall, and Larry David doesn’t always seem comfortable in Woody Allen’s skin (or should that be the other way round?), but its origins in an unused 1970s script mean that some of it works – and a sugary spoonful of old, good Woody helps the less-easy-to-swallow new, clunky, medicinal Woody go down.

Highlight:

Finally seeing Flipside favourite Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush groove out of the archive and on to BFI DVD in a zingy new, thoroughly psychedelic transfer, with tragic star Barry Evans celebrated once more in the media. If only he was still around to enjoy it.

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Naman Ramachandran
Critic, UK / India

The best portrait of crumbling aristocracy since The Leopard also has a delirious homage to D.H. Lawrence as the cherry on the cake.

Kray (The Edge)
Aleksei Uchitel, Russia

A terrific old-fashioned action film that’s a must for anyone with a love of steam engines.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame (Di Renjie zhi Tongtian diguo)
Tsui Hark, Hong Kong

Guy Ritchie should watch and learn from this majestic period detective film before desecrating Holmes again.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor)
Niels Arden Oplev, Sweden / Denmark / Germany / Norway

Noomi Rapace is the acting find of the year in a film that does justice to the book.

Endhiran (The Robot)
S. Shankar, India

It’s a riotous clash between man and machine in India’s most expensive film and highest-ever grosser, featuring the country’s biggest star Rajnikanth as a scientist, a good robot and an evil robot.

Highlights:

Meeting and getting an insight into the mind of Dibakar Banerjee, whose LSD: Love Sex aur Dhokha (LSD: Love, Sex and Deceit) opened the London Indian Film Festival. The film is based on the concept of found footage, the entire narrative seen through a voyeuristic video camera, security camera or a spy cam. Made for just £140,000, it grossed ten times that and flew high in the face of bloated Bollywood disasters. It also featured one of India’s first explicit sex scenes, which was censored there but was shown uncut in the UK at festival screenings.

It will be interesting to see how differently Banerjee treats Vasilis Vasilokos’s novel Z, so memorably adapted by Costa-Gavras in 1969, in his next film Shanghai.

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Nicolas Rapold
Film Comment, USA

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

Alle Anderen (Everyone Else)
Maren Ade, Germany

The Oath
Laura Poitras, USA

The Robber
Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria / Germany

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Highlights:

Keeping up with Stanley Donen in conversation; watching James Benning’s Google Earth presentation of his home town; watching Poto and Cabengo and Destroy She Said and Derby; and following Cristi Puiu to the end of a thought.

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Tony Rayns
Critic, UK

End of Animal (Jimseung ui Kkut)
Jo Seung-hee, South Korea

The Home of Stars (Byeoldeul ui Kohyang)
Jung Yoon-suk, South Korea

I Wish I Knew (Hai Shang Chuanqi)
Jia Zhangke, China

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Thomas Mao (Xiao Dongxi)
Zhu Wen, China

Highlights:

2010’s clear highlight was the awarding of the Cannes Palme d’Or to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, one of several titles that should really be in my top five – and would be, if I hadn’t preferred to use some of the slots for as-yet-unrecognised films. Apichatpong has been on a whirlwind tour of festivals ever since May, and his film has already opened in several countries, not very successfully in Germany and Italy but gratifyingly strongly elsewhere.

Its triumph on the Riviera prompted a remarkable polemic from the Canadian critic Mark Peranson in his magazine Cinema Scope, positing an unbridgeable divide between “us” (Apichatpong fans, and those in favour of intelligent, non-industrial and innovative cinema in general) and “them” (fans of Mike Leigh, Mikhalkov, Iñárritu et al). This was the most enjoyable piece of writing on cinema I read all year.

The other films that got my pulses racing in 2010 would all go down well with Peranson’s “us”. Most of them were from East Asia. They include Li Hongqi’s deadpan tragi-comedy Winter Vacation, the extended cut of Zhao Liang’s Petition, Lee Sam-Chil’s very witty riff on Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Japanese maverick Hirabayashi Isamu’s two latest shorts: Aramaki (on an attempt to aestheticise a suicide organically) and Shikasha (on a mysterious race against time), shown in competition in Berlin and Cannes respectively.

But I also liked some American indies: Foreign Parts by Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, about a scrapyard in the shadow of the New York Mets’ stadium, and Aardvark by Kitao Sakurai, a docudrama about a blind, middle-aged ex-alcoholic and his improbable friendship with a young black jiu-jitsu instructor who moonlights as an S&M rentboy.

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Tim Robey
The Daily Telegraph, UK

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece

For bite, formal audacity and hideous implications, there was nothing to match this.

I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)
Luca Guadagnino, Italy

Richly virtuosic with colours and playful with its antecedents. A Tilda-fest.

Poetry (Si)
Lee Changdong, South Korea

Forget the so-so noises out of Cannes – it’s magisterial on empathy and memory.

A Town Called Panic (Panic au village)
Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar, Belgium / Luxembourg / France

Hilariously off the wall, this animation blissfully refuses to settle down plotwise.

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

Finds the magic in melancholy, and vice versa. An evanescent poem in light.

Highlights:

The unsung hero of this year’s London Film Festival was Columbia restoration expert Grover Crisp, whose team’s glistening clean-up jobs on Picnic (1955) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) provided the lushest widescreen experiences I’ve had all year. In the same festival, which was in general better than ever, the restoration of Edward Yang’s street-gang epic A Brighter Summer Day by Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation finally brought this neglected magnum opus – which for me just clips the bar of masterpiece – back to light in the full cut Yang originally approved. Back in February, a first encounter with Bill Douglas’s astonishing trilogy (My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home, 1972-78) was the highlight of my Berlin. With their sullen soul and everyday lyricism, his films live up to their reputation – and then some.

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Nick Roddick
Critic, UK

9:06
Igor Sterk, Slovenia / Germany

An existential thriller inexplicably ignored by the festival circuit, about a cop coming apart at the seams as he investigates a suicide. Sterk’s third feature confirms him as one of Europe’s most rigorous and intelligent stylists.

The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans
Werner Herzog, USA

Having interviewed Abel Ferrara about the idea of a remake – “may they rot in hell” was his fond wish for those involved – I was supremely sceptical about Herzog’s version. But not since Fitzcarraldo has he produced so magnificently loopy a film, shaping the world to his own vision and redeeming Nicolas Cage in the process (and that’s saying something).

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
Sophie Fiennes, France / Netherlands / UK

This documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer is a vindication of the idea of ‘artists’ films’, imaginatively showing Kiefer’s work (and Kiefer at work) while quietly embellishing it with all the means that cinema can bring to the table.

Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project (Szelíd teremtés: A Frankenstein-terv)
Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary / Germany / Austria

Over the summer I met at least one other person who thought this was the best film shown at Cannes this year. Kornél Mundruczó has a unique – and uniquely bleak – world view, and his reimagining of the monster is both closer to Mary Shelley’s original than most versions and a visually and conceptually stunning film in its own right. The rest of the world should eventually come round.

Monsters
Gareth Edwards, UK

Edwards sets barely a foot wrong in this road movie-cum-love story-cum-sci-fi thriller. It’s not just the effects he achieves on a tiny budget – it’s that the experience of what those effects represent to the people in the film is engaging, exciting and finally very moving.

Highlights:

Two very different memories to cherish. First, Alec Baldwin’s impishly plus-size performance in the otherwise rather dreary It’s Complicated. His bedroom scene with a laptop webcam more than makes up for Meryl Streep’s strident and simpering presence in other parts of the film, not to mention its snobbish homage to luxury lifestyles.

Second, the unforgettable experience of seeing Andrei Ujica’s extraordinary, commentary and caption-free The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, not in Cannes or London, but with a packed-to-the-rafters Romanian audience in the Cinema Republica in Cluj, a Stalinist palace of culture built in Ceausescu’s heyday. Watching the film was like experiencing a national catharsis, complete with laughter and tears. The Republica, I hear, is due to be ‘redeveloped’, which probably means turned into a retail experience. And that makes the memory all the more intense.

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Jonathan Romney
The Independent on Sunday, UK

My Joy (Schastye Moye)
Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / Germany / Netherlands

The most overlooked film in the Cannes competition, and still apparently without a distributor in Britain. A troubling black-comic weaving of narratives set on the back roads of Russia, like Gogol put through an ethno-documentary filter.

Le quattro volte (Four Times)
Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / Germany / Switzerland)

The best goat film ever! But also a decisive vote for the power of storytelling in images – and largely non-human images at that. Includes an astounding single-take sight gag that Jacques Tati would have envied.

Post Mortem
Pablo Larraín, Chile / Germany / Mexico

Larraín’s absurdist take on the Pinochet coup proved more troubling and stirred more debate than any other film in Venice. It more than confirms the perverse promise of Tony Manero.

Potiche
François Ozon, France

I lost my taste for camp some time ago (probably around the time of Ozon’s 8 Women), but this reworking of a 1970s stage farce was probably the most enjoyable mainstream film of the year.

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

A brilliantly inventive escape from the dead end of British social realism, telling the tragic story of Northern playwright Andrea Dunbar and her children. Fortuitously, alas, it has also turned out to be the first real British film of the Cameron era.

Highlights:

Casey Affleck’s solo press conference for I’m Still Here in Venice, when he proved a master poker player, keeping everyone guessing about the Joaquin Phoenix ‘documentary’.

Christian Marclay’s astounding installation The Clock at White Cube Mason’s Yard: an assemblage of film clips containing specific time references which actually functions as a clock. A witty essay on time and the ways we experience it on screen, The Clock was virtuoso, mesmerising and one of the great experiments with screen duration (and a hell of a lot funnier than Empire State).

Worst film: Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Biutiful – the absolute nadir of the pious, leaden current wave of international ‘state of the world’ movies.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum
Critic, USA

Certified Copy (Copie conforme)
Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Belgium

Kiarostami’s much-improved remake of his first (and weakest) fiction feature – Report (1977), about the break-up of his own marriage – has its share of linguistic and touristic irritations, along with many thoughtful and beautiful moments. It seems like a necessary first step for a filmmaker who can’t expect to go on making films in Iran.

Film socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France

Like many friends, I’m still figuring this one out — in my case, with the special assistance of Andréa Picard’s brilliant defence of the film in Cinema Scope — and the effort has already been well worth the trouble. Even when Godard’s pet notions are unduly solipsistic, which also happens in Histoire(s) du cinéma, the work (and play) with sound and image are too dazzling to ignore.

The Forgotten Space
Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, Netherlands

I feel a special affinity for films that heroically attempt to say and do ‘everything’, even when they (inevitably) fail. The most obvious example is Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew. But it seems more useful to cite this much less-known essay film by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch about sea cargo, which has taught me even more.

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

I’m suspicious of instant classics, even when I’m immensely entertained by them, and I suspect that an important part of the popularity of this bittersweet Fincher-Sorkin comedy is its facile, cynically jaded fatalism about the corruptions of big business — a backhanded celebration, as in Citizen Kane and the first two Godfather films. Though I learned far more from Zadie Smith’s review of the film than I did from the film itself, it still has an undeniable flash.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Apichatpong’s breakthrough smash has the uncommon virtue of trusting its audience to furnish its own commentary and explanations — a virtue made possible by its magical realism.

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Sukhdev Sandhu
The Daily Telegraph, UK

The Clock
Christian Marclay, UK

It seems like it has to be a gimmick, a one-liner at best. Marclay, better known as a sound artist, has created a 24-hour film that excerpts and re-edits thousands of existing films in which a wristwatch or clock is shown telling the time. Actually the results are extraordinary: mysterious, funny, strangely moving. It’s a dazzlingly constructed reinvention of the city-symphony film that also proposes a completely new way of seeing cinema.

Voodoo Science Park
Steve Beard & Victoria Halford, UK

For a while now left-field British directors have been moving in the direction of the art gallery; perhaps, with the publishing industry in a state of ongoing retrenchment, left-field British writers will gravitate towards the cine-essay as a more productive home for their critical imaginations. Here maverick theorist Steve Beard, working with Victoria Halford, fashions a fascinating, Keiller-esque meditation on Hobbes’s Leviathan, the covert geographies of Albion and post-Ballardian crash theory.

Vapor Trail (Clark)
John Gianvito, USA / Philippines

264 minutes long, this is the first half of an epic work of eco-cinema and memory excavation in which the director of Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007) explores, with patience and intense lyricism, the calamitous legacies of the US military presence in the Philippines.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Andrei Ujica, Romania

Talk in documentary-making circles of archive fatigue may be premature; this is an uncommonly absorbing journey through the life and times of the Romanian dictator – grindingly dull public rallies, hunting-trip home movies, state visits to Universal Studios, the tribunal that prefaced his bloody death in 1989 – that makes a terrific companion piece to Ujica’s (Harun Farocki co-directed) Videograms of a Revolution (1993).

Knight and Day
James Mangold, USA

Sometimes it seems that all of 2010 – every plane journey I’ve been on, every Netflix-subscriber’s flat I’ve visited, every magazine I’ve opened – has been owned by Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Perhaps I’ve been cine-saturated into submission, but this romantic thriller – full of gassy fades and gauzy dissolves, creaky Euro mobsters and sausage-aided action scenes – is as frothily enjoyable as seaside confectionary.

Highlights:

It’s a truism that you should never meet your heroes. But, like all truisms, it’s only partly true. One lunchtime at Cannes this May I had the chance to sit next to the filmmaker who has given me more pleasure, more pause for thought, more grounds for believing in both the necessity and the possibility of social change than any other living director: Agnès Varda. Her 82nd birthday was just a fortnight away, but, as she sat at the restaurant-terrace table, brimming with energy, her eyes twinkling and logging everything that was going on around her (the latter witnessing supplemented by a few quick pans of the prandial scenario with her digicam), it was hard to believe she had changed much since her first film La Pointe-Courte back in 1955.

She spoke with a startling lack of sentimentality about the ever-more rapid migration of cinema from the cinema to the computer screen: “For me,” she said, “It is not a problem. If you watch a film on a laptop when you are in bed, the film is closer to your heart. Sometimes you fall asleep. OK. Then you wake up and you do not know what is the film and what is your dream. This is perfect.” She embraced the prospect of her films being watched on PlayStations.

I stared at her hands – even darker with liver spots now than they were in The Gleaners and I – and tried to imagine her playing Final Fantasy. We discussed her photographs of pre-Cultural Revolution China, debated at length what makes a good dessert, studied photographs of each other’s cats. By contrast, this year’s Cannes Festival couldn’t help but seem rather drab.

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Jasper Sharp
Midnight Eye, UK

Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé, France / USA / Germany / Italy / Japan / Canada

Overindulgent and coming across as more than a little trite at times, perhaps, but Noé’s technical and stylistic verve alone are enough to get my plaudits. This is sensational filmmaking, in every sense of the word.

Four Lions
Chris Morris, UK / France

Just really witty, topical and incisive.

The Kids Are All Right
Lisa Cholodenko, USA

A wonderful premise, pitch-perfect script and rock-solid performances.

Step Up 3D
Jon Chu, USA

For me, of all the live-action releases this year produced in 3D (not added in post-production), only this and Britain’s similar StreetDance 3D demonstrated ways of reaching out to wider theatrical audiences while (unlike Avatar) capitalising on the expanded visual grammar the medium affords to filmmakers. Just forget the story and enjoy the exhilarating spectacle.

Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich, USA

Another solid work from Pixar.

Highlights:

Two stand-outs for me: first, the Eureka Blu-ray release of Imamura Shohei’s Profound Desires of the Gods (1968) – which marked the debut of this most ambitious, idiosyncratic and mesmeric entry from the director’s oeuvre on any home-viewing format outside Japan – is an utter joy.

Second, the three-disc DVD release of Jake West’s documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape presents stunning value: its 12-plus hours of extras not only offer a nostalgic parade of guilty pleasures for those who remember the period, but a thorough education into the early days of the UK video market and – of broader significance – a terrifying wake-up call as to how a government can totally reject due process when rapidly forcing through legislation in response to a furore whipped up by the media.

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Anna Smith
Critic, UK

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Secrets & Lies is one of my favourite films of all time, so watching Mike Leigh almost match it with another classic was breathtaking. Wonderful to see Leslie Manville given the space to shine.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos)
Juan José Campanella, Spain / Argentina

There’s not a note missed or a breath wasted in this richly scripted, involving thriller.

Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé, France / USA / Germany / Italy / Japan / Canada

A classic audience divider, but I thought this was exceptional: edgy, exploratory, mind-bending. An instant cult classic.

The Kids Are All Right
Lisa Cholodenko, USA

I’ve always loved Cholodenko’s films, but this is her best yet: sharp, observational comedy-drama with three of America’s finest actors. After Bigelow’s Oscar win, fantastic to see another female director really resonate with the mainstream without compromising on quality.

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

As a huge fan of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, I was fascinated to find out more about writer Andrea Dunbar, but this becomes so much more than a biopic thanks to Clio Barnard’s utterly original approach.

Highlights:

I finally experienced Secret Cinema on my birthday, and what a treat: processed by Tyrell Corporation officers, we were bussed to a warehouse dressed as the Blade Runner set, complete with snakes and strippers. Deckards mixed with Rachael and Pris lookalikes; hundreds of actors milled around us, making it hard to separate punters from performers. By the time the film screened, the atmosphere was electric.

Fish Tank was my top film of last year, so I had to congratulate Andrea Arnold at this year’s London Critics’ Circle Film Awards. Buzzing from their win, she and Kierston Wareing pulled me straight on to the empty dancefloor and persuaded the DJ to play Life’s a Bitch – the song Kierston and her screen daughter Katie Jarvis dance to in that poignant scene at the end of the film. Surreal.

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Paul Julian Smith
Academic, USA

Mysteries of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa)
Raúl Ruiz, Portugal

Post Mortem
Pablo Larraín, Chile / Germany / Mexico

White Material
Claire Denis, France / Cameroon

Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt, USA

Highlight:

Guillermo del Toro’s appearance at Times Talks in the New York Times building on 21 September 2010. Del Toro proves in person to be not only funny and self-deprecating but also fearsomely erudite about the literary tradition of horror (the occasion was the launch of The Fall, his second co-authored novel in a vampire trilogy).

He suggested that Bram Stoker’s original Dracula could be seen as a response to innovations in technology, such as the typewriter, which brought the old into modernity. And he went on to show how the digital effects he devised as a filmmaker in, say, Hellboy employ traditional handcrafted skills: in one sequence, each tooth fairy in a swarm of hundreds has a different face and a distinct character. Tradition and innovation, craft and technology: del Toro is a a model auteur for film in our time.

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Fernando Solórzano
Critic, Mexico

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz)
Patricio Guzmán, France / Germany / Chile

A breathtaking documentary that weaves the story of astronomers working in a state-of-the-art observatory with that of relatives of Chilean desaparecidos looking for their remains. Their common ground is the Atacama desert — home of the trapped miners, a fact that enhances the metaphors in the film.

The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans
Werner Herzog, USA

Now that nasty policemen are the stars of TV series and films, only the combination of Herzog’s and Cage’s craziness could result in a character that wipes them all off the map.

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Banksy, UK

Even if you’re in on the joke, it’s still a great portrayal of the artist as a fame-whore.

Leap Year (Año bisiesto)
Michael Rowe, Mexico

A non-condescending stance on the loneliness and sense of inadequacy behind a woman’s self-destructive acts.

The Ghost (The Ghost Writer)
Roman Polanski, France / Germany / UK

Putting aside speculations on what topics make Polanski tic, this film is stark evidence of his perfect sense of timing and untouched directing skills.

Highlight:

In 2010 Mexico commemorated the centennial of its revolution and the bicentennial of its independence. It also turned out to be an incredibly violent year, due to the drug-trafficking wars. The irony didn’t go unnoticed by director Luis Estrada, who took advantage of the government announcement to support “bicentennial projects” and backlashed with El infierno, a film that blames politicians for supporting the narcs, and goes as far as to include a photograph of President Calderón.

Echoing the scandal surrounding La ley de Herodes, his 1999 film that put an end to government censorship, Estrada hit the right note by acknowledging the non-festive mood – El infierno’s tagline read: “What’s there to celebrate?” I for one was thrilled to attend screenings where, in spite of the grimness portrayed, the audience stood up and clapped at the end of the film – a truly emotive reaction, and a reminder of the power films have to create a sense of community, even at the hardest times.

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Brad Stevens
Critic, UK

Road to Nowhere
Monte Hellman, USA

Hellman’s first feature film in two decades is a triumphant return for one of cinema’s masters, revisiting a familiar theme – that of lives lost in obsessive pursuit of meaningless goals – with new depth and maturity.

At Ellen’s Age (Im Alter von Ellen)
Pia Marais, Germany

Demonstrating that The Unpolished was no flash in the pan, this masterpiece offers further proof that Marais is among Europe’s most important working filmmakers.

Napoli Napoli Napoli
Abel Ferrara, Italy

and Mulberry St.
Abel Ferrara, USA

Ferrara’s experiments in documentary, including the earlier Chelsea on the Rocks, are obviously part of a larger work in progress, but it is already clear that they relate to the director’s concern with performance as the central fact of our existence. These are ‘documentaries’ in which everyone who passes before the camera is judged according to how well or badly they play a ‘role’.

Dharma Guns
F.J. Ossang, France / Portugal

The latest and possibly finest film from one of France’s young mavericks. Imagine a George Romero zombie film made in the style of Léos Carax.

Survival of the Dead
George A. Romero, USA / Canada

And let’s not forget the latest George Romero zombie film made in the style of George Romero! Generally dismissed by the director’s admirers, this remarkable work reminds us just how perceptive a political commentator Romero has always been.

Highlights:

I also enjoyed Takeshis’ (Kitano Takeshi), Like You Know It All (Hong Sangsoo), Un Lac (Philippe Grandrieux), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), Tyson (James Toback), Visage (Tsai Ming-liang), White Material (Claire Denis), Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton), Bellamy (Claude Chabrol), The Dust of Time (Theodoros Angelopoulos), My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog) and Ondine (Neil Jordan), as well as a retrospective screening of Albert Lewin’s The Living Idol (1957) and Channel 4’s transmission of Mani Kaul’s Duvidha (1973).

But for me the most important cinematic ‘event’ of 2010 was watching almost the entire oeuvre of Naruse Mikio, something only made possible by members of those online communities dedicated to exploring areas of world cinema neglected by conventional distribution systems. Until recently, English-speakers who have heard that Naruse was among Japan’s finest filmmakers could only view the six titles released on DVD (or, if they lived in London, the 21 titles included in BFI Southbank’s 2007 retrospective). But now, 59 of Naruse’s 67 surviving films are available with fan-created English subtitles (and another three with French subtitles) for free download via such services as Surreal Moviez, karagarga and eMule. For discriminating cinephiles, this is nothing short of a revolution.

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Isabel Stevens
Sight & Sound

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
Frederick Wiseman, France / USA

A cinematic tour of the artistry but also the sweat, toil and bureaucracy occurring behind the normally-closed-doors of the Paris Opera Ballet. It made me want to pirouette all the way home.

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / Spain / France / Italy

Forget 3D – Martel offered the complete immersive experience in her portrait of a confused woman in this hit-and-run thriller-cum-commentary on a divided Argentine society. For 87 minutes, the only way to get out of this character’s hazy mind was to leave the cinema.

Mnemosyne
John Akomfrah, UK

A musing on migration and memory with the most unusual combination of literary quotations, obscure archive footage and stunning icy landscapes.

The Clock
Christian Marclay, UK

Real time meets reel time in Marclay’s mind-blowing 24-hour talking movie clock. Compiled from over 3,000 films, it’s the most ambitious video mash-up yet. Normally in the cinema, you sit back and forget time; here it confronts you with every blink of the eye.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

For that catfish scene alone.

Highlight:

Gasping in unison with hundreds of other people as the first iceberg came into view during the LFF screening of The Great White Silence. A hundred years after Scott’s failed mission to the Antarctic, Herbert Ponting’s documentary can still silence a cinema.

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Heather Stewart
Cultural programming director, BFI, UK

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

How I Ended This Summer (Kakya provel etim letom)
Alexei Popogrebsky, Russia

Le quattro volte (Four Times)
Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / Germany / Switzerland)

Highlights:

That Jeff Keen is finally getting the international recognition he deserves, with his films now playing at this year’s New York Film Festival; that the restoration of Ponting’s The Great White Silence was such a stand-out event at this year’s LFF; Sarah Turner’s Perestroika; The Larry Sanders Show and Breaking Bad on DVD; The Edge of the World on Blu-ray; and the extra 25 minutes of Metropolis.

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Vlastimir Sudar
Critic, UK

Silent Souls (Ovsyanki)
Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia

The biggest surprise of the year – I haven’t seen a Russian film in a while that so vividly invokes Tarkovsky, without trying hard to do so. It’s an incredibly humorous film too, although its contemplations on love, identity and transience – as in all great Russian art – come across as very sad. A masterpiece.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

A true 21st-century filmmaker.

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (En cand vreau sa fluier, fluier)
Florin Serban, Romania / Sweden

The continuing surprise – the Romanian New Wave goes on.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
Sophie Fiennes, France / Netherlands / UK

The artistic surprise – for managing to reveal an exceptional artist’s most arcane work.

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

The biggest disappointment – its representation of politics is so shallow that George W. Bush could use it to continue justifying himself and his ‘war on terror’.

Highlights:

The nicest surprise – finally a high quality restoration of Pabst’s 1928 Pandora’s Box, thanks to Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek. The fact that the world’s most ‘famous’ playboy, Hugh Hefner, mostly paid for this, demonstrates that our commitment to the restoration of film is still below any acceptable level.

And the lowpoint? The suicide of the actor Bekim Fehmiu, who came to fame playing a gypsy in Aleksandar Petrovic’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967). An ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, born in Sarajevo (Bosnia), trained in Belgrade (Serbia), he later acted in Hollywood and numerous Euro co-productions of varying quality. He was long aggrieved that Yugoslavia imploded in inter-ethnic conflict, and after he suffered a stroke, decided to end his own life. The Sarajevo Film Festival held a special screening of the above film to commemorate his death – and his career that once brought these cultures together. The print came from the institution still called the Yugoslav Kinoteka, in Belgrade, but it transpired that it is in desperate need of restoration. I wonder whether Hugh Hefner will help this time.

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Amy Taubin
Critic, USA

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Film socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France

And Everything Is Going Fine
Steven Soderbergh, USA

Persécution
Patrice Chéreau, France / Germany

Exit Through the Gift Shop
plus prologue to Episode 3 of The Simpsons 2010-11 season (Banksy, UK)

Highlight:

Works by two artists with roots in the 1960s provided experiences sufficiently intense to briefly blot out how dismal the unreal real world is. A retrospective of movies by the American avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner has been touring since his death in 2008. At New York’s Film Forum, the programme kicked off with the electrifying music-video precursor Cosmic Ray (1962), five minutes of radiant high-contrast black-and-white imagery set to Ray Charles’s incantatory live recording of ‘What’d I Say’. It’s as dazzling and kinetic a pile-up of movement and light as the final sequence of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and it’s also ecstatically carnal.

More contemplative but just as encompassing an experience, Bruce Nauman’s installation Days (sound and minimal sculptural elements arranged by the artist, movement in space improvised by the viewers) isn’t in an obvious way a movie. I doubt that Nauman regards it as such, but I do. Seven pairs of stereo speakers hang in rows, between them a row of foot stools. You can sit or mill about with the crowd. People smile goofily at each other when they realise what the sound coming from the speakers is: a variety of voices softly reciting the days of the week over and over again, but not in calendar order. Individual voices are clear only when you’re close to a speaker. Otherwise the sound is a hubbub composed of words we have in common. Is there anyone who doesn’t have the days of the week constantly on call in her / his head?

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David Thompson
Critic and documentarian, UK

The Ghost (The Ghost Writer)
Roman Polanski, France / Germany / UK

Polanski the classicist demonstrating the art of narrative pleasure through restraint and precision.

Carlos
Olivier Assayas, France / Germany / Belgium

A dizzying, complex ride through the absurdities of 1970s terrorism.

A truly original and disturbing view of parental fascism from Lanthimos.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Spellbinding, erotic and moving, Apichatpong continues to reinvent cinema.

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

A practically faultless amalgam of a brilliant script (Aaron Sorkin), sophisticated direction and perfect casting (Jesse Eisenberg et al).

Highlights:

Two magnificent presentations of silent cinema: the newly restored (courtesy of Hugh Hefner!) Pandora’s Box, looking as though it were shot yesterday, premiered in Paris; and Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) – the superior silent version – at the Barbican. Both supplied with electrifying musical scores by Neil Brand.

The Hong Sangsoo retrospective at the BFI Southbank. Exquisite, comic, subtle, never predictable, the works of a fine director scandalously never distributed in the UK.

Two remarkable new British films (seen back to back at the London Film Festival): The Arbor and Archipelago, depicting totally different social worlds in radically different styles, yet both supremely rewarding.

Eavesdropping at a filming session for a behind-the-scenes documentary on Skolimowski’s 1970 masterpiece Deep End, I witnessed the 40-year reunion of its stars John Moulder-Brown and Jane Asher, who talked as though it had been just yesterday, joshing each other like kindlier versions of their screen personae.

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Daniel Trilling
New Statesman, UK

The Nine Muses
John Akomfrah, UK

An evocative and unashamedly highbrow essay on memory and migration from the Black Audio Film Collective founder.

Wojna polsko-ruska (Snow White, Russian Red)
Xawery Zulawski, Poland

Sex, drugs and politics in post-communist Poland, with slapstick performances and arresting cinematography.

Videocracy
Erik Gandini, Sweden / Denmark / UK / Finland

Not so much a documentary as a psychological thriller about the power of Berlusconi’s Italian media empire.

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / Spain / France / Italy

A ghost story of sorts, but one where the ‘ghosts’ are Argentina’s poor, who haunt the middle-class family at the centre of this film.

The Time That Remains
Elia Suleiman, Israel / Italy / Belgium / France

A history of Palestine since 1948 as seen through the story of Suleiman’s family – and his own absurdist approach to cinema.

Highlights:

The true film highlight of my year wasn’t anything new, it was renting out a large chunk of Agnès Varda’s back catalogue and watching one film a week over the summer and autumn months. It has become so popular in my house, in fact, that Wednesday evenings are now known as ‘Agnès Varda night’.

I honestly feel that her films have added new depths to my understanding of how politics and intimate personal relationships intertwine; each of them is a powerful argument for the value and uniqueness of human life, not to mention a lesson in the potential of cinema. Try an Agnès Varda night for yourself, and I promise you won’t be disappointed!

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Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times, USA

An arthouse crime saga that marks the impressive debut of Australian writer-director Michôd, this moody, brooding modern day film noir knows just how to revitalise genre for contemporary audiences.

Inside Job
Charles Ferguson, USA

Ferguson’s powerhouse documentary about the global financial crisis restores faith in films that shake the system by having the intelligence to ask provocative questions – and the nerve to insist that they be answered.

Cinco días sin Nora (Nora’s Will)
Mariana Chenillo, Mexico

Though a big winner at Mexico’s Ariel awards, this is the kind of film to which attention is rarely paid. Funny, poignant and tremendously appealing, it creates fully imagined eccentric characters and places them in a wryly comic world. Writer-director Chenillo displays a great sureness of touch in her first feature.

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Proof – if proof were needed (and it is) – that the Hollywood studio system can still produce smart, literate, well-directed films for an adult audience.

White Material
Claire Denis, France / Cameroon

Leave it to Claire Denis to turn out an almost indefinable film, a meditation about white settlers in Africa that is politically potent, dramatically intense and beautiful to experience on a big screen.

Highlights:

My most satisfying moment was a Los Angeles screening of the rediscovered-against-all-odds Fritz Lang cut of Metropolis. Having this film come back to life, being able to watch it with a live performance by the great Alloy Orchestra, and experiencing it all with a capacity crowd of 2,200 in the still vibrant Grauman’s Chinese Theater let me feel more hope about the future of cinema past than I usually allow myself.

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Ginette Vincendeau
Academic, UK

Gainsbourg (Gainsbourg, vie héroique)
Joann Sfar, France / UK

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Les Invités de mon père (My Father’s Guest)
Anne Le Ny, France

Tout ce qui brille
Hervé Mimran & Géraldine Nakache, France

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos)
Juan José Campanella, Spain / Argentina

Highlights:

None of my highlights of 2010 have to do with new releases (alas). They are: seeing a class of French eight-year-olds (including my godson) presenting the work they did with their schoolteacher throughout the year alongside their ‘normal’ work – writing, designing and applying subtitles to a short 1950s Italian animation film. The quality of their work and their enthusiasm were fantastic.

Discovering a short 1906 film directed by Alice Guy called Les Résultats du féminisme, in which men push prams and iron clothes, while women smoke cigars and put their feet up in Parisian cafés.

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Catherine Wheatley
Academic and critic, UK

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik, USA

Quite simply a breath of fresh air.

Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé, France / USA / Germany / Italy / Japan / Canada

It feels like 2010 has been dominated by the uniformly sleek, ‘quality’ arthouse movie to the detriment of more experimental fare, and it’s for that reason that I’ve included Enter the Void. A failed experiment, perhaps, and I have major ideological reservations about Noé, but at the very least it was trying to do push cinema in a new direction, raggedy round the edges as it may have been.

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / Spain / France / Italy

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

I’ve shown an unconscious predilection – yet again – towards women filmmakers, Martel and Barnard having produced two of the more original films I’ve seen during an otherwise fairly uninspiring year (although I was really disappointed to have missed Joanna Hogg’s latest at the LFF, which on the evidence of Unrelated might well have been a contender).

Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue)
Catherine Breillat, France

Lourdes
Jessica Hausner, Austria / Germany / France

I’ve cheated and included six films not five this year, because I really felt there was so little to choose between Bluebeard and Lourdes – two lovely, reined-in takes on the fairytale by two of my favourite female directors.

Highlights:

I’ll admit to some bias here, but what’s been really exciting is seeing colleagues and friends taking matters into their own hands, getting their films made and shown outside the usual circuits. Guerrilla cinema it might not quite be, but it’s great to see such small gems as Steven Eastwood’s Buried Land and William Brown’s Afterimages getting made and screened. I’ll take those films over the likes of the overblown and overrated I Am Love any day of the week.

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Armond White
New York Post, USA

Wild Grass (Les herbes folles)
Alain Resnais, France / Italy

For our polarised era, Resnais makes a constantly inventive fantasia on our common idiosyncrasy.

Vincere
Marco Bellocchio, Italy / France

Still vital, still relevant, Bellocchio explores the neuroses of mass hysteria.

Mother and Child
Rodrigo García, USA / Spain

Garcia delves into the meaning of community through basic female experience.

Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz, USA

America’s toughest satirist takes on post-9/11 forgiveness.

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Ageing and coping, deeply seen by Leigh.

Highlights:

Bryan Ferry’s ‘You Can Dance’ music video directed by Ferry Gouw is the single most sinuous – and sensuous – piece of filmmaking this year. It perfectly complements the recent DVD release of three Josef von Sternberg classics (The Last Command, Docks of New York, Underworld) by continuing Sternberg’s enraptured impression of eroticism as a spiritual adventure. Crooner and pop avant-gardist Ferry is seen performing the song before a disco audience of mesmerised models – indulging personal fetish but recognising, like Sternberg, unstoppable human compulsion. Imagine Don Juan enchanted by and serenading two dozen Dietrichs.

The most significant film event this year is the continued passing of the French New Wave pioneers, from Eric Rohmer’s death in January to Claude Chabrol’s in September. And then the attempted besmirching of Jean-Luc Godard tied to his insincere semi-honour by Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Godard briefly became media star of the month when his refusal to attend the Academy event made him the first person to publicly point out how the Academy has reversed its own principals by insulting honourees through relegating their awards to a sideshow event, disconnected from the Oscars tradition. If any filmmakers ever demonstrated their respect for film history, it’s the nouvelle vague. Their passion and ingenuity are passing from our culture and there’s no movement on the horizon that can match their brilliance or centrality or beauty. Let the mourning begin.

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Sam Wigley
Critic, UK

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky, USA

Buried (Enterrado)
Rodrigo Cortés, Spain / USA

This year I enjoyed being stuck on a ski-lift in the biting cold (Frozen), being trapped in the bottom of a canyon with a huge rock on my arm (127 Hours), and – perhaps most of all – being buried alive with only a mobile phone for help in this terrific Spanish thriller.

I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)
Luca Guadagnino, Italy

Ivul
Andrew Kötting, Switzerland / France

An eccentric, haunting and magnificent film from Kötting about a boy taking to the trees on his family’s estate in defiance of his father.

The Secret of Kells
Tomm Moore, France / Belgium / Ireland

Though no fan of animation, I was surprised how much I enjoyed this exquisite Irish cartoon about a young monk’s adventures creating an illuminated manuscript to preserve civilisation against marauding Vikings. In an uncrowded field, this is one of the more profound – not to mention most imaginative – films I’ve seen about Europe’s distant past.

Highlights:

An unexpected demonstration of film’s magic: in a bar in a small town on the southern stretch of Baja California, a mute screening of Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! – intended merely as background, like a football match or the news – stilled the handful of patrons (including me and my partner) into mutual rapture at the beauty of its black-and-white images.

The best small-screen release was F.W. Murnau’s 1929 City Girl: astonishingly pristine film stock transferred to crystal-clear Blu-ray by Masters of Cinema. A precursor to Malick’s Days of Heaven in its lyrical depiction of rural America, the moving-camera shot following the newlyweds as they run through the fields back to the homestead ranks as the most radiant moment in my film year.

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Sergio Wolf
Critic and director of BAFICI, Argentina

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee raluek chat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / USA

Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich, USA

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Andrei Ujica, Romania

Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt, USA

Promises Written in Water
Vincent Gallo, USA

Highlights:

During the last Cannes Film Festival, I met Cristi Puiu. His film Aurora had seemed fascinating, with the winding and mysterious narrative that takes us who knows where. We were in the cafeteria of one of the hotels near the Grand Palais. It was a very pleasant conversation. I tried to convince Puiu to come to BAFICI, where his two previous films competed.

We talked of Aurora, and in my stubbornness to convince him to start talking about his film and suicide, I told a story of an Argentine writer who had committed suicide without leaving a note – without leaving the slightest clue about illness, debts or a lovers’ quarrel. Puiu asked me two or three times: “And he left no note?”

“No”, I replied, as I watched his face darken. For ten minutes he sat in silence, looking at his cup of coffee or the horizon. Had I entered a zone that might be too private or personal? “Is something wrong, Cristi?” “No, no…”

Suddenly I looked at my watch and remembered he had another interview scheduled. I offered to walk him there. His mild and ironic humour returned, but I couldn’t help thinking that the shadow of death that lurks so insistently in his films – especially Aurora – had been installed between us, as if somehow we were an episode of the film dismissed in the final cut but imbued with the same fate.

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Jason Wood
Critic and programmer, UK

The Arbor
Clio Barnard, UK

Style and substance in perfect harmony in Barnard’s inventive account of the life of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar.

Ruhr
James Benning, Germany

Composed of a series of fixed-frame compositions, Benning’s look at the Ruhr region offers an engrossing and unforgettable exploration of landscape, society and art.

The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste)
Sylvain Chomet, UK / France

“There are no such things as magicians.” Heartbreaking.

Self Made
Gillian Wearing, UK

Raw and often painful to watch, Wearing’s examination of the blurring boundaries between real life and fantasy is eloquent, perceptive and startlingly realised.

Alamar
Pedro González-Rubio, Mexico

This tender rites-of-passage tale about the soon-to-be-severed bond between a father and son inspires a sense of almost unbearable longing.

Highlights:

My other film-related highlights of the year include the incredible commercial success at the Renoir cinema of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (an all too rare instance of a ‘difficult’ film perfectly chiming with a sizeable audience); working with Andrew Kötting on the release of Ivul; and the continued acclaim enjoyed by Claire Denis.

The climax of Mathieu Amalric’s On Tour is another source of satisfaction: an empty swimming pool and The Sonics’ ‘Have Love Will Travel’ is a pretty memorable way to end a film.

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Adrian Wootton
CEO, Film London, UK

The Social Network
David Fincher, USA

Another Year
Mike Leigh, UK

Dark Love
Antonio Capuano, Italy

Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich, USA

Highlight:

As I never imagined I would ever meet Bruce Springsteen, the opportunity to interview him on stage at BFI Southbank to accompany the premiere of the documentary The Promise (about the making of his landmark album Darkness on the Edge of Town) was in itself an exciting, more than slightly scary and wondrous experience. But it was made even more magical and a little bit surreal by hearing him talk eloquently and enthusiastically about the importance to his songwriting of B movies and film noir – especially Out of the Past.

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Barbara Wurm
Critic and programmer, Austria

Kosmos
Reha Erdem, Turkey

My Joy (Schastye Moye)
Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / Germany / Netherlands

Aurora
Cristi Puiu, Romania / France / Switzerland / Germany

Hitparkut
Nina Menkes, Israel

Guest
José Luis Guerín, Spain

Highlights:

Let’s start with my regrets that I am unable to include a number of films because I simply have not seen them yet (Skolimowski, Gianvito, Sekula / Burch, Beauvois, Rosi and some more). What then remains? True events, I am tempted to say.

There was, for instance, the magical appearance of Fei Mu’s Kongfuzi (Confuzius, 1940) at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, a pure wonder of time-lapse and epic narration, one of the most skilful ever attempts in historical plot evolution.

There was another miraculous appearance, this time by the creative duo Mariann Lewinsky and Eric de Kuyper at the Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen. Their programme ‘From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918’ – and even more so the fantastic response it got during the festival – was a great marriage of the sincerity of research and the pleasure of perception.

Two other – totally Ferronian – retrospectives struck me: ‘Regie und Regiment’ (about Germany and the military in documentary films from 1914 to 1989) at Dok Leipzig and ‘Socialist Avant-Gardizm. Part 3’ – including Viktor Turov’s Through the Graveyard (1964) and Nikolay Mashchenko’s Commissars (1969) – curated by the luminous film historian Evgeny Margolit for Moscow IFF.

I also admired filmmakers talking about their work in some magical Q&As at the Viennale, such as Larry Cohen – shrewd, smart and hilariously ironic – or Cristi Puiu, who bared his soul, revealing a thoughtfulness bereft of any kind of pretentiousness. Last but not least, I love Olaf Möller’s book on / for / with Romuald Karmakar. What a trip into eternity.

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This is an unabridged version of the Review of 2010 published in the January 2011 issue of Sight & Sound.

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See also

Sight & Sound’s collected film polls and surveys

The films of 2009 (January 2010)

London Film Festival 2010: 30 recommendations including previews of many of the films in this poll (September 2010)