1. The Fighter

I keep seeing The Fighter get dismissed as Oscar bait, as if actors challenging themselves was a bad thing.  Christian Bale is unflinching in his portrayal of a crack addict, and the real jaw-dropper is seeing a clip of the actual Dickey Ecklend in the credits and realizing just how accurate Bale’s portrayal is.  Amy Adams turns a nothing part into a memorable one.  Mark Wahlburg is at his eye-of-the-storm best, but still doesn’t hesitate to play Mickey Ward as less than smart. David O. Russell finds a ton of humor amongst the pathos, including a genius usage of Ecklend’s seven sisters as some kind of a foul-mouthed, Boston-accented, trash chorus.  The movie’s even strong enough to withstand a training montage set to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a performance by Melissa Leo, who still thinks that good acting means adding “eh?” to the end of every one of your lines.  Also, it’s nice to see a movie about genuinely fucked up people who are able to put their personal ticks on hold in order to help each other.  It usually seems to go the other way.

2. Get Low

Get Low is a parable, first and foremost, about rites of passage.  Bill Murray is compelling even when he clearly doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.  But Get Low rides on Robert Duvall’s staggering performance as an old man throwing his own funeral.  His elegy for himself was by far the best piece of acting I saw all year.

3. 127 Hours

Danny Boyle uses a lot of bells and whistles to turn a true story of extreme isolation into a meditation of the importance of community.

4. Exit Through the Gift Shop

A fascinating introduction to street art, an education on what divides good art from bad, and a is-this-real-or-isn’t-it movie that beats Inception across the face with a can of spray paint.

5. Toy Story 3

Loved this, obviously.  I am, after all, a man.  It’s like saying I love stories where good things happen to good people.  PIXAR IS OUR MYTHOLOGY.

Five Movies From 2010 That Maybe You Thought Were Good That Are Actually Not Good

1. The Social Network

Everybody want to know what Mark Zuckerberg’s Achilles heel is? Love.

2. Black Swan

Look, it’s not that I need a lot of context to enjoy Natalie Portman touching herself, just don’t tell me that it’s art and not porn.  Black Swan is despicable the way that Dancer in the Dark was despicable—it’s just a masochistic, mysogynist director making his lead actress jump through torturous hoops for his own twisted edification, then selling it to us for ours.

3. Inception

Christopher Nolan’s squanders a good idea on bad storytelling.  Inception’s high concept may have warranted a shit ton of exposition, but Memento proves he knows how to do without it.  The is-it-all-a-dream framework is the most deus ex machina of them all—people in my theater rightfully groaned at the ending.  Worst of all, Nolan creates his dream world, painstakingly explaining every aspect of it.   During the first half of the movie, there are no stakes—nothing happens if the heroes fail. Then, at the beginning of the final heist, he completely changes all the rules—first, they couldn’t die during inception; then, all of a sudden they could. The ending is a triple-shot of schmaltz—Cilian Murphey learning his father’s deathbed wish, DiCaprio begging a guy who he’s been on tenuous terms with the whole time to grow old with him, and then the film ends with him hugging his kids in slow motion.

4. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Two hours of Joan Rivers telling us how funny she is instead of telling jokes.

5. The Town

The Town was fine, but I’m astounded that no one has picked up on the film’s horribly overt racism.  Example: Rebecca Hall’s character complains about a guy harassing her as she walks through “the projects.” Ben Afflick and Jeremy Renner find the guy and beat the everliving shit out of him.  Doesn’t matter that it was ultimately a white dude playing the guy from the projects—the signifiers are there.  The scene has absolutely no effect on the plot, it’s just two white dudes teaching a guy from the projects a lesson about talking to a white woman.  Plus, I counted exactly one person of color in the film and that person had exactly one line.