It's not often you can say this, but this past year was a really good 12 months for films.  Christopher Nolan managed to buck the trend of recent years and the perceived wisdom dictates that summer blockbuster this must be, to quote Shakespeare, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" by releasing Inception which did phenomenal box office business largely because it was a film that people saw more than once and enjoyed the challenging subject material.

 

The struggle to make lists like these is not only the difficulty to whittle down so many extremely good films down to just five or ten, but to look at other films that have been released and to see how many extremely highly regarded movies have passed you by, largely because of the homogenisation of films by the multiplexes.  A prime example of this was Another Year, a film that many critics considered to be amongst the very best in Mike Leigh's long and distinguished career.  There was a poster in my local Cineworld with 'Opening Friday' at the bottom left-hand corner but Friday came and went and Another Year was nowhere to be seen.  Similarly, the praised Spanish animated film Chico and Rita, didn't even warrant a poster at Cineworld, let alone a one-week showing in one screen.  As such, this list will only reflect the films that I've seen and would be very different if I had been able to view every film released this past year, no matter how good or bad.

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The Secret of Kells (Blu-ray Review here) was a bit of a surprise as it wasn't shown at the cinema (or, at least, not in any cinema near me) and was released on DVD and Blu-ray without any great fanfare.  I wasn't even aware of it as an Oscar-nominated film and I normally make mental notes of all of the films that have been considered for the big awards so I can catch them on DVD/BD and watch them at home.  This is one of the more unusual animated films that I've seen in recent years as it feels very much like a foreign film and is even more 'alien' than something like Ponyo which I saw at the cinema when it was dubbed into 'American' so, though it looked like an anime, it sounded like a film that could have been made by Pixar.  The Secret of Kells, on the other hand, is a hand drawn animated film from Ireland which draws heavily on folklore and ancient mysticism.  The film follows a young monk called Brendan who tries to do what he can but is always told exactly what to do by his uncle Cellach, the Abbot, who is busy supervising defences against the Barbarians who are on their way.  They have already sacked the monastery at Iona causing everyone, including Brother Aidan, who is writing an important book, to flee.  Brendan finds Brother Aidan to be a welcome distraction from his uncle and chooses to disobey is overpowering relative when Brother Aidan runs out of ink and asks Brendan to go into the forest outside the monastery to find something to make ink.  There, Brendan bumps into Aisling, a mystical being who can transform into a wolf and even fly.  It is an utterly enchanting and wonderfully made film that looks absolutely stunning in high-definition with quite glorious animation and great voice acting by a cast who, with the exception of Brendan Gleeson, I didn't recognise.

 

Shutter Island marked Martin Scorsese's return to the big screen and yet another collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he has now made half as many films as with Robert De Niro, four films so far against eight.  The film is based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane and follows the book extremely faithfully although certain aspects are changed, in my opinion for the better.  Following two US marshals as they hunt for a missing patient in a high security prison/hospital on an island some miles from the North East coast, it is clear that not everything is right and the main Marshal , played by DiCaprio, begins to wonder if he can trust anybody.  With a booming soundtrack that almost sounds as if it has been performed by some cross-channel ferries and extremely downbeat cinematography, the film is a remarkable psychological thriller and follows Scorsese's reputation for making extremely complicated and brilliant character-driven thrillers.  It may not be perfect, but it is a film that works very well on first viewing and stands up on your second and third watch.

 

A Prophet may have been given its premiere in 2009 but it was given its major theatrical release in the UK in 2010.  I liked it all great deal more than Michael Haneke's White Ribbon, itself an extraordinary piece of work and I am amazed that both of these missed out on the Best Foreign Film Oscar although Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes is a magnificent piece of work.  Shot in a real prison and directed with extreme flair and realism by Jacques Audiard and with an utterly compelling central performance by Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena, a Frenchman of Arabic descent who finds himself a small fish in a very big pond with some very big and powerful fish.  Given the stark choice by Cesar Luciani, the boss of a Sicilian crime family, to kill a man who is about to inform or be killed by one of Luciani's men.  The film is a fantastic gangster drama and is utterly compelling throughout its running time -- I have seen it twice and wouldn't hesitate to watch it again.  You don't get many films that are this intelligence and this watchable very often.

 

Made in Dagenham is one of those great British films that will turn up, do very well at the British box office and the BAFTAs and then be largely ignored by the American award ceremonies.  Although the subject matter is entirely different, reminded me a lot of An Education, one of the standout films of 2009 which, coincidentally, also starred Rosamund Pike.  Set in 1968 and following the strike at the Ford plant in Dagenham where the women who made the seat covers downed tools and went on strike demanding equal pay for equal work, forcing a showdown with their union, the employers and eventually securing a meeting with Barbara Castle, the Minister for Employment whose principal job was to stop the strikes.  There has been a great deal of fuss made by its producer, Stephen Woolley, who was amazed that the film was given a 15 certificate for the 11 uses of the word 'fuck' (or its derivations) as those who would benefit most from seeing such a film would be girls between the ages of about 11 and 16.  It is an extraordinary piece of work and I wouldn't hesitate to show it to a relative of mine who is officially old enough to watch the movie.  Rubbing salt in the wounds was the BBFC's decision to award The King's Speech, which has more instances of the F-word (15), a 12A certificate.  The King's Speech is also critically lauded and had been released in the UK on a limited basis in 2010 but I haven't seen it though I'm keen to do so.

 

Winter's Bone was one of the bleakest and coldest films that I've seen in a very long time and really has a story that could have been told in about 20 minutes but never felt overlong during its 100 minute running time.  Directed by Debra Granik and with (aside from Garret Dillahunt) a cast of unknowns, it features a breakout performance by Jennifer Lawrence who plays a 17-year-old girl who has to roam the Ozark Mountains in Missouri to look for her father who has put the family home town as collateral whilst on a gambling binge and then lost, giving Ree, her mother and younger brother and sister very little time to either find their father or lose the house.  For a film in which very little happens, it is one that draws you in and hold your attention for the duration as there is an extraordinary poetry in the way the characters speak, the locations and sets which look like real homes (probably because they all are real houses in the Ozark Mountains) which appear to be in a place that time forgot.

 

Kick-Ass showed that, as far as outright fun goes, this was the one to beat them all as, from the first scene to last, it is an incredible thrill ride with an array of brilliant performances from Nicolas Cage who effortlessly harnessed Adam West's Batman to Marc Strong's stone-cold gangster and breakout performances by Chloe Moretz and Aaron Johnson.  There was some consternation over Moretz’ language and violence in the film but she is clearly a girl with her head screwed on right and apparently her mother insisted that her young daughter said the dreaded C word in order to be faithful to the source material, a series of graphic novels by Marc Millar and John Romita Jr.  If Matthew Vaughn had directed this was a completely different target would have been a hard-hitting and extremely dark film but it was clearly faithful to the comic book aesthetic and his screenplay, co-written with Jane Goldman, is extremely witty, darkly comic and will appeal to the geek in all of us.  The idea is a great one: what would happen if someone had no superpowers decided to don an outfit and decide to stand up for those who are being mistreated by criminals?  The film is an absolute riot as the titular non-superhero becomes embroiled in a battle between two people who can really fight and have a vast armoury and a criminal syndicate.  Amazingly, I have only watched the Blu-ray once but it is still displayed fairly prominently and will have another airing very shortly.  It is an absolute riot of a film with a rare fine performance by Nicolas Cage and an array of eminently quotable lines.

 

The Kids Are All Right arrived in UK cinemas with some Oscar buzz surrounding the leads, Julianne Moore and Annette Benning, who play a gay couple who have each given birth to one of their children using donor sperm.  When the eldest child, their daughter Joni, is old enough to ask for information, she isn't interested but is persuaded by her younger brother, Laser, to find out who their father is, what he does and where he lives.  Their first conversation doesn't exactly go to plan but they arrange a meeting and Paul isn't freaked out and genuinely wants to know more about his biological children but things become increasingly complicated when he becomes increasingly involved in their lives and gets to know Nic and Jules a bit more, threatening the entire family.  For a film that was shot with a small budget and a very short schedule, it is remarkable how well it turned out, largely thanks to the semi-autobiographical screenplay by writer-director Lisa Cholodenko who thought that her own situation, contemplating starting a family with her gay lover using donor sperm would make a good movie -- it did.  I would be amazed if Julia Moore and Annette Benning are overlooked at the Oscars and the children, played by Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson are extremely well rounded characters.  In Marc Ruffalo (who was also superb in Shutter Island), there is realistic and tangible sexual chemistry between Paul and Jules, between Paul and Nic and between Jules and Nic.  This is an extremely accomplished film and one that I would expect to see highly represented when the awards season gets into full flow.

 

The Social Network proves that you don't have to know or care about the subject matter to be utterly fascinated by the film itself.  At the time I watched this, I was in the middle of the long hiatus from Facebook and knew absolutely nothing about how it was created, who came up with the idea and had never noticed whose name was on the masthead.  With Jesse Eisenberg, who was brilliant in Zombieland, playing Marc Zuckerman, an arrogant, obnoxious and misogynistic genius at Harvard, the film follows Zuckerman who comes up with an idea for a program that he hopes will be so successful that it will crash the entire Harvard computer system, which it does in remarkably few hours.  Approached by two privileged rowers, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, to create a social networking site just for people with a Harvard.edu e-mail address, Zuckerman has an idea of his own that slightly overlaps with the Winklevoss’ plans.  The film cuts between a series of legal hearings, lawsuits by various people against Marc Zuckerman, and how he went from a nerdy student at Harvard to the world's youngest billionaire, still with problems socialising.  The screenplay by Aaron Sorkin is incredibly complex and yet accessible at the same time and was so dense and longer that it wouldn't fit into a two-hour movie and, rather than cut anything out, director David Fincher merely told the cast to speak quickly!  Considering the film is about a group of privileged and obnoxious people, it is remarkably easy to like and I look forward to seeing it again.

 

Toy Story 3 brought to a close one of the most loved trilogies in movie history and one that most people have grown up with, making the central characters (Woody and Buzz Lightyear) toys that will be in many children's bedrooms and known and loved around the world.  Before I went to see this, I was amazed that it had been 15 years since the first one had been released and both that and the sequel, Toy Story 2, had been DVDs (and BDs) that I had watched quite frequently.  In many ways, I felt that this surpassed both of them making this the greatest movie trilogy in cinema history as all three instalments are masterpieces, unlike those in the Godfather or Star Wars trilogies.  As with the first two films, the voice acting is absolutely spot-on and the animation continues to amaze with state-of-the-art computer animation.  As I'm no great fan of stereoscopic films, I went to see this in plain old 2D and helped it worked brilliantly in that format and can't imagine that the version where you have to wear those silly glasses would have added anything to the cinematography, editing and overall design of the film.  The ending reportedly brought many grown men to tears but, as I am unfortunately emotionally numb because of depression, it didn't have the same impact on me all though I can see exactly why it would carry such an emotional punch and hope to be in the right frame of mind to watch this and end up with tears rolling down my cheeks at the end.  The film is a phenomenal achievement and one that will be passed down from generation to generation because the films are so good and appeal to children and adults alike.

 

Inception is the film of the year for me as it has an extremely ambitious plot which is masterfully carried out by Christopher Nolan and the quite incredible ensemble cast, led by Leonardo DiCaprio and including Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Berenger that Michael Caine.  This is about as far from a high concept film as you can get with DiCaprio playing Cobb, a fugitive from the United States who is suspected of killing his wife but is also the world's best at 'breaking into' people's minds and stealing their secrets.  This extraction process has proved to be a lucrative and very dangerous game which changes when he is approached by a wealthy businessman to do the very opposite: inception.  This man is worried that a rival of his, who is about to die, will seal the market in energy production and basically become a superpower so wants Cobb to break into the man's son's mind and somehow plant the idea that, when his father dies, he will break up his father's empire.  Inception is such a difficult concept that you need someone to create the dream, someone else to flood it with their subconscious and someone else to be the protagonist, going about the extremely difficult process without the person becoming aware that they are asleep.  The film is quite remarkable in its ambition, scale and complexity and there is a great moment about halfway through when Ariadne, an architect that Cobb has brought on board asks 'Wait a minute, whose subconscious are we going through, exactly?'  Nolan has established himself as one of the most gifted filmmakers currently working and can basically name his project, price, cast and in what format he wants to make his movie; there must have been a great deal of pressure on him to shoot The Dark Knight Rises (the third instalment in his Batman series) in 3D but Nolan said 'no' and is going to shoot it in 2D, just as he did with the other two.