GONE GIRL - david fincher 9.5 / 10

I enjoyed Gone Girl on every level on which it’s possible to enjoy a movie: as entertainment, as comedy, as art, as a masterful display of filmmaking technique.  It's a thriller that’s thrilling simply in the bare fact of its existence.  That a film like this-- with this budget, this level of talent, produced and promoted at this scale about this subject matter portrayed in this way-- exists at all is thrilling in and of itself.  That it also succeeds on every level makes the whole thing one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had at the movies in years and recalibrated my conception of what's possible artistically and thematically in a big budget thriller.  I'm pretty sure I was grinning like an idiot for fifteen minutes after the credits rolled.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY - andrew dominik - 9.0 / 10

Without a doubt, this brutal, angry, violent film is not for everyone.  But if you can get on its wavelength, it reveals itself as probably the most insightful, intelligent film to come out of the gangster genre since Tarantino started making historical epics.  Set around the 2008 Presidential election and the start of the bank-driven economic collapse that continues to impact the country, Killing Them Softly is a blistering indictment of the hollowness of political rhetoric, the absurdity of the American people in continuing to believe such nonsense, the lack of courage of our leaders to make difficult decisions and the inability of the people to hold them accountable for their failures.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN - marc webb - 4.9 / 10

As a character, Peter Parker / Spider-Man is fascinating.  The story of an unpopular, picked-on science geek orphan suddenly acquiring superpowers can go lots of interesting places.  When the story is told well, as in the Sam Raimi / Tobey Maguire version from a decade ago, it can be pretty powerful (enough so to overcome nonsense like the Green Goblin in an old lady's sweater cradling Spider-Man in his arms).  But when told poorly, as it is here, it's just one more story about a superhero with a tragic past and loads of daddy issues (and seriously, enough with the superheros with dead parents already).

THE HELP - tate taylor - 3.2 / 10

When you get right down to it, The Help is a film about exploited people made by their exploiters for the enjoyment of the exploiters.  It makes a lot of noise about glorifying the struggle of the black Southern maids whom a third of the story revolves around, but by the end of the movie, all that’s left is the realization that the main white character used the lives and experiences of the black characters to learn something new about herself, grow as a person and move on to bigger and better things, the consequences for those she’s exploited be damned.

THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2010

my list of the ten best films of the year along with a few honorable and dishonorable mentions.

(and yes, i know we’re almost halfway through 2011, but the alien creature that now lives in my house has taken up a lot of my spare time of late.)

FAST FIVE – justin lin – 6.4 / 10

We seem to have reached a point with the big Hollywood summer blockbusters where as long as they aren’t failures on every level, critics will give them a pass.  The fanboy edict that a viewer 'turn off their brain' and just enjoy the film 'for what it is' seems to have won the day as that's become the de facto standard by which these sorts of movies seem to be judged.  Critics who give the same three-and-a-half-star rating to Fast Five as they give to something like The Social Network can't possibly be making the comparative judgment that the two movies are of similar quality.  And yet it's not uncommon for brain-dead films like this one to earn a similar (or higher) grade than films that by any reasonable standard are far more artistically successful.  The only conclusion that can be reached must be that the two films are not being judged on the same criteria.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS – francis lawrence – 4.1 / 10

It’s not terribly surprising that former music video director Francis Lawrence has, with Water for Elephants, made a handsomely mounted but ultimately superficial film.  It is surprising, however, just how perfunctory the film is.  There’s less going on beneath the surface of this film than there is even in something as brain-dead as Fast Five.  What you see is what you get and not a bit more.  And while the 1930s setting provides for a lot of pretty pictures and some nice art direction, that’s not nearly enough to sustain a two-hour film.

SAW III – darren lynn bousman – 0.8 / 10

Basically all this film is saying is, 'Hey, weren’t those first two Saw movies cool?'  It's not an advancement of the form in any way but rather a summation of what’s come before (loaded down with plenty of flashbacks which ruin the first two films on the off chance a viewer hadn’t already seen them).  Admittedly it’s hard to come up with new and ever more brutal traps for people to have to earn their way out of, but it seems to me that the filmmakers here fell victim to the pressure to keep adding new twists.  They bend and contort the story in service of the twists and in the process lose everything that was good about the first two films (not that there was very much, but you know what I mean).

TRON: LEGACY – joseph kosinski – 2.5 / 10

Make no mistake, TRON: Legacy is a terrible terrible film.  It’s staggeringly stupid, one of the most preposterous things I've ever seen.  The story makes no sense and is nearly impossible to follow.  The performances are uniformly terrible (even from the usually awesome Jeff Bridges).  And the damn thing is too long by half.  Yet, I didn't hate watching it.  I’m not rushing out to see it again or anything, but for as awful as nearly every aspect of the film is, the visuals and the score are so striking that I found it worth watching.  Hell, if the theater I watched the film in had somehow turned off the dialogue completely and just cranked Daft Punk’s terrific score instead, TRON: Legacy might’ve actually been enjoyable (although still far too long).

THE SOCIAL NETWORK – david fincher – 8.6 / 10

Forget all the hype about this being the first great movie of the twenty-first century or the film that defines a generation; The Social Network is just a really good movie told exceptionally well.  It’s not a film interested in critiquing the new ways in which people communicate with one another in the digital age.  It’s not trying to get at some universal truth about the millennial generation.  Instead, The Social Network is a piercing look at the many ways in which men (especially young men) are assholes.

THE FIGHTER – david o. russell – 5.9 / 10

It’s all Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s fault.  I’m not positive that they originated it, but ever since they popularized it in Mean Streets, the good-for-nothing screw-up hoodlum sidekick has become an archetypal character in gritty movies about blue-collar guys from the wrong side of the tracks.  Johnny Boy, DeNiro’s character in Mean Streets, may not have been the first such character, but he was certainly the most indelible.  And ever since that movie, in any film centering around a group of male friends struggling to get or keep their lives on track, that character is bound to turn up.  Scorsese even went back to that well a couple times (with Joe Pesci’s characters in Goodfellas and Casino).

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART. 1 – david yates – 6.1 / 10

That Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is the first half of a two-film finale to an eight-film series makes it clear that this isn’t a movie that can be judged completely on its own.  Nor can it even really be understood outside the context of the larger film / book series.  If you sat down to watch Part 1 with no idea what came before, you’d be hopelessly lost within fifteen minutes.  That doesn’t make it a bad film, per se, but it does make it a very difficult one to critique since by almost all standards normally used to judge a film, this one is a complete failure.  It does very little to establish characters or even to advance their stories.  It has no real resolution.  And it certainly doesn’t follow any familiar story structure.  Nonetheless, the seventh film in the Harry Potter series is one of the more interesting blockbusters to come along in quite some time.  Even if it’s not exactly a good film, it is a very provocative one.

UNSTOPPABLE – tony scott – 6.7 / 10

At this point, if you buy a ticket to a Tony Scott film, you ought to know exactly what you’re getting: a serviceable thriller, probably starring Denzel Washington as a put upon father or husband looking to repair his relationships with the women in his life, some frantic and totally unmotivated camera movement, lots of garish greens and blues, plenty of explosions, some groan-inducingly awful one-liners (‘It’s not a train; it’s a missile the size of the Chrysler Building.’) and a far too pat ending.  Unstoppable, of course, fulfills all of those criteria, but it does so in a much more entertaining fashion than most of Scott’s recent movies (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Déjà Vu, Domino, etc.).  It’s as good as a film as we’re likely to ever see from Tony Scott.  And though that might only be slightly above average when compared to all other filmmakers, it’s nonetheless encouraging that Scott has reversed the trend his career had been taking.

127 HOURS – danny boyle – 5.8 / 10

With every successive film, Danny Boyle’s style has become more frantic and aggressive.  Trainspotting, made fifteen years ago, was fast-paced and full of quick cuts, but always in the service of the story.  28 Days Later, released in 2002, featured even faster cutting and introduced the swooping, shaky, handheld aesthetic that would become Boyle’s signature visual style.  But as with Trainspotting, this was largely justified by the story the film was telling.  In 2008, Boyle amped up his jittery, washed-out style even more for Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most aggressively in-your-face films ever made.  Though the story hardly seemed to warrant it, Slumdog Millionaire pulled every annoying trick in the book, turning the whole thing into a garish disaster.  It’s hard to imagine a more frenzied, hectic film.  Hard, that is, until you sit down to watch 127 Hours.

LET ME IN – matt reeves – 6.4 / 10

As much as I like Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film on which Let Me In is based, I think there could be some value in remaking it with a bigger budget for mainstream American audiences.  The film is rife with thorny ideas about the perils of childhood and the thrills of first love that beg to be experienced by as many people as possible.  And if it has to be remade in English for that to happen then so be it.  But Matt Reeves’s new version, while managing to hit just about all the same notes as the original (even doing a few of them better), doesn’t hear the music and the whole becomes much less than the sum of its parts.

THE TOWN – ben affleck – 8.1 / 10

Though it’s a fairly conventional film in a genre that’s been done to death (Michael Mann’s Heat being the most obvious reference point), The Town, Ben Affleck’s second outing as co-writer / director is nonetheless a very satisfying film.  It’s a solid, sturdy heist movie, constructed with great care and careful attention to detail.  And though it doesn’t quite rise to the heights of Affleck’s previous film (the excellent Gone Baby Gone), The Town is about as good as this type of movie can be.  Its ambitions may be modest, but it more than achieves them.

LOST: SEASON SIX – 5.2 / 10

After intercutting events on the island with flashbacks for three seasons, flashforwards for one season and between two separate timelines for one season, the Lost writers decided, in the sixth and final season, to intercut events on the island with so-called flash-sideways to what at first appears to be an alternate timeline and is finally revealed to be a sort of purgatory.  It’s a decision that makes sense insofar as the show’s creators had tried everything else so why not?  But this structure, and especially the decision not to reveal the nature of the flash-sideways universe until the finale, ends up fatally crippling what should have been the series’ triumphant victory lap.

THE AMERICAN – anton corbijn – 4.1 / 10

With very few exceptions, almost every film about a hitman tells one of three stories: the hitman falls in love (usually with the target), the hitman wants to retire after one last job or the hitman becomes a target himself.  The American manages to squeeze all three of these overused tropes into one film, creating a sort of hitman cliché amalgam.  The filmmakers also toss in some teeth-grindingly obvious symbolism and a couple of the stalest stereotypes going (the priest with a tragic past and the hooker with a heart of gold) in what appears to be some sort of weird attempt to create the most cliché hitman film possible.

LOST: SEASON FIVE – 4.5 / 10

After the creative resurgence that was season four, I had high hopes going into the fifth season that Lost was really going to be something special in its last couple seasons, that it would finally become the show everyone seemed to think it was.  But dear god, season five might be the worst of the bunch.  If not for the return of badass John Locke (who, of course, isn't really John Locke), the season would’ve had no redeeming moments whatsoever.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD – edgar wright – 4.8 / 10

Though it’s not nearly as offensive or misogynist, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is Twilight for hipster nerds.  Like Twilght, Scott Pilgrim is wish fulfillment for an audience already predisposed to like it.  To someone not in its narrow target demographic, however, Scott Pilgrim, like the Twilight books / movies, is so impenetrable it might as well be speaking a foreign language.  It bears no resemblance to anything one might call reality with no characters behaving like actual human beings and nothing happening in it that makes any real sense.  Unfortunately for Scott Pilgrim’s financial prospects, where Twilight’s target audience is millions and millions of young girls ready and willing to be pandered to, there just aren’t all that many hipsters nerds (thank god) and most of them don’t particularly like being kowtowed to.

LOST: SEASON FOUR – 8.1 / 10

After the mind-blowing three-part finale of season three that saw the introduction of recurring flashforwards as an ongoing storytelling device, Lost seems to have undergone a creative resurgence that has propelled it through what is easily the series’ best season thus far.  No longer constrained by the rigid structure of the series first two and two-thirds seasons, the writers have discovered a whole new world of stories to tell.  And the show has improved dramatically because of it.

LOST: SEASON THREE – 6.5 / 10

Three seasons in and a pattern has begun to emerge in both the individual episodes and the seasons as a whole: they start off strong, with a solid cold open or a few good episodes, meander in the middle, getting bogged down with all manner of trivialities that no one cares about, then make a triumphant return in the last few minutes or episodes.  Season three typifies this pattern more than any season thus far.  It opens with Jack, Sawyer and Kate imprisoned by the Others, a potentially fascinating development that goes pretty much nowhere for half the season until Jack strikes a deal that allows Kate and Sawyer to return to their camp, facilitating the terrific three-episode conflagration between the Others and the castaways.

LOST: SEASON TWO – 4.9 / 10

It becomes clear about two or three episodes into Lost’s second season that the writers have little to no interest in the survival aspects of the show.  By introducing a hatch with a couple of beds, a shower, a kitchen and all manner of other amenities as well as palettes that fall from the sky with enough food for everyone for months (even though they were ostensibly only meant for the two people who were living in the hatch), they take away all exigency to the characters’ fight to survive on the island.  No longer is anyone worried about having enough food or finding suitable shelter.  Instead they’re free to focus on everything else around them, though, curiously, not on finding some means of escape.  This is present in smaller details too, like the fact that the cast’s clothes, despite always being covered in sweat and dirt, are constantly changing and usually fit pretty well.  There’s also always a tarp available whenever a new person comes to camp (even though you’d think those would be precious commodities in a situation like that).  Lost’s writers clearly don’t find the struggle to survive on a (mostly) deserted island all that interesting.  And while this takes away a lot of the urgency of the characters’ existence, it does free the writers up to tell stories that have nothing to do with figuring out where the next meal is going to come from.  Unfortunately, in the show’s second season, the writers just weren’t up to the task of telling interesting stories outside of mere survival.

DAWN OF THE DEAD – zack snyder – 4.8 / 10

There are some really inventive, really interesting things going on in this film.  And there are also some incredibly stupid, incredibly annoying things in it as well.  In the latter category, there’s the fact that the people in this film appear to have never heard of zombies nor seen any zombie films.  If they had then they would've known that the bite of a zombie is contagious.  I find it very hard to believe that ten average people in modern America have no idea how to deal with zombies (a problem cleverly circumvented in the far superior Zombieland).

THE LAST AIRBENDER – m. night shyamalan – 1.9 / 10

As easy as it is to hate on every Shyamalan film since Unbreakable (Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, The Happening) there’s always at least one moment in every movie that makes you sit up and take notice, one moment that makes it clear that despite his inability to string together two coherent lines of dialogue, Shyamalan nonetheless has visual style to burn. In The Last Airbender that sequence is a fight scene, shot in a single take, that depicts an occupied village rising up as one and throwing off the chains of oppression. It’s a powerful shot both because of what it represents (the single unbroken take has the effect of uniting the villagers in their struggle, bringing them all together to reveal their true potential) and because it’s just really cool looking. Unfortunately that shot only lasts one minute; the other hundred and nine are a complete mess.