THE TRUE MOVIE OF THE YEAR is a movie that is not a movie, that is not a script, that is not an idea, that is not even yet a flicker in the filmmaker’s mind, and that movie, of course, would be the one not yet imagined by Jafar Panahi, yet sensed by those who governed Iran in 2010 and imprisoned, then released, and have now sentenced the writer-director of Offside and The Circle to six years in prison and, at the age of 49, twenty years without writing, filming, talking to media or leaving his homeland. What a wondrous, momentous, life-changing, world-shaking film it must be! Borges and Kafka are not amused by the Iranian government’s presumption.

An Unclothed Top 10 (with annotations below):

1. The Social Network
2. Carlos
3. Winter’s Bone
4. The Ghost Writer
5. Exit Through the Gift Shop
6. Dogtooth
7. Inception
8. Father of My Children
9. Everyone Else
10. I Am Love

OF THE 300 MOVIES OR SO I SAW IN 2010, partly on the weekly beat at Newcity and more at festivals and for juries, one entry’s sheer strangeness and immediacy took me more by surprise than any other film or video I saw in 2010, and I wrote about it for Moving Image Source’s “Moments of 2010” compendium. The movie’s even more headlong than this paragraph, hyperbole for the hypnotic:

Huang Weikai’s 58-minute Disorder, featured at Hot Docs 2010, is a black-and-white shot-on-video portrait of urban Guangzhou, but it’s also a sustained fury of delirium. Tossed into a maelstrom of deracinated images from Huang’s native province, we’re left adrift and agog at brief scenes of traffic jams, floods, accidents, police violence, fools winding through lanes of heavy traffic, and so many, many farm animals gone astray. Programmer Sean Farnel has gone beyond considering Disorder a “city symphony,” merely saying it’s set in “Chris Marker-ville,” and Huang’s film is indeed an act of sustained bricolage, essaying contemporary China through a reported 1,000 hours of footage from amateur shooters, creating an eruptive, hallucinatory landscape, resisting narrative, that is both tactile and otherworldly. It may be the first great film of the 22nd century. [Trailer.]

THE RARE MOVIE LEAVES ME ANGRY, and sometimes it takes months or years to decipher why even after I’ve written about them. (It might just be about me.) Among the 2010 movies that sent me into at least a rant were Cyrus, Blue Valentine, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and The Fighter. And an upcoming second bout with The Black Swan will surely let me misunderstand it in another entertaining way. (I like Bilge Ebiri’s notion it’s the year’s “most over-understood film.”) Movies of interest that I haven’t seen include Biutiful, Easy A, Fair Game, How Do You Know, I’m Still Here, Monsters, Tangled, TRON: Legacy, The Town, Unstoppable and The Way Back.)

THERE ARE ALSO MOVIES IN THE MIDDLE, if not necessarily the middlebrow. For instance, Sally Hawkins and Bob Hoskins playing off each other in Made In Dagenham is a delight inside that film’s period candy wrapping. And the performances of a rigid yet ruffled Colin Firth and incurable ham Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech are a delight, like a roadshow of a sturdy workhorse play, even at moments where Tom Hooper’s camera style would better suit “Dr. Tongue’s House Of Windsor in 3-D.” There are movies on many, many lists, consensus choices, that can go here as well, good movies that speak for themselves as examples of top-notch craft, like Toy Story 3, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right and True Grit.

PERSONAL BEST MOVIEGOING MOMENTS include the revelations of The Complete Metropolis, as on first viewing the moments of rediscovered footage emerge from beneath a scrim of decades of celluloid wear, dream-within-dream. The 51st Thessaloniki International Film Festival offered a retrospective of the films of Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul but also several presentations of other work, including shorts and a three-hour master class led by Joe comparing his films and shorts to his gallery work. That was a serious pleasure.

A STRIKING NEW TALENT is cinematographer-director Jody Lee Lipes, whose releases as director included the bold, confrontational artist doc Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same; lovely dance narrative NY Export: Opus Jazz (co-directed with Catfish‘s Henry Joost); and as cinematographer, Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and Alistair Banks Griffin’s’ stately Two Gates Of Sleep. [Trailer.]

And five vital performances by young women: Zoe Kazan‘s watchfulness in The Exploding Girl; Madeline Carroll in Rob Reiner’s Flipped, Elle Fanning in Somewhere, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, and the endearingly malicious Jessica Barden, a brilliant presence, as the village instigator in Stephen Frears’acid Tamara Drewe.

CINEMATOGRAPHY.

The Social Network, Jeff Cronenweth
I Am Love, Yorick Le Saux
True Grit, Roger Deakins
Somewhere/Greenberg, Harris Savides
Carlos, Denis Lenoir, Yorick Le Saux

LEAD PERFORMANCES.

Édgar Ramirez, Carlos
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Tilda Swinton, I Am Love

SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES.

Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone
Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech
Michael Fassbender, Fish Tank

SOUNDTRACKS.

Carlos, songs by Wire, The Feelies, New Order
I Am Love, John Adams
The Social Network, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Inception, Hans Zimmer
Tron: Legacy, Daft Punk (soundtrack; haven’t seen film)

AN ANNOTATED TOP 25.

1. The Social Network. The ending, borne back ceaselessly into the ‘net: Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Cinema as sensation: capturing mood and momentum through lighting and framing and the tow of Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch‘s score.

2. Carlos. Terrorist-for-hire as rock star, pop music as pulse: You don’t know what it means but you know how it feels. [Trailer.]

3. Winter’s Bone. The blue of the Ozarks mastered by the RED camera. Winter’s kill. A brave woman who passes for girl.

4. The Ghost Writer. The ending, beginning on a passed note at a public gathering that suggests the chain of complicity among not only the story’s players, but also politics and society at large. The sound design anticipates what comes next, it blooms just perceptibly, volume rising, as you realize what has happened. It’s the depth of nightmare: a fear congealed, turned crystalline, lingering penknife to the heart. And: The clean yet lightly satiric line of the beach house interiors and the slate-to-charcoal sand-water-and-sky exteriors through a wall of glass that could equally please the eye of Richard Diebenkorn or Rem Koolhaas.

5. Exit Through the Gift Shop. Hall of mirrors? Prank of pranks. [Opening 5 minutes.]

6. Dogtooth. Stay in the house. Stay in the trunk. The cat is the most evil creature. [Trailer.]

7. Inception. Why are you explaining my dream in my dream? No, no, explain my dream in my dream. Marion Cotillard‘s large, lost eyes to get lost in.

8. Father of My Children. What happens next? What happens after? [Trailer.]

9. Everyone Else. Maren Ade’s delicate moments, motions between actors. Gossamer, heart stopping. [Trailer.]

10. I Am Love. Feastly horrors!

11. Shutter Island. I envy whoever gets to tackle the BFI Modern Classics of this one. A second look nine months later, also in 35mm, was even more rewarding. Scorsese and Schoonmaker construct multiple perspectives for an unreliable narrator with consummate skill. And as marvelous as Michelle Williams is in the over-determined Blue Valentine, she’s wondrous here in only a few limpid, doomy scenes.

12. Never Let Me Go. So many rich affinities to contemporary fears and concerns that Mark Romanek‘s affecting, melancholy movie may have scared reviewers and viewers off. I hope to write about it at length soon: “They’ve learned legends and live by them, however true, however false. They have their own belief system that allows them to move forward, and its elemental grasping for hope is as simple as the comforts of religion. Questions about factory farming and the failed system of health for profit may also be sparked. What’s on screen is hardly as bleak as these gentle creatures hope and dream: it’s a tender telling of what Don DeLillo once called “the fallen wonder of the world.” The settings are worn, props and clothing are lush from wear: the dignity of things that will outlive them; us. Never Let Me Go is a attentive, sympathetic reflecting pool of modern life.

13. Let Me In. Beautiful: shot by Greig Fraser, whose credits include Jane Campion’s deliriously perfumed Bright Star. The look here, while lustrous, is more austere, with chilly blues and manila-yellow puddles of lamplight, as well as solid horizontal compositions, often as stately and bleak as an Atom Egoyan film like The Sweet Hereafter. Matt Reeves finds an American corollary to the essential loneliness of both vampire and child.

14. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Knives Chau, for one. And the fragmented, fragilistic sense of a 22-year-old man-mind, made me remember mine. And sound: ambitious, bold, nourishing sound design, both joke and dream. A generous sweetheart of a picture.

15. Animal Kingdom. Simmering acting, specific yet unyielding performances that come to blinding fruition in the final scene. J., who’s our eyes, slinks to corners of the frame, learns as every possible thing that could go wrong goes very, very wrong: the transformation of this gangly teen is as momentous as Michael Corleone’s. Jacki Weaver, Ben Mendelsohn and James Frecheville are superb.

16. Stone. A little-seen spiritual fable. With loving texture, Stone, set in rundown contemporary Michigan, is quiet and contemplative. Since his debut feature, Praise, John Curran has worked in rhythms that incorporate stillness and smolder; figures, usually couples, alone, together, in rooms. Stone starts at noir and grows from there.

17. Please Give. The momentous from minor-key moments and momentary mortifications: I celebrated Nicole Holofcener‘s film here.

18. Audrey the Trainwreck. Writer-director Frank V. Ross is the real thing. Even if he had never heard of Arnaud Desplechin, they’re onto a similar sense of gorgeous imbalance. [Trailer.]

19. Howl. Not only for the phrase “drifters of Dadaist persuasion,” but we can start there.

20. Bomber. Paul Cotter‘s first feature of daunting precision, made from almost nothing. He’s got promise, but also a fine debut. [Trailer.]

21. Mother. Opening, closing, and much of the middle: At its finest moments, Mother approaches the intensity of Shohei Imamura’s great Vengeance is Mine, but Bong Joon-ho’s mix of bumptious humor and strong plotting makes for a more eccentric mix, leading to a musical climax that’s the cinematic equivalent of acupuncture, releasing all the knots, gliding into a glorious sunset. [Trailer.]

22. Splice. What if a much of a which of a mutant?

23. Somewhere. A succession of sensations of being adrift in a city where the weather seldom changes, where the stars are always young, where children must make their own way. The sky is blue and clear.

24. The American. Wistful precision, weighted breath.

25. Chloe. A genius sense of moneyed urban space; Toronto under a loving microscope.

Plus: There were moments that mattered (with links to reviews) in Daddy Longlegs, Enter The Void, Fish Tank, Get Low (Duvall And Murray underplaying in a movie missing a pulse), Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Noomi!), Greenberg (Greta!), Hadewijch, Life During Wartime (fake stars in fake Florida’s night sky!),  Logorama, Mademoiselle Chambon, A Prophet, Red Riding 1974 (Andrew! Rebecca!), The Secret In Their Eyes (San Telmo!), Soul Kitchen, Tamara Drewe, Tiny Furniture, Trash Humpers (Ralph Eugene Meatyard!) and Vincere.

Movies that were thrills on first exposure that I look forward to revisiting and reviewing in 2011: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg; Rafi Pitts’ The Hunter; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives, Hongqi Li’s Winter Vacation.

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