Pick of the crop: Best 2010 films

Filmgoers are spoiled for choice, with many more cinemas and titles released than even a few years ago.

The selection of the year’s best is skewed toward the interests of NBR readers and therefore does not pretend to be definitive. The list could easily be doubled, particularly with several high-quality releases still awaiting their post-festival screenings and as the annual Hollywood awards season gets into full swing.

BEST BLOCKBUSTERS
The top three put murky business dealings at the centre of the action. The Social Network wowed audiences by depicting the origins of Facebook as a struggle for supremacy of a vision rather than a business case. It has few faults, thanks to a brilliant script and an excellent cast. This is a king-sized drama of ambition, betrayal and success. Inception also wowed audiences, but mainly for its dazzling special effects and mind-bending defiance of physics. Most viewers, including myself, are probably still wondering what it was about but were impressed anyway. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps didn’t come up to expectations of an insider’s version of the global financial crisis, but it did show money power at its worst. The trappings were superb, as was Michael Douglas’ reprise of Gordon Gekko, and few would quibble that director Oliver Stone put everything into it.

BEST THRILLERS
The Ghost Writer is easily one of Roman Polanksi’s best efforts in years. Each scene has a menacing tone that builds into the next one, with plenty of surprises. The idea of the CIA recruiting agents for political subversion isn’t as threatening or convincing as, say, The Manchurian Candidate or actual events during the Cold War, but the story of a former UK prime minister being a “plant” holds you to the unexpected climax. The runner up is George Clooney as The American, a vanilla euro-thriller that puts the cool back into the genre. Set in the Italian-speaking alpine region of Switzerland, it unwinds with clockwork precision pace, with barely a move out of place.

BEST COMEDIES
Clooney again features, this time as the frequent-flying corporate down-sizer in Up in the Air. His road warrior lifestyle takes off when he meets a female doppelganger (Vera Farmiga) but comes crashing down when he is given a younger (also female) colleague to rein him in. It’s Complicated raises plenty of laughs as middle-class marriages come unstuck in kitchen designer heaven, while Cyrus is another family-gone-wrong genre piece featuring dysfunctional types you never hope to meet.

ARTHOUSE FAVOURITES
This is by far the biggest category of superior films and, festivals excepted, is enough to keep discerning viewers well away from any multiplex all year. Cairo Time was the pick in the English-speaking category, as Patricia Clarkson is given an intimate tour of Egypt by her husband’s colleague. From France comes White Material, with Isabelle Huppert trying to hold everything together on a west African coffee plantation, and Lourdes, a stunning account of widely differing pilgrims and what they seeking from the Catholic shrine, which is run along the lines of a religious Disneyland. Italy’s I am Love (Io sono l’amore) melds a sordid family business drama with delectable cooking and infidelity. Tilda Swinton gives her best, speaking in Italian and Russian but in character cannot understand English. Certified Copy provides a similar vehicle for Juliette Binoche, who speaks French, Italian and English while having an enigmatic affair with an English art historian. Silent Wedding (Nunta Muta) is a black oddity from Romania, in which hardly anyone speaks as a village holds an illegal festivity during the mourning period for Stalin in 1953.

BEST DOCUMENTARY
In a year of several good examples, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work stands out for its subject’s sheer audacity and hard graft at still wanting to woo audiences at 75 with her self-deprecating humour and desire to prevent an inevitable decline as much as possible.

BEST OF NEW ZEALAND
Local favourite Boy mystified some audiences – mainly those not born in New Zealand – because they couldn’t fathom what’s funny about the unreal ambitions amid real-world poverty. But the Maori humour delighted everyone else, confirming Taika Waititi as another Kiwi national treasure. The belly laughs may not translate in other cultures as much as Whale Rider or Heavenly Creatures, but for once the box office figures delivered justice.

TAIL-END TURKEYS
Most bad films are easily avoided but I was trapped by the hype on two. Crazy Heart, with Jeff Bridges as an alcoholic country singer, impressed me only for the New Mexican scenery at the end, which couldn’t come fast enough. Home For Christmas, based on the wartime memoirs of Gaylene Preston’s father, reminded me why the local industry needs Warner Bros and Peter Jackson more than ever.