(My) Best of 2010: Picture.

10. Somewhere

Like Lost in Translation before it, Somewhere is a non-story that evokes beautiful nostalgia. Once again set in the world of Hollywood (stick to what you know, right?) Sofia Coppola delivers a delicate portrait of a movie star (Stephen Dorff) and his down to earth relationship with his young daughter (Elle Fanning).

Dialogs are limited, "actions" are sparse and yet, coming out of it, you can't help but feel that the world has been shown to you for the first time. Coppola's ability to find beauty in the quotidian has made her a true master.

9. Undertow

The year's best love story (sorry Never Let Me Go), had fishermen, photographers and ghosts. As delivered by Javier Fuentes León though, the film is able to avoid extreme quirkiness and/or melodrama, instead becoming a remarkable exercise of how to transport Latin American magical realism, into seamless visual narrative.
Manolo Cardona and Cristian Mercado will break your heart as the star crossed lovers, who must cope with denial, secrecy and death.

Kudos for being a love story between men that doesn't scream "gay movie". Love after all should transcend sexual orientation.

8. The Ghost Writer

Done with gleeful mischief by Roman Polanski, this was the year's most entertaining political thriller. Its layers and secrets more fun, not because of their real life parallels (Tony Blair mostly) but because they transport us to a time and place where movies could be entertaining and smart.

Ewan McGregor and a remarkable Pierce Brosnan take their game to splendid levels but it's Olivia Williams' role, straight out of The Manchurian Candidate, that gives this film its final laugh.

7. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Icy, distant and furiously feminist, this adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel was a stunning throwback to suspense thrillers at their best. Noomi Rapace gives an iconic performance as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander but the movie's best asset is its straightforward approach to its genre.

It's not reinventing the wheel but it never pretends to, instead it throws us sepia flashbacks, newspapers clippings and gasp worthy moments, with full understanding that it's main purpose is to entertain and seduce its audience. Action flicks are rarely this sincere.

6. I Am Love

If Luchino Visconti and Sergei Eisenstein had a baby, it would be I Am Love. Luca Guadagnino's epic work is a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of a collapsing world.

Tilda Swinton plays a Russian immigrant married to an Italian heir. The way in which love falls with violent aplomb onto their lives makes for a subtle political statement that leads us to ask questions cinema hasn't made us since the 1960s.

Is capitalism a force that opposes love? Can personal history be adapted in lieu of social class upgrades? Is there anything Tilda Swinton can't do?

5. Carlos

Olivier Assayas and Edgar Ramírez deliver one of the few biopics that can be called complete. This encompassing study of Carlos "The Jackal" forgoes ridiculous mentions of childhood traumas, facile Freudian diagnosis or unnecessary romanticism to tell the story of the world's most notorious terrorist. Assayas himself begins the film with a disclaimer saying that parts of the film are complete fiction, yet his assured direction and Ramírez's star making performance make us disbelief this. If this isn't the real Jackal, they could've fooled us.

4. Toy Story 3

People who attribute the success of this installment to nostalgia for the first two chapters, might run into a dead end when they bump into my Toy Story experience.

I'm most definitely not a fan of the first two and never held any high regards for Woody, Buzz or company. However nothing prepared me for the emotional punch of this film.

Who would've thought that Ingmar Bergman's explorations of mortality would live, not through Eastern European art cinema, but through computer animated toys?

3. Dogtooth

One of the year's funniest comedies and also one of the best horror films, Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth is a remarkable work of originality that thrives in spite of its tendency to push the level with every minute of its running time.

A morality play, a modern interpretation of Plato, a sexual comedy and much more, this film roots its perverse power in the best and worst of human nature; in our need to protect the ones we love and the fear of never living up to satisfy the universe that created us.

2. The Social Network

The Facebook movie proved to be much more than what anyone expected and delivered the thrills in more than one way.

As a comedy, it recalls some of the bitterest satires put on the stage. As a drama, it's a heartbreaking story of how money and power are never enough when it comes to eradicating loneliness. As a court movie, it's an exemplary work of how to push genres into fresh directions, as auteur work it's an unmistakable masterpiece made only better by David Fincher's ability to turn a great screenplay into an intimate, personal work.

Jesse Eisenberg delivered the best male performance of the year as Mark Zuckerberg and the film's stunt casting made a case for how its characters' values are the sad faces of an entire generation. Those who have compared it to Citizen Kane, are not using hyperbole.

1. Black Swan

In Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky explores the nature of creation while exploiting his very own creative sense. He creates an imperfect world within our own, where high camp, terror, psychological drama and insanity coexist with such balance that they make us wonder about the elements that conform our existence.

Natalie Portman gives the year's greatest performance as ballerina Nina Sayers: a fragile beauty trying to find perfection within chaos. Like the actual black swans, which remained a myth until they were discovered by explorers a few centuries ago, she undergoes a Kafka-esque process in which she discovers that she's becoming that which she once feared and thought impossible.

Her quest for perfection mirrors the film's own search for artistic sublimity, yet as an organism, the film seems to "learn" just in time that in order to achieve perfection, it must compromise with itself.

As Nina surrenders to insanity worthy of the most tragic Catholic saint, the movie takes an alternate path and observes Nina's quest, while it develops its own route. There's a moment in the film, where it stops being Nina (after following her path through most of the running time) and decides that perfection is perhaps too much to aim for.

That the film ends up being perfect in its own sense, makes for an interesting dichotomy between artistic expectations and actual aesthetic realities.

Black Swan was a reminder of why people go to the movies: to be transported to different worlds, to know people they could never meet in real life, to see the world from a different perspective, to bask in the face of the incomprehensible and metaphysical, and sometimes to be shaken to our core so all we are left to say is just "what the fuck?".

Toy Story 3 ****

Director: Lee Unkrich

Ignoring the fact that toys coming to life is actually kind of creepy, Pixar Animation studios delivered two of the most wonderful films of the last twenty years in the shape of the first Toy Story movies.
Counting on much more than their stunning animation and visuals, the films were altogether more surprising because each installment actually had something to say.
What's certainly even more impressive is that in the third, and seemingly final, chapter of the series, the filmmakers have actually outdone themselves and deliver a film of such depth and humanity that it's hard to believe it deals with characters made out of plastic.
When the film begins, Andy is packing to go to college. His mom advises him to throw, donate or store his belongings which include his childhood toys. Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the gang become concerned for their future given how Andy hasn't played with them for years.
During the going away hassle they end up in a children's daycare where they try to accept the fact that Andy has forgotten all about them.
There they meet new toys and come to believe that the daycare will turn into an eternal utopia where children will play with them forever; but things soon change as they discover a corrupt system deep within the innocent facade.
Woody meanwhile is trying to get back to Andy by all means and like in the previous films embarks on a journey back home.
With a deceptively simple premise Toy Story 3 proves that hell perhaps might not be at the end of a conveyor belt carrying garbage, as the characters fear during one crucial moment, but in the idea of being forgotten.
While the previous movies dealt with growing old and accepting change, this one maturely embraces a subject that has mystified artists throughout history: their own mortality.
Therefore, the film beautifully unites themes it started examining fifteen years ago and recurring to an array of storytelling techniques ties the whole trilogy together (the aesthetic choice of closing the trilogy with a "real life" representation of the first image we saw back in Toy Story is not only a tear trigger but a moment of pure artistic genius).
If letting go wasn't difficult enough, throughout the movie we're reminded of why these characters came to matter so much. Despite being objects they represent our memories (in a way linking themselves, at least on the surface, to the Lacanian concept of what's real) things we may not even know are there but have such meanings that we can't give them up.
It's safe to say that for a generation that grew up watching these movies, Toy Story 3 will serve as a strange meta experiment: the final movie about characters wondering what will happen to them during their final days.
Perhaps like Denys Arcand's superb history trilogy, Pixar's three-parter would make a fascinating basis for an Existentialism 101 course.
Of course the film provides ample entertainment for younger audiences, who might not get all the references (just the movie ones include The Great Escape, Indiana Jones and at least a couple John Ford Westerns) but will still be wowed by the thrilling way in which the setpieces are executed (the opening sequence is more exciting than any so called adventure flick released during a regular blockbuster season).
This time Pixar slightly succumbs to the idea that animated movies must feature contemporary jokes to have an effect on young audiences but they do so with such class and selfconsciousness that it's obvious they're not trying to make business out of it but are giving us glimpses of how in times of desperation we recur to unexpected maneuvers.
Notice then how by film's end, all the characters have returned to being who they always were, the popular references and such, being but rushed midlife crises of sorts showcased to deal with endings.
Cynics might say that the Toy Story series made a name of itself manipulating universal human emotions and using toys to create empathy for materialism; but the truth of the matter is that while Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman struggled throughout their filmographies to find a meaning in humanity's struggles with mortality, Toy Story looks at it straight in the eye, even playfully, and with unexpected maturity reminds us that maybe we should just stick to doing our best while we're still here.