(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?".

(My) Best of 2010: Director.

5. Olivier Assayas for Carlos

The scope of his film! Carlos was perhaps the closest we came in 2010 to having an "epic" film.

A multi-country, multi-cultured, multi-decade drama that focused on the life of a single person. Combining classic Hollywood filmmaking with 70's political cinema and filtering it all through his truly unique personal vision, Assayas made of Carlos "The Jackal", someone we could comprehend for a moment.

The fact that the movie originally was supposed to focus on one specific episode and was extended after Assayas realized he wanted to say more, is an impressive commitment on its own.

4. Roman Polanski for The Ghost Writer

As his world became more controversial and many expected him to slip into quiet retirement, the incredible Roman Polanski delivered one of the greatest films of his entire career.

The Ghost Writer had the balls to address current issues while recurring to political allegories that recalled The Manchurian Candidate and thrills worthy of Hitchcock's best work.

You can feel his hand the second the film begins and as it evolves you see how this seemingly simple film, ties up many of the themes he's explored in over four decades.

Best of all? The utter joy that exudes from the darkly mischievous film. Watching it you can feel Polanski's smile while he shot it. He truly loves the movies!

3. Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan

It's taken Darren Aronofsky a while but he finally delivered the movie worthy of his talents. After exploring the machinations of the human mind through addiction (whether it be to drugs, love or perfection) and trying out more intimate dramas, he grabbed all of his obsessions, techniques and styles and threw them together to create Black Swan.

This psycho-sexual-character study not only proved he's a master at directing actors (Natalie Portman will have trouble topping off her role here...) but that he's at his best when he loses some control himself.

Black Swan sometimes feels confused and misleading, but for the first time Aronofsky (who's known for his meticulousness) delivered something messy that might've lacked the firmness of his previous works but felt like a breathing, living organism.

2. Yorgos Lanthimos for Dogtooth

Making weird films is certainly easy. Making the weirdness feel coherent and achieve verisimilitude is on another different level though and that's precisely what Lanthimos does in his wickedly brilliant Dogtooth.

He creates a unique universe located within a house, but makes it work in relation to the world around the characters. Watching the precision with which all his means achieve diabolically funny ends, you can't help but think that he either lived something as insane as what goes on in the film, or he began writing it at age six.

Such is the level of encompassing power provided by Lanthimos that it makes sense that in some circles (and languages) a film director is also known as a "creator".

1. David Fincher for The Social Network

Even if he's accused of being cold, insensitive and too technical, David Fincher is truly one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers. His style is perhaps too European for Hollywood and this is why his attempts at creating fascinating essays are botched by middlebrow studio sensibilities (Benjamin Button anyone?).

It was a true delight then, to see him work at what seems to be complete freedom; in The Social Network he displays a mastery of the cinematic form that baffles in its effortless brilliance.

First, he created a movie that deals with lawsuits over a website, yet managed to make it more layered and intricate than anyone would've expected.

Second, his lead character is a complete asshole, yet like Welles in Citizen Kane he managed to make us look past the surface and created the most effective portrait of loneliness in ages.

Third, even if he says he didn't do it on purpose, he did capture the zeitgeist! The Social Network is a movie that encompasses an entire generation with such effortlessness that some out there still wonder what's the big deal about it. Others just surrendered to its perfection.

Fourth, his mastery of the cinematic form is such that it takes one several screenings to realize what a tight film this is. There's a million things going on at the same time, several times narrated and yet every single thing about The Social Network is united and flawlessly put together.

His work here is worthy of all the likes, shares and pokes anyone might think of, but perhaps his greatest achievement is that he gave us a movie to discuss over decades to come. Fincher seems fully aware that the greatest cinema doesn't stop living after the credits end, it moves with the audience who take it with them for the rest of their lives.

Summer Hours ***1/2

Director: Olivier Assayas,
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jérémie Renier
Edith Scob, Isabelle Sadoyan, Valérie Bonneton, Dominique Reymond
Kyle Eastwood, Alice de Lencquesaing, Emile Berling

By its definition a museum is a place where objects of permanent value are preserved and displayed, but how we deem something valuable and museum worthy is the nature of Olivier Assayas' touching exploration.
"Summer Hours" starts during the celebration of Hélène's (Scob) 75th birthday, she doesn't look a day past fifty but is contemplating what will happen once she's dead.
She inherited a country house from her uncle-a famous painter-who filled the place with invaluable art pieces and furniture.
Hélène lives alone except for her maid Éloïse (Sadoyan) and takes advantage of her birthday celebration to talk serious matter with her children.
Jérémie (Renier) the youngest, lives with his wife (Bonneton) in China, the middle one, Adrienne (Binoche) is an artist who lives in New York with her boyfriend (Eastwood).
Only Frédéric (Berling) the eldest remains in France and is supposed to take care of the estate after his mother's demise.
The three of them spend the celebration ignoring her wishes, out of children's fear of their parents' death or in a rush to get back to their lives, and leave reassuring themselves their mom will live forever.
She obviously doesn't and after she passes way they must return to take charge of the estate.
The second in a series of films commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay, "Summer Hours" then takes a turn as the children decide to get rid of the collection to aid themselves financially.
With a plot meant for melodrama (should they sell their childhood memories?) Assayas crafts a lovely meditation on life that doesn't involve a single false move.
Hélène's death is treated in the most unceremonious of ways (making us wonder if she felt like a museum piece herself) and the subsequent meetings with museum officers and lawyers are treated like adult transactions.
The issues are never reduced to arbitrary tantrums and unnecessary dramas, Assayas treats us like the characters treat each other. For some their decisions might seem heartless and rushed, while others will identify with the painfulness of growing up portrayed so unaffectingly by the great actors.
Throughout the film we observe how they each appraise their own lives. For Adrienne her mother's objects are weighed down by the past while Éloïse sees them as souvenirs of a life well lived. In the film's most touching moment she fills a vase with flowers and places it on her employer's desk.
"Empty vases were like death to her" she says, ignoring the fact that, minutes before, said vase was discovered to be a priceless piece by a famous artist.
This may be the whole point of Assayas film; is art valued because of the memories and personal experiences we put to it or is it some sort of sacred concept defined by abstract concepts?
Once we're dead, and even when we're living, our memories can't be displayed in museums, but their value to us can be as worthy as a million dollar antique we might own.
"Summer Hours" invites us to spend a little more time contemplating the pieces next time we're in a museum, at one time those too belonged to someone who imprinted them with memories.
But we must also treat those at home as if they were pieces of invaluable art.