Winter’s Bone – Many months after seeing it, this movie has stuck in my mind more than any other I’ve seen this year. True-to-life performances like few others I’ve seen (and many of the actors were not, in fact, actors).
The Fighter – great performance by Christian Bale, but Amy Adams really, really surprised me here – showed me a completely new side of her. The story was great, of course.
True Grit – the Coens put their spin on a great story, and it’s a resounding success.
Inception
127 Hours
Kick-Ass – I agree with DRM re: rewatchability; I saw this twice in the theater and would watch it again right now.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – see #6
Let Me In – while I don’t think the story needed to be retold from an American standpoint, this movie was a very solid effort
The Kids Are Alright – good performances all around helped move it into my top 10; the story was a little bleh.
Monsters – in every frame, you could see the heart and soul the director and writer (and SFX guy, and producer, and …) put in this movie
I have not yet seen Toy Story 3, Black Swan, The King’s Speech nor The Social Network (I love David Fincher movies, but loathe Facebook and want nothing to do with it). I will see them eventually, and, based on reviews I’ve read elsewhere and here, expect that they will move into my top 10 list and displace the bottom four.
I agree with other posters, though – there’s a division between the outstanding movies of 2010 and the ones that are only very good. I really wish AMPAS hadn’t extended the category of Best Picture to 10 nominees.
Great to see this on your list! If I ever get around to making one, this will be on it.
I’m just kicking myself for missing this. It played for like a week at a theater I detest. I was going to see it anyway but then it left. I was really looking forward to it too. I hoped and hoped it would re-open at one of the other art house theaters, ones I like, but it never did. The same thing happened with Animal Kingdom.
As I told Mahaloth, you don’t have to like Facebook, you can utterly loathe Facebook with every atom of your being, and you can still appreciate and even like The Social Network. To steal a couple of lines from someone else at another site, “it is actually a classic tale of ambition and betrayal in the best traditions of Shakespeare’s plays…Facebook is just the device for which Sorkin and Fincher have hinged their morality play.”