The five best
5. Scott Pilgrim
Yet another one those “future of cinema” movies that no-one saw (remember Speed Racer?). This one isn’t perfect but combining an aimless 20-something love story with a high-action video game is about as brilliant as high concepts get. Also, cool music. And cool fights. And cool jokes. Even Michael Cera seems sort of cool.
4. Toy Story 3D
Yeah yeah, Pixar make awesome films. But what’s increasingly obvious is that they make awesome films that will break your heart without a second’s thought. If the scene where the toys hold hands in the face of death doesn’t scar you for life, don’t worry: the ending is even more gut-wrenching. It’s a wonder they’re not sponsored by a tissue company really.
3. Hurt Locker
The occasional sliver of subtext aside, this Iraq war bomb-disposal tale is little more than a series of awesomely tense bomb disposal scenes strung together. The good news is, awesomely tense bomb disposal sense are awesome. The better news is, director Katherine Bigalow actually knows how to make action sequences work, instead of just editing the hell out of things while turning up the music.
2. The Social Network
Movies where a jerk’s experience in some cutting edge industry is used to explain The Way We Live Now are neither new nor rare. But this one gets everything right while somehow managing to be both for and against the internet’s absorption of our social lives. Not to mention being extremely funny, which is not the first thing you think of when you think of Facebook.
1. Winter’s Bone
Forget Deliverance: white trash mountain folk have never been as scary as they are in this tale of a teenage girl trying to track down her meth cook dad so the court won’t take their home away. They’ve never been as noble as they are here either though, and grounding a gripping crime story (her dad’s fellow crims don’t want him found, and they happen to be her family) in documentary-style observation makes this truly something special.
The five worst
5. Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton’s latest chunk of big budget hackwork isn’t all that bad, but it does contain the most unwatchable moment in 2010 cinema: Johnny Depp’s dance at the end of the movie. It’s not like it’s a throwaway moment either – it’s the punchline to the film’s longest-running gag. David Brent’s dance in The Office was less embarrassing, and that was trying to make audiences wince.
4. Wog Boy 2: Kings of Mykonos
On the one hand, this wasn’t that much worse than the original Wog Boy. On the other hand, that’s no excuse for making a movie where a donkey winks at the camera. And let’s not forget, this is a romantic comedy with Nick Giannopoulos in the lead. Who thought that was a good idea? Oh right, Nick Giannopoulos did.
3. Love and Other Drugs
Whatever subtlety this tale of a mid-90s drug salesman and the super-hot, sexually available Parkinson sufferer he falls for might have had in the film-maker’s minds is rapidly crushed by obvious music cues, by-the-numbers plotting, a script that doesn’t know what “story” means (why is it such a big deal if he’s a good salesman or not when half way through he starts peddling Viagra – the drug that sells itself) and – it needs to be said twice – a super-hot, sexually available Parkinson’s sufferer. Because no-one would fall for someone with a terminal illness unless they were smoking hot and constantly up for no-strings sex, right?
2. Sex and the City 2
Not so much a movie as a filmed book of fabric samples, this blatant attempt at fan service somehow had time for a massively camp gay wedding that meant nothing but forgot to give half the cast anything to do. So embarrassing it hasn’t just destroyed the franchise’s future, it’s travelled back in time to make the original series all but unwatchable as well, making Samantha officially The Queen of the Harpies.
1. Life As We Know It
You kind of expect a Katherine Heigl movie to be simplistic and depressingly blunt about what some women want out of a relationship, but this sucker laid it all out: women want to have a baby – without actually having to physically have a baby – and a partner who has had every single trace of individuality crushed out of him. Seriously, the male character arc in this film consists of him losing every single character attribute he starts out with (job, bike, lucky hat) before he finally submits to life as a stay-at-home dad. Which would be fine if this was actually funny, instead of nothing more than scene after scene based around either people arguing or a baby crying (or both!). Oh wait, a baby shits in his lucky hat. And Heigl gets baby shit on her face. Guess they’re jokes too.