Top 10 Films of 2010

This is a dynamic list, so it’ll be updated each time I see a film which had its world premiere in 2010 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
2. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)
3. Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg)
4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
5. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
6. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
7. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
8. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
9. Silent Souls (Aleksei Fedorchenko)
10. The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg)

My Top 10 Discoveries During 2010 (applies to films made before the 21st century)

1. Irma Vep (1996, Olivier Assayas)
2. Primate (1974, Frederick Wiseman)
3. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928. Buster Keaton)
4. Grand Opera: An Historical Romance (1977, James Benning)
5. S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1971, Paul Sharits)
6. Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
7. Buffalo ’66 (1998, Vincent Gallo)
8. Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis)
9. ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1982, Michael Snow)
10. A Moment of Innocence (1996, Mohsen Makhmalbaf)

Other 2010 films I’ve seen

• Leap Year (Michael Rowe) – 7.2
• You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn) – 7.2
• Tabloid (Errol Morris) – 7.1
• The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler) – 7.1
• Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard) – 7.1
• Hahaha (Hong Sangsoo) – 7.1
• I Shot My Love (Tomer Heymann) – 7.1
• Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari) – 7.0
• The Trip (Michael Winterbottom) – 6.9
• Catfish (Schulman & Joost) – 6.9
• Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino) – 6.8
• How Do You Know (James L. Brooks) – 6.8
• Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman) – 6.8
• Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo) – 6.6
• Empire North (Jakob S. Boeskov) – 6.5
• Beginners (Mike Mills) – 6.5
• The Arbor (Clio Barnard) – 6.5
• Guest (José Luis Guerín) – 6.5
• The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat) – 6.4
• Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield) – 6.4
• My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa) – 6.4
• Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche) – 6.4
• How I Ended This Summer (Alexei Popogrebsky) – 6.3
• Another Year (Mike Leigh) – 6.3
• Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Sophie Fiennes) – 6.3
• Soundtracker (Nick Sherman) – 6.3
• Benda Bilili! (Florent de la Tullaye & Renaud Barret) – 6.3
• Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese) – 6.2
• Young Girls in Black (Jean Paul Civeyrac) – 6.2
• Senna (Asif Kapadia) – 6.2
• Kaboom (Gregg Araki) – 6.2
• Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky) – 6.2
• Brownian Movement (Nanouk Leopold) – 6.2
• Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (Craig McCall) – 6.2
• Buried (Rodrigo Cortés) – 6.1
• Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich) – 6.1
• I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhang-ke) – 6.1
• A Useful Life (Federico Veiroj) – 6.1
• Cold Weather (Aaron Katz) – 6.1
• Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois) – 6.1
• Picco (Philip Koch) – 6.0
• The Social Network (David Fincher) – 6.0
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright) – 6.0
• 127 Hours (Danny Boyle) – 6.0
• The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira) – 5.9
• Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica) – 5.9
• Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-soo) – 5.8
• Carlos (Olivier Assayas) – 5.8
• The Myth of the American Sleepover (David Robert Mitchell) – 5.8
• Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek) – 5.8
• Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) – 5.8
• Sex Magic, Manifesting Maya (Eric Liebman & Jonathan Schell) – 5.8
• El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (Gereon Wetzel) – 5.7
• Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham) – 5.7
• The Joy (Felipe Bragança & Marina Meliande) – 5.7
• Post Mortem (Pablo Larrain) – 5.6
• Sensation (Tom Hall) – 5.6
• If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (Florin Serban) – 5.6
• Fair Game (Doug Liman) – 5.6
• Lily Sometimes (Fabienne Berthaud) – 5.6
• Chantrapas (Otar Iosseliani) – 5.5
• Two Gates of Sleep (Alistair Banks Griffin) – 5.5
• Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik) – 5.4
• On Tour (Mathieu Amalric) – 5.4
• The Embrace of the River (Nicolas Rincon Gilles) – 5.4
• Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs) (Lodge Kerrigan) – 5.3
• Curling (Denis Côté) – 5.3
• Somewhere (Sofia Coppola) – 5.3
• Udaan (Vikramaditya Motwane) – 5.3
• Carancho (Pablo Trapero) – 5.2
• Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán) – 5.2
• Adrienn Pál (Ágnes Kocsis) – 5.1
• Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (Pip Chodorov) – 5.1
• LENNONYC (Michael Epstein)- 5.1
• 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike) – 5.1
• Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri) – 5.0
• At Night, They Dance (Isabelle Lavigne & Stéphane Thibault) – 5.0
• The Housemaid (Im Sangsoo) – 5.0
• The Bully Project (Lee Hirsch) – 5.0
• Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell) – 5.0
• Salt (Phillip Noyce) – 5.0
• The Wanderer (Avishai Sivan) – 5.0
• The Peddler (Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano, Adriana Yurcovich) – 5.0
• Honey (Semih Kaplanoğlu) – 4.9
• A Screaming Man (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) – 4.9
• Studies for the Decay of the West (Klaus Wyborny) – 4.9
• Norwegian Wood (Tran Anh Hung) – 4.9
• The Princess of Montensier (Bertrand Tavernier) – 4.9
• The Lips (Ivan Fund & Santiago Loza) – 4.8
• Tears of Gaza (Vibeke Løkkeberg) – 4.8
• Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz) – 4.7
• Aurora Cristi Puiu) – 4.7
• The Ditch (Wang Bing) – 4.7
• Summer of Goliath (Nicolás Pereda) – 4.6
• !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History (Lynn Hershman-Leeson) – 4.6
• Inside Job (Charles Ferguson) – 4.6
• Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Dmitry Vasyukov & Werner Herzog) – 4.5
• R U There (David Verbeek) – 4.5
• Family Instinct (Andris Gauja) – 4.5
• Father (José María de Orbe) – 4.4
• Tender Son – The Frankenstein Project (Kornél Mondruczó) – 4.4
• The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) – 4.4
• Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu) – 4.4
• Howl (Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman) – 4.4
• The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski) – 4.3
• Rubber (Quentin Dupieux) – 4.3
• Morgen (Marian Crisan) – 4.2
• The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet) – 4.2
• Anything You Want (Achero Mañas) – 4.2
• All Good Children (Alicia Duffy) – 4.2
• Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan) – 4.0
• Route 132 (Louis Bélanger) – 4.0
• Revolución (Carlos Reygadas, Gael García Bernal, Mariana Chenillo, Patricia Riggen, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Rodrigo García, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, & Rodrigo Plá) – 4.0
• Erotic Man (Jørgen Leth) – 3.9
• Illegal (Olivier Masset-Depasse) – 3.9
• Shit Year (Cam Archer) – 3.9
• True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen) – 3.8
• Our Life (Daniele Luchetti) – 3.8
• Cirkus Columbia (Danis Tanovic) – 3.8
• Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) – 3.7
• Mamma Gógó (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson) – 3.7
• Inception (Christopher Nolan) – 3.6
• Nainsukh (Amit Dutta) – 3.6
• Home For Christmas (Bent Hamer) – 3.6
• Jack Goes Boating (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – 3.5
• The Last Circus (Alex de la Iglesia) – 3.5
• Cold Fish (Sion Sono) – 3.4
• We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau) – 3.3
• Better Mus’ Come (Storm Saulter) – 3.3
• Chongqing Blues (Xiaoshuai Wang) – 3.2
• Route Irish (Ken Loach) – 3.2
• What I Most Want (Delfina Castagnino) – 3.1
• Everything Will Be Fine (Christoffer Boe) – 3.0
• The Light Thief (Aktan Arym Kubat) – 2.8
• Incendies (Denis Villeneuve) – 2.8
• October (Daniel & Diego Vega) – 2.7
• You All Are Captains (Oliver Laxe) – 2.6
• The Tree (Julie Bertucelli) – 2.5
• Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (Andrew Lau) – 2.4
• Outrage (Takeshi Kitano) – 2.3
• Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller) – 2.3
• The Tiger Factory (Ming Jin Woo) – 2.2
• Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (Gust Van den Berghe) – 2.0
• ANPO (Linda Hoaglund) – 2.0
• Lights Out (Fabrice Gobert) – 1.8
• The Silent House (Gustavo Hernández) – 1.2
• Dirty Girl (Abe Sylvia) – 0.9