Director: Mark Romanek
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, Nathalie Richard
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List number: 20
Display Width: 200Keira Knightley
Never Let Me Go
Growing up, and even through college, who among us didn’t know Ruth (Keira Knightley), the competitive, somewhat manipulative, seemingly self-important classmate who saw everything you wanted and took it, despite being a close friend? Taking that societal standard, Knightley’s Ruth is betrayed to the viewer when her back is turned to Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Kathy (Carey Mulligan), a luxury not afforded to real-life social interaction. Catty, angry and more than a little bipolar, her final act of love to both Tommy and Ruth puts her childhood actions into a perspective so rarely afforded to us in the real world, and it’s all the more beautiful for it. Knightley’s final admission to Mulligan, with her false hardness crumbling away with each spoken word, her weak, frail body almost ready to die at that moment not out of illness but out of embarrassment, is worth the price of admission alone. Kevin Brettauer
Director: Will Gluck
Cast: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Cam Gigandet, Lisa Kudrow
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List number: 19
Display Width: 200Emma Stone
Easy A
Emma Stone is in every scene of Easy A and also serves as the movie’s voiceover narrator. So it’s a good thing that she’s as great as she is, otherwise Easy A would be another forgettable teen comedy. Instead, this story of a high school nobody who lies about having sex and ends up as the most notorious girl in school may be the funniest high school comedy since Mean Girls. Olive’s webcam-based voiceovers set up the movie’s “chapters” with the perfect amount of snark and/or chagrin as she tells the story of how she gained such a bad reputation. Stone makes it easy to believe how Olive could let herself slide into her new persona. Before she was nothing, now she gets all sorts of attention (and gift cards) and all she has to do is let boys at school say they did things with her. Of course it all spins wildly out of control and has far-reaching consequences, but Stone’s light touch keeps Easy A from getting too serious near the end. Chris Conaton
Director: Nigel Cole
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Miranda Richardson, Rosamund Pike, Jaime Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Richard Schiff, John Sessions
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List number: 18
Display Width: 200Sally Hawkins
Made in Dagenham
As Rita O’Grady, the real-life modern-day suffragette who rallied the female workers of the Ford auto plant in Dagenham, England during the late 1960s, Sally Hawkins does work that’s so sublime it’s almost beneath the radar. Just as in Happy-Go-Lucky, where she had to do little but turn the full-wattage smile of her personality onto Mike Leigh’s camera and let it shine, here Hawkins presents a portrait of a working-class woman up against a high, sturdy wall of corporatized sexism who doesn’t realize how much of a leader she has become until she looks around and sees just how alone she is. Nigel Cole’s film itself is no masterpiece, a serviceable piece of pop history, but Hawkins brings a determined, chin-up heroism to the role that does the character proud. You would want her at your side while working the picket line. Chris Barsanti
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
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List number: 17
Display Width: 200Mila Kunis
Black Swan
As the super sexed up Ego to Natalie Portman’s premeasured Id, this stunningly beautiful Hollywood honey could easily be dismissed. Hers is the flashier, more flamboyant march in Darren Aronofsky’s dance with genre jerryrigging. She’s a minor villain, a less than formidable foe, and one of the most earnest enemies ever. We’re never quite sure if we’re supposed to hiss poor Lily or hope she overcomes chief rival Nina’s nut-burger jealousy to finally take control. As a catalyst for greater inner understanding, for shedding the demons than a domineering mother has cemented in place, she definitely has her moments. Of course, she could just be a figment of a frail ballerina’s inner struggles. That’s what makes Black Swan, and Kunis in particular, so captivating. Bill Gibron
Director: David O. Russell
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Jack McGee, Frank Renzulli
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List number: 16
Display Width: 200Amy Adams
The Fighter
Amy Adams garnered her first Oscar nomination for playing an almost unbearably sweet mom-to-be (Junebug). Her second came for playing an unbearably naive nun (Doubt). In between, she was a live-action Disney princess (Enchanted). Now, in David O. Russell’s The Fighter, she’s trying to venture into dark territory where past cutie-pies couldn’t cut it (I’m looking at you, Meg Ryan). From her first shot onscreen, wearing the shortest of shorts and cracking wise at anyone who looks too closely at them, she glues us to our seats as Mark Wahlberg’s hard-nosed girlfriend, Charlene Fleming. She has to stand toe-to-toe with more than a professional boxer, though. Charlene trades blows with his overly controlling family, including several foul-mouthed sisters, an abrasive mother, and a drug-addicted brother. And that’s just the character. Adams shares scenes with Oscar favorites Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, talents great enough to continuously dominate the screen. Adams matches them. Who would’ve guessed? Ben Travers
15 – 11
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/b/black-swan-poster.jpg
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List number: 15
Display Width: 200Barbara Hershey
Black Swan
Perhaps the most criminally-underrated performer of her generation, Hershey daringly stepped into what most critics erroneously dubbed the “scary mom” role in Darren Aronofsky’s meta mind-fuck Black Swan, instantly drawing unimaginative comparisons to Piper Laurie’s religious fanatic in Carrie. This couldn’t be any more wrong. As Erica, Hershey plays a tightly-wound, claustrophobic game of emotional cat and mouse with her ballerina daughter Nina (Natalie Portman), one second playing at being her best friend, her confidant, and in the next her captor, her nemesis. There is a rivalry between the two women, but as Hershey pointed out in a recent interview, her character is anything but a simple villain:
“Most people will see her as the ‘mother from hell’, but I think she’s a mother in hell.” To this effect, Hershey — amazing in films such as Shy People, A Killing in a Small Town and Paris Trout — manages to convey a lifetime of sadness, dedication to her child, desperation, and, yes, even a degree of steely control and manipulation over Nina as the young woman’s mind becomes warped by playing the Swan Queen. As the film descends into darkness and madness, Hershey’s poignant, wordless final scene at the ballet jerks the spectator, at this point lost in the performance and the surrealism, back into the tangible world’s mournful denouement. It is a moment played with tremendous heart by Hershey and we weep along with Erica for everything that has been lost, and it is a satisfying release. Matt Mazur
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Cast: Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloë Grace Moretz, Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong
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List number: 14
Display Width: 200Chloë Grace Moretz
Kick-Ass
Chloe Moretz had a hell of a 2010. She finished the year as creepy vampire Abby in the criminally under-seen Let Me In, helping to make it one of the few Hollywood remakes that lives up to the original film. But it was her appearance as the 12-year old Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass that really put her on the map. Although the movie itself didn’t live up to the internet hype-inflated box office projections and had its share of detractors, Moretz was clearly the best thing about it. She brought unflagging energy to the role, gamely fighting off bad guys with swords, guns, and various martial arts. As entertaining as Kick-Ass was, the excitement level of the movie picked up noticeably whenever Moretz was on screen. Hit-Girl did all her fighting while being profanely sarcastic, gleefully murdering thugs and mobsters. That the movie manages to portray Hit-Girl as an unrepentant killer who suffers no apparent psychological consequences and still make her likable is a testament to Moretz’s considerable charm. Chris Conaton
Director: Mark Romanek
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, Nathalie Richard
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/n/never-let-me-go-p.jpg
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List number: 13
Display Width: 200Carey Mulligan
Never Let Me Go
As Kathy, Carey Mulligan is forced into the daunting task of being the emotional anchor of Never Let Me Go, something the character, but certainly not the actress, is largely incapable of. In the middle of the most unfortunate and most heartbreaking of recent screen love triangles, Mulligan’s Kathy radiates sincerity in a world not too far removed from our own. Her clear love for Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), sometimes conveyed with a quick eye movement or the faintest quiver of her lip, helps secure the film to an emotional reality that would not exist were its characters, three second-class citizens, not so… human. Kevin Brettauer
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Max Von Sydow
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List number: 12
Display Width: 200Michelle Williams
Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island leaves no Gothic horror reference unturned and this results in a pileup of real and imagined corpses. Disappearance might be what motivates U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) to investigate the island’s hospital for the criminally insane, but death is what follows him. In waking and sleeping visions, Daniels sees the atrocities of war and new fears awakened by the madness around and within him. While Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis crowd the movie with flashes of dead bodies, Michelle Williams’ graceful performance as Daniels’ late wife Dolores is the key to his haunted condition. Emerging from shadows or surrounded by ashes, Dolores is an irresistible siren, beckoning Daniels and the audience towards a truth we may not want to face. Williams’ guilelessness and vulnerability increase in meaning as the film progresses toward the agonized reality of its final, extended flashback. The actress’s measured last moments form a flawless counterpoint to DiCaprio’s hysteria. She is the crucial heart of a film too taken with tricks of the mind. Thomas Britt
Director: Tyler Perry
Cast: Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Loretta Devine, Anika Noni Rose, Kimberly Elise, Kerry Washington, Phylicia Rashad
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List number: 11
Display Width: 200Phylicia Rashad
For Colored Girls
Bringing together two different kinds of damn-the-torpedoes expression — mid-1970s experimental dramatized poetry long marinated in Meaning, and neon-symbolism gospel-play moralizing — promised that Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s cornerstone black feminist text was going to be a wiggy mess of a thing; and the baffled response to this uncomfortable hybrid confirmed it. But while Perry’s amateurish threading together of Shange’s resonant, firecracker monologues left most of his cast out to dry, Phylicia Rashad rose above it all. Playing Gilda, the seen-it-all matron of an apartment building with more than its share of complicated young women, Rashad’s stone-quiet presence and beautifully resonant delivery cut through the TV-tawdry confusion of Perry’s film and give Shange’s poetry the burnished, prophetic gleam that it deserves. Chris Barsanti
10 – 6
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Gabriele Ferzetti, Marisa Berenson, Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini
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List number: 10
Display Width: 200Tilda Swinton
I Am Love
“One’s always downloading one’s heroes, I suppose, all the time. We’re not referencing any particular, current pieces of work. I remember being asked whether I thought about Gena Rowlands for Julia and thinking ‘well, I think about Gena Rowlands all the time!’ Not just for Julia. Of course, we thought about [John] Cassavetes a lot for Julia. For this film, we thought about Catherine Denueve in Belle de Jour. I thought about — and again, I always think about — Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad. But again, it’s not just sampling these performances, but being inspired by them all the time. I could say that I’m just as inspired by Delphine Seyrig when I’m making Julia as when I doing I Am Love. Who else? Let me think… Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be. Those are the people that kind of spring to my mind. So does Ingrid Bergman.“
— Tilda Swinton, on her inspirations for I Am Love, to Matt Mazur, July 2010 Matt Mazur
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Tammy Blanchard
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List number: 9
Display Width: 200Nicole Kidman
Rabbit Hole
How does one move on past grief? Better yet, how do they do it when the rest of the world demands a socially accepted series of bereavement “steps”. If you’re Becca Corbett, the devastated mother of a dead son in John Cameron Mitchell’s captivating adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s hit play, you try to find a balance. Your husband wants answers. Your family wants closure and compliance. But you? You reach out to the young man who caused the car accident tragedy, hoping that forgiveness achieves the equilibrium you need. Allowing her porcelain statue facade to fade, if ever so slightly, Kidman combines an understated grace with a simmering sadness to give us both sides of the story. When finally confronted, the blowback is bracing, if only because it was so controlled before. Bill Gibron
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Rebecca Griffiths, Harry Treadaway
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/fishtank_poster.jpg
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List number: 8
Display Width: 200Katie Jarvis
Fish Tank
Playing Fish Tank’s Mia Williams, the older of two wild girls doing their best in the absence of any real parental figure, Katie Jarvis creates a portrait of the teenager in free-fall with no sense of a safety net. When not engaged in territory-defining combat with any random person that crosses her path, Mia practices dance moves in a vacant flat, dreaming of the big-time break on one of the junky reality shows always flickering in the background. Her rage isn’t caricatured as it so easily could be, but channeled into this slight, seething sprite of unbottled fury. She’s a bomb with no fuse but tragically unaware that her unchecked anger doesn’t make her safe, but more vulnerable to the predator she didn’t see coming. Chris Barsanti
Director: David Michôd
Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver, Sullivan Stapleton, James Frecheville
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List number: 7
Display Width: 200Jacki Weaver
Animal Kingdom
She calls herself “Mama Smurf” and lords over a household of men each going through their own struggled stages of corrupt criminal growing pains. Yes, we’ve see the malevolent matriarch shtick before, going back to when Angela Landsbury helped foster her son’s Manchurian candidacy, and the last 12 months have seen a rife of similarly styled roles. But beyond Kim Hye-Ja’s vengeful nother, or Melissa Leo’s fame whoring Alice Eklund, Weaver’s Janine Cody is capable of her own acts of indescribable horror, from fostering said feloniousness to hinting at an incestual bond that goes beyond cops and robbers. And she does it all with a smile that even the most blood-thirsty, man-hungry shark would envy. Bill Gibron
Director: Debra Granik
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser, Garret Dillahunt, Dale Dickey, Shelley Waggener
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List number: 6
Display Width: 200Jennifer Lawrence
Winter’s Bone
In Winter’s Bone, based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Lawrence) must venture into the figurative seven circles of hell (in fact, into a far more terrifying network of meth production and dealing) to find her father, who used their home as security before skipping bail. It’s a task which would terrify an adult but with the confidence of youth and the determination of someone with no alternative Ree pushes forward despite both verbal and physical warnings to mind her own business. Lawrence has previously appeared in smaller roles in several major films and television shows but her performance as Ree is a revelation which marks her as one of the up-and-coming stars of her generation. Sarah Boslaugh
5 – 1
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin, Jin Goo, Yoon Je-moon
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List number: 5
Display Width: 200Kim Hye-ja
Mother
As our mad matron out to protect her mentally challenged son, Kim Hye-ja is genius. She’s clearly a short skip away from completely crazy, maintaining social standing while subverting the system. We learn of her various minor misdeeds through innuendo only – a warning from the snotty owner of the shop, a common acknowledgement and shaky alliance with the local police. But there is something more to her meaning that just flaunting the law. This mother has a deep dark issue gnawing at her core, an action we see in short flashback that goes unexplained until her son suddenly “remembers”. The reveal is just one of this movie’s many upending delights. One minute we are on the trail of the victim’s tainted Lolita-like backstory, the next our leads are screaming at each other in painful familiarity. Bill Gibron
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/i/inception-poster.jpg
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List number: 4
Display Width: 200Marion Cotillard
Inception
When viewers first meet Mal, she calmly, seductively walks in at Saito’s (Ken Watanabe) side, sabotaging her husband Cobb’s latest gambit with a simple glance. Using her body for all its considerable worth, yet never overusing it as many other, lesser actors often do, she skulks around the borders of the film just as she haunts Cobb’s mind. Always there, always present, even in the waking world and even when she’s not in frame, Mal’s huge, expressive eyes (conveying every human emotion from anger and greed to jealousy and pain and everything in between) and her calm, collected delivery show that no matter what’s at stake, be it in a memory or a dream, she’s a woman who means business. With her artful performance, Marion Cotillard makes it abundantly clear why Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb fell so in love with her. Kevin Brettauer
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Cast: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Stefan Sauk, Ingvar Hirdwall, Sven-Bertil Taube
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List number: 3
Display Width: 200Noomi Rapace
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Noomi Rapace, is and remains to this day the living embodiment of late author Stieg Larsson’s troubled lead protagonist. From the moment she arrives onscreen in the first installment of the so-called Millennium trilogy (Dragon Tattoo was followed by The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), we are instantly draw to this stunning performance — the haunted look in Rapace’s raccoon eyes, the asymmetric approach to her appearance, the awkward piercings, the jaundiced Joan Jett haircut, the stolen Sioxsie Sioux fashion sense. But there is more to her than a bitter couture. Thanks to what she brings to the character, Lisbeth becomes the most unlikely action hero since Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling entered FBI training. Call her punk. Call her Goth. But the truth is, Lisbeth — and Ms. Rapace — are one thing only: flawless. Bill Gibron
Director: David O. Russell
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Jack McGee, Frank Renzulli
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/fighter-poster.jpg
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List number: 2
Display Width: 200Melissa Leo
The Fighter
Really, Alice Ward should be the easy target as the villain of The Fighter. She’s Micky Ward’s overbearing mother, always hovering over his shoulder telling him what to do and guiding his career. Micky doesn’t find real success until he finally lets her go as his manager. But in Melissa Leo’s hands, Alice is understandable. Leo disappears into the role under a bleached-blonde wig that hides her trademark red curls and a thick Massachusetts accent. Alice is doing what she thinks is best for her family and her son. The fact that the best thing for Micky might not be the same as what’s best for the rest of the family never occurs to her. Micky is part of the family, so the idea that he would cut ties with his brother over his crack addiction makes no sense to Alice. The idea that Micky would listen to the advice of his girlfriend over his seven sisters and his mother baffles her. As written, Alice could be a borderline cartoon character, but Melissa Leo is too grounded a performer to let that happen, and The Fighter is a better movie because of her presence. Chris Conaton
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/b/black-swan-poster.jpg
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List number: 1
Display Width: 200Natalie Portman
Black Swan
Like its mentally fracturing ballerina protagonist Nina, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is all over the place. Partly a fairy tale adaptation, partly a riff on All About Eve (with some tawdry Showgirls camp to boot), and partly an aesthetic homage to a range of authorial styles from Polanski to the Dardenne brothers, Black Swan zigs and zags with the alacrity of an eager dancer. Grounding the disorienting enterprise is the overriding sense of body horror, fully realized in the remarkable performance of Natalie Portman as Nina. Presently, there is much discussion about Portman’s weight and harsh training regimen. The film was doubtless a physical challenge. Yet body horror is empty if it lacks emotional and psychological triggers or connectors, and Portman’s total disappearance into Nina’s tortured mind makes the film tick. In scene after scene, from her elation in conveying good news about her prized role, to her regal, evil, sashay onto the stage when she “becomes” the black swan, Portman taps into something decidedly non-corporeal. She is otherworldly. She is perfect. Thomas Britt
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