True Grit (2010) – The Coen brothers’ adaptation of this story stays closer to the novel than the 1969 version, but borrows some scenes directly from the John Wayne classic. Observe:

Very good dialogue and acting, and I’d recommend it to anyone, but it seems like minor Coen.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse – Why the fuck do people like these movies so much? I cannot say. I didn’t enjoy this: Every story beat was obvious several beats in advance, the dialogue was terrible, the action was rote. I will say that love triangle was amusing despite the complete uselessness of Bella Swan — her father and Jacob are the only tolerable parts of the enterprise, with their relentless sarcasm and disbelief that Bella can be so consistently stupid in her decision-making. But I really wonder what happened to the whole “vampires sparkle in sunlight” thing. Nobody sparkles!

Agora – From the director of “The Sea Inside” and “Open Your Eyes” comes, surprisingly, a two-dimensional swords-and-sandals epic about science and religion in Roman Egypt at the moment that Christianity took over.

Dinner for Schmucks (2010)
Ugh. I get the inspiration here — develop script full of goofy situations, get some of today’s bigger and more credible comedy stars to be in it, voila. When you cast Steve Carrell you remember that his breakout role was Brick Tamland in “Anchorman,” and surely a movie full of Brick Tamlandisms should be funny. I’m just not sure why it was so fitfully funny. Is it my dislike of mistaken identity plots, which are so forced here that they require two characters constantly misplacing their cell phones? Is it that we’re asked for too many reactions to Carrell’s character — sympathy, annoyance, empathy? Not a terrible movie, but not very good.

The Last Airbender (2010)
If it wasn’t for “Sex and the City 2″ (and I refuse to consider even of those movies canon) this would be the most entertainingly-reviewed film of 2010. And sure, it’s a piece of shit. Our child stars have apparently been instructed to act exactly like anime characters, with wide eyes and excitable dialogue. (The female, uh, lead, is one of the worst child actors in history.) The special effects are ripped from a direct-to-video “Mortal Kombat” sequel. There are no stakes, no surprises. There are many funny lines that sound as stupid in context as they do out of it. “I am sorry. I forgot to tell you before. If you failed the test, as all others have, you would have been free to go.”

Please Give (2010)
The latest in Nicole Holofcener’s series of pleasing, plot-light, low-stakes portraits of upper middle class people with problems. It might be her best, though, because the plot device is at least sort of interesting — a well-off couple run a store that sells antiques purchased from the recently deceased, and they befriend (or co-exist) with the granddaughters of a neighbor they plan to ransack. (They’ve actually bought her apartment and plan to demolish it to expand their own.) Only Rebecca Hall’s sweet character (also named Rebecca) has any apparent morals; everyone else is an entertaining mess.

Four Lions (2010)
If you hear this description — “four bumbling Islamic terrorists plot an attack on the London marathon” — and don’t run screaming, you’ll like this. I loved it, smiling through a few awkward patches, wincing at the family drama (our hero Omar’s loving suburban family are excited about the prospect of their patriarch blowing himself up), and losing it at some of the funniest bits of the year. (The sequence in which two sharpshooters quibble over whether they’ve shot a man in a “bear” costume or a Chewbacca costume is evil and sublime.) I’m glad Chris Morris escaped from the sitcom slum to make this, and now I want him to go further.

I adored this movie. I adored in the way the Younger Dave used to hoard VHS cassettes of anime and Kevin Smith and Whit Stillman movies, and watch them over and over again. I adored it more than I’d expected to because early reviewers said things like this:

Who cares if Scott winds up with Ramona, Knives, or anyone else? Described by his own sister (Anna Kendrick) as “chronically enfeebled,” he makes an implausible lady-killer—and even less of a fighter, despite his innumerable bouts against Ramona’s other beaux. These are staged and filmed as if they were video games, all painless panic, and they are best taken as Scott’s inward reveries of a power that he will never possess. I strongly suspect, in fact, that he stayed in bed and dreamed the whole sweet movie. Call it “Inception” for geeks.

Stupid geeks! What’s wrong with you idiots, taking all this pleasure from silly fight scenes and an inscrutable love story? Go back to ComicCon, and clean your rooms!

It’s a goddamn shame that “Scott Pilgrim” (do you mind if I call it that?) hits just as the movie-critiquing profession gets over a couple of the nerdy trends that made it marketable when it was optioned a few years ago. The indie geek-who-gets-girl-despite-being-an-”ass” (as Pilgrim calls himself at one point) genre hit the reef sometime after “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Michael Cera, who became a beloved critics’ kewpie doll after “Arrested Development,” wore out his welcome with a series of mediocre roles, led by “Year One.” What to take out the anger on? “Scott Pilgrim,” obviously.

All the criticism is wrong. Judged as its own movie, and judged as an adaptation, this is a complete success. There is no weak performance; the songs, by Beck, Broken Social Scene, and Metric, are not just catchy but appropriate for the “bands” playing them; the visuals are really unlike anything ever seen in the movies. I’m talking about the effects ripped right out of 8-bit (and occasionally 16-bit) video games, but I’m also talking about director Edgar Wright’s dizzy editing, where conversations are finished across multiple scene changes, and title cards and narrations pop on and off the screen informing us without distracting us.

Let’s talk about the adaptation first. Wright was tasked with compressing a story that takes more than 1100 comic pages to tell — adapt every scene for a movie and it’s probably 6 hours — into around 110 minutes. He gets rid of some dross and loses almost nothing. Yes, I like the comics for the way they drag Scott’s romance with Ramona out over the course of a year, so you see them grow together, but Wright does a better job of making this action convincingly happen over the course of a few weeks than I thought would have been possible. He’s also extremely good at 1) adding jokes that jibe with the material and 2) adapting jokes that you thought only worked in sequential art. For the first example, I’m thinking of the lines he gives Brian Comeau in the double-shot scene (don’t ask) when Scott confronts Gideon. One of the times that Scott walks past him, we hear Brian in a snobby conversation saying “well, the comic was better than the movie.” That’s funny, but it’s the kind of joke you could put in any comic book movie. The other time we overhear Brian, he’s saying “the first album is better than the… first album.” That’s the kind of joke you’d laugh at in a smart indie comedy, the kind of joke that made readers love the “Scott Pilgrim’ comics, and Wright just threw it in there.

I mentioned the casting before — it’s one of the things that makes this work as a movie on its own, not just a faithful adaptation. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona is a little darker and harder-to-get than the Ramona we saw in the comics. I don’t think we ever see her teeth when she’s smiling, and she disappears from the movie more than she does in the comics. (When she flat-out vanishes in volume 5, it’s a huge, heart-breaking deal.) We (by which I mean nerdy guys) immediately fall for the comic version of Ramona. We fall for this Ramona, too, her huge eyes that burn with obvious intelligence. We instantly love Kieran Culkin’s Wallace and Ellen Wong’s Knives, who’s given a lot to do here — so much that the audience is clearly torn on whether Scott should be with her, even though he obviously shouldn’t. (She’s 17!)

I don’t have much to say that doesn’t sound like gushing, so just go see the damn thing. It will make less money than it cost, and the smart kids will call it a bomb, and then the rest of us will keep watching it for decades.

I realize today, as I drink coffee and eat eggs in the sunshine, that I have seen only four movies in the year 2010.

“But, Dave!” you ask, lip quivering. “You watch like 50 movies per year.”

Indeed I do. But I rarely catch many movies before the summer. There are reasons for this. 2010-specific reasons include the fact that I am dating a smart, strong and beautiful woman and we have a lot of other things to do.* Every-year-specific reasons are that if a movie is released before, say, August, I can catch it on DVD or — now — streaming Netflix by the end of the year. So while I’ve failed to see A Prophet and Greenberg so far, I will by, like, November. The big blockbustery nonsense I HAVE seen:

Alice in Wonderland – Wow, really not that great. You don’t have to pine for feminist heroism in every movie to be confused and disappointed that the headstrong, take-no-shit little girl of Lewis Carroll’s story has been turned into a bland, scared, clinging-to-Johnny-Depp action figure. I liked Ann Hathaway’s little hand motions and basically everything from Helena Bonham Carter. And I guess I like that this movie seems to have sparked the neo-3-D backlash.

Hot Tub Time Machine – I almost don’t want to see anything else in 2010 so I can say that Crispin Glover was in 50% of the films I saw. His ongoing gag is a highlight of this movie that almost excuses the really radical sexism (Haha that black guy’s wife made him hyphenate his name!) and missed opportunities to mock 80s cliches. But I generally liked this, especially the embrace of completely amoral behavior. (Did Rob Corddry murder Vince Neil or something?)

Kick-Ass – Also, 50% of the films I’ve seen this year have featured Clark Duke. Probably my favorite film of the year so far, an improvement on Mark Millar’s overwritten comic in a lot of ways.

*Like CONCERTS. That’s what I mean.

I don’t read many movie reviews any more, but I assume the libertarian embrace of Iron Man 2 (2010) is in full swing. Insofar as it has a message, it was lifted by screenwriter Justin Theroux from Ayn Rand. “I have successfully privatized world peace!” says Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), dressing down a panel of weaselly senators who want to take his technology away from him. “I’m tired of the liberal agenda,” says Stark to his assistant Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), in a line that doesn’t make a lot of sense (he’s tired of spending money on projects that look good for his company) except as a dog whistle to tea partyers. Stark’s biggest foil is Justin Hammer, a government contractor/moron played by Sam Rockwell as the best reason to cut federal spending since Ronald Reagan bashed “welfare queens.”

The problem, as with so many attempts to inject real world relevance and politics into a super hero movie,* is that the message doesn’t really make sense. There’s no sense that Stark’s agenda is any different than Uncle Sam’s — he’s not, as Warren Ellis’s or Mark Millar’s heroes sometimes do, neutering the United States and leveling the playing field between the first and third worlds. And as stupid as Hammer is, his downfall comes not from punishing the innovation of private operators as it comes from hiring as his lead developer a Russian psychopath (Mickey Rourke) who uses his government contract to carry out a vendetta against Stark.

I had fun during Iron Man 2. Downey and Rockwell are given lots and lots of scenery to chew, and they take to it like termites. Director Jon Favreau does some wonderful work with the cliches of the genre and the series, like an angry video chat (in the heat of battle) between Stark and Potts, a 3-D supercomputer projection whose images can be crunched up and tossed into (also imaged) basketball hoops, a souped-up version of the Iron Man armor that folds into a suitcase.

But in Iron Man (2008), Stark is forced, again and again, to invent his way out of a crisis. He puts together his original, clunky Iron Man armor in a frantic race to save his life from terrorists. He develops his improved armor as he experiments on ways to keep his nuclear-powered heart alive — one of my favorite scenes in the film was the screwball “fix my heart, fast!” surgery with Potts. We know that the armor he’s inventing would never really work, but it’s fun watching how long it takes to figure out each kink.

There’s significantly less of this in Iron Man 2 — inventing new armor becomes an easy action movie task along the lines of making an 18-wheeler explode with a well-timed shotgun blast. It takes Rourke’s Ivan Valko six months to create his first bootleg arc generator and energy whip, which he uses to face down Iron Man at a racetrack. (As my friend Phil Klein asked in the dark theater, how is Valko the only person in Monaco who knows that Stark will race his company’s car? Not even the TV station knows.) It takes him approximately three days to create 18 armored droids and a suit of armor that improves on many of Stark’s designs. It takes Stark around a day — in a really moronic sequence — to realize his father hid the chemical code for a new element in a diorama, build a rube goldberg machine that synthesizes elements, and add the new element to his suit. (This element is necessary, by the way, because of a previously unspoken flaw with Stark’s arc generator that is poisoning him, and for some reason toxifies his blood by 24% in 6 months and by another 27% in the two days from the start of the film’s narrative.) Oh, and this — how does Pepper Potts spend her entire career working around sci-fi robots and NOT KNOW WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A RED BUTTON STARTS BEEPING LOUDER AND LOUDER. It means explosions.

Like I said — funny movie, two actors that produce one-liners like Rob Pollard produces lo-fi rock tracks, some memorable scenes of robots going shithouse on other robots. But fairly stupid, a little disappointing.

Also, Scarlett Johansen is in it.

*One exception here is the sonic spying technology invented by Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight (2008), which actually makes a point about civil liberties, especially when it’s deactivated at the end of the film. And the X-Men films aren’t bad at this either.

Congratulations, Moviefone — you popped up first on my “Oscar list” google search.

BEST PICTURE
Will win: Avatar, because it’s the biggest-grossing film of all time — did you suckers realize that receipts were up 10% last year? During a motherfucking recession? #teaparty
Should win: The Hurt Locker, although I would fully support a win for A Serious Man

BEST DIRECTOR
Will win: Kathryn Bigelow. I just have a theory, which will be shredded or validated in due course, that the judges will split the baby here. Maybe it’ll go in the other direction — surely, Cameron’s achievement is more impressive than Bigelow’s, even if his movie is worse.
Should win: James Cameron. You see? You see?

BEST ANIMATED PICTURE
Will win: Up.
Should win: Coraline. Yeah, I fucking said it.

BEST ACTOR
Will win: Jeff Bridges.
Should win: Jeremy Renner.

BEST ACTRESS
Will win: Sandra Bullock.
Should win: God, I don’t even care. The girl from Precious?

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Will win: Christophe Walz.
Should win: Walz, even though he’ll give the most boring speech of the night.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Will win: Mo’nique
Should win: Mo’nique

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Will win: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
Should win: Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Will win: Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious
Should win: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche, In the Loop

BEST FOREIGN FILM
Will win: The White Ribbon
Should win: Uh, sure! The White Ribbon!

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Will win: James Horner, Avatar
Should win: Alexandre Desplat, The Fantastic Mr. Fox

BEST ORIGINAL SONG:
Will win: “The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett. The songs from The Princess and the Frog cancel each other out; the song from Nine, being a song from Nine, totally sucks.
Should win: “The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

Matthew Yglesias says it’s “Iron Man,” which I think is reflective of the back-loaded bias of so many decade retrospectives. “Spider-Man,” which came out seven years ago, is clearly the adaptation of the decade. Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin/Norman Osborn is a fantastic villain (remember the mirror monologues? of course you do) with motivations that make sense and a great denouement. Kirsten Dunst, as bland as she can be, makes a great dream girl, and the resolution of the romance is so good that J.K. Rowling ripped it straight off for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Like “Iron Man,” it nails the ecstasy of the origin scene, but “rich man gets powers” is a less satisfying transition than “nerd gets everything he wants.”

I hesitate to rank the superhero films I saw — I saw lots of them — but we can divide them into “successes” and “failures” pretty easily. Will you leave it on if it comes on during your channel-flip? Will you buy the chromium-embossed 12-disc blu-ray collector set? Then it’s a success. The first two X-Men films are successes, the third saved narrowly from disaster status because of all the cool stuff that happens, and the fourth (“Wolverine”) is an abomination. Both “Fantastic Four” films are failures, and Jessica Alba as Sue Storm is up there in the pantheon of terrible casting choices. Both Zak Snyder adaptations — “300″ and “Watchmen” — are successes, even if they’re just ripped straight from the comic pages and splashed onto the screen. “Superman Returns” is a failure, doubly so because it saddled us with Brett Ratner as the director of “X-3.” Both Punisher reboots were failures — “War Zone” is a worse film, but the setting of the Tom Jane film in Tampa, and the shoddy use of Garth Ennis’s unadaptably strange villains (“Send in the Russian!”), made it a total disaster. Both Batman films were fantastic successes.

For all that CGI did for these films,I don’t think “successful superhero adaptations” were big breakthroughs this decade — the 1970s Superman and 1980s Batman reboots were wonderful. The big comic-book discovery of the Oughts was, I think, the successful translation of “arty” comics into fine films. “Persepolis,” “A History of Violence,” “Sin City,” “From Hell,” “Road to Perdition,” and on and on.

That said, if you told my 15-year old self that one decade would bring a masterpiece of a “Lord of the Rings” adaptation, fantastic adaptations of “X-Men” and “Spider-Man,” and serviceable versions of “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Watchmen,” I’d have gone into a joy coma. We nerds, we picked the right side. More evidence? The best comic book adaptations were churned out by the directors of “Evil Dead 2″ and “Swingers.

Every year, I run the same game. In the summer, I see big blockbusters with friends. In every other season, I try and see the art films that make it to D.C., usually at the E-Street Cinema or the AFI Theater. In December, I see all the movies I missed–a task that has become easier, with Netflix, and harder, with my less-idle life.

So, here’s my end-of-year film ranking. I am posting it on Christmas Day with the intention of updating and re-ranking as I see a few more films–Still Walking, Broken Embraces, etc.

Oh, and it’s the end of the year, so HERE THAR BE SPOILERS.

47) Obsessed

I have an excuse! I watched this — for free, with plenty of work to distract me — so that the next movie would not be the worst one I saw all year. Let’s be honest, I made a great decision. This is a terrible, terrible movie, a hodgepodge of material that worked in other movies but falls completely apart in the hands of Idris Elba, Ali Larter, and Beyonce. She, by the way is the only reason to watch this, if less for her acting than for her pointlessly sexy outfits. All the drama in the climactic catfight (spoiler alert! like you give a crap) depends on whether Beyonce’s sexy heels will cause her to trip onto an attic plank.

46) Push

We’ve seen enough successful superhero movies by now that we know what the audience cares about and what it doesn’t. This film was full of “doesn’t”–the only images that stick with me were, honestly, the woozily floating guns and the Asian guy with huge eyes when he screams. It’s really bizarre seeing actors like Djimon Honsou and Dakota Fanning in a mess like this.

45) X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The director of “Tstosi” and an all-star cast bring you — total shit! We, as a society, got too cocky about the X-movies. After Bret Ratner delivered a pile of action scenes and called it “X3,” we thought we’d bottomed out. No, sir — here was a movie that looked cheap, with a script that made no sense, and an ending that the most addled fanfic writer would delete. Two words: Adamantium bullets. Two more words: Memory-erasing.

44) The Men Who Stare at Goats

This reminded me of Choke, in that the people who adapted the text seemed to have no interest in making a movie that resembled it, or replicated why it worked. Choke, however, was pretty fun on its on terms. This is just a tone-deaf piece of crap. I think there’s a case here that this is the year’s biggest disappointment — a fine cast with great source material, and nothing much to show for it. But the flashback scenes worked. So it’s better than “Wolverine.”

43) Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Honestly, the best part of this movie was my arrival with friends, and my strongest memory is of Kriston Capps, getting in late, high-fiving his friends as he hurtled to his seat. The movie itself? Eh. Vampire-on-werewolf sex is always worth $10.

42) Monsters vs. Aliens

Perfectly serviceable, although as I consider it I think of how Shrek won the 2002 Oscar for Best Animated Film, and how in retrospect everyone denies that they thought broad, adults-can-enjoy-it-too genre parody was in the same league as Pixar. We’ve got our minds right now, and we recognize these Dreamworks CGI films as Family Guys to Pixar’s Mononoke Hime, fun and funny without touching any nerves.

41) Where the Wild Things Are

Aaaand here’s where I break with the critics and prove how edgy I am. I was bored silly by this movie, vaguely insulted by the simple and stupid morality play that Dave Eggers injected into the text. It’s beautiful to look at, absolutely, probably the most impressive thing Spike Jonze has done visually. But it left me cold. The monster dialogue and relationships were, as my friend Becks pointed out, imitation of the banal conversations late-twentysomethings are having right now. The whole exercise, turning a children’s book into a touchstone for whiny adults, is masturbatory. Again, though–beautiful to look at!

40) Terminator Salvation

To paraphrase William Hurt’s villain from A History of Violence: Post-apocalyptic robot warfare? How do you fuck that up? I, for one, do not accept Simon Worthington as our new action hero–better than Shia LeBeof, sure, but so is almost anyone. He punches and screams and blands-up his way through a barely interest robot-human conflict, given screen and character time I would have liked to see given to the comically under-written Kate Connor (Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to specialize in paper-thin roles in fantasies–here, Spider-Man 3, Lady in the Water).

39) 2012

Here’s where I started to have fun. I love, love, loved the second act of this movie, when shit blew up real good, when Los Angeles fulfilled the destiny Warren Zevon set out for it, and when Yellowstone turned into a volcano. Everything else is second-rate, but man, try and admit you didn’t have fun for 30 minutes there.

38) Funny People

Sorry, Ross Douthat. The day may come when I discover some brutal humor in this movie. And on a second viewing–which I haven’t given it–I might replace my expectations of a quotable, paralyze-you-with-laughter Judd Apatow movie with a sadder Apatow-for-grown-ups movie. But I went in with those expectations and came away hugely disappointed, and quite bored. It’s not that the story of a 40something comedian unable to buy and charm his way out of his poor life decisions is so dull, it’s that Apatow takes so long to tell it, and forces us to watch his family–wife and daughters–act out key roles

37) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Eh, I feel like they adapted the wrong parts of the book. Why so much focus on the magical love potions and so little on the cute and tender Harry-Ginny love story? And why such a perfunctory treatment of the showstopping final scenes of the book? The weakest Potter film since Chris Columbus mercifully quit ruining them.

36) Knowing

A well-plotted and surprising apocalyptic saga, much better than it had any right to be. Really, the flash-forward sequences and the ending are fantastic, and the children-in-danger scenes work right up til the finale. Nicolas Cage is almost, almost, almost believable as a loving and normal father, which is a real success on his terms.

35) State of Play

So very much weaker than the masterpiece it’s based on, but smarter than the usual political intrigue picture. There’s an uncomfortable lesson in there.

34) I Love You, Man

I adored this while it was on, but it faded a bit afterwards. It’s a really serviceable comedy–it’s wonderful that the likes of Paul Rudd and Jason Segal are playing the “put ‘em in that new comedy screenplay” role that, like Chevy Chase and Dan Ackroyd played 20 years ago. Nothing wrong with the movie, there’s just not much to it.

33) Tyson

Strange that this was sold to viewers as the first look at the “real” Mike Tyson, as he’s always been an unsettlingly honest interview subject. The artistic touches really fall flat (Tyson talking over himself like some sort of 1967 Steve Reich loop) but this is an un-fuck-up-able story.

32) Taken

A “Bourne” movie without the brains — fantastic idea! While it’s on, the emotional triggers all work just fine. You hope he rescues his daughter! You hope that one guy gets tortured! You hope that other guy dies for no reason!

31) Notorious

What’s the bigger sign of racial progress–President Barack Hussein Obama, or a hip-hop biopic that’s just as paint-by-numbers as Walk the Line? I, unlike a lot of critics, thought the acting was superb, and I grade on a curve considering how much heart and bias Diddy et al put into the project.

30) Observe and Report

Jody Hill seems to have alienated a lot of people with this unapologetic and unlovable black comedy. I wasn’t offended at all. Just thought it was a little lazy.

29) Adventureland

Could have been a whole lot better–some very strongly written characters are given way too little to do, and what they do get into is just too cliched.

28) Paranormal Activity

Works horrifyingly well in a full theater. I get the feeling it’d be crap on video on a re-watch.

27) Extract

Mike Judge’s best-plotted movie, and his least interesting. Funny how that works.

26) The Hangover

An 80s screwball comedy transplanted to 2009, complete with racist Asian stereotypes and a goddamn Rain Man parody of all things. Zack Galifanikas’s weirdness makes the movie.

25) The Limits of Control

Inscrutable Jim Jarmusch nonsense. “Reality is arbitrary.” Pass it on!

24) Up in the Air

Great first hour, nonsensical “deep” ending that seems very tacked on for Oscar season. Please explain to me how Alex’s decisions make any sense–why travel to Wisconsin with a man she is about to heartlessly discard? Also, for the record, Vera Farmiga is 12 years younger than George Clooney.

23) World’s Greatest Dad

Bobcat Goldthwait is now in the business of making brilliant black comedies–first Sleeping Dogs Lie, now this. I know, I’m surprised too. Daryl Sabara, who plays Robin Williams’s odious and sex-crazed son, gives one of the best performances of the year. Alexie Gilmore is given an impossible character–guilelessly sexy, loyal to multiple men without really thinking about it–and pulls it off. Robin Williams is controlled! And endearing! In the wake of the Michael Jackson death, and the quick turnaround of a celebrity from a Freak We Love to Hate to a Genius Who Will Be Missed, this had real resonance this year. As low as I’ve ranked it, it’s one of the first movies I’d recommend on this list.

22) Bruno

Fun, but my favorite Sacha Baron Cohen character this year was Orly Taitz.

21) The Brothers Bloom

Came and went through the theaters despite a high-wattage and sexy cast (I somehow wonder how we can go about our business every day when we could simply stare slack-jawed at Rachel Weisz) and despite being a Wes Anderson movie with momentum and real characters.

20) Star Trek

You know, it should probably be ranked higher. While I was watching it, I had more fun than I had with almost any other movie this year. So I’m going to back slowly away before anyone notices my cop-out.

19) Drag Me to Hell

Sam Raimi bounces back nicely from the Spider-Man 3 debacle with a gross (so many things going in and coming out of mouths!) and almost puritanical tale of morality that, by accident I’m told, happens to be about the recession.

18) Watchmen

Eh, it’s critic-proof. Obviously Zak Snyder’s not a genius, although his title sequence–invented for the film–is probably the best of the year. Obviously Malin Ackerman can’t act her way out of a wet paper sack, and the decision to give her the most pivotal and emotionally resonant role was a crazy one. But it’s a Watchmen movie, and it isn’t terrible, and I spent 1/3 of my likely lifespan waiting for such a thing. Yeah, I have the 5-disc DVD set.

17) Up

Like the last few Pixar films, it soars in the first act and drags as it turns into an action movie for the kiddies. Did I cry a couple of times, though? Yes. And that’s no fun with 3-D glasses on.

16) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Like Watchmen, this is just critic-proof. I like Herzog. I like watching Herzog get tremendously bored with a cop-thriller script and decide to film a bunch of iguanas instead. Bonus points for the shamelessly strange casting–Jennifer Coolidge! Eva Mendes! Val Kilmer! Brad frigging Dourif!

15) Il Divo

A lot of fun, if hard to follow–and I write about goddamn politics for a living! I have to give special notice to the soundtrack, which is 1) fantastic and 2) jarring to hear in a foreign language film about byzantine European politics. Beth Orton! The guys who sing “Da Da Da!”

14) Sherlock Holmes

The trailer, which made it seem like Guy Ritchie had turned Holmes into a swaggering ladykiller, lowered my expectations. The movie exceeded them. Downey’s Holmes, rather than being dashing, is just fantastically weird, a few cats and old newspapers away from shut-in status. The only bring-down for me was the performance of Rachel Adams, who’s blown off the screen to a comic, ACME-brand dynamite degree every time she appears. As my friend pointed out, they should have cast the newly Oscared–and thus, I’d think, less picky–Kate Winslet.

13) Avatar

As gorgeous to look at as it is IQ-destroying to think about–seriously, some of the most derivative plotting and dialogue of the decade. “They won’t think twice about eating your eyes for jujubees”? You can just see Cameron at the Macbook, glancing alternately at a thesarus and the stuff he has lying around the room.

12) Gomorrah

Almost as good as everyone says it is, just a little bit boring when it really shouldn’t have ever gotten boring. It’s about ugly Italians killing each other!

11) District 9

Easily the best White Man Goes Native And Betrays Humankind movie of the year.

10) The Road

By all indications the studio buried this movie–its widest release sent it to 396 theaters–and I can see why. At its best it’s a straight translation of Cormac McCarthy’s instant-classic novel, and at its worst it’s been altered for maximum Oscar potential in a way that just doesn’t work. But a good adaptation of one of the decade’s best novels is, damn it, a good movie. Watching this, I got the same hollow, scared feeling I’d gotten when tearing through the novel two years ago, and that’s more than I can say for most movies. The acting is weary and pitch-perfect, the scenery is relentlessly grim, the moments of tension are unbearable, and the soundtrack, which most critics seemed to despise, is basically the same as the one Nick Cave and Warren Ellis composed for “The Proposition.” They could have screwed this up, and they didn’t.

9) Zombieland

Probably the most pure fun I had at the movies all year, because, not in spite, of its truly weird lack of forward momentum and real danger. Even this late in the zombie renaissance, it brings in new tricks like the “rules” that appear as tactile, giant words in the foreground.

8) Coraline

Perfect storytelling, beautiful animation, and a retrograde message that I just loved–kids, don’t talk back to your parents, or you’ll be enslaved by spider-demons!

7) (500) Days of Summer

Quickly ascending into the pantheon, along with Kicking and Screaming and Before Sunrise, of Romantic Dramas About White People That Dave Considers Knowing and Profound. It’s easy to pick it at, but this gets so much right, from the “dream girl” character whose dreaminess is an ongoing joke with the audience, to the filmmakers’ winking acknowledgment that Tom is, at this stage in his life, kind of an asshole. The “freak out at the office which reveals all of the bottled-up emotions and not-so-subtle subtexts” scene was a bit much, but have you read the original screenplay? It’s amazing how much that stuff was toned down by the time it got to the screen.

6) The Fantastic Mr. Fox

The best Wes Anderson movie since Rushmore, I’d say, very noticeably improved by the script-doctoring of Whit Stillman, who really needs to make another goddamn movie of his own sometime.

5) Inglourious Basterds

I came out of this one with mixed feelings. It seemed like a collection of scenes more than a movie, and Tarantino didn’t exactly disguise that fact by putting up title cards before each big scene. But it stuck with me. Images stuck with me — rubber Hitler being riddled with machine gun bullets, the stand-off in the rendezvous bar. Music stuck with me, like the first-ever successful use of Bowie’s “Cat People” theme.

4) A Serious Man

This one was a grower, with dialogue and scenes that spent days rattling around my brain. The only aspect that sunk in while viewing was the acting, and that, two, only gets better as you think on it–sobbing Richard Kind! The guy who plays Sy Abelman oozing slime from every pore! The hapless rabbis!

3) The Hurt Locker

Yes, I’m part of the hallelujah chorus here. I was nailed to my seat for every second of this movie. I had trouble talking about it afterward. Kathryn Bigelow has made a great, great war movie that finds and leaves its characters in uncomfortable places, and makes us care for a hero who, let’s face it, is more or less a fucking crazy person.

2) In the Loop

In an interview with Jesse Thorn, Armando Iannucci recounted his trips to Hollywood back when he was trying to adapt “The Thick of It,” his comedy about British politics, into an American sitcom. Iannucci saw firsthand how America’s engines of entertainment worked. He translated that to our engines of government. He was completely successful. Bonus points for the consulting work my friend and colleague Spencer Ackerman did on this.

1) Anvil! The Story of Anvil

The other day, my friend Eric IMed me to gloat that Michael Moore’s newest documentary did not make the lengthy shortlist for the 2010 Academy Awards. That didn’t bug me. What bugged me was the inexplicable diss of “Anvil,” a documentary so stupid and so surreal that, when folks began blogging about it, naysayers demanded proof that it wasn’t a hoax.

It’s not a hoax. There really is a band named Anvil, a mediocre Canadian hair metal band that’s produced songs like “Metal on Metal” and “Free As The Wind” and “Butter-Bust Jerky.” Their ringleaders, guitarist/singer Lips and drummer Robb Reiner, really do lead lives of quiet desperation in Ontario. They really did mount a slapstick European tour and a “comeback” album that no label would release. And the guy who wrote the screenplay for “The Terminal” found them and directed their story. He plays it for laughs, at first — is there anything *un*funny about a former metal god delivering grade D meat to Canadian elementary schools? — and cuts deeper, staying in the room while Anvil threaten shady club-owners or break down over the knowledge that they’ve failed.