“Let’s shoot this fucker!”–Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) to Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) in Ed Wood.
Elevens (Movies of Merit):
Agora (On DVD)
The American (On DVD and Blu-ray)
Best Worst Movie On DVD and, umm, pictured)
Blue Valentine
Brooklyn’s Finest (On DVD and Blu-ray; also Netflix Instant)
Daybreakers (On DVD and Blu-ray)
The Eclipse (On DVD and Blu-ray; also Netflix Instant)
Farewell
The Ghost Writer (On DVD and Blu-ray)
The Good, The Bad, The Weird (On DVD and Blu-ray; also Netflix Instant)
Greenberg (On DVD and Blu-ray)
I Love You Phillip Morris
Inception (On DVD and Blu-ray)
The King’s Speech
Let Me In
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (On DVD; also Netflix Instant)
Never Let Me Go
Rabbit Hole
Red Hill
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (On DVD and Blu-ray)
Shutter Island (On DVD and Blu-ray; also Netflix Instant)
Solitary Man (On DVD and Blu-ray; also Netflix Instant)
Somewhere
The Town (On DVD and Blu-ray)
-10s (Stinkers): Sticking to my vow to avoid obvious traps I missed, say, Little Fockers and The Last Airbender, but got unlucky and fell into Alice in Wonderland, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Looking for work, Shia?
And now…drumroll please…
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10. Unstoppable. Meat-and-potatoes action films are rare these days; from director Tony Scott and Denzel Washington, rarer still. With those two on their best behavior and a straight-up script I was on the edge of my seat: Just how were they going to stop that train? There’s always room on a Top Ten list for a movie like this.
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9. Splice. A brainy, irreverent mash-up of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that draws from what’s come before while adding a fractured family dynamic to the gene pool. (On DVD and Blu-ray)
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8. Please Give. Is Nicole Holofcener a filmmaker or an excavator? She certainly has a gift for burrowing into the nooks and crannies of our seemingly well-ordered lives. (On DVD and Blu-ray)
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7. The Tillman Story. “By all rights The Tillman Story should be depressing as hell…yet it’s also inspiring.”
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6. The Kids Are All Right. “The two actresses are as wonderful as they look, and form a tight, thick and thin bond with the younger performers. No issues, save for thorny, universal matters of the human heart.” (On DVD and Blu-ray)
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5. Carlos. Olivier Assayas’ speculative dissection of the infamous terrorist (a legend in his own mind as much as anything else, as played in a transformative performance by Á‰dgar RamÁrez) is available on demand in a shortened form, but it’s worth waiting for the whole presentation to show up on DVD, I trust within the year. Its three parts streak by, burning a hole through history.
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4. A Prophet. “Completely, nerve-janglingly immersive, and a deserved winner of the Cannes Grand Prix and recipient of an Oscar nomination.” (On DVD and Blu-ray; also Netflix Instant)
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3. Toy Story 3. “The movie that saved summer is one of the year’s best.” (On DVD and Blu-ray)
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2. The Fighter. “Terrifically entertaining, it provides uplift on its own gritty, foul-mouthed, R-rated terms.”
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1. The Social Network. “Whether Mark Zuckerberg invents a way for us to beam messages into each other’s brains, or the Tea Party attains power and confiscates our computers as tools of Satan, The Social Network will endure as an encapsulation of our era.” (On DVD and Blu-ray)
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