This year, I’ve been lucky to have made some good picks from my perspective, to varying degrees of quality. What I have not reviewed on the site’s Movies section or on my blog, I have not considered worthy of comment, and I see more movies than I write about. As usual, the 2010 pictures I like tend to be more serious, romantic, and often sentimental, some say too sentimental. The older I get, and the more I see and experience, the less tolerant I am of pointless blood, guts, and violence on screen, as I think there’s too much purposeless bloodshed in real life, such as the sacrifices of our troops in the unending, non-war against jihad Islam, which people choose to forget, ignore or evade.
The better movies in 2010 include Alejandro Amenabar‘s agnostic drama Agora, which I found disturbing; Tim Burton’s surprisingly engaging Alice in Wonderland in 3D; Secretariat, which I found exhilarating in its enthusiasm for winning in contrast to The Social Network; the rousing Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe; Mao’s Last Dancer; Queen Latifah’s flawed but charming Just Wright; Disney’s animated Tangled, which is botched but a wonder in the second half; The Tillman Story; The Wolfman (a thriller with Anthony Hopkins); the predictable but endearing Letters to Juliet; Tyler Perry’s bold undertaking for Lionsgate, For Colored Girls; and, in the take-it-for-what-it-is category, Green Zone, Sex and the City 2, not nearly as awful as critics made it sound, The Last Song with Miley Cyrus, the sentimental Valentine’s Day, and Burlesque. Movies to skip: Hereafter, When in Rome, Little Fockers, Yogi Bear, It’s Complicated, How Do You Know, Dear John, and The Runaways.
Based on what I’ve seen, the best movie of 2010 is a toss-up; either the animated happy ending to childhood Toy Story 3, or the insightful The King’s Speech, an enjoyable psychological study of how a man becomes a king and how a king becomes a man.