The Best Films of 2010

1. The Social Network (David Fincher)

"How does it feel to be

One of the beautiful people?"

David Fincher's The Social Network is the best film of the year. Although the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate who created the website Facebook and subsequently became the youngest billionaire in the world, doesn't sound like material worthy of comparison to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), the comparison is more than justified. Fincher's astounding direction, Aaron Sorkin's brilliant and dense screenplay and the performances - particularly from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg - are all first-rate. The film brilliantly illustrates both Zuckerberg's apathy toward the Harvard social elite and his desire to somehow be a part of their social network - and in the process, the movie, with its kinetic energy and obsessive characters (one of the film's many resemblances to Fincher's finest film, 2007's Zodiac), chronicles the rise of the smartest man in the room and his ascension to power.

In the end, however, The Social Network is astonishingly powerful not simply because it brilliantly illustrates the twenty-first century rise of brains over brawn, but because it gives us a portrait of a talented young man who, despite having taken the entire social experience of college and put it online, will always remain on the outside looking in, strangely alienated from both the real, physical world (the college parties, normal relationships with other human beings) and the virtual world of his own creation. And it is in this way that we understand and empathize with Mark Zuckerberg. Because, by the end of the film, he's still reaching out for that one thing more unattainable than money, social status or five-hundred million online friends - his own personal Rosebud.

2. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)

Blue Valentine is a film that tore my heart into pieces. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance worked for years to get this gritty, Cassavetes-inspired relationship drama made, and his passion for the project is evident in every frame.

Ryan Gosling, who gives the most fearless, heartbreaking performance of any actor this year, and Michelle Williams, who is equally incredible, play a young married couple whose once-thrilling relationship is now slowly disintegrating. And while certainly both characters have their virtues and faults, I must admit that I haven't connected so strongly or felt so deeply for a character in many years as I did with Gosling's Dean, a genuinely decent young man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Blue Valentine resonated strongly with me, and I have a feeling it's because I saw a lot of myself in Dean (there's one scene near the end, in particular, that frustrated me endlessly, as Dean visits his wife at work and is considered 'a threat' by her co-workers). Blue Valentine is the sort of film that feels ripped straight from personal experience - it's as raw and honest a portrait of young love as I've ever seen, and it's a tragedy that will resonate with anyone who has ever been where this film takes us.

3. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is a fascinating character drama, an exciting and almost experimental exploration of the human mind, a reinvention of the horror genre and a dynamic acting showcase for its star, the incredible and still very underrated Leonardo DiCaprio. Shutter Island is also an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated man haunted by his past. Add Teddy Daniels to the list of Scorsese’s tragic and multilayered antiheroes – Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Howard Hughes, Billy Costigan, Rupert Pupkin, Jesus Christ. The film also continues Scorsese's fascination with our understanding of violence (it should be noted that our perception of the lead character's violent actions changes dramatically when watching the film for a second time).

Shutter Island is eerie from the very beginning. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) steadily approach an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Hovering over every scene is a paranoid, post-war anxiety shared explicitly by our protagonist and thoroughly felt and realized by Scorsese. Tensions rise as Teddy recalls horrific memories from liberating a concentration camp during the war, and his suspicions of Nazism and conspiracy by the House of Un-American Activities on the island become our suspicions. The best Scorsese films force the audience to live inside the minds of moderately-to-severely delusional characters weighed down by an enormous and overwhelming guilt. Shutter Island does just that. DiCaprio’s performance is superlative and even more layered than one initially realizes. With this performance, I think it’s safe to say that DiCaprio is the best actor of his generation.

The film is a brilliant melding of film noir, detective mystery and psychological horror, at its very core an exploration of an emotionally disturbed human psyche, disguised as a Hitchcockian thriller that works as both a homage to Scorsese’s favorite psychological thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s while simultaneously elevating itself into something larger and more complicated. When you watch Shutter Island, you're not just watching Scorsese's film – you're watching thousands of classic movies at once, assembled together in a picture conceived by a filmmaker whose encyclopedic knowledge of film history pours into every detail of every frame, so much so that an already-genuinely suspenseful scene of DiCaprio racing up a flight of winding stairs simultaneously serves as a homage to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). The ranking of Shutter Island behind The Social Network and Blue Valentine is arbitrary - in a year of great films, these three are the best.

4. The Fighter (David O. Russell)

The Fighter is one of the rare films that gives me hope that the gritty, character-driven dramas of the 1970s are not completely dead. Four terrific actors – Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo – are given powerful material and, with David O. Russell behind the camera, they are allowed to dynamically explore some intense and raw relationships in a boxing drama that wisely aims for the realism of Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) rather than the hokiness of the Rocky films. Bale gives the male performance of the year, in a brilliant, Method-driven portrayal that ranks alongside the best work of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. In fact, The Fighter is the kind of project that would have attracted the talents of De Niro and Pacino years ago. Unsurprisingly, it took Wahlberg five years to get the movie made in the current Hollywood climate.

There’s a scene between Bale and Leo where, in the midst of a tense confrontation, Bale starts singing The Bee Gees' I Started A Joke, and, slowly, leads Leo into singing along with him. It's the sort of uncomfortably honest scene that you don't see in movies anymore. The Fighter undoubtedly features the best ensemble cast of the year.

5. Biutiful (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)

The films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu have regularly appeared near the top of my past ten-best lists. 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) were two of the decade's most powerful films, and in those films, Inarritu directed Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi in some of their finest performances to date. His latest film, Biutiful, stars Javier Bardem, whose performance is head and shoulders above every other male performance this year, with the exception of Ryan Gosling's work in Blue Valentine and Christian Bale's work in The Fighter. If every Academy member went out and saw this extraordinary film, Bardem would almost certainly win the Best Actor Oscar - he is astonishing. With Biutiful, both Bardem and Inarritu are doing the best work of their already impeccable careers.

6. True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Time just gets away from us.”

There's a moving and unexpectedly emotional resonance in True Grit that I didn't experience fully the first time I saw the film. Joel and Ethan Coen, the most consistently excellent of all American filmmakers, have made a western that stands in brilliant contrast to their nihilistic and grim masterpiece No Country for Old Men. If the latter film captured the disillusionment and brutality of the new West, then True Grit surely captures the heart and the sadness of the old West. Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon give three of the year's best performances, and the screenplay is as dryly hilarious and strangely poetic as the finest of the Coen's works. With the moving hymn Leaning On The Everlasting Arms by Iris DeMent closing the picture, Joel and Ethan Coen offer a softer but no less profound meditation on spirituality than their masterpiece from last year, A Serious Man.

7. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

I suspect the reason I love Darren Aronofsky so much is because, as Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly pointed out, his films remind me of the early work of Martin Scorsese. Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), the best film of that respective year, had a sort of gritty realism that recalled Mean Streets (1973). With Black Swan, Aronofsky once again calls upon an actor to go above and beyond the call of duty, and, just as Mickey Rourke bled for his artful performance in The Wrestler, so does Natalie Portman bleed and suffer here, in a role that should unquestionably win Portman the Best Actress Academy Award. The entire film is disturbingly visceral and haunting, and the supporting cast - particularly Barbara Hershey as a frighteningly possessive mother - is phenomenal. It's the best movie I've ever seen about performance anxiety. In a year of films dealing with psychological trauma, Black Swan may very well remain the finest.

8. Inception (Christopher Nolan)

This breathtakingly original and fascinating film is not a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie or the latest installment in a film franchise. Nolan, who brought gravitas to superhero films with 2005’s Batman Begins and especially 2008’s The Dark Knight, is one of very few commercial American filmmakers taking risks and exploring new territory with his films, and Inception may represent his finest accomplishment yet. The film is a complex and thrilling heist movie, a tragic romance, an exploration of the human psyche and Nolan’s own, seemingly personal commentary on what separates our dreams from our reality. As far as science-fiction thrillers are concerned, Inception is the best of its kind since Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).

Leonardo DiCaprio, further cementing his status as the best actor of his generation, is Cobb, a ‘dream thief’ who specializes in extracting ideas from people’s minds while they are asleep. What distinguishes Inception from nearly every other big-budgeted action picture in recent memory (particularly James Cameron’s Avatar, which seems less impressive with each passing day) is the film’s sheer originality in concept and execution, and, most importantly, Nolan’s use of a dynamic ensemble of actors, including Marion Cotillard’s deeply felt and powerful performance as Mal, Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s sly and ingeniously underplayed point man Arthur, and Cillian Murphy’s troubled tycoon Fischer, a character so compelling that he deserves his own film. When was the last time a science-fiction action picture broke your heart and engaged your brain simultaneously? With Inception, Nolan has set the bar extremely high for summer entertainment.

9. 127 Hours (Danny Boyle)

Danny Boyle's extraordinary 127 Hours is, quite simply, the most intense and gripping theatrical experience I've had in years. And yet the movie is also one of the most uplifting, life-affirming and joyous odes to the human spirit that I've seen since Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle and his star, current Tisch School of the Arts student James Franco, have taken fascinating true-life material and elevated it to great art. This is masterful filmmaking and features a lead performance from Franco that will be talked about for years to come.

10. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

The Ghost Writer is one of the year's great surprises - a thrilling, shocking mystery that represents Roman Polanski's finest work in years. This film opened on the same weekend in New York City as Shutter Island, and it was amazing to sit back and watch as two legendary filmmakers, Scorsese and Polanski, showed their younger peers how to direct deliberately-paced and shocking thrillers. As grim as Chinatown (1974) and every bit as entertaining, The Ghost Writer is the sort of movie that would have made Alfred Hitchcock very proud. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson give fantastic performances.

There were more than ten excellent films this year, however. Here are fifty-one movies that deserve some recognition. Following the list, I've posted some personal awards.

1. The Social Network

2. Blue Valentine

3. Shutter Island

4. The Fighter

5. Biutiful

6. True Grit

7. Black Swan

8. Inception

9. 127 Hours

10. The Ghost Writer

11. Another Year

12. Hereafter

13. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

14. Greenberg

15. Animal Kingdom

16. The Town

17. Life During Wartime

18. The Kids Are All Right

19. Somewhere

20. Fair Game

21. I Love You Philip Morris

22. Rabbit Hole

23. Barney's Version

24. Solitary Man

25. Let Me In

26. Get Low

27. Never Let Me Go

28. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

29. Toy Story 3

30. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

31. The American

32. Inside Job

33. A Letter to Elia

34. Please Give

35. Cyrus

36. The King's Speech

37. Enter the Void

38. Winter’s Bone

39. Casino Jack

40. City Island

41. Stone

42. Leaves of Grass

43. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

44. Mother and Child

45. Green Zone

46. Farewell

47. I Am Love

48. The Killer Inside Me

49. Exit Through the Gift Shop

50. The Other Guys

51. Love and Other Drugs

52. Ondine

53. Harry Brown

54. Machete

Best Picture: The Social Network

Runner-Up: Blue Valentine and Shutter Island

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island

Runner-Up: David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Actor: Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine and Javier Bardem, Biutiful

Runner-Up: Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island

Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Runner-Up: Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine and Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter

Runner-Up: Matt Damon, True Grit

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Runner-Up: Amy Adams, The Fighter and Lesley Manville, Another Year

Best Original Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Inception

Runner-Up: Blue Valentine and Black Swan

Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Runner-Up: Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit

Awake Again, I Can't Pretend, And I Know I'm Alone... And Close To The End

On Friday, October 22nd, I had the opportunity to perform in the Off-Broadway production of my friend Rachel Lewis' play Consciousness at Theatre 80 at Saint Marks Place in New York City. The production was presented by The People's Theatre LAB as part of an all-night show called The People's Fest. In Rachel's play, I played two different characters - Dr. O'Hanlan and Reverend Jonas Haversham, both meaty roles, and I had the chance to perform alongside some incredibly talented actors, many of whom train at the Stella Adler Studio at New York University. As an actor, I was honored and thrilled to perform in this production, particularly considering that the play counted as an Off-Broadway credit. As an added bonus, I also appeared on the poster for The People's Fest, which I have posted to the right (granted, the picture on the poster is from four years ago, when I played Edward Teller in The Red Dragon Players' 2006 production of The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer).

In October, I was also elected to join Tisch New Theatre's Executive Board as an officer. It is an incredible honor to join the officers on this board, including my good friend Alexander Fofonoff. I have been involved with this incredible organization since last year, when Tisch New Theatre produced and performed my original one-act play The Certifiable for their Fall 2009 Staged Reading, and last spring when I first performed in Rachel Lewis' Consciousness for their Spring 2010 Staged Reading. Since on the Executive Board, I have helped organize the Fall 2010 Staged Reading, as well as helped plan a TNT Master Class with musical director Will Van Dyke, the current keyboardist for The Addams Family on Broadway. Shortly after being elected to the Executive Board, my fellow officers and I went to see The New York Neo-Futurists perform Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind at The Kraine Theater, a fascinating piece of performance art that, to quote Backstage, is "like the glory days of Saturday Night Live, only funnier and slightly surreal."

My roommate and good friend Bobb Barito recently had his short film The Pit, which he filmed this past summer, selected for the 7th Annual NYC Downtown Short Film Festival Audience Choice Screenings. He and I attended one of the Audience Choice screenings on Saturday, October 23rd at the Duo Theater on East 4th Street. We were astounded to find that this theater, which features beautiful paintings and artwork, was used by Francis Ford Coppola for the astounding operetta scene from The Godfather Part II (1974), where Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) first sees Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin). Bobb's film was received very well, and I very much hope The Pit is selected as an audience favorite for the festival.

In other news, my Sight and Sound: Film class, taught by the incredible professor Laszlo Santha, is quite simply the best class I've ever taken in my life, college or otherwise. Santha told our class at the beginning of the semester that this was the greatest class of all time, and I should have taken him at his word. After all, in what other class can you write, direct and shoot five of your own movies on 16mm film and crew on at least fifteen other films in one semester? So far this semester, I have written and directed four projects - The Hand Job, a short comedy thriller about a man searching for his severed hand; Relapse, a drama about a recovering alcoholic who falls back into old habits at a birthday party; Proper Behavior For Your Date, a Woody Allen-esque piece on an awkward man's struggle to find love and behave appropriately on dates; and Heart of Gold, a solemn drama about a Midwestern boy who follows a lost love to New York City. Several of my friends have acted in these films, including Bobb Barito, Mike Cheslik, Alex Casper, Jeremy Keller and Lizzie Logan, who I first met two years ago at the University of Southern California's Summer Screenwriting program (she is now a freshman at Columbia University). I'm enormously proud of all four films - particularly the latter two, as they are both rather personal projects.

In addition to working on these films, I have also starred in nine movies in my Sight and Sound class, ranging from slapstick comedy films to serious dramas. This has been an incredible opportunity to work with talented Sight and Sound crews other than my own and also a great opportunity to practice the difficult art of acting for film, which is an entirely different beast than acting for stage. I hope to post many of these movies once the semester has ended and we have turned in our 16mm films to be digitized by the Post-Production Center (although the movies will, quite simply, never look as good or as beautiful as they do when projected on a 16mm projector).

In the past month, there have been some astounding movies released in cinemas, including works from Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, two of my favorite filmmakers. Eastwood's Hereafter is a solemn, heartfelt meditation on the existence of a spiritual life after death. The movie, masterfully written by Peter Morgan, is full of the thoughtfulness that has come to be associated with Eastwood's incredible work as a director. The performances are superb, particularly from Matt Damon, as a retired psychic haunted by his gift, and from newcomers George and Frankie McLaren, as two young brothers in London who are faced with an unspeakable tragedy. Audiences should be so lucky that a master filmmaker like Eastwood is willing to maturely explore this material.

Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, the filmmaker's best work since Match Point (2005), also reckons with death, albeit in a very different way. The picture is funny, yes, but it becomes increasingly devastating as we watch Allen's characters face existential dread, find comfort in ridiculous paranormal spiritualism, destroy their relationships with one another and learn the hard way that, in terms of romantic relationships, the grass will always be greener on the other side. The movie hit me very powerfully, as the best Woody Allen films always have, and its middling critical reception is really bewildering to me. The ensemble cast is so uniformly excellent that it's hard to know where to start (although Anthony Hopkins in particular stands out).

But the best film I've seen since The Social Network is inarguably Danny Boyle's extraordinary 127 Hours, which is, quite simply, the most intense and gripping theatrical experience I've had in years. And yet the movie is also one of the most uplifting, life-affirming and joyous odes to the human spirit that I've seen since Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle and his star, current Tisch School of the Arts student James Franco, have taken fascinating true-life material and elevated it to great art. I have no doubt that 127 Hours will stand as one of my favorite films of the year - it is masterful filmmaking and features a lead performance from Franco that will be talked about for years to come.

There are many other incredible movies that I've seen in the past month, including Doug Liman's Fair Game, an important movie for American audiences to see in order to relive the outrage regarding the Bush administration's handling of ousted CIA agent Valerie Plame, with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as fantastic and compulsively watchable as they've ever been; John Curran's Stone, with Robert De Niro and Edward Norton giving brilliant performances in a daring character-driven drama with no easy answers and no easy resolutions; Charles Ferguson's infuriating and fascinating documentary Inside Job, which relentlessly pursues the cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis; Matt Reeves' Let Me In, the film that Stephen King correctly named the best American horror film of the past twenty years; Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, a beautiful and disturbing drama starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley; and Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here, the 'documentary' about Joaquin Phoenix's descent into madness (the fact that this film is apparently a hoax does not diminish the power and the sadness of Phoenix's performance and downfall in the film).

I am extremely excited to announce that I will be attending The Face of Tisch Gala 2010 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center on Monday, December 6th. This annual Tisch Gala is an event that I have always wanted to attend, and this year the Tisch Dean's Scholars have been invited to attend the ceremony for free, where guests will include Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, James Franco, Whoopi Goldberg and Honorary Chair Martin Scorsese. I am incredibly honored to attend this event with my fellow Dean's Scholars, where I will hopefully meet many of these incredible talents.

On Tuesday, November 2nd, my wonderful and supportive screenwriting professor Selma Thompson hosted a screening of the great documentary Winnebago Man in Third North's Mini Theatre, and following the screening there was a Q&A with the film's producer, Joel Heller. Mr. Heller, Professor Thompson's former student at NYU, now lives and works primarily in Austin, and so it was fascinating to hear him speak about the film and the Austin filmmakers who made the movie. On Friday, November 5th, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Professor Thompson, Mr. Heller and a group of other students in the East Village, where I was able to ask him all about his filmmaking career. The next weekend, I served as Producer and Assistant Director on my friend Aaron Kodz's short film Moneyrollers, which we shot in Coral Tower with a very talented cast and crew (I will also work as a Co-Editor with Aaron on the movie, which is now in post-production).

Until my next post, I'll leave you with the above recently released image from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), one of my ten favorite films of all time.