1.  Black Swan.  An elegant and surreal masterwork from Darren Aronofsky about a ballerina who will stop at nothing to reach the top of the New York ballet scene.  This film about madness, artistic rigor, and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake is haunting and voluptuous in equal measure.  The prologue encompasses the film's essence:  the seduction of the Swan Queen by the evil Rothbart deftly balances grace with terror.

     2.  A Prophet.  A fascinating work from Jacques Audiard about a convict who must kill or be killed.  The level of fascination and artistry in this film reminded me of the foreign-language films back in 2001.  The convict foresees a deer crossing right as the unsavory characters who have enlisted him in their scheme run over the deer in slow motion.  This earns him the name "a prophet."

     3.  Never Let Me Go.  Mark Romanek's elegiac adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel about a totalitarian society where some children are raised to have their organs harvested in a series of "donations."  The somber color palette is derived in homage to Lindsay Anderson's boarding school drama if....  The film becomes more bleak, stark, and monochromatic toward the end.  The earthtones of the boarding school and a nearby windswept beach give way to a final act composed of silvery blues and greys.  A narrow hospital corridor is glimpsed with a frail Keira Knightley struggling to walk past.  The film is an emotional tour de force.

     4.  The Social Network is David Fincher's look at a new generation and the phenomenon of social networking sites.  The movie is composed of skilled, exhibitionist stretches of film that examine -- as if under a microscope -- college life, parties, elite final-exam study clubs, web businesses, entrepreneurship, and double-crossing.  The music by Trent Reznor is thrillingly subtle.  The main character, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, winds up being the youngest billionaire in the world.  By the time this information crawls on the screen, this character study has charmed the wits out of you.  The first scene is a master class in writing.

     5.  Inception.  This is an intricate film about dreams that is in love with paradoxes.  One shot to look for is Ellen Page's character falling from a high-rise building and awakening.  Every time a character dies in a dream, they wake up in real life.  Things get more complex as circumstances build and interweave.  A van falls into a river for what seems like forever.  Sets at the beginning are inspired by a Japanese aesthetic.  A city folds in on itself in a puzzling display of cinematic adroitness from filmmaker Christopher Nolan.  The memory of a loved one haunts the Leonardo DiCaprio character and this bittersweet nostalgia gives the film its motif.

     6.  Another Year.  Mike Leigh's portrait of kindred spirits has deep themes and an eye for nuances of character.  A jolly couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) is happy that their young son is settling down with a nice, chirpy young lady.  Sheen's co-worker (Lesley Manville) is a fixture at family functions.  The overzealous co-worker has a drinking problem and copes better with her friends around her.  A funeral leads the film into bleaker emotional waters and Leigh is an accomplished storyteller who captures the gloom surrounding such an event.  "The work by Ruth Sheen, with her lovable overbite, is worthy of Oscar consideration" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). 

     7.  127 Hours is an energetic and triumphant film by Danny Boyle about the struggle of Aron Ralston to survive after being pinned to a Utah canyon wall by a rock.  In this true story, Ralston had to amputate his left arm after much duress.  The film is filled to the brim with joy and sorrow.  James Franco's performance as Ralston is infused with the agony and the ecstasy of the situation.  Dream sequences illustrate what the character would do if he could defeat this dilemma of being caught between a rock and a hard place.

     8.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  The bleak story about a lost girl and the computer hacker and detective who join forces to solve this decades-old mystery.  Stylistically and visually the film resembles The Princess and the Warrior or Run Lola Run, though with a more deliberate pace.  The film's psychological tension reminds one of Bruno Dumont's L'Humanite.

     9.  The Illusionist.  Sylvain Chomet's pungent and whimsical animated homage to Jacques Tati.

     10.  Shutter Island.  Incendiary and passionate work from Martin Scorsese.  A scathing indictment of the way psychiatric institutions were run in the '50s.

     Stay tuned for more reviews to come --  Patrick Kelly

Tags: Film Review