Best films of 2010

I think the best film I saw in 2010 was Poetry, made by Lee Chang-dong of South Korea.

The still shows the lead actress, Jeong-hie Yun, who made the film after sixteen years of retirement, and the director, Lee Chang-dong. Her performance was outstanding. Lee Chang-dong has now made five films as screenwriter/director and he has won several international awards. I don't doubt that he now has a place with the best directors in the world.

This film's strengths were its deeply moving poetic quality, avoiding the drama at its heart like a dramatic elephant in the room, until the very end, when all the themes converge. Other very good films for me were:

• Of Gods And Men, a story of monks bravely staying put in a place of political instability. This film has sublime casting, perfect acting and striking cinematography.

• A Single Man, Tom Ford's first film. An adaption of a Christopher Isherwood story. The most moving romance I can remember seeing on film.

• Chongqing Blues, a story about a returning seaman trying to discover the circumstances of his son's death, and raking through the gravel of Chinese society in the process. An understated and beautifully filmed and acted Chinese film, revealing much about contemporary Chinese society.

• How I Ended This Summer, A Russian film set in a remote arctic meteorological monitoring station. It was named Best Film at the London Film Festival. This is a strong drama with very powerful acting in a remote and stunning location

• Up In The Air, a George Clooney vehicle made by Jason Reitman. While being entertaining this film has an elegant and complex screenplay that resonates with many meanings.

Honourable mentions should go to I Am Love a bold and back-to-basics melodrama, with the 'melo' provided by John Adams, The Secret In Their Eyes - a fresh drama extended over lives and time, Shutter Island - outrageously entertaining hokum, The Maid - a Spanish drama in which not much happens very dramatically, Gainsbourg - a very imaginative realisation of Serge Gainsbourg's life with excellent casting,  Mother, a film from South Korea, Certified Copy, Kiarostami's first film made outside of Iran, 3 Seasons In Hell, a Czech film about events in Czechoslovakia in the period between 1947 and 1949, seen from the point of view of a rebellious poet, Leaving, a story of blind lust and passion, Manila Skies, a film from the Philippines showing a man being dragged down by the difficulty of life in Manila and finally acting desparately and The Illusionist, a very moving animated film based on a screenplay by Jacques Tati. On a different day I might have put any of these films into my top list.

I also saw many very good old films, including The Leopard, Pandora And The Flying Dutchman, Ozu's Tokyo Story and Late Spring, Metropolis, Went The Day Well, Sammy Going South, The Shop Around The Corner and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners And I.

My top cinema event of 2010 was - well, there were two! At the Chichester Film Festival I saw Tony Palmer present his South Bank Show film about the Wagner family. This film will be released on DVD in 2011 in a feature-length version. Palmer has become knowledgeable about Wagner as he also made a film about him starring Richard Burton. In support of the South Bank Show film he showed a filmed dramatized biopic of Wagner made in 1913! The film is 90 minutes long and only two prints remain. Wagner in the film is played by an Italian comedian who looks strangely like Wagner. Palmer sat at the front with a microphone and talked the audience through the film - a very special experience!

But this was capped a couple of days later when Palmer presented his film Bird On A Wire, a film Palmer made about Leonard Cohen in 1972 and which then became lost. Recently the audio master tapes were found along with editing fragments of film, and Palmer has reconstructed the film from memory using 3000 fragments. This is a significant document about an important artist in his prime and it has extremely moving moments. Palmer believes that many of the takes of Cohen's songs are better than the takes on the albums that made him famous. Palmer showed the film and talked about it for a hour. I am very pleased to have the DVD.

The most moving films were Poetry, Of Gods And Men, and A Single Man.
The most interesting films were Chongqing Blues and How I Ended This Summer
The most entertaining and enjoyable were Shutter Island, Up In The Air, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and Gainsbourg.
Best non-fiction was Bird on a Wire followed by John Pilger's The War You Don't See. A film about embedded journalists and how the media collude in government lies and deception and pass on to us the propaganda.
Notable acting: Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, Kristin Scott Thomas in Leaving,  Jeong-hie Yun in Poetry, Grigory Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis in How I Ended This Summer and all the monks in Of Gods And Men.
Best film music: Shutter Island, I Am Love

If I could take a DVD of just one of these films to a desert island it would be Bird On A Wire

Disappointments were:

• Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, a very fine-looking film that says very little about someone who's not very interesting, I was bored. Maybe I'm not as taken by pole-dancers as I should be.
• Inception, a film targeted at a demographic with far more taste for hackneyed and cliched shoot-em-up scenes than I have, all overlain with impenetrable and tedious mysticism
• The Social Network, a not-bad Friday evening flick, but unworthy of the attention it has received in best-film lists. It has very good cinematography and looked very good up on the screen, but the drama lost its way.

Films I still haven't managed to see are The Arbor and Police, Adjective.

The film I'm really looking forward to seeing next year is Biutiful.