It was a terrific year for Hollywood
movies — if I’m unhappy with anything about my final top-10 list, it’s the
absence of non-English-language films. Yes, that’s partly a function of a lack
of moviegoing adventurousness on my part, and I should take the rap for that.
But the foreign-language films I enjoyed the most — The Lives of Others, The
Host, the first section, at least, of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — just didn’t seem
to quite belong in this company. (The much-lauded 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — which I won't see until next week — is a 2008 film for my purposes.)
The films here are also dominated by men. They’re directed
by men (the single documentary is the one woman-directed exception) and they deal with traditionally male concerns — cooking, adventure
travel, police work, drilling for oil, hunting down and killing your
tormentors. You have to go all the way down to number eight to find a movie with a
female character who does more than just play sidekick (unless you count Angie
in Gone Baby Gone, which I don’t), and that doesn’t make me happy. I could have
slipped Day Night Day Night, Margot at the Wedding, Red Road, or even Black Book onto the
list for the sake of gender balance — though none of those boast what you’d call
female role models. (Maybe I could have listed Juno.) You can pretend they’re
there if you like, but they weren’t my favorites.
Again, it was a terrific year for Hollywood
movies. These are the best ones I saw.
