5. Tiny Furniture

I usually hate children of privilege who get everything they want (indie fame, professional mentorship by powerful showbiz admirers like Judd Apatow, etc.) while most struggling young filmmakers are paying their dues in the data-entry and food-service industries. So consider it high praise when I say recent college grad Lena Dunham is the real deal, a distinctive comic auteur fully deserving of her opportunities and accolades. Furniture finds a distaff Graduate named Aura (Dunham) returning home from a Midwestern liberal-arts college to grapple with twentysomething alienation in the condo/studio of her cuter, more ambitious sister and their successful artsy mother (played by the filmmaker's actual kinfolk, Grace Dunham and Laurie Simmons, respectively). In most such films, a schlubby guy comes of age through the unlikely ministrations of a conveniently available (and way too beautiful) dream girl, but the gender roles in Tiny Furniture are swapped, while expectations and genre clichés are constantly upended by the clever script and crackerjack ensemble cast (including the sensational Jemima Kirke who — like Dunham — I hope to see a lot more of in the future). (AO)

4. Toy Story 3

I didn't need the 3D glasses — seriously, Hollywood, I really, really didn't need them — to fully immerse myself in the final cinematic adventure of Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the beloved who's who (or maybe what's what?) of toys from distant childhood memories and fifteen years of Pixar's flagship franchise. I am neither joking nor stoned when I say the climactic scene of TS3's desperate characters joining tiny plastic hands in the face of oblivion was far more harrowing (and life-affirming) to me than James Franco's character chopping off his flesh-and-blood hand in 127 Hours. It's more than just a "kids'" film — I'm guessing this animated masterpiece (yes, I said it) will resonate with its target audience well into adulthood as they eventually face the bittersweet nostalgia of putting aside their own childish things. (AO)

3. Inception

In my circle, there were no mild reactions to Inception. My wife and in-laws flat-out hated the endless gun fights, droning sonic-boom soundtrack, and twisted Comic Book Guy logic of the film's insanely overcomplicated plot. But, while I'll admit the Act Three assault on Ice Station Zebra dragged a bit, writer/director Christopher Nolan nevertheless managed the increasingly rare feat of successfully keeping a brainy, (relatively) original idea intact through the meat grinder of Hollywood's cinema-industrial complex. In an era of slick but instantly forgettable assembly-line "blockbusters," Inception's inventive chronology, fight choreography, offbeat cast, and spinning-top fade-out made it one 2010 celluloid dream that didn't fade as soon as the lights came up. (AO)

2. The Social Network

We all had a good laugh about "the Facebook movie" before it came out, but the joke was on everyone who thought the creation of the all-consuming social-networking site would never make for compelling cinema. Success is the best revenge, at least in Aaron Sorkin's incisive script — a piercing ode to Harvard hubris that becomes, in the capable hands of David Fincher, a bracing comedy of ill manners. Without ever straining for the significance of being A Movie For Our Times, The Social Network achieves that status anyway — and Jesse Eisenberg need never worry about being described as "the other Michael Cera" again. (SVD)

1. True Grit

It's easy to see what attracted the Coen Brothers to the 1968 Charles Portis novel True Grit, despite the fact that a popular adaptation starring an American icon has already existed for more than four decades. Of all the movie genres the Coens have dabbled in over the years, they had yet to tackle a western, and Portis's idiosyncratic dialogue and offbeat characters out of the old, weird America are right in the brothers' wheelhouse. With longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins, they transform the sun-baked plains and snowy woods of the nineteenth-century frontier into some of the most striking visuals of the year, and in another stellar late-career performance, Jeff Bridges makes Rooster Cogburn his own — a shambling, drunken force of nature who also happens to be, like the movie surrounding him, funny as hell. (SVD)