A pretty good year for Hollywood...

To my thinking, 2010 was a pretty good year for the movies.  We could be in for a pretty good Academy Awards, too, since some of this year's noteworthy flicks (True Grit, The Black Swan, The Social Network, The Kids Are Alright, Inception etc.) did pretty well at the box office.

Metacritic aggregated a bunch of critic's top ten lists and came up with this:

1	The Social Network
2	Winter’s Bone
3	Black Swan
4(tie)	Inception
	Toy Story 3
6	The Ghost Writer
7	The Kids Are All Right
8	The King’s Speech
9	Carlos (released on TV first, thus ineligible for statues)
10	127 Hours

I'll put out my own list after a few more visits to the megaplex, but  a few thoughts for now:

• It's remarkable how many good movies didn't make this list: True Grit, Howl, The Green Zone, Greenberg, Get Low and plenty more.  I'm not saying all of these were better than those listed, but there were plenty of opportunities to catch a flick and not leave disappointed.
• This was also a good year for popcorn flicks: the A-Team remake was a blast, as were The Expendables and Iron Man 2.  I've heard great things about The Town and Red from several people.  Get Him to the Greek was pretty funny.  Consensus seems to be that the Wall Street sequel was better than expected. Unstoppable wasn't earth-shattering but it was better than it had to be.  I look forward to seeing The American.
•  Two documentaries were widely-released and well-regarded: Client #9 and Inside Job.  Haven't seen either yet, but trailers for both look interesting.

 *Footnote:  I'm mostly talking about commercial cinema, but I want to recommend Sweetgrass, which is the best documentary I've seen in a long time (but be forewarned: it requires a bit more patience than your average doc.)