Marshall Fine makes a list of the year‚Äôs “10-best unseen or unacknowledged films ‚Äì think of it as the downer-dozen-minus-two.” Movies he considers either under-appreciated, under-attended or both.
- Greenberg
- Somewhere
- The American
- Biutiful
- Winter’s Bone
- Blue Valentine
- Another Year
- Mother
- A Prophet
- Tiny Furniture
Fine reminds us that this “is NOT a 10-best list.”
Rather, it’s my list of the best movies of 2010 that you probably didn’t see, didn’t want to see or didn’t know about. But they were all movies that challenged the viewer in one way or another. Which is why, for the most part, they went (or will go) unseen.
Yes, I know: To the average person, movies are about escapism. People buy tickets to movies to take themselves out of their everyday lives and plunge them into someone else’s. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the gross-out hilarity of “The Hangover” or the sci-fi trippiness of “Inception” and “Avatar” or the superhero antics of “Iron Man” and all the other comic-book movies (a genre that threatens to run away with the movie industry).
The point is that, generally speaking, the mass audience of people doesn’t want movies that force them to think. People want movies that make thinking superfluous, that do the thinking for them, that tell them what to think and feel.