my favorite movies of 2010:

(1) The Trip

(2) Certified Copy

(3) The Social Network

favorite of 2010:

The Trip

(Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Margo Stilley, Ben Stiller. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.)

The Trip is sort of like My Dinner with Andre (my favorite movie of 1981), but British and funnier.

Steve Coogan (the one staring into the camera in that picture) and Rob Brydon play fictionalized versions of themselves on an all-expenses paid tour of restaurants in northern England, where one of them has been assigned to write a travel essay.

The two men have a teasingly competitive friendship and a penchant for doing spontaneous impressions of other entertainers, as in this scene where they argue over who does the better James Bond:

Later, some of the lines from their Bond impressions come back when they riff on the ABBA song “The Winner Takes It All”:

You’ll miss a few references in this movie (not in those clips) unless you’re familiar with Coogan’s signature character, a buffoonish radio- and talk-show host named Alan Partridge who’s better known in the UK than in the US. The movie repeatedly uses his catchphrase: shouting “Aha!!!” Meanwhile, Brydon’s trademark bit is making his voice sound like he’s a “small man trapped in a box.” This isn’t just played up for laughs; Coogan is taking stock of his life in middle age and reflecting on how silly both men’s most famous achievements are.

While it isn’t a conventionally plot-driven movie, The Trip does have a story that’s quietly touching. And watch for a cameo by Ben Stiller. Bottom line: The Trip is one of the best dramedies of this century.

I would never stick the knife in. I might just, like, tickle you with a knife.

UPDATE: I chose The Trip to Spain as one of my favorite movies of 2017, and The Trip to Greece as a favorite of 2020. 

Stream The Trip on Tubi (free with ads), Kanopy or one of these sites.

2nd favorite of 2010:

Certified Copy

[French: Copie Conforme]

(Juliette Binoche, William Shimell. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami.)

Set in Italy but largely in English and French, this movie starts out feeling like Before Sunrise (one of my favorites of 1995): two people meet in a picturesque European city and share their musings about life over the course of a leisurely day. …

But keep watching and you’ll be stunned at what Certified Copy turns into. One review sums it up: “Imagine a cinematic equivalent of a Picasso cubist portrait, but instead of showing multiple perspectives of an object in an image, it presents experiences from different periods in a life in a single narrative.”

Stream Certified Copy on the Criterion Channel (with bonus features), YouTube (free with ads), Pluto (free), Kanopy, or these sites. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.

3rd favorite of 2010:

The Social Network

(Jesse Eisenberg, Armie Hammer, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Rashida Jones. Directed by David Fincher.)

The trailer for this biopic about Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) said: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Today that sounds absurdly small as the total number of Facebook users in the world at the time, and the idea that this movie reveals the dark side of Facebook seems quaint.

You really don’t need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.

Stream The Social Network on Hulu, the Roku Channel (free with ads), or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.