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Kim Hollis: With the Calvins and the Academy Awards in the books, let's wrap up 2010 cinema. What will be your lasting opinions of the year in movies?

Josh Spiegel: There were a lot of great films this year, no matter how much I may grouse about this year's Best Picture winner. And, honestly, as has been pointed out here and elsewhere online, The King's Speech is not a bad movie; the hype surrounding it drove my opinion of the film down. But we had Black Swan, True Grit, The Social Network, Inception, Toy Story 3, and many more great films, big and small. I hope we get just as lucky in this calendar year, Oscars be damned.

Max Braden: There were decent dramas this year, but this year in particular my favorite movies were the comedies. Easy A tops my list and I got a lot of entertainment from She's Out of My League, The Other Guys, Scott Pilgrim, and I Love You Phillip Morris. Even True Grit was as funny as it was dramatic. The other standout for me was the creativity of Inception. Even if it was Byzantine in execution, it still demonstrated that not every action flick needs to follow the same old Hollywood formulas, and there's room for thinking outside the mainstream while still grabbing mainstream audiences.

Brett Beach: Having a newborn in 2010 led to seeing almost nil in the theaters (and catching up with scores of older movies, previously seen and unseen, both for my column and for pleasure), but there were a handful of moments worth shouting about.

1) Seeing Babies in the theater with my girlfriend and said newborn (then four months old) on Mother's Day. What could have been as boring as watching someone else's home movies was funny and moving. Although I guess the true test would be if someone who hates babies actually enjoys it.

2) The Michael Cera bi-fecta of Youth in Revolt and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Combined, those two films provided me with more entertainment and giddy moviegoing magic than just about anything else in sight.





3) For all of its praise, awards, and box office, I think the waters of time will need to wash over The Social Network before it becomes apparent what David Fincher accomplished. A lot of the criticism against it pegs it as a "made for TV movie" (ouch! but still, is that like a Lifetime movie or a SyFy movie or an HBO movie?) simply because Fincher isn't employing a "look ma, no hands" bag of flashy camera tricks in this one. (If you didn't know there was only one Armie Hammer, this may be especially true). From the opening scene, I was hooked. Thinking back to songs such as The Heart's Filthy Lesson, Love Plus One,and Closer (in Seven) Hurdy Gurdy Man (in Zodiac), and scores by Trent Reznor (TSN) and The Dust Brothers (Fight Club), I would argue he uses lyrical songs and instrumental songs as well as, say, Wes Anderson.

I can't provide an overall summation since I don't feel I have seen enough yet to do so, but as I stated in last week's MMQB, I could care less about 80% of the major studios' already pencilled in schedule for this year, so in retrospect, I think 2010 will look better and better.

David Mumpower: Overall, I consider 2010 to be an unusually good roster of movies. A lot of the releases were ones I enjoyed watching rather than slogged through for BOP. That hasn't always been the case over the past decade. 2010 largely avoided clunkers, meaning that better decisions were made in the planning phase by studios and sets were run better than normal. There was not that one title that absolutely blew me away, but the overriding depth of solid films overcomes that minor annoyance. We also followed the 2009 trend of tremendous animation titles. Truly, this is a golden age for family films.

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