La fille du RER

2010 in Movies: The Year's Best Movies

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Here’s my list of the best films of 2010: 1)  Winter’s Bone; 2) Toy Story 3;  3) The Social Network; 4) The Secrets in their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos); 5) Rabbit Hole; 6) Black Swan; 7) A Prophet (Un Prophete); 8 ) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; 9) Mademoiselle Chambon; 10) (tie) Ajami and Inception.

(Note:  I’m saving room for some films that I haven’t yet seen, especially Mike Leigh’s Another Year.)

Continuing with my list of 2010’s best films: The Tillman Story, True Grit, The King’s Speech, The Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER), Inside Job, Fish Tank, The Ghost Writer, Carlos, Fair Game, Hereafter, The Fighter, Solitary Man, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Sweetgrass.

You can watch the trailers and see my comments on all these films at Best Movies of 2010.

(Further Note:  The Secrets in their Eyes, A Prophet and Ajami were nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but were widely released in the US in 2010.)

DVD pick of the week: The Girl on the Train

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The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER) is an absorbing mother daughter drama set in the Paris suburbs.

The young woman  is  Emilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress who won the best actress award at Canne when she was only 17 in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta.  In contrast to Rosetta, she doesn’t play a force of nature, but a slacker bobbing through life on a tide of random influences.  She lives with her single mom (Catherine Deneuve), and they get along, despite the mother’s unwelcome tips on job hunting.

The daughter meets a guy, her life takes some resulting turns and then she makes a really bad choice.  The mom seeks out an old beau, now a celebrity attorney to help fix the situation.

I missed seeing this in the theater because the trailer emphasizes a faked hate crime (and I wasn’t eager to see a topical movie).  But the movie is not about the faked hate crime, which occurs late into the story.  The story is character driven.  The daughter drifts first part of the movie and is controlled by events until she finds herself in a desperate situation; she panics and sees the most stupid option as a solution.  The situation then forces the mother to re-open a chapter in her life that she had chosen to close – how far will she open the old door?

It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010 So Far.

See the rest of my DVD recommendations.