Here’s my list of the 10 best films that I saw in 2010, with 10 more runners-up.

1. Social Network- Some complained that the movie wasn’t really about Facebook. But it was actually about something bigger than that: the shift from a social elite—where the privileged Winklevoss brothers of this world would hire and discard its geeky Mark Zuckerbergs—to the true meritocracy of the digital age. The smug, awkward, voluble Zuckerberg (brilliantly inhabited by Jesse Eisenberg) wasn’t the most likeable of heroes, but he was a hero of our times. He made Facebook because he could—and because he was smarter than everyone else around him. The same could be said for this incredible film.

2. The Kids Are All Right- Lisa Cholodenko’s smartly observed, wryly funny, and loveably lived-in portrait of a lesbian couple (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening) disrupted by the unexpected appearance of their children’s’ sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo) features some of the best ensemble acting of the year.

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I just read on Wikipedia (so it must be true!) that TRON—the 1982 sci-fi flick about a computer engineer (Jeff Bridges) who enters his own video game—was inspired by the Atari game Pong. But of course, Pong has about as much to do with today’s video games as a Model T has to do with today’s cars. (If you watch the trailer for the original TRON on YouTube, they treat computers like some sort of ominous futuristic threat to humanity—which, okay, proved accurate, but still).

Yes, this sequel somewhat updates the original’s wide-eyed view of the digital world, but it’s still working with an outmoded mainframe, if you know what I mean.

In TRON: Legacy, Kevin Flynn (played by both an eerie, computer-simulated young Jeff Bridges and the wily old actor himself) has been missing for 20 years. His rebel son Sam (dishy but dull Garrett Hedlund) wanders into the cob-webby arcade where Flynn used to work and gets sucked through a portal into the grid. There, he discovers a world of avatar-like “programs” who engage in old-fashioned video-game-style battles for survival....

Burlesque can’t decide if it wants to be a serious musical, a la Chicago, or a piece of guilty-pleasure trash, a la Showgirls. As such,  it’s stuck in the middle—too cheesy to be good art and not nearly fabulous enough to be good camp. It needed, frankly, more catfights, more glitter, more transvestites! Instead, it’s an earnest story of small-town girl Ali (Christina Aguilera) who lands a waitress job at a burlesque club in Los Angeles, with dreams of being a star. Cher plays the tough (yet tender) owner of the club, who resists Ali at first, but eventually sees that the kid’s got moxie to burn!

Stanley Tucci is on hand, natch, playing Cher’s loyal gay sidekick. And for reasons unknown, Alan Cumming is also in the film, albeit briefly, playing the coat check boy (or somethin’). (My theory: They got their big-get Tucci after they had already cast Cumming and didn’t have the heart to tell him he was no longer in the film.)

Kristen Bell plays a rival performer, but they don’t even bother to make her that nasty. She’s more of a misunderstood bad girl...

There’s been a lot of talk about the scene in 127 Hours where hiker Aron Ralston (James Franco) cuts off his own arm. Some people reportedly passed out at screenings. Others were only able to look at the carnage through clenched fingers. Still others so dreaded the scene, they chose to avoid the film altogether.

What people don’t tell you is that, at that point in the movie, you’re absolutely dying for Aron to cut off his arm. It’s basically either arm evisceration or death. And while the scene is grisly and, yes, hard to watch, it’s also a cause for celebration. In my own mind I was thinking, “Do it! Do it!” as poor Aron dug the (dull) knife into his flesh.

I imagine that director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) never considered not showing Aron do the unthinkable deed. In fact, I’d venture to guess that the whole reason he chose to make the film was because of that scene.

After all, we’d all heard the true story of the hiker who fell into the canyon with his arm pinned under an intractable...