In a way, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never is the best use of 3D technology that I’ve seen all year. If you are a tween girl, what’s the only thing better than Bieber? All together now: Bieber in 3D. And the movie takes full advantage of that fact, having our pint-sized heartthrob pump his fist at the audience, practically shimmy onto our laps, and, in one inspired moment, just stand there, in all his 3D glory, flipping his shiny, shiny hair.

Despite its silly, James Bond-esque title, Never Say Never is actually pretty good: part concert film/part Behind-the-Music-style biopic. In many ways, Bieber was our first true YouTube-era superstar. The film cleverly starts by showing him among other YouTube memes: There’s sneezing panda, there’s scared kitty cat, and there’s a pubescent cutie-patootie singing Chris Brown songs in his bedroom. OMG, indeed.

Turns out that while the talented, clean cut Bieber seems to have been created in a teen idol lab, he was, in fact, raised in Ontario by his single mother and doting grandparents. He received a toy drum when he was 5 or 6...

The margins of Ivan Reitman’s scrappy new romantic comedy—yes, the Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters fame—are populated with a bunch of underground film darlings: There’s Greta Gerwig, queen of the mumblecore movement (and star of last year’s excellent Greenberg), there’s Olivia Thirlby from Juno, there’s Jake Johnson from Paper Heart.

And it occurred to me that if, instead of Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, the leads of this film were, say, Anton Yelchin and Kat Dennings, this whole project might have seemed like some charming, if indulgently overlong indie project.

The script, by Elizabeth Meriweather, has a hip, winking, smart-girl vibe to it. I giggled for example, when our hero Adam (Kutcher) made a “period mix” for his would-be girlfriend Emma (Portman) that included “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “Bleeding Love,” and “I’ve Got the World on a String.” And I laughed even harder when Emma’s best friend and fellow medical intern Patrice (Greta Gerwig), also on her period, moaned, “It’s like a crime scene in my pants!” (Okay, not exactly highbrow...

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....