The New Yorker Top 10 Lists: Denby & Lane

The New Yorker Critics don’t rank their favorite films and don’t even officially list them. But here are the titles they highlight. David Denby does say that The Social Network is the best of the year (“of course”) and asks, “Has there ever been a funnier use of digital technology for sly social commentary?”

• The Social Network — “one of the rare big-studio efforts that ravish the audience with sheer intelligence‚Äîin this case an inexhaustible vivacity of observation, temperament, wit.
• The Ghost Writer — “the niftiest and most beautifully designed thriller of the year.”
• The Fighter
• Company Men
• Toy Story 3
• Please Give
• Winter‚Äôs Bone — “Debra Granik‚Äôs grim but entirely expressive murder mystery” … “the atmosphere is as authentic as rotgut cut with turpentine, and the actors seem to have been planted in the earth.”
• Exit Through the Gift Shop — “seems to be making itself up as it goes along; every time you think you understand what it‚Äôs about, the subject shifts slightly, yet the entire movie hangs together as a devastating commentary on art-world fakery and fashion.”
• Restrepo
• Inside Job — “gathered together the essential facts of the economic breakdown and financial malfeasance into brisk units spiced with devastating interviews.”

Anthony Lane after the cut.

Anthony Lane:

• A Prophet — “Jacques Audiard is light on his feet, and Niels Arestrup, in the role of a Corsican mafia boss, gave a master class in how to keep your calm while all around you are frightened out of their wits.
• The Father of My Children
• Life During Wartime
• Dogtooth — “in which familial horrors and pleasures alike were not just inflicted, but borne, with a bewildering lack of fuss.”
• Toy Story 3
• I Am Love — “showed with fine, Italianate panache how uncontrollable feelings can be held and sustained by an organizing eye.”
• The Social Network — “who would not revel in the irony of a movie about smart-ass kids that was suitable for intelligent grownups? “
• Mother
• Winter‚Äôs Bone — “a confirmation of the moral swamp in which most of the characters dwelt‚Äîwith the noble exception of Jennifer Lawrence‚Äôs Ree?”
• Sweetgrass — “Lucien Castaing-Taylor spends many seasons among shepherds‚Äîthe last of their breed, it transpires‚Äîin the high pastures of Montana. The resulting documentary, despite its subject and its elegiac mood, was the least woolly movie of the year.