2010 seemed, for a while, to be an underachieving year for the movies. Yet when I sat down and started making a list of the films that I really enjoyed this year, I quickly came up with a list that was thirty titles long. And whittling it down to 10 wasn’t as easy as I expected. Hollywood struggled to combine quality with box office in a big way this year, so a look at the movies that were big was looking at a list of disappointments (Alice in Wonderland, for instance) and utterly awful failures (Clash of the Titans, Salt). Sure, there were notable exceptions like Inception and Toy Story 3, but many of the best films of the year weren’t found in wide, or even mid-sized, release. It was the smaller indies, documentaries, and foreign films that were quietly released and had to be sought out that really shone.

With all the museum screenings, and the offerings at the AFI, D.C. is great for retrospectives — but we only have a couple of venues for those smaller new releases. As a result, of the movies in my top 10, one had less than a half-dozen local showings, one screened just once and one never made it to D.C. at all. That’s why this fall’s re-opening of West End Cinema as an art house for titles overlooked even by E Street was such good news for area movie lovers.

In trying to rank those thirty films that made my “short” list (all of which are represented in the poster collage), the main criteria that seemed to surface was the intensity of the reactions produced by the films that worked their way to the top. Films that made me laugh the hardest, smile the widest, think the hardest and clench my fists the tightest muscled their way to the front of the line. The most unsettling of the bunch found their way to the very top. One of my favorite scenes in any movie, ever, is the seemingly endless argument that forms the centerpiece of John Cassavetes’ 1974 A Woman Under the Influence, a scene that is as exhausting and uncomfortable as being in the midst of a tense verbal conflict yourself. Call it a masochistic impulse, but that intensity of discomfort, as filmmakers explore the darker, more uncomfortable corners of the minds of their characters and their audiences, is as deeply rewarding to me as it is arduous.

Given all that, the top three films on my list should come as no surprise, starting with…