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.