Critics' picks
Clarence Tsui: It's about the craving to connect, the desire to belong, and the unfettered aspiration towards prestige and power; it's about how communication flounders when people 'say two things at once', ending up with nobody being exactly sure what is being talked about. And all this achieved just within a film's opening sequence - which shows how remarkably scathing The Social Network is, as director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin use the emergence of Facebook to reflect on the alienation and narcissism that drives the world today.
Through the story of Mark Zuckerberg's development of the portal and the many devastating relationships which he (or at least this fictional version of him) leaves in his wake, the film is a compelling portrayal of people thriving on code - both digital and social - and how such communication regimes only lead to more disillusion, however many friends and likes a Facebook user has.
Fincher's film is an exploration of the origins of social malaise; so is Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, the second of my three favourite films of 2010. The film looks at how authoritarianism in the home fosters in future generations a tendency to marginalise and persecute those who do not conform to social norms. Set in a small German village before the first world war, The White Ribbon offers a clinical view of how young boys and girls resort to monstrous misdeeds as a result of an oppressive social system; rather than rebelling against the dogma, they react by furthering the twisted nature of the rules, becoming the harbinger of tyrannies to come.
A dictatorial regime is at the centre of Juan Jose Campanella's Secrets in their Eyes, with the Dirty War which blotted 20th-century Argentinean history being the backdrop to a thriller about a man's mission to investigate the truth behind an unresolved murder from the 1970s. Campanella's multi-layered film combines both mainstream entertainment (a police procedural and a romance) with a wider reflection on how a country deals with its obscured memories of a violent past.
And a possible Academy Award nominee for the future: Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions, which tackles an extreme case of teenage delinquency through a variety of perspectives - from the teacher whose daughter is killed by two schoolboys to the young culprits themselves, and then also through the eyes of the mother of one of the boys. And finally we get the point of view of a schoolgirl who wryly sees the events as embodying the anomie of strictly codified and inhuman Japanese society. Nakashima offers a tour de force which is relentless in its critique of social norms.
Paul Fonoroff: Though the year's Chinese-language features continued to lag behind their overseas competitors when it came to box office receipts, Hong Kong cinemas gratifyingly found room for a surprising variety of non-blockbusters from both here and other linguistically related locales. Perhaps only in this city could such a large number of unconventional, lower-budgeted productions from the mainland, Taiwan and, of course, Hong Kong enjoy commercial theatrical releases.
My three favourites of 2010 coincidentally reflect this regional diversity by originating in three disparate Chinese-language filmmaking centres.
Taiwan's Au Revoir Taipei is a small gem, an engaging, understated comedy so skilfully scripted by Chinese-American director Arvin Chen Chun-lin that it successfully navigates the shoals separating 'sweet' from 'saccharine'. The tale of a burgeoning romance between a bookstore employee and an ardent customer studying French in order to reclaim his Paris-based girlfriend, the picture makes vivid use of its nocturnal Taipei milieu to concoct a confection that is simultaneously specific and universal, along with accomplishing the seemingly impossible feat of making the Taiwanese capital nearly as idyllic as its French counterpart.
Zhang Yimou's Under the Hawthorn Tree (above) paints a different portrait of young love. Set during the Cultural Revolution amid a stark northern landscape, the wistful story of zhiqing (educated youths sent to the countryside) reveals a touching sense of humanity, one the director has kept under wraps in recent films and major events such as the Beijing Olympics. Zhang once again shows himself to be a master of emotional nuance as he subtly weaves the era's political realities into an ostensibly simple saga.
The movie also reaffirms the auteur's talent for casting unknowns in lead roles, with newcomers Zhou Dongyu and Shawn Dou Xiao perfectly embodying the star-crossed sweethearts buffeted by factors beyond their control.
Nostalgia of another kind is at the heart of Gallants (left), an homage to 1970s kung fu pictures that manages to concurrently tease and revere the genre with which Hong Kong is most closely identified. Co-directors Derek Kwok Chin-kin and Clement Cheng Sze-kit make a virtue out of their budgetary restraints, utilising locations and techniques that wouldn't be out of place in a decades-old Shaw Brothers adventure and then cleverly filtering these elements through a thoroughly 21st-century sensibility. With its roster of legendary 1970s icons capped by a tour de force by actor/musician Teddy Robin, the cockeyed saga intriguingly presents the city's celluloid past as potential prelude to a quirky cinematic future.
