I’m always a little sheepish when I begin the process of surveying the movie year just past. Given my physical placement in the world, I lack the ability to see all of the movies of any given calendar year before the December page is made obsolete at the moment when tradition dictates that Auld Lang Syne is sung. I don’t have the New York or Los Angeles luxury of the movies being rushed to my vicinity to qualify for year-end awards, nor do I have critic credentials sufficient to motivate studios to send me stacks upon stacks of screener copies. So I need to wait until the finest cinematic offerings make their way to my humble little mountain town. Even now, as the second month of the year begins and the ink on the Oscar nomination announcement is dry as a desert, major films haven’t hit my friendly neighborhood movie theater. Even if I had the money and time to be properly complete before weighing in, the nature of the movie business keeps me in the dark (or perhaps, given the low-lit comfort of theaters, out of the dark is more appropriate phrasing) longer than I’d like. I do the best I can, but my viewing efforts are necessarily incomplete. But there’s always a point when I feel compelled to put a cap on a movie-going year, and that time is now.

Luckily, all that moaning and groaning doesn’t mean that I’m compelled to include fare I find mediocre on my personal top ten list. In fact, this year I’m struck by how many movies I feel strongly about don’t make the cut. I’m not sure I’m prepared to make any grand pronouncements about 2010 as a good year for movies on that basis, but it was definitely a year in which I felt especially lucky. Time and again, the movies I saw defied expectations and held abundant rewards. Filmmakers tapped rich reservoirs of creativity. Even films I didn’t especially like often had elements I deeply admired. Some of this springs from my good fortune in being discerning about what I see, but that hasn’t automatically rescued me in the past. I think it’s telling that even the weakest films among the ten in the Best Picture Oscar race are fodder for fascinating discussions.

When I look at the ten I settled on, there are things that united some of them, a shared theme or a similar structure here and there. I don’t especially adhere to the notion that trends can be teased out of movie years anyway, but my group seems to particularly repel those attempts. Without doing so intentionally, I feel like I’ve wound up with a set that exhibits a fair amount of diversity. That seems fitting for a year that surprised me in many ways. So I’ll spend the next few weeks moving from ten to one, and I’ll begin tomorrow, appropriately enough, with one of the films that surprised me the most.