2010 / Darren Aronofsky > The original script for Black Swan played out like a detective story, but Aronofsky is better than that. He didn’t want to approach paranoia driven by perfection in conventional plot techniques, especially after having made his directorial breakthrough on the topic in Pi. What he does here is more contained than his previous efforts, showing a kind of maturation: The first hour of the film works as a set-up (with incidental horror cues that create just the right amount of tension), and then he lets the game loose. The last third of the film builds in an incredible crescendo that culminates in Natalie Portman’s finest performance since Closer. Like Giulietta Masina’s face told a thousand stories at the end of Nights in Cabiria, Portman is able to evoke the motions of a transformation simply by looking into the camera. Overall, it’s a solid, controlled effort hampered by some shallow characterizations (such as Mila Kunis’s character as a cliched foil) that puts an unfair burden of the film’s success on its finale.

2010 / Will Gluck > Easy A is effectively a star vehicle for Emma Stone. She presents herself with just the right aura of the girl next door fantasy without crossing over to blatant Pussycat Girls territory to keep the film in the realm of possibility for the average teenager. But as enjoyable as her performance is, the script constantly tries&#151and fails—to break cliches, then relents to being generic. Still, Stone is the only reason you watch this. Her charisma will carry her far, far away from Superbad.

1966 / Guy Hamilton > It’s hard to believe the follow-up to The Ipcress File had the same cinematographer: The original had carefully constructed camera angles that contributed to the storytelling, but here Otto Heller’s camerawork feels generic and secondary. Also troubling is the change of mood: Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer is still shuffling through the bureaucracy to do his counter-espionage duties but our focuses constantly shift until we realize the plot is a bit too clever for itself. We don’t get attached to any characters, and we don’t really care much when we find out who the bad guys are (especially since the motives feel muddled). Oddly enough, Hamilton made Funeral in Berlin after Goldfinger, which feels problematic because Palmer’s character is closer to Bond here than in the original.

2010 / Harald Zwart > Call it The Karate Kid or as it would have been more aptly titled The Kung Fu Kid, the fact remains that Jaden Smith’s genetically passed-on charm and charisma doesn’t make up for his near-farcical martial arts techniques (especially in comparison to many of the young Chinese actors). But if we can excuse that, the film works as a modern immigration tale: How do young Americans, especially a minority, moving to China come of age? Christopher Murphey’s screenplay has enough twists on genre conventions to justify the remake, though it fails to take advantage of deeper intercultural understanding by simply glossing over most conflicts.

2010 / Noah Baumbach > There’s a surprising amount of humanity packed into Greenberg, though what stuck out for me is the disconnect between generations. How we handle things is different than 20 years ago and will be different 20 years from now. Technology has changed the way we communicate with our neighbours. Youth, adolescence and the potential of the lost twenties vary due to the context of their own eras. It’s not an easy matter to dissect during the length of a feature film, but Baumbach tries to throw the kitchen sink at it. For the most part, his heart is in the right place, but I’d argue that the two leads were a little too polar for it to work efficiently. We’re not dealing with subtlety here, and that makes it feel a bit more pedantic than it needs to be. In contrast, one could argue the lightheartedness of Kicking and Screaming better added to the effectiveness of exploring post-collegiate life than Greenberg’s near-blanket cynicism.

2010 / Todd Solondz > As Solondz’s follow-up to one of the iconic chronicles of a modern dysfunctional American family, Life During Wartime is effective. But it only really works as an addendum to the original: The characters (played by different actors than in Happiness, a technique Solondz first experimented with in Palindromes) are surprisingly two-dimensional without their expository sequences, though there is some satisfaction in seeing the aftermath of it all.