The Heat Vision Top 10 of 2010

How To Train Your Dragon

2010 is about to close but before it slips out the door, Heat Vision presents it’s Top 10 Movies of the Year.

These lists are always tricky -- mood and expectations can be factors -- and one movie can be up on a rank by a sliver. Two months from now, or a year from now, would they be in a different order? You never know.

But for now, on this second last day of December 2010, here is the Heat Vision 10:

1) How To Train Your Dragon: Eminently rewatchable, this tale of a boy and his dragon has it all. It hits all the right notes for the relationships of the characters, be it Hiccup and his father or Hiccup and his dragon, which makes the story emotional. The flying sequences soar; you feel like you’re riding a dragon alongside the characters. And the action, especially during the “attack on the Death Star”-inspired climax, kicks ash.

2) The King’s Speech: Who knew that speech therapy could be so dramatic? Colin Firth excels as the future King George VI as does his supporting cast. A period drama for those that hate period dramas.

3) The Social Network: No other movie feels like its tapped into now. But it’s also just a great story about friendship gone bad, how you can have it all and still have nothing. It’s one of director’s David Fincher’s best and we can all stop worrying about Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man.

4) Toy Story 3: The double-whammy ending is what makes this film exceptional. Very few movies, live-action or animated, make their characters stare so bleakly, so heroically, so devastatingly in the face of death like this one does as the trash furnace sequence. And then the hand-off of the toys to a new owner? Niagara Falls.

5) Inception: The $200-million art movie that dreams its an action movie. The Christopher Nolan mind-bender is stunningly constructed, from the story to the design, and is more than matched by its able -- and in this awards season so far -- underrated cast.

6) The Fighter: Not only does this show that the boxing genre still has plenty of fight left in it, the movie single-handedly redeems David O. Russell’s promise as a director.

7) The Town: Ben Affleck’s work as a director for Gone Baby Gone was no fluke and his crime movie proudly continues the Warner Bros. tradition of crime movies and big name casts. 

8) Scott Pilgrim vs the World: A movie that manages to capture the essence and be faithful to the graphic novels it’s adapting yet be so attuned to the art and spirit of its director, Edgar Wright.

9) Let Me In: The remake of the Swedish horror movie that stands (almost) equally to its originator. Hollywood made a good character-based vampire horror movie and no one went to see it because it didn’t compromise, keeping its characters children instead of turning them into hunky teens.

10) Monsters: An interesting take on the alien invasion genre, focusing on two people crossing a zone infected by giant, tentacled lifeforms in Mexico.

Happy New Year!