Non-vintage year fizzed up by ... the odd sparkle

The loyal Irish cinema-going public deserves better, reckons Tara Brady

NOT A vintage year by any means, 2010 unfolded almost precisely as our Hollywood overlords dictated. Almost. Reliable tent-pole releases - Sex and the City 2, Iron Man 2- failed to capitalise on previous successes; the 3D boom peaked then tipped toward inevitable decline; Avatar's premature reissue prompted an embarrassed shuffling of feet among the kids who jumped the bandwagon six months earlier.

It hardly mattered: movie-going remains a growth sector. Box office takings in the Republic of Ireland continue to resemble the kind of annual tractor production figures an apparatchik might once have handed to Josef Stalin.

We loved the New Wave of Irish Miserablism: take a bow Ivan Kavanagh and Ken Wardrop. We delighted in the monsters of Mother, Splice, Uncle Boonmeeand, well, Monsters.

We're still not getting enough non-francophone foreign-language titles, anime or documentaries. We're still waiting for Terrence Malick's Tree of Life.

We're still waiting for adequate and legitimate streaming and downloading options; the internet isn't going away, you know, and neither will cinemas.

We flipped for not one, but two Werner Herzog movies. This writer hated that the most impressive films she has seen this year - A Serbian Filmand Black Swan- were ineligible for this poll; the former did not receive a theatrical release; the latter won't hit Irish cinemas until January 28th, 2011. For now we have these 10 to cherish.

Tara Brady's 10 best films 2010

1 Dogtooth

2 Bad Lieutenant

3 A Prophet

4 Winter's Bone

5 The Illusionist

6 Samson and Delilah

7 Ponyo

8 Inception

9 Precious

10 The Arbor