Arguably more a miniseries than a motion picture (and actually shown that way, both on French TV and the Sundance Channel) director Olivier Assayas’ riveting biopic about legendary ’70s terrorist Ilich Ram

Why am I foregrounding a film that probably won’t make my personal top 20 for the year? Because there’s absolutely no doubt about the craftsmanship at work in David Fincher’s direction and Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, because “The Social Network” is one of those rare Hollywood movies that tries to address the changing nature of society in the present tense, and because it’s a highly intelligent must-see discussion-topic movie that has reached a large audience and is the presumptive Oscar best-picture favorite. I’m on record as believing that “The Social Network” is more a Sorkin rewrite of “The Great Gatsby” than an accurate biopic of Mark Zuckerberg, and also that Sorkin and Fincher are waging a sub-rosa generational war against the Facebook founder. (And for what it’s worth, I belong to the filmmakers’ generation, not Zuckerberg’s.) But whatever reservations you or I or anyone else may have, there’s no slicing away this fact: “The Social Network” is a triumph of American filmmaking, and the most important movie of the year.

Remember those long-ago days, deep in our collective past, when Christopher Nolan’s ornate dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams thriller “Inception” seemed like a world-rocking cultural event? Well, OK, that was just July, but it sure feels like another epoch. People argued about the calibrated physics of Nolan’s interconnected dream universes, discussed whether or not that top in the last shot would ever stop spinning, and authored arcane exegeses, rivaling medieval theology in their metaphysical complexity, about what was really going on. More than one Nolan fan responded to my negative review with an extended essay, pointing out all my errors of fact and interpretation and exuding tremendous confidence that in the fullness of time his peculiar analysis would become accepted dogma. Somehow, since then, “Inception” has become the film world’s answer to the “ground zero mosque”: something we all thought we cared about, for a while, that pretty much evaporated. Partly, “The Social Network” happened (see preceding slide) and partly people realized that “Inception” was just another effects-driven summer action flick, albeit one with a convoluted M.C. Escher premise. Now, Nolan’s got all the money and all the creative freedom he could want. Given the Academy’s promiscuous 10-film best-picture slate, “Inception” will probably receive the Oscar nomination his bigger (and arguably better) Batman flick didn’t get. But it won’t win, or even get serious consideration, and Nolan seems unable to escape his strange, high-level rut: He makes blockbusters and draws millions of viewers, but I can’t avoid the sense that he’s not living up to his own expectations.

In a strong year for female filmmakers and female performances, 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence was the first (and perhaps most unexpected) star, playing Ree, the indomitable teenage heroine of director Debra Granik’s Sopranos-of-the-Ozarks crime drama, which took Sundance by storm last January. As any number of subsequent magazine pictorials revealed, Lawrence is a beautiful young woman, but in “Winter’s Bone” the focus is on Ree’s iron toughness and ferocity as she evades sheriff’s deputies, bail bondsmen and members of her own ultra-scary, meth-cooking extended family. Some viewers have detected a patronizing or exploitative tone in Granik’s depiction of rural white desperation — for the record, I completely disagree — but almost no one could resist Lawrence’s gutsy portrayal of a strong-willed girl who’s thoroughly uncowed by the retrograde and sinister man’s world around her, and whose search for her missing father brings her, suddenly and startlingly, into adulthood.

An overstuffed but enjoyable movie that was partly social satire, partly a comic yarn about the evils of Big Pharma and the Viagra boom, and partly a weeper-of-the-month about early-onset Parkinson’s disease, Ed Zwick’s “Love and Other Drugs” might have fared better with audiences had it focused on its central attribute: Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are really hot separately, really hot together, and spend a lot of time naked. A lot of things about the relationship between motormouth salesdude Jamie (Gyllenhaal) and hard-shelled Parkinson’s patient Maggie (Hathaway) are too obvious: She’s eventually going to bring out the sensitive guy within the jerkass, and he’s going to convince her that life and love are for right now, etc. But just to dredge up another clich

A 57-year-old Belfast native with a long and varied career in film and TV on both sides of the Atlantic, Ciar

“If it were up to you,” Nic (Annette Bening) purrs at her spouse Jules (Julianne Moore) over the dinner table early in Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right,” “our kids would never bother to send out thank-you cards. Just good vibes.” In the first scene of Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine,” Dean (Ryan Gosling) carries his preschool-age daughter (Faith Wladyka) around the land surrounding their trailer home, calling out for the beloved family dog, who has vanished. His wife, Cindy (Michelle Williams), possibly hung over or just exhausted, won’t get out of bed. These two painstakingly and often painfully realistic portraits of American marriage and parenthood — one a lesbian relationship in upper-middle-class Los Angeles, the other a hetero marriage in small-town Pennsylvania — are built from such ordinary details. They depict the near-universal experience of coupledom as a heroic struggle that never has clear heroes or villains, and as a redemptive drama that can just as easily end in pain and destruction. Four of the most extraordinary actors of our time, telling complementary tales of love and loss that rank with the best marriage dramas ever made. It’s a remarkable gift to the rest of us.

As a pair of former Black Panther lovers reconnecting amid the half-ruined social world of 1976 African-American Philadelphia, Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington carry burdens much too heavy for ordinary people to bear. Constrained by big, abstract things like race and American history and by smaller and more specific factors like the guilty secret they share, they collide in a tale of doomed romance that suggests an R&B-flavored remake of “Casablanca.” Mackie’s stylin’ wardrobe was deliberately sized too small, to suggest that this handsome, mysterious dude doesn’t quite fit in the world, while Washington, playing a do-gooder defense attorney, dresses in excessively square, ladylike attire. She’s trying to fit in a bit too well. Director Tanya Hamilton’s film was shot in less than three weeks and has many imperfections — but whatever you think of the Panthers and their long-ago revolutionary movement, Washington and Mackie provide magnificent portrayals of wounded survivors in an unacknowledged war for America’s soul.

Take two beloved screen veterans and the halfway-true story of the couple who ran Nevada’s most famous legal brothel and you should get a prodigious entertainment, right? What could possibly go wrong? Well, nothing whatever went right in “Love Ranch,” from Helen Mirren’s wandering Yank accent as madam Grace Bontempo (was she born in New England and raised in New Jersey? With subsequent stopovers in west Texas and the San Fernando Valley?) to Joe Pesci’s thoroughly irritating performance as her noxious and pathetic husband to the painful lack of chemistry between Mirren’s character and the meathead Argentine boxer who becomes her lover (Sergio Peris-Mencheta, don’t give up the day job, whatever it is). Unfortunately, the secret to this mismatched on-screen marriage may lie in a real one: “Love Ranch” was directed by Mirren’s husband, Taylor Hackford (“Ray,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” etc.), and sometimes, as we all learn sooner or later, there can simply be too much togetherness.

In a year that featured so many memorable tales of family, it’s only fitting that this category belongs to a couple of moms. Mind you, the context is just a little different: Clad in an alarming assemblage of early-’90s Atlantic City leisure wear in “The Fighter,” Melissa Leo’s Alice presides over a terrifying gaggle of daughters as well as the lives and careers of her two boxer sons, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale), the prides of working-class Lowell, Mass. Helena Bonham Carter in “The King’s Speech,” meanwhile, plays the Duchess of York and later Queen Elizabeth (mother of the current queen, that is) as a dry, droll wit, informing a stunned London housewife, “I’m told your husband calls my husband Bertie. I do hope you’re not going to call me Liz.” Despite their, um, rather different circumstances, both Alice and Liz are strong women minted in another era, women accustomed to commanding the stage and ordering men around, while pretending to occupy a subsidiary supporting role.

Although Oscar-nominated in the foreign-language category for 2009, French director Jacques Audiard’s absorbing gangster epic “A Prophet” didn’t reach American theaters until this year. Its star performance came from Tahar Rahim as a naive young Arab-French convict named Malik, whose ambiguous rise to jailhouse godfather is the movie’s central drama. Even more impressive, in many ways, is the guy Malik ultimately supplants, a bearded, supposedly avuncular and thoroughly sinister Corsican crime lord named C

Set in a suburban London wasteland of decrepit housing projects and debris-strewn fields, Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” is a story of forbidden sex and terrible mistakes, revolving around a 15-year-old would-be hip-hop dancer named Mia (Katie Jarvis). Mia has an atrocious relationship with her drunken and promiscuous mother (Kierston Wareing) and embarks on a thoroughly misguided liaison with her mom’s sexy Irish boyfriend (the terrific Michael Fassbender). All this could be a prescription for disaster, and very nearly is. But Arnold believes in the possibility of salvation, and delivers it, near the very end of the film, in a scene when Mia and her younger sister, in defiance of all plausibility, end up dancing with their mother to Nas’ hit “Life’s a Bitch.” There’s no way such a stereotypical chick-flick move should work in this universe, but it does, and the contrast between the driving nihilism of the music and the improbable tenderness of this family’s last moments together utterly destroyed me.

In the last few years, nonfiction films have begun to divide between the ones that seek to rip the scales from our eyes and enlighten us, and the ones that seek to cloud the distinction between fact and fantasy and totally bewilder us. In the former category belongs Charles Ferguson’s bracing expos

I enjoyed “Toy Story 3″ as much as anyone — in fact, I’m pretty sure I liked it better than my 6-year-old son did. But the quasi-cultish worship of all things Pixar has reached unreasonable dimensions: TS3 is not actually a Holocaust parable, people, nor is it among the greatest films ever made! For my animated fave of the year, I’m backing away from CGI spectacle in favor of a low-budget, handcrafted effort, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s “The Secret of Kells,” which combines Celtic legend and some snippets of medieval history into a gorgeous tapestry of light and darkness. (Although it was a surprise Oscar nominee for 2009, “The Secret of Kells” did not get United States release until early this year.) Telling the vaguely plausible story of how a group of Irish monks besieged by Vikings created the Book of Kells, an illustrated manuscript that is now considered Ireland’s most important cultural artifact, “The Secret of Kells” is freewheeling and fanciful, melding Celtic and medieval graphic motifs, pagan and Christian themes, and a contemporary, kid-friendly quest narrative.