“Somewhere” is much more austere. With a “we’ll get there when we get there” feeling reminiscent of the ’70s cinema the director adores, Coppola takes her sweet time and only goes places that interest her. The movie is less of a story than an experience, a mood, a set of situations — something you look at and listen to and either engage with or don’t; perhaps more like an album of aloof yet mysterious pop songs than a typical American narrative film.

As much as I admire the film’s stylistic cojones, I can’t entirely recommend it, mainly because the hero is such a numb (and when he opens his mouth, shallow) question mark that the investment-to-reward ratio seems out-of-whack, like spending two hours cracking open a safe that turns out to contain half a bag of M&M’s. (I prefer Coppola’s first two films, which are structurally almost perfect and much less withholding.) Still, I can’t deny that “Somewhere” is brilliant in places and occasionally devastating — especially in this scene, which highlights a realistic moment of affectionate bonding that just sort sneaks up on the father and his daughter and sinks in without announcing itself.

“The Ghost Writer” is an example of a vanishing type of film direction rooted in the values of classical (pre-TV) Hollywood. Although Polanski didn’t make his first feature until 1962 (“A Knife in the Water“), he has done most of his work in that tradition. The subject matter of his movies is often disturbing — jealousy, insanity, conspiracy, the triumphs of chaos and evil — but his style is usually conservative, with a touch of elegance. He doesn’t cover action with two or three or 10 cameras to produce enough usable footage to create the illusion of comprehensiveness. Polanski more often tries to plan and shoot action from one, maybe two angles, and he doesn’t cut to a new angle unless he can get a better result than by staying where he is. Polanski’s screenwriting sensibility is just as exact — a point vividly demonstrated on “The Ghost Writer,” which Polanski co-adapted with Robert Harris, from Harris’ novel. The filmmaker doles out words the way he doles out shots: sparingly, never giving the viewers more than is necessary to keep them on the hook and waiting for the next revelation. This is a nearly perfect entertainment, never more so than in its final few minutes. 

“Solitary Man” is that kind of movie. It’s being singled out here partly on its merits (which are considerable) and partly because it exemplifies the kind of invisible excellence that ought to be common in commercial cinema but isn’t. Written by Brian Koppleman, and directed by Koppleman and David Levien, it’s the bittersweet tale of Ben Kalmen, a onetime used car magnate and compulsive womanizer stumbling through the wreckage of his life. Casting Michael Douglas as Ben was arguably the filmmakers’ masterstroke; the character invokes every clever, self-centered, hard-living horndog Douglas has ever played in his career.

The scene showcased here is from the film’s final act, which unfolds in a college town Ben visited earlier while escorting a girlfriend’s teenage daughter on a campus tour. Here, as elsewhere in the picture, the filmmakers shoot and edit the action in a way that suggests Ben’s deteriorating confidence without being ostentatiously clever about it; it’s all about the content of the scene, yet the film is never dull; every scene is shaped and every moment has zip.

The scenes run the gamut in terms of genre, budget and storytelling mode. There are a spectacular action sequence, grueling suspense scenes, two dreams, a mortifying display of family dysfunction and a couple of intimate moments so dependent on pop songs that they could double as stand-alone music videos. The most popular movie on this list cost $200 million to produce and has already grossed a half-billion worldwide. The smallest cost less than a used car and was such a labor of love that it didn’t open in U.S. theaters until five years after its completion. Taken together, these 10 scenes give a sense of the dazzling range of movie year 2010 and illustrate the idea that there is no single, irrefutably “correct” way to make a good movie. It’s all about the material and what the artists do with it; in other words, alchemy. We can parse the result, but only up to a point.

Casual moviegoers should be warned that because this series is more about form than content, we’re not concerned with protecting virgin eyeballs. At least two of the scenes are taken from the very end of plot-driven films. Most of the rest showcase pivotal moments in the lives of their characters. Spoiler alerts have been affixed to a couple of the videos, but readers are strongly encouraged to read the articles and the title cards leading up to each scene, and decide how much they value plot before going further.

One final note on the videos themselves. Rather than stop the scene or mute the dialogue to allow for voice-over commentary, we’ve decided to let each clip play out in real time, with observations appearing in the letterbox area of the image. We strongly recommend watching each scene all the way through without looking at the text, then running it again and scanning the notes as the scene plays out again. You can use the play/pause button and the toggle bar at the bottom to pause, rewind or skip forward. The videos are also embeddable (the code automatically cuts-and-pastes to your computer’s clipboard when you click that option). And they can be enlarged to full-screen size by clicking the little TV symbol.

To enjoy all the entries we’ve published so far, click here.