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Our film critic makes the nominations for his own personal Oscars in a widely underrated year for film

December is the season of list-making and Top 10 compiling, but when I mention this to other critics, it's been getting winces and shrugs and mutterings that 2010 hasn't been a vintage year. I'm not so sure about that. It's true that the huge arthouse hits like The White Ribbon and A Prophet are now a very distant memory — A Prophet in fact was released at the very beginning of this year, but has been so extensively discussed, that I don't mention it below. Some huge crowd-pleasers, like Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, haven't yet had a full release and neither has Kelly Reichardt's western, Meek's Cutoff. These things may combine to produce the impression that 2010 is in itself a thin year.

The Illusionist and Ben Miller's directing debut, Huge, are two of the gems this year

Magicians don't exist is the forlorn message of Sylvain Chomet's beautiful animation The Illusionist, which opened the 64th Edinburgh international film festival. I should think film festival organisers often reach a similarly prosaic conclusion, for they can only work with what's in front of them. But the collection of films on show this year has certainly got some style about it, if not quite magic.

After complaining for the past few years about Edinburgh holding its gala nights in the unattractive multiplex on the edge of town, I was delighted with the transformation of the lovely old Festival theatre on Nicolson Street into an atmospheric cinema. It gave the opening night a real flourish, complete with dancing girls in feathers, a brass band and moustached mime-artists performing magic.

The Illusionist, the follow-up to the director's award-winning Belleville Rendez-Vous,...

Rating: 1.5/5

Directors: Ashley Horner

Cast: Liam Browne, Nancy Trotter Landry

The conceit of Brilliantlove is simple: Love can not be challenged until something comes along to test its strength. If a perfect world is created around two people, whether intentional or unintentional, they can exist inside a bubble filled with life and surroundings of their choosing; an environment that only compliments their relationship with nothing to undermine it and nothing to cheapen it. There’s a real beauty knowing that it can still be possible to be so wrapped around someone that you don’t know where they end and you begin. Oh, and the sex is great, too.

Read more on Tribeca 2010 Review: Brilliantlove…...

Year: 2010

Directors: Ashley Horner

Writers: Sean Conway

IMDb: link

Trailer: link

Review by: Bob Doto

Rating: 4 out of 10

Brilliantlove tells the story of Manchester (Liam Browne) and Noon (Nancy Trotter Landry)—two super insignificant hipster twenty-somethings—who are madly in love with one another, have sex every five seconds, live in a garage in a dilapidated countryside, steal from the local grocer who’s just trying to make a living, and say the word “pussy” a lot. So, what you’ve got here is a film about bourgeois gentrifiers, stealing from the working class, as they try far too hard to be “real” and intense while they look for their next pair of skinny jeans. In essence, they suck.

The plot is even more yawn-able: Boy-hipster takes silly and pretentious photos of his lover when she’s naked, when she’s sleeping, and when she’s taxiderming. (Did you know...