Reminding us of everything David Fincher does well after the lumpen and interminable Benjamin Button, this story of Facebook fallout was the year’s timeliest movie, among its wittiest, and conjured such an indelible aura of melancholy amid the back-stabbings that it looks certain to last. Aaron Sorkin’s fleet script doesn’t skimp on rapier put-downs, but it’s shaped beautifully to make us feel the overwhelming loneliness of Mark Zuckerberg, both the odd basis of his success and the reason it rings so hollow. In Jesse Eisenberg’s hands, he’s the vindictive nerd as tragic archetype, a know-all who doesn’t, finally, know himself. Setting his obsessions brilliantly to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsating score, Fincher’s watertight direction elevates what might have seemed a legal footnote into a story for our times, one of human connections reduced to a pattern of ones and zeros, in a doomy echo chamber of clattering laptops.
2. A Prophet
Eleven months after its release, Jacques Audiard’s prison-survival masterpiece, with its scorching breakthrough performance from Tahar Rahim as a light-skinned Arab inmate caught between battling cultures, remains richly unforgettable and near-flawless, an epic of Darwinian wiles.
3. Toy Story 3
We expected a fond farewell to Andy’s toys, but maybe not this skilful a threequel, which keeps all the necessary plates spinning, hardly ever flags and elicited many a tear from grown adults when it says farewell to Woody and the gang, with the simple words “Thanks, guys”.
4. Another Year
Mike Leigh’s best since Topsy-Turvy and a feast of great ensemble acting from his regular players. Lesley Manville’s boozy singleton is reaping plaudits, but the film’s bedrock is the ace tandem work of Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as a snugly (smugly?) contented couple.
5. I Am Love
Tilda Swinton’s luminous magic is a given by now, but she never plays it safe: Sicilian stylist Luca Guadagnino deliberately strands her as an out-of-place Russian trophy wife, in a pulse-quickening and sensually heady drama of infidelity, sexual fulfilment and fish-soup epiphanies.
6. The Kids Are All Right
Cracking work from Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as feuding lesbian moms, and a bespoke part for Mark Ruffalo as the oblivious sperm donor who comes back into their lives. Director and co-writer Lisa Cholodenko makes a spectacular breakthrough with this plum comedy of eye-rolling dysfunctionality.
7. Dogtooth
Speaking of dysfunctionality, nothing was more disturbing this year than the implications of Yorgos Lanthimos’s startlingly original Greek movie about a family in confinement, being taught a mad vocabulary and strange ideas about sex by their controlling patriarch.
8. How to Train Your Dragon
It wasn’t only Pixar who came up with the mainstream animated goods. DreamWorks triumphed too, finally ditching the sarky quips for this charmer about a Viking blacksmith’s apprentice and his pet, a fire-breathing reptile of rare appeal.
9. The Ghost Writer
Initially underrated, Roman Polanski’s frisky political thriller about a PM in exile was classy, creepy and thoroughly absorbing. Yes, Ewan McGregor’s dissolute hack gets implausibly up to his neck, but the caustic repartee in Robert Harris’s script was great fun.
10. Inception
Love them or loathe them – and rival sections of the geekosphere did both – there was nothing to match Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending dreamscapes for giddying spectacle and scale this summer. Quite a ride.