(Time Magazine) The list is not about perfection, it’s about the experience the movies provide.
10. Margaret – Kenneth Lonergan’s talky, much delayed film about a self-absorbed teenaged Manhattanite (a brilliant Anna Paquin) whose accidental contribution to a woman’s death sends her on a quest for peculiar justice is hardly a smooth ride. It bumps along in patches and meanders in others, but when it gathers steam becomes an unforgettable force of startling emotional intelligence.
9. Contagion – Back in 2000 it took Steven Soderbergh 147 minutes to place drugs into a global context in Traffic. Here he briskly handles a world plague in 106 minutes without missing a beat, thanks in no small part to Scott Z. Burns’s extraordinarily streamlined screenplay. The star power is huge — Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law — but a terrible, destructive flu is the true lead, with modern technology and speed-of-light communication playing
