Top 10 films of the week

1. Black Swan | Rating: * * * * *

Natalie Portman – widely tipped for Oscar glory – delivers a startling performance as a ballerina cracking under the pressure of her latest role. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is delirious hokum, high-class trash, the best movie Ken Russell never made.

2. Son of Babylon| Rating: * * * *

Son of Babylon is a moving work of mourning for all those Iraqis who have disappeared since the Gulf War.

3. Rabbit Hole | Rating: * * * *

The terrain of grief is well mapped-out in American art movies, but Rabbit Hole finds some subtle new pathways through it. David Lindsay-Abaire adapts his own play, which doesn’t proceed through those five stages of Kubler-Ross bereavement in anything like strict sequence. Nicole Kidman gives her best performance since Birth (2004), which means it’s not far off her very best.

4. Nénette | Rating: * * * *

Nénette, by Nicolas Philibert, best known for Être et Avoir (2002), is a mysterious, discomforting documentary about an orangutan. She’s the oldest inhabitant at the oldest zoo in the world, in Paris.

5. Barney's Version | Rating: * * * *

If you don’t mind the lack of hype around it, this is a refreshingly idiosyncratic drama, rambling and self-absorbed, but also smart and literate. At times, it recalls those other vagrant treasures, Wonder Boys and Sideways.

6. True Grit | Rating: * * *

Gruff, growling Jeff Bridges is Rooster Cogburn – the role that marked the climax of John Wayne’s career – in a Coen brothers reworking.

7. Never Let Me Go | Rating: * * *

Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-shortlisted novel about the residents of an unusual boarding school, Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland manage to avoid sticky overstatement and the they fast-forward to the emotional nub of the story.

8. The Fighter | Rating: * * *

A real-life story about a boxing family at war with itself. Mak Wahlberg and Christian Bale star in this rickety, unfocused contraption of a film that sputters and chugs along without offering any hint of why its director thought it was worth making.

9. Tangled | Rating: * * *

What’s disarming about Tangled, underneath the 3D and the savvy sense of humour and the bedazzled girly-girl appeal, is how traditional it actually remains, a romance with songs, and none of them thankfully sung by animals.

10. The Machanic | Rating: * * *

Jason Statham inherits the role of a laconic assassin, played by Charles Bronson in the 1972 Michael Winner film of the same name. Simon West's best film since Con Air.

Coming soon: new film releases

2010: this year's movies