Winter's Bone made Anthony Lane's "10 Films I Liked in 2010".
A Prophet is really good, definitely one of my favorites this year. I'd been meaning to recommend that in this thread for awhile, not that anyone would pay attention.
The wife is out of the country, so it's netflix binge time. Yesterday, I watched:
1. The Warriors: Out of curiosity. It's really, really boring (kinda surprising) and poorly acted (not surprising)
2. Winter's Bone: So very, very good. It's rare that a movie has such a fully formed world and aesthetic. Do you ever see the sun in this movie? Every thing is masked in browns and greys. Winter's Bone does for the Ozarks what Deliverance did for the Georgia Appalachians. Just without the buttrape.
3. The Paper Chase. I'm a lawyer, this is the law school movie that every law professor reared in the 60s/70s raves about. I had a professor much like Kingfield, so those scenes were enjoyable. The movie itself is trite and inconsequential though, with the kind of melodrama that you seem to only really find in 70s movies.