Andrew Garfield

CHICAGO – Three of the best young living actors turn Mark Romanek’s adaptation of the highly-acclaimed novel “Never Let Me Go” into one of the more lingering films of 2010, and now released on Blu-ray and DVD from Fox. You know how some films dissipate on the ride home, so much so that you barely remember the plot? The opposite are those movies that burrow their way into your memory and grow with time. “Never Let Me Go” is definitely one of those.

CHICAGO – There just wasn’t enough room at this year’s Oscar party for several of the most-deserving candidates. There never is. Like every year, most of the key categories had at least one (and often more) deserving nominee not getting the happy call on Tuesday morning. Who should have? Who should have been left out instead? Here are the big ten.

CHICAGO – It started with the best lead performances of 2010 yesterday and now we naturally move on to many of the stars who made those lead turns possible. For what is a great lead performance without the supporting ones that got it there? These were the MVPs of 2010 who may have allowed others to take the spotlight but also made it shine so much brighter.

CHICAGO – So many recent films have been called “masterpieces” by critics that the word doesn’t have the power that it once did. And yet there’s sometimes no better way to describe a film. David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake is a masterpiece.

CHICAGO – Oscar-nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design, Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is a great fit for Blu-ray as the luster of 1080p enhances the best thing about the movie. Highly touted as “Heath Ledger’s final film,” history is likely to remember the film as more of a return to form for the director of classics like “Brazil” and “The Fisher King”.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Much ink has been spilled about how HBO is at the forefront of made-for-TV filmmaking in the world, a fact already demonstrated this year by the brilliant biopic “Temple Grandin” and the stellar WWII mini-series, “The Pacific.” Yet Britain’s Channel 4 deserves just as much attention and praise for producing the “Red Riding” trilogy, which has been routinely compared to HBO’s classic series, “The Wire.”

Semi-alarming photos surfaced on Monday from London of Heath Ledger not as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” but as a character being hung by a noose in the upcoming fantasy film “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”. These photos are from JustJared.com.