Steven Rea: The best films of 2010

If the lame retro romantic caper The Tourist is good for anything, it's for making Angelina Jolie's international glamourpuss seem utterly anachronistic in the context of all the blazingly great - and real, and honest - women's roles on screen this year.

From the sharp-tongued cowgirl played by Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit to the lonely New York exec played by Patricia Clarkson in the beautifully rueful Cairo Time to the loving couple that Annette Bening and Julianne Moore bring to messy life in The Kids Are All Right, 2010 has been marked by a wealth of fully realized female characters.

Noomi Rapace's fiercely committed reading of the dragon-tattooed, fire-playing, hornet's-nest-kicking Lisbeth Salander in three - count 'em! - Stieg Larsson adaptations is not to be trifled with. Jennifer Lawrence's portrait of an Ozarks teenager thrown into a world of hillbilly criminality in Winter's Bone may well get her an Oscar nomination.

In fact, there's been such a surfeit of substance this year that honing the Academy Award best actress list to five is going to leave a good dozen worthy contenders unrecognized. In the past, AMPAS voters (and critics, and moviegoers) were hard-pressed to count the notable women's roles on one hand. Not this year: Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Naomi Watts (Fair Game), Katie Jarvis (Fish Tank), Tilda Swinton (I Am Love), the aforementioned Clarkson, Steinfeld, Bening, and Moore - plus Hilary Swank (Conviction), Sally Hawkins (Made in Dagenham), Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass and Let Me In), Carey Mulligan (Never Let Me Go), Catherine Keener (Please Give), Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture), Isabelle Huppert (White Material), and, by many accounts (I've yet to see these), Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole and Halle Berry in Frankie and Alice.