Let's compare the speed difference between masking and dropping missing rows and boolean indexing. Boolean indexing is about an order of magnitude faster in this case:

>>> %timeit movie.mask(criteria).dropna(how='all')
11.2 ms ± 144 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

>>> %timeit movie[movie['title_year'] < 2010]
1.07 ms ± 34.9 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)