My rule on eligibility:
A film is classed as belonging to the year in which it was first theatrically released, in any country.
This rule exists to
aid consistency from year to year, and also to avoid discounting films which
don't get a release in either the UK
or the USA .
And there are many festival films to which that applies, including honourable mention "Adrift" ("Choi Voi") below, which I
wouldn't have been able to include had it not been picked up by a French
distributor.
My Top Ten Films of 2011
1. “The Tree of Life”/Terrence Malick
2. “Margaret”/Kenneth Lonergan
3. “Beginners”/ Mike Mills
4. “Once Upon a Time In Anatolia ”/Nuri Bilge Ceylan
5. “Sleeping Sickness”/Ulrich Köhler
6. “Weekend”/Andrew Haigh
7. “Meek’s Cutoff”/Kelly Reichardt
8. “The Interrupters”/Steve James
9. “Melancholia”/Lars Von Trier
10. “Rampart”/Oren Moverman
Special Mention: “Hanna,” which flirts with genius in so
many ways, but is prevented from really getting there through an iffy approach
to backstory. On another day of compiling these lists, I might have included it
in my ten.
Honourable Mentions: The superbly composed “Moneyball” offers a stellar average, but doesn’t
quite hit for the cycle, while “Snowtown” hits for all it has and is largely
the better for it. Brit horror flick “Kill
List” chews you up, spits you
out, and neglects to wipe its mouth afterwards, as the dense, upper-crust
charms of “Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy” drool for
two-plus hours. Super clever “The
Artist” revitalises ailing
memories with gravitas; “Mission
Impossible: Ghost Protocol” proves
that Tom Cruise can still be fun, and that action cinema can still be coherent,
while the combined efforts of miniature gems “Tomboy,”
“Pariah,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and
the finally-released Korean film “Adrift” all offer worthwhile reflections on
female sexuality.
And then I suppose you can make a case for the
films people loved but I didn’t quite get, like “Drive,” “Martha Marcy May
Marlene,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Attack the Block,” and maybe even “A Separation” (despite its unyielding obsession
with portioning off blame.) Then there are films like “The Adventures of Tintin,” which folks seemed to outright
hate but I quite liked (you can add “The
Future” and “Young Adult” to that list, too) and the films
that sat nicely with me but never troubled the top tier of this list: I’m
looking at you, “Jane Eyre,”
“The Kid with a Bike,” “The Myth of the American Sleepover,” “We Have a Pope,”
and “Rango,” which is
comfortably the best animated film of a disappointing 2011 slate.
The worst films I saw this year* are: “Horrible
Bosses,” which doesn’t even
attempt to hide its racism and homophobia and still manages to get good
reviews. What gives?! “The
Resident” wins awards for
‘film most stuck in the early nineties’ and ‘film with the most pointless
flashback sequence,’ while “Albert
Nobbs” (Oscars be damned!)
has to rank among the worst films of the year for that bizarre tragicomic
finale alone. “The Green
Lantern” could have done
without the presence of Ryan Reynolds, whereas I’d have welcome him raising the
floppy blancmange that was “Chalet
Girl” with those monster abs
of his. Alas, both of them died a death.
*Disclaimer: these are most likely not the worst five
films of the year, since I don’t subject myself to such dreck as “Jack and Jill,”
“Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon” and “The Change-Up.”
2 comments:
dude what about Drive? that movie was an absolute art of movie making. honestly it must be in this list.
Nice list - you saw a hell of a lot of movies... and you're writing is super fierce.
Post a Comment