Best of 2011: The Films

Truthfully, 2011 was a year that produced very few great films, even fewer good ones and a surplus of decent ones. Thus, making a Top 20 list was more a reach than in year's past, yet like every year, the great films are there - you just have to look for them. 
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#20

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"DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME"

Directed by Tsui Hark

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Tusi Hark's fantastical-historical Chinese epic is one big, grandiose achievement, if nor nothing else, that it manages to take a story so fanciful and chimerical and yet unburdened by the esoterics of its mythology even to a Western audience. Credit mainly goes to the film's gravity-defying choreography and magnificently-staged set-pieces, which supersede Chinese politics and shifting alliances.

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#19

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"MONEYBALL"

Directed by Bennett Miller

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There's nothing truthfully wrong about Bennett Miller's oft-obstructed "Moneyball" (based on Michael Lewis' 2003 book on the re-inventive Oakland Athletics), but the fact remains that I believe it to be a film lesser than the sum of its parts. Even still, Brad Pitt and the wily-yet-redundant Zaillian and Sorkin screenplay manage to make inside-baseball sabermetrics compelling and fleet.

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#18

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"MIDNIGHT IN PARIS"

Directed by Woody Allen

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Although it's essentially Woody Allen on repeat, no other romantic comedy this year was more fizzy or elegant. It takes the big-city romanticism of "Manhattan", the gooey nostalgia of "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and makes something admittedly minor, but palatable.

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#17

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"MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL"

Directed by Brad Bird

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Never mind the Russian-nuclear hokum, this one was the most cocksure, high-wire, bemusingly enjoyable blockbusters of the year. Fancifully high-tech and yet brutishly physical, you won't find more extravagant stunt work anywhere. It's just too bad the last thirty minutes are so criminally rote.

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#16

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"THE ARTIST"

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

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The much-ballyhooed French-produced silent film is, once you finally stop reading about it and actually see it, a predictably spirited, wistful and wily near-century-old throwback. Dujardin and Bejo are magnificent, as is the film's depiction of artists and their craft passing them by. 

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#15

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"SHAME"

Directed by Steve McQueen

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While I believe Steve McQueen's follow-up to "Hunger" is a bit too mannered and affected in places, its depiction of addiction - the neglect, the sputtering relationships, the need to be alone - breaches beyond just its subject of sex. 

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#14

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"WIN WIN"

Directed by Tom McCarthy

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Tom McCarthy is unequaled at these pocket portraits of unexpected relationships and "Win Win", although far from perfect, sees the actor/writer/director working away from the sullen race-relations of "The Visitor". 

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#13

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"JANE EYRE"

Directed by Cary Fukunaga

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Cary Fukunaga's unjustly disregarded sophomore feature may not have been thrilling news to fans of his debut, 2009's "Sin Nombre", but truthfully, this adaptation of the oft-adapted Charlotte Bronte novel makes for a compelling double-feature, both films about young, unprivileged misfits looking for a way out (or in). 

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#12

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"THE GUARD"

Directed by John Michael McDonagh

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Some consider this Irish debut, an irreverent buddy-cop comedy, a bit too routine, too minor, but I'm not only a big fan of Brendan Gleeson's heinous, foul-mouthed performance, but McDonagh's derisive, borderline-offensive sense of humor.

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#11

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"SUPER 8"

Directed by J.J. Abrams

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While J.J. Abrams' nostalgic nod to Steven Spielberg is a bit too clumsy, too cacophonous to work as a straight monster movie, it does work as a heartfelt family portrait of healing and self-discovery.

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#10

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"ATTACK THE BLOCK"

Directed by Joe Cornish

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This street-smart, urban-action debut may have caught fire at fervent geek-laden festivals, but the truth is, it's better than that. With muttering South London accents, a mostly black cast and a bass-thumping Basement Jaxx soundtrack, the film - an unlikely alien-invasion flick - has plenty of swagger, but the goods to back it up. Led by a terrific performance by teenager John Boyega as the hesitant leader of a petty street gang, the film constantly surprises with not only its pulsating, straight-brim style, but its constant sense of danger and character motivation. 

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#9

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"HANNA"

Directed by Joe Wright

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Easily the most memorably dexterous film of the first few months of the year, Joe Wright's sizzling fairy-tale thriller fuses art-film sensibility, style with familiar spy-movie tropes to produce something wholly unique. Wright, who previously flaunted his talents behind British prestige pictures like "Pride & Prejudice" and "Atonement", brings his signature camerawork and not-so-subtleties to the proceedings, but the film's storybook veneer suits it well.

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#8

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"TAKE SHELTER"

Directed by Jeff Nichols

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Visions of the apocalypse haunted plenty of auditoriums in movie theaters around the globe in 2011 and Jeff Nichols' sophomore feature "Take Shelter", the story of a husband and a father driven to near-insanity by visions (or premonitions?) or an impending storm, was certainly at the forefront of this movement. Although surrounded with trappings of sensationalist horrors and dreams, the film is truthfully, more about the insecurities and anxieties of marriage and fatherhood as it is about inquiries of sanity.

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#7

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"CONTAGION"

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

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No other studio-backed film this year exhibited a stronger sense of authorial presence than Steven Soderbergh's sickly viral-thriller "Contagion". With each frame wrapped in dread and submerged in detachment, the film, featuring a downright chilly, menacing electronic score, is like a glazed-over, hollowed-vision of our systematic, impending doom. Concerned far more with procedure than melodrama, the film will leave plenty rather chilly, I'd imagine, yet either way, I suspect it will - and has - scared the daylights out of skeptics and believers alike.

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#6

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"TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY"

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

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Ice-cold and precise to the last, Tomas Alfredson's immaculately-captured 60's Cold War spy-thriller is admittedly more "spy" than "thriller, yet through the film's otherwordly sense of detachment and rough-grain espionage, nuances of regret, redemption seep through.

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#5

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"THE TREE OF LIFE"

Directed by Terence Malick

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Although Malick's much-ballyhooed spiritual odyssey spans the entire spectrum of existence - from the dawn of the dinosaurs to the modern age - it is the film's meditation on the beauty and hardship of family life in 50's rural Texas that proves the most indelible. As a piece of craftsmanship, the film is breathless, almost effortlessly so. 

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#4

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"MELANCHOLIA"

Directed by Lars von Trier

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If Lars von Trier's previous film, "Antichrist" examined his own effects of depression in a delirious, ghastly manner, then "Melancholia" is the romantic reprieve. Split into two parts - a horrific wedding reception and a lonely, pondering of the inevitable - and bookmarked with two rapturous visions of the apocalypse, von Trier's most inoffensive film in years - with its mammoth crescendos - reintroduced the importance of the movie theater experience.

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#3

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"DRIVE"

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

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This fashionable, sunset-colored crime drama may be mannered or kitsch, but it doesn't come at the expense of its menace, prurience or vivacity. Filming Los Angeles like its 1985, Nicolas Winding Refn's most enjoyable, ably-stylized genre film is equal parts exhaust-fume muscle and retro-pink chic. 

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#2

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"MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE"

Directed by Sean Durkin

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Stunning in its structure and execution, Sean Durkin's carefully-crafted debut about the attempted recovery and escape of a young woman from the grasp of a deadly cult is just about the most disquietly arresting film of the year. Shuffling between past and present, the film unnerves, paralyzes and then teases with the prospect of the two timelines intersecting.

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#1

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"MEEK'S CUTOFF"

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

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Perhaps Kelly Reichardt's finest hour-and-a-half, "Meek's Cutoff", a beautifully spare, vivid anti-Western about a small convoy travelling through the Oregon territory who become consumed by doubt, endurance and survival, is a minimalist masterpiece. Composed of barren, terrifyingly immense long takes, the film blares down and sinks in like a sunburn as members of the convoy (including Michelle Williams as the catty Emily Tethrow) begin to doubt themselves and one another in the search for salvation - or in this case, just some water.

10. "Attack the Block"

9. "Hanna"

8. "Take Shelter"

7. "Contagion"

6. "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

5. "The Tree of Life"

4. "Melancholia"

3. "Drive"

2. "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

1. "Meek's Cutoff"