Top Ten Films of 2011

Be sure to check the next pages for the views of Editor-in-Chief Sarah Mattero, and staff writers Matthew Anders and Angela Rawling!

Jake Mulligan, Arts Editor: 2011 may have been a dark year at the cinema (I think I saw threats or depictions of the apocalypse in at least ten different major films) but it was also a damn good one. Not 2007 good or anything, but it was good enough that there were a few films left off my top ten that are so excellent I had to mention them somewhere: "WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN", "CONTAGION", "MIDNIGHT IN PARIS", and "A DANGEROUS METHOD".

10. "ATTACK THE BLOCK" (Joe Cornish)– The best debut film I saw this year; director Joe Cornish's upstart energy pulsates through every single frame. He makes a chase down the stairs more energetic than most filmmakers can make their climactic scenes.

9. "SHAME" (Steve McQueen)– Michael Fassbender turns in one of the performances of the year in Steve McQueen's second film, a cold and calculated look at how one man's sex addiction destroys every aspect of his life. Most of this year's acclaimed films turned their cameras back upon celebrations of the past, but this is a disturbingly real look at our present.

8. "POETRY" (Lee Chang-Dong)– Lee doesn't share the genre influences of some of his more prolific South Korean contemporaries (like Kim Ji-Woon or Bong Joon-ho) but his portrait of the country only feels realer for it: this is a harrowing film of truly novelistic depth. I saw this in the past week, and something tells me if I had seen it earlier, it would have crept up much higher on this list.

7. "CARNAGE" (Roman Polanski)– Calling back to his ‘Apartment Trilogy'; Polanski once again he crafts a movie that never leaves the confines of his characters home (try and resist reading the film as his response to house arrest). A dissertation on the impossibility of reasoned discussion and rhetoric disguised as a vitriolic comedy of manners, "CARNAGE" recalls Bunuel in its setup ("But I don't understand; what is holding them in the room?") and classic Polanski in its execution. The funniest film of the year.

6. "THE TREE OF LIFE" (Terrence Malick)– Is there a better cinematographer on the planet right now than Emmanuel Lubezki? Orson Welles said that a camera needs to be the "eye in the head of a poet", and never has that been more true than here.

5. "MARGARET" (Kenneth Lonergan)– Kenneth Lonergan's second film was a long time coming, but this psychotically unhinged story of a Manhattan teen's (Anna Paquin) coming of age was perhaps the most daring film of the year. Deliberately messy, rife with interrupting dialogue, and featuring painfully unfinished arcs for all but one of its characters, "MARGARET" was too dark to ever succeed at the box office.

4. "13 ASSASSINS" (Takashi Miike)– Taking the honor-based samurai genre and giving it the structure of American action films like "THE DIRTY DOZEN" or "THE WILD BUNCH", iconoclast director Takashi Miike sets us up with 80 minutes of character work then floors the audience with a 45 minute battle sequence. For once we care about the people involved in the carnage (I love Miike, but character development often falls short behind cinematic style on his to-do list,) and it makes all the difference: never have I seen an audience react to a film with such primal bloodlust.

3. "HUGO" (Martin Scorsese)– Using the early days of cinema as his playground, Scorsese connects his use of the 3^rd dimension to the way silent filmmakers would use depth and color tinting to shock audiences. And much like the Lumiere brothers train would leave viewers awestruck early in the 1900s, Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson's use of digital cinematography allows them to string together physically impossibly long shots that left me floored, devastated, and lost for words.

2. "MELANCHOLIA" (Lars Von Trier)– Lars Von Trier has finally made a movie big enough to dwarf his own personality. Try as he might to overshadow his romantic and operatic fable about the effects of depression on the human psyche, no amount of jokes about Nazi culture could make me forget about "MELANCHOLIA". The approaching planet is a symbolic flourish, but the destructive mood he's investigating (and, surely, suffering from) is as real as can be.

1. "DRIVE" (Nicolas Winding Refn)– What can I say that hasn't already been said about Nicolas Winding Refn's masterpiece? Working within the tradition of lone wolf assassin films (and yes, it does live up to "LE SAMURAI") Refn has created a film that is simultaneously contemplative, unabashedly romantic, and violent in the most primal sense. But its most brilliant flourish is the way he edits the film, always returning us to his master shot, Gosling gliding into the night in his car (in that jacket, to that soundtrack) the same way Eastwood rode off into the sunset 50 years ago. A crazy hallucination driven by the id of its main character; this is a perfect film.