I could sum up my overall moviegoing experience last year in three words. The first two are Jessica Chastain and the last one is mediocre.
As of today, I have seen 90 2011 releases. While few were downright abysmal (only five of the films I’ve seen received *1/2 or less), only THREE films that I saw last year warranted a perfect four-star rating.
Note that I haven’t seen the following 2011 releases and thus they are not on my list: Carnage, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Interrupters, Into the Abyss, Like Crazy, The Myth of the American Sleepover, Pariah, Pina, Rampart, A Separation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Bought a Zoo, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Regardless, there were several stellar films and performances from 2011 worth acknowledging. My top 10 films of the year are below (in descending order).
Honourable Mentions: the dazzling animated adventures Rango and The Adventures of Tintin, the powerful AIDS documentary We Were Here, the bloody samurai epic 13 Assassins and the terrificly-acted adaptation of The Help.
10. Take Shelter
(director: Jeff Nichols)
Writer/director Jeff Nichols reaches into the anxieties of Middle America with piercing results in this superbly acted drama. A construction worker named Curtis (Michael Shannon) has vivid, frightening hallucinations about the end of the world. As delusions of impending destructions rattle at his psyche, his stoic wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), worries that these visions may end up ripping their family apart. Shannon and Chastain are both masterful, the former giving the hard-working everyman type nuances of such unhinged ferocity and deep vulnerability that it’s to no surprise he’s already picked up several accolades this season.
9. Page One: Inside the New York Times
(director: Andrew Rossi)
Relevant and insightful, this terrific documentary chronicles the ever-changing structure of media and journalism through the lens of the essential American newspaper, The New York Times. Capturing the anxieties Times writers and editors must go through as the publication adapts to new changes (Wikileaks, Twitter), Rossi’s film shows the struggle that both old-school and new-age journalists face. David Carr, the gravel-voiced ex-junkie who became the Times’ media editor, is one of the many fascinating reporters at the doc’s centre. He is worried about the state of journalism, but is faintly optimistic as well. So is the film, which should be mandatory viewing for anyone who still picks up a newspaper.
8. Midnight in Paris
(director: Woody Allen)
Arguably the best film Woody Allen has made in my lifetime, and his most sumptuously romantic outing since The Purple Rose of Cairo, this comedy (and time-travelogue, if you will) about a wistful American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) who is transported to a new side of Paris at the stroke of midnight is simply delightful. Wilson is a charming Woody Allen surrogate, and a large pool of supporting performers popping in as legendary figures from the City of Love circa 1920 sell the concept with conviction. With an easygoing touch and an intriguing story that explores elements of fallacy and reality, Allen’s film is like an excellent French meal: very light and very rich at the same time.
7. Moneyball
(director: Bennett Miller)
Deconstructing America’s pasttime into a cold, cynical and calculating game, Moneyball is an unconventional but excellent sports film. Based off Michael Lewis’s compelling business book of the same name, the film follows Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane (an exceptional, seasoned Brad Pitt) as he tries to rebuild a dirt-poor franchise whose top players have been pilferated into the league’s richest teams. Moneyball’s sentimental hook is that Beane used to be a ball player who never reached the heights of his burgeoning potential, and his redemption comes from organizing a team of players who are anything like he was. Miller’s directorial approach, alongside Stephen Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s sharp script, is intelligent and deeply compassionate, capturing the humanity of the ball game in unexpected ways.
6. Certified Copy
(director: Abbas Kiarostami)
Taking place over one gourgeous afternoon in Tuscany spent between a revered English writer (William Shimell, in his screen debut) and an unnamed, lovely French antiques dealer (a ravishing Juliette Binoche), Certified Copy is the first film from auteur Abbas Kiarostami to be shot outside of his native Iran. Throughout the day, the man and woman put on a façade as husband and wife. As the sun sets and these souls merge closer together, we get the feeling that they may have once been husband and wife. Are they strangers or are they reliving a faded past? Kiarostami’s often enigmatic but endlessly fascinating film lets the audience interpret for themselves.
5. Contagion
(director: Steven Soderbergh)
Following the rapid outbreak of an unknown virus as it permeates throughout the globe, spawning an international pandemonium for prescriptions, Soderbergh’s star-studded thriller could have easily slipped into B-movie territory. Instead, with a taut script from Scott Z. Burns and a foolproof ensemble featuring Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Lawrence Fishburne and Jude Law, the film is primarily effective due to its hyper-realism. Briskly placed without having to compromise its characters, who move throughout several intersecting plotlines, Soderbergh’s Contagion is a gripping and involving thriller that feels eerily prescient.
4. Incendies
(director: Denis Villeneuve)
Based off an acclaimed play by Wajdi Mouawad, this searing French-Canadian drama was robbed of a Foreign Language Film Oscar last year. When Montreal twins Jeanne and Simon receive the will of their late Arab-Canadian mother, they are asked to deliver two envelopes – one addressed to their father presumed to be dead and the other to a brother that they never knew existed. Gravitating between the present as Jeanne departs to Fuad to track down her family history and the horrific past that their mother, Nawal (played as a younger woman by an astonishing Lubna Azabal) encounters, Incendies is a devastating and uncompromising journey into the horrors of political strife and civil war. It is also a remarkable move forward for experimental Quebec director Denis Villeneuve.
3. Hugo
(director: Martin Scorsese)
Martin Scorsese leaves the gritty mean streets for the romantic city lights of Paris with Hugo, a visually wondrous and deeply sentimental family film that also works as a soaring love letter to the early days of cinema. Adapted from Brian Selznick’s bestseller, we follow the orphaned Hugo Cabret (a luminous Asa Butterfield) and his adventures around the Paris train station where he mans the clocks. The young boy wishes to find a heart-shaped key needed to unlock an automaton, and gets some unlikely help from a grouchy toy store owner (Ben Kingsley) who has a secret past of his own. With dazzling set design and a dreamy original score, Hugo also explores the connections people can make through art, a favourite theme of Scorsese's. It is a tender and visually stunning movie that, it turns out, is all about loving the movies.
2. The Tree of Life
(director: Terrence Malick)
The arrival of a Terrence Malick film is a cultural event for any serious film buff, and his latest film, the glorious, evocative The Tree of Life, may be his crowning achievement. Intensely ambitious and expressionistic, it follows the boyhood years of Jack O’Brien (Hunter McCracken, a revelation), who grows up in the midlands of Texas during the 1950s. His father (Brad Pitt, never better) is a strict disciplinarian who nurtures his children with pride and punishment, while his mother (Jessica Chastain) is simple and saintlike, trying to raise her boys through prayer and plenitude. Intimate in its approach to character while exhilaratingly grand in its depiction of everything else – including a 20-minute sequence of the world’s creation – Malick’s film is an audacious symphony of sound and image. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography captures Jack’s fluid, fleeting memories of youth, as he grapples with questions of reason, spirituality and his place in the world. It is a daunting and audacious work of art due to its cerebral direction, but is one that beckons to be revisited again and again.
1. Martha Marcy May Marlene
(director: Sean Durkin)
Haunting and unpredictable, Sean Durkin’s film is one of the most accomplished directorial debuts in years. His film follows Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young lady who flees from a dangerous cult commune in upstate New York to stay with her sister (Sarah Paulson) at a Connecticut cottage. The film gravitates between Martha’s tormented memories from the cult and of its leader (John Hawkes, a menacing treasure), and the present day. Olsen is astonishing as a woman fearful and vulnerable to the dangers that she has escaped but feeling as if they are looming not so far away. Durkin, with firm control over every frame, builds suspense by aligning us with Martha’s restlessness, and the writer/director seamlessly wanders between scenes in the present and mementos from the past. It’s a frightening, mesmerizing glimpse into a woman on the verge, and the very best film of 2011.
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