List: Top Ten Films of the Decade (2010-14)

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

2. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)

3. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonca Filho)

4. Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)

5. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zurcher)

6. The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet)

7. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)

8. Senna (Asif Kapadia)

9. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

10. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier)
Honorable mention: The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Pictures: My Top Dozen Favourite 2011 Films

So here it is, finally. My top dozen favourites of 2011. I wanted to dedicate a post to each of the films and write about them in detail, but this has taken long enough (3 months!) and school work never seems to be over. I’ll just go ahead with a small list for now, and hopefully in the future, I’ll get to give some space to each of them separately.

Though I’d like to think that I have a pretty good taste and my favourite film equates the best film, I’m not confident enough in my academic knowledge of cinema to claim such a thing – and generally, I don’t think anyone should be. So what I’ve written here is a list of my favourite films of 2011. A film like Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which I respect much more than I love, couldn’t find a place here, for example, because having seen it twice now and despite absolutely,wholeheartedly being floored by its central performance, I can’t say the film as a whole touches me in any way.

There are a few titles I wish I hadn’t missed but as I said, it’s already late March and definitely time to move on to the new year. Ultimately, the entire year can be summarized in 18 films for me. As per tradition – and by that I mean an arbitrary rule I made up just last year – this blog only awards a Top Dozen so as much as it pains me to do so, I’ll have to leave six films off the list. Ask me on a different day and these honourable mentions can swap places with any of the films in the bottom six of my top dozen. No matter the placement, I love all these films and I’ll be going back to them in the future. And if you haven’t had the chance to see any of them yet, I really hope I can encourage you to do so.

Honourable Mentions
Miss Bala (dir. Gerardo Naranjo), Young Adult (dir. Jason Reitman), Weekend (dir. Andrew Haigh), The Skin I Live in (dir. Pedro Almodovar), Attack the Block (dir. Joe Cornish), Tomboy (dir. Celine Sciamma)

12. Moneyball (dir. Miller)

There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap. And then there’s us.

11. Sleeping Beauty (dir. Leigh)

You are very beautiful, very talented. But we are going to make you even more beautiful, even more talented.

Visionaries: 2011's Best in Writing and Directing

Screenwriters

6. We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lynne Ramsey and Rory Stewart Kinnear based on the novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver

5. Young Adult

written by Diablo Cody

4. Moneyball

written by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian based on the novel Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

3. ALPS

written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

2. Oslo, August 31st

written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt based on the novel Le feu follet by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

1. A Separation

written by Asghar Farhadi

The writers of Kevin did the undoable by completely reshaping the tone and structure of such an unadaptable book to create a visual narrative. In Young Adult, Cody gave us a refreshingly uncompromising character with no redemptive qualities and left us with memorable quotables like psychotic prom queen bitch. In Moneyball, Zailian and Sorkin added emotional depth and charm to the layered texture of their sport story and gave us an abundance of terrific lines like fifty feet of crap. ALPS is another uniquely humorous and conceptually original entry in Lanthimos’s resume and doesn’t shy away from examining our deepest fears. Oslo, August 31st treated its hopeless protagonist with grace and told a universal story with such spatial and temporal specificity. Finally, A Separation has a focused but multi-faceted narrative that illuminates the social constructs of Iran with utmost subtlety. It also features an ensemble of characters that deserve their own full feature. Wouldn’t one about the judge be most interesting?

Directors

Honourable Mentions
Terrence Malick (Tree of Life), Andrew Haigh (Weekend), Pedro Almodovar (The Skin I Live in)

6. Sleeping Beauty

directed by Julia Leigh

5. Melancholia

directed by Lars von Trier

4. ALPS

directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

3. A Separation

directed by Asghar Farhadi

2. Martha Marcy May Marlene

directed by Sean Durkin

1. Drive

directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

In Sleeping Beauty, Leigh shows an impeccable understanding of colours and spaces and creates tension by manipulating her elaborate mise-en-scene. Lars von Trier universalizes his internal feelings, and brings together the grandiosity of earth’s destruction and the intimacy of a wedding in his allegorical take on depression in Melancholia. Lanthimos’s formal control and confidence in ALPS reaffirm his position as an auteur with a visually distinctive voice. In A Separation, Farhadi shows once more that he is one of the world’s most capable hands in directing ensembles. That in the maze-like structure of his film, the pacing never falters is a miracle. In Martha Marcy May Marlene, there were no signs of naiveté as newcomer Sean Durkin held on tight to his careful framings and seamless transitions between past and present, and dream and reality to keep us on the edge of our seats. Finally, Nicolas Winding Refn’s pulpy, tacky, hot pink ode to Los Angeles and the cinema of the 80s in Drive has to top the list because as I wrote in my original review, the film has his fingerprints on every frame. And what a stylish film this is to have your mark on!


Previously on Best of 2011