Films of the Year 2011

Here is the list of my top 20 favourite films of the year 2011

20. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike)

Here's a great surprise from Japan from the director of Audition. Opening with a brutal scene of Harakiri (samurai suicide), thirteen assassins are called in to overthrow an incredibly ruthless lord who wishes to bring the nation back to a land of war and terror. There are scenes from this film that remind us of the great Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and the last hour of this film is a astounding battle scene with some incredibly bloody action scenes. It also happens to be a remake of a 1963 film of the same title. It is without a doubt the best action film of the year.

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19. A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
The new film by the great Canadian director David Cronenberg (one of my personal favourite directors) is not your usual Cronenberg film, as it is heavy on the dialogue but as always, it is very intriguing. It's set pre WWI and is based on the agitated relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender, one of the most exciting new actors) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and the relationship Jung's patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley).

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18. Trust (David Schwimmer)

As David Schwimmer (Ross from Friends) has just become a father in mid 2011, he has said that his greatest fear (for his daughter) is that of online sexual predators. In this film we see Clive Oven and Catherine Keener deal with their young teenage daughter becoming a victim of an online sexual predator. Now the father (Owen) is so completely filled with anger and voilent thoughts that he can't even think straight.

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17. Margin Call (J.C. Chandor)
It's 2008, on the brink of the financial crisis in wall street in an un-named investment firm where 80% of the staff is being laid-off, including top risk analyst Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) who is very rudely ordered to leave the premises. Only before he leaves, he hands a flash drive to a brilliant young analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and also warns him of the substance. Later it is revealed to him with the info of the flash drive that the company is broke, due to a few bodus trades in the real-estate field. Now it's a battle of survival as we see how the company can survive this with a brief, ruthless and excellent performance from the great Jeremy Irons. It's a terrific debut film from writer/director J.C. Chandor.

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16. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

In his European tour, Woody Allen has a few great hits like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but he's also had his share of misses. Now he returns with his best film in years with a beautifully written and directed film. We have a young American couple (Gil & Inez) who are in Paris on holiday with Inez's rich conservative parents. Whilst Inez is happy to go back to California, Gil wants to write novels in Paris and dreams of Paris in the 1920s with all the great writers of the time. Then one day, Gil gets drunk and wanders around Paris, only something very odd a magical happens at Midnight... in Paris.

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15. Blackthorn (Mateo Gil)
Now here's a surprise, a western about Butch Cassidy set in Bolivia, 20 years after he disappeared in 1908 (rather than die along side his longtime partner the Sundance Kid as portrayed in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). In this fictionalised version, he's very much alive as an ageing man living under the name of James Blackthorne. He also learns that Etta Place (his long time companion) has passed on and he finally wishes to return to the America, despite his exile. Only there are quite a few complications along the way. It's also a terrific performance by Sam Shepard in a film that was originally released for iTunes and then into the cinemas a month later.

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14. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)
Have you ever watched a film that by the time it ended, you felt like hugging someone? Director of The Visitor brings us a new film about an average man in an average neighbourhood with average problems. He's stressing out about money, work and a team he coaches on the side at school. When all of a sudden he stumbles upon an opportunity to make some easy money by being a "guardian" of an old man who has dementia. Only the only complication arises when a teenage boy claiming to be the old man's grandson arrives at his doorstep, who also appears to not want to return to his mother.

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13. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
Remember the film Outbreak from 1995 with Dustin Hoffman? Well forget it, here is a true and frighteningly realistic film (with an outstanding cast) about an outbreak that starts out with a businesswoman in Hong Kong who travels back to her home in Minneapolis. Only she returns with what seems to be a cold, and eventually succumbs to a severe seizure and is rushed to the hospital by her husband. However she does not survive the night and the husband is beyond stunned. But this is only the beginning, as this epidemic begins to spread at an outrageous level across the globe.

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12. Beginners (Mike Mills)
How do you deal with your mom dying, and six months later you learn that your dad is gay and has been all through his 44 years of marriage (with his wife in the know) and is later diagnosed with terminal cancer himself and has a boyfriend? Well Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor) mostly feels sorry for his father (Christopher Plummer, in one of his all time greatest performances) for having to lie to himself all those years, but also understands the distance between his father and mother all those years. He also realizes what a profound influence it had on him and his personal relationships.

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11. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
Based on the 2003 novel 'Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game', the film stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who in 2002, above all odds changed the game of baseball forever. With the major small budjet of the Athletics, Billy reinvented the system of how they build a team of players. It also marks the first nomination role for Jonah Hill who plays Peter Brand, the economics graduate who came up with the idea. It's probably the best baseball film out there.

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10. Terri (Azazel Jacobs)

The most honest film of the year has to be Terri, which sometimes is so honest we shy away from it. It stars Jacob Wysocki as Terri in a star making performance who plays an over weight 15 year-old depressed student in a small town who is struggling with life. We also have the always great to watch John C. Reilly who plays the assistant principle in Terri's high school who is unconventionally helping Terri along the way, whilst dealing with his own life.

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09. The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
George Clooney is Matt King who lives in Hawaii and has inherited a lot of land from his family. He is also on the verge of making a major deal with the land and is also dealing with the fact that his wife is in a coma due to a boating accident. Now he learns that his wife was cheating on him and his older daughter Alexandra knew about this, which is why she constantly argued with her mom. So of course Matt has to deal with taking care of his two daughters by himself, which proves to be a disaster, and is also after some answers with his wife and her lover along with the pressure of the land deal on his shoulder.

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08. 50/50 (Jonathan Levine)
Probably the most under-appreciated film of the year. Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is 27 years-old and learns that he has cancer. His girlfriend is on board with him (or so it seams) and is best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) is there with him all the way. His mother is of course beyond terrified for him and this makes it difficult for Adam to talk to her and his father has Alzheimers. He also begins to see a therapist who is very young and new to the job but Adam seems to be taking all this well, or is he?

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07. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
Arguably the best foreign film of the year is from Iran. An Iranian couple are facing some major difficulties as the wife files for divorce, not because she doesn't love him anymore, but because he won't leave the country with her. She wishes to move to a better country so that their child can have a better future, only the husband won't leave his father who has severe Alzheimers. However an even bigger issue arrises when the husband hires a woman (who is deeply religious and simple minded) to take care of his father.

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06. Rango (Gore Verbinski)
Rango is as Roger Ebert called it "...some kind of a miracle". It's an outrageously entertaining film for all ages, it's very funny and it's very smart. Voiced by Johnny Depp as Rango, he plays a chameleon pet who falls off a moving car in the middle of nowhere. Now he's lost and eventually stumbles upon a lawless town in the wild west that is in desperate need of a sherif. The film seems to be in love with the western genre and we fall in love with it, it is by far the best animated film of the year and Johnny Depp's funniest film.

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05. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
This is by far one of the most beautiful, artistic and poetic of films I have ever seen. It may not be flawless, nor is it Malick's best film but it is a jaw dropping experience. We see a family in the 1950s in Texas where the father (Brad Pitt) can be seen as the way of nature, and the mother (Jessica Chastain) as the way of grace. We see Sean Penn (in future scenes) who was clearly one of the children of Pitt and Chastain and witnesses the loss of innocence.

There is no real way to explain this film other than it is about everything and begins in the beginning of time and matter, showing images of the origins of the universe and the beginning of life on earth. There are many scenes in this film that for me did not work (mainly the dinosaur scene) but non the less, it is an original and magnificent piece of film which at times even reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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04. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)
From the brilliant writer of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the director of Let the Right One In, comes one of the greatest cold war dramas ever put on the silver screen. Gary Oldman is George Smiley, and he is forced out of retirement to find a mole (soviet agent) within the MI6 who has been there for years. Originally a seven-part series for the BBC with Alec Guiness as George Smiley, now brought back to life in this top notch espionage thriller, where the suspense is heart-pounding, the cast is brilliant and the outcome is far from predictable.

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03. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
Hugo is a film by my favourite director, Martin Scorsese, and it is a family film. It contains no elements of a typical Scorsese film, no mob, no streets (New York particularly), no religion and no Italian-American subject. However what drew Scorsese to this project is the love of Cinema and the fact that he has been a fan of 3D since he was a kid and wanted to make a real film of it.

It's about a boy who loses his father whilst rebuilding an automaton. Only his father dies and he believes that if he can bring the automaton back to life, he will receive a message from his father. Now he's on a search for the missing key to the automaton and with the help of a young girl, he succeeds. Only in the process, they stumbles upon another message, from a forgotten master from the dawn of cinema, Georges Méliès. It's a beautiful film like a love letter to cinema with wonderful references to classic films like Safety Last, Under the Roofs of Paris and the most obvious, A Trip to the Moon.

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02. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
Here we have the Academy Award winner (and deservedly so) of the best picture award. It is one beautiful piece of cinema and you can see the love of cinema in every scene of this silent film. Yes it's a silent film and it's also funny, sad, brilliant and wonderful. We see George Valentin (who is loosely based on legendary silent film star Douglas Fairbanks) played wonderfully by Jean Dujardin, at the top of his game in 1927, just before sound is invented with The Jazz Singer. However when sound arrives, Valentine is not keen on the switch and of course is slowly forgotten, as Hollywood makes room for the new kids in town.

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01. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Cinema is changing and loosing some of it's greatness. We're getting more 3D films (which is a waste of time and money, except for a few exceptions like Avatar or Hugo), more Computer-generated imagery and less art. It's as though there's no more room for the Steve McQueens, Paul Newmans and James Deans. But then out of nowhere, came Drive.

Like an unstoppable force of nature, this brilliantly dark neo-noir came to us as though from the late sixties or seventies with amazing direction from Refn (Pusher) and the absolute coolness of Ryan Gosling as the driver. He's a hollywood stuntman, a mechanic and a getaway driver, you give him five minutes and he is yours for those five minutes in whatever situation. Only one day he decides to help a neighbour out who's in a bad spot with mobster Bernie Rose (played superbly by Albert Brooks who is robbed of a nomination) and things get way out of hand. It's my favourite film of the year and a modern masterpiece.

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Click here for other Big Thumbs Up of 2011