The Best Damn Films of 2011

What a year it was at the movies! Just reflect for a second all the places we’ve traveled together on our cinematic voyages of 2011 in that theatrical transport known as film. Alternate worlds and realities. All over the map of our own. Forward to the future. Back in time. Into the psyche. Hell, half of it being in the third dimension!

We’ve witnessed life, death, love, hate, peace, war, violence, tragedy, racism, happiness, acceptance, adversity and an overpowering, overcoming spirit in the face of it. Some with happy endings, others not. Hundreds of different stories told up there on that silver screen but all shared one similarity; they brought us together for a shared journey into the great beyond, with their storytellers as our tour guides. Here are the ten adventures I most enjoyed this year:

1. Drive

Who would have ever thought that a film about a stunt man by day/getaway driver by night (Ryan Gosling) who drives around the streets Los Angeles listening to pop music could ultimately be the violent yet oddly beautiful neo-noire masterpiece painted in ’80s pastiche that is Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive? Not to mention my favorite film of this year. I swear the parallel Gosling mania of 2011 (he’s a real hero and a real human being, you know?) had nothing to do with it!

2. The Adventures of Tintin

A prime example of what happens when you give Steven Spielberg free reign to open his imagination and let spill out on screen whatever it is that’s inside that brilliant brain of his. The Beard’s first foray into animation and 3D is what going to the movies is all about. Popcorn most definitely required.

3. Hugo

Another example of what happens when you give the keys to the kingdom (pun intended) of new school filmmaking to one of its old school auteurs. In Martin Scorsese’s self-reflexive ode to the magic of filmmaking, The Brows proves that he still deserves to be king in the modern age of movies.

4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

When a film gives you a new emotional understanding of one of our country’s most tragic events, it’s a feat. But when you don’t have a dry eye throughout the entire run time, it’s another. Stephen Daldry’s exploration of one boy’s (the young but remarkable and perspicacious Thomas Horn) pain and subsequent attempt at assimilating his father’s (Tom Hanks) death on 9/11 is the year’s best tear jerker for sure. One that is extremely emotional and incredibly insightful.

5. The Artist

Yet another film about filmmaking itself, Michel Hazanavicius’ silent, black and white picture about an old Hollywood actor trying to cope with the new innovation of sound reminds us that no matter what new “gimmicks” may come along, it all comes down to storytelling. If you’re wondering why a silent, black and white film in 2011 could be so beloved, well, that’s a testament to Mr. Hazanavicius’ ability to tell a story.

6. Attack the Block

With not one but two films out this year that aimed to stroke our nostalgia for ’80s Spielbergian adventure flicks (see also: #10), the directorial debut from writer/director Joe Cornish (the writer of #2) had me busting out my Goonies bedsheets and feeling like a kid again, back at the age where, say, taking down an alien horde with my friends to protect our neighborhood or hunting for buried treasure seemed more real than reel. Thanks for the walk down Memory Lane!

7. Captain America: The First Avenger

Talk about ’80s adventure flicks, Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger was equal parts Indiana Jones (which coincidentally Johnston did visual effects for) and The Rocketeer (which coincidentally Johnston directed). Not to mention, that it proved to be the best adaptation thus far of comic book popcorn fun on screen.

8. Shame

To get inside the head of a sex addict is no easy task, but director Steve McQueen, along with the film’s star Michael Fassbender, successfully provided a glass house with no stones in the sense of what battling with that affliction is like. Painted in a very raw, honest, and poetic portrait. Just, whatever you do, don’t go see it with your mom. You’ll know a new definition of shame.

9. 50/50

Cancer is its own ugly beast, rarely tamed on screen. Never before have we seen the emotional journey of the disease and its effects on a young person. That was until this year, with the poignant and comedic semi-autobiographical film from writer Will Reiser and director Jonathan Levine starring indie boy wonder Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a man in his late twenties battling a rare form of testicular cancer. If 50/50 showed us anything, it was that you have to have balls and a sense of humor to face life’s worst.

10. Super 8

It is wholly apparent in everything JJ Abrams does that he is completely inspired by the film’s of Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment. These being the same films that I grew up glued to the screen over, ruining VHS after VHS due to overuse. So it should be no surprise that Abrams’ own homage to E.T., The Goonies, Gremlins, and other like films rounds out my top ten of the year. After all, those are the very films that caused me to first fall in love with movies. Super 8 was the type of movies that reminded me of that time in my life and just why I fell in love with the magical world of motion pictures in the first place.

10 Honorable Mentions (in no particular order…unless you count alphabetical):

Contagion, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Help, Hesher, I Saw the Devil, Like Crazy, Moneyball, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Source Code, Warrior

Side note: There are a few films ranked by my peers as the year’s best that I unfortunately did not have a chance to see before the composition of this list (War Horse, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Descendants, Take Shelter, Margin Call, Melancholia, Midnight in Paris and Submarine just to name a few). I do have a feeling that I will be kicking myself later on for the exclusion of at least a couple of these.

What were your favorite films of 2011? List ’em below! Read more in this week’s cover story.