Top 25 Films of 2011: The Top Ten

For those of you who missed my first blog I will just reiterate that if a film was released in 2011 but nominated for this year's Best Picture Oscar . So without further ado here are the Top Ten which again will be in alphabetical order.

Animal Kingdom 

And after stating my rules for the list I sort of go and break them. Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom was indeed nominated for an Oscar but as it didn't feature in the Best Picture list I've decided to include it. Another reason it's in the list is that it is a brilliant piece of work and was rightfully awarded for the brilliant supporting performance from Jacki Weaver as the sinister grandmother Smurf. Animal Kingdom is told through the eyes of 17 year old J who is forced to live with his mother's estranged family after she dies of an overdose. It becomes clear that the Cody family are a notorious crime gang led by J's monstrous Uncle Pope. The story basically comes to a head with a shocking incident about halfway through in which J has to decide whether he's on the side of the police, headed by a moustached Guy Pearce, or if he is aligned with his family. I loved everything about Animal Kingdom from the way it was filmed to the performances - Weaver in particular creating a character who accepts her sons' behaviour as long as she gets to shower them with affection. As I said earlier with Snowtown this has been a great year as far as Australian cinema is concerned and I think in particular their gritty outback scenery is a great backdrop for gripping crime dramas as has been proved multiple times in 2011.

The Artist 

I think if any of us thought twelve months ago that an almost completely silent film in black and white was one of the favourites to win the Best Picture we'd have been utterly out of our minds. But that's before Michel Hazanavicius wrote and directed this fabulously charming piece of cinema which evokes memories of pre-sound cinema. Concentrating on the fictional movie star George Valentin it shows how the advent of the talkies prevented some of the stars of the silent age from advancing in their careers. As Valentin's career is on a downward spiral we see aspiring star Peppy Miller go from strength to strength after briefly meeting George in her first feature. While The Artist doesn't really have a gritty subtext it is a lovely film with stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo really clicking sharing fabulous chemistry and looking like real movie stars. Familiar faces like John Goodman and James Cromwell are great as the movie producer and loyal chauffeur respectively but the real star of the show is Uggy the Dog as Valentin's loyal companion and one that is around at the right time to save his life. Though there are touches of A Star is Born and Sunset Boulevard, The Artist is definitely its own film full of joy and humour and more importantly an arthouse film which could appeal to the masses. When modern life is so depressing its great to see a heart-warming film like this doing so well and I for one hope it gets the Best Picture award it so richly deserves.


Drive

2011 was definitely the year of Ryan Gosling from political intrigue in The Ides of March to romantic comedy in Crazy Stupid Love he seemed to conquer every genre but it was the LA-set crime film Drive that saw him give his best performance of the year. At the start of the film Gosling's unnamed driver is an emotionally detached character who simply offers five minutes of his time as a getaway driver to criminals who are after a professional. However his world is changed when he meets his neighbour Irene, played by Carey Mulligan, and her young son that things get complicated and he starts to reveal himself to have emotions even he didn't think he possessed. Drive is very reminiscent of the moody crime films of the 1960s and 1970s and has been in particular compared to Bullitt and The Driver. Gosling's getaway driver/stuntman is a great antihero character and the actor delivers an almost muted performance which develops into something great as the film goes on. Albert Brooks, an actor known for his comic work, was brilliant in the role of the crime lord who ends up becoming the driver's enemy. Drive is incredibly violent but it is never over-the-top and always within the context of the film in addition in possesses one of the year's best soundtracks which has new music which somehow feels that it is about 25 years old. A very new film with a foot in the past, Drive combines great camerawork and set pieces with a lead performance from 2011's most consistent performer.


Poetry

Now onto a great piece of cinema from South Korea with Lee Chang-Dong's story of an elderly woman who has to care for her increasingly unruly grandson while at the same time coping with the fact that she is suffering from dementia and will soon lose her memory. Yoon Jeong-hee gives a great lead performance as Yang Mija a 66 year old woman who discovers that her grandson is one of five boys who was responsible for the gang rape of a girl who later committed suicide. While the fathers of the other boys are able to pay a share of the compensation to the girl's mother, Yang Mija is not and is still torn over whether to put the matter in the hands of the authorities. To distract herself from the real world she enlists in a poetry class and struggles to write her own poem. Poetry survives thanks to the beautiful Korean scenery that Chang-Dong creates and balances it with the harsh reality of both the grandson's crime and  her deteriorating health. The central message is that we all have a poem in all of us whether it be a beautiful one or one that reminds us of the harsh reality of our situation and while the film is not always easy to watch it captures the audience from beginning to end thanks to a great script and an even greater central performance.


Senna 

As you can see in the first part 2011 has an excellent year for documentary films from Inside Job to Armadillo to Cave of Forgotten Dreams a number of great directors have bought films dealing with a number of subject matters. But it was Asif Kapadia's film about the life and untimely death of three time Formula One Champion Ayrton Senna. Obviously going into this film I knew how it was going to end but that's about all I knew as I'm not a big fan of motor racing, or sports in general, therefore I wasn't expecting to enjoy it very much. But Kapadia painted a picture of a complicated man, born in a deprived area of Brazil his skill at his sport meant that he could use his money to improve the area. As well as Senna's life story the film told of the inner-workings of the F1 world full of wealthy brand owners and sponsors willing to buy people's favour. Before the tragic finale the main story told was Senna's rivalry with fellow driver Alain Prost which was present on and off the track. Everything was put together perfectly from the race footage to the talking heads to the soundtrack and this was a film that wasn't just a documentary but a great story. As someone who doesn't know about Formula One I thought it explained the sport well and more than that I felt I'd got to know the man which is a testament to Kapdia's film as well as the captivating Senna himself.

A Separation 

As someone who has studied Iranian film in great depth it was great to see a film like Asghar Farhadi's A Separation which depicts modern day Tehran and the stigmas attached to Iranian society. It sees a couple wanting to end their marriage after fourteen years as the wife Simin wants to leave husband Nadir as he refuses to leave Iran and his father who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The couple argue about who their eleven year old daughter should be with, with her initially wanting to stay with her father and grandfather but her mother slowly changing her mind as the film goes on. Nadir then hires a poor woman to be his father's carer but gets annoyed when his father his left on his own and is accused of pushing her by her angry father. A Separation deals with themes of how much one's social status defines how much people believe their story it also looks at the themes of divorce in a culture as strict as the one in Iran. While Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi are both great in the leads it is young Sarina Farhadi as the couple's daughter who is the star of the show as a character who starts to learn that her parents aren't as innocent as she first thought. More than anything else Iranian cinema is about realism and  A Separation almost feels like we are spying on a real family and the ambiguous ending lets the audience decide how the story ultimately ends and that's one of its best qualities.



The Skin I Live In 

Pedro Alomodvar took a break from working with Penelope Cruz this year and the result was this tense revenge thriller about sex and passion. Antonio Banderas starred as Robert Ledgard a plastic surgeon who was working on a new form of artificial skin but who let his personal life get in the way of his work and ends up using his skills as surgeon to a devastating effect. Saying any more than that would ruin the film for anyone who is yet to see this masterpiece which was full of twists and multi-layered characters. Anyone who has seen an Almodovar film knows that they aren't just about one thing but here the main theme seems to be how we define ourselves whether it be by our profession, our relationships or our gender. Banderas is absolutely great in the lead role and it's good to see him playing something outside voicing a computer animated cat it's a very hard role to play but he does exceptionally well. Any film that features a woman in a perfected skin suit fighting with a slightly thuggish man dressed as a tiger is Okay with me and The Skin I Live In combines bizarre plotlines with believable characters and realistic motives for the extraordinary things they do. For me this is possibly Almodovar's best film since All About My Mother which I completely adore. 

Super 8 

Another one people are seemingly split on some people thought it was only okay or detested it but for me Super 8 was another film, along with Hugo, that rejuvenated the flagging genre of the classic family film. JJ Abrams' 1970's set movie about a group of young friends making a zombie film was essentially a love letter to the film's producer Steven Spielberg. The kids against the authorities storyline seems to have been taken straight out of E.T. while the mysterious goings on in the small town of Lilian also draws comparisons to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Though the alien story is the film's central mystery what drew most of us to the film was the relationships between the kids namely Joel Courtney's Joe who has just lost his mother and Elle Fanning's Alice the lost fragile girl who is the object of all the boy's affections. The young actors in the film are just superb and make their film-making endeavours believable as the town members get more and more paranoid as dogs start to disappear and town members go missing. While the ending may be a bit of a letdown what comes before is so great that it doesn't really matter for me this was the best purely entertaining film that I saw at the cinema all year. 


Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 

Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In was one of my favourite films a couple of years back and now he returns with an adaptation of John Le Carre's classic cold war thriller. Gary Oldman was seemingly made to play the lead of George Smiley a sort of distant character who goes into semi-retirement but is talked out when he asked to discover which member of the MI6 team is in fact working for the Soviets. During his investigation Smiley uncovers some secrets and our initial ideas about certain characters are changed throughout the piece. What I really liked about this film was its moodiness, something Alfredson had already demonstrated in Let the Right One In, with all the smoky meeting rooms and dank exterior scenes adding to the feel of the whole thing. Oldman is brilliant in the lead role in a cast of great British male actors and Kathy Burke stand-outs for me were Tom Hardy's slightly shifty Tarr and Mark Strong's illusive Jim. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a film which let its characters speak volumes without actually saying anything a film about men who have been sworn to a life of much secrecy and in some cases are wondering why. A truly spectacular piece of work and another masterpiece to prove that Alfredson is one of the best directors working today. 

We Need to Talk About Kevin  

I wish we could end this blog on a high but instead it's a film about the lack of connection between a mother and a child that ultimately leads to a fatal incident, that ends the blog. Some thought Lionel Shraver's original book of the same name was unfilmable but then director Lynne Ramsay came along and proved everybody wrong. The film though is really Tilda Swinton's show as she plays Eva a woman who is being persecuted for something her son has done, again I don't want to give anything away, and is living in the shadow of tragedy. Most of the film is shot in flashback as we see Kevin's birth and Eva's struggle to get on with him as he goads her while constantly favouring his father played by John C Reilly. My favourite parts of the film were probably those set in the modern day with Eva working in a trashy travel agent where the ceiling fans are blowing posters off the wall and the Christmas party is a particularly cringe-worthy affair. But I feel Ramsay has done everything right here and I did empathise with Eva throughout the film and Ezra Miller was also electrifying as the teenage Kevin. There's too much to praise her from Ramsay's direction through to Johnny Greenwood's score everything was absolutely great and I'm just hoping someone gets some recognition come awards season.

Alright that's your lot, 2011 is finished but 2012 is now upon us and if you go to http://filmsof2012.blogspot.com/ you will discover what my next project is all about. See you on the other side people.