The 8 Ball 01.24.12: The Top 8 Films of 2011

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 01.24.2012

From X-Men: First Class and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to Hugo, Warrior and more, 411's Jeremy Thomas completes his look at the top 16 films of 2011 with #8 through #1!

Welcome, one and all, to the 8 Ball in the Movie Zone! I'm your host Jeremy Thomas and as always, we will be tackling a topic and providing you the top eight selections of that particular category. Keep in mind that this list is meant to be my personal opinion and not a definitive list. You're free to disagree; you can even say my list is wrong, but stating that an opinion is "wrong" is just silly. With that in mind, let's get right in to it!




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Top 16 Movies of 2011: #8 - #1

It's part two of the list that started last week. Are you sick of "Best of" and "Worst of" lists for last year? I bet you are. Worry not; this is my last one before moving ahead. We took at look at #16 – 9 last week, and this week we count down the final eight. Let's get right to it!

Caveat: I did not include documentaries because I did not get a chance to see many (and rarely do). If I were including them, Paradise Lost 3 and We Were Here are two off the top of my head that would have been top contenders. Also, there are several foreign films I wanted to see but couldn't such as A Separation and The Flowers of War. In terms of domestically-release films, the only ones I didn't get to see by the time I started this list last week that I really wanted to were The Artist, My Week With Marilyn and Take Shelter. Otherwise I'm confident I saw most of the ones which had a good shot of making the list.

Just Missing The Cut

The Ides of March, Source Code, Carnage

The First Eight

16: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
15: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
14: Thor
13: Win Win
12: Beginners
11: Super 8
10: The Tree of Life
9: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

#8: X-Men: First Class





When I did my mid-year Top 10 list, X-Men: First Class was ranked #1. Six months later, it's ranked #8 which says a lot about the movies above it, because I do love this film. And to be fair, this prequel to the X-Men films had a lot going against it, from the substandard nature of the X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine to the abysmally bad first bits of promo art we say. But somehow, I kept hope and no small amount of that was because of the cast and the director, all of whom delivered in very big ways to make this the best film of the franchise thus far. Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman's script does what Last Stand failed to do in juggling multiple new characters without making any of them feel superfluous or unimportant, and it made what I thought was the wise move of trying to be a good film over a film that was faithful to the first four. There are breaks in continuity but they aren't nearly as severe as some make them out to be and they're minor nitpicks in what is an otherwise excellent film. The cast almost uniformly delivers; James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender in particular continue their rises to stardom as Xavier and Magneto while Jennifer Lawrence is fabulous as Mystique and has a great chemistry not only with McAvoy and Fassbender but with Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy. The film has a strong visual style that fits in with the 1960s era and the story gives us every opportunity to appreciate the characters we've already come to know and love. There is a short list of the best comic book adaptations out there, and this belongs on it, as well as one of the best of the year.


#7: Warrior



I know that this film has some detractors, who claim that it's only a good movie if you don't know a lot about MMA. That's true I suppose, but by the same token Moneyball is only a good movie if you don't get so hung up about the specifics of sabermetrics and The Godfather is only a good film if you aren't that familiar with the Italian mob. Hell, I'm sure there's drug kingpin out there watching Scarface and thinking "Man, when I was the king of Miami it was nothing like that...so unrealistic!" Listen, if I want to watch as real a depiction as I can on a subject, I'll watch a documentary. When I want to be entertained and see a great story, I'll watch a film and Warrior is both entertaining and a great story, not to mention an incredibly well-acted and directed one. Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte all play flawed individuals from the same family, but they make those flawed people very sympathetic as well. We care about these guys and while it should be a given what's going to happen up until the last fight, director Gavin O'Connor and the screenplay he co-wrote with Cliff Dorfman and Anthony Tambakis manages to keep you on the edge of your seat doubting. It's a great underdog movie as well as a well-made family drama, with some thrillingly-shot fight scenes to boot.


#6: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy



If you will remember from my Top 8 Spy Thrillers, I am a big fan of a good, cerebral espionage potboiler and I was very much looking forward to this film. Luckily despite high expectations, I wasn't disappointed as director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) delivered a moody, tense film that manages to be a great spy film without requiring a lot of action scenes and effects shots. The story is one spy fans are likely knowledgeable of, with Gary Oldman taking the role of retired spy George Smiley who is brought back in to investigate a potential mole in 1970s London. Oldman nails this role to a T and he's surrounded by one of the more impressive supporting casts seen in quite a while. Benedict Cumberbatch is destined to become a major star with roles in Star Trek and The Hobbit coming up, not to mention his work on Sherlock, and he does a great job here as Smiley's assistant. Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, Toby Jones and Tom Hardy all turn in exceptional performances and the script by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan takes an incredibly dense story and boils it down to a story that plays well and moves along briskly without ever seeming like it leaves the audience behind. It's a great spy drama and one that definitely needs to be seen.


#5: The Descendants



The Descendants was the last movie to make the top 16 that I saw, having caught it not long after the #3 choice. I had high hopes for it based on all the critical love it's gotten, but they were tempered a touch because while I very much like Alexander Payne's Sideways, I do think it got a bit more love than it deserved. The Descendants, on the other hand, is getting the exact amount of love that it deserves and it is easily Payne's best work, not to mention George Clooney's. Clooney has become one of the top actors of his generation and he tops all his work with a refreshingly honest and real portrayal in what could have been a very over-the-top melodrama. Shailene Woodley is great as the oldest daughter and much of the supporting cast is equally good, even Matthew Lillard in a smaller role. What I love about this story is that it feels real. There's a bit of movie worldness to it in the set-up, sure. But this isn't a neat, clean movie where everything gets fixed in a neat package by the end. Things stay messy and while there are emotional journeys and epiphanies, things are still messy and issues unresolved by the end. That's life, and that's death...that's how it works. You have to respect Payne's honesty here and the support he gets from his cast and crew makes this a must-see.


#4: 50/50



50/50 was undoubtedly one of the best surprises of the year, a movie that was funny, tragic and above all, a real and moving depiction of a young man's battle with cancer. Between this and The Descendants, we certainly got a some excellent films about loss and dealing with grief. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been building a reputation for a long time as one of the best guys working in film, particularly in terms of limited release films, and his work as Adam is easily the best of his career. He goes on a harrowing emotional journey as he's diagnosed with cancer, his girlfriend cheats on him, friends he meets at the hospital die and he gets closer to his own demise, yet somehow this journey isn't the melodramatic tale that it could be. Levitt establishes an immediate chemistry with the whole cast and thus makes their performances better by comparison. That supporting cast is good on their own though; Seth Rogen is better than he's ever been as the supportive friend, Bryce Dallas Howard isn't afraid to be hated in her role and Angelica Huston adds both humor and gravitas as Adam's overbearing mother. This is a film that shocked me; I had mild hopes but I didn't expect it to be so good. I can promise that Gordon-Levitt and director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) will not surprise me again; I will expect nothing less than the best from them.


#3: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo



Man, I really wanted to hate the idea of this when it was first announced. Like many people, I think Hollywood's almost sociopathic need to remake anything and everything is a very bad thing indeed, and I especially hate when they remake a recent foreign film rather than take the chance of spending money on distributing the original because American hates subtitles. And when a remake to 2009's Swedish film was announced, I was not particularly pleased. Then David Fincher was reported to be directing it, and I was kind of annoyed that I couldn't hate it automatically. Fincher has done great things with films that should have been disasters. The Social Network was a movie about Facebook for Christ's sake, and Fight Club was a book that a lot of people considered unfilmable. So if anyone was going to make a great film here, it would be Fincher and what do you know, he did. It's very interesting to compare Fincher's take on the material with Niels Arden Oplev's version; both are fantastic and it's difficult to say which I like more. At the moment I like Fiincher's but it's fresh in my mind and that could be why. The performances from the leads in both are great; Rooney Mara transforms herself into a performance that deserves an Oscar but sadly probably won't even get a nomination while Daniel Craig strips some of his usual confidence away to play a bit more hesitant of a character in Blomkvist. The ending was a turn off for some but I actually liked it as it was obviously a curveball but not one that seemed entirely implausible. This is a film that hooks you in from the incredible credits sequence (seen above in lieu of a trailer) all the way through. It's a bleak and harrowing but beautiful film and one I'll enjoy watching again and again.


#2: Drive



Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is one of the most unfairly marginalized films of the season. It's a movie that everyone seems to like but no one is quite ready to love. Even Quentin Tarantino gave it the "Nice Try" award (literally). I for one do absolutely love it and have no problem with saying that, and I will be pissed when it fails to garner more than a perfunctory Oscar nod or two. Refn's tale of a getaway driver forced to take a stand when he's drawn into a situation involving mobsters, hit men, ex-cons and double crosses may not be the deepest film. There's no deep bond between a man and his favorite animal, Nazis don't show up, there are no terminal diseases or grant metaphorical understandings. That doesn't mean it's not a great film. As much as The Artist is a love letter to the silent film era or Pulp Fiction is Tarantino's tribute to the pulpy films of the 1970s, Drive is Refn's homage to his own favorite films and the utter coolness of those films bleeds through into this. It's a strange sort of flick admittedly; it's fairly slow paced at times but is punctuated by sudden and extreme violence. Recognizable stars are used and quickly killed off, adding to the shock value. But it all fits together into a near-perfect piece of movie-making and Ryan Gosling anchors it without having to say barely anything. To make a great movie-watching experience out of all of that is the mark of a great film, even if its greatest quality is its essence of coolness.


#1: Hugo



A lot of people are showing The Artist a ton of love and don't get me wrong; having seen it over the past week it is a great film. But for my money, when it comes to my favorite film of 2011 that celebrates Hollywood's beginnings it has to be Hugo. Being a movie lover, you can't be terribly shocked that I placed Hugo on the list or even at #1. I know I'm not the only one who did a head scratch when I heard that Scorsese was tackling what was initially described in reports as a children's adventure novel for his next film; it's not the kind of thing that you would expect from the guy who made Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Shutter Island and so on. And to be fair, it's less of a children's adventure novel than it is a film about the love of classic movies that just happens to be family-friendly. The truth is that after seeing this film I can understand why Scorsese made it; it's exactly the kind of material you would expect Scorsese to be passionate about in that it reveres the origins of film. What's ingenious about it is that it does so in such a way as to make the love of silent film and the classic era of film-making infectious. Scorsese has long been an advocate for film preservation and this can be seen almost as a mission statement in that respect. But it's more than just a blaring advertisement for AFI and the Film Preservation Society; it's also a wonderful tale about a young man on a quest to connect with his lost father and an old man who finds himself on a course that will connect him with a past long-thought dead. The performances are uniformly excellent from the likes of Ben Kingsley, Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Christopher Lee and Asa Butterfield; even Sasha Baron Cohen does well in his role. This is a film crafted with delicate care and powerful sentiment that yet manages to avoid being schmaltzy or sentimental and it certainly deserves to be in the top film of the year, in my book at least.

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Current Doctor


Current Series/Season: Series 2 (2006)
Episodes Watched: 477
Last Serial Completed: Tooth and Claw - The Doctor and Rose shoot for 1979 but end up in 1879, where they become wrapped up in a plot against Queen Victoria involving warrior monks, the Empire of the Wolf and the Torchwood estate.
Surviving Episodes Remaining: 147

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From Guest#6677:
OK, Thor gets a pass but MI:GP and other movies I have never heard of go over HP and the DH part 2?? Really? I cannot wait to see the top 8 movies and they better be good ones.

Well with all due respect 6677, if you have not heard of a movie how can you say it's not better than the ones you have heard of? "Best" and "Most widely marketed" are not synonymous terms and considering that Beginners in particular is getting a ton of awards attention thanks to Christopher Plummer (and Win Win is for the screenplay), it's not like these are films that no one has heard of, they just slipped under your radar. Anyway, thanks for the comment and I hope you liked the rest of the list!


From Guest#6044:
mission impossible sucked big time, but I can see you liked it since most of the u.s think the cold war is still going on...

From The Reaper:
MI:GP in 9th you are kidding right,Thor was better,and harry potter was even better.but as this is your personal list and you feel the need to pander to BS like what Tom cruise spits out(playing a cocky....nevermind)you do realise the cold war is over...

the Ids of march was 20 times better then Mission been there done that impossible.

I don't understand what the Cold War has to do with this, and certainly not enough to be commented on twice. Obviously the Cold War is over but that doesn't mean that Russia would just be okay with things if an attack on them was made to look like the US was involved. At any rate I respect your opinions, though you need a better argument than "It was bad" if you want to say others. Thanks for the comment!


From Premo Jure:
Wow, blew your load right out of the gate...

Ehh, I didn't think so. There were more blockbusters in the first eight perhaps, but it's not like #8 - #1 was just a bunch of unknown films.


From Big Dirty:
I saw "Tree of Life" this weekend and have to say that i didnt get it...I understand the premise and what the narrative and director are trying to do. I agree the acting is very good and the presentation wonderful but the movie is difficult.

What was the directors end point and how exactly did we get there?

There is a good story in the middle and Brad Pitt does the most honest acting of his career. maybe the relation between the father and the son hits too close to home.

I think its a little too abstract to garner any true recognition. The film is very experimental.

We have a seen with dinosours???? I understand why but still....Why?

We have space and time but why with this family??

just my feelings. i dont know too many peopl who have seen it.

The director's end point was (and I am presuming here based on my own interpretation, I don't claim to know Malick's mind) to explore the idea of grace--charity, mercy unconditional love and the more passive yet kinder traits in human nature--versus of nature--instinct, aggression, ambition. I don't think Malick was stating a particular point about which is better or whatnot, and I think that's part of what makes it challenging is that we're left to find the answers ourselves and Malick only gives us some examples of how grace can win out over nature or how nature is needed so grace is possible. I definitely think that Tree of Life is a film that will not be for everyone--and to be clear, by that I don't mean that you either "get it" or you don't, but that it just won't be the kind of film that works for everyone. But it did work for me and even for people who it didn't work for, you have to respect the skill put into the film and the individual elements of it.


From Ryan Haseldine:
MI 4 was a fantastic movie and it was definitely better than HP & Thor

From The Great Capt. Smooth:
Glad to see Potter, Thor, Super 8, and MI:4 on the list.

From The Big Fat F*g:
For those slamming the list, it's not his list for "Best Motion Picture of the Year." It's a list of his personal favorites. Remove the sticks from your arses.

The argument that no one will ever remember, BFF. Thanks for bringing it up though!


From Andrew Barbarash:
I thought Harry Potter was the most spectacular movie of the year... it was mesmorizing to watch, it really did feel like an epic conclusion... I'm astounded such average films like MI and Thor got ahead of it... both those movies I forgot the moment I left the cinema.

It is opinion based so there isn't necessarily a right or wrong but the general agreement from most people would be that Harry Potter was one of the best movies of 2011 let alone not making a top 15.

I agree with you that Harry Potter was one of the most loved films of the year, and I did love it. Did it make my top 15? Obviously it just missed out, but keep in mind that the difference between it the films close to it on my list are razor thin. Catch me on a different day I might have organized them slightly different. The point is that wherever it ranks on my list, it is in the top 10% of all movies I saw that came out in 2011 and that does make it one of the best films of the year, so we're all right.


From Guest#3186:
MI4 was fantastic, only an immature twat who thinks all film should be deadly dark and serious to be good wouldn't like it. Harry potter dh 2 was excellent but its still only half a film. Thor is massively overrated...and probably one of the most dull superhero flicks Ive ever seen.

From Guest#6759:
I guess Green Latern was awesome in your opinion then. GL was horrid dull and predictably stupid like Superman Returns. Marvel Comics >>> DC Comics. Although Batman series does save DC comics especially since Watchmen is lame and dull.

Okay to be fair, I don't really agree with the way that 3186 presented his argument, but 6759, you just created the singular textbook example of a straw man argument right there. No offense, but probably not your shining moment.


From APrince66:
Tucker and Dale was funny, gory, clever, fun and straight up awesome. Glad it finally got to see the light of day.

It astounds me to a degree that it almost didn't. I know Hollywood is horror-comedy shy, but really, they didn't think they could make a few bucks off this one? I wonder about studio executives sometimes.


From WTF:
Gotta love the nerds ripping MI 4 just to be different even though critics and most people raved about it.

They very well may have not liked it. We all have our tastes and movies we hate than everyone else loves (and vice versa). I spoke to someone once who thought Casablanca was an incredibly overrated and ultimately bad film. Sure, I called him a blasphemer and we may or may not have gone to pistols at dawn, but it's his opinion and he has (or had) the right to carry that to his grave (which may or may not be a shallow river bed with the words "BOGART RULES" etched into a nearby tree).

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And that will do it for us this week! Join me next week when we'll talk a look at the Top 8 2012 Oscar Snubs. Until then, have a good week and don't forget to read the many other great columns, news articles and more here at 411mania.com! JT out.