Was 2011 a particularly great year for movies? Hard to say – there were a handful of great movies, a number of very good ones, and then there was Jack and Jill. (Sigh.) But considering that every year in film demonstrates a broad spectrum of quality – and since both Brett Ratner and Steven Soderbergh put out movies this year, we’re talking really broad – the only way to truly determine how good of a year it’s been is to look at the best of the best. In this sense, while 2011 didn’t quite reach the artistic peaks of, say, 1999 (Magnolia and Fight Club and Eyes Wide Shut yo!), it gave us genuinely compelling new releases from old masters (Malick, Scorsese, etc.), as well as some very strong debut features.

Having said all that, here is our roundup of the best of the year in movies, conveniently organized for you with reasonably arbitrary rankings.

10. Moneyball: There’s nothing flashy about Moneyball, but Bennett Miller’s naturalistic style infuses the material with such a sense of lived-in melancholy that it’s hard not to be compelled by the plight of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt, giving a great movie star performance). The genre-specific schmaltz of the baseball flick is here replaced by a narrative of missed opportunities and second chances that would be right at home in a 1970s character study, to the extent that in context, it makes perfect sense for the film’s climax not to be at some big game, but rather shared in a clubhouse office between two unlikely allies.

9. Shame: Shame is a film about intimacy, though not necessarily in the way you may think. Rather, the crux of Shame is not the physical intimacy that Michael Fassbender’s Brandon drowns himself in, but the emotional intimacy that he is incapable of supplementing it with. For all of the sleek surfaces and beautiful faces that director Steve McQueen uses to populate this film’s vision of New York, that emptiness of the soul is what makes it such a compellingly bleak experience.

8. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Much like how Tomas Alfredson’s last film Let the Right One In used a story about vampires to explore one boy’s loneliness, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy atmospherically deconstructs alienation and loyalty in the guise of a distinctly 70s-set British espionage thriller. For both its complexity and its style, this is a film that demands to be seen more than once – preferably in a living room rife with beige furniture and dark leather, with a glass of whiskey by your side and smoke lingering in the air.

7. Hugo: Less of a children’s adventure film and more of a personal ode to the power of cinema, Martin Scorsese’s latest film has the texture of a moving storybook, where the nighttime Parisian streets turn into a beautiful symphony of car headlights, and fluttering flakes of snow lend a constant sense of life to the air around us. For a movie about the escape of viewing the world’s magic like a moviegoer, Hugo triumphs in making the mundane indeed feel magical.

6. Young Adult: If you saw Juno and wrote off Diablo Cody for that film’s cutesy dialogue, Young Adult exists to prove that your dismissal was dead wrong. In Mavis Gary, a former high school queen bee trapped in perpetual adolescence, Cody and Charlize Theron have crafted a nasty, boozing, self-destructive, self-pitying, and thoroughly unlikeable antihero who you cannot help but relate to on some level, even as Mavis’ creators refuse to ask you to like her. This is a very dark comedy, which freely mines laughs from social discomfort and casual cruelty, yet that uncompromising sensibility, when combined with the script’s genuine emotional nuance, feels completely invigorating. It’s easily the best film Jason Reitman has ever made, and that’s not just because he gives the great Patton Oswalt a chance to stretch his considerable dramatic chops in a heartbreaking supporting performance.

5. Melancholia: In the eyes of Lars von Trier, nothing is more beautiful than the inevitable end of it all – here symbolized by a literal planet on a collision course with Earth. As Wagner ramps up on the soundtrack in the Melancholia’s gorgeous first ten minutes, and we watch in slow-motion as the world literally goes to pieces, the overpowering visceral appeal of von Trier’s perspective becomes self-evident, and the film sucks you into this world of cathartic, operatic hopelessness. And then the opening title comes up, and the movie really begins.

4. Martha Marcy May Marlene: The year’s most frightening film features very little blood or gore, but what Martha Marcy May Marlene can claim as its own is an unending sense of pervasive, paranoid dread, as echoed brilliantly in its chilling final shot. Shot like a lost drive-in flick from the early 1970s (think Texas Chainsaw in the Catskills), NYU alum Sean Durkin’s time-hopping mosaic of warped gender roles and psychological enslavement puts you into the mind of its protagonist like no other film this year. Much like Rosemary’s Baby, this is an intensely claustrophobic film where much of the tension lies in just waiting, because as the film’s structure alerts us early on, we know things are going to get nasty.

3. Attack the Block: This movie is just too goddamn fun. A perfectly constructed, genre-defying action/horror/sci-fi comedy, Joe Cornish’s debut feature is the kind of flick that is so infectiously enjoyable that it latches itself onto you, so much so that by the time film ends, you want it to start all over again so you can spend another tight and thrilling eighty-eight minutes with this incredible batch of characters. Believe, bruv.

2. The Tree of Life: You don’t watch The Tree of Life like you would a normal film. You can’t, really. Instead Terrence Malick has created a cinematic tone poem of childhood, memory, and loss that defies narrative convention, and dares you to get lost in its freewheeling form. Sure, this can easily make for a frustrating viewing experience, but if you’re willing to give yourself over to what Malick is doing here, and truly invest yourself into it, the result is a deeply personal experience of a movie. For all of the gorgeous grandiose imagery on display here, this is ultimately a film of little moments and recollections, of exchanges between father and son, and of tensions between memories and dreams. The fact that Malick has the sense to play such a personal journey on such a grand scale is what makes it such a unique ride.

1. Drive: Drive is many things – the most purely cool and stylish film of 2011, a heart-pounding neo-noir, an unabashedly cheesy love story caked in gore, a terrific L.A. flick, but above all in my eyes, this is a movie that reminds us why we love movies so much in the first place. From the compulsively listenable 80s synthpop soundtrack to the gently menacing villain portrayed by an incredible Albert Brooks, director Nicolas Winding Refn cranks every emotional beat of the film up so high that eventually, all the characters have to do is glance at one another for the mood to flare. The anonymous Driver portrayed by Ryan Gosling may too be many things himself – a mildly autistic superhero, a steely psychopath, a stuntman so drunk on the fantasy of Hollywood that he can no longer distinguish between that and reality – but above all, Refn is most captivated by the way the Driver sees himself: a real hero, if not always a real human being. By the time the film arrives at its final (terrifically ambiguous) frames, it’s easy to see why.

Honorable Mentions: The Descendants, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Take Shelter, 50/50, Contagion, Midnight in Paris,Hanna, Super, Rango

Note: As of the time of writing, I have yet to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Certified Copy, Margaret, War Horse, I Saw the Devil, 13 Assassins, Rampart, Bellflower, Submarine, and The Adventures of Tintin.

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