10. Melancholia9. Oslo, August 31st
In a year this Bergman-bleak, you'd expect Scandinavia to be busy, and lo, from there issued both macro- and micro-apocalypses, affecting in their own ways. von Trier's grandiose, operatic Melancholia is a film of two halves: a sniggering, misanthropic social comedy - Festen-lite, or The Rapture According to Saint Lars - that almost, almost disguises the very personal demons at its core. Where that film makes explicit why his heroine might well want the world to end - in its searing, painterly images of depression and its damning characterisation of supporting players as bastards or bitches who deserve to die - Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st is subtler, and more internalised: instead of the whole world going up in smoke, here we're confronted with the deeply moving tragedy of one young man slipping quietly, inevitably, and almost unnoticed, into the long night.
8. The Messenger
A belated arrival on these shores, and yet a fine summing-up of America's recent misadventures overseas: two military men (Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster) go door-to-door, informing wives and parents that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq, and will not be coming home. A throwback to that wave of low-key Vietnam-era character dramas, it takes a simple premise - a string of doorstep set-pieces, with the notified reacting in variously sad, ferocious and strange ways - and proceeds to write and act the hell out of it: among a clutch of strong, interesting women (Jena Malone, Lisa Joyce), Samantha Morton is memorably spaced-out as the widow one of the men becomes involved with, but equally Harrelson and especially Foster have never been better.
7. Meek's Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt's reined-in Western parable reclaims the tight Academy frame as a space within which to show people straying off-track, heading inexorably into dead ends, banging their heads against unyielding stone walls: it's almost an anti-motion picture, yet its crisp, precision-framed panoramas, and its vivid illustrations of the hardscrabble frontier life, stick with you, as do the labours of those actors (Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson, Paul Dano) struggling to impose themselves upon the landscape. A nifty counter-myth, realised with perfect control.
6. Moneyball
At last, amid all the bleakness, a success story of sorts. You have to hand it to those Americans: every time they make a movie about a sport that should be as resistible to us as the travails of Hamilton Academicals and the Milton Keynes Dons might be to them, they somehow pull it off, turning the complex business of first drafts and third bases into a drama that compels and seduces on its own terms. (As Brad Pitt's baseball coach Billy Beane puts it, "How can you not be romantic about baseball?") In this sense, Moneyball was the logical successor to 2004's fine Friday Night Lights, another film more interested by what was going on away from the sports arena (a motif of this particular sub-genre: the empty stadium, as observed on those evenings when there isn't a game): the backroom hustle, ideally incarnated by a cast of tough, punchy, salty ensemble players. One of 2011's triumphs notable for the paths that it didn't take: in its central fascination with statistics, and how best they might be analysed, Moneyball should have been utterly nerdy or merely tedious. Instead - granted momentum by its illustrious scribes, and crucial space by its very promising director - it was a film that lived and breathed.
5. A Separation/Jodaiye Nader az Simin
We had to wait a good decade for the next great film out of Iran, the site of much turn-of-the-century New Wave activity - and here it was. In that decade, the Iranian people have evidently had to retreat indoors, for one reason or another: Kiarostami, the key director of the late 90s/early 2000s, wandered and wondered within landscapes, but for A Separation, Asghar Farhadi put us in the middle of one not-badly-off Tehran household and allowed us to witness the enforced disintegration taking place there - in every room and department, from a marriage to a working relationship to a black plastic bin bag. Brilliantly shot, edited and performed, it wasn't like watching a movie, in the conventional sense; it was like watching the news, such was its degree of urgent seriousness - or a new and hugely impressive mutation of neo-realism.
4. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
Because, after all that, I needed cheering up - and the combination of Tina Cohen-Chang, "The Safety Dance" and the most warming pop-cultural phenomenon of our time will do that to a guy.
3. Post Mortem
...and then I went back to watching movies about mortuary assistants in Pinochet's Chile. Another major step forward for writer-director Pablo Larrain, taking a scalpel to his country's body politic and examining the toxicity left behind there, this gripping, not unsuitably chilly drama further refined the considerable formal control the filmmaker had already displayed in 2008's Tony Manero: Larrain knows the horrors he wants to show, but also those he can leave off-screen and still make his point. Featured the year's best omelette-related sequence, and another welcome outing for the talismanically decrepit leading man Alfredo Castro: an Al Pacino with enbalming fluid for blood.
2. TT3D: Closer to the Edge
Previously, I'd found motorcycling one of the dullest sports known to man - part of the unholy trinity (other offenders: horse racing, rugby league) that always made Sunday Grandstand inferior to its Saturday equivalent. But this was a revelation: a documentary on the Isle of Man TT (never part of Grandstand's remit, crucially) that revealed these knights of the road as ghostriders-in-waiting - the 3D (and actually, even the 2D version) situating its subjects very specifically within the bends and curves of their high-speed, potentially fatal environments. People's champion Guy Martin may be the greatest, most resilient character anybody had put on screen all year - though even his infernal, death-defying crash gets upstaged by young contender Conor Cummins's unexpected last-reel flight over a cliff.
1. Take Shelter
You can approach this one a multitude of ways: as the young writer-director Jeff Nichols, a student of David Gordon Green and Terrence Malick before him, finally proving he can do involving narrative as well as he does big skies and ominous moods (it's truly a masterpiece, in the sense of a work accomplished at the end of an apprenticeship); as an acute study of ordinary madness, potential schizophrenia, brilliantly suggested in Michael Shannon's commanding yet carefully modulated central performance; as a horror movie, with skilfully integrated CGI effects; or as a study in the particular climate and atmospheric conditions that set a mind to unravelling. Like many of those on this Best Of list, it's not always an easy watch - but I'll be damned if I saw a better film this year on the subject of where we're at right now, and what we've been left to face up to, unprotected as we are in our wide open spaces.
A Worst Films of 2011 list will run here tomorrow.
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