Best Films of 2011

3D depth composition in 'Hugo'

1. Hugo
2. Drive
3. The Artist
4. Melancholia
5. The Tree of Life

The Facebook Movie

Jesse Eisenberg

A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A Best Picture Oscar.

Oscar season. The whole year the studios flood the market with rubbish, keeping anything with potential carefully locked up. The only blips on the radar appear when the blockbuster summer delivers a movie that just accidentally happens to be good. Only at foreign festivals they carefully test what they’ve got in stock. Then, when the Toronto festival arrives in september, sounding the unofficial start of the race, the gates open. The studio flagships make their grand entrance premieres and are unleashed to chase the most precious metal in the industry: Oscar gold. This year, one of them has an unlikely subject: the creation of Facebook.

Inception vs. Avatar

Brilliant Inception shot

In what was to be an astoundingly dull year, there wasn’t much to look forward to from Hollywood. Fortunately, the summer was saved by the hands of the ridiculously reliable Pixar and well… Christopher Nolan. Since his movie Inception was released, it garnered a steady, albeit not spectacular, two-time American weekend top box office spot. It received very good critic reviews, calling it an ambitious, daring and highly original visual extravaganza. However, I’m not going to talk about that. If you’ve seen the movie or have been in a conscious state during the summer of 2010, you know it’s pretty damn impressive. Nearly all of the more notable critics however, issued several caveats.

Best films of the decade

While the new millennium brought a few films or film-related events sure to remembered for years to come, this decade can be seen as a moderate period in film history. With this text I present a guiding overview for the decade by way of a commented best-of list: the top ten best films of the noughties.