Ten Best Movies, 2011
In no particular order, these are winnowed from a memorable field, the 2011 moviegoing year. While no one movie dominated the landscapes many fine films demonstrated the artful possibilities in telling stories that matter in surprising ways, often with performances that are unforgettable.Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey – Jolie the writer serves Jolie the director very well with a clear, fast-paced screenplay that chronicles an unimaginable war, one that gave birth to the term ‘ethnic cleansing, populated with real people not political talking points. Rightly horrific, stunningly played, beautiful in its gravity and reach. Subtitled in English.
Jason Reitman’s Young Adult – Teamed again with screenwriter Diablo Cody Reitman masterfully introduces a deluded 37 year old anti-heroine played with malicious grace by Charlize Theron whose booze-soaked realization that her life can be turned around by reuniting with her high school sweetheart is both hilariously appalling and pathetically sad.
Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist – A valentine to silent cinema which celebrates with wit, with style, with insight, the wonder of making audiences laugh and cry. In Jean Dujardin as the silent era clown destroyed by the talkies, Artist soars, enchants. And let us not forget his faithful four footed companion and only friend, played with equal grace and wit by Uggie the Jack Russell terrier. Intertitles as befits a silent film!
Steven Spielberg’s War Horse – Epic in ambition, scope, size and moral grandeur, this sprawling WW1 melodrama about the wartime cruelties that befall an English teenager and his horse is sentimental, contrived and devastating. Classic Hollywood filmmaking that lingers.
David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method – Was it the clear sunny sky set against the pristine Swiss mental hospital setting that entranced me from the start? Was it Keira Knightley’s brave, bravura performance as a ‘mad’ woman redeemed by the dawn of psychoanalysis? Or the complex interplay that Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) develops with his patient as he breaks away from his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen)? Whatever the reason, Christopher Hampton’s brilliantly adapted screenplay and Cronenberg’s steady helming made this exhilarating and engrossing from start to finish.
Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris – Ah Mr. Allen, how wise, witty and sweet this Paris is. And magical. And hilarious.
Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation – This Iranian divorce drama makes for the year’s the most shocking surprise. Simply extraordinary, unexpectedly moving and always compelling in its look at a trial between two couples that pivots on the truth as decreed in a courtroom. I predict this will be the first Iranian film, after winning every possible award, to win the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. Subtitles in English.
Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In – Almodovar’s masterful Hitchcockian study of a sociopath is, as usual, a complex confection that is alternately - or simultaneously - blackly comic, tense, sorrowful and sexy. Subtitled in English.
Simon Curtis’ My Week with Marilyn– The legend of Marilyn Monroe is not so much revised as compactly summarized in a behind the scenes comedy about not just the making of a movie but ambition, dreams, fear and need. MM epitomized the Irving Berlin song she sang in one of her Fox musicals, “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It,” and the next line of the lyric is, “You’re like a baby, you want what you want when you want it,” and that is very much what’s applicable here. Call this Week a comedy of melancholic proportions, romantic yet realistic.
Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus - Wonderfully effective transposing of Shakespeare to the Balkan wars that makes for a formidable directing debut for Fiennes, not to mention hossanas for his casting of Vanessa Redgrave as the general’s steely, scary mother and his own performance as the arrogant, doomed general Coriolanus.
Film critic and entertainment reporter Stephen Schaefer writes regularly for The Boston Herald with interviews, features, reviews and "Hollywood & Mine," and to Variety, Hollywood's trade paper, where he contributes to a weekly column "Scene & Heard." Schaefer also hosts the half-hour weekly WEB interview show "Beyond the Subtitles" on AIR (Art International Radio, www.artonair.org) where guests range from independent and foreign language filmmakers, documentarians, actors and critics from around the world. He often covers film festivals in Berlin,Venice, New York and Toronto.
