10. SHAME

Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender team up for a second time after breaking out together with the film Hunger.  This time, they team up to tell the story of a successful New York executive who has a severe sex addiction.  As one might guess, Shame isn’t exactly a joy ride – it’s bleak, uncomforting and rather depressing, but it’s also one of the best acted and most important films to study addiction in recent memory.  Fassbender gives one of the best performances of the year, and Carey Mulligan, who plays the sister of the addict, gives her most daring performance to date.  Not to mention that her karaoke performance of Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York remains one of the most unforgettable scenes of a rather strong movie year.

9. MEEK’S CUTOFF

As challenging as the classic video game Oregon Trail was, one can’t help but to believe that the challenges were much more severe than what the game portrays.  In Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s fascinating western, Michelle Williams plays a passenger on Stephen Meek’s ill fated guided journey through the Oregon Trail.  As the two-week journey expands to five, all of the passengers begin to question whether Meek has led them astray.  Williams, who is arguably turning into the best actress working today, gives another standout performance in Reichardt’s best film to date.

8. 50/50

Cancer comedies are the riskiest of film genres, because everybody knows that there is no topic that is less funny than cancer.  Yet, Jonathan Levine pulls  off the impossible task of telling the story of a 27 year old journalist whose life changes drastically when he finds out he has cancer.  Josheph Gordon-Levitt, who plays the young journalist, has now appeared in my lists three straight years (500 Days of Summer and Inception) and Seth Rogen has emerged as the most talened Freaks & Geeks alum.  50/50 isn’t revolutionary, but it is sweet and heartbreaking, and it might even be the best cancer dramedy since 1983’s Terms of Endearment.

7. MELANCHOLIA

Nobody makes films bleaker than Lars von Trier, and Melancholia may just be his bleakest film yet – almost to the point where’s borderline unwatchable.  So why would I put it among the year’s best?  Simply because it’s mesmerizing, beautifully shot, thought-provoking and unforgettable.  The film tells the story of Justine (Kristen Dunst) on her wedding day, which also happens to be the last day on planet Earth.  Although there has been countless end of the world films in the history of cinema, Melancholia is the first one that feels like how we’ll feel and act when we realize the end is near.  Nobody does melancholy better than Lars von Trier, and this is one of his best.

6. TAKE SHELTER

Is it crazy to want to protect the ones you love, even if you go to unusual lengths to do so?  That is the question that Jeff Nichols’ psychological thriller Take Shelter seems to ask as it takes us into the life of Curtis LaForche.  Curtis spends his days building a shelter and worrying that he might be getting paranoid schizophrenia, a condition that his mother suffered from at around the same age.  Thanks to wonderful performances from two actors who were fairly unknown at the time – Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain – Take Shelter follows the lead that Black Swan started last year by digging deep into psychological issues.

5. BRIDESMAIDS

As I look back at the last decade of film, one thing becomes extremely clear to me: that great comedies are a very rare art form.  In fact, the only great adult comedy in the past ten years is Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids.

Feig, who struck television gold with the high school comedy Freaks and Geeks ten years earlier, finally took his talents to the big screens in 2010. 

In doing so, he teamed up with another TV star whose talents were too big for the small screen: Kristen Wiig, the hilarious comedian who may have singlehandedly saved SNL from extinction throughout the first decade of the 21st Century.  Wiig plays Annie, the best friend and Maid of Honor of bride-to-be, Lillian (played wonderfully by Maya Rudolph) – at least until she starts to get some serious competition for the role from the much more dominant and wealthier sister of the groom. 

Together, Feig, Wiig and company took on the topic of bridal parties, a tradition that has comedy written all over it, just one year after the guys gave bachelor parties a try with The Hangover.   But don’t you dare call Bridesmaids a Hangover knockoff. Sure, The Hangover deserves credit for coming first, but Bridesmaids deserves credit of its own for keeping us laughing much longer and far more often.

4. MONEYBALL

As a lifelong baseball fan, it’s easy for me to spot the flaws in Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, but my fandom also is the reason that I love baseball movies.  Especially when they’re as good as Moneyball.  Yet, unlike so many baseball movies that came before it, Moneyball isn’t simply a movie for baseball fans. It’s also a movie for fans of science.  It’s a movie for fans of math, and for fans of academics.  And for fans of Brad Pitt.  Perhaps that’s why it resonated so deeply with its audience.  For me, so much that it nearly made me switch careers.  For others, enough to save a spot on their year-end top ten list.  Either way, there’s no denying that Moneyball is a homerun.

3. THE DESCENDANTS

From 1999 to 2013, no director created a stronger portfolio of work than Alexander Payne.  His films, which include Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska and The Descendants each manage to portray American culture in a unique was that is really creative, very funny and uniquely sad.  In The Descendants,George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian attorney who realizes that his wife had been unfaithful while she’s in a coma fighting for her life.  Adding to the challenges, Matt must now take care of his two children and try to fix the damaged relationship that he’s had with them for many years.  The Descendants may not be Payne’s funniest film, but it may just be his most touching film to date.

2. THE ARTIST

Quite a pitch must have been given to persuade Warner Brothers to give the green light on The Artist – a silent, black-and-white romantic comedy about the rise and fall of a silent film actor.  Fortunately for Warner Brothers, Michael Hazanavicius’s film went on to win the Best Picture Oscar and grossed over $133 million.  Fortunately for us, we were given one of the best films of the 21st century – even if it feels more like a great film from the 1920s.  The Artist is funny, sweet and a beautiful tribute to the glory days of Hollywood.

1. A SEPARATION

Selling an Iranian film to the average American filmgoer is no easy task.  Even though Asghar Farhadi’s film received universal acclaim, including a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, A Separation only grossed $7 million during its limited release.  The people who did see it, however, were in for quite a treat.

That’s because few films provide the insight and understanding of the beliefs of a culture that is different than our own.  Payman Maadi’s direction gives us the discomfort of staring into the personal life of an Iranian couple – as though we were a fly on the wall – and helps us understand that the issues and struggles Iranians face are not all that different from our own, they just don’t have the same freedoms we have to express it.

That alone is why A Separation is such a brave film.  It managed to get past the strict Iranian censorship, despite tackling controversial issues. But that’s not why it’s the best movie of 2011.  Rather, it earned its spot by being the most thought-provoking film of the year.