Monday, January 30, 2012

The Top 10 Films of 2011

See? Told you I'd post this soon. And it's even still January! Just. I'm currently choosing not to reflect on how disturbing it is that we are already almost a month into 2012. Egad.

Anyway, without further ado, below is my list of my ten favourite films of last year, according to my wildly-inconsistent ranking that takes into account both quality and entertainment factors and treats them entirely differently on a film-by-film basis.

The Top 10
  1. Source Code
  2. Drive
  3. Never Let Me Go
  4. 50/50
  5. The Artist
  6. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
  7. The Adjustment Bureau
  8. The Ides of March
  9. X-Men: First Class
  10. Hugo
NB: This list goes by UK release dates, as per previous years. If I were to go by "official" Academy/BAFTA criteria, Shame would have shot straight in at number 3 on the list.

Overall I'd say that 2011 had plenty of "good" films but very few "great" films. This is made clear by looking at the last few entries in the list, none of which I would have expected to make it into my top 10 at the end of the year. That said, despite seeing 43 films in the cinema and another 5 on Blu-Ray, there were still plenty of big films that I missed, including 2 Best Picture Oscar nominees and plenty of other highly-acclaimed work. Once again I have also seen far too few foreign or arthouse films, mostly a result of owning a Cineworld card and as such balking whenever I see the price of a real cinema ticket these days.

And, as always, on the other end of the spectrum, the 5 worst films I saw are:

The Bottom 5:
  1. Green Lantern
  2. Sucker Punch
  3. Your Highness
  4. Battle: Los Angeles
  5. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Green Lantern would probably rank as one of the worst films I've seen in the past few years. I sincerely hope that if DC Comics pursue a Justice League of America movie, that they steer well clear of this particular interpretation of the character...

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Monday, January 23, 2012

Films of 2011: The Rest of Them

It all started so well. After a poor showing last year, I told myself that I would pay much more attention to this blog and write a proper review for everything I saw.

Ahem.

For the sake of the approximately 3 people who may still actually check this URL occasionally, I've finally managed to round up a list of everything else I saw since my last review, back in... er, May. Of course, at this point even writing a two-line summary of each film would take forever, so I've chosen to go for the more efficient (i.e. lazy) route of simply dividing everything into one of four broad (and I mean broad) categories of "Great", "Good", "Okay", and "Bad", which are all hopefully self-explanatory. Within each group the films are just listed in order of release date - I wouldn't want to spoil my top 10 list that I will post in the next couple of days (honest!)...

Great

Drive
The Ides of March
50/50
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (especially in IMAX!)
The Artist

Good

Thor
Hanna
X-Men: First Class
Senna
The Tree of Life
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Horrible Bosses
Captain America: The First Avenger
Super 8
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Inbetweeners
The Skin I Live In
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Albatross
Contagion
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
In Time
Moneyball
Hugo
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Okay

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Bad Teacher
Super
Cowboys & Aliens

Bad

Your Highness
Green Lantern
Transformers: Dark of the Moon

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