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...