2011 has been an exceedingly weak year of cinema. There's no "Social Network" or "Brokeback Mountain" or other clearcut classics.But that doesn't mean there hasn't been a large number of really good films.
But 2011 has a bevy of solid flicks about illegal immigrants, illness and ill-gotten gains, with memorable performances from maids, monsters and mutants. Here's the 10 best of the bunch.
10. Midnight in Paris
A breezy, easy romp through the most romantic city in the world in what is, ironically, about a love affair with the city, not between two people. Owen Wilson is the most unlikely Woody Allen protagonist this side of Steven Seagal, but acquits himself well as a head-in-the-clouds writer who wanders Paris at night, entranced, and when the clock strikes 12 he is picked up by ... Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald!? Rachel McAdams co-stars as his grounded rich fiancee, making "Paris" something of a breezier, alternate-universe sequel to "Wedding Crashers."
9. A Better Life
The beautifully told tale of a struggling undocumented immigrant and his son and the multitude of dangers the better life presents. Carlos Galindo (Demian Bichir) struggles doing landscaping work while his teenage son (Jose Julian), bored at home in inner-city Los Angeles, finds himself drawn to gang members. A hard-hitting, sobering drama about a father and son who find themselves drifting apart at a time they need each other more than ever.
8. X-Men: First Class
It would have been easy for director Matthew Vaughn to just crank out another superhero (pre)origin story, but Vaughn, who also helmed another unconventional superhero yarn, "Kick Ass," infuses his superhero movie with equal parts '60s pop-kitsch and '70s revenge flick, culminating in a film that dares both to turn the previously villainous Magneto (Michael Fassbender) into a vengeful anti-hero and have the previously grandfatherly Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) hitting on chicks and uttering the word "groovy" Austin Powers style no less than a half-dozen times. Oh yeah, and it spectacularly melds an exciting X-Men tale with the real-life Cuban Missile Crisis, creates believable relationships between mutants and offers a surprisingly emotional explanation for why Professor X is in a wheelchair.
7. Margin Call
A dense, taut, gutsy flick that doesn't dumb down its dialogue or story for an audience of laypeople, "Margin Call" goes full-speed and dares the audience to keep up. It's "Glengarry Glen Ross" meets "Wall Street" and features enough cast to stock at least three films full of star power. The film follows a company in the vein of Lehman Brothers that almost singlehandedly throws the entire country into the Great Recession. The most telling thing about the film is the character Sam Rogers, who starts the film by callously firing a bunch of people (including Stanley Tucci of all people) and telling their friends and co-workers how irrelevant they were, then spends the rest of the film as the voice of reason.
6. Super 8
Exciting, scary, engaging, romantic and full of wonder, "Super 8" is J.J. Abrams' love letter to Steven Spielberg (or, perhaps, since Spielberg is an exec producer, his love letter to himself). Told through the eyes of a '7os-era preteen (Joel Courtney), we get kids making movies, daddy issues and a first crush, all built around a mysterious train crash and the extraordinarily frightening creature that caused it.
5. Contagion
Steven Soderbergh's take on the Killer Disease genre succeeds mostly because it sticks to the basics: a smartly told story of paranoia and fear that solidly shows both the government response to combatting the illness and the human toll as people lose loved ones. He turns the genre on its head a bit by using a big-time Hollywood cast — including Jude Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet — and isn't afraid to kill some of them off. Soderbergh also employs a plot device masterfully used in at least one other film this year, which is mixing grief and anger when finding someone close to a major character has been betraying them.
4. The Help
A tremendously affecting period film dealing with race relations in the 1960s, "The Help" overcomes the the urge to be a patronizing crowd-pleaser and allows its characters to be real people. Even the film's villains are afforded moments of kindness, whether it's Hilly Holbrook's activism or devotion to helping out Skeeter's (Emma Stone) love life, or Skeeter's mom, Charlotte (Allison Janney), taking her daughter's side at a pivotal moment in the film, "The Help" understands that while intolerable cruelties were perpetuated on a people that continue to affect us all, they were made by people driven not by evil, but by fear. It's that message at the core of "The Help" that allows the courage shown by its heroes to mean all the more that the cowardarice of the villains is not exaggerated.
3. The Descendants
While it's one of the more mainstream-accessible films on this list, "The Descendants" has a lot going on. None of the major characters is extraneous or exists simply to drive the plot; each of them is given a real motivation, from Matt's (George Clooney) broken relationships with the women in his life to Alexandra's (Shailene Woodley, showing she's anything but the cardboard cutout she is on "The Secret Life of the American Teenager") anger at her mother, father, and the world, to Sid (Nick Krause), a character who in a lesser film would exist solely as comic relief whom we find out is more than the dunderhead he seems to be. This is Clooney's film, about a man who will soon be a widower who learns that his wife has been cheating on him, all the while finding pressure as the trustee of a lucrative stretch of ancestral land in Hawaii to sell, effectively spoiling the last stretch of undeveloped land in the Rainbow State but providing a financial windfall to himself and the rest of his family. But the film's two best performances may belong to Amara Miller as Clooney's younger daughter, and Judy Greer, who owns a pivotal scene where she comes face to face with the comatose woman who has been cheating with her husband.
2. Win Win
A quietly brilliant film featuring virtuoso performances by Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan (who between this, her run on "The Office" and her stellar performance in "Gone Baby Gone" is proving to be one of the more versatile actresses working), in a story about Mike Flaherty, a struggling lawyer who moonlights as a high-school wrestling coach. After back-dooring a client who can't help himself (Burt Young) for a financial windfall, he meets the man's troubled grandson (Max Shaffer), who happens to be a talented wrestler. Soon he's on his wrestling team, battling opponents and the reach of his alcoholic, manipulative mother (Melanie Lynskey) to succeed. Also featuring outstanding performances from Bobby Cannavale and Jeffrey Tambor, "Win Win" is stunningly emotional and sharply funny.
1. Hugo
It took Martin Scorsese to finally get this new age of 3D going in the right direction after so many other films pussyfooted the gimmick into near obsolescence, and boy, did he tell a dynamite story doing it. "Hugo's" title character (Asa Butterfield) is a scamp on the run — from the shopkeeper he keeps stealing from (Ben Kingsley), from the lame constable of the train station he lives at (Sacha Baron Cohen) and from the desolation of being utterly alone at one of the busiest places in 1930s Paris. All Hugo has are memories and a mysterious, broken automaton he received as a gift from his father (Jude Law).
When he befriends the shopkeeper's granddaughter (Grace Chloe Moretz), he unlocks the secret to the automaton, and to the shopkeeper himself whose past he's tied more to than he realizes.
With a dizzying, dazzling array of 3D effects that accentuate rather than dominate the film and an interesting, engaging cast of characters, "Hugo" is an enchanting, heartwarming, family-friendly story that is Scorsese's love letter to cinema's past.