ROGER EBERT'S JOURNAL
The Best Films of 2011
By Roger Ebert on December 15, 2011 4:06 PM | ovies won't be familiar. Those are the most useful titles for you, instead of an ordering of movies you already know all about.
One recent year I committed the outrage of listing 20 movies in alphabetical order. What an uproar! Here are my top 20 films, in order of approximate preference.
1. "A Separation"
2. "Shame"
3. "The Tree of Life"
4. "Hugo"
5. "Take Shelter"
6. "Kinyarwanda"
7. "Drive"
8. "Midnight in Paris"
9. "Le Havre"
10. "The Artist."
11. Melancholia
12. "Terri"
13. "The Descendants"
14. "Margaret"
15. "Martha Marcy May Marlene"
16. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2"
17. Trust
18. "Life, Above All"
19. "The Mill and the Cross"
20. "Another Earth"
Those are my top 20, leaving out documentaries, which I will list later. To include them on the same list would be ranking oranges and apples. There were many other excellent films in 2011, some fully the equal of some of these. Alphabetically:
"13 Assassins," "The Adventures of Tintin," "Beginners," "Blue Valentine," "Boy Wonder," "Certified Copy," "The Future," "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Guard," "The Help," "Higher Ground," "I Will Follow," "J Edgar," "The Last Rites of Joe May," "Le Quattro Volte," "Margin Call" "Meek's Cutoff," "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol," "Moneyball," "Mysteries of Lisbon," "My Week with Marilyn," "Poetry," "The Princess of Montpensier," "Rango," "A Screaming Man," "Silent Souls," "Tyrannosaur," "Queen to Play," "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," "War Horse" and "The Whistleblower."
Note: Many of you asked if I forgot about "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Not at all. It doesn't even have an opening date in Chicago, and so will be on my list of the best films of 2012. But if it helps, just say I called it "one of the best films of the year," which it certainly is. Watch Tilda Swinton here as she talks with me about the film at the Toronto Film Festival:
http://bit.ly/qYwRJf
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