Yeah, we know. We’re late with the list again. But 2011 had a remarkable run in cinema, and this year’s list truly runs through nearly the entire spectrum.
Something to keep in mind: none of the individual lists are the same. Films listed as number one by some people weren’t even seen by others. But, indeed, this is part of the film going experience and part of why the list is formulated as it has been. This is a snapshot, a look inside what different people are interested in, and what they thought of what they have viewed.
Below you’ll find the official Company list, followed by all the individual lists, and the scoring and explanation of how the list was created.
1. Beginners
2. Melancholia
3. Tree of Life
4. Midnight in Paris
5. Hugo
6. Meek’s Cutoff
7. Weekend
8. Moneyball
9. Bill Cunningham New York
10. Drive
* * *
Giampaolo
Mysteries of Lisbon
Sleepless Nights Stories
The Turin Horse
Melancholia
The Future
Meek’s Cutoff
Contagion
Hugo
Le Havre
Bridesmaids
Jake
Tree of Life
Melancholia
Moneyball
Poetry
Le Quattro Volte
Hugo
Weekend
The Descendants
The Arbor
Take Shelter
M. Pitkoff
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Too Big to Fail
The Trip
George Harrison: Living in the Material World
The Love We Make
Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest
The Black Power Mixtape (1967-1975)
Moneyball
Zookeeper
Liz
Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest
Sleeping Beauty
Tree of Life
Beginners
Weekend
Heartbeats
Page One
Bill Cunningham New York
Bridesmaids
Conan O’Brien: Don’t Stop
Brian
Le Quattro Volte
Beginners
Tree of Life
Shame
Midnight in Paris
The Trip
I Saw the Devil
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Moneyball
M. Paley
Beginners
Melancholia
Drive
Meek’s Cutoff
Into the Abyss
Tree of Life
Poetry
Weekend
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
The Artist
Adam
Beginners
Drive
Tree of Life
Melancholia
Shame
Midnight in Paris
Bill Cunningham New York
The Artist
Meek’s Cutoff
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Peter
The Ides of March
Win/Win
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Midnight in Paris
Crazy, Stupid, Love
Bill Cunningham New York
Melancholia
Super 8
Bad Teacher
X-Men: First Class
The list was created through a compilation of frequency and then weighted through adding their rankings and dividing the sum by the frequency. The films in four lists or more have their averages equally weighted with one another.
Beginners – 4 ( 1, 1, 2, 4 ) // 2
Melancholia – 4 ( 2, 2, 4, 4 ) // 3
Tree of Life – 5 ( 1, 3, 3, 3, 6 ) // 3.2
Midnight in Paris – 4 ( 2, 4, 5, 6) // 4.25
Hugo – 3 ( 1, 6, 8 ) // 5
Meek’s Cutoff – 3 ( 4, 6, 9 ) // 6.3
Weekend – 3 ( 5, 7, 8 ) // 6.6
Bill Cunningham New York – 3 ( 6, 7, 8 ) // 7
Moneyball – 3 ( 3, 9, 10 ) // 7.3
Drive – 2 ( 2, 3 ) // 2.5
Le Quattro Volte – 2 ( 1, 5 ) // 3
Beats Rhymes & Life : The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest – 2 ( 1, 7 ) // 4
Shame – 2 ( 4, 5 ) // 4.5
The Trip – 2 ( 4, 6 ) // 5
Poetry – 2 ( 4, 7 ) // 5.5
The Artist – 2 ( 8, 10 ) // 9
Bridesmaids – 2 ( 9, 10 ) // 9.5
Now, on this snowy New Year’s Eve, it’s a better time than ever to reflect back on the year and select our choices for the best cinematic efforts in 2009.
Myself, Peter Warren, Brian Barth, Giampaolo Bianconi, Jake Teresi and Matt Paley all wrote down our Top-10 lists (although Matt, in an uncharacteristically cynical move, declined to offer a full 10). There were ten films overlapping our choices, and, ranked by frequency, comprise the final top-10 list.
Best Films.
Up (Dir. Pete Doctor) — 5 Votes
The Hurt Locker (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow) — 5 Votes
A Serious Man (Dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) — 4 Votes
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Dir. Wes Anderson) — 3 Votes
Up In The Air (Dir. Jason Reitman) — 3 Votes
Inglorious Basterds (Dir. Quentin Tarantino) — 2 Votes
Lorna’s Silence (Dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne) — 2 Votes
Where The Wild Things Are (Dir. Spike Jonze) — 2 Votes
The Road (Dir. John Hillcoat) — 2 Votes
Sugar (Dir. Anna Boden) — 2 Votes (more…)
The ride’s over.
There went the decade, crawling to a slow halt in the station, and now we disembark. This decade had its ups (college, technology) and downs (war, hurricanes)–and the world of film was no exception. Filmmaking went in two directions: Hollywood films ballooned year by year with increasing budgets and frames, culminating with this month’s Avatar, James Cameron’s all-digital $700 million 3D action romp; Independent Cinema moved into inventive territory with uploads to YouTube and low-fi meditations in Neo-neorealism after many Studio Independent Branches that funded indies (for a period, c. 2003-2007) realized that there was no real market where they believed one to be and abandoned the cause. Still, large theater chains carried more independent films than ever before, and distribution for independent films was bigger than ever with the internet and VOD cable television bringing cinema to places it never could have travelled in the past.
We forget that in 1999, DVDs were seen as the luxury alternative to VHS tapes (as Blu-Ray is to DVD now) and the local video rental store was the general access point to the cinematic world. But with this decade came the domination of the disc, and Netflix rose with it along the way. No matter where you live, so long as you have access to the internet and a DVD player, you can watch nearly any film. Think about that.
This decade was the era of the superhero. Television rooted itself in its conception of reality, though gradually began to lose itself to the power of the immediacy of the internet. Just as the remote control killed the traditional nightly television schedule, so did TiVO and iTunes murder watching television on any predetermined schedule at all.
Here’s the Company List for the top films of the Noughties. (more…)
