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William Shimell and Juliette Binoche in "Certified Copy"
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For the St. Louis-based cinephile, 2011 was a year in which the most enthralling films were predominantly those that quickly flitted in and out of the local art house theaters, often with little fanfare. The past 12 months offered viewers engrossing work from veteran filmmakers; stunning feature film debuts; terrific sophomore features from ascendant American auteurs; and vitalizing new cinema from foreign directors who are little-known even among film aficionados. For the fortunate viewer drawn by exceptional word-of-mouth or the repute of a particular filmmaker, the best cinema to be found in St. Louis in 2011 lurked just out of sight, waiting to be discovered.
For the purposes of this list, a film qualifies as a “Film of 2011” if it could be viewed theatrically in St. Louis between January 1 and December 31, 2011. Festival screenings and other limited engagements in St. Louis are included, but revivals and re-releases are not.
10. The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, USA / New Zealand)
The vast potential of digital animation, so often squandered by lesser filmmakers, allows Spielberg to soar to new heights of undiluted action-adventure bliss in Tintin, a giddy, jaw-dropping adaptation of Belgian comic artist Hergé's celebrated stories. Heaps of old-school globe-trotting peril, dollops of Continental whimsy, and a double-dose of sheer velocity combine to create a creamy, dizzying achievement of cinematic wizardry. Simply put, it's Spielberg's finest and most unabashed thrill ride since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now in wide release.
9. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, USA)
Malick's astounding and perplexing fifth film is cinema as an ecstatic enigma. A collage of moments and movements that pulse with significance, The Tree of Life flits between arid philosophy and acute emotion with effortless grace. The film's cosmos-spanning scope and theological reveries are intoxicatingly ambitious, but it's Malick's wistfully precise evocation of childhood—or at least an adult's memories of childhood—that leaves tenderhearted awe and a lingering ache in its wake. Now on DVD and Blu-ray.
8. Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, France)
In presenting the true tale of French Trappist monks caught between the Algerian civil war and their own moral conscience, Beauvois privileges an unadorned aesthetic, narrative simplicity, and thematic frankness over heavy-handed under-lining. The result is one of the boldest and most efficacious films in recent memory about right and wrong. Suffused with unfussy realism and humanistic attentiveness, Of Gods and Men confronts the thorniest questions of duty, dignity, and the self with uncommon elegance. Now on DVD and Blu-ray.
7. Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, UK / USA)
Fukunaga returns Charlotte Brontë's oft-adapted novel of cross-class yearning and shameful secrets to its gothic roots, and the effect is positively mesmerizing. No film this year utilizes rich production design to such rattling, pointed effect, and no film boasts such a deep cast of expertly drawn characters. Centering it all are Fukunaga's adroit direction and leads Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. These performers lend genuine presence to Jane and Rochester even as they steep in the envenomed pleasure of Brontë's words. Now on DVD and Blu-ray.
6. Another Year (Mike Leigh, UK)
With his new feature film, Leigh confirms his status as the finest purveyor of captivating social realism. Comfortable as both an acerbic critic and sensitive apologist, Leigh finds the sour and sweet in this unexpectedly dense tale of family, friendship, and aging. With astonishing sensitivity, Another Year traces the fault lines—some hidden, some sorely visible—that snake through human relationships of all sorts. It is the rare film that is comfortable simply observing with quiet purpose as people go about the sad, slow, simple drama of their lives. Now on DVD and Blu-ray.
5. Circo (Aaron Schock, Mexico / USA)
Lugging his digital camera through dusty Mexican towns, first-time director Schock pulls ahead of several established masters to deliver the documentary film experience of year. Circo gently enfolds the viewer into the fraying magic and tearful choices of a small-time family circus, zeroing in on the heady visual splendor of its subject even as it banishes romantic illusions. Schock’s profound attunement to the sensory and thematic patterns that whirl about him is nothing short of stunning. It permits the film to function as an exhilarating celebration of circus art, and also as a hard-nosed assessment of guilt, exploitation, and broken promises. Through this fragile balance of delight and despair, Circo captures that most elusive documentary quarry: a stark, unforced portrait of life’s pleasures and tragedies. Now on DVD.
4. Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, USA)
The finest and most disturbing horror film in years, Take Shelter offers a vision of American anxiety run amok. Exhibiting his forceful aptitude for Old Testament doom, director Nichols weaves a startling, acutely haunting tale of one man’s mounting awareness that his irrational fears cannot be defied. The knowledge that the film’s apocalyptic omens are mere figments of the mind does nothing to lessen their creepshow potency. Anchoring this story is the inimitable Michael Shannon, who vigorously evokes an ordinary man hemmed in by terror, obligation, and Midwestern Protestant shame. Equal parts exhilarating and desolate, Take Shelter is a distinctive marvel of spine-tingling cinematic storytelling, one that leaves the viewer unsteady, unmoored, and gasping for air. On DVD and Blu-ray on February 14.
3. The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, Poland / Sweden)
Majewski begins with a single painting by Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder and creates a stately, ravishing film about… well, everything. At its most fundamental level, The Mill and the Cross serves as an illuminating portrait of artistic genius at work, but the film achieves something far more daring and grand than a mere costumed biopic. Majewski utilizes his medium to dissolve the boundaries between artist and art, symbols and characters, realism and allegory, past and present. Slipping gracefully between these worlds in mute wonder, the film offers a heroic, brooding meditation on the human condition. From a plethora of dazzling painted landscapes and redolent vignettes, The Mill and the Cross resolves into a remarkable artistic achievement in its own right. On DVD and Blu-ray on January 31.
2. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, USA)
The formally audacious and thoroughly unsettling Meek’s Cutoff solidifies Reichardt’s status as the most vital independent American filmmaker working today, and emerges as the best feature film of the director’s career thus far. The scenario is an exercise in stark simplicity: Three hapless pioneer families and one shady guide are lost in the high desert of western Oregon. Boxed in by stakes that are monstrously clear, each man and woman reacts in differing ways to the mounting strain of their desolate odyssey, where even reasonable choices could lead to death. Meek’s Cutoff is part slow-motion period thriller; part discerning, female-centered revision to the seminal wagon train tale; and part bleak reflection on the limits of knowledge and liberty. Cinema of such tremendous discipline and dense mood is rare enough, but it is the singular character of Meek’s Cutoff—plainspoken and yet unabashedly cerebral—that makes the film so vexing and addictive. Now on DVD and Blu-ray.
1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Belgium)
Where to begin? With a couple, of course. They are traveling the Tuscan countryside on a sunny day. They seem to be strangers who simmer with understated attraction. Or are they newlyweds bubbling with romantic elation? Or are they an embittered married couple choking on their dissatisfaction? Could each explanation be true? Does it matter? Kiarrostami’s brilliant, unforgettable new film—his greatest in an illustrious career—is both seductively simple and staggeringly profound. On its lustrous surface, the film is a sumptuous romance set in a postcard landscape, where the divine Juliette Binoche and newcomer William Shimell earnestly discuss the meaning of art, life, and love. This alone renders Certified Copy a shamelessly pleasurable experience, but the film swiftly reveals itself as a far more challenging and ambiguous work. Ceaselessly shifting and upending the viewer’s understanding of its Boy-Meets-Girl narrative, Kiarostami’s film offers a sweeping, deeply affecting meditation on authenticity and aesthetics that can justly stand among the greatest works of philosophical cinema. No other film this year has exhibited such rarefied craft, such commanding performances, or such confounding thematic delvings. Certified Copy is, in short, a modernist masterpiece, guaranteed to be a bountiful source of delights and mysteries with each re-visitation. On DVD and Blu-ray in 2012.
Honorable Mentions: 13 Assassins, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, A Dangerous Method, Drive, Into the Abyss, Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Midnight in Paris, Shame, Tabloid, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Useful Life.
Worth Another Look: 9:06, Biutiful, City of Life and Death, Hanna, Hugo, Project Nim, Source Code, Troll Hunter, Viva Riva!, The White Meadows.
Overrated, Slightly or Highly: The Artist, Beats, Rhymes & Life, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Incendies, Moneyball, Point Blank, Rabbit Hole, Win Win.
Unjustly Pilloried: Sucker Punch.
Notable Films I Missed: Beginners, Bill Cunningham New York, Coriolanus, The Descendants, The Interrupters, Poetry, Putty Hill, Rango, Senna.
St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series. Wyatt has worked as a freelance writer and game designer since 2000. When not watching, thinking about, and writing about cinema, he assumes the mild-mannered secret identity of an environmental scientist. He completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., but returned to St. Louis to attain a master’s degree in environmental science from Washington University. He has been happily married since 2001.
