Ten Best Films' 2012 Mini-Poll

1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
125 points (AZ, KW, LB, MA, ML, MS, RS)
2. Barbara (Christian Petzold)
83 points (LB, MA, ML, PK, RS)
3. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
72 points (KW, LB, MA, PK)
4. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)
69 points (AZ, JS, MA, RS, SB)
5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
65 points (LB, MA, ML, RS)
6. Amour (Michael Haneke)
58 points (KW, ML, PK)
7. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)
51 points (JS, LB, MA)
8. Looper (Rian Johnson)
46 points (LB, MS, SB)
9. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
43 points (LB, ML, PK)
10. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)
42 points (AZ, KW, SB)
11. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)
40 points (AZ, JS, KW)

Films Receiving Two Citations: The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard) - 33 points (MS, SB), The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson) - 33 points (MS, SB), Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell) - 30 points (LB, PK), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) - 29 points (JS, KW)*, Compliance (Craig Zobel) - 27 points (AZ, MS), Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2011) - 27 points (AZ, KW), Premium Rush (David Koepp) - 27 points (PK, SB), Argo (Ben Affleck) - 26 points (MS, SB), Footnote (Joseph Cedar, 2011) - 23 points (LB, MA).

Combined Mini-Poll Results: 2008-2012
1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) - 164.5 points
2. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008) - 147
3. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008) - 139
4. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) - 136
5. Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008) - 129
6. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008) - 126
7. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) - 125
8. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) - 101.5
9. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) - 101
10. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) - 99
11. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) - 98

Note [*]: Films marked with an asterisk received at least one vote in last year's poll.

Scoring: Each citation receives ten points with an additional ten for a first place citation, nine for second, and so on, on down to one for tenth. This method of scoring is intended to give appropriate weight to those films that have been cited most frequently by this year's participants. For those participants who have not specified an order for their choices, 5.5 points have been assigned to each of their choices.

Key: AZ - Alberto Zambenedetti (Ten Best Films), JS - Jeremi Szaniawski (Ten Best Films), KW - Karen Wang (You're Making a Scene), LB - Lisa K. Broad (Tativille), MA - Michael J. Anderson (Tativille), ML - Mike Lyon (Tits & Gore), MS - Matt Singer (Criticwire), PK - Pamela Kerpius (Ten Best Films), RS - R. Emmet Sweeney (Ten Best Films), SB - Soren Bailey (Ten Best Films).

2012: Pamela Kerpius

1.  Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
2.  Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)
3.  Amour (Michael Haneke)
4.  Red Hook Summer (Spike Lee)
5.  How To Survive A Plague (David France)
6.  Hope Springs (David Frankel)
7.  Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
8.  56 Up (Michael Apted)
9.  Premium Rush (David Koepp)
10.  Barbara (Petzold)

Runners-up:  Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino), Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh), Lincoln (Spielberg), Arbitrage (Nicholas Jarecki), Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

Pamela Kerpius holds a M. A. in Cinema Studies from New York University.

2012: R. Emmet Sweeney

1. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel)
2. August and After (Nathaniel Dorsky)
3. Barbara (Christian Petzold)
4. Neighbouring Sounds (Kleber Mendonca Filho)
5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
6. Motorway (Soi Cheang)
7. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (John Hyams)
8. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
9. Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul W. S. Anderson)
10. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)

Honorable Mentions: Sleepless Night (Jang Kun-jae), Traveling Light (Gina Telaroli), Reconversion (Thom Andersen), In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo), Safe (Boaz Yakin), Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson), Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami), The Three Stooges (The Farrelly Brothers), Vamps (Amy Heckerling), Dredd (Pete Travis), Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh), Romancing in Thin Air (Johnnie To)

R. Emmet Sweeney is a regular contributor to Movie Morlocks and holds an M. A. in Cinema Studies from New York University. 

2012: Jeremi Szaniawski

The Best New Films of 2012:
1-4. Withheld out of protest
5. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011; Netflix)
6. The Snowtown Murders (Justin Kurzel, 2011; Netflix)
7. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011; 4k, Laemmle theater, Pasadena)
8. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011; Flagey, Brussels, 35mm)
9. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino; New Beverly Cinema, Los Angeles, 35mm)
10. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011; Netflix)

Honorable Mentions:
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011; Netflix)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax; 4k, Film Forum, New York)

Favorite Films that I Saw for the First Time in 2012:
1. Les Bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960; Netflix)
2. 3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977; Netflix)
3. Through and Through (Grzegorz Krolikiewicz, 1973; DVD)
4. Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978; DVD)
5. Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949; Le Desperado, Paris, 35mm)
6. Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971; Film Forum, New York, 35mm)
7. Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010; Netflix)
8. Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974; New Beverly Cinema, Los Angeles, 35mm)
9. Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992; Whitney Humanities Center, New Haven, 35mm)
10. The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971; DVD)

One mighty indulgence: 
The Mighty Peking Man (Meng Hua Ho, 1977; Netflix)

And a second GIGANTIC indulgence: 
Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2 (Lee Harry, 1987; New Beverly Cinema, LA, 35mm)

Jeremi Szaniawski is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker with a PhD in Film Studies and Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale University.

2012: Soren Bailey

1. Looper (Rian Johnson)

2. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)

3. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

4. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)

5. The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard)

6. Premium Rush (David Koepp)

7. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

8. Argo (Ben Affleck)

9. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)

10. Les Misérables (Tom Hooper)

Soren Bailey is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker with a M. A. in Cinema Studies from New York University.

2012: Alberto Zambenedetti

1. The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011)
2. Caesar Must Die (Paolo and Vittorio Tavian)
3. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)
4. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
5. Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)
6. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)
7. Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2011)
8. Compliance (Craig Zobel)
9. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)
10. Prometheus (Ridley Scott)

Alberto Zambenedetti is a lecturer of Italian at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and a regular contributor to www.spietati.it and www.xrun.eu.

The Top 100 Films of All-Time

Playtime

1. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967, France)
2. Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1972, India)
3. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966, France)
4. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939, Japan)
5. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959, United States)
6. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948, United States)
7. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939, France)
8. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, United States)
9. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955, Denmark)
10. Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994, Iran)

Floating Clouds

11. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937, United States)
12. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979, Soviet Union)
13. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986, France)
14. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955, Japan)
15. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956, United States)
16. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932, United States)
17. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989, Taiwan)
18. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994, Hungary)
19. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, Soviet Union)
20. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967, France)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

21. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991, Taiwan)
22. Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951, Japan)
23. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927, United States)
24. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962, Italy)
25. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974, France)
26. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1976, Belgium)
27. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, Thailand)
28. The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926, United States)
29. The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950, Italy)
30. By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936, Soviet Union)

Distant Voices, Still Lives

31. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988, United Kingdom)
32. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934, France)
33. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973, Spain)
34. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953, United States)
35. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964, India)
36. Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978, Portugal)
37. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946, United Kingdom)
38. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, France)
39. The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934, United States)
40. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948, China)

Ivan the Terrible

41. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975, United States)
42. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985, France)
43. Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944-1946, Soviet Union)
44. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998, United States)
45. The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, 1975, Greece)
46. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003, Taiwan)
47. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942, United States)
48. Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002, Russia)
49. Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928, United States)
50. A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, 1993, United States)

Yeelen

51. Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952, United States)
52. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957, India)
53. Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, 1942, United Kingdom)
54. Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström, 1913, Sweden)
55. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001, United States)
56. El (Luis Buñuel, 1952, Mexico)
57. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, United States)
58. Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987, Mali)
59. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915, United States)
60. My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988, Japan)

Kings of the Road

61. Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976, West Germany)
62. Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963, France)
63. Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969, Japan)
64. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915-16, France)
65. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944, United States)
66. Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, 1983, France)
67. La Région centrale (Michael Snow, 1971, Canada)
68. Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922, United States)
69. Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952, United States)
70. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963, Italy)

Written on the Wind

71. Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1991, Hong Kong)
72. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980, West Germany)
73. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949, United Kingdom)
74. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008, Argentina)
75. A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954, United States)
76. Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992, Hong Kong)
77. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983, France)
78. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956, United States)
79. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956, United States)
80. The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1989, Poland)

Platform

81. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968, Italy)
82. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957, Japan)
83. Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Soviet Union)
84. Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000, China)
85. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011, Turkey)
86. Awaara (Raj Kapoor, 1951, India)
87. (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971, United States)
88. Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985, United States)
89. Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936, France)
90. Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927, United States)

Il Posto

91. The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967, Hungary)
92. Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961, Italy)
93. Antoine and Antoinette (Jacques Becker, 1947, France)
94. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943, United States)
95. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982, Sweden)
96. Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932, United States)
97. Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Yamanaka Sadao, 1935, Japan)
98. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1965, United States)
99. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988, Canada)
100. Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936, Japan)

Ten Best Films' 2011 Mini-Poll

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
164.5 points (AZ, GW, JS, KW, MA, MH, ML, RS, SB)
2. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
101.5 points (AZ, LB, MA, ML, PK, SB)
3. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
85 points (KW, MA, ML, MS, PK)
4. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky)
82 points (MA, LB, MC, ML, RS)
5.  Hugo [3-D] (Martin Scorsese)
63 points (LB, MA, PK, RS)
6. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
60 points (LB, MA, MC)
7. Pina [3-D] (Wim Wenders)
59 points (KW, LB, ML, PK)
8. The Kid with a Bike (Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)
56 points (JS, MA, MC, RS)
9. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)
50.5 points (ML, PK, SB)
10. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
49 points (LB, MA, RS)

Other Films Receiving Multiple Citations:  Cave of Forgotten Dreams [3-D] (Werner Herzog, 2010) - 48 points (AZ, MH, PK), Melancholia (Lars von Trier) - 46 points (AZ, JS, ML), House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello) - 42 points (KW, LB, RS), Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010) - 37.5 points (AZ, PK, SB), Insidious (James Wan, 2010) - 34.5 points (PK, SB), The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2010) - 34 points (AZ, MS), Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta) - 33.5 points, Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010) - 33 points (GW, JS), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay) - 33 points (MC, ML), I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-woon, 2010) - 32 points (JS, MS), Bridesmaids (Paul Feig) - 31.5 points (MH, SB), Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010) - 31 points (AZ, GW), Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010) - 29 points (MS, PK)*, Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki) - 30 points (LB, MA), Margin Call (J. C. Chandor) - 29.5 points (KW, SB), Win Win (Thomas McCarthy) - 28.5 points (MS, SB), Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010) - 26 points (MS, PK)*, TRON: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski) - 23 points (AZ, GW)

The 2011 Mini-Poll, the fourth consecutive survey of a small sample of current graduate students and alumni of New York University and Yale University, came to the same predictable result as every other group poll in 2011: The Tree of Life was our runaway winner. More than two-thirds of this year's respondents cited Malick's film, with four (Matt Hauske, Mike Lyon, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alberto Zambenedetti) listing it as the year's best film. In fact, The Tree of Life became our all-time leading points-getter, blowing past Summer Hour's monster two-year running total (listed below). In second place, Drive found its way onto nearly half of this year's lists, though in its case it finished no higher than second (on Pamela Kerpius's ballot). Both The Tree of Life and Drive are precisely the sorts of films that the Mini-Poll favors: American titles, on the art end of the spectrum, which receive large enough releases to insure that most of our respondents saw the films.

Other than The Tree of Life, the film that generated the most passion this year seems to have been Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which tied for fifth place and nearly equaled Malick's achievement by placing first on three lists (Michael J. Anderson, Lisa K. Broad, Michael Cramer) - the only three lists that cited the January 4th New York release. The Turkish auteur's latest is as must-see as films get. Among the remaining five picks for the top position (Soren Bailey listed his titles in no particular order, though the first film he did list was also Pamela's #1, Insidious), there were five different films, with the remaining four not even managing to make a second list: Oscar front-runner The Artist (Karen Wang), Indie favorite Take Shelter (Matt Singer), art installation juggernaut The Clock (Jeremi Szaniawski), and View From the Avant-Garde Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances (Grant Wiedenfeld). A year without too much consensus, in other words - beyond Malick's unstoppable Palme d'Or.

Combined Mini-Poll Results: 2008-2011
1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) - 164.5 points
2. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008) - 147
3. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008; pictured) - 139
4. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) - 136
5. Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008) - 129
6. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008) - 126
7. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) - 101.5
8. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) - 101
9. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) - 99
10. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008) - 97.5

Note [*]: Films marked with an asterisk received at least one vote in last year's poll.

Scoring: Each citation receives ten points with an additional ten for a first place citation, nine for second, and so on, on down to one for tenth. This method of scoring is intended to give appropriate weight to those films that have been cited most frequently by this year's participants. For those participants who have not specified an order for their choices, 5.5 points have been assigned to each of their choices.

Key: AZ - Alberto Zambenedetti (Ten Best Films), GW - Grant Wiedenfeld (Ten Best Films), JS - Jeremi Szaniawski (Ten Best Films), KW - Karen Wang (You're Making a Scene), LB - Lisa K. Broad (Tativille), MA - Michael J. Anderson (Tativille), MC - Michael Cramer, MH - Matt Hauske, ML - Mike Lyon (Tits & Gore), MS - Matt Singer (IFC), PK - Pamela Kerpius (Scarlett Cinema), RS - R. Emmet Sweeney (Termite Art), SB - Soren Bailey (Ten Best Films).

Ten Best Films of 2011

1. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/
Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Ceylan synthetically constructs his portrait of bi-continental Turkish national identity from the tissues of high-modernist European and Middle Eastern masters, from the metaphysical phantasmagoria of Tarkovsky to the cosmological landscapes of Kiarostami. With the sun setting on the autumnal latter, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia descends into an endless digital expanse of sensual blacks, cut by glowing high-beams, which in turn will give way to an unforgettable gas-lit interlude. Ceylan's latest, easily his best, is 2011's most inexhaustible work of cinema.

2. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary/
France/Germany/Switzerland/United States)
Purportedly Hungarian master Tarr's final film, The Turin Horse provides the most distilled expression of the director's style to date: Tarr's heavily choreographed, phenomenological long-takes bleakly inscribe a series of quotidian gestures on a perpetually windswept Central European plane. No less signature is Tarr's Nietzschean take on a European civilization that has already collapsed. This is Tarr bringing both his corpus and Europe's fin de siècle late modernism - in form and in content - to a highly masterful conclusion.

3. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
A sign of life in an increasingly endangered corner of world cinema, Farhadi builds one of the art's more comprehensive portraits of human relations under theocratic rule, constructing a private social sphere in which virtually nothing exists outside the sight of fundamentalist Islam's invisible monitors. A Separation's consistently transparent architectural spaces fulfill an especially crucial role in enabling the the surveillance that provides the film with its inherently critical subject. A masterpiece of Iran's latest filmic wave.

4. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, United States)
A rare example of a genuinely American art cinema - and easily the year's most ambitious work - The Tree of Life reproduces God's Book of Job answer to his human interrogators, combining the beauty of divine creation that provides this response with a form of confessional autobiography that looks to the director's adolescent origins. The latter sequences showcase the exceptional impressionistic power of Malick's subjective film craft, which ultimately outweighs Malick's reliance on New Age cliché.

5. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran)
A home movie of unparalleled personal courage, festival auteur Panahi (under house-arrest and a twenty year ban from filmmaking at the time of production) and documentarian Mirtahmasb combine a series of tangential forms - surveillance, the reading and blocking of a screenplay, the scouting of a location - that stand outside Panahi's prevailing narrative practice. Constructed out of the medium's remainders, few works have ever made what is forbidden to Panahi any more meaningful.

6. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, United Kingdom/United States)
Ever the most Mizoguchian of contemporary directors, Davies's latest tragic masterstroke reprises the disjunctive Proustian temporality of the director's very great Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes in cinematically adapting Terrence Rattigan's eponymous 1952 play. Davies remains gloriously stuck in the postwar moment of his legit source material, nostalgically remembering a bygone working class public that the filmmaker elegantly casts in a warm amber glow.

7. Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/France/Germany)
Espousing the virtue of humanistic resistance in the face of punitive immigration-law enforcement, leading Finnish auteur Kaurismäki's first French-set film in almost two decades finds the director in his default deadpan comedic style and preferred proletarian milieu. The level of Kaurismäki's filmmaking however exceeds his standard high quality, with the the director employing a thematically significant, metronomic economy of primary colors that offers a parallel source of formal interest.

8. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, United States)

Reviving the mid-level American action filmmaking of Michael Mann and Walter Hill at a time when both have made the transition to long-form cable television, the Danish-born Refn borrows his carefully mapped nocturnal cityscapes from the former's Collateral and almost everything else from the latter's The Driver, including Drive's no less deep professionalism, its late 70s consciousness and even its nameless protagonist. A very welcome revival - not to mention 2011's best cast film.

9. The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/
France/Italy)
A profoundly humanistic companion-piece to Le Havre, The Kid with a Bike similarly features an at-risk youth who finds his savior in a charitable adult stranger. Where Kaurismäki engages with contemporary politics, the Dardenne brothers opt for a more archetypal, though no less personally urgent narrative treating the appeal of adolescent gang life. Breathlessly rendering their on-the-move young subject with equally mobile camera work, The Kid with a Bike is boundlessly cinematic.

10. Hugo (Martin Scorsese, United States)

A categorical improvement in 3-D aesthetics, Scorsese treats the revived form as an entirely new medium, wracking focus as he subtly guides his spectators' attention across a series of interior planes - when he is not skillfully propelling his viewers through Hugo's immersive environs. No less adeptly, Scorsese gracefully re-imagines the work of the film's subject, Georges Méliès, stereoscopically. The preservationist Scorsese's latest is consummately a work of film history.

2011: Grant Wiedenfeld

1. Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances (Samantha Rebello, 2010)
2. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
3. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010)
4. Case Départ (Lionel Steketee, Thomas Ngijol & Fabrice Eboué)
5. Our Idiot Brother (Jesse Peretz)
6. Mysterium Cosmographicum (Brent Coughenour)
7. Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)
8. Empty Quarter (Alain LeTourneau & Pam Minty, 2010)
9. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
10. TRON: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)

Grant is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies & Comparative Literature at Yale University.

2011: Jeremi Szaniawski

2011: Annus (Quasi) Horribilis*

Perhaps 2011 is analogous to 1928's awkward conversion from silent to sound cinema, which would account for the generally weak output at a moment of uncertainty and transition. One can only hope that a new generation of filmmakers will be able to exploit the new aesthetic resources offered not only by digital filming, but also by digital projection, and reinvent the medium. In the meantime, the end of 35mm is, at least in my eyes, a tremendous catastrophe. Digital projection, be it 2 or 4K, is only appropriate for 3D animation films such as Steven Spielberg's and Peter Jackson's grotesque desecration of Tintin.

In general, with the economic crisis causing a dearth of quantity but also quality in cinematic production (ultra conservative studio executives placing all their money on 'safe' lowbrow hyper-marketed blockbusters, even more so than in the past), a spirit of scavenging has characterized commercial cinema of late, with strings of redundant remakes or nauseating celebrations of cinema's former glories (Hugo, The Artist). But the ghoul's spawns are hardly more than cinematic zombies, or vaguely charming bric-a-brac, and the glorious wind that once swept the hills of Southern California cannot shake the ideological cesspool that the wavering capital of world cinema has become.

In this dark context, no traditional feature film produced this year has managed to truly capture my imagination. The latest films by established American auteurs (Scorsese, Eastwood, Cronenberg) are disappointing, if earnest, at best; and formerly cutting-edge Hollywood filmmakers (Fincher and Soderbergh) have produced arguably their worst films in 2011. As in the 30s, it is a European import who has delivered Hollywood's best film (the slick Drive), while European (Moretti or Polanski hitting all time lows, for instance) and Asian art cinemas have been found lacking as well, by and large.

For all these reasons, my favorite films seen in 2011 don't actually qualify as 'feature films' or were released theatrically in 2010.

1. The most stimulating place for audiovisual experiences in 2011, far more even than the scores of celebrated shows that inundate public and private TV networks, has been the internet. Sites such as Youtube and its ilk have offered wonderfully creative 'mash-ups', in a reflection of our nostalgic, exhausted times and accelerated, disjointed global capitalist culture gone 'tidbits, soundbites and little else.' Acknowledging the cultural relevance of the 'genre', the talentless but shrewd journeyman Ridley Scott has produced the theatrically released mash-up, Life in a Day, which is alas way inferior to the sum of its parts. Conversely (and while only on view in selected galleries or museums, currently at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010), the crowning audiovisual achievement of 2011, is an endlessly stimulating, playful and gigantic 'film of films', an ode to cinema and time, which need not be viewed in its 24 hours entirety to be experienced, understood and enjoyed fully.

2. With her painterly celebration of femininity, the old West and the Oregon trail's perils, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010) proves once again that the director's understated, humanist cinema is by far the best alternative to Hollywood's current desperate and pathetic race for remakes and 'in your face' sensationalism. Michelle Williams shines once again in front of Reichardt's camera, miles away from her horrifying (if impressive) incarnation of Marilyn Monroe.

3. Essential Killing (2010) may be the purest film I saw this year, an almost dialogue-free, incredibly intense and compelling cinematic experience. Vincent Gallo seems to be a perfect interpreter for Jerzy Skolimowski's instinctual, physical and slightly psychotic approach of life and cinema.

4. If the theatrical version of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is at times superb, there's hope that, much like with The New World, a director's cut, more controlled formally and structurally, will emerge on the home video market and offer us Malick's truly complete vision. At present, and even if it is unquestionably one of the year's best films, The Tree of Life remains somewhat unsatisfactory.

5. Conversely, Lars von Trier's Melancholia is almost perfect structurally, but loses what it gains in such symmetrical construction to the darker, more powerful and genuine impulses of 'Antichrist', for which it serves, in many ways, as the acceptable, bourgeois remake.

6. Hors Satan, Bruno Dumont's latest film, is inferior to Hadejwich but still compels one by its rendition of a completely bleak existence. If not a masterpiece, the film is another building block to the director's unflinching quest to become France's most important cinematic auteur since Robert Bresson.

7. In a context of global cinematic mediocrity, the minor Dardenne Brothers' The Kid with a Bike comes across as a nice surprise, and their most overtly Christian film - their own alternative to the Life of Jesus they never made, in Luc Dardenne's own words.

8. For its sheer cinematic energy and the opposition of two wonderful actors (Oldboy's Min-Sink Choi and the angel-faced Byung-hun Lee), Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil (2010) is the good, if harrowing and protracted, surprise of South Korean cinema - definitely the current capital of dark romantic narratives of sadism and revenge.

9. Faust, Alexander Sokurov's Mephisto Waltz is the Russian director's weirdest, most kinetic film. Perhaps this dynamic nature contributes to a sense of disorder and makes the film an unnecessarily difficult audiovisual experience at times. Still Faust contains more artistic power and dedication per frame (if the word still applies in the digital age) than most other films, and cannot fail to inspire the viewer, albeit in meandering, unexpected ways.

10. Pater, Alain Cavalier's daring, powerful and minimal piece of meta-cinema blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary, and proves at once to be one of the most intellectually robust and energetic efforts of the year, a true young man's film about the wariness of power and the contradictions of contemporary French politics, from a filmmaker who turned 80 in 2011.

Honorable Mentions: Drive, A Separation, Warrior

* I have not had a chance to see the critically acclaimed The Turin Horse or Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Jeremi is the author of "Sokurov Waltz: Faust (2011)" on affiliate site Tativille.

2011: Alberto Zambenedetti

As far as movie watching is concerned, 2011 was an unusual year for me. For various reasons I had to forgo all international travel, I was not able to attend any major film festivals, and getting myself to a movie theater was a luxury I could afford only sporadically. My film viewership dropped from my usual three hundred titles per year to a square one hundred, which is a very low average for a film scholar, let alone one that dabbles in online and print criticism. The titles in this list reflect the uncommon set of circumstances that kept me away from my favorite activity. I limited my choices to the films I watched in a theater during the solar year (which were not repertoire). Some of them were released in 2010 but played in New York throughout the first few weeks of 2011.

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
2. Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
3. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
4. The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
6. Another Earth (Mike Cahill)
7. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
8. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010)
9. TRON: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)
10. Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010)

Alberto is a PhD candidate at New York University.

2011: Soren Bailey

Insidious (James Wan, 2010)
Super 8 (J. J. Abrams)
Bridesmaids (Paul Feig)
Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta)
Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)
Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)
Margin Call (J. C. Chandor)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Bill Cunningham: New York (Richard Press, 2010)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Listed in no particular order.

Soren holds an M. A. in Cinema Studies from New York University.

Ten Best Alfred Hitchcock Directed Films

Notorious

1. Rear Window (1954)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. Notorious (1946)
4. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
5. Psycho (1960)
6. The 39 Steps (1935)
7. North By Northwest (1959)
8. The Birds (1963)
9. Rebecca (1940)
10. The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Runners-up: Marnie (1964), Sabotage (1936), I Confess (1953), The Lodger (1927), Young and Innocent (1937), Frenzy (1972), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Farmer's Wife (1928), Family Plot (1976), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Ten Best Kenji Mizoguchi Directed Films

Ugetsu Monogatari

1. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939)
2. Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
3. Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
4. Sisters of the Gion (1936)
5. The Straights of Love and Hate (1937)
6. The Life of Oharu (1952)
7. Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954)
8. Street of Shame (1956)
9. The Love of Sumako the Actress (1947)
10. Osaka Elegy (1936)

Runners-up: Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), Tokyo March (1929), Shin Heike Monogatari (1955), The Downfall of Osen (1935)

Ten Best John Ford Directed Films

How Green Was My Valley 

1. The Searchers (1956)

2. My Darling Clementine (1946)

3. Stagecoach (1939)

4. The Sun Shines Bright (1953)

5. How Green Was My Valley (1941)

6. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

7. Judge Priest (1934)

8. 7 Women (1966)

9. Steamboat 'Round the Bend (1935)

10. Fort Apache (1948)

Runners-up: Wagon Master (1950), They Were Expendable (1945), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), 3 Bad Men (1926), Pilgrimage (1933), The Iron Horse (1924), Two Rode Together (1961)

Ten Best Films of 2010

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/United Kingdom/France/Germany/
Spain/Netherlands/United States)
In what is likely the Thai auteur's greatest achievement to date, Apichatpong explores not only the past lives and origins of his terminal lead, but also those of his own cinematic career - and even of his chosen medium (down to a Platonic shadow-play) - constructing a dense web of self-reference that transforms the filmmaker's reincarnation narrative into a comprehensive career reexamination.  Uncle Boonmee is the best new film in years.

2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Italy/Iran)
For Kiarostami's first fiction feature shot outside his native Iran, the director makes explicit the European sources (especially Rossellini and Resnais) of his half-neorealist, half-modernist idiom, while adding a new dimension to his art: a heretofore forbidden sensuality that as always relies upon spectator participation.  A major return to narrative form for Kiarostami, and the best of the recent spate of Asian-made European art films.

3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz, Portugal/France/Brazil)
Staging the Chinese box narrative structure of stories-within-stories-within-stories of the director's masterpiece Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), within gracefully circular sequence-shots that call to mind (without conceptually replicating) the temporally unstable spaces of his very fine Time Regained (1999), Mysteries of Lisbon emerges as a summarizing achievement for the Chilean-born polyglot.  Ruiz's career in 272-minute micro form.

4. Aurora (Cristi Puiu, Romania/France/Switzerland/Germany)
By virtue of one of the year's more comprehensive reinventions of film language, where a series of unmarked events - including a pair of double homicides - unfold within visually occluded beehive spaces, without the aid of narrative exposition, Puiu's essentially experimental Aurora pushes the default realism of the new Romanian cinema into truly novel (minimalist) territory. Puiu's Crime and Punishment has almost unparalleled staying power.

5. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, Romania)
A small masterpiece of the new Romanian cinema, Tuesday, After Christmas discovers a formal means of working through its love-triangle subject - physical exclusion - following an extraordinary one-shot, one-take open that maximizes bodily presence.  That it is the 'other woman' who remains off-screen in Muntean's final act, after one of the year's more unsettling exchanges, insures that Tuesday, After Christmas registers as a profoundly moral work. 

6. The Social Network (David Fincher, United States)
Justifiably anointed an instant classic of the American cinema, even if it is not quite to the level of Zodiac (2007), Fincher has again built his narrative around a film historical source - here no less than Citizen Kane - while employing a narrational strategy that generates meaning less from the distribution of bodies in spaces than from the film's lighting strategies and its mimetic scoring; that is, as a top music video artist would.

7. Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy/Germany/
Switzerland)
Echoing Uncle Boonmee's transmigration-of-the-soul theme, Le Quattro Volte charts the interconnections of  the Calabrian life-cycle from man to goat to tree to charcoal.  In so doing, Frammartino introduces the sense of an economy to the fiction-documentary hybrid, while also reducing man's cardinality to the cinema.  With its avowedly "Pythagorean" perspective, Le Quattro Volte qualifies as one of 2010's true originals.

8. My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany/Ukraine/Netherlands)
An early contender for the defining cinematic achievement of the autocratic age of Putin, the Belarusian Loznitsa's My Joy divides between a verdant Heart of Darkness forward progress and the stasis that comes with arriving at the cursed, wintery nowhere at road's end. Loznitsa assiduously moors his narrative to his victim-lead with the second half's increasingly conspicuous digressions always returning full circle.

9. The Strange Case of Angélica (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/Spain/France/Brazil)

From a screenplay that centenarian Oliveira wrote in the early 1950s, The Strange Case of Angélica returns not only to the filmmaker's Oporto origins, but to the naissance of the cinema itself (in the documentation of Lumière and the magic Méliès). Emphasizing both poles, Oliveira introduces notable anachronism into his latest - though, of course, his screenplay dates to a moment closer to the art's origins than to the present.

10. Unstoppable (Tony Scott, United States)
Scott has stealthily become one of Hollywood's most timely filmmakers, producing work since Déjà Vu (2006) that has registered the contemporary American mood with unparalleled acuity.  Unstoppable proves to be another work in the same vein, commemorating post-9/11 heroism within a more exclusively immersive, classical diegetic world than his partially viewer-activated 2006 career peak. Superior action-hack filmmaking.  

Ten Best Films' 2010 Mini-Poll

 

1. The Social Network (David Fincher)
136 points (AZ, KW, LB, MA, ML, MS, PK, RSu, RSw)

2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

99 points (LB, MA, PK, RSu, RSw)

3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)

86 points (LB, MA, PK, RSu, RSw)

4. I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)

84 points (LB, MA, ML, PK, SB)

5. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

66 points (KW, MS, PK, SB)

6. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik)

54 points (ML, MS, PK, SB)

7. Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)
49 points (AZ, LB, MA)

8. Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, 2009)

48 points (ML, MS, RSw)
9. The Strange Case of Angélica (Manoel de Oliveira)
47 points (JS, RSu, RSw)
10. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
46 points (LB, MA, RSu)

Other Films Receiving Multiple Citations: Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino) - 45 points (AZ, MA, PK), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009) - 40 points (JS, ML), Ha Ha Ha (Hong Sang-soo) - 40 points (LB, MA, ML), Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy) - 35 points (MS, SB), Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) - 35 points (AZ, RSu), Carlos (Olivier Assayas) - 34 points (ML, RSu), The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg) - 31 points (AZ, KW), White Material (Claire Denis, 2009) - 31 points (JS, ML)*, The Fighter (David O. Russell) - 29 points (PK, SB), Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois) - 29 points (KW, RSu), A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009) - 29 points (AZ, LB), Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009) - 29 points (MS, RSw), Aurora (Cristi Puiu) - 27 points (MA, RSw), Inception (Christopher Nolan) - 27 points (AZ, LB).

If I may be permitted, let me offer a few comments and observations on this year's Mini-Poll, conducted over New Year's weekend 2011, with a group of eleven New York University and Yale University graduate cinema and film studies alumni participating.  First, let me commend the respondents on organically forging what I personally believe is the finest consensus of any of this year's on-line group polls, be it Sight and Sound's exciting year-end review, or those of American outlets such as indieWIRE and The Village Voice.  Of course, the Mini-Poll benefited from the advantages of a small group of respondents, many of whom routinely discuss the films they care about most with one another - not that the critics of the aforesaid fail to do the same - and even more, from not limiting itself to 2010 commercial releases.  Indeed, three of the Mini-Poll's top ten (Uncle Boonmee, Mysteries of Lisbon, Certified Copy), including two of its marvelous top three, have in fact yet to receive US theatrical premieres.  With six more cited among the runners-up by multiple respondents, this should suggest the very high caliber of 2010's festival premieres, while also providing a preview of next year's 'best of' choices for critics both inside and outside the poll.  Let me also underline the value of choosing non-distributed films as it proves proscriptive - we all need recommendations; I still need to see four of our runners-up - rather than simply reflective and in some sense (needlessly for the readers) affirmative for the critics.

Let me further offer a word or two on the choices themselves.  It should come as no surprise that The Social Network finished first, as it has in nearly every survey and critics' group vote this year.  It is certainly the film that almost everyone can agree upon.  To this end, nine of the Mini-Poll's eleven respondents selected the film, though, quite significantly, the majority did not place in their personal top five.  Compare this to Uncle Boonmee, our number two, which appeared on five ballots, with four of those five ranking it as their number one - and the fifth, his number two; thus, all five ranked it higher than The Social Network, which failed to score a single number one.  What this suggests is a rather substantial enthusiasm gap between the top two (though not also, as you might except, numerous dissenters for the second).  The fact is that a number of our respondents will not see the film until 2011, making it an early favorite to add to its total should this poll make it to year four.  Among the other films selected as the best of 2010, Enter the Void is particularly notable as it received two first places with no additional citations.  (Here, and I am only speculating, there may be dissenters.)  Other selections for the year's best included The White Ribbon, a popular hold-over from 2009; Black Swan, this year's number five; Alamar, our number eight; runner-up Film Socialisme; and most obscurely of all, Tokyo International Film Festival prize-winner and out-of-competition Cannes selection, the Korean A Brand New Life.  As I said, polls at least in part should be about directing readers to new films.  Thank you to this respondent for this unexpected selection.

Lastly, I have tabulated the on-going totals four our first three years of selections below, with 2010's top two moving into our all-time top ten.  Namely, The Social Network moved into third position, where it will have to stay being theoretically ineligible after this year, while Uncle Boonmee ranks in seventh place, with upward mobility a definite possibility.  

Combined Mini-Poll Results: 2008-2010
1. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008) - 147 points
2. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008) - 139 
3. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) - 136
4. Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008) - 129
5. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008) - 126

6. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) - 101

7. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) - 99 
8. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008) - 97.5
9. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009) - 96
10. (tie) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) - 93
10. (tie) White Material (Claire Denis, 2009) - 93

Note [*]: Films marked with an asterisk received at least one vote in last year's poll. 

Scoring: Each citation receives ten points with an additional ten for a first place citation, nine for second, and so on, on down to one for tenth. This method of scoring is intended to give appropriate weight to those films that have been cited most frequently by this year's participants.

Key: AZ - Alberto Zambenedetti (Ten Best Films), JS - Jeremi Szaniawski (Ten Best Films), KW - Karen Wang (You're Making a Scene), LB - Lisa K. Broad (Tativille), MA - Michael J. Anderson, ML - Mike Lyon (Tits & Gore), MS - Matt Singer (Termite Art), RSu - Richard Suchenski (Ten Best Films), RSw - R. Emmet Sweeney (Ten Best Films), PK - Pamela L. Kerpius (Scarlett Cinema), SB - Soren Bailey (Ten Best Films).