Richard Brody names “The 26 Best Films of 2011”

Nothing about Richard Brody’s list of 26 films in The New Yorker touches me more than his introductory premise.

2011 in cinema could be called, with apologies to Joan Didion, the year of magical thinking. Many of the year’s best movies exalt the metaphysical, the fantastical, the transformative, the fourth-wall-breaking, or simply the impossible, and—remarkably—do so (following Didion’s theme) in response to loss, grief, mourning. These films depart from “reality” (or what is often offered up as such with a stern reproach to the ostensibly frivolous alternatives) not in order to forget the irrefutable but in order to face it, to think about it, to act on it more freely. And much (though not all) of the new realm of cinematic fantasy results from the increased availability and quality—the very inescapability—of sophisticated digital cinema. Every technological advance starts as a miracle, becomes a necessity, and ends up as a vice. Despite ambient complaints about the alienation of the real by means of the virtual, the powers of the virtual are now being wielded by artists, who reverse the course —- they restore to daily life its share of the miraculous.

Writing like that is a reminder that obsessing over the specific of each critic’s year-end round-up can sometimes tend to diminish what we value most about their work. Reading sharp analysis of films in their cultural context is one of the great pleasures associated with loving movies and thinking about what makes the best of them so special.

1. The Future

Miranda July is the Marguerite Duras of 2011: she infuses her movie with literature in order to make it more truly cinematic, reveals a choreographic precision that evokes physical intimacy and remoteness better than any other film this year, bares her metaphysical strivings in order to explore her most practical and venal fears and desires, fulfills the promise of her film’s exquisite title.

2. The Tree of Life

The very nature of inchoate thought, discovered and actualized by way of cinema. Terrence Malick overcomes the nearly insurmountable risks of the long-dreamed-of project to fuse autobiography and philosophy of mind, scientific fascination and religious reminiscences, desires and realities, a receding past and an uncertain future—and to do it with a fusion of dramatic intensity with visionary exaltation. The film’s very existence is a marvel.

(You’ll find a few more gems of crystallized distillation at The New Yorker, but I don’t want to re-publish the whole article)

3. Film Socialisme
4. Hugo
5. Certified Copy
6. Margaret
7. Petition
8. Putty Hill
9. Silver Bullets
10. A Screaming Man
11. The Interrupters
12. You All Are Captains
13. Bellflower
14. J. Edgar
15. Midnight in Paris
16. Terri
17. Impolex
18. Moneyball
19. Road to Nowhere
20. Bridesmaids
21. The Descendants
22. Uncle Kent
23. The Time That Remains
24. Le Havre
25. The Skin I Live In
26. Restless