I’m feeling extremely lazy this year. And I already covered many of these on the site. And the recent Oscar nominees have once again depressed me. So, without further excuses, here are my favorite films of 2011 presented in alphabetical order and in trailer form. Yes, I’m an innovator. Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share...

I’d been promising a friend my Blu-ray copy of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows for weeks. I finally remembered to bring it today as I was leaving to meet him for a viewing of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I bring this up because, after fully digesting the film, I was struck by how much it reminded me...

The last few minutes of Melancholia had me paralyzed with fear, on the verge of tears. The film then cut to black and, as if in the place of an insufficient exhale, I began laughing hysterically. That is the spectrum Lars von Trier’s incomparable film inhabits. With their shared emotional, metaphorical and allegorical motifs, Melancholia is very much a...

My primary criticism of Niels Arden Oplev’s original 2009 adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had to do with the way the film was stitched together. In the original film, the lives of two troubled souls, a brilliant hacker and an embattled journalist, intersect with a thud and then devolve into what I described as...