Critics’ choices: The best films of 2011

1. The Tree of Life

“The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. An epic, quasi-religious work from reclusive director Terrence Malick, it blends a small-town family story, featuring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, with a vivid imagining of the creation and end of the universe. Malick’s purpose is to address some of life’s “hardest and most persistent questions,” and even viewers not attuned to The Tree of Life’s sensibility will draw from this movie “awe, amazement, and grist for endless argument.”

2. The Descendants

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Sideways director Alexander Payne’s latest comedy-drama “perfectly captures the blackly comic insanity that can overtake a family forced to confront an impending death,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. George Clooney, as a father trying to reconnect with his two daughters after a boating accident renders his wife comatose, “has never been better.” There’s “not a wasted moment or misstep” in the entire film, which also “makes brilliant, often ironic use” of its Hawaiian setting.

3. The Artist

The Artist “evinces such mastery of form” that it could easily be mistaken for a classic film of the late 1920s, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. French director Michel Hazanavicius pays homage to silent cinema’s golden age by making an actual silent film about a screen actor (played by Jean Dujardin) whose popularity fades with the advent of talking pictures. “To see The Artist is to realize how much movies have lost from having gained so much technical sophistication.” When film was silent, it was a medium that spoke a truly universal language.

4. Melancholia

Danish director Lars von Trier reached new heights with this “ecstatic magnum opus on the themes of depression, cataclysm, and the way the world might end,” said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. A “magnificent” Kirsten Dunst stars as a clinically depressed bride forced to reckon with imminent apocalypse when a planet is found to be hurtling toward Earth. The film’s grand score and “striking visual tableaux” convey profound emotional depths. “It’s a giant achievement.”

5. A Separation

This family drama from Iran is proof that movies “don’t always have to sacrifice formal sophistication for visceral power,” said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. An unhappy wife wishing to raise her daughter in the West is denied permission to divorce her husband, who is caring for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. While the film’s “sad, funny, suspenseful story about love, grief, and the search for justice” provides a sharp political critique, it is also “a quiet reminder of how good it’s possible for movies to be.”

6. Drive

“Star of the moment” Ryan Gosling made his 2011 memorable with a fresh take on “one of Hollywood’s most cherished archetypes—the sad-eyed man of few words,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. In this stylized crime drama, Gosling plays a moonlighting getaway driver whose controlled existence gets complicated when Carey Mulligan moves in next door. “Low-key and sophisticated,” Drive is action filmmaking done “cool and smart.”

7. Hugo

Martin Scorsese somehow found a way to use modern 3-D to create a rapturous “love letter” to early cinema, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. As viewers enter the world of an orphan who lives in a 1930s Paris train station and is trying to solve a mystery involving his late father, Scorsese’s visual gimmickry dazzles. But the technical wizardry would mean nothing absent the director’s obvious passion for storytelling.

8. Moneyball

This fact-based baseball tale proved to be “the best sports movie in a long time,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. As Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, a “sharp” Brad Pitt made us root for the low-budget team’s use of an unorthodox, math-based system of choosing players. Everything in this underdog story “could’ve been rendered dull or sappy,” but director Bennett Miller struck the perfect tone.

9. Take Shelter

Indie filmmaker Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter “is a terrifically crafted little movie” that deserves to be compared to the early works of Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Michael Shannon stars in this “modestly scaled, character-based drama” as a man experiencing apocalyptic visions that may be real or may be the result of schizophrenia. From the performances to the cinematography, this is a film that succeeds “on all levels.”

10. Certified Copy

This “delicious brain tickler” twists reality in unexpected ways, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Juliette Binoche and William Shimell star as apparent strangers who’ve been mistaken for a married couple, but once the two begin playacting as if they are married, it becomes unclear whether or not they are partners after all. At Cannes, Binoche took home a Best Actress award for her performance, which “humanizes the film and lends its theoretical substructure emotional weight.”

How THE list was chosen: We created the rankings above by weighing the end-of-year Top 10 lists of 30 print and Web publications, including The Arizona Republic, the A.V. Club, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, CNN.com, CSMonitor​.com, Entertainment Weekly, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Portland Oregonian, Salon.com, Slate.com, Time, USA Today, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.