10. Beginners – Mike Mills’ latest film may look like art house catnip at first glance with its plot mix of cancer riddled father, late age homosexuality, and its perpetual attempts at eccentricity, but beneath the caked layers of quirk lies a surprisingly moving dramedy about loss, intimacy, and the immortal adorability of talking Jack Russell Terriers. Elevated by low-key performances from Ewan McGregor, Melanie Laurent, and Christopher Plummer, Beginners far from revitalizes the genre, but instead resonates strongly not because of its treatment of loss, but rather its deft portrayal of the generational divide. If any film this year deserved to be called The Descendents this year, it was this one.

9. 13 Assassins – Takashi Miike’s homage to the samurai genre, a play on the time worn plot conventions of Seven Samurai, plays with classical conventions of honor and the samurai code while simultaneously catering to a blood-starved contemporary audience. Miike’s love letter to Kurosawa never quite transcends its status as fan service, but with its gleefully sadistic villain, enormous set pieces, and its now infamous usage of flaming boars, 13 Assassins stands out as the most entertaining action movie I saw all year.

8. Super 8 – There was no better classic blockbuster experience I had all year than Super 8. Super 8’s quality will unluckily be harped on in future history due to its predictable climax and descent into complete convention, but for an hour, J.J. Abrams created a near perfect pastiche of Spielberg sentiment and scope. With a group of charismatic kids who could have easily passed for the Goonies in a different world, Abrams relies on the spectacle and mystery of past epoch-defining events like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Stand by Me, and the aforementioned Goonies to create a film that feels all but lost in the current era.

7. Hugo – Can Martin Scorsese really make a kid’s film? The answer is a resounding yes. Hugo may lack the typical Scorsese playing pieces of gangsters, betrayal, gory violence, or the almighty Robert De Niro, but Hugo retains a bewildering amount of Scorsese’s essence and charm. Employing the rich vein of film history, Scorsese’s love letter to cinema is the most delicately beautiful history lesson all year, if only for its staggeringly reverent Melies recreation late in the film. As an exploration of film’s power, Scorsese is manipulative in all the right ways, leading the audience through a wistfully dreamy Paris full of film archetypes keenly aware of their precedents, but never delving into parody.

6. Melancholia- From its first ten minutes, Lars Von Trier’s fatalistic melodrama tries really really hard to move its audience. At first, the slow-motion pictures of characters in states of emotional duress and finally their acceptation of their fate seems bizarrely sequenced, in essence revealing the directors cards of a film that threatens apocalyptic conclusion. Melancholia isn’t a drama about the end of the world though, it’s about the way people act at the end of the world. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst are the yin and yang, two characters who look at the world in drastically different ways. As the film marches to its foregone conclusion and both the entire world and the worlds of the characters fall apart, Von Trier shows a startling vision of a life threatened by impending death. In its own way, Melancholia is essentially a spiritual snuff film, but it’s a gloriously weird and hallucogenic view of the world.

5. The Arbor – How far does the definition of documentary stretch? The Arbor, Clio Barnard’s starkly moving account of playwright Andrea Dunbar and the whirlwind of pain she inflicts on everyone around her tosses out standard definition: blending theater staging, avant-garde performance-art, acting, and a clever variation on the talking head format with actors lip-synching the real-life stories of their counterparts. While convoluted on paper, The Arbor functions perfectly in execution as the Dunbar clan’s wrenching tales come alive through dramatizations and some of the sharpest editing I’ve seen in any film in years. The best documentaries are able to give new life to their subjects and while The Arbor defies predictable definition, it’s incredibly difficult to imagine a more insightful depiction of the Dunbars’ lives.

4. Drive – Your enjoyment of Drive will depend entirely on what you’re looking for within it. Yes, this is an action film, but in the same way, House of the Devil is a horror film or The Vanishing is a thriller, Drive is a film built entirely on the thrill of anticipation, heavily stylized anticipation, but anticipation nonetheless. Punctuated by moments of extreme violence, claustrophobia, and melancholy, Drive is the action film that John Hughes and Jean-Luc Goddard would have created together: an existential mood piece tied together through a killer retro soundtrack and an adorable love interest.

3. Weekend – There are few films that realistically and effectively address the sensation of intimacy. As the title suggests, Andrew Haigh’s debut shows the simple progression of two gay men getting to know each other for a weekend after a one-night stand, but it’s the little touches that set apart Haigh’s film. For being a debut filmmaker, Haigh displays a startling assurance behind the camera, channeling mood and tone with his shot choice. From one moment to the next, Haigh is able to detect sea changes in emotion and the sense of the room and the tension within the men’s interactions. More than simply the control of the filmmaking though, Haigh’s script feels like a real document of experience, shifting through rites of passages of relationship and the trial of what getting to know someone really means.

2. Certified Copy- My placement of the film this high is certainly related to the twist of sorts revealed later in the film, but prior to the twist, Certified Copy is a fascinating illustration of the way clashing minds think and how our viewpoints and experiences define our lives. Deeply melancholy yet never cloying, Abbas Kirostami’s film begins as a meditation on artistic theory, but soon mutates into something completely different.

1. The Muppets- It’s only kind of peculiar to have The Muppets as my number one movie of 2011 after a series of art house films, but there’s no film that filled me with more pure joy this year than The Muppets. I wish I could point to some long apparent thread of fandom for Jim Henson’s delightful puppets, but while my Muppets Christmas Carol VHS has been worn ragged, my experience with the gang and their perennial renditions of Mahna Mahna and Rainbow Connection have been severely limited. Maybe it’s my enduring man crush on goofball Jason Siegel, the gleefully self-aware soundtrack, the mélange of game guest stars, or simply a desire to vicariously experience Muppets mania, but there has to be a reason that a gigantic smile was planted on my face for the entire experience. Regardless, The Muppets is the type of movie that makes a cynical moviegoer like me happy to still have blockbuster efforts.