The L Magazine's 2011 Film Poll
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16. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
A car-chase movie that seems to be find car chases dull. Refn applies style over substance in this pulp adaptation of James Sallis's lean novella of the same name, prioritizing mood and setting over plot and character development, a welcome change to louder, dumber movies of the same ilk. Daniel Loria
17. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
By 2011, the stateside emergence of promising new Romanian filmmakers had begun to seem almost like a matter of course, making it all too easy to take a devastating realist drama like this for granted. In an impressively nerve-wracking series of long takes, the fourth feature by Muntean (and the first to see U.S. commercial release) stared straight at a marriage at its breaking point—in the process also offering a peerless on-screen depiction of the holidays-as-crucible. Benjamin Mercer
18. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt)
As the Hollywood blockbuster becomes an increasingly moribund spectacle, a movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes arrives as a multi-layered revelation: a modern Faustian fable about the tragic consequences of scientific man's desire to play god; a Mosaic personal journey—of a monkey, no less—from Edenic childhood to disillusioned adolescence to vengeful adult leader of an oppressed sub-society; and a thoroughly tense apocalyptic thriller and prison flick, all tenets of this surprising "reboot" attesting to its bold ambition and virtuoso execution. Michael Joshua Rowin
19. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
Filled with sequences of earth-shaking power (the aftermath of a bus accident is surely the scene of the year), and buoyed by a titanic lead performance by Anna Paquin, Margaret bursts at the seams of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. The story of a teenager and her misdirected sense of guilt in the wake of tragedy, Lonergan's belatedly released film is a work that pins down vast swaths of life carved from a very specific place (New York) and time (the dawn of the 21st century). Schenker
20. Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield)
Porterfield's sophomore film, about the fallout from a 24-year-old's fatal overdose, observes the empty places and people the young man left behind. It feels like a documentary about fictional characters; the director interviews them when not simply observing their unremarkable routines. It's like he's deliberately avoiding any traditional scenes or drama, highlighting instead the ennui and spiritual void experienced not just by those in the Baltimore region—here, a rural, Caucasian-dominated milieu far removed from The Wire—but by a whole generation. Henry Stewart
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