Category Archives: Best Of

MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – Videogames

Best of 2011, Games

by MrMoth

I am spectacularly under-qualified to write this, but when has that ever stopped me? I did a pop column for six months, despite being quite clearly a man in his mid-thirties. So here I am writing about the best videogames of 2011 having only played about ten in total. I haven’t had a chance to play two I’m looking forward to (Skyrim and Zelda). None of the games I have played were the big, brown franchises – Resistance, Gears, Battlefield, Call of sodding Duty – none were quirky Japanese side-scrollers and absolutely none had any downloadable content installed because I haven’t got a fucking modem, okay?

So for the half-dozen of you still here, let’s get cracking.

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MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – The Book of Mormon

Best of 2011, Music, Theatre

by Spank the Monkey

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV series, South Park, first hit our screens in 1997, about the same time as domestic internet access was beginning to take off. It was the first TV show I can remember being widely, let’s say, distributed across the web, a factor that probably contributed towards its rapid worldwide success. (It certainly didn’t hurt that in those days of 28k modems, a South Park episode looked so rough already that it could be brutally squished into 30-odd Mb of Real Video without any visible degradation.)

Parker and Stone apparently appeared out of nowhere, but the technology of the web also gave fans like me a method of tracking down their earlier work. There were a couple of crude South Park prototypes, Jesus v Frosty and The Spirit Of Christmas: a curious in-house short for Universal called Your Studio And You: and further back than those was their first proper film, the unholy marriage of Rodgers and Hammerstein with Lucio Fulci that was Cannibal! The Musical.

Cannibal! was made in 1993, which means that Trey and Matt have been getting away with this shit for nearly two decades now. And their 2011 smash hit Broadway musical, The Book Of Mormon, is the perfect synthesis of everything they’ve done over those two decades.
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MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – A Separation

Best of 2011

by Adam Howard

In a year full of big-name directors making big, messy, ambitious films – see The Tree of Life, Melancholia, Black Swan – I suppose it makes sense that one of the very best of the year would be a quiet little character piece, its ambitions only to capture life in all its complicated shades of grey. While watching A Separation for the first time, I remember thinking to myself that director Asghar Farhadi had created an entire universe for his characters to live in. It was only when I realised that that universe was the very same one that we’re living in now that I realised how truly special it is. It’s a film about an incredibly specific situation that touches on something universal, and while we in the West may not be able to relate to an awful lot of what happens to these people, the emotions that run through the film resonate far beyond the characters’ where and whats.

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MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – Submarine

Best of 2011

by Paul Shuttle

In the largely subjective realm of film criticism, there can be few more useful barometers of quality than whether you were moved to again return to a film once your review had been filed. The process by which a critic arrives at their film of the year may be a tortuous one  but such retrospective analysis tends to lionize the important over the good. Rather than succumbing to the futile cross-referencing of colour coordinated lists, perhaps a critic should instead consider just one question: which film do they feel most compelled to watch right now? For my part, the answer has been the same for almost every day that has passed since I first saw it. The answer is Submarine.

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MOSTLYFILM’S BEST OF 2011 – Mostly Records

Best of 2011, Music

by Jim Eaton-Terry

tUnE-yArDs - a typographical error waiting to happen.

Having spent most of 2011 trying, with varying degrees of success, to listen only to music released this year, the albums I’ve loved the most have invariably been odd and angular takes on pop.  They’ve also mostly been fronted by women

Whether  I think about Tune-Yard’s dazzling, incomparable, almost indescribable WHOKILL – without doubt my album of the year, the first record I’ve ever heard to be as exciting as The Pop Group and still work as pop music – or Let England Shake, with PJ Harvey stepping further away from straightforward rock than she’s ever been and, in the process, producing her best album since 4-Track Demos, most of the year has been spent listening to music by women taking music places it’s never quite been before.

Despite that, the song I keep coming back to, find myself listening to, humming, and boring my children with more than anything else I’ve come across this year is straightforward to the point of minimalism.  It’s also sung by a man.
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MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – Beginners

Best of 2011

by “Ron Swanson”

2011 has been a great year, in many ways. We’ve seen excellent documentaries, brilliantly ambitious auteur epics, fresh and inventive period drama and some great foreign language films. The one genre that has lagged behind has been the stereotypical American ‘indie’ movie, the type that would have a star in a slightly schlubby role learning life lessons in a quirkily sad way. Usually also featuring a bewilderingly attractive love interest and some sharp-tongued best friends.

There are good ways to make that film, and there are bad ways. In 2011, the best example of the genre was Mike Mills’ Beginners. Mills followed up his excellent, under-appreciated debut Thumbsucker with one of the year’s most emotionally arresting films, while never really deviating too far from the genre blueprint.

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MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – the year in Rep

Best of 2011, Classic Films

by Philip Concannon

The Devils

The most exciting action sequence I saw on the big screen in 2011 didn’t occur in a summer blockbuster. It wasn’t directed by Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Paul Greengrass, or any other contemporary master of cinematic thrills, and it has nothing to do with those myriad French films in which a frantic man in a suit runs around Paris for some reason. The sequence I’m referring to is the climax of Storm Over Asia, when the protagonist – a direct descendant of Genghis Khan – picks up his sword and leads the charge against his British captors. Breathlessly paced and set to a rousing score of Mongolian throat singing, the sequence practically lifted me out of my seat in a way that very few recent films have managed to do. Storm Over Asia was directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and it was made in 1928.

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MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – Confessions

Best of 2011

by Sam Inglis

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.  Not entirely, sayeth the movies.

The vengeance film has a long, sometimes sordid, often fascinating history, and it’s a subgenre I have long found interesting due largely to the way that it allows filmmakers and actors to explore characters in extremis.  This year’s outstanding entry in this subgenre is Japanese, and comes from a perhaps unexpected source.

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MostlyFilm’s best of 2011 – Margaret

Best of 2011

by Indy Datta

The annual end-of-year ritual of anointing the year’s best films is probably as old as film criticism itself – there was probably some contrarian who thought Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat was overrated, and not as good as Dancing Darkies. I’ve been thinking about how different things must have been, though, in the pre-internet world, where the average film buff might only know what Barry Norman thought was the year’s top ten, or Time Out, or the Guardian (or if they were really fancy, Sight and Sound, or if they were fancy-shmancy, Cahiers du Cinema). And while Bazza probably chatted to Derek Malcolm or Alexander Walker about films they’d seen when he bumped into them at screenings, I have to assume that film critics talk to each other a lot more about films these days. They’re right there in my Twitter timeline doing it all the time, for a start. And they’re also talking about films to people who wouldn’t have been part of the conversation a few years ago – on Twitter but also in the comments sections of newspaper film reviews, and on blogs, and even on the BBC’s Film programme. It’s clear that the internet has made a difference to the culture of film criticism, but has it been a positive one?

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