Last year my Top 10 list mainly consisted of un-heralded indies. This year I give up: I liked “Captain America” and “The Tree of Life,” but I can’t put them on the same list. So my top mainstream movies are here. I’ll post my favorite art-house pictures on The Post’s movies blog.
1 The Artist Sure, it’s a silent picture, but the best film of the year is this sweet story of a big-time actor who gets very small at the advent of talkies. The idea is a brilliant means of sneaking in old-fashioned sentiment and gentle humor under the guise of mocking Old Hollywood. For those who haven’t seen many silents: Trust me, you forget no one is speaking out loud after five minutes.
LOU LUMENICK’S BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
2 War Horse The value of cinematic beauty and emotion should not be underestimated: If all filmmakers could make you cry, they would. Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, emotionally replete story of a boy trying to find his horse against the backdrop of a world in flames navigates the heart as well as the master’s finest works. The final image is indelible.
Lou says: Spielberg at his most phony and manipulative. I couldn’t forget for a second I was watching actors on sets, and the director paying homages to other filmmakers. Not to mention John Williams’ soupy score. After three hours of this, I wanted to shoot the horses and send them to the glue factory !
3 Bridesmaids I’ve never seen anything like it. Funny, smart and surprisingly real, this movie written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo has the potential to create a revolution in film comedy — and I hope it does.
Lou says: You’re looking forward to an endless string of knockoffs where women poop in the street? Guess who’s going to be reviewing them, buddy.
4 Captain America: The First Avenger Tongue-in-cheeky without being snarky, the year’s best superhero movie salutes WWII propaganda even while poking fun at it. A witty script, superb period art direction and a likable low-key hero set up a reasonably exciting climax and an amusingly daft ending.
Lou says: Dull, cornball two-hour trailer for “The Avengers.’’ Lunkish Chris Evans gives what is surely the year’s most relentlessly boring performance.
5 Drive Cool has a new alias: Nicholas Winding Refn, the Danish director who made the counterintuitive decision to saturate his LA gangster noir in ’80s touches such as a synth-heavy soundtrack and the hero’s satin windbreaker. Marlon Brando was never more magnetic or enigmatic than Ryan Gosling (above) as the tough guy known simply as “Driver.” And give Refn credit for casting Albert Brooks, in an Oscar worthy role, as a ruthless killer.
Lou says: Has its moments, but this has got to be the most overrated movie of the year. I’m so weary of reviewers playing “spot the film reference and tell your fellow critics about it.’’
6 Super 8 I didn’t love the climactic scene, but until then J.J. Abrams’ fond pastiche/recreation of early Steven Spielberg movies shows an expert sense of childhood and its dreams, not to mention the frustration, impatience and excitement that comes with being young and talented.
7 Rango The year’s one great animated movie is a wonderfully goofy riff on Hollywood presentations of the Wild West (not to mention “Chinatown”), and you couldn’t ask for a more endearing choice to play the self-aggrandizing yet self-doubting lizard than Johnny Depp.
8 Contagion Breathless, creepy and intense, Steven Soderbergh’s globe-trotting inquiry is a scarily convincing look at what might happen if an out-of-control lethal virus began to do its worst. Utterly convincing from start to finish, with an almost unbearably well-imagined script by Scott Z. Burns.
Lou says: Well, I’ll give you this: It does have 2011’s most satisfying scene, a deceased Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being sawed open. And Purell sales went up 12,000 percent.
9 The Iron Lady Indomitable Margaret Thatcher gets her due in a sympathetic, impossible-to-top portrayal by Meryl Streep, who is to acting what Thatcher was to British politics. The movie leans too heavily on Thatcher’s unfortunate decline, but it also depicts how Thatcher shook the double handicap of being middle-class and female as she burst into the ultimate Old Boys Club and reformed a nation that didn’t know how desperately it needed her.
Lou says: UGH! Who wants to watch Streep swathed in Latex as the dotty old Maggie debates her long-dead hubby for two hours? Panders shamelessly to both sides of the political fence, not to mention Oscar voters.
10 50/50 Bro, I’ve got cancer! Doesn’t sound like a great idea for a comedy, but Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt bring the funny as well as the alarming. Still, it wouldn’t be the same movie at all without the galactic-size charms of Anna Kendrick as the slightly disorganized rookie shrink who helps a young, possibly doomed man get his stuff together.