I’m trying something new this year. I’ve traditionally ranked my end of year list top to bottom, and it’s been incredibly difficult, not to mention a false, unfair measure. This year, I’m grouping them by star-rating.

I’ve been using Flixster for the past 1.5 years, but this year, I’ve made a conscious effort—for every movie I’ve seen this year that’s in Flixster’s database—to add a star rating, and write a review; be it a sentence or a rare, wordy exposition. Note that this will also contain random, older movies I’ve seen at home, etc throughout the year.

One thing I’m noticing now is how extremely difficult it has been for me to award something 5 stars. It’s silly in retrospect, but shows I don’t completely believe in my ratings, or am afraid to say, “hey, I think this is worth 5 stars and found basically nothing I didn’t love about it”. Considering the extremely subjective nature of it all, I don’t know why, so I’ll have to normalise some of that now.

On the flipside to that, you’ll also notice how rather positive I am with my ratings in general, because, heck, I love my movies, dammit! At least in the context of everything else on here, it can be taken as relative.

Oh, and just to clarify, these are movies I’ve seen at the cinemas in the year of 2011, in Australia and Austin, during SXSW. While looking back, I was surprised that some of these weren’t 2010 releases, but then remembered Australia’s backward nature in receiving them.

I’ve written a relatively large amount about movies in 2011 across Twitter, posts on this blog, Flixster, and the /r/movies subreddit, so this is simply going to be a list.

Here they are, grouped by star-rating out of 5, and alphabetically within the groupings.

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