A list seen this year in Australian cinemas, at SXSW, and the Sydney Film Festival. I group this list by star-rating, and alphabetically within the groupings. It’s too difficult to rank linearly.

I’ve seen a lot this year, and a lot of old films too! 110 in this list plus at least 30-40 oldies. I’ve even tried my hand at filmmaking through the awesomeoness of Kino Sydney, and made two really bad short films; ‘Tearjerker’ and ‘Swings & Roundabouts’.

As to the ratings, I overwhelmingly loved and/or connected with each and every one of the films I’ve given 5 stars to, for many different reasons. If there were faults in them, I did not see them. So yeah, it’s all relative, and stacked top heavy. I rate them as soon as I see them, to avoid any normalising and brain hurting come end of year.

I thought about including original tweets, but looking back at them in retrospect, they’re too uneven, so unless I start writing seriously about every single film, at least the 5 and 4.5 star ones, I’m keeping it as just a list. All my ratings and extended thoughts are on Flixster or against the movies tag on this blog.

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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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It’s that time of the year again. The post I look forward to and dread in equal parts.

Bear in mind that this is a list of movies I’ve seen at the cinemas in Australia [with the exception of two that I saw in The States] this year, so quite a few that are ’09 releases to some of you, are in fact 2010 releases in this lagging country of ours. I can already see the same thing happening next year, with True Grit, Black Swan and The Fighter getting releases mid-January here.

Once again, this has taken 3+ hours to do. With the notable exception of Inception being best of the year by a clear margin for me, I think in future years, I’m going to have to create this list in some other way [maybe grouped by star ratings], because frankly, this is excruciatingly difficult, and probably not a completely fair way to rank movies either.

Anyway, here they are, ranked best to worst.

EDIT:

I’d omitted Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Knight and Day, so I’ve updated the list to include those two, and got to 100 in the process!

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I only had one real goal this year; to watch a 100 movies at the cinemas. Sadly [sadder than the fact that that was my one real goal of the year [and year before too]], I’m stuck on 99, and I don’t know if I’m going to squeeze in a screening of The Lovely Bones tomorrow.

w00t! Scratch all that. I found a ticket stub for a Japanese Film Festival movie I missed that wasn’t in the IMDB database / my IMDB list [and people shake their head when I mention that I collect all my movie ticket stubs – this has saved me from another year of pain and guilt!]

Anyway, here’s the list, ranked, without explanation, as always [the list was completed 2 hours after I wrote this…I really need to do it as a dynamic, weekly list next year].

1. Okuribito [Departures]
2. Up
3. Avatar
4. Revolutionary Road
5. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex [The Baader Meinhof Complex]
6. Beautiful Kate
7. Star Trek
8. I Love You, Man
9. The Girlfriend Experience
10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

11. The Cove
12. District 9
13. Balibo
14. Whatever Works
15. This Is It
16. Samson and Delilah
17. Changeling
18. Inglourious Basterds
19. Doubt
20. The Informant!
21. A Serious Man
22. Låt Den Rätte Komma In [Let The Right One In]
23. Los abrazos rotos [Broken Embraces]
24. The Wrestler
25. Sunshine Cleaning
26. Gran Torino
27. The Reader
28. Disgrace
29. Moon
30. It Might Get Loud
31. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
32. Seppun [The Kiss]
33. Che: Part One
34. Che: Part Two
35. (500) Days of Summer
36. Julie & Julia
37. Genova
38. Drag Me to Hell
39. Funny People
40. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
41. Brüno
42. An Education
43. Whip It
44. Mary and Max
45. The September Issue
46. Hansamu sûtsu [The Handsome Suit]
47. Coraline
48. State of Play
49. Yes Man
50. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
51. Watchmen
52. Amreeka
53. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
54. Adam
55. Fast & Furious
56. Paper Heart
57. Mao’s Last Dancer
58. Rachel Getting Married
59. The Boys Are Back
60. Sherlock Holmes
61. The Invention of Lying
62. Is Anybody There?
63. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
64. Milk
65. Ghost Town
66. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
67. The Soloist
68. Synecdoche, New York
69. Gomorra [Gomorrah]
70. Chi Bi [Red Cliff]
71. Role Models
72. 9
73. Duplicity
74. Terminator Salvation
75. Gravity’s Clowns
76. Seven Pounds
77. Gururi No Koto [All Around Us]
78. A Christmas Carol
79. Monsters vs Aliens
80. Flammen & Citronen [Flame + Citron]
81. Angels & Demons
82. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
83. Bronson
84. Year One
85. Blindness
86. Surrogates
87. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
88. Valkyrie
89. Transporter 3
90. The International
91. Séraphine
92. Zombieland
93. Gake no ue no Ponyo [Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea]
94. Public Enemies
95. Where the Wild Things Are
96. The Hangover
97. Capitalism: A Love Story
98. Push
99. Kei hei hup [Metallic Attraction: Kungfu Cyborg]
100. 2012 [I seriously stand by my tweet on this. Just, please stop, Mr. Emmerich]

Ok, a line of analysis… #1 – #50 are all pretty darn good and worthy of a second viewing. #73 onwards is where I go from like to dislike, and #98, #99 and #100; I do not wish the type of punishment I endured during them upon anyone.