The best films of 2011…

…that I’ve seen, so far. As recently as last month, I couldn’t have scraped together 10 tiles worthy to sit on a reputable “best” list. I enjoyed Thor and X-Men well enough, but I can’t pretend the pleasure they delivered was very much more than a sigh of relief that disaster had been averted. Within the past few days, though, I’ve been able to fill in some gaps, and a couple of recent releases have shot so high on my chart of personal favorites I expect the very top tier will hang tight on my ‘Best’ list for the rest of the year.

10 movies have earned more than $100 mil domestic thus far this year (chart on page two), and I wouldn’t recommend half of them to my worst enemy on earth (Andrew Brietbart). Rango, Bridesmaids, Thor and Kung Fu Panda 2 are the only box-office hits of 2011 I can tolerate, so I suppose it’s heartening to know there are millions of 12-year-olds who share my taste in movies. On the downside, it means we have millions of grown-ups to blame for The Hangover Part III getting fast-tracked.

Super 8 is phenomenal fun. The finest mainstream movie I’ve seen this year.

• 13 Assassins
• Incendies
• Super 8
• I Saw the Devil
• Midnight in Paris
• The Double Hour
• Source Code
• Win Win
• Black Death
• Potiche
• Rango
• Cedar Rapids
• Hanna
• Kaboom
• Bridesmaids

Roughly in order of relative respect, though I’m not ready to rank these titles numerically or restrict the list to 10. The landscape is still too hazy and fluid for that. And, nope, I haven’t seen Tree of Life, Beginners, The Trip or Meek’s Cutoff yet — so don’t ask and don’t fricken rub it in. At least I’m seeing Midnight in Paris later this afternoon.

Super 8 looking at an estimated $35 million opening weekend. Better than the worrisome tracking data was predicting. Not as much as Hop, though, hell no. Because parents who flock to see schlock start training their kids young to swallow regurgitated dreck. It’s how the segment of the population who don’t believe in evolution make sure their offspring don’t evolve.