I’m beginning to wonder. If the Academy were populated with critics, how would their eclectic taste ever overlap enough for any movie to get 5% of the vote?
(By the way, I named Detective Dee among my top 10 last year, and people averted their eyes the way they do when encountering street-corner doomsday preachers.)
1. The Artist
2. Hugo
3. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
4. The Tree of Life
5. War Horse
6. Super 8
7. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
9. Rango
10. Fast Five
I love a good rationalization, so I’ll re-post the reason Richard Corliss gives for including Fast Five after the cut.
This list is short on sensitive indie dramas, heavy on mainstream mayhem, but it was that kind of year. The big boys — Hollywood technicians, from FX gurus to stunt choreographers — used their tools with more craft and cojones than the Sundance auteurs. Fast Five, fifth in the Fast & Furious series, is a live-action movie with so much whirling tumult, so many moments of low genius, that it plays like an animated car-toon. The dialogue, characterizations and acting are irrelevant to the success of this first great film of the post-human era. As if recalling the epochal heist in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery and, a decade later, the auto carnage of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, director Justin Lin goes back to basics with another train robbery and vehicular violence in police rides — souped up and stripped down like stock cars in a death race — on the streets of Rio. A carnival of roguish heroes and pretty girls, car chases and cliffhangers, Fast Five is as much a tribute as The Artist or Hugo to the cinema’s primal thrills.