The 50 best movies of 2011

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By published

41. Crazy, Stupid, Love.

40. How I Ended This Summer

The Movie: Two Russian men fall out on a remote Arctic weather station. The kind of action movie Tarkovsky might have made.

Impact: It beat The King's Speech to Best Film at the London Film Festival, but as it turned out the audience for Russian art-house action cinema wasn't as wide as the one that went to see stammerin' King Colin.

39. Warrior

The Movie: Brothers Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton take each other on in a mixed martial arts championship. Unusually for a sporting movie, you want them both to win.

Impact: A surprise box-office failure, but once The Dark Knight Rises comes out this is going to be a slow-burning hit on DVD.

38. Contagion

The Movie: Steve Soderbergh reinvents the disaster movie with a sober, scientific approach that makes this outbreak scarier than, say, Outbreak. Bonus points for casting Gwyneth Paltrow as the monkey.

Impact: Audiences desperately trying not to touch anybody as they left the cinema, and regarding anybody who coughed as bringers of destruction.

37. Meek's Cutoff

The Movie: John Ford's Westerns printed the legend. Kelly Reichardt's tale of pioneers lost in the desert paints those wagons as they really were: long, slow and uncomfortable.

Impact: Reichardt's deliberately obscure anti-Western divided opinion, not least for using the old 1:33 aspect ratio. Expect confused Blu-ray owners to ask for their money back.

36. X-Men: First Class

The Movie: A stuttering franchise finds its mojo, a la Austin Powers, in the 1960s. Bond-esque cool, a hot cast (Fassbender, Lawrence) and smart retconning of history make this the summer's most stylish movie.

Impact: With characters emphasised over action set-pieces, this brought a relatively low return on investment for Marvel. Expect more pyrotechnics in the prequel-sequel.

35. The Interrupters

The Movie: Steve James, director of documentary classic Hoop Dreams, finds another inspirational and heartbreaking slant on the American Dream with his look at Chicago's violence interrupters, ex-cons who break up fights to make the world a better place.

Impact: A film that has already made a difference. The Bermudan Government is apparently planning to create its own interruption programme to bring down crime rates.

34. Arrietty

The Movie: The story of the diminutive junk-hoarding Borrowers, as reimagined by Studio Ghibli. Small in stature, a giant in spirit. It was the year's finest animation.

Impact: Veteran Ghibli animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi made his debut, suggesting that the studio is in safe hands whenever Hayao Miyazaki retires for good.

33. Thor

The Movie: The first of two feature-length advertisements for The Avengers this summer succeeded (where Iron Man 2) failed in being an enjoyable stand-alone adventure mixing culture-clash comedy and high-camp aesthetics.

Impact: Kenneth Branagh's appointment as director was a reminder that the more leftfield the choice, the more distinctive the result. Joe Johnston's more orthodox Captain America could only suffer in comparison.

32. The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn

The Movie: A Belgian cartoonist. A crack squad of British writing talent (Moffat, Wright, Cornish). And an American beard-wearing legend. The 'Berg's most purely enjoyable popcorn flick since the 80s.

Impact: A bizarre feud between generations. Younger bloggers loved it, but The Guardian published at least half a dozen negative op-ed pieces from established critics.