Mid-year Report

If you don’t make a habit of keeping an eye on obscure genre films making a blip on arthouse radar or getting dumped onto VOD, it’s been… well, it’s been a pretty shitty year, is what it’s been. The lack of a truly outstanding big summer entertainment may be the most disappointing thing; after all these years, I still keep faith with the Hollywood blockbuster, and sitting through one clunker after another has been dispiriting to say the least. X-Men: First Class came the closest, and though I liked it, it’s not a film I imagine I’ll ever watch again.

I did not, and will not, see Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Y’all are on your own with that one.

In alphabetical order, my ten favorite commercial releases of the first half of 2011:

Black Death (Christopher Smith)
How to Die in Oregon (Peter Richardson)
Insidious (James Wan)
Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
Rango (Gore Verbinski)
Source Code (Duncan Jones)
Stake Land (Jim Mickle)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson)
Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)

And some as-yet unreleased contenders:

Absentia (Mike Flanagan)
Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
Fightville (Michael Tucker & Petra Epperlein)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley)
NEDS (Peter Mullan)
Sound of My Voice (Zal Batmanglij)