Graham Young rounds up the best and the worst movies of 2011

What a difference a year makes.

January 2010 began with Hugh Grant dawdling through the laboured comedy Did Your Hear About the Morgans? before Jack Black wrapped it all up on Boxing Day with the irksome Gulliver’s Travels.

Little more than a week later, January 2011 opened with The King’s Speech on its way to four Oscar wins from 12 nominations.

And the year is closing this week with a gymnastic return to form for Tom Cruise in the gravity-defying Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

That’s what I call a proper pair of calendar year bookends – and the good news is that they seem to be sparking a trend.

The first big release of January 6, 2012 will see the incomparable Meryl Streep arriving as The Iron Lady.

And closing out next year will be Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D (Friday, December 14).

Then, on Boxing Day, the unignorable Quentin Tarantino will release Django Unchained starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L Jackson, Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz.

Such is the magic of the movies, one feels indignant about having to wait another 12 months for these treats.

But we must always remember, of course, that not every optimistic, slickly-cut trailer can turn its parent film in to cinema gold.

During the course of any year, it’s still a good rule of thumb that for every ten releases, only one will be of top quality while the rest can soon drop from fair to middling to full-blown disasters like this year’s record financial flop, Mars Needs Moms.

Even the turkeys on full-strength antibiotics have their worth since it’s often more fun to carve up the truly awful than to praise the righteous and meritorious.

More worrying is the British Board of Film Classification’s constant softening of its certification system.

Adults might grow used to violence, but do we really only need a 12A for Sherlock Holmes’ knuckle duster, when children will always be children?

And when did the BBFC/Hollywood’s studios decide the sluice gates could be opened on jokes about oral sex in 15-rated movies like Friends with Benefits and 50/50?

As the star of the tasteless, foul-mouthed Horrible Bosses and Just Go With It this year alone, Jennifer Aniston deserves two nominations at next year’s worst-of-the-worst Razzie Awards.

Other big-name 2011 movies you would only want to see for all of the wrong reasons would have to include Big Momma’s – Like Father, Like Son starring the hapless Martin Lawrence; The Dilemma (Vince Vaughn/Kevin James); I Don’t Know She Does It (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Green Lantern (Ryan Reynolds, also scarcely watchable in The Change-Up).

Two others deserve a mention for an even greater waste of talent.

After the multi Oscar-nominated As Good As It Gets (1997), how did double best Oscar-winning actor Jack Nicholson and Terms of Endearment director James L Brooks turn How Do You Know into the dullest film of 2011?

Likewise, why did two former best actor Oscar winners like Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman ever agree to make a film as reprehensible as Trespass. Did they not read their own script?

With such appalling judgement they deserved to play a wealthy couple being tortured in their homes by evil raiders, especially as Michael Heneke’s painful Funny Games got there first 14 years ago.

But enough of the second rate.

In the year when we lost Googie Withers, Anna Massey, Peter Falk, Susannah York, Pete Postlethwaite and the imperious Elizabeth Taylor, another former child star became an Oscar-winning best actress thanks to the dark thriller Black Swan.

Natalie Portman’s confirmation as the new, 29-year-old queen of Hollywood came just 17 years after her juvenile role in Luc Besson’s seminal hit-man thriller, Leon (1994).

Scored by prolific Midlands’ composer Clint Mansell and directed by Darren Aronofsky as a “sibling” movie to his previous film The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan explored the sheer dedication and borderline madness involved in reaching the pinnacle of ambition.

That it was also a spellbinding film about ballet just added to the sense of flair which ought to appeal to, and be a warning for, every wannabe member of the X Factor generation.

It certainly made you wonder why Ms Portman could possibly be in a film as tedious as Your Highness just two months later.

At least within two more weeks she was adding Kenneth Branagh’s hugely enjoyable Thor to her CV as compensation.

Along with Captain America, Thor was up there with the very best of the modern vogue for adapting comic stories, whereas Green Lantern and The Green Hornet were anything but environmentally friendly.

Directed by little known, Devon-born Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist), Rise of the Planet of the Apes was so exciting it was head and shoulders above all of the other summer blockbusters.

While the multi-talented Tim Burton had managed to suffocate an earlier remake in 2001, new boy Wyatt offered a combination of stunning action sequences and the return of Gollum and King Kong star Andy Serkis in fur.

The whole point of going to the cinema is to see something new and surely not an endless string of predictable sequels like Paranormal Activity 3, Spy Kids 4, Scre4m and West is West (rather belated after East Is East in 1999).

The best foreign movies of 2011 includes A Separation, The Skin I Live In, Farewell, The Silence and Outside the Law which all offered things that Hollywood didn’t and probably couldn’t if it tried.

Comedies like Bridesmaids and The Inbetweeners Movie (which had a surprising degree of British heart to match the typically over-optimistic nature of its young, hot-blooded male characters) both did well at the box office.

Pointless remakes included Footloose, Conan The Barbarian, The Mechanic, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Arthur, Brighton Rock and The Next Three Days (Pour Elle).

So why does (the fourth) Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol also deserve a place in the year’s top ten?

Well, director Brad Bird has used our sense of the familiar to really push the envelope for stunt-based movies.

If his adaptation of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Giant (1999) would surely have had an Oscar nomination had the Academy Awards not waited until 2001 to introduce a best animation prize, Bird then took flight regardless to win the best animation Oscar for both The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007).