Top 3 Movies of 2011

These are top three movies of 2011:

3. 'The Descendants' 

A number of major movies this year were about looking into the past and attempting to find some sort of solace or meaning there, creatively, personally or otherwise. But as Woody Allen revealed in his "Midnight in Paris," our view of the past is often distorted by our own desires, and things weren't truly any better then than they are now. That's why there's not a whole lot of emotional truth in a simple homage. But there's a ton of it in "The Descendants," which is ultimately about taking one's eyes off the rearview mirror and peering into the future. That means letting go, and the grief that Matt King (George Clooney) and his two daughters must work through as they say goodbye to their dying wife and mother is acute and real. So is the sense of loss that Matt feels over the possibility of relinquishing his family's stake in their home state of Hawaii. In both cases, Matt comes to terms with the mistakes of the past and attempts to move forward -- forging a new relationship with his daughters now that their "primary parent" is gone, and finding a way to preserve his family's land. Your reaction to "The Descendants" may depend on what point in your life you're at while watching it. For us, it was somber, funny and terribly moving. It's a beautiful film about trying to live right now, to know the people around you and where you all come from, before everything slips away and becomes just another distant, nostalgic dream.

2. 'The Tree of Life' 

If, in one sense, the power of Terrence Malick 's filmmaking comes from its ambiguity, "The Tree of Life," has to rank as his most potent and daring work yet. The movie begins and ends with an image of a swirling energy, a smoky, dancing light which means ... what? The spark that began the universe? The essence of everything that began and will eventually end what we perceive as reality? Yes ... and ... sure, why not? With Tree," it's always more about the questions than the answers. Malick's heartfelt meditation on life's mysteries, as filtered through a portrait of a West Texas family in the 1950s, has been fashioned to allow his audience the space to experience the emotions it might evoke within themselves. So as you watch the film's three young boys caught in the middle between the physical embodiments of grace (their lovely mother, played with such tender feeling by Jessica Chastain) and nature (a never-better Brad Pitt as their stern, thwarted father), we, too, feel the push and pull between the physical and infinite aspects of the human existence. There's beauty, poetry, tyranny, death. There's the birth of the universe. There are dinosaurs! Why dinosaurs? Short answer: (Again) Why not? Long answer: Perhaps Malick is reminding us that the creatures that once held dominion over the Earth no longer exist. Could the same fate befall their successors? Or maybe that little moment of grace where the big lizard spares its sickly cousin shows a way of avoiding that destiny. Again, it's all about the questions, and Malick gives you enough to chew on here that you could return repeatedly to "Tree" for years to come, knowing (and savoring) that your experience will be different each time you watch it.

1. 'Melancholia' 

Universal and personal, blatant and mysterious, sorrowful and funny, nihilistic and yet, sublimely, romantically, celebratory, Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia" takes the black bile of its namesake -- the depression of its heroine -- and transforms the "humor" into exaltation. A terrifying, dazzling planet that, true to Dane Von Trier's dip into German romanticism, is set to destroy life on Earth: Götterdämmerung via Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" (used in the picture's rapturously beautiful overture), via Ophelia via Cassandra via Von Trier's personal mythology. Clinically depressed Justine (a stunning Kirsten Dunst, Von Trier's surrogate) does what's often expected of those afflicted -- wear a brave face and a wedding dress, embrace love, work, family (no matter how dysfunctional) and rules. Well, Von Trier cannot accept that fate, and in the picture's first half, in which Justine destroys her nuptials, her actions serve as depressive, rebellious self awareness. "What did you expect?" she asks. Indeed. And then comes planet Melancholia, inching closer, leaving stable sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) panic stricken while Justine, calmly, grimly and at times, cheekily, accepts annihilation, not as easy suicide but as a kind of cosmic extension of despair. Finally. Justine isn't wallowing in depression, she's embracing, seducing it, and in one of the picture's most exquisite moments, lying beneath it naked, basking in the glow of doom. Von Trier, a sufferer himself, sincerely understands depression (just as he understood anxiety in "Antichrist"), which may be why he maddens many. Weaving himself into his characters, he's sadistic, masochist, empathetic, self obsessed, morbid and morbidly funny and then honest and honestly confused. With "Melancholia" he grants depressives a gift. Taking Justine's depleted darkness and imbuing her with celestial life through doomsday, he, to recall another German Romantic, creates an "Ode to Joy" through heartbreaking and gloriously inspirational...woe. 

Adapted from MSN