Here’s the list so far. What else do I need to see?

1) Drive
2) Attack the Block
3) The Artist
4) A Dangerous Method
5) The Tree of Life
6) Beginners
7) Cave of Forgotten Dreams
8) Contagion
9) Young Adult
10) The Muppets
11) Bridesmaids
12) Weekend
13) The Descendants
14) Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
15) Margin Call
16) X-Men: First Class
17) Moneyball
18) Source Code
19) Margin Call
20) The Trip
21) Meek’s Cutoff
22) Bellflower
23) The Future
24) Captain America: The First Avenger
25) Paul
26) Super
27) 50-50
28) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II
29) Everything Must Go
30) Tabloid
31) Kung Fu Panda 2
32) Fright Night
33) A Very Harold and Kumar 3-D Christmas
34) Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
35) A Better Life
36) The Adjustment Bureau
37) The Help
38) Another Earth
39) Midnight in Paris
40) Hesher
41) Limitless
42) Drive Angry
43) Green Lantern
44) The Conspirator
45) Red State
46) Super 8
47) Win Win
48) Hobo with a Shotgun
49) Thor
50) The Devil’s Double
51) Rango
52) Battle: Los Angeles
53) Cedar Rapids
54) Your Highness
55) The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
56) The Green Hornet
57) Hall Pass
58) HappyThankYouMorePlease
59) Horrible Bosses
60) Cars 2
61) Bad Teacher
62) The Iron Lady
63) Gnomeo and Juliet
64) J. Edgar
65) No Strings Attached
66) Transformers: Dark of the Moon
67) Atlas Shrugged, Part One
68) Just Go With It
69) 30 Minutes or Less
70) The Beaver
71) Priest
72) Sucker Punch
73) I Am Number Four

The Beaver (2011, Jodie Foster)

“So, Mel Gibson is a depressed toymaker who finds a beaver puppet in a dumpster. He drinks himself unconscious one night, and a TV falls on him while he’s wearing the beaver. All of a sudden, he can only talk through the beaver, which has a cockney accent.”

“Why?”

“It just does.”

“No, not just the accent — why any of this?”

“Oh, better question. What I’m told is that a brilliant script had been sitting on desks, or shelves, or whatever scripts sit on — cocaine mirrors? — for years, and that Jodie Foster finally acquired it, turning it into a comeback vehicle for Mel Gibson.”

“Well, they’re both good actors.”

“They’re not alone! Anton Yelchin is Gibson’s depressed son. Jennifer Lawrence is convincing and button-cute as a cheerleader with a secret. Well, two secrets.”

“Which are?”

“Her brother died, and she used to be a graffiti artist.”

“Does everyone in this movie have totally stupid interests?”

“Yes. Stop interrupting. So, Gibson immediately turns his life around because the Beaver gives him amazing advice — usually along the lines of ‘shut up and do something constructive.’ He gives an inspiring speech to his failing toy company and it’s saved with a new product — Beaver-themed wood carving kits.”

“This is a child’s toy?”

“Yes. It sells out immediately. Gibson becomes a national celebrity. There’s one of those ‘cover of every magazine’ montages, and a Today Show interview.”

“So this solves his problems?”

“Sort of. He reignites his marriage for a while, having what appears to be great sex…”

“With the Beaver still on?”

“Yes. But he still can’t function without the puppet. Foster takes him out to dinner and he’s basically non-responsive. I’ll give it to him, Gibson is quite good at portraying the shame and resignation of someone suffering from extreme depression.”

“In a movie about a puppet.”

“Rub it in, huh? Anyway, everything works for a while, then falls apart. Gibson’s son screws things up by encouraging Jennifer Lawrence to pick up graffiti again as therapy and getting them both arrested. Gibson sinks back into depression, and the puppet attacks him. Or something. Gibson fights the puppet. He defeats him by taking him to the garage, building a coffin, and chopping off his arm with the puppet on it.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“This actually happens. Anyway, everyone learns something and the movie ends with the characters frolicking at an amusement park.”

“This sounds hilarious.”

“It is!”

Green Lantern (2011)

After all the hype about how terrible it was, it really wasn’t so bad.

“Limitless” (2011) – Surprisingly good sci-fi about a man who stumbles upon a drug that allows him to access his entire brain and become nearly superhuman. He recalls everything he’s ever learned or heard. He picks up languages just by half-hearing them. (Goddamn it, I need a drug that does this.) The movie loses me a bit by making the same mistake that “The Adjustment Bureau” did — assuming that political power is more useful than financial power!

“Shameless” (2004) – The Showtime remake of this show was modestly amusing, even if I didn’t buy the winsome, moneyed-looking Emmy Rossum as a poor family provider. Some Twitter pals convinced me to rent the British series that got ripped off. It’s… pretty great, mostly because it drinks so deep in the dark, grimy, hopeless side of modern British life. (I liked Rose, Doctor Who’s first reboot companion, for this very reason.) Somebody adapt a fantasy novel into a big budget film so David Threlfall can make big bucks.

This bottled coming of age story set inside a mental hospital rose and sank without a trace. Marketers were unable to translate the new megastardom of Zach Galifinakis into some buzz of their own. Such a shame, because this is a perfectly cute and adequate movie, adapted from a young adult novel and perfect for a certain kind of young adult.

I might have been one of those at one point. My depression, at this point, is gentled and tamed, but on one day in 2002 I cracked under the pressure of school and reporting and girls and (if I remember correctly) a computer error and I checked myself into a Chicago mental hospital. This movie nails it — the patient’s confusion about what he needs is interpreted by specialists as the need to put him up for three or five days. My roommate was a smart guy who slept all day and night; so’s the roommate of our hero, Craig. I didn’t meet any girls, but Craig, the lucky little geek, meets-cute with Noelle, played by the winsomely normal Emma Roberts. They bond over how nice he is (although you could read his behavior as patronizing) to other patients and draw each other pictures of flowers and faces and “brain maps.” Craig bonds and occasionally escapes (to other parts of the hospital, like a gym) with Bob, the Galifinakis character, whose problems are smartly left obscure.

Having revealed too much about myself (although I did write about this nine years ago), I should say whether the movie’s credible. It is. A mental hospital is an easy place for a non-crazy, just depressed person to navigate. When Craig arrives, Bob is a sort of local legend and fixer. In glimpses, we see that this is the only place where he’s not hopeless. He’s interviewing for a spot in a community home, and has a daughter that his wife is trying to protect him from. The saddest moment of the movie comes when Craig, who’s 16 and has no real problems, gives Bob a painting with his number on the back. “We can meet up,” he says, “play some table tennis.” Galifinakis shoots him a look that says this will never happen. Of course it won’t. There is no special rejuvenating power in the hospital. The man with the broken life returns to it, several thousand dollars poorer; the kid with the rich family got a nice girl and a vacation.

Hall Pass (2011) – eponymous
The Bucket List (2009) – eponymous
Pay It Forward (2000) – eponymous
She’s Out of My League (2010) – “Moodle”

Red (2010) – Never read the Warren Ellis comic it’s based on, but it probably wasn’t as frothy and fun as this entry in the Happy Hitman genre. Bruce Willis plays the Retired, Extremely Dangerous (GET IT?????) hitman Frank Moses, who is being targeted by assassins for reasons I still don’t understand. Mary Louise Parker plays his accidental girlfriend — a bored bureaucrat/harlequin romance fan who quickly gets used to high-stakes spy work — with her patented braininess and habit of never keeping her eyes on the person she’s talking too. John Malkovich is the drug-fried paranoiac who’s actually totally right. (“He was secretly fed LSD every day for 16 years,” explains Moses.) And Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, and Rebecca Pidgeon (!!) make appearances. No one seems to be working particularly hard, but they’re happier blowing shit up and shooting guns than they might be in a Harry Potter movie.

Captain America (2011) – Surprisingly good, corny, fun, although I think the long Hydra set-up might be dull on future viewings. Chris Evans, who has specialized in playing flashy jerks, is actually cool, humble, and convincing as the skinny short guy who’s Serumed into superherodom. (I’m sure Transformers will win the special effects Oscar, but the CGI that puts Evans’s head on a shrimpy guy is really something.) Hugo Weaving plays the Red Skull with a Werner Herzog accent. There are just enough scenes of a dude flying off a ramp on a motorcycle as stuff blows up behind him.

What’s a good way to get over a stupid theft that puts you out >$1000? Watch some movies, obviously.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

I was pretty bored by the first film in this series, and the horrible second one I only saw in snatches on HBO. (Several friends had the same joke on the way in: “Can I follow it if I haven’t seen the second film?” Yes, asshole, you can.) This, however, is a solid Michael Bay joint. It’s clear now that Martin Lawrence’s ad-libbing in Bad Boys II has convinced Bay that ALL of his characters, human or robot, should be socially maladjusted idiots. (Unless they’re women, in which case they’re either moony hot girls or frigid scolds.) Shia LeBouef’s Sam Witwicky may be the goofiest lead of a major franchise, ever — a jealous, bitchy, arrogant, whiny jackass, who is only useful when he’s blowing up robots. Why, for example, does he drive to the secret Transformers depot at DHS and yell at guards instead of preemptively calling Bumblebee to help him out?

But ANYWAY: Robots are in this, and they blow shit up. The other films in the series give us robot fights in barren locations or small cities. This one gives us a full-on alien invasion. And alien invasions are cool, what with the humans running away from danger in slow motion.

Gattaca (1997)

Finally caught this one at the stage when its futuristic design has become anachronistic. It’s very amusing to watch the newborn Vincent be tested for genetic traits, and for doctors to announce these traits with… a ticker-tape print-out! The twist at the end is silly but powerful [SPOILER: the cop investigating the murder is Vincent's genetically perfect brother, and the reason Vincent eventually outraced him is that he didn't save any energy for the trip back, which we can read directly into his Titan mission]. The dialogue and love story? Wonderful, actually sort of meaningful. I think it was this film and Wilde that made a star out of Jude Law, and deservedly so — he’s sleek, mean, and impossible to read.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009)

Just horrible. John Krasinski, the tall and handsome star of The Office, directs a bunch of David Foster Wallace short stories by incoherently stringing them together. I don’t think there’s 30 seconds of film without dialogue, and the IMPORTANT dialogue is announced as such with BIG BOOMING MUSIC. A bunch of actors you might remember from better movies and TV shows appear, read DFW lines, and disappear. Krasinski appears in order to provide a dictionary definition of smugness.

Nowhere Boy (2010)

It’s about time someone realized that the life of the young John Lennon was amazing drama. (Listen to Plastic Ono Band.) Aaron Johnson, the star of Kick-Ass, is amazing as Lennon — looks, accent, energy, everything. Ann-Marie Duff, who I can’t remember seeing before, is a wonderfully complicated Julia Lennon, whose interactions with John are as Oedipal as you can get without plagiarism. (I suppose the story is public domain by now.)

Rango (2011)

What a delightful kid’s movie — the best kind, with a Hunter S. Thompson joke! (Several, actually. HST appears in an opening sequence, and Rango’s hawaiian shirt is an obvious nod to the writer, whom Johnny Depp idolized and played him in the 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing.) The movie is cast for vocal talent, not starpower, so we get Ned Beatty and Isla Fisher in key roles. The action is as good as anything I’ve seen in animation.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

What Yglesias said.

Perusing the nominated films this year, I find that I have seen all the Best Picture nominees, all but one of the Best Actor/Actress performances (Biutiful), all but one of the Best Supporting Actor/Actress nominees (Animal Kingdom), and all but two of the documentaries. So here are my predictions for the winners, my haughty judgments of who SHOULD win, and my even-haughtier judgments of what else should have been nominated.

BEST PICTURE

Will win: The King’s Speech. Sure. Why not? It’s a terrific movie, apart from the problems Christopher Hitchens has laid out clearly and at length. It’s fun because, as some critic (whose name escapes me) pointed out, it’s basically a sports movie. Which brings me to:

Should win: The Fighter. My standard for greatness is “Do I want to watch this again?” I want to re-watch only a couple of these movies, but I really, really want to re-watch this. I loved the portrayal of Lowell’s white trash, the occasional gawkers looking at their verbal spats, the visceral boxing scenes, and all the acting — all of it, especially the characters who aren’t getting much buzz.

Should have been nominated: Four Lions. Chris Morris’s wonderful farce about terrorism deserved more attention than it got. Instead of: “The Kids Are Alright.”

BEST ACTOR

Will win: Colin Firth. I’m fine with that.

Should win: Colin Firth. You see?

Should have been nominated: Michael Shannon from “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” As I keep saying, he’s either a great actor or a crazy person who keeps breaking onto movie sets. Instead of: Jeff Bridges in “True Grit.”

BEST ACTRESS:

Will win: Natalie Portman. It’s the choice between gold-plating the box office star (Portman) and rewarding the older actress who keeps getting passed over (Bening) and I’d bet on the gold-plating. I can’t be the only person liking “The Kids Are Alright” less in retrospect.

Should win: Nicole Kidman. I don’t even like Kidman that much, but “Rabbit Hole” was the best I’ve ever seen her — more emotionally devastating than Portman because there are no pyrotechnics to help her out.

Should have been nominated: Hallie Stanfield should have been in this category, but she wasn’t, because of the horse race. Instead of: Michelle Williams.

At some point in 2009, while reading some website or drinking at a bar with friends, I learned that Seth Rogen would write and star in an adaptation of “The Green Hornet.”

“Hunh,” I thought/said. “That sounds like a horrible idea. On the other hand, I guess, who cares about the Green Hornet? I remember it was the show that Bruce Lee kicked 36 flavors of ass on, but I don’t remember or care about the character, so I guess this could work.”

Later, I learned that Michel Gondry was directing the film; later still, I learned it was “in 3-D.” Failing, for once, to do appropriate research, I did not check whether this would be a 3-D upconvert or a movie filmed with James Cameron’s cyborg cameras. Hey, Gondry’s an innovative guy, so it was probably the most arty experiment he could develop with… let me check… $130 million!

Alas, it is a 3-D upconvert. It’s a bad one, too. It’s one of many bad things about this lazy and miscast movie. There are only four or five real touches of Gondry magic. The movie’s interminable partying and dialogue scenes are artless and could have been filmed by Kevin Smith. The Gondry-esque scenes, like the first fight between Rogen’s Britt Reid and Jay Chou’s Kato, are perfectly fine, but make no real use of 3-D.

And Gondry’s touch is the best thing about the movie. Rogen’s script and performance are weak enough to make us question how much talent the guy had in the first place. Oh, I’ve always liked his performances. I’m not one of those people who think his act is composed entirely of sarcasm and smarm. But he wasn’t the breakout actor in any of his early projects. “Pineapple Express” was, like this movie, a combination of listless suspense and some fun dialogue, and that movie’s breakout actors were James Franco and Danny McBride.

At the end of every year I list the movies I’ve seen in some sort of ordinal ranking. I have yet to see “The King’s Speech” and some other Oscar bait, hence their absence from the list.

Documentaries are in italics. The general categories are in ALL CAPS.

PIECES OF FUCKING SHIT

66. Shutter Island
This is my bias: I despise the “it was all a dream” plot twist. I always have. That and the “it turns out the person making all the mischief was someone DISGUISED as the hero” twist have irritated me since they were used in lousy cartoons. Huge misfire, wasted cast, etc. SEEN: Netflix, Unalaska.

65. The Last Airbender
Not the worst movie of the year because it’s so enjoyable in its badness — it has the worst performances by young actors since at least Jake Lloyd in “The Phantom Menace.” Also, a Daily Show correspondent as the key villain? Good casting. I mean that seriously. SEEN: In-flight entertainment.

64. Cop Out
I give Kevin Smith a lot of leeway — I really enjoyed “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” really, and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” was survivable — but this was absolute dreck. Predictable, lazy, unfunny, giving me reason to doubt the talent of Tracy Morgan weeks before his HBO special confirmed that he’s no good without “30 Rock” writers. SEEN: Chris Chandler’s DVD copy, Delaware.

63. Saint John of Las Vegas
Plotless indie waste of time, with a good enough cast (Sarah Silverman, Steve Buscemi, Romany Malco) to avoid the direct-to-DVD fate it richly deserved. SEEN: Netflix streaming, DC.

62. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Why the hell do people like these stories? You mean to tell me that millions of young girls enjoy a book in which a key plot point involves the heroine rubbing up against a dude in jean shorts and no shirt so that she can attain his wolf scent to ward off vampires? SEEN: Download for iPad.

61. Blood Done Sign My Name
Quasi-religious Civil Rights era drama rented on the recommendation of the Flick Filosopher. Meh. SEEN: Netflix DVD, Amtrak from New York to DC.

60. The Human Centipede: First Sequence
Best parts: The title and the ending. SEEN: Ben Miller’s house, on demand.

59. Daybreakers
The cure for vampirism is sunlight-plus-not-dying? Fuck you. SEEN: Netflix DVD, DC.

58. Chloe
Atom Egoyan scrapes the barrel. Good lesbian sex scenes, I guess, if you’re into that. SEEN: Netflix DVD, DC.

MERELY MEDIOCRE

57. The Losers
Ebert loved this for some reason; I thought it was toothless and rote, with one of the year’s worst performances from Jason Patric as the villainous Max. SEEN: Download, iPad.

56. The A-Team
Basically the same thing. SEEN: Ben Miller’s house.

55. Dinner for Schmucks
Mostly interesting for how it gets around a modern problem — cell phones make it difficult to get into goofy situations without someone eventually calling you — with a lazy kludge. Everybody leaves his phone in the wrong place! Duuuueeeehr! An incredible waste of talent with a confusing “message.” SEEN: Airline movie.

54. City Island
Stupid sitcom humor made worse by my least favorite actress, Emily Mortimer. Andy Garcia is one of those great Actors Who Never Made It, and we see why here. SEEN: Netflix DVD.

53. Survival of the Dead
George Romero’s decline continues with a messy, but very well-gore-infused, story about a family feud between Irish people on an island “off the coast of Delaware.” SEEN: Netflix DVD

52. Alice in Wonderland
I actually liked “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” unlike a lot of people, but this? Meh. Nice set design and character design that looked a little lazy post-Avatar, generic plot. Also, the Johnny Depp dance at the end was… yeah, well, that. SEEN: Theater, 3-D

51. Green Zone
Why not just make a real movie about the Iraq War? SEEN: iPad

50. Youth in Revolt
Way to fuck up Michael Cera’s image right before Scott Pilgrim. I guess I dug the animation. SEEN: Netflix DVD

49. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Mediocre. SEEN: Netflix

48. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
The best of Chris Columbus’s three adaptations of children’s fantasy novels. Uma Thurman, though: WTF? Seen: HBO

47. The Book of Eli
How do these people survive so long without water? Fine Michael Gambon cameo. Seen: iPad

WORTHWHILE

46. MacGruber
Surprisingly fun, considering the reviews. The scenes in which MacGruber explains how his arch-enemy came to hate him — for a perfectly good reason! — make the movie.

45. The Crazies
44. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
43. Agora
42. Morning Glory
41. Salt
40. Predators
39. The Killer Inside Me
38. Get Low
37. Edge of Darkness
36. Harry Brown
35. I Am Love
34. The Ghost Writer
33. Smash His Camera
32. Iron Man 2
31. The Runaways
30. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
29. Cemetary Junction

GOOD MOVIES

28. Who Is Harry Nilsson?
27. Hot Tub Time Machine
26. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One
25. The Town
24. Please Give
23. I Love You, Philip Morris
22. 127 Hours
21. How to Train Your Dragon
20. Get Him to the Greek
19. Life During Wartime
18. Easy A
17. Greenberg
16. Kick-Ass
15. Blue Valentine
14. Black Swan

GREAT MOVIES

13. Marwencol
12. The Kids Are All Right
11. Catfish
10. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
9. Winter’s Bone
8. Inception
7. True Grit
6. Four Lions
5. The King’s Speech
4. The Social Network
3. Toy Story 3
2. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
1. Restrepo