A few weeks back, I had a conversation (well, an email exchange) with a friend of mine about the way I title these various features that prove I know how to count backwards while also highlighting my favored films from certain stretches of time. Specifically, we were debating the use of plainly assertive statements of value in the title of the posts. There are no qualifiers, no hedges, just the flat insistence that these are the “Top Ten” or “Top Fifty” films of the designated time frame. This was a very deliberate choice when I first starting writing such pieces for digital disbursement; in an admittedly slippery game of semantics, I decided that “Top” was more humble than “Best.” But, of course, there’s still an inherent, if unintentional, assertion of authority in the way I phrase it. The title offers no clarification that these are personal picks, subject to the same whims of shifting taste as any list concocted by a sole individual, though I suspect (or maybe hope) that is implied and understood.

I share this not because I’m planning a change in terminology (a simple glance upward confirms that), but because in looking at the list of ten that I’ve settled on as my final statement on the cinematic peaks of the 2011, I see a batch of releases that looks very different than any other I’ve drafted for a yearly survey, a practice that I’ve been doing with regularity and a reasonably informed knowledge base for at least two decades. More than any other time in the past, I’m struck by the certainty that my top ten list is less a measure of the current state of movies than it is a figurative temperature check on my own personal taste. This might not be all that novel of a concept–certainly any attempt at ranking favorites is more revelatory of the person assembling the list than it is of the artists who toiled on the original works being cataloged–but it is maybe the first time that I feel that my ongoing evolution of preferences has made a seismic shift rather than a gradual adjustment, at least by the measure of the titles I feel compelled to include.

I’m left to wonder if it’s me or it’s them. Lamenting the state of Hollywood studio filmmaking is a pastime practically as old as motion picture cameras themselves, and the lowest lows seem no more dire now than at any other point since I started regularly crossing the thresholds of various multi-screen theaters. But somehow, the peaks seemed far less impressive this past year, as almost every ostensibly important film suffered from some persistent flaw, some indication of material overthought and underworked. So many films I saw, even those I generally liked, seemed to fit all too neatly into one formula or another. I’m not really one to automatically decry test screenings or studio influence, but when I think back on some of the biggest films of the past year, even those that are racking up accolades elsewhere, my sight of the actual work is obscured by all the fingerprints I see, the evidence of compromise so persistent that it begins to look like cowardice.

Then again, it could simply be me. My post as one of the film reviewers for Spectrum Culture has afforded me the chance to see an abundance of relatively obscure independent and foreign films that might have otherwise evaded my gaze during the calendar year. Although the final list has only three titles that I saw under those circumstances (and only one that didn’t wind up playing in my modest mountain town anyway), the scrappiness, fearlessness and roughness around the edges (in both good and bad ways) surely could have dulled my taste for the studio product polished to a relentless sheen, if only by shifting the context of my expectations. I also spent an awful lot of time these past twelve months (or so) watching specifically selected movies from the nineteen-seventies, a time of arguably unprecedented cinematic freedom, which was often embraced with an appealing gleeful recklessness. Most modern films can’t help but look wanly safe in comparison.

So I tended to gravitate towards those films that were risky, challenging, thought-provoking and, in their wild ambition, perilously messy. I don’t think there’s a single film on my list that I would call perfect, even those I find to be exquisitely crafted in most respects. Every last one has some amount of problems that a reasonable person could call out and I would have no strong defense for, at least beyond my admiration that the questionable passages tend to emerge from directors and their collaborators taking on storytelling problems that carry with them an astonishing degree of difficulty. Even the problems are a result of great ambition rather than craven uncertainty, a shortcoming that, therefore, is far more agreeable to me.

I claim to spot no trends, and I don’t believe these films necessarily represent some clarion call that will lead cinema in bold new directions. These are just the ten films from the past year that excited me the most and also stayed with me the longest, the strongest. These speak to what I want most right now when I give a couple hours of my life to a collection of filmmakers. These are the rewards I seek. Between now and Oscar night, I’ll track through the group in sporadic doses interspersed with all the other nonsense that fills up this space. And I’ll start tomorrow with, naturally, number ten.