Total Recall: Top 50 Best Films #LFF 2011

And after having a look at those works which somehow disappointed us, it’s time for a recap of the movies we enjoyed the most, compiled in an improvised Top 50. To choose amongs them wasn’t easy; even some of those already mentioned disappointments (The Deep Blue Sea; This Is Not My Place; Faust…), only felt as such because of the high hopes we had for them, and could have also been part of our selection.

A few notable titles had to remain bubbling under, from crowd-pleasers such as the over the top Swedish thriller ‘Headhunters’, adaptation of best-selling author Jo Nesbo’s tome about a human resources executive who finances his lavish lifestyle recurring to art forgery; epic catastrophe specialist Roland Emmerich surprising everyone by reinventing the story of Shakespeare and questioning whether the writer was the real author of his classic work in ‘Anonymous’; French auteur Robert Guédiguian returning to his habitual socialist reflections and troupe of actors with ‘The Snows Of Kilimanjaro’; in France too, ‘Early One Morning’ gave a glance at the life of a banker and the way the Financial industry manipulates and disposes of people; down the Pyrenees, the Spanish post -civil war tear-jerker ‘The Sleeping Voice’, conceived as a tribute to the women whose lives were the worst affected by the conflict; US indie ‘Terri’ told another story of dysfunctional kids mentored by the peculiar tutor of their high school, plus the directorial debut by British actor Dexter Fletcher ,‘Wild Bill’, revisiting the ever popular world of east London gangsters.

Another actor turned director, Austrian Karl Markovits, presented ‘Breathing’ – The films of his country were subject of one of the festival’s events – one of many promising first features. As well as American Braden King with its Armenian set drama ‘Here’; Italian Alice Rohrwacher’s ‘Corpo Celeste’, exploring the effects of religious myth and rituals in the mind of a young girl on the eve of her confirmation and Zuzana Liova’s solid family drama ‘The House’.

The Documentary field has also provided a wealth of fine work. The return of Jonathan Demme with ‘I’m Carolyn Parker’, which follows the struggle to get her home and life back of a victim of Hurricane Katrina. The Look at the bunch of outsiders populating ‘Darwin’, a nearly abandoned ex-mining town lost in the California desert or a deserved tribute to the eternal hope of British Pop, ‘Lawrence Of Belgravia’. On a more experimental note, the audio visual correspondence between J.L. Guerin and Jonas Mekas, a new instalment of the project that began with Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami, was also worth checking.

Our Top 50 movies of this year’s London Film Festival after the jump.