Movieline at the Midpoint: Stephanie Zacharek's Favorites of 2011 (So Far)

By the midpoint of any moviegoing year, the previous January seems like ancient history. Was it really just six months ago that I trudged off to witness the stupendously dumb spectacle that was Season of the Witch? Seems like eons.

But among the many gifts the movie gods gave us when they sent those first thunderbolts down from the great gilt movie palace in the sky (now a Loews Cineplex) was a blessed kind of amnesia: As the year progresses the memory of stinkers like Red Riding Hood and Arthur, or even just mediocre disappointments like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, fades rather quickly. No matter how bad things get, there are always better movies to push them out of the rearview mirror.

For me, the movies that helped erase the horror of, say, The Green Hornet weren't necessarily great artistic achievements. Looking back at the first half of 2011, I'm happy to recall the straightforward moviegoing pleasures of movies like Brad Furman's The Lincoln Lawyer (which I graded too low upon its release -- what was I thinking?) or Justin Lin's Fast Five or Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer's Drive Angry 3D. And I'm still high on Cameron Diaz, as the year's finest non-role-model, in Bad Teacher.

But the first half of 2011 wasn't all lawyers doing business out of the backs of their Town Cars and gold-digger teachers trying to raise money for boob jobs. We also had French monks, struggling to maintain a peaceful relationship with Muslim terrorists in Algeria, in Xavier Beauvois' marvelous, soulful Of Gods and Men. Cary Joji Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, is one of the finest literary adaptations in years. Kelly Reichardt's pioneer drama Meek's Cutoff, featuring Michelle Williams in a sturdy but understated performance, is one of those movies that's both ambitious and unassuming at once; it moves slowly, but its riches build gradually. And in Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, comic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take a rambling trip through the north of England, facing up to their own mortality when they're not trading Sean Connery impressions. Its freewheeling structure notwithstanding, The Trip is pointed, funny and affecting.

2011 has also been a strong year for documentaries: Two of the finest so far are Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's 3-D excavation of France's Chauvet Cave, and

Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press' glorious portrait of the New York Times street-style photographer. (Four months after opening, it's still playing at Manhattan's IFC Center.) Also worth checking out: Andrew Rossi's exuberant Page One: Inside the New York Times, and Pierre Thoretton's deeply moving L'Amour Fou, which uses the dissolution of the art and furniture collection amassed by Yves Saint Laurent and his longtime business and life partner Pierre Bergé as a way of reflecting on a glorious, only recently lost era.

Perhaps the biggest surprise pleasure of the year so far is Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, a picture that's more about wistfulness and longing than unalloyed nostalgia. It's the least-fussy, most unself-conscious film Allen has made in years, perhaps his best since Manhattan Murder Mystery.

The Tree of Life is a great favorite with many moviegoers and many critics, though not with me. What has stunned me about the reaction to the film isn't the fact that so many people love it; it's the neofascist movement that people's "love" for the movie has inspired. In the weeks after the movie's initial release, I read numerous scolding Tweets and Facebook observations (plenty of them from professional critics, who you'd think would know better) dictating that people who'd seen the movie only once needed to see it again if they didn't like it -- obviously they'd simply failed to grasp its delicacy and brilliance. Some of these Tree of Lifers came right out and said that any viewer who doesn't respond to the movie is somehow lacking as a human being.

The last time I encountered so many tyrannical bullies was around the time of The Dark Knight, and frankly, I'll take the Christopher Nolan fanboys over the Terrence Malick ones anyday. If The Tree of Life causes the milk of human kindness and tolerance to flow so freely in people, it must be a great movie. And I, for one, am not watching it again.