| Lowering your expectations since 2009

2011: a film odyssey

Every one of the 115 years since the invention of moving pictures tells us something new about filmmakers, and even more about the audience; ourselves. What do we like, who do we love? What are our fears and desires? What can we create and what has been innovated? In reflection, 2011 has enjoyed a high number of great movies that are worth watching. Independent cinema in particular dominate 18 of my top 20 films this year. 18/20. British cinema has risen to a new golden era of high quality filmmaking, and yet the government is financing less and less productions with lower budgets than before. The last of the UK Film Council productions are due to be released this month, and then the only places the UK will take on the box office will be in the form of co-productions. This is also the year of some of Hollywood’s biggest blunders from Green Lantern to Mars Needs Moms. It’s not surprising that in a year of interplanetary superheroes, the most likeable protagonist is 50/50′s down-to-earth Adam Levine, credit due to Joseph Gordon Levitt’s superb performance and Will Reiser’s screenplay, one of the year’s best. At the moment we only seem to have films made for either under $2 million or over $100 million and, perhaps frighteningly, $1 billion is the new $100 million target for box office takings. The unprecedented success of stylish thriller Drive has fuelled the current super rock star status Ryan Gosling now holds, complete with his own internet meme, which will no doubt continue into the new year.

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The best films of the next 2 years…

300 studio executives chose the top 10 scripts they’ve read all year…here are just a few screenplays making their way to the big screen in 2012/3.

133 lists: The Imitation Game by Graham Moore

The story of British WWII cryptographer Alan Turing, who cracked the German Enigma code and later poisoned himself after being criminally prosecuted for being a homosexual.

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