Coming Soon to a Cinema Near You

The year thus far has been pretty awesome for great films. The Oscar buzz shrouding the likes of The King's Speech and Black Swan is completely deserved, as it is for The Fighter, True Grit, The Social Network and Toy Story 3, but some of the smaller flicks have certainly contended with the big-hitters. Below is my list of the top 10 films of 2011 so far:

1. True Grit
2. Cell 211
3. Source Code
4. Stake Land
5. The Skin I Live In
6.The King's Speech
7. Black Swan
8. The Fighter
9. Super 8
10. Animal Kingdom

Also worth mention are Thor, Hanna, Never Let Me Go, 127 Hours and X-Men: First Class. The top three letdowns of the year have to be Sucker Punch, Battle: Los Angeles and Tree of Life. All three were seriously lacking any sort of interesting plot (don't get me started on the Tree of Life) and had way more media buzz and anticipation than they deserved. Anyhow, there are plenty of cracking-looking films to come out in the next three months or so before we bid farewell to 2011, and here's my top 10 most anticipated:

1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (16 Sep)
2. Drive (23 Sep)
3. Warrior (23 Sep)
4. The Adventures of Tintin (26 Oct)
5. We Need to Talk About Kevin (21 Oct)
6. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (07 Oct)
7. Red State (30 Sep)
8. Tyrannosaur (07 Oct)
9. The Ides of March (28 Oct)
10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (26 Dec)

 On top of this we have the US box office hit that is The Help, alongside blockbusters Contagion, Immortals, Real Steel, Sherlock Holmes 2, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and Hugo Cabret, and the smaller but equally brilliant-looking The Debt, Melancholia, Killer Elite, The Rum Diary, Machine Gun Preacher, We Bought a Zoo and The Thing. It's gonna be a good few months!!