The Hunger Games (2012)
A young-adult bestseller arrives on screen with a hard premise and a star turn from Jennifer Lawrence, and clears the genre's low bar by some distance. 8/10.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
David Fincher remakes a film that barely needed remaking and makes it his own anyway, all sleet, server logs and forensic patience. The story is borrowed twice over; the precision is not. 8/10.
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Mission - Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
Brad Bird brings an animator's eye to live action and hands the franchise back its sense of fun, with a Burj Khalifa climb that earns every inch. 9/10.
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Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows (2011)
Guy Ritchie's second Holmes is bigger, louder and built around the rivalry the first film was missing, with Jared Harris quietly stealing it as Moriarty. Noisier than the original but more entertaining for it. 8/10.
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The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Spielberg goes fully digital and rediscovers the boyish adventure register of his Indiana Jones days. The faces take some getting used to; the momentum never lets up. 8/10.
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Contagion (2011)
Steven Soderbergh treats a global pandemic as a procedural, cool and credible and almost clinically unsentimental. It is gripping and intelligent, if a little cold to love. 7/10.
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Drive (2011)
Nicolas Winding Refn turns a pulpy getaway thriller into a slow, neon-lit mood piece, anchored by a near-silent Ryan Gosling and a synth score you carry home with you. Cool to the point of chilly, but hard to shake. 8/10.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
A Swedish director and a near-flawless British ensemble compress le Carré's densest novel into a cold, watchful, endlessly rewatchable piece of espionage. 9/10.
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Super 8 (2011)
J. J. Abrams hands Steven Spielberg's old Amblin keys back and drives the car beautifully. A train wreck, a small town, a pack of kids and a monster, all in the summer of 1979. 9/10.
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
A franchise nobody was asking to revisit comes back as a quiet tragedy about one clever chimpanzee, and Andy Serkis turns a digital ape into the most human thing on screen. 8/10.
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