2011
Showing 128 works across all media from 2011
A Separation
The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.
The Tree of Life
It won the Palme d'Or and audiences walked out of it: Malick set a 1950s Texas boyhood against the formation of the universe and left the connections to you.
Niggas in Paris
Hit-Boy's beat, a Blades of Glory sample, and twelve straight encores of it one night in Paris.
Midnight City
Gonzalez built that shrieking hook from his own distorted voice, then let James King's saxophone close the record.
Someone Like You
Dan Wilson of Semisonic at the piano, Adele singing, nothing else added; five weeks at number one.
We Found Love
Calvin Harris wrote and produced it alone, and Rihanna rode ten weeks at number one, 2011's longest run.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
It will alter how you think about doing one thing for an entire lifetime: an eighty-five-year-old sushi master in a Tokyo subway station, still not satisfied with himself.
Drive
It looks and sounds like nothing else from its decade: neon Los Angeles, a synth score, a driver who barely speaks, and sudden violence that arrives without warning.
My Brilliant Friend
No novelist has written female friendship with this much competition. Elena and Lila grow up in a violent Naples neighborhood in the 1950s, and only one is allowed to stay in school.
Holocene
Horns and clarinets swell over guitar in a converted Wisconsin veterinary clinic; Grammy voters nominated it for record and song.
Moneyball
A film about a spreadsheet that plays like a thriller: Sorkin and Zaillian turn Billy Beane's 2002 Oakland roster into an argument between a broke general manager and every scout in his building.
Super Bass
Kane Beatz's synth bounce, a bonus track buried on the Pink Friday deluxe, and Minaj's first solo top ten.
Somebody That I Used to Know
Recorded at his parents' house on the Mornington Peninsula around a Luiz Bonfá sample, eight weeks at number one.
Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen's biggest hit at the box office is also his gentlest: a screenwriter stuck on a novel steps into a car at midnight in Paris and is driven straight into the 1920s.
Debt
Graeber demolishes the story every economics textbook opens with: barter did not become money. Credit came thousands of years before coins, and every debt is a moral claim that finally rests on violence.