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.
Helplessness Blues
Pecknold called it an anti-protest song, a plain opinion with no poetry, and gave it away free in January 2011.
Titanium
Sia cut the vocal as a guide for another singer; Guetta released it anyway, and she got a number one.
Set Fire to the Rain
Rosie Danvers wrapped the strings around Adele's biggest crescendo, and 21 took its third straight American number one.
1493
Columbus rejoined two halves of a planet that had evolved apart. Mann shows Andean silver destabilizing Ming China and malaria deciding who could be worked to death in Virginia's tobacco fields.
Pumped Up Kicks
Five hours in a Los Angeles jingle studio, the demo kept as the master, its subject hidden in plain sight.
The Interrupters
Steve James followed former gang members whose entire job is talking people out of retaliation: Chicago violence filmed as something interruptible, one conversation on one corner at a time.
Bon Iver, Bon Iver
Every song is named after a place, and some of the places do not exist. The cabin has been replaced by horns and pedal steel.
Arguably
No English-language essayist of his generation wrote with more range or less caution. These 107 pieces run from Orwell and Jefferson to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hitchens had himself waterboarded before writing one.
Watch the Throne
They recorded much of it in hotel suites around the world to stop it leaking, and the gold sleeve was designed by a Givenchy designer.
Paradise
Eno took a co-writing credit and played synthesizers; it became Coldplay's second UK number one and a stadium fixture.
Catherine the Great
A minor German princess arrives in Russia at fourteen, deposes her husband eighteen years later, and rules for thirty-four. Massie writes her from the inside, drawing on her own candid memoirs.
A.D.H.D
Sounwave's woozy loop, Ab-Soul in the margins, and Lamar naming a generation's numbness on his debut album.
Hugo
Scorsese made a children's film in 3D to argue for film preservation: an orphan living inside a Paris railway station keeps a broken automaton his father left him, and the station watches him.
Helplessness Blues
Singer Robin Pecknold scrapped a finished version and started over. The title song is about not wanting to be anyone special.
The Descendants
Hawaii has never looked less consoling: George Clooney plays a landowner left in charge of two daughters and a vast family trust while his wife lies unconscious after a boating accident.
Bridesmaids
Studios genuinely believed women would not carry a raunchy comedy, and this ended the argument in one weekend: Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo wrote it, and the real romance is between friends.
Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
We Are Young
Six weeks at number one, and it began with Ruess singing the chorus, tipsy, at the Bowery Hotel.
Margin Call
J.C. Chandor shot it in seventeen days on one office floor and got Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey anyway: an investment bank works out overnight that it is holding something worthless.
The Artist
The first silent film to take Best Picture since 1929, made by a French director nobody in Hollywood knew: a star of the silents watches sound arrive and refuses to adapt.
Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Ten years and eight films with the same three actors growing up on camera, which no other series has managed: David Yates closes it with the largest battle the series ever attempted.
Look at Me Now
Diplo and Afrojack made the beat for a mixtape; Busta Rhymes' double-time verse pushed it to diamond.
Lights
Goulding wrote it about a childhood fear of the dark, and the Hot 100 kept it fifty-two weeks.
Who Gon' Stop Me
Flux Pavilion's dubstep drop rebuilt into a rap victory lap, cut at the Mercer Hotel with Jay-Z trading verses.
The Intouchables
A French box office phenomenon built on two performances: a quadriplegic aristocrat hires a man from the projects precisely because he refuses to be careful around him, and Omar Sy took the Cesar.
I Can't Make You Love Me (Bon Iver)
Vernon strips Reid and Shamblin's Nashville ballad to falsetto, then slips into Raitt's "Nick of Time" at the end.
The Way It Goes
Eight years of songs Welch and Rawlings never liked enough to release, then this litany of friends gone.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
Steve McQueen
Justin Meldal-Johnsen co-produced at Sunset Sound, and Gonzalez turns unembarrassed optimism into a wall of synthesizers.
Section.80
He put it out himself with no label, about the generation born under Reagan, a year before anyone outside Los Angeles knew his name.
Motivation
Cut at Miami's Circle House, Jonsin's sparse keys and Lil Wayne's verse gave Rowland seven weeks atop the R&B chart.
Freaks and Geeks
A free EP download from 2011, Goransson on the beat, and Glover rapping like he had something to prove.
Can't Hold Us
Ray Dalton's hook, Ryan Lewis's piano gallop, and a sleeper single that took nearly two years to reach number one.
Safe and Sound
Trumpet hook lifted from the Yiddish standard Dona Dona, and two and a half years later, number eight.
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
Beth Rest
A Korg M1 supplied most of the sounds, NPR called it the year's most divisive song, Vernon his favorite.