The world doesn’t need another list of the best films of the year, but after considering my own recent lists, I realized there were a handful of movies‹excellent independent work that has largely flown under the radar‹that even I initially overlooked. Here are seven bold American
low-budget movies from 2011 that may have been forgotten in theatrical release, but should make for essential home viewing (if you haven’t seen them yet) in 2012. And I’ll be among the first in line to see where these young directors go next.

1. Silver Bullets. ­ All I can say is that I hope Joe Swanberg doesn’t burn himself out. Fourteen movies in six years is enough to kill most directors, but Swanberg not only perseveres, but he’s far smarter and skilled than most critics give him credit for, and with Silver Bullets, I think he’s proven them wrong. The movie that inspired this list, Swanberg got short shrift from the N.Y. Times, but the film deserves a...

As 2011 comes to a close it’s time to look back on the year in movies. It’s always tough for me to come up with a yearly best movie list because I never feel I’ve seen everything by Jan. 1. By this time of year I’m still trying to finish watching the award contenders (still on my list: Hugo, War Horse, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, The Help).

So here are 10 movie moments from 2011 (in no particular order) that have stayed with me.

“I Want You To Help Me Find A Killer of Women”
I know you’re probably tired of hearing this line as it’s in all the TV spots and trailers for David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but after seeing the movie there was no better moment for me than when Mikael seeks out Lisbeth for her help. The look Rooney Mara gives after hearing this line gave me goosebumps. Seeing close to an hour how this woman goes through horror after horror, she is...

As 2011 comes to a close, here, based on Google Analytics, are this site’s top ten posts of the year.

1. 25 New Faces of 2011. I mean, of course — what else would have been our top traffic-getter of the year? As it does every year, the unveiling of our 25 New Faces list outpaced everything else on the site by almost three to one. And one thing I’m especially proud of — at the time we pick them, the people on this list are real discoveries. As I look at lists with similar ambitions on other sites, I’m struck by the fact that their lists mostly chart people who’ve already broken through the independent media whereas we at Filmmaker actually look at the work and try to pick people who we think are going to break in some way. We’re often years ahead of the curve. Pariah director Dee Rees, for example, was picked in 2008. So, one reason the list generates so much traffic is simply because as the filmmakers we profile gain greater prominence, web surfers...

It’s a good time to be making animated films, enough so that even regular indie filmmakers may want to sit up and take notice. Animation has always been on the cutting edge of film artistry and technology, and in a year that saw innovative use of motion capture, rotoscoping, CGI, and 3D (in documentaries, no less), an animated picture may be indie film’s next big thing.

2011 was also exciting because it gave us a wide open field for cartoons. For over a decade Pixar has dominated feature animation, but there’s now room for newcomers and underdogs to enjoy their place in the sun. Award nominations already reflect this: the five nominees for the Golden Globe’s Best Animated Feature Film prize are fairly straightforward, but the 18 films submitted for Academy Award consideration run the gamut in terms of style, audience, theme, and nationality. (More on that here and here.)

In the spirit of end-of-the-year wrap-ups, here are some of the best and most innovative animated features of 2011. Most of these were completed this year, but I’m including a...

I plead guilty. I’ve committed the writer’s sin of entitling this article with a heavily loaded pun that threatens to undermine what follows. Referencing a 65-year-old recognized masterwork of classic Hollywood melodrama — one by Douglas Sirk, no less — that has stood the test of time, then segueing into more of the best-of-this-and-that-from-2011 litanies that every film journo is tossing into the blogosphere right now, stacks the deck against the most recent productions. A few will be remembered, but All That Heaven Allows stays with us. Out of all possibilities, this is the one Todd Haynes chose as a point of departure for the revisionist melodrama that became Far From Heaven. Of course many of the best contemporary filmmakers work against, or oblique to, the widely accepted codes of film grammar that Sirk inherited from the likes of D.W. Griffith, who codified what was arbitrary in the first place. We can not just rehash conventional Hollywood form. It must be questioned, subverted, maybe amplified. The times were so different,...

Here we are again, with part three in a series highlighting some of 2011′s most daring, innovative television. This week, I’ll be singing the praises of AMC’s consistently shocking and always riveting Breaking Bad.

Indeed, there is no show on TV more unrelenting in its exploration of human misery than Breaking Bad. Created by former X-Files writer Vince Gilligan, the show stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who, after being diagnosed with cancer, begins cooking and distributing meth with the help of a burnout ex-student (Aaron Paul). If that premise sounds a bit too high-concept and wacky cable-TV for your tastes, let me assure you, wackiness is far down on this show’s list of priorities.

Gilligan has spoken at length about his ambitions for the show, to take a sympathetic, relatable protagonist and track his gradual destruction, a destruction both of himself and of the people around him. Or, as Gilligan likes to put it, “the goal was to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface.” In one scene from the series’ first episode, Cranston’s Walter White touches upon...

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam marked the 11th film festival (across two continents and five countries) that I covered in 2011. Which means that not only do I probably deserve an Independent Spirit Award for journalistic insanity, but also that I’ve been under a rock when it comes to what’s been playing in actual art-houses and multiplexes for the past 12 months. So with this in mind I’ve compiled a list of my personal greatest fest hits (arranged by festival of discovery, though in no particular order, complete with quotes from previous posts) – from those that have played a theater near you, to those that will in 2012, to those that will frustratingly fall victim to the vagaries of the market only to reappear on someone else’s top DVDs list.

The Interrupters
Steve James
Miami International Film Festival

Steve James’s stunning look at Chicago’s CeaseFire organization, which consists of former gang members who act as violence-stopping mediators and collectively “have over 500 years of prison time at this table.” “That’s a lot of fucking wisdom,” one seasoned vet says...

As Filmmaker’s contributors offer up summations of the year’s greatest achievements in film, I wanted to share some of the best new music I discovered in 2011. I tried to make picks that highlight musicians still flying under the radar (even by independent standards), or, in certain cases, artists tracking huge success through a unique, idiosyncratic, and independent mindset.

Here are my picks in alpha order, along with Soundcloud streams and (where available) music videos:

Air France – “It Feels Good to Be Around You”
Following in the tradition of The Avalanches, Sweden’s Air France have made a name for themselves crafting complex, beat-driven found-sound puzzles. Unfortunately, also like The Avalanches, the band is frustratingly elusive, having released only one EP and this single track in their first half-decade of existence. It would be easy to write Air France off if their slim output wasn’t so damn impressive. “It Feels Good to Be Around You” continues the group’s flawless track record, melding a number of distinct styles and melodies into one chugging, vibrant track.

City Center – “Puppers”

This...

For many supposedly serious cinema folk, there is no secret pleasure more pleasurable than the disaster film. What makes the genre so familiar – predictable plotlines, one-dimensional characters and an ever-present threat that only kills the people who deserve it – is also what makes it so damn fun. In the late ’90s, people cheered when the alien spaceship blew up American monuments. A full decade after September 11th, it’s still hard to imagine that happening now. During the past decade, disaster films have become more serious, less The Towering Inferno and more District 9, but it is only in the past year that the genre started to evolve into something entirely unexpected. In 2011, disaster was back, but this time? It was seriously good.

During several interviews about Contagion, his globe-trotting, virus-chasing thriller  (pictured above), Stephen Soderbergh openly referred to it as his take on Irwin Allen,  the master of disaster behind The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but unlike Allen, Soderbergh refuses to privilege one character over another, giving the same amount...

1. A sense of outsideness. Buildings turned inside out on 9-11, and people outside in the streets of Manhattan. The mind, outside of itself with disbelief. The brutal and temporary restoration of the natural world in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities. Located a block from the World Trade Center, Zuccotti Park, terribly damaged on 9-11 and slowly restored,

would become the locus of the Occupy Movement. Encampments. Tents. The incongruous sight of camping gear in urban spaces and beneath the shadows of skyscrapers, in a forest of steel and concrete and glass. It is not films like Margin Call or Contagion which speak to the Occupy anxieties of this past year, but rather a handful of films that at first glance seem far removed from what happened, and in some instances is still happening, in Manhattan, Oakland, Boston, and other cities.

2. In chapter two of Walden — a chapter that seems as bright and dangerous as it must have upon publication in 1854 —...