Top Songs of 2011

1. Florence + the Machine, 'No Light, No Light'

In another context, this "No Light, No Light" could be the sound of a religious revival. Florence Welch's rich voice has never sounded better than on this track; her fervent, even rapturous, lamentations about her partner's lost love resonate like requests for salvation made by a faltering believer with arms raised to the sky. "Heaven help me, I need to make it right" she wails, but gets no reply. Replete with harps and a tribal drum beat, "No Light, No Light" operates as a plea for salvation that will soon have you running to your deity of choice.

2. Adele, 'Rolling in the Deep'

Sometimes you hear a tune and you just know that it will last; that in twenty years you'll be scanning the radio dial, and the singer's opening wail will find you again, accentuated by a kick drum and beat so recognizable that they feel like an old friend. That song — one of them, anyway — will be Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." The British singer's passionate retort to a man who has hurt her is one of the boldest, bluesiest ballads ever written. Since its release last winter, "Rolling in the Deep" has become pervasive, appearing on Glee, on The Voice — hell, even John Legend covered it. It's the story of two people who "could have had it all," but one of them threw it away, leaving the listener aligned with the wounded one (that would be Adele). Adele's voice is in top form here, alternating between high and low notes smoothly and quickly, just as she switches between mournful and vengeful emotions. Anger and resentment never sounded this catchy.

3. Mayer Hawthorne, 'A Long Time'

With just one song, the 32-year-old Detroit DJ-turned-singer has reinterpreted the Motown sound. "A Long Time" is an ode to Hawthorne's hometown, about how Barry (Gordy) and Henry (Ford) built up the Motor City only to see it come crashing down. "We'll return it to its former glory," Hawthorne promises, "But it just takes so long." Given the state of the economy right now, his words could easily apply to entire country. But it's hard to feel downtrodden with a beat this funky — "A Long Time" is practically begging to be accompanied by Soul Train-type dance moves.

4. Jay-Z and Kanye West, 'Otis'

The lead single off Watch the Throne mixes and loops Otis Redding's passionate shouts and screams from "Try a Little Tenderness," paying homage to his soulful style while mixing it up by adding heavy beats and chopping up the original track's piano tune. "I guess I got my swagger back!" Jay-Z declares as Redding's impassioned "gotta-na-na-na" line provides a pounding backdrop. Hova and Yeezy then trade witty, lighthearted verses (standout: "last week I was in my other other Benz") to create a genre-defying tune drawing equally from soul, hip-hop and pop. "Otis" is clever, upbeat and irresistibly fun.

5. Nicki Minaj, 'Super Bass'

Nicki Minaj is the rare female artist making headway in a hip-hop world still largely dominated by men; Kanye West and Drake have both featured her on their albums only to find that her snarled guest raps outshine their own. She largely cages her wild side on her own debut album Pink Friday, but one exception is the peppy "Super Bass." Here, Minaj spouts bubbly raps so fast that they'd even make speed-rapping titan Busta Rhymes do a double-take. With a simple refrain — "You got that boom ba-doom boom, boom ba-doom boom, super bass" — Minaj has found a way to mold her savagery to fit pop music's standards. The way her voice switches from a coquettish coo to a violent roar in that first verse belies what would otherwise be just another soft, innocent pop song.

6. tUnE yArDs, 'Gangsta'

A police siren, alarms that cut in and out and children's voices kick off tUnE yArDs' "Gangsta," a rollicking anthem inspired by singer Merrill Garbus' move into a violent neighborhood — Oakland. "Gangsta" is the audible representation of what it's like to move to a big city: it's loud, it's disjointed, it doesn't feel familiar, and its dissonant sounds can make your head hurt. But eventually, those sounds coalesce in a rhythm, as wild drums and explosive horns turn "Gangsta" into a full-blown dance song. It's easily the strangest, most creative pop tune this year.

7. Cults, 'Go Outside'

The dreamy, distorted, lo-fi Cults have produced an effortlessly breezy song with a melody that isn't so much sung as it is released into the air. The lead single off the band's self-titled debut album, "Go Outside" sounds like an innocent call to play in the sunshine. But don't be fooled by its chiming glockenspiel or the children's voices in the chorus, for the tune has a sinister side: it's preceded by an audio recording of Jonestown cult leader Jim Jones saying, "To me, death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's treacherous." Jones' message gives added weight to the lyrics' subtle references to depression — "You really want to stay inside and sleep the light away" — and turns the song from a celebration of life into something much darker.

8. Tyler the Creator, 'Yonkers'

(Warning: this song contains obscene language)

The Los Angeles rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (also known as OFWGKTA or just Odd Future) has incited controversy for its violent and misogynist lyrics. But whatever your opinion on the artistic validity of this controversial group, there's no denying that 20-year-old Tyler the Creator's "Yonkers" has sprouted a new branch — minimalistic rap — on hip-hop's family tree. "Yonkers" has no chorus. It has no discernible beat save for the horror movie-esque screeching sound that runs through the entire track. It's not a song that you'd want to play at a party, groove along to in your car, or even put on when you're relaxing at home. No, it's so sparse and inaccessible that it functions more like a piece of performance art. "Yonkers" creates a thrilling sense of uneasiness that the music world hadn't seen since the early days of punk.

9. St. Vincent, 'Cruel'

St. Vincent (née Annie Clark) has a knack for making the macabre sound merry. Her ode to abuse is a unique combination of art rock, disco and baroque pop. The muddled, messy guitar riffs add a bit of grime to the otherwise cheerful tune, as Clark sings about "waving flares in the air" for help only to have her rescuers "blow past," laughing. On "Cruel," Clark has crafted a melody so beautiful it could be sung by a Disney princess, bound it, gagged it and dragged it through the mud.

10. Foster the People, 'Pumped Up Kicks'

This surprise hit finds frontman Mark Foster declaring that the kids with the cool shoes, cool clothes, and cool attitudes better run away from him before he shoots them. And yet, he's delivered this murderous threat as a fuzzy dance pop tune; the exact type of song that those oh, so cool kids are going to want to sing. With a subdued drum beat and spoken-word verses, the electronic-tinged track is one of the most undeniably enjoyable tunes to hit the Billboard charts this year.

Best Movies of 2011

1. The Artist

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

A movie set in Hollywood's silent era that is virtually wordless: a gimmick? No: sustained cinematic inspiration. For our first No. 1 movie since 2007 that's not an animated feature (you could look it up), we choose this delightfully inventive comedy about a swashbuckling star (supreme Gallic charmer Jean Dujardin) and the peppy waif (Bérénice Bejo) he befriends. Historians of antique cinema will tell you to imagine that Douglas Fairbanks had John Gilbert's talkie troubles while Ginger Rogers was on the rise. We'll just say: Think Singin' in the Rain, but silent and in black-and-white, and reveling in the same fondness, acumen and effervescence. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius transported the two stars of his OSS 117 films to Hollywood, hired American actors (James Cromwell, John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller) in supporting roles, had the cast speak their dialogue (shown in intertitles) in English and somehow achieved the impossible balance of comic pastiche and earned emotion. There's also an adorable dog. Skeptical readers are welcome to discount the praise of old movie critics for a movie about old movies, but we see a treat in store for anyone open to sheer joy. Here's a film so seductive it could leave you...speechless.

2. Hugo

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

A young orphan (Asa Butterfield) works furtively regulating a train station's clocks while pursuing his dead father's dream of bringing a machine to life. What sounds like a grease monkey's Frankenstein is really a parable of creative ingenuity. For lifelong movie obsessive Martin Scorsese,Hugo is also an imaginary autobiography. Like Brian Selznick, author and illustrator of the source novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese believes that films are both the stuff dreams are made of and the product of supreme technological expertise. The camera is a machine that makes art, and filmmakers can be tinkers and tinkerers of genius. In this urban adventure with dewy Dickensian elements, Hugo finds a kindred soul in Georges Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley with the pained grandeur of an exiled king), who virtually invented cinema fantasy with such films as A trip to the Moon, then fell into obscurity. Scorsese's love poem, rendered gorgeously in 3-D, restores both the reputation of an early pioneer and the glory of movie history — the birth of a popular art form given new life through a master's application of the coolest new techniques.

3. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

INDOMINA RELEASING

Judge Di Renjie, the legendary sleuth of 7th-century China made famous to Western readers in the novels by Robert van Gulik, takes on the case of the flaming monks in this epic martial-arts whodunit from veteran Hong Kong director Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues, Once Upon a Time in China). Always a swami of cinematic compression, Tsui Hark can pack reams of exposition and sensation into a dozen pristinely composed shots that take only a few seconds of screen time. His trickster genius is shared by the main characters — the Empress (Carina Lau), her loyal adviser (Li Bingbing) and Detective Dee himself (Andy Lau) — each of whom is supremely adept and understandably suspicious of everyone else. The films boasts nonstop stunt work in the great Hong Kong tradition: tree-hopping, a fierce battle on two galloping horses and plenty of dexterous swordplay, all choreographed by veteran Hong Kong star Sammo Hung. Packed with a magic talking deer, a red-robed river king and characters transformable by acupoints, Detective Dee is a pinwheeling narrative and cinematic delight. We call it Crouching Tiger, Freakin' Masterpiece.

4. The Tree of Life

MERIE WALLACE / 20TH CENTURY FOX

This is the movie with the 17-min. history-of-the-cosmos section that drove ordinary customers out of the theaters to demand their money back. So timid have films become in the past few decades that any deviation from the norm, even a spectacular planetarium show, requires lodging a formal protest. The outraged citizens should have hung around for the rest of writer-director Terrence Malick's movie: a pristinely observed portrait of a midcentury Texas family, with stern Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt in a boldly acute performance) lording it over Mom (Jessica Chastain) and their three young sons. Just Malick's fifth film in nearly 40 years, The Tree of Life has the elliptical intensity of his '70s masterworks Badlands and Days of Heaven. Family affection or animosity is revealed in a glance, a tilt of the restless camera, a cut from a parental argument in the house to the apprehensive kids outside. You can see the dinner-table tension in each of the boys' faces, dreading an explosion. The movie says, or rather shows, that to a man looking back on his youth, a father's harsh word can have the seismic effect of a crack in the cosmos.

5. War Horse

ANDREW COOPER / SMPSP / DREAMWORKS

After six years when he directed just one feature (the commissioned fourth episode of Indiana Jones), Steven Spielberg launches two films within four days; and both reveal the old boy wonder in splendid form. On Dec. 21 comes Spielberg's 3-D motion-capture animated feature The Adventures of Tintin, from Hergé's world-beloved comic books, a kind of Raiders of the Lost Art of boys' adventures and the niftiest pirate movie ever. Then, on Christmas day, the perfect holiday gift: this traditional, live-action adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo novel about an English boy and the horse he loved as the first World War was ravaging Western Europe. War Horse also inspired the every-prize-winning stage production in which Joey and the other equine characters are full-size puppets manipulated by actors inside them. Viewers coming to the movie version might think it's no fair using real horses (seven played Joey), but Spielberg's team wrangled eloquent performances from all of them, and from the human stars Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan and Tom Hiddleston. In his most painterly film, Spielberg has appropriated the lavish visual palette of John Ford movies: The Quiet Man for the rural settings, The Horse Soldiers for the war scenes. Boldly emotional, nakedly heartfelt, War Horse will leave only the stoniest hearts untouched.

6. Super 8

PARAMOUNT PICTURES / EVERETT

No less than Martin Scorsese's Hugo, J.J. Abrams' Super 8 is a chapter of a filmmaker's early movie life turned into a genre classic. One night in 1979, some kids in a Rust-Belt town are shooting a movie when a train crashes and something —some thing — escapes from its boxcar prison. Abrams, a teen-tyro director before hatching the TV series Alias and Lost, has made a tender coming-of-age story disguised as a monster thriller. Super 8 borrows elements from the early films of Steven Spielberg, the J.J. Abrams of his day (and this picture's executive producer). And not just plot devices from Jaws, Close Encounters, The Goonies and especially E.T., but their aching, innocent emotions. Did you ever cry at a boy-meets-girl picture? All right, did you cry when a monster wins? Those are just two of the surprises awaiting you in the year's most terrific mainstream movie. The some-thing you'll feel is the beating heart of J.J. Abrams, Super 8's boy genius.

7. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

IFC FILMS / EVERETT

A wanderlust documentarian, Werner Herzog has found his film subjects in remotest Alaska (Grizzly Man) and Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World) and on Texas' Death Row (Into the Abyss). For his first experiment in 3-D cinematography, this pioneer won permission to film our planet's earliest known artworks: wall drawings some 30,000 years old in the Chauvet cave in the South of France. Preserved by an avalanche that sealed the cave's opening 20 millennia ago, the sketches reveal visions of a time when Neanderthals still trudged across Europe and the English Channel was a dry bed. Someone daubed glorious images of wild animals — lions, wolves, bison, bears — with a sophistication that reveals the beasts' contours and propulsive power. The bison, for example, is shown with eight legs, "suggesting movement," Herzog says; "sort of a proto-cinema." In the paintings, he finds analogies to Picasso, Fred Astaire and Baywatch. At 69, Herzog has entered his 50th year of moviemaking. This is one of his most revealing and appealing journeys into the cave of the human soul.

8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

20TH CENTURY FOX / EVERETT

No apes were harmed in the making of the year's finest action fantasy. In fact, no apes appear in it: all are humans, filmed and transformed through motion capture by Peter Jackson's Weta Digital company. The star is Andy Serkis as Caesar, a genetically altered baby chimp raised lovingly at home by Bay Area scientist Will Rodman (James Franco). It is Caesar's destiny to realize that he is not a near-human but a great ape, a simian Spartacus leading his kind to freedom. Director Rupert Wyatt artfully synopsizes Caesar's growth in magical tracking shots as the ape lopes through the Rodman home and scales trees in Muir Woods. The script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver creates a story of emancipation as seen from both sides: the human (sympathetic liberals incapable of stanching an armed revolt) and the animal (we gotta be free). But even if you don't buy this as a semi-profound social document, the utterly seductive integration of apes and men should slacken your jaw in amazement. Rise restores wonder to the word "movie."

9. Rango

PARAMOUNT PICTURES / EVERETT

A CGI Western with a passel of moviewise fun and a knockout animation style, Rango ransacks, then smartly twists, elements from dozens of classic pictures, from Chinatown to Clint Eastwood's No-Name Westerns. The clever script by John Logan (The Aviator, Hugo, Coriolanus) spins the familiar tale of a tenderfoot who's mistaken for a savior sheriff by rude hombres and the lone pretty girl. Except that the dude known as Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp) and the girl, Beans (Isla Fisher), are lizards; the Mayor (Ned Beatty) is a turtle; and the chief gunslinger (Bill Nighy) is a rattlesnake mean enough to scare Samuel L. Jackson. For his first animated feature, Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski filmed the actors in motion-capture and called on the ILM team to surround them with natural Western landscapes; this looks like the most gorgeous live-action movie. The scaly skin on its reptiles has a realism that's tactile, even if you wouldn't want to touch it. In a strong year for animation — Rio, Happy Feet Two and The Adventures of Tintin would all be worthy 10-Best finalists — Rango was the coolest, funniest and dagnab-orneriest of the bunch.

10. Fast Five

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

This list is short on sensitive indie dramas, heavy on mainstream mayhem, but it was that kind of year. The big boys — Hollywood technicians, from FX gurus to stunt choreographers — used their tools with more craft and cojones than the Sundance auteurs. Fast Five, fifth in the Fast & Furious series, is a live-action movie with so much whirling tumult, so many moments of low genius, that it plays like an animated car-toon. The dialogue, characterizations and acting are irrelevant to the success of this first great film of the post-human era. As if recalling the epochal heist in 1903's The Great Train Robbery and, a decade later, the auto carnage of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops, director Justin Lin goes back to basics with another train robbery and vehicular violence in police rides — souped up and stripped down like stock cars in a death race — on the streets of Rio. A carnival of roguish heroes and pretty girls, car chases and cliffhangers, Fast Five is as much a tribute as The Artist or Hugo to the cinema's primal thrills.