Teenagers exist to make everyone else uncomfortable.

Dreamt a deranged Justin Bieber was trying to kill me.

It was legitimately terrifying.

I have laryngitis and it makes me sound like the Godfather.

It’s pretty awesome, except for how it’s laryngitis.

2011 was so bad that there weren’t even enough truly good movies to put on a respectable top ten list. So here’s my top five. Think of it like the Oscars, but better.

5. We Need to Talk About Kevin - The fascinating thing about We Need to Talk About Kevin is its use of unreliable narration, much rarer (and harder to pull off) in film than in literature. It’s so subtle here that I think a lot of people missed it entirely. But the relationships in the flashbacks seem so exaggerated (Kevin is Satan incarnate with Eva, but a perfect angel with everyone else?), and Eva is so obviously searching for some kind of answer in her grief-wracked mental state, that her memories have to be taken as subjective distortions of reality. Even the RED ERRYWHERE motif of the present-day scenes is pretty obviously a visual externalization of Eva’s overwhelming guilt. But I wouldn’t be so high on this if all it had to offer were experiments in subjectivity. Tilda Swinton is predictably fantastic, and Ezra Miller was practically born to play her son: both have an alien quality about them, which is perfect given both characters’ statuses as social pariahs. The disjointed narrative and Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant score add to this alien effect, because a story about a high school massacre just wasn’t unsettling enough on its own.

4. Warrior - A lot of people have accused Warrior of relying too heavily on cliche and coincidence, which makes me laugh because both have been used in great literature for centuries. Warrior uses the same devices found in the best works of Sophocles and Dickens, and for the same purpose: to produce an emotional effect in its audience. The final few fights are so tense and Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton sell their characters’ raw emotion so well that I really don’t care how implausible the plot is (not very, as far as I’m concerned - how many times have Venus and Serena faced off in a championship? how near have we been all these years to a Manning-Manning Super Bowl?). It was the closest I came to crying at anything last year.

3. Weekend - Weekend is a wonderfully tender gay romance - a wonderfully tender romance, period - but it’s much more than that. It’s a sensitive dual character study that examines the different ways different people relate to the world and to each other. It’s about the utter subjectivity of our worldviews and the experiences that inform those worldviews, something both Glen and Russell are still too immature to understand. In fact, my favorite moment is when Glen confidently declares that coming out to one’s parents isn’t at all complicated, only to discover some minutes later that Russell, an orphan, never really even had parents to come out to. Whoops. So far I’ve made both men sound a bit unappealing, but it’s a testament to both Tom Cullen’s and Chris New’s performances that their characters always remain basically likable. The movie is a real masterpiece of naturalistic dialogue and acting, maintaining a feel of authenticity that the American mumblecore movement could only dream of. It’s full of so many low-key, sublime little moments, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

2. The Tree of Life - Remember when I said Melancholia’s opening sequence contained the most amazing imagery of the year? I was afraid I’d catch myself in a lie, and so here it is: The Tree of Life outdoes Melancholia with a 20-minute sequence full of even more amazing imagery, including the birth of the entire universe. It’s a crazy thing to stick smack-dab in the middle of a narrative, but it’s awe-inspiring all the same. The more mundane parts of The Tree of Life are just as beautiful, at once universal and deeply personal. Malick imbues everything in his world with a deep sense of spirituality: the smallest, most insignificant sights and sounds are treated as revelations here. After my first viewing, I foolishly thought it could have done with significant editing; now I feel that I could watch it for hours on end.

1. Drive - Drive became a cult classic the instant Kavinsky’s Nightcall started playing over those hot-pink opening credits. In fact, that instant epitomizes the rest of the movie: it’s a punch to the gut, a kick in the teeth. It exudes cool. Because of this, Drive has had the “style over substance” criticism invoked against it, but what does that even mean? Why do we imagine that intellectual experiences are more valuable than visceral ones? Not that I agree that Drive has no substance: as far as I’m concerned, its enigmatic protagonist alone should be enough to provide critical fodder for years to come. But whatever. The simple fact that Nicolas Winding Refn could take a fairly conventional noir and turn it into a neon-lit, scorpion-jacketed, synth-drenched superhero film starring Ryan Gosling is enough to win my undying affection.