December 7, 2011 1:00PM ET

10 Best Movies of 2011

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Peter Travers chooses his top 10 movies of the year. Drive is bloody, polarizing, pure cinema; The Artist has unexpected soul; Hugo is a bedtime story for movie lovers; and more.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Columbia Pictures

An inside-baseball movie with the pulse of an action flick. Thank director Bennett Miller and acting homers from Brad Pitt as the general manager of the Oakland A's and Jonah Hill as a numbers cruncher who shows him how to find value in what others miss. Score.

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Merie Wallace/FOX Searchlight

Here's that rare human comedy that earns its laughs and tears. Orchestrated without a false note by director and co-writer Alexander Payne, The Descendants gives George Clooney the role of his career to date as a Hawaiian landowner coping with a cheating wife (now in a coma) and two daughters he can't fathom. It brims with surprises you don't see coming.

The Weinstein Company

A silent movie in black-and-white about Old Hollywood is now the presumptive favorite in the awards race. Why? Because French director Michel Hazanavicius has style to burn and unexpected soul. Jean Dujardin is stupendous as the screen idol who resists talkies until a perky starlet (Bérénice Bejo) convinces him that art should never be afraid to embrace new forms. Roger that.

Richard Foreman Jr/FilmDistrict

Screw Oscar, which will surely ignore Drive because it's too bloody, too creative, too ambitious and too polarizing to comfort audiences. Solid reasons, I say, for naming Drive the year's best movie. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn puts an iconic Ryan Gosling behind the wheel into a feverish battle between good and its opposite (Albert Brooks does great evil). Hard-wired to the year's most propulsive synth score, Drive is pure cinema. I couldn't have liked it more.