Ed's Top 20 Films of 2011

They sure are happy to have the Number One spot.

First off, I'd just like to wish everyone reading this a Happy New Year. I hope that you all had a great couple of days and are quietly dreading the return to the normal grind of working life as much as I am. (If you work in a capacity that meant that you have not had any time off over the last few weeks, my heart goes out to you. I worked over Christmas and New Year the last few years and it is the worst.) I saw the New Year in by getting ferociously drunk in a cottage just outside of Blackpool with a bunch of my friends, and it was terrific.

Film Review: The Skin I Live In (2011)

Pedro Almodóvar's latest film, The Skin I Live In (La piel quo habito), is a brilliant example of a gearshift movie. For those unfamiliar with the term, it was coined by Paul Thomas Anderson, director of Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, to describe films that start off as one thing, then suddenly change into a completely different kind of movie partway through. (A textbook example of this would be Psycho, which starts off being about a young woman who steals money from her employer, then shifts into something else.) When done well, gearshift movies can be wonderfully unnerving experiences for an audience, as they upend their expectations of where the story was going by sending it off in a completely new direction. They're also almost impossible to review, because you can't discuss the film as a whole without giving too much away.