For me at least, the year in film started with a bang in the form of Gregg Araki's crazysexycool apocalyptic collegiate comedy Kaboom and ended with the whimper that was Stephen Daldry's flat, feeble 9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. In between those two bookends, 2011 proved a pretty great year for movies, particularly if you thought outside the Hollywood box. After lumbering through a mostly fallow winter, spring and summer, the big movie studios rebounded with a strong fall slate of releases that included the bold new works from veteran filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh among them), star vehicles that actually emphasized brains over brawn (Moneyball, The Descendants) and even a few above-average franchise entries (Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, Paranormal Activity 3). And when Hollywood faltered, the independent and international film industries picked up the slack. If you lived nearby an art house or had access to a video-on-demand service, every month brought a steady stream of terrific titles that ran the gamut of genres, from ultraviolent samurai tales (Takeshi Miike's 13 Assassins) to moody Westerns (Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff) to stories of young love in bloom (Andrew Haigh's Weekend). Some years, I struggle to decide which films absolutely deserve a place on my Top Ten list. This year, I struggled to decide which ones I could leave off without too much regret. (That explains, by the way, why my list of Honorable Mentions includes another twenty-odd movies I couldn't bear not to single out.) So without further ado, in one of the best years for movies in some time, here are the best of the best.

Do you still want to be losers like them?

Blame it on Marley & Me. When that cutesy-poo tearjerker about a family and their dog topped the holiday box office charts a few years back, Hollywood started looking around for other sentimental animal-centric tales designed to warm the hearts of even the sourest grinches. This year, families can choose between not just one, but two cheesy movies about adorable animals and the humans that love them, Steven Spielberg's War Horse and Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo. The latter is based on a memoir by Benjamin Mee and stars Matt Damon as a widower, who packs up his two kids and moves them to a dilapidated zoo, which they have to get up and running again before it's shut down for good. The former is derived from Michael Morpurgo's children's novel (which also served as the basis for a recent Tony Award-winning play) and follows a spirited horse named Joey, who gallops through the lives of an all-star cast of European character actors (Emily Watson! Benedict Cumberbatch! Niels Arestrup!) against the backdrop of World War I. Although they tell very different stories, both films have the same ultimate goal: to make you weep often and openly. So which one succeeds? We'll answer that by pitting the films against each other in a few key areas.

Ever since the twin failures of United 93 and World Trade Center, Hollywood has been leery of tackling the events of September 11, 2001 head on. Most movies follow the example set by Spike Lee's 25th Hour (generally thought to be the finest 9/11-themed feature made yet) and explore the aftermath of 9/11 rather than depicting exactly what occurred on that tragic day. It's a logical approach; after all, experiencing the collapse of the Twin Towers was horrifying enough the first time. Asking audiences to relive it via a simulated recreation -- even one as gripping as the one depicted in Paul Greengrass' United 93 -- is a challenge many moviegoers would understandably rather decline.

There's a clever gag early on in The Adventures of Tintin that effectively passes the baton from the title character's comic-book origins in the 1930s to his 21st century incarnation as the hero of a lavish animated blockbuster. In the scene, investigative journalist/globetrotting adventurer Tintin (played here by Jamie Bell via the magic of motion capture technology) is sitting with his back to the audience, having his picture drawn by a flea market street artist. The illustrator puts the finishing touches on the portrait and hands it over to his subject, saying proudly, "I think I've captured your likeness." With that, Tintin turns towards the camera and we see the character's past and present in the same frame. On the canvas is a sketch of Tintin as Belgian artist Hergé first drew him all those years ago. Next to that is the version of the character the animators at Weta Digital -- the New Zealand effects house operated by Peter Jackson, one of the primary creative forces behind this new movie, along with its director Steven Spielberg -- have come up with. While these two faces aren't precisely mirror images of each other, the mo-cap figure is still recognizably Tintin. In a single shot, the filmmakers convincingly lift this iconic character off the two-dimensional comics page and turn him into a walking, talking movie star.

When it was first announced that David Fincher had signed on to helm an American version of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's absurdly popular crime thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, my chief fear was that the resulting film would be Fincher's Ron Howard movie; i.e., a by-the-book adaptation of a bestseller (The Da Vinci Code, in Howard's case) that put profit first and artistry second. The other wrinkle Fincher faced (which Howard didn't) was that a perfectly serviceable (and quite faithful) film adaptation of Dragon Tattoo already existed -- a 2009 Swedish-language picture directed by Niels Arden Oplev and starring Noomi Rapace as the titular heroine, leather-clad, heavily-pierced hacker extraordinaire, Lisbeth Salander. So unless the Fight Club director was prepared to do some radical re-working of the novel -- thus pissing off its legions of fans -- it seemed as if his prodigious talents were going to be wasted on a project that would, at best, be a straightforward slice of pulp fiction or, at worse, a warmed-over rehash of too-familiar material.

Rocky gets an MMA-makeover with Warrior.

David Fincher is (in)famous for his exacting directorial methods on set; stories abound about him putting his actors through multiple takes and working his crew hard to ensure that they get every shot absolutely right. Away from the camera, though, he seems laid back and comfortable, even up for cracking a joke or two (or three or four). While making the rounds for his latest film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which opens in theaters tomorrow), Fincher passed through New York and appeared at a press conference for the Sweden-set thriller, adapted from Stieg Larsson's best-selling book of the same time. He was joined by the movie's stars -- Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as the titular hacker, Lisbeth Salander -- and two supporting players, Christopher Plummer and Stellan Skarsgård. Despite the movie's dark subject matter, all five were in fine spirits, cracking wise about everything from the movie's depiction of Sweden to a difficult stunt that literally left Craig gasping for air.

Steven Spielberg gets his epic on with this sweeping story of a boy and his horse set against the backdrop of World War I. When a poor British farmer spends all of his savings on the titular steed at an auction, his young son forms a strong bond with the horse -- which he names Joey -- that continues even after it is shipped away to the front. The horse then passes through the hands of various owners, while the boy grows up and goes to war himself.

A movie literally decades in the making, The Adventures of Tintin began its trip to the big screen in 1983, when Steven Spielberg first reached out to Belgian comics artist Hergé about acquiring the film rights to his most famous creation, the intrepid journalist/adventurer Tintin. But for a variety of reasons, the project kept falling by the wayside, that is, until Spielberg teamed up with Peter Jackson in the wake of the New Zealand director's epic Lord of the Rings trilogy. Together, the duo decided that doing full justice to Hergé's comics meant eschewing a conventional live action adaptation in favor of the animation process known as motion capture, whereby live actors perform the characters on set and then computer animators translate their work onto digital models. Jamie Beard, a veteran employee of Jackson's New Zealand-based effects house Weta Digital, served as animation supervisor on The Adventures of Tintin and played a significant role in overseeing the design of the film's world and its characters. He spoke with us about bringing the motion capture Tintin (played by Jamie Bell) to life and why he sometimes made the actors walk on futon mattresses on set.