Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman shares his list of the 10 best films of 2011.

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My number 10 choice is "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol." When a popcorn movie is this good, who’s to say it doesn’t belong on a year-end list?

My number nine choice is "The Trip," an enchantingly funny road movie in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon go on a restaurant tour of northern England. It's also a high salute to what acting means to the English soul.

Number eight is "Crazy, Stupid, Love." Steve Carell is at his most wittily defeated as a newly single schlub who learns how to pick up women from a happy-hour smoothie played with velveteen polish by Ryan Gosling. It’s like a comedy made by the Woody Allen of suburbia.

My number seven choice is "Rampart," Oren Moverman’s hallucinatory film about a very bad Los Angeles cop, played with searing, complex brilliance by Woody Harrelson.

Number six is "Beginners," with Ewan McGregor as a young man who learns that his aging father, played by Christopher Plummer, is gay. It’s a film that looks at all the meanings "liberation" can have.

My number five choice is "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," the most electrifying movie you could imagine of Stieg Larsson’s Swedish serial-killer novel. As Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara acts with a quiet power — a rage chilled into silence — that is almost ghostly.

Number four is "A Separation," an Iranian masterpiece of marital discord that expands, almost invisibly, into the most organic of thrillers.

My number three choice is "Bridesmaids." Kristen Wiig gives the best performance by an actress this year, as a neurotic maid of honor whose insecurities push her hilariously over the edge.

Number two is "The Descendants," with George Clooney as a Hawaii land baron whose wife lays in a possibly fatal coma. The film combines medical terror, real estate, adultery farce, and the wounded salvation of family in a way only an Alexander Payne movie could.

Finally, my pick for best movie of the year is "The Tree Of Life." Terrence Malick has made the rare mystical drama that's rooted in the everyday. Brad Pitt is magnificent as a loving, raging, deeply reverent 1950s father, and the film is told with such startling, off-center vividness that it suggests the movie James Joyce might have made, if only he’d had a handheld camera.