The 10 best movies of 2011

From young love to a documentary on capital punishment, here are the 10 movies that wowed Monitor film critic Peter Rainer at the multiplex this year

2. 'Of Gods and Men'

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Xavier Beauvois’s drama is about a band of Cistercian monks in the Algerian mountains in the 1990s who must decide whether or not to flee their monastery after Islamist militants have invaded the area. A film of almost supernal grace, it closes with a sequence I will never forget, as the monks share a makeshift Last Supper while Tchaikovsky’s grand theme from “Swan Lake,” a favorite piece of music, plays on the Victrola.

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