I don't know what's going on out there in the world at large, where ticket sales sank to their lowest point in over a decade and everyone was generally down on the movies, because from where I was sitting, this was a great, great movie year, with a deep bench of movies that pinged my geeky love of childhood icons, my brainy geeky obsession with mind-bending genre metaphors, my love of character studies that speak to the human condition and even my hopes for the wiz-bang possibilities of 3D (granted, not so many of those, but there were SOME).  I laughed, I cried (even a couple times with the 3D glasses on), I was pretty damned happy when an invading alien force got what it had coming to it, and most of all, I totally geeked out on an instant sci-fi classic that joins Stranger than Fiction, The Mist, The Dark Knight, Coraline and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as the Palace's 6th annual Best Movie of the Year.  Drumroll please, for my Top 10 Movies of 2011:

1.Source Code-Duncan Jones arrived as a major new sci-fi filmmaker with his sophomore directorial outing (his debut, Moon, merited an Honorable Mention on this list in 2009) based on a great, great script by Ben Ripley about a test pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal, who summoned leading man heft I'd never seen from him before) who finds himself in a mysterious capsule from which he's teleported into the same final eight minutes before a commuter train is bombed by a mysterious terrorist over and over.  But all is not as it seems, and the people (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) talking him through his mission know more than one devastating secret.  Like Moon, Source Code pits a lone man against an impersonal technological edifice that treats human life as a mere gear in its machine, but it's also a rousing, deeply affecting crowd-pleaser.  Too many people missed this great flick upon its spring release and hopefully they're catching up with it on DVD.
2.Take Shelter-THE acting duet of 2011 was watching Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain as a construction worker tormented by visions of an apocalypse heralded by oily rain and the wife who struggles to stand by him even as his actions become increasingly erratic.  Is The End at hand or is he losing his mind just like his long-institutionalized Mother (Kathy Baker)?  Writer/Director Jeff Nichols kept me guessing right up to the final scene and delivered a quiet, relentless horror movie unlike anything we'd seen since the salad days of M. Night Shayamalan. 
3.Hugo-I know who'll lick this whole 3D thing!  A 60-something Oscar-winner famous for his gritty dramas making his first-ever children's fantasy... right?  Heck, yeah!  Martin Scorsese respected the third dimension like no filmmaker before him and cranked out a fable for artisticly-inclined viewers of all ages about the magic of making things, be they machines or movies (even silent ones).  Magic is the word here, as the technology and storytelling combine to create a masterful sense of the sort of wondrous time and place one finds in children's books.  And it no doubt inspired a whole lot of hits on the Wikipedia page about Georges Melies (brilliantly played here by Ben Kingsley).
4.The Adjustment Bureau-So, let's say there IS a Grand Design, a God and Angels and all that ushering us through our lives from birth to death... how to reconcile that with all the cruelty and futility of so many of our lives?  Writer/director George Nolfi used an old Philip K. Dick short story as a springboard to examine those issues in his tale of a politician (Matt Damon) selected by "The Chairman" to be the sort of Great Man upon whom history pivots, and then tortured by a miserable life designed to maneuver him into place when all he wants is a chance at happiness with the woman (Emily Blunt) he instinctively feels he was meant to be with... as he was, in an earlier draft of The Plan.  So brainy, well-acted, well-realized and rousing, it's that rare movie that actually knows how to flesh out one of Dick's intriguing short stories rather than grind them into dreck.
5.Mission:  Impossible-Ghost Protocol-The poster child for that delusional hope you always have after a property you love inspires a bad movie that if they'd just do a sequel, it would be better.  It took 3 go-rounds before Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt was actually part of a film worthy of a franchise (M:I-3 was #7 on the Palace's very first 10 Best List), and after a 5-year gap, he's back in his best outing yet.  Ghost Protocol finally perfects the Impossible Missions Force by disbanding it, forcing Hunt and 3 allies to try to avert global nuclear war with no backup and a couple duffle bags full of defective spy gear.  Electrifying stunts, edge of your seat suspense and a wonderful sense of humor make Brad Bird's live-action directorial debut exactly the kind of good time blockbuster they really don't make anymore.
6.X-Men:  First Class-Years after dropping out of X-Men:  The Last Stand at the last minute, Matthew Vaughn finally took his shot at the eternal struggle between Professor X and Magneto, only this time taking us back to a (slightly altered) vision of how it all began.  James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender shined in those iconic roles, while Kevin Bacon made a triumphant comeback to the world of big-budget blockbusters as a swingin' 60's fiend hoping to end the world of humans.  Yes, this is a movie about two dueling teams of mutants, but it also packs a serious emotional punch, and asks questions not so confined to the 60's about the eternal choice the downtrodden face between hoping for a better future and declaring war on their perceived enemies.  It's the best X-Men movie since the original.
7.Young Adult-Oh, how my heart broke for the awful, selfish and delusional Mavis Gary as created by the brilliant Diablo Cody and brought to life by Charlize Theron in the kind of fearlessly dark performance one rarely sees from a beautiful woman in her prime Leading Lady years.  Young Adult is a black comic tragedy about the emptiness of so many adults lives that never find an adult purpose, and Theron is joined by an equally exceptional Patton Oswalt as the handicapped geek with whom she briefly bonds on an insane mission to steal her childhood sweetheart (Patrick Wilson) away from his wife and newborn child.  Jason Reitman's best movie since his auspicious debut Thank You For Smoking (#4 on that 2006 list).
8.Warrior-Gavin O'Connor returned to the Inspirational Sports Movie genre of which his Miracle is one of the best ever with this sensational drama about a broken family that settles its issues in a winner-takes-all Mixed Martial Arts tournament.  Joel Edgerton didn't get the credit he deserved for his breakout lead performance because Tom Hardy was so terrifyingly intense as his damaged brother and Nick Nolte once again the master of the Bad Father Who Insists He's Changed.  Sensational MMA action sequences leading up to the finals, one of the best fusions of action and character payoff I've ever seen.
9.Super 8-JJ Abrams has the career every creative person would want, producing, writing and directing just about anything he wants on TV and in the movies, and here was a passion project I could really get behind:  a simulated 1980's Amblin Entertainment blockbuster complete with Steven Spielberg on-board as Executive Producer.  His tale of troubled kids whose zombie movie shoot is interrupted by dual attacks on their town by a sinister government force and the hostile alien who escaped their custody.  Abrams has a mastery of a tone from another generation here, and his young performers are exceptional.  And he didn't just recapture the Amblin tone; this really would have been one of their best flicks.
10.Captain America:  The First Avenger-The last of Marvel's five films leading up to 2012's all-star superhero blowout The Avengers was the best since the first, the original Iron Man.  Chris Evans returned to Marvel heroism (he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four movies in the previous decade) in an amazing, special effects-enhanced performance as a 90-pound weakling who gets a chance to become a Super Soldier to battle mad Nazi The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving adding another bullet point ot his masterful resume of supporting turns in genre flicks) during World War II.  Funny, exciting, romantic and even tragic in the end, Joe Johnston's rousing superhero war flick was everything you could ask of the mashup.

What's that, you say?  Stop at 10 after a movie year like this?  Hell to the no, we're going for a Top 20!

11.Sherlock Holmes:  A Game of Shadows-Robert Downey Jr. returned as his other iconic big-screen genius, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Consulting Detective in this sequel that reteamed him with Dr. Watson (Jude Law, perfect as ever) to battle the diabolical Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris, an unconventional choice that worked to perfection).  Fans of the Holmes/Watson dynamic got more than they could have asked for, and lovers of Doyle's classic Holmes vs. Moriarty story "The Final Problem" got a chance to go absolutely bananas over the best and most original climactic fight of the year.
12.The Three Musketeers-Too bad so few people saw Paul W.S. Anderson's 3D swashbuckler, the first truly great movie directed by the Fanboy-despised Master of the Mediocre.  A truly eclectic International cast had great fun mashing up Alexandre Dumas' iconic heroes with the works of Jules Verne.  No Art here, just pure matinee daring-do, complete with dueling flying pirate ships.  Too bad we'll probably never get that sequel promised by the final scene.
13.We Bought a Zoo-That big ol' softy Cameron Crowe staged a triumphant comeback from his Elizabethtown exile with this wonderfully big-hearted valentine to life, love and second chances, taking more than a few liberties with the true story of a family that bought a broken-down zoo and struggled to bring it up to code.  Another great Matt Damon performance and Crowe's trademark belief in human connection and taking a chance.
14.Battle:  Los Angeles-The year's least appreciated Great performance came from Aaron Eckhart, whose Marine who refuses to quit in the face of an alien invasion and his own mounting despair may be the finest work of his career.  Yeah, Battle:  LA may have seen Independence Day a few dozen times before mapping out its vaguely familiar climax, but I get goosebumps every single time I see ID4, and did so both times I saw this one too.  Plus, pitting modern ground troops against aliens provided a terrific chance to celebrate the heroism of the soldier without getting bogged down in politics.
15.Thor-The other great Marvel movie of the summer allowed director Kenneth Branagh to stage a comeback of his own by proving the perfect man to guide the Norse God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) through a Shakespearean web of palace intrigue.  Just about the only movie last year that benefited from a post-production conversion to 3D (LOVED that Rainbow Bridge), it also proved surprisingly light on its feet and Hemsworth did the seemingly impossible, bringing a highly improbably comic book creation to robust life.
16.Fast Five-Like the Mission:  Impossible movies, the Fast & The Furious franchise is slowly but surely developing toward perfection.  Justin Lin's third turn in the director's chair had him presiding over an all-star cast of actors from the previous Fast films, united to pull off an amazing heist while on the run from a ruthless US Marshall (Dwayne Johnson).  The climactic "dragging the safe through the streets" sequence took vehicular mayhem to places I'd never imagined in a year when stunts staged a major comeback.
17.Scream 4-Director Wes Craven, writer Kevin Williamson and stars Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courtney Cox reunited for this inventive generational sequel that essentially pits a sequel to the movie that defined post-modern irony in the horror genre against a murderous conspiracy to reboot the characters world by killing them all and taking their place.  It's a little draggy in the middle, but the final half hour, when Williamson lays all his cards on the table, is a truly amazing reminder that the dude's still got it.  And that he remembers the First Rule of Remakes.
18.Margin Call-Debuting writer/director J.C. Chandor allowed us to witness the Fiscal Apocalypse through the eyes of an investment firm's employees who, during a few fateful hours, make decisions that will plunge the nation into an economic crisis that continues to this day.  A tremendous cast including Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons and Stanley Tucci made this the most gripping set of business meetings you'll ever see.
19.In Time-Writer/director Andrew Niccol smashed us upside the head with a sci-fi sledgehammer that couldn't be more true:  in The Future, the rich have conquered the poor and imposed upon everyone a system by which life force is hoarded by the wealthly and the common man must work all day to earn enough Time to live another day.  Solid performances by Justin Timberlake and Cillian Murphy helped to make this a diverting action thriller besides, but it's the metaphor that's the show and it was a doozy.
20.Fright Night-Director Craig Gillespie and writer Marti Noxon cleverly updated Tom Holland's much-loved 1986 teen horror flick with an ace cast led by Anton Yelchin stretching his leading man skills, Colin Farrell proving to be one cool vampire and David Tennant making an auspicious American feature film debut as a burned-out magician who must embrace his destiny as a vampire hunter.  The climax was pure gold and some of the year's best 3D effects (you might need to brush some ash off yourself while leaving the theater) also helped to pump up the proceedings.

But wait... there's more!

BEST 2010 MOVIE THAT DIDN'T REACH CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA UNTIL 2011:  The King's Speech-What more needs to be said about last year's Oscar-winning Best Picture?  A phenomenal history lesson anchored by three amazing performances, all with a quiet attention to detail that made it feel so much truer than the usual awards season costume parade.

BEST COMEDY-Bad Teacher-It was a great year for really caustic female characters, and Cameron Diaz got the chance of a lifetime to just be awful as Elizabeth Halsey, a very bad teacher indeed forced to return to her job after being dumped by that guy who caught on that she was only planning to marry him for his money.  What to do but go after some other guy's money while totally and spectacularly neglecting her students?  Jake Kasden's delightful character study actually threw in a few surprisingly sharp comments on the value of honest self-evaluation while otherwise just wringing innumerable laughs out of how shockingly bad a teacher can be.

BEST ANIMATED MOVIE-Rango-Man, was it really just two years ago when four of my top 10 movies were animated and we all thought animation was the future of originality and artful storytelling in the movies?  Well, now it's the present of mediocrity and sequel bloat and only one 2011 animated feature was truly exceptional.  But, man, Gore Verbinski's desert critter Western was something to behold, animated in amazing detail and depth by Industrial Light & Magic.  Johnny Depp led a first-rate voice cast in a surreal story with Big Ideas about the importance of heroism and archetypes in society, whether they're backed by reality or not.

And there you have it!  As long as great titles like these keep coming, no number of blockbuster disappointments will ever make me lose faith in the movies.  Here's no another great year in 2012!