Would Fast Five Make Your Top 10 Films of 2011?

Time magazine critic Richard Corliss raised a few eyebrows when he included a popcorn flick in his picks for the year. But which of these years blockbusters would you choose to honour?

Fast & Furious Five

Production year: 2011

Country: USA

Runtime: 130 mins

Directors: Justin Lin

Cast: Chris Ludacris Bridges, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Vin Diesel

If 2011 is anything like every other year of late, you're about to get quite sick of end-of-year film lists. Every publication, in print and online, will soon be dutifully chronicling the same 10 films as everyone else. These selections will invariably be of the prestigious middlebrow Oscar-bait variety, and will very self-consciously ignore most of the big summer marquee blockbusters.

Except one. Time magazine has stolen a march on the rest of the industry by publishing its end-of-year list nice and early. As you'd expect The Tree of Life is there, as are The Artist and Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But Time has also remembered films that people actually went to see – Super 8 is included, along with Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Rango. But the real shock comes at number 10. It's Fast Five. According to Time, the 10th best movie released this year is the fourth sequel to a lunk-headed decade-old car caper, The Fast and the Furious, that was precision-designed to appeal to those awful teenage boys who have caricatures of Lamborghinis Blu-Tacked to their bedroom walls.

According to Time film critic Richard Corliss, there's a perfectly decent explanation for this. He described Fast Five as "a live-action movie with so much whirling tumult, so many moments of low genius, that it plays like an animated car-toon". According to Corliss, Fast Five is "the first great movie of the post-human era".

Now, Fast Five is an undeniably fun film – the kind of movie you stumble into with your expectations around your ankles, only to be pleasantly surprised by its gimmickry and technical flair and wit – but is it really one of the films of the year? There is an argument, perhaps, that not a lot separates Fast Five from Cannes darling and likely end-of-year staple Drive. They're both violent automotive crime dramas. They're both undeniably genre pieces. They'd almost be identical if Fast Five replaced all the shots of The Rock clearly having the time of his life with endless footage of him moodily driving around listening to hollow-eyed electropop. Perhaps that's the point that Corliss – who left Drive out of his list entirely – was trying to make.

Or perhaps he just wanted to kick back against the tendency of these lists to ignore populist movies in favour of films that have been written and produced specifically to win awards. Inevitably The Skin I Live in has already started to crop up on many of these lists, as has Margaret and We Need to Talk About Kevin. But Fast Five's inclusion in Time's list is both unique and unexpected. It almost seems like a validation of brainless popcorn flicks.

So let's have an amnesty. If Time can celebrate gormless spectacles, so can we. I'll go first – I loved the Fright Night remake, even more than the original. Thor is perhaps the only film of 2011 I've voluntarily watched more than once. No film in recent memory has made me laugh harder, albeit unintentionally, than In Time. And if Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn't the best film ever to be made about a talking monkey who can ride a horse, I'd be quite surprised.

Now it's over to you. Which of this year's blockbusters, likely to be overlooked by the torrent of year-end lists, did you enjoy? Your thoughts below, please.