The Best of 2012

At the risk of sounding like Peter Travers, this is a knockout of a film; by turns disarmingly beautiful and incredibly powerful. What may have been in another director's hands a cheap and maudlin inspirational story is in Audiard's a titanic film; every beat is earned and sometimes painfully felt, plus a Springsteen song has never been put to better use.

There are no real ways to do justice to this genuinely masterful film; Zvyagintsev's noirish stylistic tendencies are perfectly balanced with more ambitious social commentary. The result is sublime, and the tracking shot that ends the film is nothing short of breathtaking.

Feeling at once like an epitaph and a prologue to cinema itself and full of anarchic melancholy, I don't think I've seen anything quite like this and sadly, probably won't ever again. While The Master and Post Tenebras Lux also challenge linear narrative conventions, it's this film that seems almost revolutionary. However, I do have reservations; Carax seems to indulge in the sense of melancholy to the extent that it feels out of place in this particular film.

Like many of Anderson's efforts, this hearkens back to a time when American cinema carried a certain vitality and complexity it largely lacks now. Beguilingly mysterious and epic in its scope, The Master is not without its flaws, but this portrait of the postwar American mindset (and much more, really) will hopefully be remembered, if not as an unqualified success, as a hugely fascinating and memorable film.

While I was no big fan of Dominik's previous films The Assassination of Jesse James and Chopper, it seems like the director has hit his stride here. An acerbic, heavily stylized attack on American capitalism, Killing Them Softly is flawed, sometimes over-directed and naive, but, as a whole it marks the belated arrival of a promising filmmaker. The cast is great too, with Pitt, Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ben Mendolsohn, and especially Scoot McNairy all acquiting themselves well.

As a portrait of postwar Britain it works very well; as a chronicle of an affair in its minutiae, it works spectacularly. Lush, mature, and complex, this deeply classical picture is one for the ages.

Between TV and movies, there have been no shortages of screen cops. However, they have rarely seemed as, for lack of a better word, real as they do here. There's a raw, ragged feeling to the camerawork and editing which actually seems appropriate given the material. The only major misgiving I have is with the ending, but that is not really significant in the face of the tremendous realist accomplishment that Polisse is.

Like Errol Morris at his best, The Imposter leads its audience to its own conclusion in a stylized, genuinely exciting fashion. Finely crafted and incredibly involving stuff.

Mainstream critics often complain of the lack of female-centric or black-centric movies (granted, this is not an unfounded statement), but when this film came along, which features a black woman in a rounded protagonist role, there was hardly a murmur from most critics. It's not groundbreaking stylistically, but wonderfully crafted and satisfying. Definitely worth a watch because chances are, you haven't seen it.

The kind of simple, lyrical filmmaking the Dardennes have become known for is brought to a peak in this spellbinding sort-of fairy tale.

Dark, bordering on misanthropic. Relentless, bordering on cruel. It's not an easy film, and a little iffy politically, but ultimately worthy and very memorable. It is also one in a wave of excellent, against-type Matthew McConaughey performances, which includes The Lincoln Lawyer and Bernie (but definitely not The Paperboy).

This isn't just an excuse to put a JCVD movie on this list - it's a legitimately intelligent deconstruction of the action film while providing that kind of genre exercise in spades. Among other things, the use of colors is noteworthy; the purples and blues early in the film contrast with more generic washed-out greens and greys in the latter half.

Like Day of Reckoning, Looper is a genre exercise with a twist. It doesn't work as well as that film, and the ending is frankly pretty silly, but mostly, it's another example of the emergence of a wave of intelligent genre films saturating the market. Its exploration of the themes of reconciliation and fathers and sons is also admirable, if not ultimately successful.