That means that out of an average year, if Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds isn’t already on my radar, I’m probably not coughing up seven bucks to see it.

Because I’m not a “critic” — yeah, in multiple senses of the word — a Top X List doesn’t really feel fair, especially since the worst film I actually paid to see this year was probably Snow White and the Huntsman. 

What I can do is weigh my own expectations against the finished product. What was a surprise in 2012? What was a total letdown?

So yes, embedded somewhere in this post are “best of” and “worst of” lists. As a disclaimer, there are some blind spots in my list. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t come ’round these here parts for another week, and Holy Motors screened in the city of Madison exactly once from what I can surmise. I haven’t seen Lay Mizzzzz or Anna Karenina or Michael Haneke’s Amour. And I’ll save you Whedonites some time: there is no Cabin in the Woods on this list. *drops mic*

– A Few Notes –

1. It doesn’t take some idiot with WordPress to point out the obvious: superhero movies still pwn the shit out of Hollywood. Joss Whedon’s snappy action extravaganza The Avengers was the domestic B.O. king this year, taking in over $623 million. More to the point, all three major comic book releases this summer easily broke the top box office charts (#2 The Dark Knight Rises: $448 million; #6 The Amazing Spider-man: $262 million). Back in the spring, film sites ripped (now former) Walt Disney Studios President Rich Ross for poorly marketing the financially disappointing John Carter. In my opinion? Andrew Stanton shoulda just thrown a cape on him. BILLIONS O’ DOLLARS.

2. The internet has changed film journalism (arguably for the worse) and induced round-the-clock rumor-mongering and list making. Where ten years ago, a top story might be the critical disappointment over The Phantom Menace, now it’s “Ten Potential Directors We’d Like to See Direct Episode VII.” The internet hasn’t just expanded platforms for the critics, though; it’s also unleashed the wrath of the fanboy. First with The Dark Knight Rises and more recently with early criticism against the first Hobbit, rabid fans likely foaming at the mouth have taken to sites like Rotten Tomatoes and lashed out at negative reviews. Expect this to continue if not increase altogether. And then prepare for the worst.

3. Even with Monsters University on next year’s slate, look for continued challenges to the iron-fisted reign of Herr Pixar on the peaceful peasant lands of children’s animation. While Brave still pleased most critics and took a decent chunk at the box office, it’s a stretch to compare it to the likes of other recent successes like Wall-E, Up, or Toy Story 3. Dreamworks and Disney released Rise of the Guardians and the excellent Wreck-It Ralph respectively, and while I wasn’t hot on it, Focus Features and Laika (of Coraline fame) garnered plenty of buzz with ParaNorman. 

4. For film scores, Hans Zimmer and Adele are obvious winners. The latter came out with one of the best Bond themes, and while most 007 songs suffer from being pop cultural artifacts of their respective time, Adele’s more timeless old school qualities have me thinking “Skyfall” will go down as more Shirley Bassey and less Madonna. Zimmer’s Dark Knight Rises score also felt like an appropriate conclusion to Nolan’s story. Bane and Catwoman both got some pretty unique themes, but Zimmer also brought back ideas he and his former collaborator first introduced way back in Batman Begins. While Rises’ score clearly suffered from the absence of Howard’s gentler moments, Zimmer’s knack for epic bombast in tracks like “Rise” and “Imagine the Fire” is unparalleled. Or to put it another way: BWOOOOOOOM.

5. On the flip side, Howard Shore let me down. In his original Lord of the Rings scores, he’d developed such an iconic and varied musical language for Tolkien’s mythology. Thus far, his work on The Hobbit has been a bummer. Shore adds variations of themes we all know and love, but there’s very little creative expansion, and it frankly comes off as tired and lazy. The “Hobbit theme,” while clearly riffing on that of the Fellowship’s, is undeniably catchy in its many forms and remains a standout. If only the rest of the score didn’t bank on its predecessor as a crutch — or cause head-scratching comparisons to be made. What does a goblin chase in the Misty Mountains have to do with the Bridge of Kazad-dum? They both have… stairs? Yeah, I don’t know either.

6. What about formats? Will 2013 see even more overpriced tickets for 3D conversions? Or will Apple realize the ultimate in consumer home theater systems so we never have to leave our padded apartments ever again? One thing’s for sure: IMAX is coming back. HARD. Star Trek Into Darkness, Oz: The Great and Powerful, Pacific Rim, Ender’s Game, and Iron Man 3 are just a handful of releases next year slated to go big. Is it another easy way to make more money? Sure. But studios may also be finally catching on to the fact that a lot of people couldn’t give two shits about patchy 3D conversion. And hey, maybe we’ll end up getting a Will Ferrell buddy comedy in IMAX. America could really use one of those.

– Biggest Letdowns –

3. The Dark Knight Rises

Seriously? You? What’s next, asshole? Mexican food had an “underwhelming” third quarter?

First of all, unless the secret brain-washing ingredients Taco Bell throws in its Grade F meat start convincing America it’s the best thing ever, Mexican food will always be great.

And I did like this Batman movie. How couldn’t I? Hathaway kicked ass. Tom Hardy’s Bane was this bizarre, lucha libre Darth Vader. It gave us “Light it up” and “What a lovely, lovely voice.” It gave us a BANE SOUNDBOARD. And that ending with Joseph Robin-Levitt was about as perfect of a conclusion to the series as anything I could’ve masturbated to.

Rises has a metric ton of cool ideas: Bane’s mask is a literal inversion of Batman’s; not to mention he actually breaks the Bat; a huge battle in the streets of Gotham; a plot about some nuclear reactor that actually felt like a comic book movie telling a “comic book” story; Talia and Ra’s al Ghul have the exact same deaths. The Nolans even reverse the standard hero-villain relationship. This time, the bad guys are the idealists with a sweeping plan to change the world, and the hero is just one pissed off dude, hellbent on getting his revenge. It’s slight and a little genius.

But even after five months of thinking and two separate screenings — one in glorious IMAX, no less — I can’t help but shake this feeling of letdown. This was probably inevitable. As fun as it is to cover our mouths and purr “Do you feel in chaaaahhge?” Bane is no Joker. And if you had to narrow down a single element to The Dark Knight’s success, it would probably be Heath Ledger, for better or worse. Not to mention that any way you slice it, Rises’ script has a lot of problems. There’s weird pacing and a strangely elastic sense of time, and Christopher Nolan’s glib handling of specifics felt almost abbreviated this time around.

Still, this marks my fourth paragraph on a film that I’m calling a “letdown.” Not too shabby, eh? Plus, I already know I’ll be buying any future releases of a Dark Knight Rises Twelve-Disc Triple Awesome Collector’s Deluxe with Bacon Edition, whenever that comes out on Blu-Ray.

2. Lincoln 

Maybe it was the cram-packed movie theater on a Saturday afternoon that did me in. Maybe the white-haired crankiness that comes with a weekend matinee rubbed off on me too much. But the headaches are a’comin just thinking about Lincoln’s wordy pompousness.

Daniel Day-Lewis is the mad notes. For TEH ALWAYS. If Tom Cruise is Hollywood’s best actor at showing you how hard he works, DDL works just as hard and then does something more substantial than Jack Reacher with that same “I’m totally sleeping in an abandoned jail” level of dedication. Thank Christ Liam Neeson’s resurrection probably kept him off this project. Had he stayed on as planned, one of Lincoln’s few strengths would’ve been lost to another boring, deep-voiced one-note interpretation of an already mythologized President.

And speaking of mythologizing, what exactly are Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner trying for here? The writing in Lincoln often feels like it’s fighting to up the impact of the President’s life. No, no I want to begin with a couple of black Union soldiers reciting lines back to Abe from the Gettysburg Address. And make that shit verbatim, dammit. 

Granted, Kushner limited to white back-patting in adapting Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, but this sobering perspective on exactly how sweeping change is made in this country was a little too sobering, and too anesthetic. Lincoln is overblown, flowery and self-indulgent in the worst ways, from that absurd Gettysburg recitation to an unnecessary stretching of the President’s assassination. Spielberg shows the bullying, the bribery, the paper-pushing behind the Fourteenth Amendment, and then squats all over the collective effort with a saccharine eulogy. Lincoln wants to have its moldy, bearded seed cake and eat it, too. With all due respect, Mr. President, fat chance.

1. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

If you listen closely while watching Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit film (of three!),  in the background you can hear Warner Bros. execs setting aflame their wads of $20 bills, which they presumably use to light larger wads of $100 bills which they then use to light the finest cigars in all the Southfarthing.

Skeptical as I am with this trilogy biznass, I can imagine where each film would begin and end. An Unexpected Journey wrapped up the goblins and the bits with Gollum; The Desolation of Smaug will look to showcase the Desolation of Smaug; and There and Back Again has gotta have the Battle of the Five Armies somewhere in it. The problem with this plan is that you can already see the seams from the cutting and re-arranging of Tolkien’s context. Never mind that An Unexpected Journey seems convinced a story about dragon’s gold is just as epic as the end of Middle-earth. Even with the extra tidbits from Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and the dearly departed Guillermo del Toro, the story feels run down, like butter scraped over too much bread.

Where was the fun from Tolkien’s children’s story? Where was the whimsy? An Unexpected Journey’s moments of “adventure” only occur when characters literally say the word aloud. Maybe I’m just too naive. From a fiscal standpoint, why wouldn’t studios stretch this out to three movies? Or five? Hell, let’s make it an even thirteen. One for each dwarf.

– Biggest Surprises –

5. The Grey

One of the problems with year end lists, beyond the arbitrary ranking of subjective opinions, is that certain “kinds” of films get left in the cold. Films where Liam Neeson fights off a pack of CGI wolves get ignored alongside the films where Liam Neeson blathers on about a CGI kraken. (Kraken! Kraken! Kraken!) Frankly, that’s not very fair to Joe Carnahan.

Disguising itself as Taken It 2 Tha Wolves, The Grey is smart and stripped-down with an actual head on its shoulders. Neeson plays an Alaskan oil worker whose sole job is to protect his drilling team from getting torn apart by wild wolves. When the team’s plane crashes in the middle of fucking nowhere, The Grey gets cold and callous real fast.

While it’s easy to point out the stock character tropes at play — Neeson’s the badass, Dermot Mulroney’s the coward, Frank Grillo’s the hothead — each man feels fleshed out. That goes double for Neeson, who’s embellished with a two-pronged biography that’s as tragic as it is poetic. Once more into the fray, into the last good fight I’ll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day…

Carnahan is better known for his showier fare in Smokin Aces or The A-Team, but his co-writing credit with Ian MacKenzie Jeffers shows he’s fully capable of crafting a smart, even moving action film that defies conventions and expectations.

4. Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh’s first film In Bruges was a darkly comic look at the lives (and inevitable downfalls) of career hitmen. In Seven Psychopaths, McDonagh returns to that same interest, with an even wilder bent and a more raucous sense of humor. From his days as a playwright, McDonagh has had an undeniable knack for witty dialogue, whether it’s the snappy back-and-forth between Colin Farrell’s screenwriter and Sam Rockwell’s serial dognapper or a smart-assed sitdown with Woody Harrelson’s unhinged gangster and Christopher Walken, latter who’s rarely been better.

Taking meta-textual cues from the likes of Pulp Fiction and Charlie Kaufman’s headscratchers, Seven Psychopaths is a bloody dissection of not just the gangster film but our broader interests in pop culture and how violence plays into those obsessions.

And to alter a famous bit of graffiti, if I may:

CLAPTON ROCKWELL IS GOD

 3. Cloud Atlas

Okay, here’s the thing. I totally get the hate for Cloud Atlas. There’s a good chance its idealistic musings on love and human connections and their broader effects through time are too “hippie bullshit” for some. That’s completely fair.

But I couldn’t help admire a film that has this big of a heart and so brazenly wears it on its sleeve. To steal from myself:

The more important, less infuriating question is ‘Why does Cloud Atlas work?’ The short answer is the editing, or more appropriately, the acid-laced, crotch-flaming juggling act Tykwer and the Wachowskis pull off. It’s not always perfect; you can definitely see some of the seams out of the gate, and Cloud Atlas’ first opening minutes take some getting used to. You wanted to learn more about our intrepid homosexual composer? Sorry, bru but you’ll have to wait until space Halle Berry helps Tom Hanks kill nuclear fallout savages first! That sounds exaggerated, but it can be very close to the truth. Thankfully, this is seven total minutes out of a nearly three hour movie, and the deftness of knowing which plot threads to turn to (and when to do so) is a real testament to the filmmaker trio. To put this into context: buy six 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, dump ‘em together and then show me the best parts of each completed picture all within a single finished product. Or you know, just kill yourself now.

Yes, a great deal of Cloud Atlas’ makeup looked really fucking terrible. But from the infinite cross-cutting over numerous stories to co-director Tom Tykwer’s collaborative composition with Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, this is a group effort that’s as moving as it is impressive. Cloud Atlas is the trippiest, craziest class presentation you’ve ever had to sit through in college. A+ for effort

2. Django Unchained

Truth be told, Django wasn’t even on my radar until the flipping opening credits started up. That’s how little I was excited for Tarantino’s latest. And truthfully, I’m curious what didn’t make me so curious, because oh what a movie this is.

There’s been a lot of love for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom this year, and for good reason. While I’d argue Anderson’s never really moved past his obsessions with dysfunctional communities and the mechanics of the nuclear family, Moonrise Kingdom’s focus on an innocent love story between two young adults feels more appropriate for its director’s spritely palette and awkward conversations — at least more than anything he’s done since The Royal Tenenbaums. Django Unchained, with its endless references and vintage aesthetic, is perfectly tailored right down to Tarantino’s story.

Remember that scene in Reservoir Dogs where Tim Roth has to recite a fake drug story to convince the other chaps he’s legit? From his early career on, Tarantino’s been fascinated by the “hows” and “whys” of films within other films, and that moment in Reservoir Dogs is a superb look at the actor’s role. Well Django is all about theatricality and performing for an audience, too. It’s also a deft commentary on the slippery ethical slope of American business. And it of course functions as a slick, modern take on the blaxploitation revenge picture. Any way you slice it, it’s damn cool, baby.

1. Kill List

Before you angrily type comments of “refund!” and “hack!” below, I would hope the quality of this writing has reminded  you all that this site has no paywall. So I owe you all nothing. NOTHING! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Kill List was by far 2012′s biggest surprise. Sure, The Master and Compliance were tighter, better made films, and there’s a strong chance you don’t even know what the fuck I’m talking about. But if you had to ask what film has stayed in my mind more than any other I saw this year? Kill List wins out. And frankly it’s not even close.

Director Ben Wheatley plays with horror, suspense, and crime in ways I have never seen before, and arguably with a more severe genre-bending penchant than Drew Goddard’s excellent Cabin in the Woods. Suspense turns to dread with impeccable sound mixing. Unflinching depictions of violence submerge you in the inner suffocation of Neil Maskell’s soldier-turned-hitman — a hammer to the head in Kill List doesn’t cut away like another film might. Forget those contrived pull quotes calling this a “gut punch” or a “white-knuckle thrill ride.” Kill List will destroy your soul, slowly and subtly, until it finally tips its hand. By then it’s far too late.

Of course now that I’ve talked it up this much, it can only really be a letdown right? Now I just look like an asshole. I guess even as the years change, some things still stay the same. See you in 2013.

I’m not gonna fart around like I normally do; it’s late and I just put Anchorman on so I’m only half-paying attention to this semtance. Here’s where I traditionally complain about cinema release dates and how punitive they are if you live outside the US, so here goes: five months for Cloud Atlas? Four for Wreck-It Ralph? Dozens of other movies have been delayed this year, and to be honest I feel stupid writing up this list before seeing Zero Dark Thirty or Lincoln or especially Django Unchained. How can I think of this as definitive when films by my favourite filmmakers remain out of my reach? Will this list be invalid by the end of January?

And yes, I know, the ways in which studios are attempting to capitalise on increased revenues from overseas mean films are now starting to come out in Europe before the US, but this year the biggest examples of that were The Avengers and Skyfall, both of which were out over here a couple of weeks before the US. I hear some say there’s an equivalence here but two weeks is frustrating while a four month delay is absolute bullshit. I thought I was the only person who ever moaned about these things but even Cory Doctorow got in on the action (thanks to @catvincent for the heads-up on that piece). Everything in that makes so much sense to me but still we put up with the old ways.

Okay, moaning over. Here’s the (sadly incomplete) list. No disrespect to any of these films. Naturally, if I didn’t like them I wouldn’t have included them.

25. Your Sister’s Sister

This year Sundance came to London, complete with overpriced tickets, interesting documentaries, and a handful of fiction movies that sounded less so. As ever Shades of Caruso finds itself struggling to love the output of the US independent scene when compared to the bigger studio releases, especially when the new voices showcased at Sundance often seem to provide films as formulaic as their derided big-budget brethren. Lynn Shelton’s chamber-piece Your Sister’s Sister, in which a grieving man becomes dragged into the dramas connecting two sisters, was not on the Sundance list; more’s the pity. At times this looks and feels like every other movie of its kind, right down to casting the seemingly ubiquitous Mark Duplass as the feckless interloper, but Shelton’s a better filmmaker than most, and here does wonders with limited means, supplying all the quiet character work of the best of this genre, but with a populist’s touch for the dramatic. Seemingly sedate for the most part, Shelton saves the fireworks for a startling end-of-second-act blowout, aided by magnificent work from Emily Blunt and Rosemary DeWitt. Only an underwhelming third act prevents this from getting higher in the list, yet after the dramatic lull we at least reach a sweetly satisfying denouement, a gentle sigh of resignation and love you don’t see often enough. It left me with a glow that lasted for days.

24. Killer Joe

The one thing you can count on with a late-career William Friedkin film is that it’ll be muscular, and will likely feature at least one scene that makes your hair stand on end. Killer Joe goes one better than that; it features a final act so full on that when it was over I literally didn’t know what to think or do. To be fair the whole movie, adapted by Tracy Letts from his first play, is pitched at such a weird level of energy that the viewer should know all bets are off. As a filmed play the performances from almost everyone are heightened and emphatic in a similar way to David Cronenberg’s stagy Cosmopolis, but while that was bloodless, Killer Joe is almost dementedly provocative. Performances like this can carry a movie away into quirky irrelevance but thankfully there is a rock to hold it down; Matthew McConaughey continues his campaign to become the most interesting actor in Hollywood with a riveting portrayal of a malevolent scumbag with a baffling sense of dark morality. His final acts turn this from a neo-noir into a macabre spoof of family life, or a satirical depiction of the terrible things we would do to our loved ones to survive in a brutal world. I’m not sure I can even call this worthy of inclusion here, except that it got my pulse pounding like nothing else this year.

23. Moonrise Kingdom

Fantastic Mr. Fox might have been Wes Anderson’s children’s film, but it’s arguable that his follow-up is likely as much in tune with the viewpoint of a child as his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s tale. Like some kind of gaudy yellow reworking of the stories of Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, Anderson throws his two very young lovers into an adventure across a humdrum island devoid of any magic or mystery until their imaginations and new-found optimism transform the claustrophobic environs into a wonderland. It’s the clash between their defiant enthusiasm for life and the beaten-down and jaded adults that provides this film’s highlights, with Bruce Willis and Ed Norton on especially good form as two men trying to make the most of a pretty crappy hand, before finding a spark of life in their attempts to help the lovestruck couple. And yet this is the least sentimental of Anderson’s movies, while also serving as his least cynical; a miraculous juggling of tone and intent from a director whose eyebrow often seems perpetually arched. It’s also another piece of evidence for SoC’s argument that Anderson is the finest and most intuitively brilliant comedic director of the current generation. Yes yes, I know, no one agrees, whatevs. But seriously, for your consideration, the trampoline shot. Come on!

22. Premium Rush

How frustrating it must be to be seen as merely “competent” by a critical monolith that doesn’t have time or patience to appreciate the craft of a filmmaker who instinctively knows their shit. David Koepp has been writing deceptively elegant populist screenplays for years, in addition to honing his directorial skills with a number of interesting films that almost hit the spot. Premium Rush is his first directorial effort that absolutely nails it, with a confident visual style, an intoxicating sense of momentum reminiscent of Speed, and the ability to pull sprightly and appealing performances from a well-chosen cast. There’s little else to it than the thrill of a chase, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s cocky bike messenger pursued by a magnificently, hypnotically unhinged Michael Shannon, but Koepp manages the action brilliantly and has fun filling in the margins of the tale, capturing the edginess of a dangerous but vibrant New York while portraying the community of the couriers as a sub-culture with its own rules and priorities. Mid-movie pacing problems can be forgiven when everything else in this exuberantly kinetic thriller is handled so deftly. And Shannon’s work cannot be praised enough. This should have attracted a bigger audience just for him alone.

21. Killing Them Softly

Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket; that much we know for sure (even though it possibly isn’t). Andrew Dominik is more sure than most. His follow-up to the magisterial The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not about to hold back in its portrayal of America as a morally bankrupt, soul-deadened wasteland populated by venal opportunists, depressed to the point of inactivity, educationally backward and entitled, and he certainly isn’t about to miss an opportunity to drive the point home by including footage of the 2008 election campaign. It’s the kind of point-hammering that would normally drive SoC away, but perhaps I was particularly receptive to those sentiments on the day of viewing, or perhaps I was swayed by the bravura setpieces – such as the brutal, degrading beating and murder of one character, no spoilers – or the slow descent into numbness of James Gandolfini’s morbidly depressed hitman, or Brad Pitt’s increasing frustration with a culture that doesn’t value talent and instead seeks a quick buck. The sentiment expressed in this excoriating blast of fury at a broken society might be delivered with the smugness of a disgusted outsider, but to see Pitt’s electrifying delivery of his key speech is to feel like you just got told, son. It’s the kind of electrifying scene that becomes legendary.

20. Berberian Sound Studio

As with a number of films on this list, there’s a good chance this would rank higher after a few extra viewings, certainly to see if there is some sense to be made of the exasperating third act. If you can even call it that; writer-director Peter Strickland’s fealty to the weird atmosphere conjured up earlier appears to have taken over his mind as completely as the terrifying events in the in-movie movie The Equestrian Vortex do to poor sound engineer Gilderoy, leading to a dereliction of duty right before the end. But what menace, what madness, what delirious berserk horror he provides before that. Cleverly keeping The Equestrian Vortex offscreen, we’re forced to see this film through the eyes and ears of Toby Jones’ horrified technician, a man out of his element and soon unable to cope with the unfamiliar and hostile world he has been thrust into; the typical quiet middle-Englander who thinks of Europe as being the home of insidious decadence. Strickland ratchets up the tension with all sorts of visual and aural trickery, creating a disturbing world with a few sets and well-utillised darkness; this is one of the most technically accomplished films from a British director in a long time. Kudos to all involved, but special praise for Jones, who gives one of the performances of the year, all repressed rage and confusion, sympathetic and infuriating in equal measure.

19. Sightseers

It’s hard to think of another movie in recent years that oozes Britishness as much as this one. As with Berberian Sound Studio, Ben Wheatley has made a character study of what makes the classic British underdog tick, but whereas Peter Strickland’s film isolated its protagonist in Italy and made him weak, Sightseers gives us a murderous, gradually empowered couple to rival Malick’s Kit and Holly, or Tarantino/Stone’s Mickey and Mallory. Two old-at-heart lovers find themselves on the road, travelling north through England, killing those who break their unwritten but familiar codes, becoming emboldened by their love for each other and their transgressions. At first this seems like a simple translation of American homicidal road movies into a British vernacular but by its magnificently unhinged finale it feels like its own thing; a snapshot of everything that is ugly about our nation’s soul, with resentment aimed at those around us and at ourselves, all taking place against some of the country’s most beautiful landscapes. It’s also hilarious, and as quotable as that similarly bleak national self-portrait Withnail and I. With luck this clever and strangely lovable two-hander, deftly written by its stars Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, will find as large an audience.

18. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Peter Jackson’s urge to turn every project into some kind of epic has worked against him before, which is why even the idea that he was going to transform JRR Tolkien’s relatively slender children’s tale into a trilogy created such a backlash. Seeing the first installment places that decision into context; this is no longer a six movie adaptation of four books, more a world-building exercise for the confident New Zealander as he expands upon Tolkien’s tales. There’s a persuasive argument that that’s hubris but these projects are beginning to feel like a compilation of decades of visual and emotional reactions to Tolkien’s complex world, a smorgasbord of interpretations from readers and designers that brings something new to life; a fusion of literary work and fan appropriation that lives and breathes in a way even Tolkien never imagined, reminiscent of the mix of Burroughs and Cronenberg that gave us the movie Naked Lunch. The alterations to the original text are once more shrewd and exciting, his casting insights have again paid off, and even though even this fan can see that some trimming might have helped, what we’ve been given is yet another thrilling demonstration that Jackson is the pre-eminent fantasy filmmaker on the planet, and a persuasive argument that he should fight for the rights to The Silmarillion and keep making these films for the rest of his life. I’m sure he’d hate that, but some of us would be well chuffed.

17. Rust and Bone

You can’t go from making the greatest prison drama of recent times to a love story without bringing some of that grit with you, and Jacques Audiard’s adaptation of Craig Davidson’s short story is simultaneously tender and abrasive, like its beaten-down lovers. Bare-knuckle boxer Ali and gravely-injured Stéphanie seem like they’ve never even understood love before; their slow awakening to its possibilities, in a world of distrust and casual cruelty, would seem trite were it not for Audiard’s sure hand and the remarkable work from Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard. Their commitment to rehabilitate the critically derided love story genre and their low-key performances yield surprising dividends. Rust and Bone achieves moments of astonishing beauty amidst the grime of lives poorly lived; shadows like bruises pushed back by rays of blinding light provided by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine. There’s even beauty in the brutality that galvanises and saves our protagonists; our rubbernecking fascination in the awful things people do to survive cheekily justified by Audiard’s eye for the transcendental, and the luminous Cotillard’s triumphant, well-earned return to life. This can be dismissed as mere melodrama, but those crimson brush-strokes, and the conviction of all involved, turn it into something more than mere potboiler, a romance for the austerity age.

16. Compliance

It’s hard to shock an audience these days, but Craig Zobel has managed it with this simple but horrifying account of the Mount Washington prank call crime of 2004. The writer-director handles the slowly escalating tension with commendable confidence, his bravest choice being to pace this movie so deliberately, taking the time to let the horror of the events (the TRUE events, don’t forget) sink in and percolate in the nerves of the audience. Watching this with a crowd of people was the most startling cinematic experience of the year, with numerous walkouts and furious tirades aimed at the screen from viewers who couldn’t handle the slow degradation of the protagonists. Very little in recent years plays on our expectations as well as this, but while some critics have attacked it for being a purposeless exercise in baiting the crowd, this remarkable thriller’s only real fault is to have come out now and not during the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, when Zobel’s points about the ease with which people can be manipulated into doing terrible things might have seemed more timely. As it is, this is a memorable achievement, an experiment in which the events on screen are symbolically acted out by those who watch it; the ultimate in meta-narrative trickery, with our horrified reactions becoming part of the story. Seeing it at home defeats this film’s bold purpose. If you can see it in a roomful of disgusted co-voyeurs, you’ll understand its impact.

15. Painless

Juan Carlos Medina’s directorial debut, the tale of a village torn apart by the birth of several “painless” children, and a family hiding a dark secret, does many things brilliantly; it captures the agony of a country tainted by its terrible past, exorcises that pain by channeling it through metaphor, and offers hope that forgetting these terrors can lead to a new future for a generation now free of the experience of the Civil War. Just for achieving those things it would be remarkable, but for making something with such serious intent in a genre that has, for a few years, seemed to be coasting on found-footage exorcism movies and endless repetitive zombie rampages, Medina’s ambition shines even brighter. That’s before we get into his mastery of atmosphere, his skillful manipulation of the audience –especially during the almost unwatchably tense middle-section — and the bold creation of Berkano, a character surely ready to join the pantheon of horror greats. The bravura, operatic finale is a flourish well-earned; this is the best horror movie of the new decade – emotional, intellectual, and unflinching, made with an elegant touch that is easily a rival to new horror masters Del Toro and Bayona.

14. Jack Reacher

This kind of hoary thriller, based on the questionable novels that target armchair libertarian gun nuts who distrust all forms of authority except that which is dispensed by uncomplicated common-sense killing machines, is exactly the sort of thing that makes Shades of Caruso want to vomit up both lungs, and Chris McQuarrie’s adaptation of Lee Childs’ One Shot is no exception. Our hero is a macho force-of-nature full of old-fashioned values, with a dash of slut-shaming and a damsel-rescuing fetish thrown in for good measure. Everyone wants to fuck him or be him; Jack Reacher is a MAN’S MAN. This is the bad bit of the movie. The good bits? Almost everything else, from the shrewd casting (Rosamund Pike aside), to the attention to detail, to the exquisitely choreographed setpieces. The action is believably messy, the central mystery is intricate but comprehensible, and the inevitable pro-capital punishment argument is arguably tempered by the final scene. The retrograde politics repulse, but the old-school sharpness and focus of the filmmaking is undeniably thrilling to behold. To go back in time to a world of starkly shot and constructed thrillers of this calibre entails taking the rough of the past with the smooth, but considering how rarely we get smooth these days, McQuarrie deserves credit for at least taking the time to transform macho lead into cinema gold.

13. Argo

For those of us who have eagerly followed Ben Affleck’s career since he began to show promise, for those of us who pooh-poohed all of the mean gossip about how he and Matt Damon’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting was really the work of William Goldman, for those of us who loved him in Changing Lanes and Hollywoodland and even Daredevil (God help us), oh my, this has been a long time coming. After Gone Baby Gone and The Town were described as being “surprisingly well-made considering it’s by Affleck”, the great man returned with his strongest and most confident movie yet and finally, FINALLY, everyone started giving him a break. To be honest this incredible tale of the rescue of six Iranian Embassy staff would be hard to screw up, considering the astonishing details about the fake sci-fi movie Argo and the crazy plot to fool the hardline regime of Iran, but Affleck goes above and beyond, offering up a riveting piece of big-screen entertainment, maintaining suspense from the first scene right through to the end while modulating the tone with a light touch. Add to that a cast packed full of beloved character actors — with special attention to lovable Bryan Cranston — and you’ve got the cheekiest film of the year; part heavily-detailed period piece with modern relevance, part adventure, with a touch of Wag The Dog thrown in.

12. The Bourne Legacy

Skyfall, and the two films before it, impressed Bond fans by taking the popular hero back to his beginnings and recasting his historical failings as consequences of his adventures, with a good man broken down and rebuilt in new form. The first three Bourne movies followed a similar path, with a lost man finding himself, ending with a journey back to the room in which he was “born”, followed by a metaphorical rebirth. The fourth Bourne movie reverses this trend, with a new character given a new lease of life by evil men, made to do evil things, but terrified of returning to his original self. As with the previous films the enemy here is the banal self-preservation instinct of venal bureaucrats, but for once they have done one good thing; delivering a man from oblivion, giving him the tools to make a future for himself; yet another example of how the Bourne movies defy expectation and complicate what could have been simple. That is pleasure enough, but Tony Gilroy also provides a masterclass in writing suspense, withholding information skilfully to build tension in the early scenes, keeping characters in the dark about others’ motivation (another convention of the series), before laying all the cards on the table with a breathtaking finale on the roads and rooftops of Manila. Dismissed as a misstep by critics during the summer, this espionage classic is due a revisit. Hopefully we’ll have time to realise that Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross is a worthy replacement for the franchise’s titular hero.

11. John Carter

Could it be SoC’s reflexive love of the underdog that saw this blog go out of its way to defend Andrew Stanton’s obscenely expensive love letter to pulp sci-fi? Was it sympathy that triggered a million tweets of desperate pleading for audiences to give this instantly dated old-school adventure a chance? Or was it a sense of injustice that something crafted with such affection for the source material and – at times – such storytelling skill could be dismissed with such ease by reviewers who likely got the scent of an easy kill in their nostrils? Perhaps it was just relief that, in a year where big-screen entertainments, for the most part, delivered so little, there was someone out there who was willing to put their reputation on the line to tell a tale that they loved and to do it with brio and enthusiasm and crowd-pleasing confidence. John Carter might have ended up the punchline of a million shitty jokes, but for a growing legion of fans this was the real deal; space opera with scale and imagination and spirit, light and uncynical and emotionally honest. It’s everything critics have been complaining has been missing from cinema, done with an open heart and the buccaneering spirit of the Golden Era of film; a Burt Lancaster carouser in a digital shell. This should have been loved from the moment it came out, but no matter. That love will come in time.

10. Dans La Maison

Storytellers prone to agonising over the conventions and expectations they need to consider as they practice their craft will likely find Francois Ozon’s dizzying adaptation of Juan Mayorga’s play The Boy In The Last Row a difficult film to watch, but they should swallow their pride and do it anyway. Much of this tale of a soured marriage, and how it is enlivened by tales spun by a mysteriously-motivated schoolboy, focuses on satirising the class prejudices of its smug middle-class characters, and treating the film as such is rewarding in itself, thanks to Ozon’s deft touch and witty approach. Nevertheless this is also about how we view life through the prism of expectation, either through the rigid rules of storytelling taught by Fabrice Luchini’s amusingly humourless protagonist, or the eagerness to treat the outside world as a display to sate our voyeurism; the world as stage, filled with people who forget that they are players as well as participants. If Haneke had directed this it would have been a gloomy parable; maybe better, maybe worse. Gratitude is due, then, to Ozon for whipping up something lightly entertaining yet multi-layered, critical but hopeful, cautionary but compassionate. It will reward repeat viewings for years to come.

9. Seven Psychopaths

You could see this as the typical balls-out, unrestrained debut of a director with more ideas on his mind than he knows what to do with, and in a way you’d be right. Martin McDonagh wrote this before In Bruges, before a number of his plays, and the feeling that he was running riot in his study, cramming jokes and setpieces and thoughts about writing into a screenplay that barely has time for it all. But if this doesn’t have the focus of The Pillowman or In Bruges, it does have the charm of an eager puppy. The way McDonagh picks at the mindset of the writer, the laziness of the mainstream story factory, and the process of transforming reality and previously-absorbed stories into a new form is endearingly frank; anyone who has ever written for a living would probably recognise the desperation and egotism of Colin Farrell’s brilliantly played anti-hero. Even more pleasing is the cast, all of whom are on top form, especially Shades of Caruso favourite Sam Rockwell at his very best, and Christopher Walken, here giving his strongest and most moving performance since Catch Me If You Can. McDonagh’s games with genre and narrative are a pleasing puzzle for the mind, but his craft as a director is improving; no one else could pull off the film’s surprisingly powerful final scenes while still keeping the tone this light.

8. The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan’s ambitions from one movie to the next have increased so much that surely the only thing he could do to top the scale of The Dark Knight trilogy is to cram the rise and fall of the Roman Empire into one four-hour epic. What makes The Dark Knight Rises a success, however, is not the eye-popping shots of a city at war with itself, or the image of the Bat soaring above the streets through concrete canyons, engines and rockets booming. The masterstroke is grounding the trilogy, turning what could have merely been a story about heroes and villains into the tale of a boy getting over his grief, locating the source of his unhappiness and overcoming it through sheer force of will. This simple arc would be satisfying enough, but it also serves as a warning to the audience about the consequences of giving in to despair. Bane represents a lie that the society we have built for ourselves is only a prison, a lie easily believed when the institutions we have built become corrupted by human venality. The Dark Knight trilogy has shown the people of Gotham inspired by a symbol to say that they can do better, if they say no loud enough while never losing their humanity to despair. If superheroes are meant to show the nobility of the hero, and the possibilities created by courage, then The Dark Knight Rises is possibly the ultimate example of this message.

7. Cabin in the Woods

Whoever thought Scream had the last word in deconstructing the horror genre ::says nothing but points at own chest with a look of regret:: was wrong. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon managed to do it with even more wit and energy than we had hoped. But their greatest achievement was to take a clever idea and run with it, to run so damn far that you never think they’ll stop. For a writer to see an explosion of ideas this extreme, and yet so grounded in honouring a single core concept – that this film will link the repetitive and necessary conventions of a subset of genre to every other subset you could imagine, creating an ur-myth of horror that accepts that genre is about honouring conventions because of our psychological make-up as well as in a completely fantastical made-up sense that explains the plot of this specific story – is to fall in love with the telling of stories all over again. They put SO MUCH STUFF in this movie, you guys, and it ALL WORKS COHERENTLY. Watching this is like being a part of the greatest and most satisfying brainstorming session ever, with the bonus that the finished product is not only clever but effective as a horror movie and also still hysterically funny. It’s the complete package; a story about story that’s also just a really good story. In a year in which meta-fiction proliferated, this was the most deliriously enjoyable example.

6. Cloud Atlas

As a fan of David Mitchell’s ambitious multi-layered novel this adaptation by Tom Tykwer and Wachowskis Lana and Andy had a lot to live up to, and for the most part it succeeds. Certainly this is a masterclass in editing, penny-pinching and thematic ambition, going all out to honour the book’s ideas about pan-temporal connection by using the same actors in each of the film’s six timeframes. Perhaps on first viewing this can be seen as a mistake; picking out familiar faces obscured by layers of make-up can be distracting. But then this is a movie not afraid to risk failure, and so we swing back and forth from one tone to the other, from farce to high drama, and all the while with the same disarming, open-eyed sincerity. Anyone with even a grain of cynicism will take nothing from this film, citing its simple message of love and hope as the kind of thing a fool cherishes. But a simple idea, told with this level of narrative complexity, deserves all the praise it can get. Ignore the idea of souls passing through the ages; this is a story that heralds the accretion of ideas across the ages through the narratives of our lives, passed on to those around us, and with those ideas the possibility that courage is transferable, and goodness cumulative. To do this Tykwer and the Wachowskis had to create a story like a web, one whose connections will only become completely apparent with further viewing; a perfect film for our connected and complicated age.

5. The Grey

Marketed as part of Liam Neeson’s late-career action renaissance, audiences must have been mystified at Joe Carnahan’s survival tale, in which the actual act of enduring horrors is secondary to exploring the idea of whether it’s even worth fighting against impossible odds. There’s no wolf-punching here, merely the struggle to squeeze the last few drops out of a life before death wins; a message far less palatable than the bluntly Manichaean battles Neeson usually fights. This high-mindedness has drawn its own criticisms; how dare this pulpy B-movie try to address the most important issues facing every human? But the disparity between the macho natures of the characters and the vulnerable, terrified survivors they become is arguably the ideal way to show how imminent death can humble all of us, leading to a final act of devastating power. Mamet may have given us a similarly symbolic tale of man vs. nature in his survival epic The Edge but even that most perceptive of masculine dramatists doesn’t approach what is accomplished here. Neeson has been great value in recent years but this remarkable, grueling movie represents his finest hour. We expected an ironic diversion, but Joe Carnahan and his star managed to achieve a kind of brutal, startling profundity. It’s a game-changer for both of them; let’s hope it leads to more ambitious work in the future.

4. Wolf Children

Pixar’s Brave was an interesting attempt to dramatise the love between a mother and her child within a magical framework, at times achieving breathtaking beauty and insight, but notably complicating an otherwise simple tale with anthropomorphic transmogrifications and such like. Your opinion of the movie may vary depending on how you take such things. Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children does similar things to Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews’ Highland tale, showing the bond between a mother and her children, whose animal nature makes bringing them up even more challenging than usual. It also strikes right at the heart with a directness to equal the opening scene of Up, except stretched out to two hours. The result is exhausting; an assault on the senses and the emotions that left SoC weeping as if bereaved. With admirable honesty Hosoda — aided by a glorious score by Takagi Masakatsu — presents young motherhood as a struggle that can only end in loss, bringing pain leavened by the love and joy of family and community, while also taking time out to honour the fantastical nature of his protagonists without ever losing sight of the story’s emotional core. The delicate skill with which Hosoda dramatises young Hana’s trials is beyond doubt; whether we will ever recover from this lachrymose onslaught, this instantly cherishable masterpiece, remains to be seen.

3. The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson’s spiky movie expands on There Will Be Blood‘s loose narrative structure, presenting a tale of healing in which no one is healed, a tale of education in which no one learns anything, a tale of love in which no one finds love; a choice that has inevitably frustrated many. Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd’s peculiar rapport is less a meeting of minds, more the desperate embrace of two men lost in a storm, turning this into a tale of disappointment, both men holding onto a doomed relationship for selfish reasons, almost to the point of destroying each other. To tell that story, Anderson has created a drama that deflates as their friendship dissolves, a platonic love story where happy endings come from the characters realising they’re wasting each others’ time. How fitting that their only talents are for obfuscation and intoxication, in a movie that hides its purpose – the empty life of the charlatan – within scenes as brilliantly baffling as Dodd’s seemingly endless and ineffective deconstruction of his charge, or in a mise-en-scene so perfectly rendered by David Crank, Jack Fisk and Amy Wells, so luminously lit by Mihai Malaimare Jr., so energised by Phoenix and Hoffman at their very best. If There Will Be Blood is the tale of a man who loses his soul and doesn’t care, The Master is a story about two men who have lost sight of their souls but are too stupid and proud to realise it. Such desperation is rarely dramatised, and never before has it been done with such mesmerising and unpredictable immediacy.

2. Holy Motors

Is it possible to like a movie without having a concrete idea of what its intent actually is? Leos Carax’s critically adored festival crowdpleaser is a million mysteries at once, an anti-narrative sunburst of imagery, a handful of short stories that play with audience expectation in the most playful of ways. And that’s the key to appreciating Holy Motors, at least for this viewer. Carax sets his muse, the magical Denis Lavant, loose on Paris in a series of vignettes that set out to play to our expectations before dancing away in bizarre directions, all of which make a perfect dream-like sense, like an image caught at the edge of our vision. So is it a paean to the imminent death of cinema? Does it embrace the digital future? There’s enough in the movie to argue for either case, but also enough for interpretations that Carax is as interested in the stories we all live as in the ones we see on the screen. Lavant’s protagonist is a performer dancing to the tune of an unseen, possibly celestial organ grinder, but is he also just a human, transforming through a number of personas each day as we all do? Is Carax paying homage to the medium of cinema, or is he drawing attention to the audience, and how we live our lives in the light of stories remembered, where we find ourselves lost when real life takes unpredictable turns untold by our cinematic gods? Holy Motors will inevitably flourish upon further viewing, to be plundered for new ideas and interpretations, but this isn’t a barrier to immediate enjoyment. Carax’s joyous melange of image and sound, idea and mood, is welcoming, filled with a warmth and wit rare in art cinema, offering dreams within dreams within glorious dreams.

1. The Avengers

Shades of Caruso knows what it likes, and it rarely feels the urge to apologise for those likes. Yet this may be the most defensive entry in this list, simply because with all the will in the world I cannot argue that Joss Whedon’s superhero epic is a better film than Holy Motors, or The Master. It has a clumsy first hour or so. The plotline in which the team rebels against the machinations of SHIELD is underpowered. Whedon’s eye as a director is not the most reliable. The shady guys on the other end of Nick Fury’s phone feel like artificial obstacles and particularly stupid human beings. And so on, and so on. But my god, look at what it gets right. Look at the ambition of the Marvel Studios project, making these huge, gallumphing movies line up so that we could get this unifying vision at the end of it. Look at the wit on display, the dedication to bringing an entire universe of possibility to life, the effort to understand these icons as distinct and exciting viable characters. I mean, it’s like we got a movie with seven Indiana Jones’ in the lead, they’re that well drawn and likeable, and yet we take this incredible achievement for granted. Okay, I’m getting overexcited here but honestly, to most people this might be little more than a big summer event movie, one with a few nice jokes and some cool action. But to a few of us, this is the electrifying depiction of a childhood fantasy. It’s here! It’s really here! They did it!

It’s impossible to overstate how happy this movie made me. Last year I chose Jeff Nichols’ remarkable but troubling Take Shelter as my movie of the year because it perfectly captured my state of mind; desperately fearful of what is to come. This is the flipside. In times of strife we look back to the things that made us feel safe when we were children, and part of the success of The Avengers is down to its ability to make the audience feel young again, to give us unambiguous goodness and heroism versus unformed but undeniably nefarious threats and, most importantly, not to apologise for it. This is possibly the least complicated movie on this list, but for that reason I love it all the more. It’s “merely” well-wrought escapism, but the very best example of this since Back to the Future, maybe even earlier; a huge, unifying blast of populist joy that turns packed cinemas into some kind of communal dream palace cum stadium. Film lovers worry about the future of the medium, but should resist their negativity, even if it means accepting “hokum” as the solution. Whedon and Marvel Studios brought fun back to cinema this year in the most overwhelming, exhilarating manner imaginable. Nothing in 2012 has made me as euphoric as this delirious display of optimism and spectacle, nothing else left me reeling in this way. So screw the apologies, cancel the equivocation. The year belongs to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and so does my heart.

Honorable Mentions:

Chronicle: The only film this year to make the increasingly miserable found-footage genre seem like a viable option. Josh Trank and Max Landis’ superhero movie is actually more a supervillain saga, with Dane DeHaan’s unhappy and sympathetic lost soul becoming a force of darkness upon discovering great power. His increasing instability leads to an ending that evokes memories of Akira. Thrilling, imaginative, emotionally resonant; this is a superb debut, and an instant classic of the genre.

The Pirates: In An Adventure With Scientists!: Finally, Aardman Animations lives up to its potential as an animation powerhouse with this inventive and joke-packed crowdpleaser. For too long they’ve coasted on affection for their endearing shorts, but screenwriter Gideon Defoe, adapting from his popular children’s novel, has brought a necessary sly and snarky wit to a studio whose output can sometimes seem a little too polite. Aardman are looking for backers to fund a sequel; if I had the money I’d fund it myself.

Magic Mike: Congratulations to Steven Soderbergh for making a movie that is defiantly harder to love than the garish good-time movie promised by the ads and yet still made money and generated good word of mouth. That’s how smart and absorbing this story of thwarted entrepreneurial spirit and economic difficulty is; come for the gyrating and greased-up abs, stay for the low-key character drama. And some more abs, cuz seriously, there’s a lot of them, mostly flexing on Channing Tatum’s belly.

21 Jump Street: Regular readers will know that we’re the world’s biggest fans of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which dissects movie cliches with the precision of a coroner. This adaptation of the ludicrous 80s TV series looked and sounded like a misfire for Cloudy‘s directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, but even if it’s not as good as their animated masterwork, it’s still sharp, silly, and perfectly judged, with a stand-out performance from the increasingly lovable Tatum.

The Man With The Iron Fists: If there’s a place in the world of cinema for movies made with precision, sobriety and emotional complexity, there should also be a place for balls-out enthusiasm and goofiness. The haphazard style of The Man With The Iron Fists betrays RZA’s desperate attempts to cram in as many homages to his beloved martial arts genre as possible, but goddamn it, at one point Lucy Liu kicks a guy’s head off, and later RZA punches someone’s eye out. Sometimes this is exactly what you need in your life.

And sometimes what you need in life are SHIT MOVIES and that’s what’s coming up next: my worst movies of the year list.

Here we are: my Top Tens in the major award categories, including Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. I included my Top 25 for Best Picture. Also, click the movie titles to read my original reviews of these film. Enjoy.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE:
10. Alexandre Desplat, Zero Dark Thirty
9. Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina
8. Marc Streitenfeld, Prometheus
7. Patrick Doyle, Brave
6. Henry Jackman, Wreck it Ralph
5. Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, Lawless
4. Fred Avril, Magnus Borjeson, and Six Drummers, Sound of Noise
3. Alan Silvestri, The Avengers
2. Jon Brion, ParaNorman
1. Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer, Beasts of the Southern Wild

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY:
10. Steve Yedlin, Looper
9. Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master
8. Seamus McGarvey, Anna Karenina
7. Benoit Delhomme, Lawless
6. Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier de Ribes, Holy Motors
5. Robert Yeoman, Moonrise Kingdom
4. Dariusz Wolski, Prometheus
3. Janusz Kaminski, Lincoln
2. Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi (in 3D)
1. Roger Deakins, Skyfall

BEST SCREENPLAY:
10. Chris Butler, ParaNorman
9. Ava DuVernay, Middle of Nowhere
8. Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
7. Leos Carax, Holy Motors
6. Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
5. Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods
4. Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom
3. Martin McDonagh, Seven Psychopaths
2. David Cronenberg, Cosmopolis
1. Tony Kushner, Lincoln

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
10. Gina Gershon, Killer Joe
9. Alicia Vikander, Anna Karenina
8. Kristen Stewart, On the Road
7. Samantha Barks, Les Miserables
6. Emma Watson, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
5. Amy Adams, The Master
4. Sally Field, Lincoln
3. Emily Blunt, Looper
2. Helen Hunt, The Sessions
1. Lorraine Toussaint, Middle of Nowhere

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
10. Jason Clarke, Zero Dark Thirty
9. Michael Fassbender, Prometheus
8. Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
7. Tom Hardy, Lawless
6. Ezra Miller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
5. Mark Ruffalo, The Avengers
4. Sam Rockwell, Seven Psychopaths
3. Christopher Walken, Seven Psychopaths
2. Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
1. Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild

BEST ACTRESS:
10. Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games
9. Rashida Jones, Celeste & Jesse Forever
8. Aubrey Plaza, Safety Not Guaranteed
7. Keira Knightley, Anna Karenina
6. Kara Hayward, Moonrise Kingdom
5. Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild
4. Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
3. Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone
2. Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
1. Emayatzy Corinealdi, Middle of Nowhere

BEST ACTOR:
10. Dane DeHaan, Chronicle
9. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour
8. Liam Neeson, The Grey
7. Aksel Hennie, Headhunters
6. Suraj Sharma, Life of Pi (in 3D)
5. Robert Pattinson, Cosmopolis
4. Logan Lerman, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
3. Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
2. Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
1. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

BEST DIRECTOR:
10. Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
9. Rian Johnson, Looper
8. Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
7. David Cronenberg, Cosmopolis
6. The Wachowskis, Cloud Atlas
5. Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
4. Peter Jackson, The Hobbit (in HFR)
3. Joe Wright, Anna Karenina
2. Ang Lee, Life of Pi (in 3D)
1. Leos Carax, Holy Motors

BEST FEATURE FILM:
25. Anna Karenina
24. Cloud Atlas
23. Chronicle
22. Headhunters
21. Skyfall
20. Lawless
19. 21 Jump Street
18. The Grey
17. Argo
16. Zero Dark Thirty
15. The Hobbit (in HFR)
14. Life of Pi (in 3D)
13. The Master
12. Looper
11. ParaNorman
10. Beasts of the Southern Wild
9. Middle of Nowhere
8. The Cabin in the Woods
7. The Avengers
6. Moonrise Kingdom
5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
4. Lincoln
3. Seven Psychopaths
2. Cosmopolis
1. Holy Motors

Here are my 2012 Oscar nomination predictions (in order of probability) along with the actual nominations in blue:

Best Picture

Predicted Nominations:

• Argo
• Zero Dark Thirty
• Lincoln
• Silver Linings Playbook
• Les Misérables

If Six Nominations:

• Life of Pi

If Seven Nominations:

• Django Unchained

If Eight Nominations:

• Moonrise Kingdom

If Nine Nominations:

• Beasts of the Southern Wild

If Ten Nominations:

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Other Possible Contenders:

• The Master
• Amour
• The Dark Knight Rises
• Skyfall

Other Note-Worthy Films:

• The Sessions
• Flight
• The Impossible
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Hitchcock
• Promised Land
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
• Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
• The Hunger Games

Best Director

Predicted Nominations:

• Ben Affleck, Argo
• Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
• Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
• David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
• Ang Lee, Life of Pi

Other Possible Contenders:

• Tom Hooper, Les Misérables
• Michael Haneke, Amour
• Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
• Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
• Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom

Other Note-Worthy Directors:

• Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Ben Lewin, The Sessions
• Sam Mendes, Skyfall
• Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight Rises
• Gus Vant Sant, Promised Land
• Robert Zemeckis, Flight 
• Peter Jackson, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
• John Madden, The Exotic Marigold Hotel
• Lasse Hallström, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
• Joe Wright, Anna Karenina
• Juan Antonio Bavona, The Impossible
• Sacha Gervasi, Hitchcock

Best Actor

Predicted Nominations:

• Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
• John Hawkes, The Sessions
• Denzel Washington, Flight
• Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook 
• Hugh Jackman,  Les Misérables

Other Possible Contenders:

• Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
• Richard Gere, Arbitrage 
• Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
• Anthony Hopkins, Hitchcock

Other Note-Worthy Performances:

• Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour 
• Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained
• Ben Affleck, Argo
• Daniel Craig, Skyfall
• Matthew McConaughey, Killer Joe
• Suraj Sharma, Life of Pi
• Matt Damon, Promised Land
• Bill Murray, Hyde Park on Hudson
• Christian Bale, The Dark Knight Rises
• Jack Black, Bernie
• Ewan McGregor, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen & The Impossible
• Jake Gyllenhaal, End of Watch

Best Actress

Predicted Nominations:

• Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
• Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
• Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone
• Naomi Watts, The Impossible
• Helen Mirren, Hitchcock

Other Possible Contenders:

• Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
• Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea 
• Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Other Note-Worthy Performances:

• Keira Knightley, Anna Karenina
• Laura Linney, Hyde Park on Hudson 
• Deanie Yip, A Simple Life
• Judi Dench, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• Maggie Smith, Quartet 
• Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Smashed 
• Meryl Streep, Hope Springs 
• Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
• Emayatzy Corinealdi, Middle of Nowhere

Best Supporting Actor

Predicted Nominations:

• Alan Arkin, Argo
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
• Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
• Javier Bardem, Skyfall
• Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook

Other Possible Contenders:

• Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
• Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained
• William H. Macy, The Sessions
• Matthew McConaughey, Magic Mike 

Other Note-Worthy Performances:

• Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained 
• Jason Clarke, Zero Dark Thirty
• Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Ezra Miller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Eddie Redmayne, Les Misérables
• John Goodman, Flight or Argo
• Hal Holbrook, Promised Land
• Russell Crowe, Les Misérables

Best Supporting Actress

Predicted Nominations:

• Sally Field, Lincoln
• Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
• Helen Hunt, The Sessions
• Amy Adams, The Master
• Maggie Smith, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Other Possible Contenders:

• Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy
• Ann Dowd, Compliance
• Samantha Barks, Les Misérables
• Judi Dench, Skyfall 

Other Note-Worthy Performances:

• Jennifer Ehle, Zero Dark Thirty
• Emma Watson, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Pauline Collins, Quartet
• Kelly Reilly, Flight
• Kerry Washington, Django Unchained
• Helena Bonham Carter, Les Misérables
• Frances McDormand, Promised Land
• Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Adapted Screenplay

Predicted Nominations:

• Chris Terrio, Argo
• Tony Kushner, Lincoln
• David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
• David Magee, Life of Pi
• Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Other Possible Contenders:

• Lucy Alibar & Ben Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Ben Lewin, The Sessions 
• Ol Parker, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• William Nicholson, Les Miserables

Other Note-Worthy Adapted Screenplays:

• Tom Stoppard, Anna Karenina
• Jose Rivera, On The Road
• Jacques Audiard & Thomas Bidegain, Rust and Bone
• Christopher & Jonathan Nolan, The Dark Knight Rises 
• Judd Apatow, This is 40
• John Logan, Patrick Marber, Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, Skyfall 
• John J. McLaughlin, Hitchcock
• Simon Beaufoy, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
• Ronald Harwood, Quartet

Best Original Screenplay

Predicted Nominations:

• Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
• Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
• Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
• Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom
• Rian Johnson, Looper

Other Possible Contenders:

• Michael Haneke, Amour
• John Gatins, Flight 
• Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano, The Intouchables
• Ava DuVernay, Middle of Nowhere
• Reid Carolin, Magic Mike

Other Note-Worthy Original Screenplays:

• Martin McDonagh, Seven Psychopaths 
• Matt Damon & John Krasinski, Promised Land 
• Sergio G. Sanchez, The Impossible 
• Dan Fogelman, The Guilt Trip
• Sarah Polley, Take This Waltz 
• Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods

Best Animated Feature

Predicted Nominations:

• Brave
• Frankenweenie
• ParaNorman
• Wreck-It Ralph
• Rise of the Guardians

Other Possible Contenders:

• Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted
• The Painting (Le Tableau)
• From Up on Poppy Hill
• The Rabbi’s Cat
• Hotel Transylvania
• A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman 

Other Note-Worthy Animated Films:

• Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax
• The Pirates! Band of Misfits
• Zarafa
• Ice Age: Continental Drift

Best Foreign Language Film

Predicted Nominations:

• Amour
• The Intouchables
• A Royal Affair
• Kon-Tiki
• No

Other Possible Contenders:

• War Witch
• Sister
• The Deep
• Beyond the Hills

Other Note-Worthy Foreign Films:

• Rust and Bone
• I Wish
• The Kid with a Bike
• Once Upon A Time in Anatolia
• Holy Motors
• Tabu
• The Loneliest Planet
• The Turin Horse
• Oslo, August 31st 
• Lore
• Our Children
• Barbara

Best Documentary Feature

Predicted Nominations:

• Searching for Sugar Man
• The Gatekeepers
• How to Survive a Plague
• The Invisible War
• This is Not a Film

Other Possible Contenders:

• The Imposter
• Detropia
• The Waiting Room
• Bully
• Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
• Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
• The House I Live In
• Chasing Ice
• Ethel
• 5 Broken Cameras

Other Note-Worthy Documentaries:

• The Queen of Versailles
• The Central Park Five
• Samsara
• West of Memphis

Best Original Song

Predicted Nominations:

• Skyfall, Skyfall
• Suddenly,  Les Misérables
• Learn Me Right, Brave
• From Here to the Moon and Back, Joyful Noise
• Abraham’s Daughter, The Hunger Games

Other Possible Contenders:

• Still Alive, Paul Williams Still Alive
• For You, Act of Valor
• Not Running Anymore, Stand Up Guys
• Touch the Sky, Brave
• Ancora Qui, Django Unchained

Other Note-Worthy Songs: 

• Safe & Sound, The Hunger Games
• Dull Tool, This is 40
• Breath of Life, Snow White and the Huntman
• Strange Love, Frankenweenie
• When Can I See You Again, Wreck-It Ralph
• Still Dream, Rise of the Guardians

10: The Dark Knight Rises

This third and last film in the Batman trilogy could have been a huge disappointment for fans. Luckily the film was in more than capable hands with director Christopher Nolan who delivered the darkest and most thrilling film of the series. Christian Bale is, as usual, amazing as Bruce Wayne/Batman. However new additions Anne Hathaway (as Catwoman) and Tom Hardy (as Bane) nearly eclipse him and everyone else onscreen creating their own versions of characters previously seen in other Batman films. It takes a while to get going with a boring first half (mostly for scenes in which Bane and Catwoman are absent), but once it really kicks in, The Dark Knight Rises rarely stops for a breath with plenty of action scenes and an iconic ending to nicely round off the trilogy.

9: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Although this has just been released, it’s already in my top ten of this year. Yes it’s flipping ridiculously long in parts and certain inclusions, while they create a satisfactory story, do leave you wondering why they’ve been added… But still Peter Jackson has managed to pull it off yet again and create a great start to a new trilogy. The dwarves are all excellent, in particular Richard Armitage as their serious/grumpy leader Thorin Oakenshield, but the film really belongs to Martin Freeman as the young Bilbo Baggins, providing comic relief throughout the film as the nervous Hobbit, while also being able to play serious when he needs to. The design throughout is rich and detailed, New Zealand again being used to create a beautiful Middle-earth, and the action set pieces are thrilling and expertly directed by Jackson. More importantly it leaves you eager to see the next two films of the trilogy (and I’m intrigued to see just how they ARE going to split this into three films). (Full review still to come!).

8: Shame

Artist turned director Steve McQueen creates a visually poetic drama about a man in New York struggling with a sexual addiction. Michael Fassbender bares all and was robbed of an Oscar nomination for his amazing turn as said man trying to get his life back together, while coping with the return of his wayward sister (Carey Mulligan, also excellent) and trying to hide his true self at the same time. Fassbender shows Brandon as a conflicted soul, making you feel sympathetic towards him, rather than view him as a sleazy individual. The numerous sex scenes throughout are sometimes difficult to watch as they feel so intrusive and realistic, but McQueen expertly uses them to portray Brandon’s addiction and how much it encroaches on his everyday life.

7: The Artist

Ok, so this was released on December the 30th in the UK last year and we’ve already had all the Oscar wins for it and so on, but I’m including it in my top ten of this year as it’s such a gem of a film (and most of us in the UK only got to see it in January). Jean Dujardin plays silent movie star George Valentin whose world is torn apart when sound starts to be introduced to pictures. But with the advent of sound new actors are discovered, including Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) who slowly climbs the ladder of stardom while Valentin struggles to keep hold. Completely silent yet entirely riveting throughout, mostly because of the Oscar-winning performance from the charismatic Dujardin and also from Bérénice Bejo (who should have won an Oscar too), as well as an amazing soundtrack and expert direction from Michel Hazanavicius. And it has THE cutest dog in the world in it (Uggie!). The Artist is a heart-warming film that is a love letter to the silent era of cinema and is absolutely beautiful to watch.

6: The Cabin in the Woods

Scary fun times from Joss Whedon with the help of director Drew Goddard and a whole load of horror clichés. A stereotypical group of teens go on a trip to a creepy cabin in the woods and things start to get weird… But whatever you think might be about to happen (and why), you’re wrong. Written by Whedon and Goddard they create a fresh, very funny gory horror that both sticks to the rules and completely turns them on their head. The ending is one of the most bizarre things you are likely to see this year (or in fact EVER). That this was stuck in distribution hell for three years is an absolute crime.

5: Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson’s latest is a cute tale of young love and includes his regular cast of oddball characters. After a chance meeting two twelve-year-olds, Sam (a well-prepared Khaki Scout) and Suzy (a girl who fantasies about adventure), fall in love and decide to run away together to live in the woods, leaving the distraught adults searching for them. The composition throughout is astounding, Anderson creating almost symmetrical shots that look like lavish, colourful paintings, and the direction used for numerous long take scenes is expert and well-choreographed. It includes two great performances from young leads Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, and the eccentric and funny adult turns also make it a worthwhile watch, mostly from Edward Norton as the Khaki Scout leader and (of course) Bill Murray as Suzy’s kooky father.

4: Sightseers

Director Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace and Kill List) creates another hilariously dark film about a couple on a sightseeing tour in their caravan which takes an unexpectedly (murderous) turn. Alice Lowe and Steve Oram take on writing duties this time as well as playing the couple (Tina and Chris), creating two characters that you can’t help but like, no matter what despicable deeds they’re up to. Their script is also one of the funniest of this year, while Wheatley’s direction shows the darker side to the beautiful countryside, as well as to them. (Full review still to come!).

3: Looper

An original time travel premise involving contract killers in the past who ‘dispose’ of people sent back to them from the future (or something) and Rian Johnson’s clever script is what makes this film truly gripping. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the ‘Looper’ who is contracted to kill his future self (played by Bruce Willis) is superb, his mannerisms and performance making him really seem like the younger Willis (bit of a dodgy prosthetic nose though). Fast-paced action scenes make it even more watchable and writer/director Johnson creates something that feels truly unique and uncategorical, and that feels like it is both a Hollywood blockbuster and an indie drama at the same time.

2: Lawless

Written by Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, this is the story of the real-life bootlegging Bondurant brothers in Depression-era Franklin County during the Prohibition. The (sometimes unbearable) build-up of tension makes it gripping throughout and it is a tough watch in parts, in particular for the more intense, gory moments. Everyone in it gives some of their best performances as well, in particular Tom Hardy as Forrest, a man more of grunts than words, Shia LaBeouf as the on-the-rise younger brother, the brilliant Jessica Chastain as Maggie, a woman with more grit than many bargain for, and Guy Pearce as the creepy Agent who keeps a close eye on the brothers. Expertly written by Cave and beautifully directed by Hillcoat who makes the scenery shine and the era really come to life, this is the must watch drama of the year.

1: Avengers Assemble

Urgh, that title. Despite that, Joss Whedon’s film is my favourite of the year. I actually felt a little silly putting an action-packed superhero flick at number 1. But after careful reflection I’ve realised it definitely is not only the best film released this year, but that it also DESERVES to be the best. A film that has been five years in its build-up could have failed miserably, not only through its production, but through the heavy anticipation that was then not lived up to (which often happens to me when I’m looking forward to a film coming out). However writer and director Joss Whedon has managed to create something that actually exceeds the expectations of everyone, comic book fans and others alike. Being able to write a satisfactory story that has 4 main characters (Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America and Thor) and 4 minor, yet still very important characters (Nick Fury, Loki, Black Widow and Hawkeye) and keep a balance between all of them, is a massive achievement for Whedon. Clever writing which ties all these characters together, as well as delivering a pay-off to the 5 films before it, the inclusion of an excellent cast (especially new addition Mark Ruffalo as the new, much better version of The Hulk), and most importantly writing that delivers laughs a plenty, all add up to make this a FUN film that’s entertaining to watch. And that’s why it’s my best film of 2012.

(Those that just missed the top ten: Magic Mike, The Muppets, Ted, Anna Karenina, Haywire, The Five-Year Engagement).

And that’s it for 2012. Let me know what you think about my top 10 – anything you disagree with? Do you think something else should have been at number 1? Send me your comments! And Happy New Year to you all!

For the past couple months I’ve been weighing the last year’s worth of films against one another in an effort to come up with some sort of obligatory year-end “Top Five” list, and I’ve arrived at one conclusion.  Considering the intense war that Hollywood seems to be waging on its own product and the identical feculent pods that issue forth every weekend from the bloated reproductive sac at the very core of that foul hive, 2012 was an unusually entertainment-rich year.  I lurched my shambling form into the theaters more often than usual to be sure, and I can’t lie: I saw a whole lot of really great movies.  There’s a lot that I thought might be horrible but wasn’t, and a handful of really big things that didn’t get covered on A Nerd Occurrence due to some poor coordination on our part.  So in an effort to talk about everything I want to talk about, I’ve expanded the list to a more inclusive count of ten, and even then I had to make some cuts.  So without further ado, in a suspenseful and roughly ascending format, here are my favorite films and strongest recommendations of 2012.

10. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Dir. Peter Jackson) - This is probably the most tenuous and qualifier-ridden film recommendation I’ve had all year, which explains its spot on the bottom of the list.  Simply put, it’s an incredibly bloated piece of work even by Peter Jackson standards, and the obvious studio exec cash-grab plan to turn a single 300-page novel into a drawn out nine-hour trilogy hurts the film far more than it helps.  It’s weaker than the decade-old Lord of the Rings trilogy in every regard, and this should have been the easier of the two stories to film by far.  That’s my film criticism perspective.  The Tolkien fan in me, however, was just happy to be transported back to the film version of Middle Earth, almost regardless of the circumstances.  If you speak conversational Elvish, have anything tattooed on you in either Dwarven runes or the black tongue of Mordor, or have read the extensive books, notes, and appendices that came about as a byproduct of Tolkien’s epic trilogy, this first installment in Jackson’s own Hobbit trilogy will work for you on just about every level.  However, non-superfans that were simply won over by the astounding quality of Jackson’s previous efforts will likely                            find themselves disappointed.

09. The Amazing Spider-Man (Dir. Marc Webb)- Full disclosure for readers of ANO who didn’t see my full review elsewhere, I expected this to fail on every single level.  I loved the first two installments in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy and was disappointed when Sony forced his hand on the Venom issue in part three, setting him up for a franchise-halting failure.  So a mere four years later, when I saw the first promo shots of Andrew Garfield as an extremely brooding Twilight-esque Peter Parker, I could not have been less excited, despite my enduring love for all things Spider-Man.  As it turns out I was pretty wrong, and it’s a well-cast reboot that incredibly even fixes the few small problems I did have with the Raimi versions.  It suffers a bit from origin story fatigue, but the rest of the film is incredibly strong, and Emma Stone’s portrayal of Peter Parker’s first love Gwen Stacy really highlights how much of a soul-crushing horrorshow Kirsten Dunst was as Mary Jane Watson.  I eagerly await the sequels and expect that this will end up being the definitive Spider-Man movie franchise.

08.  Seven Psychopaths (Dir. Martin McDonagh)- Anytime a writer/director seemingly comes out of nowhere with an amazing film like McDonagh did with 2008′s In Bruges, and then just kind of disappears, I get a little sad.   A lot of times they don’t come back (I’ll always miss you, Kerry Conran), but thankfully as in this case sometimes they’re just away making more awesome things.  Seven Psychopaths features an abundance of actors whom I love but don’t get to see backed by a good script very often, so it’s basically just a gift that keeps on giving.  It’s a story about what happens when a dog kidnapping “business” reaches its worst-case scenario, and also about what happens when the lines start to blur between fact and fiction.  Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell are great, while Colin Farrell and Christopher Walken just kill it in almost every scene they’re in.  There are some pacing issues and the script falls apart here and there, resulting in a film that’s not quite as tight as In Bruges, but still good overall, and it’s clear that McDonagh still has a lot more left in him.

07. Indie Game: The Movie (Dir. Lisanne Pajot & James Swirskey)- Unlike those snobs at the Academy, I don’t require a theatrical release before I start handing out awards (even though my “awards” are admittedly less tangible).  Indie Game: The Movie is a documentary about the increasingly popular indie game market, a world once known only to hobbyists that has reached new heights in recent years thanks to digital distribution platforms such as Steam and Xbox Live Arcade.  Store shelves are dominated by AAA titles with blockbuster movie budgets, but thanks to the relative ease of these new distribution methods it is possible for games built by small teams or even a single person to reach households worldwide.  Indie Game: The Movie is an in-depth look at three titles: Braid, which broke ground for the current indie “movement”, Super Meat Boy, a commercial and critical success story, and Fez, a troubled but brilliant title that languished for years in “development hell”.  Developers Jonathan Blow, Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, and Phil Fish provide a pretty good overview of how difficult the process of game development can be even after you’ve secured a deal with Microsoft.  You won’t find this movie in stores, but you can go buy a downloadable and DRM-free copy at www.indiegamethemovie.com, or stream it for free via Netflix.

06. Looper (Dir. Rian Johnson)- This is one of those movies that just never happens; going to the theater and seeing a sci-fi story that’s not a sequel, not a remake, and not directly ripping off something that was popular two years ago is like going to Taco Bell and having them get your order exactly right.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal on the surface, but when it happens it’s so incredible that you’ll barely be able to believe it.  Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, and helmed by the writer/director mastermind behind 2005′s high school noir Brick, Looper manages to pull off not one but two impressive tricks.  Not only is it unique, it uses time travel in a way that’s not impenetrably convoluted.  Set in a near future where time travel has not yet been invented but WILL be, Loopers are employed to kill criminals who are sent back from the future as a means of body disposal.  Eventually, a Looper will be tasked with killing his own future self, at which point their “loop” is closed and they are retired with a huge payday.  This is a film about what happens when none of that goes as smoothly as it should.  Made on a relatively small budget that has been recouped five times over prior to the home video release, this should serve as a lesson to Hollywood that good sci-fi doesn’t always need a recognizable brand and a six figure budget, but it probably won’t.

05. Wreck-It Ralph (Dir. Rich Moore)- An animated family film about the secret lives of video game characters could easily have been a pandering attempt to cash in on a prebuilt fanbase, and probably would have been if DreamWorks had made it.  Disney, however, has managed to weave together a well thought-out world populated by both “real” and fictional video game characters: a world where villains attend support groups to get through their days of endless scheming, and where characters from abandoned franchises like Q*Bert beg for work.  The titular character is the bad guy from a game called Fix-It Felix Jr., who has grown tired of being an outcast just because he was programmed to wreck things.  Unable to receive any accolades in his own game, he ventures into other game worlds seeking a medal and all the love and praise he thinks will come with it.  Like the best classic Disney films, it’s a relatable story written with both kids and adults in mind, and it should resonate equally with both groups.  Longtime video game fans will enjoy cameos by characters from such diverse games as Street Fighter II and Sonic the Hedgehog, but the in-jokes aren’t so densely packed as to leave non-gamers out in the cold.  I’m   normally opposed to the trend of celebrity voice-casting, but John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman both turn in well-rounded and believable performances that don’t just feel like they’re playing themselves.

04.  The Cabin in the Woods (Dir. Drew Goddard)- Written by nerddom’s Poet Laureate Joss Whedon and shot in 2009, this film’s release was subject to a lengthy delay while producers tried to get it converted into 3D.  Thankfully Goddard and Whedon’s protests against 3D won out eventually, and they were able to reap the benefits of having produced a cheap pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth movie released in a post-Thor environment.  Or, they should have.  Nobody really bothered marketing the movie, and Hemsworth’s fanbase didn’t really come out in droves, but the movie still did alright for a horror film released in the spring.  It was a hard film to market in general, really, with no way to piece together a trailer that would be representative of the whole without blowing the “twist”.  The trailer made it look like a competent if slightly generic Sam Raimi knockoff, when in fact it’s a dark comedy that deconstructs the horror genre in an extremely unique fashion.  In addition to the aforementioned Hemsworth factor, Cabin features a great cast loaded with faces from the “Whedonverse” and other notable television series, and in particular Fran Kranz, Bradley Whitford, and Richard Jenkins are a pleasure to watch.  If you’re a horror fan who somehow hasn’t seen this one yet, get on it right now.

03. The Dark Knight Rises (Dir. Christopher Nolan)- Nolan’s cinematic Batman universe has been incredible to behold from start to finish.  What should be easily filmable comic book icon yielded nothing in the theater but misdirected (although profitable) garbage until 2005′s Batman Begins.  Nolan stepped it up to an incredible degree with 2008′s The Dark Knight, and many fans, myself included, thought that second installment would be impossible to top.  Whether or not The Dark Knight Rises accomplishes that feat is debatable depending on who you ask (I think it’s better), but it’s hard to argue that it’s not an amazing end to the trilogy.  Everybody wants a Batman that never quits and wages a decades-long war on crime, but Christopher Nolan’s Batman films have never been about that.  Instead he has taken advantage of the rare non-superpowered superhero and tried to present a Batman that was as close to our reality as possible.  And with that comes a Batman who is fallible, and a Batman whose body will eventually give out on him.  Accepting those facts, I think that Nolan drew the franchise to a close and went out on top in an admirable fashion.  Tom Hardy is incredible as Bane, and it’s great seeing Batman engaged in a high-stakes conflict where he’s not constantly wondering what Rachel’s doing right now.

02. The Avengers (Dir. Joss Whedon)- The past thirteen years or so have been a pretty good time to be a fan of both movies and comic books.  Studios have finally realized that comics have actual characters and stories that can be translated to the screen, rather than just churning out the occasional hack job adaptation.  Marvel’s initial practice of farming their characters out piecemeal to a variety of studios prevented the establishing of a true to the books film universe where anyone could pop up at any time, but when Nick Fury popped up in a brief post-credits scene in 2008′s Iron Man, Marvel studios made their intentions clear.  They still had the rights to all the primary Avengers characters, and they planned to use them in spectacular fashion.  Flash forward to a brief four years later, and Marvel has already accomplished that lofty goal.  With solo films in the bag for Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America, those characters were teamed up with newcomers Hawkeye and Black Widow to form The Avengers, a superhero team under the guidance of Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.  It was a huge undertaking with potentially huge problems: how to handle an ensemble cast comprised of such larger-than-life characters?  Simple.  Put a comic book geek in charge.  With Joss Whedon writing and directing, The Avengers came together better than most comic book fans could have ever hoped for and set a new gold standard for the handling of superhero franchises on the big screen.

01. Django Unchained (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)- The Avengers enjoyed an undisputed claim on my number one spot for 2012 for seven months, but if anyone was ever going to steal that honor away it was Quentin Tarantino.  Django has come under fire from many who are offended that Tarantino would dare set his blaxploitation/western/revenge epic in the days of slavery, whereas I’m just happy to live in an environment where directors are free to make a movie that makes people uncomfortable.  Nobody got mad at Spielberg for Schindler’s List, and nobody is upset that Roots got made.  This is an amazing film on par with any of Tarantino’s long line of genre-blending masterpieces, with performances from Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, and Leonardo DiCaprio that are as strong as anything else to hit theaters this year.  Is it over-the-top violent?  Sure.  Is it exploitative?  Probably.  But suggesting that QT should stop doing those things is like politely asking a shark to stop swimming.  It’s what he does, and he does it better than just about anyone else making movies today.  The soundtrack is incredible, and the look and feel of the film perfectly capture that gritty 70′s western vibe with all the added polish that Tarantino brings to the table.

MOVIES 2012: YEAR IN REVIEW

Setelah merampungkan INDONESIAN MOVIES 2012: YEAR IN REVIEW kayaknya memang kurang lengkap kalau saya tidak memberikan list 12 Film terbaik Internasional sepanjang tahun 2012 versi saya. Namun, untuk tahun ini saya menemukan banyak film yang berkesan. Sehingga saya putuskan untuk membagi dua: Film Drama dan Film Komedi/Musikal/Animasi terbaik masing-masing 12 film. Here we go!

12 FILM KOMEDI/MUSIKAL/ANIMASI TERBAIK SEPANJANG TAHUN 2012

01. 21 Jump Street

02. 50/50 

03. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

04. Intouchables

05. Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

06. Men in Black III

07. Pitch Perfect 

08. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

09. Ted

10. To Rome With Love

11. We Bought a Zoo

12. Wreck-It Ralph

12 FILM DRAMA/THRILLER/SCIFI TERBAIK SEPANJANG TAHUN 2012

01. A Separation

02. Argo

03. The Avengers

04. The Cabin in the Woods

05. Chronicle

06. The Dark Knight Rises

07. End of Watch

08 The Expendables 2

09. Life of Pi

10. Looper

11. The Perks of Being a Wallflower

12. Prometheus

Ya, mainstream banget memang listnya. Tapi inilah yang menurut saya terbaik dan remarkable di tahun 2012.

Selamat Tahun Baru 2013!

The Cabin in the Woods no es la típica película de terror que nos han tratado de vender durante los últimos años, su fortaleza recae en la cantidad de referencias a otras producciones del mismo genero por ello la disfrutaran mucho los entusiastas del cine.

Empieza como cualquier cinta de adolescentes que verán pasar su vida en cuestión de un par de horas, eso si, habrá cerveza, drogas y probablemente sexo.

Todo cambia cuando de la nada, una puerta que conduce al sótano se abre en un pestañar, al bajar a inspeccionar se encontraran con cientos de objetos extraños, sin quererlo ahí decidirán su futuro.

Podras ver sangre, persecuciones a pie, intentos por salir de ese extraño lugar y muchos pero muchos seres de procedencia desconocida. Todo transcurre entre los típicos clichés de este segmento de cine (sarcasmo), referencias a cintas que marcaron época y sobre todo un buen manejo de historia que le da versatilidad a la película, las actuaciones son pasables y el final es sobresaliente.

Si eres amante del cine no dejes de verla, si buscas “espantos” esta no es tu producción.

Detalles

Director: Drew Goddard.

Actores: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Brian White, Amy Acker, Tim De Zarn, Tom Lenk, Dan Payne, Jodelle Ferland, Dan Shea, Maya Massar, Matt Drake, Nels Lennarson ,Rukiya Bernard, Peter Kelamis, Adrian Holmes, Chelah Horsdal, Terry Chen, Heather Doerksen, Patrick Sabongui, Phillip Mitchell, Naomi Dane, Ellie Harvie, Patrick Gilmore, Brad Dryborough, Richard Cetrone.

Duración: 96 minutos.

Clasificación: B15.

Sinopsis: Cinco amigos deciden pasar unos días de descanso fuera de la ciudad en una apartada cabaña en el bosque, sin imaginar que lo están a punto de vivir pondrá en riesgo sus vidas. Juntos, deberán descubrir la verdad que se oculta detrás de la cabaña del terror… si es que logran mantenerse a salvo.

Trailer: http://youtu.be/pZV8ssilm9k

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom quirkily straddles the delicate line between charming and sickly sweet, staying just about on the right side of charming. It’s eccentricity adds wonder, aided by a couple terrific performance from the two lead child actors while the score features a most memorable use of the music of Benjamin Britton. Typically for Anderson, he uses a small world to explore big issues, capturing a sense of childlike fervor to their adventure and you really understand why this relationship means everything through these young, inexperienced eyes. Bruce Willis appears against type, which is also good fun. ★ ★ ★ ★

So many people had told me to enter into watching Cabin in the Woods completely blind and I managed to do exactly that. It takes familiar conventions and twists them in order to leave you constantly unsure exactly what might be going on. It puts a lot of fun back into horror, plus it’s also quite scary with a brilliant monster sequence in the final act which is littered with imagination. It’s a thrilling and at times even a fairly disturbing ride that proudly separates itself from generic mediocrity. ★ ★ ★ ★

Lastly, Chronicle is the debut film from director Josh Trank, aged just 27 and from this effort he is certainly one of the most accomplished young directors out there. Amalgamating both the superhero and found footage genre – it does well not to seem completely hackneyed. While I can’t help but feel the found footage aspect should have been let go part way through the movie, it’s well written despite relying on some clichéd teen character tropes. The three young actors (Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan) all help make the film feel real and hold together the climax, which it really feels like it had earned. For a film with a comparatively low budget for an effects movie ($12m), it’s an awful lot more fun than some that cost twenty times that sum.  ★ ★ ★

Review by David Rank

As promised, it is now time for Cabin in the Woods. As you know, I am an avid Joss Whedon fan. He is a master of relationships and turning any classic genre on its head. Cabin is no different, as he and Drew Goddard reunited from their Buffy and Angel days to write the script for this slasher with a twist. After locking themselves in a hotel suite for three days, they emerged with a screenplay and began working towards production, filming for three months in 2009. The film would not premiere until Friday, April 13, 2012.

Cabin is not a regular horror flick. It may start like one, with five college students driving up to a cabin by a lake for a weekend getaway. But we quickly see that they are not alone. Contrasting to the gritty nature of the cabin is the lab, with technicians Sitterson (played by Richard Jenkins), Hadley (played by Bradley Whitford) and Lin (played by Amy Acker) from the chem department. They are controlling the groups’ environment while keeping an eye on similar operations at various locations around the world, implying that their operation is one of many. The group stops for gas at a dingy convenience store and is warned by the Harbinger who runs the store to turn back, but instead they ignore him and continue on. They arrive at the cabin and begin unpacking, Jules (played by Anna Hutchison) and Curt (played by Chris Hemsworth) taking one room, Marty (played by Fran Kranz) another, and Dana (played by Kristen Connolly) and Holden (played by Jesse Williams) taking neighboring rooms with a creepy two-way mirror looking on from Holden’s room to Dana’s. This is only the first of many creepy things to happen. The lab has been continually pumping mood-altering and intelligence-inhibiting drugs into the cabin that are manipulating the group into acting according to a certain scenario, except for Marty who has been smoking weed since the beginning of the trip. As the lab technicians prepare to begin the operation, the different departments take bets on how the scenario will go, as shown on the board here:

What would you bet on?

The group begins to have a little fun, while Sitterson and Hadley monitor, and a game of truth or dare breaks out. The cellar door is blown open, they conclude by the wind, and Jules dares Dana to enter it. They all wind up exploring the cellar, which has a variety of strange objects, and Dana finds a diary written by Patience Buckner. The journal details the girl’s abuse by her family of sadists and ends with an incantation of Latin, which Dana reads (much to Marty’s dismay). The lab technicians then dish out the money to the maintenance department (plus Ronald the Intern) who bet on Zombie Redneck Torture Family, Hadley complains that once again he won’t get to see a merman, and the group goes back upstairs. Jules and Curt decide to “take a walk” (and by that we all know they mean go have sex in the woods) while Marty goes on about “Puppeteers” and Holden reads Patience’s journal. While Jules and Curt go at it, the zombies rise and find them, killing Jules. Curt runs back to the cabin and tells the rest of the gang, who barricade the house in an attempt to keep the zombies out. Of course this doesn’t work, and they are sent running for their lives.

Curt, Holden, Jules, Marty, and Dana (respectively)

Sitterson, Lin, and Hadley (respectively)

This is another film that I feel relies on twists, so I won’t spoil the big fun by telling you all the interesting twists and turns. Obviously the cabin and the lab must collide, and when this happens it is bloody fun. You shouldn’t forget Whedon’s love of killing off characters, and this is a horror film. The ending is a statement on horror films in general, with a short appearance by The Director (Sigourney Weaver). It’s lots of gore and wondering if anyone will survive and qualms about morality and where this world is going, with a little mythology thrown in there for fits and giggles.

Besides the fact that this is a Whedon/Goddard film (which means you know it’ll be amazing), there is the acting by Whedon-alumns. Amy Acker has worked with Whedon on Angel, Dollhouse, and the upcoming Much Ado About Nothing; Fran Kranz was also in Dollhouse and will be in Much Ado with Acker; Hemsworth was in the recent Avengers film as Thor. Tom Lenk, who has worked on Buffy, Angel, and soon to be on Much Ado, also makes an appearance as Ronald the Intern.Whedon is notorious for reusing actors, which some might criticize, but I love this technique because the actors he uses are skilled and I enjoy seeing them play extremely different characters. It also makes it entertaining when things happen to new characters that are funny in relation to old characters. Not to mention I have an intense nerd-love for Fran Kranz.

I would go nerd for him.

Cabin is not your typical slasher flick or your typical Whedon film, but for that you have to love it. It is sort of its own sci-fi/horror/dark comedy genre. You will laugh, you will jump, and will wonder if you should really be laughing at all. And then you’ll laugh again.

A fun teaser screencap from the end.

Ignore the obnoxious tagline.

Cabin in the Woods, much like the Scream series of films, is a horror film that is also a comment on the horror genre at large. Five college students (anchored by a fun performance from Fran Kranz, who should really get more work) leave for an impromptu camping trip. Unbeknownst to our group, two white-collared G-men (the great Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) and a team of technicians and specialists are going to make the getaway very difficult to survive for our heroes. To say much more than this would be getting into massive spoiler territory, and since Cabin in the Woods didn’t exactly light up the box office, I’m not inclined to spoil the movie for newcomers.

What I like about this movie is that there is simultaneously a great tension building up paired with a wicked sense of humor. Meta-humor is one of the most difficult things to get right, but Cabin in the Woods just works in this respect. Characters comment on their situation (primarily Kranz, who plays the stock stoner character Marty) but not obnoxiously so. For example, the eternally high Marty, wonders aloud why Curt (Chris Hemsworth, in one of his earliest American roles) has suddenly turned into an alpha-male jag, noting that Curt is an honors student on full academic scholarship as well as a Sociology major. Other characters find themselves in stock roles as well, including Kristin Connolly as Dana, the “virgin” of the group, Jesse Williams as Holden, the “brains” of the group, and Anna Hutchison as Jules, the “whore” of the group.

While the performances in the group range from pretty good (Kranz, Connolly) to decent (Hemsworth) to just ok (Williams, Hutchison), the real stand-outs are Whitford and Jenkins as specialists Hadley and Sitterson. The chemistry between the two is fantastic, and their dark senses of humor and long-term relationship really shine through in the script and the acting. The two have long worked in this unique setting – one where they get to terrorize teens and college students – and have thus adapted to and developed unique senses of humor about their macabre employment. I love how they continuously unintentionally offend their coworkers, including Amy Acker as Wendy Lin and Brian J. White as new employee and security officer Daniel Truman, who takes no pleasure in the sick acts he witnesses.

I was totally entertained by Cabin in the Woods, which took me by compete surprised. The last quarter or so of the movie came as a real surprise to me as well (once again I will not spoil things). I think the only way to describe the on-screen mayhem are the words “fucking awesome.” I’m not usually as positive about the kinds of things that happen in movies like this, but I couldn’t help but be absolutely charmed and taken in by this film; I’m not even a big fan of Joss Whedon or his stable of devoutly-worshipped cancelled television shows either. When this movie came out in theaters last spring, I took a pass and waited for it to appear in the Red Box. Even though I paid only about a buck to see it, I kind of wish I did go to the theaters to support Cabin in the Woods. It has ended up being the biggest surprise of 2012 for me and like the many cool parts of the movie, I never saw it coming.

-Z-

Now Whedon, the fanboy favorite, has given us “The Cabin in the Woods,” a film he wrote along with director Drew Goddard.  The film took three years from shooting to release, although the satire feels relevant still as the climate of the horror genre remains roughly unchanged (with the exception of the found-footage epidemic that struck with “Paranormal Activity“).

And indeed, I really did enjoy some of the things it had to say and the clever way it presents them.  The deconstruction of the horror genre, particularly the onslaught of torture flicks, is done deftly and swiftly.  While “Scream” was Craven talking merely about the archetypes and trademarks, “The Cabin in the Woods” expands to include the audience.

What does it say about us that in our heads we are rooting for the directors, played to droll hilarity by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, to inflict the strangest and most unimaginable pain on people we don’t even know?

If we think it’s sick that there’s a betting pool on how long these characters will survive and how they will die, isn’t that essentially what we do when we gossip with the person in the seat next to us in the theater?

These questions were fun to ponder for a while, yet I found that “The Cabin in the Woods” quickly got on my nerves.  It reminded me of the feeling I get when a Hermione Granger-like student thinks they are the smartest person in the room and wants everyone to know it.  Whedon and Godard act like their film is the most ingenious thing to be dropped into cinema in ages.  Granted, anything that deviates from convention in this depraved artistic moment feels original.  Yet I couldn’t escape a sense of arrogance being radiated from the film.

And my only response was that I wanted to get on Amazon, order the Blu-Ray of “Scream,” and mail it to Whedon’s house.  The message: it’s been done before, and it’s been done better.  That doesn’t mean you can’t try, but you can’t gallivant around as if you are God’s gift to the genre.  You’ve made your contribution to the parodic state of horror, and you should be content with that.  B / 

First off I have a feeling zombie fan boys are going to be pretty split about the upcoming summer zombie movie World War Z.  It’s a strong departure from the typical zombie flick and I’m sure fans of the genre will cry foul over how the movie seems to break away from all the standard zombie conventions.  These are not your standard creeping, slowly moving zombies slowly roaming the city like we are used to, but instead a horde of blood thirsty mindless humans running at full speed after their targets.  They look more like a buffalo stampede and crawl over each other like ant’s would to get over obstacles.  I’m sure zombie guru George A Romero would be rolling in his grave if he saw this new breed of zombie.  I mean if he was dead,

World War Z stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Marc Forster (who’s credits include the James Bond film Quantum of Solace and the acclaimed Monsters Ball).  Which in itself sounds like a great mix to make a great horror movie thats front loaded with tons of action.

However, buzz around the internet suggests it might not be as promising as the trailer insists.  While the 2006 book it was based on World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks,was widely received by critics and fans alike, the movie adaptation has been receiving a lot of flack.

The problems plaguing the production of World War Z seem almost as horrifying as a zombie outbreak itself.  It was originally slated for a December release, but has since been moved to June for various reasons.  One of which was the various rewrites the film went through.  Originally J. Michael Straczynski was signed on to write the script, which was soon tossed out and rewritten by Matthew Michael Carnahan.

After shooting was finished Damon Lindelof was brought on to rewrite the back third of the script and had to bow out to have Drew Goddard (The Cabin In The Woods and Cloverfield) pick up the slack. Combined with weeks of reshooting and reedits, it’s rumored that World War Z went completly over budget and had almost grinded to a halt during numerous stages of development.

I guess we will have to wait until it’s release to see if it’s any good, but fans of the genre have already pointed out how disappointed they are with the zombies who have been compared to those in the movie I Am Legend.

In the meantime check out the trailer and let me know what you think.