The Best Films of 2012 (Top 10)

10. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)

Perhaps David Cronenberg’s best film since A History of Violence, Cosmopolis was also one of his most offbeat and humorous. With the help of Robert Pattinson’s brilliantly stoic performance, a crisp and icy color palette, and an ineffably off-kilter tone, Cosmpolis transformed the interior of a limousine, where the first hour of the film took place, into a universe unto itself. A veritable hyperreality of futuristic global capitalism that seemingly operated outside the confines of time, this living, breathing entity thrust Pattinson’s Eric Parker through Manhattan to his favorite barbershop, where he was seemingly immune and indifferent to the chaos and danger of the protests, riots, and crime occurring just on the other side of the glass. His crosstown odyssey was filled with a bizarre array of characters feeding him raw data, tactical advice, and philosophical quandaries, as he gazed at them with similar aplomb, even while getting his prostate examined or taking a pie to the face. The film’s final act, where Parker confronts the outside world, capped off what may be the single most effective examination of the unbridgeable gap between the elite and the 99% of this young decade, and while Cosmpolis did not enjoy the heaps of praise most of Cronenberg’s recent output has received, its sheer singularity and bold engagement with the political climate - with the help of the equally fine Don DeLillo source material - made it one of the most important films of the year and his career.

9. Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)

Andrea Arnold’s earthy, visceral adaptation of Wuthering Heights is quite unlike any other adaptation of the famed novel I’ve seen. The landscape is less magical than magisterial, a commanding presence that looms over all the characters, particularly Heathcliff whose existence is mirrored in its harshness.  Arnold’s handheld camerawork is magnificent, intensifying the characters physical interactions with each other as well as the effects of the wind, mud, fog and hills. This materialist depiction may seems at odds with such ethereal material, but the delicacy of the rare moments of happiness between Heathcliff and Catherine play as a beautiful contrast to the harshness of daily existence, the coldness that the older Catherine displays coming as a logical extension of the land’s mysterious hold rather than a desire for wealth or to please her father’s will. Arnold’s skillful and unique style has finally found a proper home, albeit in the unlikeliest of places.

8. Amour (Michael Haneke)

Perhaps the most divisive of all acclaimed international directors, Michael Haneke throws a small bone to his critics who find his films overly academic and devoid of life with Amour. Haneke’s second straight to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Amour tells the story of a couple struggling to deal with increasingly crippling dementia. The awards and positive critical response couldn’t quite squash my fear that Haneke would make the film either too sterile or sentimental, but his ascetic style lends itself perfectly to a subdued take on the troubles of aging and losing the capability to do the things one loves to do. Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant are as lovely and convincing as word-of-mouth has led us to believe, as they so effortlessly sustain the organic ebb-and-flow of a couple who have been together for decades, both in their understated sweetness and restrained bursts of viciousness. Throughout the film, neither character sheds a tear; rather, Haneke methodically tracks the wife’s inevitable descent into dementia and, with a watchful eye, covers a wide range of emotional terrain through her interactions with her husband as well as her distant yet well-meaning daughter. What the film lacks in Haneke’s usually impressive formal rigor, it makes up for with truly earned emotional truths and as the director’s mother suffered a similar fate as Anne’s, one senses the subject matter affects the director on a more humane than intellectual level and, fortunately, the film is all the better for it.

7. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

Zero Dark Thirty is a radically different take on military operations than The Hurt Locker.  The latter was an effective and intimate character study where the former’s scope is far broader, encapsulating everything from the mundane daily tasks and protocols of CIA agents to the shifting landscape of global anti-terrorism. Jessica Chastain’s Maya is the central protagonist, but only so far as her involvement with capturing Bin Laden goes.  There are numerous extraneous plotlines or relationships that lesser films couldn’t have resisted playing out – Thirty has essentially no love interests or hackneyed backstories thrown in to add emotional heft and Chastain is herself off-screen for most of the 30-minute military op at the end.  Bigelow shows enough confidence in that final sequence to allow it to stand on its own rather than rely on constant crosscutting to attempt to put us in Maya’s shoes. This respect of both the material and the audience extends to the much-debated torture sequences. The objective representation of such harsh material has been wrongly interpreted as some as an absolution of such tactics simply because it may have helped lead the CIA to Bin Laden, but it is neither absolving nor condemning, but rather presenting as accurately as it knows how the events as they happened. This deft handling of such tricky material, that miraculously never devolves into jingoistic or anti-American propaganda makes for a remarkably economical film that is as great for the things is doesn’t do than for those it does.

5 & 6. Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl) & Whore's Glory (Michael Glawogger)

Like his equally brilliant Import/Export, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love, the first film in his Paradise trilogy, seamlessly melds devastating social conditions and dispassionate sexual encounters to deadpan humor and sharp satire. Set mostly in Kenya, where a 50-year-old Austrian woman travels as a sex tourist, the film operates with equal aplomb as a metaphor for Western imperialism and an intimate character piece exploring the depths of a woman’s loneliness and her inability to fill that void with anything within her power. The exotic locale and explicit sexual content are rendered flat and lifeless through Seidl’s dispassionate eye and schematic staging, but the film is nonetheless intensely emotional and surprisingly funny. The mutual exploitation of the woman/West and Africans is portrayed with such vibrancy through the astounding performance of Margarete Tiesel, who conveys tenderness and viciousness with equal skill, and portrays the hypocrisy of her character with a careful balance of pathos and ferocity. Seidl’s work with all of these dichotomies is remarkable, and this film makes it easy to see why he’s one of Werner Herzog’s favorite working directors.  A perfect companion piece to Paradise: Love, Michael Glawogger’s globe-trotting documentary, Whore’s Glory, examines the nature of prostitution in three separate countries (Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico) with an array of interviews with pimps, prostitutes and johns. It's quite an impressive feat both for tackling that subject matter without resorting to anything remotely exploitative or emotionally manipulative and for effectively capturing its three milieus with extensive research and interviews rather than latching onto one particular person or guide. Glawogger’s subdued, direct approach shows a respect both for the material and the audience, understanding that the content is powerful and disturbing enough without dressing it up.  It’s a tough watch, but rewarding nonetheless.

4. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)

Miguel Gomes’ odd and intriguing love story starts off like a typical, slow-burning Eastern European drama centered on the struggles of a curmudgeonly old woman, her maid, and her kindhearted neighbor before drastically shifting gears into a delicate, sweet yet unsentimental retelling of the woman’s youthful dalliances in Africa. In what essentially transforms into a silent film in one respect (none of the dialogue is heard) is in another respect a truly experimental aural, sensory experience. The lack of dialogue heightens the characters’ connection to nature and their surroundings while also intensifying the drama through its dreamlike atmosphere. The crisp black-and-white cinematography captures the stark contrasts of modern-day Lisbon, with its rigid angular architecture and the lush fluidity of Africa. For a film that easily could teeter on the edge gimmickry or preciousness, Tabu is especially striking in its knack for grounding the ethereal in the real, its paradise lost remaining tangible and full of genuine passion and emotion. Gomes is a talent to watch out for, possessing an original voice and eye for detail.

3. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Returning with the aesthetic developed and perfected in There Will Be Blood, complete with another brilliant accompanying score by Jonny Greenwood, The Master perplexed and underwhelmed a number of Paul Thomas Anderson’s biggest supporters.  All of Anderson’s prior films, at least since Boogie Nights, have contained scenes or moments of great awkwardness, where emotion erupts violently from within a character (Julianne Moore in the pharmacy in Magnolia, Adam Sandler’s outburst in the bathroom in Punch-Drunk Love, Day-Lewis’s famed milkshake monologue in Blood) to such a degree that its intensity, under the patient, watchful gaze of PTA, gives the audience a concrete, albeit odd and unsettling, cathartic expression.  While The Master has a smaller scope than the director’s previous film, it is far less accessible, essentially taking odd moments like Plainview throwing a napkin over his face and creating a feature length expression of that peculiarity. Not that The Master is simply strange only for the sake of it – it’s one of the most fascinatingly original depictions of post-war, pre-50s America, with both Phoenix and Hoffman embodying different sides of the incomplete modernist man before suburbia was fully crystallized and the uncontrollable yearnings and feelings of emptiness of the new self-aware generation were given an ample social construct behind which they could vanish. This fascinating piece of gonzo Americana is yet more evidence than Anderson is our country’s finest filmmaker and working with two of the finest actors out there only helps to cement that fact.

2. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)

Co-directed by Sweetgrass director Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Leviathan is a difficult film to describe, but if you imagine an episode of The Deadliest Catch as directed by Stan Brakhage, you’re on the right track. Shot with an array of tiny cameras on a commercial fishing boat off the New Bedford coast, the film captures the brutal realities of life at sea in a terrifyingly visceral, kaleidoscopic montage of perspectives. Shots with cameras attached to wires, chains, nets, and the fishermen themselves, take us up and down the ship, put us in the pits among the freshly captured and sliced-up fish, plunge us in and out of the ocean, and soar us into the sky amidst the seagulls, creating a purely sensorial, visual abstraction that changes what would typically be an observational documentary into an intensely physical and experiential avant-garde piece. If given the chance, this is not to be missed on the big screen.

1. It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Herzfeldt)

I’m as surprised as anyone that my top two films are a documentary about fishing and an experimental animated film with a stick figure protagonist, but both Leviathan and It’s Such a Beautiful Day defy categorization in their sheer singularity, the former for its batshit crazy adherence to its preset aesthetic limitations and the latter for its intensely personal material and the avant-garde stylizations that perfectly and creatively mimic the oft-shattered mental state of the film’s protagonist. My first foray into the world of Don Herzfeldt, It’s Such a Beautiful Day is deeply moving, intensely neurotic and gut-bustingly funny. Herzfeldt’s rough-edged, simple animation belies the amount of thought and skill that went into make this film (a combination of 3 short films to make a complete 70-minute feature), but is perfectly suited for the unstable, delicate mental states it depicts. Of course, the film is far more than stick-figure animation, incorporating trippy backdrops and dizzying animated asides that enhance Herzfeldt’s quirky voice-over work and its almost confessional content. The balance of emotional turmoil with humor and pathos gives the film a much-needed levity for such a devastating narrative, its overwhelming creativity and originality as responsible for its transcendent effect on the viewer as its highly potent emotional subject matter.

The Best Films of 2012 (#25-11)

25. Haywire (Steven Soderbergh)

Steven Soderbergh's foray into the action genre has more akin to the globe-trotting espionage anti-thrillers of Olivier Assayas than any recent Hollywood production. His action sequences, thanks in large part to the athletic prowess of Gina Corano, which allowed him to shoot fight sequences in long, unbroken takes, bring a raw and visceral realism that is sorely missing in its American counterparts.  The plot is convoluted and littered with celebrity cameos that function as signposts rather than plot points, but the pared down nature of the narrative is perfectly suited to Soderbergh's economical, no-nonsense filmmaking that's on display here.

24. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Niri Bilge Ceylan)

Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a nearly 3-hour existential procedural film covering a 12-hour period where a group of police and a doctor drive around Anatolia with a criminal trying to locate the buried corpse of the victim. The film’s glacial pacing, replete with long shots of the men against the hilly landscape, is reminiscent of Kiarostami and Antonioni, where plot takes a back seat to the existential dialogue and contemplative compositions.  Its pensive nature is trying at times, but its philosophical payoff makes it worthwhile, especially in the film’s second half where the characters’ inner struggles begin to flesh out.

23. Life Without Principle (Johnnie To)

Johnnie To’s triptych of overlapping stories examining the nature of greed in the 21^st century gives ample evidence of the director’s skill at transferring his slick style to high-minded drama. A complex blending of morality tale, corporate fraud and intrigue, Life Without Principle is as thrilling as it is unnerving and its masterful interweaving of segments leaves no side inculpable for their actions, presenting selfishness as a societal, rather than simply institutional, problem.

22. I Wish (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Few directors so effortlessly blend a sense of childhood wonder and melancholy as Hirokazu Kore-eda.  I Wishis a tender and moving yet subdued and unsentimental story of three generations that is simultaneously sprawling and intimate.  Kore-eda follows two brothers, each living separately with one parent, and their friends as they plan to watch the new bullet trains first pass at a nearby town, believing that if they make a wish at the exact moment of their passing it will come true. The plot sounds treacle, but in Kore-eda's deft hands, it transforms into a beautiful meditation on moving on, be it the children who search for self-realization, the boys' parents who struggle with the newfound freedom and troubles that come from their separation or the boys grandfather and his friends who try to recreate a dessert popular in their own youth to serve at their pachinko parlor.  The film's ability to seamlessly weave these various storylines and characters together fully fleshing out each of them is impressive enough, but it's wonderfully compassionate handling of both the implacable hopefulness of youth and the tempered enthusiasm and weathered pragmatism of adulthood are what really make it special. Edward Yang may no longer be with us, but thankfully we Hirokazu Kore-eda to carry the torch.

21. The Imposter (Bart Layton)

The year's strangest documentary, The Imposter tells the improbable story of a brown-haired Spanish man in his 20s who not only personates a blonde Texan teen who has been missing for several years, but, despite his accent and physical disparities, is taken in by the boy's family with open arms.  It only gets weirder from there.  Layton uses the Errol Morris palette, combing direct-to-camera interviews with stylized re-enactments along with archival footage.  The blend of realism and high stylization mirrors the dual nature of the story, which contains multiple deep-rooted mysteries that are hidden beneath the mundane surface of a family who insists upon the seemingly impossible.  It's moving, unsettling, frightfully compelling and one of the finest documentaries of 2012.

20. In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo)

In Another Country sees Hong Sang-soo taking his typically self-reflexive approach to the next level, framing the film’s triptych (with each third focusing on a woman fleeing from or towards infidelity) within an additional fictional perspective. Per usual with Hong's films, In Another Country’s structure - replete with narrative repetitions, visual motifs, synchronicity, and playful variances - rather than its visuals or dialogue, is where the keys to its thematic depths lie. Each variation reflects the innate instability and unpredictability of Hong’s cinematic reality as minor shifts in perspectives, attitudes and mental states lead to wildly different experiences. These loops and repetitions have a musical quality about them in that they create a dialectic between the original sequences and the new within a rhythm predetermined by the film’s overarching structure. As one gets a sense of these rhythms (something that, as always, takes patience as the film unfolds to slowly reveal the powerful lyricism hidden within), In Another Country is as rewarding as anything Hong has released in recent years.

19. This Is 40 (Judd Apatow)

Apatow’s films have always head third act or second half problems, so with This Is 40, he essentially abandons the three-act structure in favor of one giant, sprawling, heaping mess of a film. Yet it is this loose structure that the film is able to breathe, sidestepping the overly schematic transformations that have marred his past works (although The 40 Year Old Virgin still held together) allowing things to unfold naturally as the characters have room to breathe, grow and interact organically. Paul Rudd is virtually on the edge of over-exposure, but his character here – a far more nuanced version of his supporting role in Knocked Up – has a depth and shades of good and evil that his typical everyman character lacks.  Leslie Mann, who I’m typically not a fan of, also brings her A-game, transforming the one-note bitch from the earlier film into a complex and troubled woman struggling to balance the needs of herself and her children and the dream of her husband.  It’s not only Apatow’s most moving and assured film, but his most consistently funny with the humor never feeling forced or telegraphed.

18. Killer Joe (William Friedkin)

Friedkin’s Bug showed he could still direct the hell out of a movie, but Killer Joe shows he can still make a great movie when given the right material. McConnaughey’s performance is stunningly good as he embodies the seedy underworld of backwoods Texas with every calculated glance and gesture. The plot is stripped of all fat and the film relies on its atmosphere, which oozes increasing desperation and futility, and strong ensemble performance to carry its audience to the explosive finale. In many ways, Killer Joe is a sleazier, trashier version ofBlood Simple, but even the Coens wouldn’t crack a smile at the depths to which the last act take us, McConnaughey’s killer sinking from mere assassin to vengeful devil.

17. Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs)

Ira Sachs’ emotionally observant and compassionate story of the joys and turmoil of a relationship between two men - one the naïve yet confident Erik, the other the closeted and drug-addled lawyer, Paul. Sachs’ portrait of the couple organically captures the natural ebbs and flows of a relationship over a number years, weaving together mini-vignettes that peek into various aspects of their lives and their personal growth together and apart. The two lead performances are quite convincing in their openness and vulnerability which allows the characters to retain a naturalness and multi-dimensionality that is so crucial in pulling this type of small-scale indie drama off. Passing through time with seeming effortlessness, Keep the Lights On hits all the right notes, retaining an emotional honesty and maturity that many films never achieve for even a scene.

16. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)

Terence Davies spin on the classical melodrama, The Deep Blue Sea is a breath of fresh air with its unironic approach to the woman’s picture. Its carefully constructed and subtly nuanced study of female agency within a restrictive society is enhanced both by Rachel Weisz’s wonderful performance, her finest to date, and the cinematography, which sets a delicately somber and melancholy tone. Weisz’s sense of entrapment, stuck between a husband she doesn’t want and a lover who is intimidated by the amount she loves him, is palpable as her progressive ideals put into action only further her suffering and make the conservative status quo appear both safe and sensible.  The film’s mining of this quandary, neither completely propping up its feminist aspects nor dismissing the alternative, is quite well-played in its refusal to bludgeon the audience with obvious morals.

15. Cloud Atlas (Lara & Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer)

David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, a critical favorite of the new millennium was considered unfilmable, its 6 stories divided in most untraditional fashion – the first half of each story, starting with the earliest and moving chronologically forward, is told in succession to the halfway point of the book, at which point the second halves of each are told in reverse chronology. It was clear from the onset that the Wachowskis and Friend may have bitten off more than they could chew, but rather than attempt to stick to the novel’s structure or its subtle connections between the storylines, they essentially made 6 different short films connected by strong emotional and thematic throughlines and the presence of the same actors reprising wildly different roles in each. The Wachowskis and Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas is high camp with a big heart (clearly winking at its own absurdity with Hugo Weaving playing a female nurse, Tom Hanks playing an Asian, etc.) and its themes are painted with most broad strokes, but what the film loses in subtlety and cleverness, it makes up for with its skillful editing that creates a thrilling sense of momentum and accumulative power and its sheer balls-out creativity.  It’s far from a perfect, but I wish more mainstream films would shoot for the moon like this one, even if they only make it halfway there.

14. Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Love)

Mia Hansen-Love’s Goodbye First Love begins innocuously enough as a breezy, vibrant story of young love not unlike the tales told in many other similar films, albeit more gracefully, subtly and perceptively than most. Once the first word of the title comes into play, the formula is inverted and the paradise of childhood left behind, only for the two protagonists to be left 8 years later to deal with the consequences of their past actions. What follows is an jequally moving examination of the awkward phase between adolescence and adulthood, where ties to your youth begin to loosen yet those to adulthood are still tenuous. And as much as I do enjoy some of the mumblecore films, it’s refreshing to see a film tackle this period of life without fully resorting to an overwhelming sense of ennui.

13. Snowtown (Justin Kurzel)

Snowtown is a film about John Bunting, Australia’s most notorious serial killer, but it is only slightly more about the killings themselves than Zodiac was about those committed by the Zodiac killer. As Fincher’s film filters its history through the mundanities of procedure and extensive obsession, Snowtown’s tale is told through the innocent young teen who Bunting befriends and methodically shapes into a highly coerced yet somewhat willing accomplice. The poverty-stricken locale takes on a character of its own; life within the town is shown not so much as a struggle for survival, but as a struggle to avoid dying of sheer boredom. The barrenness of the landscape mirrors that of the culture, a town where pedophiles and miscreants reign free since a legit police force is too far away to bother; seconds feel like hours, yet the blur of aimless daily life extends to an eternity. Jamie’s unstoppable descent into criminal life is tragic, but the environment within which it occurs and the pure terror of rural mundanity and geographical remoteness turning savage and deadly is ultimately the most stirring and chilling notion presented by Snowtown.

12. Sister (Ursula Meier)

Ursula Meier’s Sister, a French thriller in the tradition of the Dardenne Bros., is a wonderfully evocative blend of character-based thriller and family drama. Centered on the 12 year old Simon, a boy who lives with his negligent sister near a Swiss ski report where he methodically steals from tourists to support them both, Sistertackles a difficult, unnerving topic in a way that neither devolves into straight genre mechanics nor simply wallows in the harsh realities of the boy’s existence. Meier’s compassionate eye carefully details Simon’s inner struggle to balance his adult responsibilities of supporting himself and his sister with his childlike impulses for receiving love, affection and acceptance from his sister and other adults. Kacey Mottet Klein‘s remarkable performance along with Meier’s astute direction give the film a perfect balance of tender compassion and raw realism.

11. The Comedy (Rick Alverson)

Tim & Eric’s comedy, for as puerile and ridiculous as it can be, often touches on the relationship of surface presentation of people (from news and local access TV to Hollywood and reality television) and the realities of the disenfranchised, the latter actually being mirrored in the former with its heightened fakery only belying its emptiness.  In The Comedy, an extremely dark, and much straighter, comedy, Tim Heidecker plays a spoiled rich thirtysomething whose father is dying of cancer. As with his television show, the absurdity of his behavior serves as a mask to the pain and loneliness that lies beneath, the endless stream of money and material goods merely exacerbating his issues and easing his ability to mess with people, sometimes pointing out their upper class hypocrisy and other times flaunting his own wealth over others. It is in some sense, a tragic Billy Madison played straight, infantilism not as a rejection of responsibility, but as a symptom of money and a response to the false, shallow world it can help one construct around oneself.