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.