Forget the Oscars! These Are the Best Films of 2012

Many top filmmakers in 2012 gravitated toward darker themes reflecting the anxieties and uncertainties of our modern age, even if those themes were sometimes embedded in a highly entertaining gloss. Zero Dark Thirty and Argo thus took on real-world terrorism, the former with grim docudrama-like precision, the latter with a literal (albeit ostensibly true) happy Hollywood ending. Lincoln and Django Unchained looked at the thorny issue of race, while Hyde Park on Hudson, like Lincoln, looked to the politics of the past as inspiration for healing our current body politic. Interestingly, four separate films explored the indignities and uncertainties of aging. These ranged from sentimental (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) to caustic (Late  Quartet), from warm-hearted and poignant (Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet) to unsparing (Amour).

 Even the few romantic stories worth seeing in 2012, which excludes most of the studio-released schlock, involved couples as seemingly ill-suited to the general principle of love as they are to each other (Rust and Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, Safety Not Guaranteed, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World). The two films that stood head and shoulders over all others in 2012—Beasts of the Southern Wild and Moonrise Kingdom—had children as their protagonists, kids who refuse to accept a forbidding or inauthentic world as it is and take control of their own destiny.

With only a handful of truly great films in 2012 it is perhaps more instructive to analyze the ambitious failures, to try to determine why works by serious artists either failed colossally or at least underwhelmed. When I heard Paul Thomas Anderson was making a thinly veiled account of the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, I expected great things. (Remember his brief but sharp characterization of a misogynistic motivational guru, played brilliantly by Tom Cruise, in Magnolia?) So how could a movie so beautiful to look at, with three near-great performances at its core and some of the best scenes on film in 2012, still devolve into a muddled mess? The failure rests solely in the hands of Anderson, who should have sought imput from other writers to rein in the weaknesses and vagaries of his self-penned script (such as its insistent focus on its least interesting character), and exerted more directorial discipline over some of his actors’ distracting indulgences (we’re talking about you, Joaquin, no matter how much we love you).

The failed promise of The Master evidences a weak-mindedness ever more pervasive in movies in recent years. The majority of filmmakers today lack either the intellectual heft or passionate ideological vision to shape films with a clear point of view. What is the point of making a movie about a subject as controversial as a cult like Scientology if the filmmaker doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what he wants to say? One may love or hate the work of Danish director Lars Von Trier (and I have done both), but at least the viewer knows what the director feels about his subject. Von Trier forces you to see the world through his eyes, however painful or dehumanizing that may be at times. Thank God for the mad genius that is Quentin Tarantino, who makes films that are completely unapologetic, that are not afraid to provoke or offend, that have heart and spirit and real intelligence beneath their rollicking surfaces.

The same problem mars the, in my view, greatly overpraised Zero Dark Thirty. I'm willing to cut director Kathryn Bigelow some slack because she set out to make a very different movie: one about the failure to capture Osama bin Laden. When world events threw a monkey wrench into her plans, she had to scrap the whole thing and bust out a completely different story under a tight release schedule, presumably worried that someone else would beat her to the punch. Maybe the film she had originally conceived had a strong and compelling point of view. I have my doubts, because her previous Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker, somehow managed to score the 2009 Best Picture despite having nothing more profound to say than that war is a dirty job and those tasked with carrying it out have to compartmentalize their feelings in order to survive. (Sadly, a far more intuitive film on the psychological fallout of war, The Messenger, went largely unseen and unheralded the year The Hurt Locker stormed to a surprise Best Picture win over Bigelow's ex-husband's Avatar.)

Zero Dark Thirty carries the same basic message as The Hurt Locker, ending with Jessica Chastain not in triumph but alone and seeming emotionally adrift now that her obsessive mission has been accomplished. A puzzling controversy has arisen over whether the film endorses or condemns torture, but the film takes no position on that or anything else that might give the viewer something to chew on. Torture is just presented as a fact of spycraft and not as a subject of any real interest either to the protagonist or to the filmmaker. Bigelow's real interest is the bang-bang, the documentary-like recreation of the daring assault on Bin Laden's compound. The rest of the story seems rather perfunctory, despite Chastain's game efforts, tacked on just to hold the frame up until the picture comes to life during the Abbottabad raid. When the raid is over we as viewers are left with the same empty feeling captured on Chastain's face in the final shot, more entertained than enlightened.

Still the most inexplicable failure of 2012 was Hitchcock. Who could serve as greater cinematic fodder than Alfred Hitchcock, the master of movie suspense, whose work reflects one of the most fascinatingly complex psyches in human history? But Hitchcock the movie was pure camp, without a single authentic idea or genuine emotion. Anthony Hopkins has been able to convincingly portray Pablo Picasso and Richard Nixon by the sheer skill of his acting, without any attempt to look or sound like those historical figures. But his ridiculously mannered “performance” here is more stunt than acting. My ears still sting from the over-enunciation of his character’s name, which sadly lives on to irritate in the turn-off-your-cell-phone ads which theaters continued to play long after the movie’s run mercifully ended, a marketing angle as cynical and predictable as this movie.

On the acting front, Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in Lincoln is a master class in the craft of acting, but its cool calculation left me emotional wanting. The performance that moved me most in 2012 was that of 6-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild. Some critics have argued, unfairly in my view, that Wallis could not possibly have been “acting” in this movie, simply being herself, because 6 year olds are incapable of that level of abstract thought (so much for Mozart!). The argument is patently ridiculous, as Wallis has never lived in a makeshift junkyard, or stared down mythical beasts, or lost a parent, or survived the melting of the polar icepacks, or experienced any of the other fantastical elements depicted in Beasts. In what she accomplishes in Beasts isn’t acting, I don’t know what is.

Movies in 2012 featured a number of other accomplished performances by children and teens—Tom Holland, the son who comes of age trying to survive a tsunami and reunite his family in The Impossible; Isabelle Allen, the young Cosette in Les Miserable; Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, the runaway lovebirds in Moonrise Kingdom; Suraj Sharma, the intrepid shipwreck survivor struggling to share a lifeboat with a hungry tiger in The Life of Pi. I am excited to see what the future holds for these bright young talents.

On the other end of the age spectrum, Emmanuelle Riva, at 85 the oldest woman ever to receive a Oscar nomination for Best Actress, was superb as an elderly woman trapped in an increasingly debilitated body, matched note for note by her onscreen husband, played with a haunting sense of dislocation and despair by 83-year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant.  Other indelible performances were delivered by Marion Cotillard, an unsentimental accident victim in the lovely Rust and Bone, Denzel Washington, playing against type as a self-destructive alcoholic in the underappreciated Flight, Ann Dowd (in the year’s second most unforgettable performance) as a by-the-book fast food restaurant manager unwittingly enticed into enabling a horrible crime in the squirm-inducing Compliance, an uncharacteristically tender turn by Bruce Willis in Moonrise Kingdom, and nearly the entire cast of Django Unchained, most notably Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a completely against type Samuel L. Jackson.

As always, this list is my humble, idiosyncratic corrective to the inevitable miscarriage of justice that is the Academy Awards. Without further ado, here are my nominations for best and worst in cinema in 2012. [Please note as always films and performances are listed in the order in which I saw them during the calendar year, not ranked within each category.]

The Best of the Best

Beasts of the Southern Wild: The most magical, transportive film of 2012. First time feature director Behn Zeitlin, in an extraordinarily auspicious debut, creates an beautifully realized world known as The Bathtub, simultaneously magical and grittily earthbound, in this Katrina-like parable of a down-and-out Bayou community threatened by an apocalyptic storm. Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Albar, whose play was the source of the story, made the decision to change the protagonist from a little boy to a little girl, creating one of the best young female role models in film history. No fairy tale princess waiting to be rescued, “Hushpuppy” is tough and resilient, willing to face life on its own terms, come what may. The relationship between Hushpuppy and her sometimes-available father, Wink, is surprisingly nuanced. The superbly moving performances of Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry are all the more remarkable considering that both father and daughter are played by completely untrained actors. The denizens of The Bathtub may be poor but they live and love and hope and experience joy and fight to stay in the only place they know as home and the movie never condescends towards them. Wondrously imaginative, Beasts is visual poetry.

Moonrise Kingdom:  While I’ve enjoyed the work of Wes Anderson in the past, his films

are often too-precious-by-half to provide any kind of true emotional experience.  Kingdom marks a huge step forward in Anderson’s maturation as a filmmaker.  This charming tale of would-be young lovers on the run set among two precocious 12-year-olds—he an orphan fleeing “Khaki Scout” camp, she a dreamy girl with a penchant for stealing library books and listening to French chanteuses—manages to mix deft satire with ineffable sweetness and a European cinematic vibe. The fable-like quality of the movie is enhanced by the stunning composition of its design, which looks like a hand-painted storybook come to life. The visuals are complemented by a beautiful score composed by Alexandre Desplat, with additional music ranging from Benjamin Britten to Hank Williams to Françoise Hardy. The director also elicited great performances from his entire cast, including previously unplumbed depths from Bruce Willis.  

The Imposter:  This astonishingly documentary – the improbable but true story of a European scam artist who managed to convince a Texas family that he was their missing son—is more suspenseful than any thriller released last year and more entertaining than nearly all feature films in cinemas in 2012. Director Bart Layton does a superb job getting his real life characters to tell the story in a way that it feels as if we are seeing the stories events unfold before our eyes. The movie leaves us with a lot to ponder about truth and fiction and the nature of human psychology, especially as even greater questions are raised toward the film’s end.

Django Unchained:  Quentin Tarantino matches and perhaps even tops his last brilliant effort, Inglorious Basterds, once again focusing his eye on one of history’s darkest periods and recasting victim as hero in charge of his own fate. This time, rather than the Holocaust, the director takes on the ugly legacy of slavery, in a way I found much more compelling and insightful than the much lauded Lincoln. No synopsis or trailer can ever do justice to the work of Quentin Tarantino. You have to let his films unfold in all their delirious glory, and look beyond the violence and clever dialogue and audacious setups at what the film is really trying to say. And Django has a lot to say about the corrosive institution of slavery. No other filmmaker working today has the stones to risk offending and upsetting people in the way Tarantino does to express his unique vision, and we are the luckier for it.

Amour:  This movie may be hard to watch for many, but that makes it no less important. The ravages of aging, a topic on the minds of many a baby boomer, has never been examined in such unstinting fashion, without an ounce of sentiment. Director Michael Haneke’s greatest work, with career-capping performances by legendary French actors Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Searching for Sugar Man:  The second documentary, after The Imposter, so accomplished it deserves to be on the best film list. The vicissitudes of fame are explored through the story of an obscure American musician who became an unlikely hero during the struggle against apartheid in South African. Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul employs an extensive array of skills to tell this transformative story, from intrepid reporting to beautiful cinematographic flourishes to simple yet riveting use of animation.

The Best of the Rest

Lincoln:  I was not as enamored as most by Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln biopic. A movie that champions craven compromise in the body politic, even in the interest of an exceedingly greater good, is something that I find a hard time cheering (especially the abnegation by Thaddeus Steven of his view that blacks and whites deserved equal treatment in order to win Southern votes for the Thirteenth Amendment). Not to mention the fact that the movie overlooks Lincoln’s slow evolution against slavery, and disproportionately credits a handful of white men with the demise of the institution. I credit Spielberg for almost completely reigning in the sentimental excesses that mar most of his work. But I suspect the success of this movie lies first and foremost at the hands of screenwriter and playwright extraordinaire Tony Kushner, whose love or words and the rough and tumble of argument is rivaled only by Aaron Sorkin, and who kept the movie tightly focused on the effort to constitutionalize the end of the “monstrous injustice" rather than take a sprawling biopic approach to the entire Lincoln presidency, which would have surely diluted the film’s impact.

Flight:  This movie seems to have been virtually forgotten at awards time. But Flight marked an incredible step up in class for director Robert Zemeckis and provided Denzel Washington with another tour de force opportunity to show off his incredible range depicting a deeply flawed airline pilot in denial over his alcoholism.

Life of Pi:  An incredible technical achievement by the anti-auteur director Ang Lee, who seems to approach every film as an opportunity to master a completely new genre. Here he uses special effects with virtuosic ease to turn a seemingly unfilmmable novel not into a soulless cartoon but a poetically realized tale of faith and fate, man and nature.

Rust and Bone:  An unlikely romance between a physically handicapped woman and an emotionally stunted man by Jacques Audiard, the French director of the 2010 Oscar nominee Un Prophet. Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts are both terrific, and one shot in particular, of Cotillard visiting the underwater whale tank in the sea park where she used to work, is unforgettable.

The Impossible:  Extraordinary special effects and affecting performances by Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, and Tom Holland highlight this true story of a family's struggle to survive the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Most Underrated Film of the Year

Anna Karenina:  I fully expected to be put off by director Joe Wright’s decision to set this remake of literature’s greatest love stories in an artificial theatrical setting, replete with stylized gestures and choreographed camera movement, which many viewers and critics felt robbed the romance of some of its heat. But the movie’s sumptuous color scheme and inventive production design created a feast for the eyes, the sinuous camera work a mesmerizing visual ballet. Keira Knightly redeemed herself after earning my worst performance palm twice in recent years for her overwrought turns in 2010’s Black Swan and 2011’s A Dangerous Method. And Jude Law was so transfixing you wondered why Anna could not see that still waters run deep. Only Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s stolid, wimpy Vronsky failed to convincingly hold up his end of the love triangle.

Most Overrated Film of the Year

Silver Linings Playbook:  Sure, the performances were solid across the board, but there was nothing else that set this movie above a garden variety romcom—especially when a seemingly thoughtful story about loss and mental illness took a turn into a bad homage to Dirty Dancing. Another triumph for the Weinsteins’ publicity and marketing machine.

Best Actor

Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

Denzel Washington, Flight

Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour

Tom Courtenay, Quartet

Best Actress

Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Paprika Steen, Applause

Ann Dowd, Compliance

Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone

Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

Best Supporting Actor

Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Bruce Willis, Moonrise Kingdom

Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Jude Law, Anna Karenina

Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook

Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained

Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams, The Master

Helen Hunt, The Sessions

Sally Field, Lincoln

Corinne Masiero, The Impossible

Maggie Smith, Quartet

Best Ensemble Acting

Moonrise Kingdom: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Bob Balaban

Worst Performance

Anthony Hopkins, Hitchcock

Best Director

Behn Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom

Bart Layton, The Imposter

Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Michael Haneke, Amour

Special Award for Achievement in Direction

Ang Lee, Life of Pi

Juan Antonio Bayona, The Impossible

Worst Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

Best Original Screenplay

Moonrise Kingdom

Django Unchained

Amour

Best Adapted Screenplay

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Lincoln

Life of Pi

Worst Screenplay

The Master

Best Cinematography

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Moonrise Kingdom

Anna Karenina

Life of Pi

The Impossible

Best Production Design

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Moonrise Kingdom

Anna Karenina

Life of Pi

Les Miserables

Best Visual Effects

Life of Pi

Best Documentary

The Imposter

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Bully

The Flat

Searching for Sugarman

Best Animated Short

Head Over Hills

Best Live Action Short

Death of a Shadow

Most Disappointing Movie

The Master

Hitchcock

Best Score

Moonrise Kingdom

Worst Soundtrack

Hugh Jackson's painfully off-pitch warbling in Les Miserables

Best Scene

Two scenes from The Master:  the “free association” exercise between cult leader Philip Seymour Hoffman and acolyte Joaquin Phoenix; and the scene in which Hoffman looses his cool when confronted by a skeptic

The stairwell smoking encounter in Flight.

The "whale ballet" scene in Rust and Bone

Worst Scene

The “wall touching” exercise in The Master

Best Shot

The gasp-inducing minibar shot in Flight

Best Movie Line

Almost any line in Moonrise Kingdom but these bits of dialogue between the runaways lovebirds, Sam and Suzy, were gems:

Sam:  “What happened to your hand?”
Suzy:  “I got hit in the mirror. “
Sam:  “Really? How did that happen? “
Suzy: “I lost my temper at myself. “

In another scene from Moonrise Kingdom:

Sam: “I feel I'm in a real family now. Not like yours, but similar to one.”
Suzy: “I always wished I was an orphan. Most of my favorite characters are. I think your lives are more special.”
Sam: “I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about.”  

This interchange from Beasts of the Southern Wild between Hushpuppy and her father, Wink, a flawed but loving man who has been Hushpuppy’s only parent since her mother reportedly “swam away” form the squalor of the flooded bayou where they live, may seem like simple cliché when read out of context. But delivered with such conviction by Quvenzhané Wallis, it played like a feminist battle cry:

Wink, who has been tutoring his daughter to be more self-reliant, believing his death is near: “Who the man?            “

Hushpuppy: “I’m the man!”

Worst Movie Line

Laura Linney’s Daisy Stuckley, “cousin-with-benefits” to FDR, after her first sexual encounter with the 32^nd President in Hyde Park on Hudson: “I knew then we were not just fifth cousins but very good friends.”

How to Make a Movie

First-time feature director Benh Zeitlin on what inspired his magical, moving bayou saga Beasts of the Southern Wild:  "When you look at the map you can see America kind of crumble off into the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting eaten up. I was really interested in these roads that go all the way down to the bottom of America and what was at the end of them."

How Not to Make a Movie

Writer and director Martin McDonagh on his self-named protagonist “Marty” in Seven Psychopaths, a stymied screenwriter: “He has ideas and has characters and stuff, he’s just not quite sure how to put them down. It’s not a writer’s block so much as a writer’s self-appraisal of his own past work and where he finds himself in the present.”