The Best Films of 2012

I’m starting to make a habit of publishing late lists of the year’s best. In the post-Netflix era, I could conceivably keep watching films from the last calendar year through the next several calendar years, so eventually one must decide where to stop, and I’ve drawn that always arbitrary line here.

2012 was a slow year for me; I watched 58 films released in the calendar year – yes, I keep count – including fewer foreign and documentary titles than usual. There are many I may still see, and several are likely as good as or better than the films on my list, so while I call this annual roundup “The Best Films,” it would more accurately be understood as “10 Films I Loved That I’d Most Like To Share.” But that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.

“Holy Motors” – The many lives or Mr. Oscar

Dir. Leos Carax
(2012, Not Rated, 115 minutes)

The French film Holy Motors is an intriguing head-scratcher, which assembles two hours worth of scenes into what never really amounts to a story. In such cases I try to search the incongruous images for evidence of a prevailing theme, common bonds, or unifying elements. Maybe they’re there, but I didn’t find any. So while many of the individual scenes are interesting, funny, or exciting, the film as a whole left me unsatisfied.

I don’t know what it’s about, so I’ll describe what I see. Denis Lavant stars as Mr. Oscar, who is driven around Paris by a chauffeur, Celine (Edith Scob). Over the course of one day, he will dress in costumes, wigs, and makeup to assume various identities that are assigned to him by an unknown controlling entity.

“ParaNorman” – Zombies, witches, and the real monsters

Dir. Chris Butler and Sam Fell
(2012, PG, 92 minutes)

I wouldn’t call ParaNorman a kids’ movie, per se; it has more decomposing flesh and dead children than you’d typically find. Parents would be advised not to exhibit this to their youngest progeny without careful consideration, but I don’t generally approach films from the perspective of their target audience; whether it’s primarily aimed at 8-year-olds or 80-year-olds, the only point of view I can report is my own, and while it may not be suitable for the youngest viewers, I highly recommend it to everyone else.

“The Cabin in the Woods” – Funnier games

Dir. Drew Goddard
(2012, R, 95 minutes)

One of the first thoughts that came to mind while watching The Cabin in the Woods is how much better it is at addressing some of the same themes as Michael Haneke‘s sanctimonious, condescending Funny Games. The two films don’t have the same aim, necessarily, but both are meta-horror movies, using the tropes of the genre to comment on them, shining a light on how we produce and consume violent culture.

“Stories We Tell” – Remembrance of things past

Dir. Sarah Polley
(2013, PG-13, 108 minutes)

Away from Her announced Sarah Polley as an important new director. Stories We Tell confirms it. (Her shaky second film, last year’s Take This Waltz, had me worried for a minute.) It’s her first documentary, in which she turns the camera on herself and her family to recount an important event in her life. Autobiography is a risky endeavor for a filmmaker, who might come across as self-indulgent, but Polley takes a different approach: instead of a straightforward retelling, she uses her own story to explore how our lives are broken down and reconstructed by our memories, and by the end are transformed into something that may be entirely different.

“The Great Gatsby” – Love goes boom and bust in the Roaring Twenties

Dir. Baz Luhrmann
(2013, PG-13, 143 minutes)

The Great Gatsby is a good fit for director Baz Luhrmann, who continues to pursue the theme of doomed love that also marked his previous films Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, and whose exaggerated, impressionistic style is well suited to capture an era of excess and a feeling of love that ultimately proves as unsustainable as the world it’s set in. He doesn’t show us what life was like in the Roaring Twenties. He shows us what it might have felt like during such a period of unquestioned prosperity. And when the characters experience their crushing heartbreak, it foretells the looming societal downfall of the Great Depression.

“Kiss of the Damned” – This bites

Dir. Xan Cassavetes
(2013, R, 97 minutes)

Vampires have been done to death, so to speak, so I’d hoped Kiss of the Damned, an independent thriller from first-time feature director Xan Cassavetes, of the famous filmmaking family, would be unique either in style or storytelling – a traditional thriller, expertly made, like Let the Right One In, or perhaps something more subversive. What we get instead is bad True Blood fan-fiction.

The story follows Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume), a vampire living an ascetic lifestyle until she meets Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia), a handsome mortal screenwriter who inspires her to give in to her animal instincts. Using vampirism to explore a primal kind of eroticism might be interesting, but their relationship has no more depth or sophistication than a Harlequin romance novel.

“Mud” – Lost love on Ellis’s island

Dir. Jeff Nichols
(2013, PG-13, 130 minutes)

Director Jeff Nichols previously helmed Take Shelter, one of my favorite films of 2011. His follow-up, Mud, is set in another rural community, but takes a much different point of view, showing life along the Mississippi river through the eyes of 14-year-old Ellis (Tye Sheridan, in an impressive breakthrough performance). He becomes involved in the life of the mysterious title character played by Matthew McConaughey, who has made better, more interesting career choices in the last two years than he had in the previous 15.

“Oblivion” – Cleaning up after the apocalypse

Dir. Joseph Kosinski
(2013, PG-13, 126 minutes)

Oblivion is a passable actioner, but it has the problem of reminding me of better movies. Perhaps unintentionally in some places but unmistakably in others, this sci-fi mash-up recalls WALL-E, 2001, Independence Day, Moon, and maybe others that didn’t come immediately to mind. Certain action scenes feel like they were designed more for video games than for movies, with their high tech weaponry, heads-up displays, aerial maneuvers that look like they should be executed with an Xbox controller, gun battles that resemble first-person-shooters, and powerful enemies with one extremely exploitable weakness. Don’t get me wrong, I love video games. I’d just prefer to be playing them.

“In the House” – Home is where the art is

Dir. Francois Ozon
(2013, Not Rated, 105 minutes)

In the House is only the second film I’ve seen by Francois Ozon, and perhaps by coincidence it’s markedly similar to the first: 2002′s Swimming Pool. They are alike in their delicious, twisting narrative structures and their perspectives on the inner workings of artists’ minds. Swimming Pool was about the mysterious impulses of a crime novelist. This one focuses on a teenager, who is taken under the wing of his jaded literature teacher, but who is teaching whom, and what is being taught?