The Best Films of 2012

Many people said that 2012 was a down year, or a bad year, for movies... and I basically agreed with them, as there was a lot of shit and it seemed like not a lot of good stuff. But then when I sat down to make this list, I realized that there were actually a lot of good or interesting movies that were worthy of a "best of the year" designation, albeit many of them very small art-house or foreign fare (or even very, very small film geek stuff)... so many, in fact, that I'm not satisfied merely doing a Top Ten list. 

I hereby submit my list of the 41 best films of 2012 (including a few ties). I would say that 41 good movies out of the 130 that I watched—a 31% success rate—is not terrible... or maybe it is... 
Here you go:

THE BEST FILMS OF 2012

1 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) 
2 Almeyer's Folly (Chantal Akerman)
3 Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
4 Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
5 The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
6 Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)
7 Keyhole (Guy Maddin)
8 Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)
9 Declaration of War (Valérie Donzelli)
10 Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik)
11 Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
12 The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)
13 The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) 
14 The Law in These Parts (Ra'anan Alexandrowicz)
15 The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh)
16 Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard) 
17 Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín)
18 Bernie (Richard Linklater)
19 Headhunters (Morten Tyldum)
20 Alps (Giorgos Lanthimos)
21 Planet of Snail (Yi Seung-Jun)
22 Oslo, 31 August (Joachim Trier)
23 Brooklyn Castle (Katie Dellamaggiore)
24 Haywire / Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh)
26 The Day He Arrives / In Another Country (Hong Sang-Soo)
28 The Fairy (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy)
29 The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Chad Freidrichs)
30 The Grey (Joe Carnahan)
31 Gerhard Richter - Painting (Corina Belz) 
32 Turn Me On, Damnit! (Jannicke Systad Jacobsen)
33 Norwegian Wood (Tran Anh Hung)
34 Michael (Markus Schleinzer)
35 Footnote (Joseph Cedar)
36 Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev)
37 Beast of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)
38 Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs)
39 How to Survive a Plague (David France)
40 Argo (Ben Affleck)
41 The Bourne Legacy (Tony Gilroy)

(Forgive the formatting; Blogger is stupid.)