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.)

The Worst Films of 2012

I saw 125 new movies in 2012 and 38 of them were good or great. There were another 20 of them that were horrible, including some of the most incompetent, incoherent filmmaking I've ever seen in my life. 

Here is a list of the worst movies of 2012: 

1 Les Miserables

2 The Intouchables

3 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

4 Prometheus

5 The Dark Knight Rises

6 The Hunger Games

7 The Avengers (3D)
8 Flight

9 The Sessions

10 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (HFR 3D)

11 Not Fade Away

12 Red Hook Summer

13 For Ellen

14 Friends with Kids

15 Natural Selection

16 The Five-Year Engagement

17 On the Road

18 W.E.

19 Damsels in Distress

20 The Sound of My Voice

Hi There! It's Been a Long Time—How Are You?

So it's been about six months since I've posted anything here. Mostly that is a result of me getting busy (with grad school and work) and not being able to review everything I see. So, in an effort to make it up to you, I wanted to list the films I saw in 2012, after I stopped blogging, and what my rating (out of four stars) they got.

So here goes:


64 Headhunter 3.5
65 Bourne Legacy 3
66 Alps  4
67 The Dark Knight Rises 1.5
68 The Queen of Versailles 2
69 Planet of Snail 3.5
70 Marina Abromovic: The Artist is Present 3
71 Ruby Sparks 2
72 Searching for Sugar Man 2
73 Almayer's Folly 4
74 Red Hook Summer 1
75 Meet the Fokkens 2.5
76 Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry 3
73 Almayer's Folly 4
77 Cosmopolis 4
78 Compliance 3
79 Lawless 2.5
80 Keep the Lights On   3.5
81 Side by Side 3
82 The Master 3
83 For Ellen 1
84 United in Anger: ACT UP 1.5
85 How to Survive a Plague 3.5
86 End of Watch 1.5
87 Looper 3
88 Argo 3
89 Holy Motors 4
90 Wuthering Heights 4
91 Flight 1
92 Cloud Atlas 2
93 Seven Psychopaths 3
94 Loneliest Planet 4
95 Anna Karenina 2.5
96 In Another Country   3.5
97 The Sessions 1.5
98 A Late Quartet    3
99 Skyfall 2.5
100 Silver Linings Playbook 2
101 Lincoln 2.5
102 The Life of Pi 2
103 The Law in These Parts 4
104 Rust and Bone   4
105 Hitchcock 2
106 This Must be the Place 2.5
107 Amour 3
108 Middle of Nowhere   1.5
109 In Our Nature   2.5
110 The Central Park Five 2
111 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (HFR 3D) 1
112 Not Fade Away 0.5
113 On the Road 1.5
114 Barbara 2.5
115 Zero Dark Thirty 2.5
116 This is 40  2
117 Django Unchained 4
118 Tabu 3
119 Les Miserables   0
120 West of Memphis 2.5
121 Detropia 2.5
122 Promised Land 2.5
123 Chasing Ice 3
124 Brookyln Castle 4
125 The Kid with a Bike 4

The Best Films of 2011

I saw fewer movies in the calendar year 2011 (141) than any year since I have been keeping count, yet I really don't feel like I missed much good stuff (I've subsequently watched more films and have now seen 154 films total). I am shocked by how many movies are merely average (2 or 2.5 stars). I will say that when it came to making this Top Ten list, I struggled a bit to get it down to only ten titles... so I cheated....

I have a tie in 10th place, not only because I felt bad about cutting the list down further, but also because a set of film seemed to deal with material a similar way, Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty and Sciamma's Tomboy. Both of these deal with either child sexuality or pre-sexuality, that translates as sexuality, in an interesting way. I think both of these women directors imbue their works with film theory in a Freudian context and neither one is as easy as it might seem on the surface.

Some interesting statistics: There are two Iranian films on the list (even though Certified Copy was made in Europe and is mostly in English), there are two Romanian films (and a third on the honorable mentions list), there are two French films and a Portuguese film. There are two documentaries and three American movies (plus a Germanish movie... where Werner speaks English and riffs on Hollywood 3D movies of old). There are two films that clock in at three hours each and one that clocks in at four-and-a-half hours.

I think The Tree of Life is one of the best films ever made. I recently had to make up a list of the greatest 100 films of all time and I strongly considered putting this on that list (I only didn't because such an inclusion requires a bit more time to marinate, digest and live with). I can't think of another film that is so beautiful thematically and technically and moves the audience along in a similar way. This movie is really in a category entirely by itself and to compare it to anything else would be silly.

I also know it's a bit silly to have so many films in the "honorable mention" category, but I didn't want them to go unmentioned. Amid all the terrible movies, there were lots of good movies in 2011 and they should all be seen and enjoyed.

1) The Tree of Life
2) The Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D
3) Aurora
4) Meeks Cutoff
5) The Future
6) Mysteries of Lisbon
7) The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
8) A Separation
9) Certified Copy
10) The Sleeping Beauty and Tomboy

Honorable Mentions:

* Beginners
* Drive
* Hesher
* The Kid with a Bike
* The Muppets
* Over Your Cities Grass Will Go
* Le Quattro Volte
* Nostalgia for the Light
* Pina 3D
* A Screaming Man
* The Skin I Live In
* Super
* Take Shelter
* Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
* Tuesday, After Christmas
* Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
* Weekend

The Worst Films of 2011

So 2011 had lots of mediocre movies and lots of really awful ones. Here is my "bottom 10". They range from the facile and deeply offensive (both historically and intellectually) to the ridiculous and the stupid. I hope all of these films are burned and are never shown again. They're terrible.

1) The Help
2) Sarah’s Key
3) Rise of the Planet of the Apes
4) Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D
5) Miral
6) Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
7) Super 8
8) The Roommate
9) Margaret
10) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Honorable Mentions:

* L’Amour Fou
* Thor
* Midnight in Paris

The Worst Films of 2010

So 2010 was a very good year in bad movies. There was a lot of garbage released. Most of it was from Hollywood, though there were a bunch of independent movies as well.

One note I want to make is that Birdemic is one of the most sublimely horrible films I've ever seen in my life. It might be worst than Tommy Wiseau's The Room (and possibly worst than Troll 2, though I've never seen that). Every part of it is terrible, the story, acting, direction, music, editing, sound editing and special effects are so bad it seems like it has to be a joke... but if it was a joke, they wouldn't be so convincingly terrible. I gave it its own section of the list because it deserves it. It is the Michael Jordan of bad movies.

Eat Pray Love was totally offensive too, so that gets 1A. In a normal year it would be the worst of the year, but it was unlucky enough to be released the same year as Birdemic - a true masterpiece of shit!

Oh - and Oliver Stone is the big winner with Wall Street 2 and South of the Border both on this list. He had a heckuva year!

The Bottom Ten Films of 2010:

1 Birdemic: Shock and Terror

1A Eat Pray Love
2 The Runaways
3 Black Swan
4 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
5 Twilight Saga: Eclipse
6 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
7 The Last Airbender
8 Salt
9 Dinner For Schmucks
10 Greenberg

Honorable Mentions:

Middle Men
South of the Border
Alice in Wonderland -3D (I don't know where this blogpost went. Sorry. The movie sucked.)
Enter the Void
Shutter Island
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Hereafter
Fair Game
The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector
Holy Rollers
Somewhere
Valhalla Rising

The Best Films of 2010

I've heard a lot of people say that 2010 was not a great year for movies and that ticket sales were down, partly because there wasn't anything out there that appealed to moviegoers. I think that idea is both right and wrong. This was a bad year for Hollywood movies. There are none on my Top Ten list and only one in my top 29 movies of the year (Toy Story 3).

At the same time, I think 2010 was a great year for movies, filled with lots of really great pictures. When it came to boiling down my list, I couldn't cut it off at a Top Ten with a few honorable mentions. I had to list all 19 of them - because I like them all and they all deserve another mention. 2010 was a great year for foreign films and eight of the top ten are foreign. Three are French, two are German, one was Portuguese and one was Greek (I'm not sure I had seen a Greek movie before Dogtooth). The Oath was made by an American and produced partly by PBS (dirty socialists!) but is about two Yemeni men, so that's only partly "American". Winter's Bone is deeply American.

I should say that you won't necessarily find a correlation between the stars I gave to the films and the relative rankings on the list. When making this, I listed of all the movies that are 3 or more stars and then ranked them in terms of how they sit in my mind today. In some cases I looked over my reviews and notes on them to refresh my memory. There might be movies with more starts in the honorable mentions than in the top ten itself. This happens when one movie gets better with time (I generally review things within a week or so of seeing them) and other things fade as I consider them more. So, yes, I'm aware, the stars might be confusing here, but you can ignore them. The placement on the list should supersede the relative star ratings for each film.

I had the pleasure of watching A Prophet three times in the theater (twice because I wanted to see it a second time and once more because I wanted to show it to a friend). It got better, deeper and more interesting with each viewing. I think it is one of the best films of the past decade and it will last for a long time as a masterpiece of filmmaking.

When I first saw The Human Centipede I thought it was fun and silly and sorta dumb. But it has stuck with me. I recently posted on my other blog some more thoughts I've had about it. I am proud to put that on my Top Ten list. I think it's a fabulous work of art and if it were a Samuel Beckett play, we would all think it was beyond brilliant rather than disgusting.

So here it is - enjoy!

The Top Ten Films of 2010:

1 A Prophet
2 Bluebeard
3 Everyone Else
4 Dogtooth
5 Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl
6 Mademoiselle Chambon
7 Human Centipede
8 Alamar
9 The Oath
10 Winter's Bone

Honorable Mentions:

Another Year
October Country
Four Lions
White Material
Inspector Bellamy
Lebanon
Secret Sunshine
The Strange Case of Angelica
Tiny Furniture
Spring Fever
Toy Story 3
Exit Through the Gift Shop
No One Knows About Persian Cats
Terribly Happy
Last Train Home
Boxing Gym
Marwencol
The Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (Again no link- stupid Blooger clearly hates me and my year-end list)
Fish Tank

The Best and Worst Films of 2009

So here it is - my Top Ten list for movies released in New York City in 2009. Out of 214 films seen in the year these are the best. Forgive me for listing so many honorable mentions, but I couldn't hold back and, hey - it's my freaking list, so I can do what I want. You might notice that some of the films did not necessarily get four stars from me when I first saw them. I guess I should say that some movie stick with me a bit longer than the time it takes to write the blog, some of them getting a bit better and more solid over time. I've linked to the reviews, when available. Of course films that I saw before June (before I began this blog) don't have reviews. I'm thrilled with this list - I think it was a pretty solid year for movies and these are all really fabulous.

Best Films of 2009
1) Police, Adjective

2) Hunger

3) 24 City

4) The Sun

5) In a Dream

6) Katyn

7) The Windmill Movie

8) Hurt Locker

9) Two Lovers

10) Inglorious Basterds

Honroable Mentions:

Medicine for Melancholy, Revanche, The Country Teacher, Goodby Solo, The Informant!, District 9, Lorna’s Silence, Treeless Montain, Observe and Report, Beaches of Agnes, Still Walking, Home

Worst Films of 2009

1) Julia

2) Antichrist

3) Avatar

4) Tyson

5) Gamorrah

6) Lymelife

7) Whatever Works

8) Public Enemies

9) Orphan

10) The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

2009 Year-End Wrap-Up

In 2009 I saw 214 movies that were theatrically released in New York City. In addition, I also saw 39 films from 2008 and 35 films from previous years, for a grand total of 288 films.

Of the 214, I saw 25 films on DVD, 22 films at the IFC Center, 21 films at my neighborhood independent cinema (the Cobble Hill Cinemas - they should offer me a discount, ehem), 21 films at the Angelika, 20 films at Film Forum, 10 films at Cinema Village, 10 films on OnDemand, 14 films at the Landmark Sunshine, 14 at my local Regal multiplex (filthy, terrible place), 8 films at BAM, 6 films at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema (such a wonderful neighborhood art-house) and dozens more around New York and the country.

Four movies got no stars and 57 movies got three stars or better. I think it's not a terrible year when I can say emphatically that I like a quarter of the movies I watch.

I don't think I will ever see this many movies in one year again. It was a ton of fun for me, but the pace is ridiculous (four new films each week).

I hope to have a best of the year list out very soon. There are still a few movies that I'm waiting to see on DVD, but I should be able to have the list out in the next few weeks. I also hope to come up with a best of the decade list soon.

Thanks for reading!

List of movies so far this year

I realized I never posted my list of movies to this point in the year... I might go back and write blurbs about the better films... we'll see:
The Country Teacher ****
Goodbye Solo ****
Silent Light ***.5
Cherry Blossoms - Hanami **
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema ***.5
Notorious **
Of Time and the City ****
Crips and Bloods: Made in America **.5
Taken *
He’s Just Not That Into You 0
Coraline 3-D **
Memorial Day **
Katyn ****
Ganorrah *
Watchmen **
Shall We Kiss? **
Sunshine Cleaners **
I Love You, Man **.5
Spinning into Butter *
The Escapist **
Hunger ****
Sin Nombre ***
Tulpan **
Adventureland **
Observe and Report ****
Valentino: The Last Emperor *
Lymelife *
Tokyo! *.5
Monsters vs. Aliens 3D *.5
Mysteries of Pittsburgh **
Sugar **.5
Guest of Cindy Sherman ***
Anvil! The Story of Anvil **.5
In a Dream ****
Gigantic *
State of Play *.5
Every Little Step **
The Soloist *.5
Bride Wars half
Nursary University *.5
Star Trek *.5
Angels & Demons *.5
Objectified **.5
Revanche ****
Lemon Tree **
The Brothers Bloom half
The Limits of Control *
Summer Hours **
Jerichow ***.5
Il Divo **
The Girlfriend Experience *
X-Men Origins: Wolverine *
Up 3D **.5
Terminator Salvation *.5
Pressure Cooker ***
Unmistaken Child ***
Burma VJ ***
I Bring What I Love **.5
24 City ****
The Hangover **
Moon *.5
Away We Go *.5
Herb & Dorothy *.5
Departures **
Tyson half