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