Ten Bests, Five Not Bests

My own ten best movie list can be found here.  But I've also asked my fellow Phoenix critics to contribute their own top ten, plus, if they wish, a list of five films that, if not the worst of the year, are the most disappointing, overrated, or most  likely to bring about the downfall of cinema as we know it, not to mention civilization in general. For those who care about such things I will also include my own five not best at the end of this posting.

TOM MEEK

TEN BEST

1. Moonrise Kingdom:  Wes's best yet?

2. Zero Dark Thirty: We know the guy with the beard gets it, yet it's rife with tension and suspense in every frame.

3. Argo: Ben always showed promise, now he shows talent.

4. Queen of Versailles: The one percent having to live like the ninety nine, priceless.

5. How to Survive a Plague:  A taut retracing of a time of fear, hate and misunderstanding.

6. Marley:The incredible and sad life of the man who brought Reggae to the world.

7.The Invisible War: Rape in the military as standard operating procedure gets exposed.

8. Django Unchained: Tarantino’s nod to Sergio Leone is both fun and QT quirky. Excellent score/soundtrack and Waltz delivers with aplomb in every scene.

9. Silver Linings Playbook: O. Russell takes Nick Sparks material and gives it bite while Lawrence answers the questions about range and sex appeal.

10. Killing Them Softly: Razor sharp dialogue and protracted (perhaps too much) violence. Pitt's the lead, but it's all the pieces around him that make the film hum--even if they shot this Boston based noir in Louisiana.        

Ten others not to be missed: Holy Motors, Downeast, Cabin in the Woods, Polisse, The Central Park Five, The Perks of Being a Wall Flower, Sister, Magic Mike, Life of Pi, Amour.

 

GERALD PEARY

TEN BEST

1. Barbara
2. Marina Abramovic: the Artist is Present
3. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
4. Goodbye, First Love
5. Perks of Being a Wallflower
6. Take This Waltz
7. Holy Motors
8. Kid With a Bike
9. Liberal Arts
10. Killing Them Softly

FIVE LEAST BEST
A note: I try to see only movies which sound worthwhile or come recommended, so I can't really make a "Worst List," only a list of "The Most Overrated"
(in order)
1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. Beasts of the Southern Wild
3. Argo
4. Zero Dark Thirty
5. Silver Linings Playbook

MONICA CASTILLO

With Bigelow's espionage opus, Trier's soulful tale, Whedon's witty superhero mashup, and Carax's homage to cinema, I loved going to the movies in 2012. It was a great year to trek out to the theater, despite the ever-looming deadline for digital conversion and the usual hazard of box office clunkers. No matter, the craft of storytelling is alive and well, and moviegoers have much to look forward to from this crop of filmmakers.  

JAKE MULLIGAN

TEN BEST

1.      THE MASTER. Lensed on luscious 70mm film, Paul Thomas Anderson's follow-up to There Will Be Blood is another inquiry into one of America's defining eras; following Freddie Quell (a transcendent Joaquin Phoenix) as he - and his country - searches for forgiveness, acceptance, and a sense of peace following WWII. Mysterious yet primal, Anderson's latest may be his best; a search for meaning in the depths of a most erratic mind.

2.      MOONRISE KINGDOM. Wes Anderson's lovers-on-the-run yarn about a pair of 12 year olds - nods to Pierrot Le Fou, Badlands, and the films of Stanley Kubrick abound, laughably - is, miraculously, as romantic and soulful as it is meticulously designed. I grew up with Rushmore, and long considered it one of my favorite pictures, but Mr. Anderson may have topped it with this stunning masterpiece. 

3.      THIS IS NOT A FILM. Jafar Panahi's day-in-the-life chronicle- he's been banned from filmmaking for two decades and subjected to house arrest for years by the Iranian regime- bounds between reality and fiction, constantly questioning its own construction (15 minutes in, Panahi - as actor and director - refutes everything you've seen thus far as "a lie".) An audacious act of cinematic introspection reminiscent of Godard and Kiarostami, Panahi's picture speaks not just to his struggle but to that of all Iranian filmmakers. Make no mistake: this is a film.

4.      ZERO DARK THIRTY. Kathryn Bigelow's last effort, The Hurt Locker, was about being obsessive and single-minded. Her latest film, in its own zen-like way, truly is obsessive and single-minded. Tracking the ten-year search for Bin Laden with emotionally detached precision, she's finally working from a script that can match the pedigree of her dead-serious direction, and it results in her greatest film.

5.      HOLY MOTORS. I've seen Motors more than a few times since it opened a couple months ago, and I still have no clue what it's "about". Depending on the day of the week and my mood, if you were to ask me, I may guess director Leos Carax intended it as a eulogy for film, or as critique of formulaic storytelling, or as a short film anthology strung together by an inexplicable narrative, or perhaps even as a tribute to make-up artists. The only thing I know for sure is that I can't stop thinking about it.

6.      ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest is somewhere between a police procedural and an absurdist comedy; following a crew of small-town cops, forensic experts, and a couple criminals as they spend a night trying to find a body the latter pair buried amidst a vast nondescript terrain - while blackout drunk. The incredibly awkward hunt takes up much of the film's 150 minutes. But the few moments of daylight that conclude the mystery is what brings Anatolia to haunting, profound heights.

7.      21 JUMP STREET. The year's best comedy took Judd Apatow, John Woo, and John Hughes, threw all their aesthetics into a blender, and produced a singular high-school-dick-comedy-cop-movie. And has any film captured changing mores in American youth culture better than directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller do here? Watching Channing Tatum roam the hallways, distraught that he no longer seems to be accepted as naturally cool, and pontificating about the evil influence of anti-bullying sentiments and Glee, we realize the nerds really taken over the world.

8.      MAGIC MIKE. Like many, I'm hoping and praying that Steven Soderbergh's threats of retirement are idle. Mainly because his recent full-on diversion into genre filmmaking - here, frontloads the film with dance sequences full of Channing Tatum eye-candy, while spending most of his time on a Bressonian narrative about aging and the economy and more than a few other things - has produced some of his best work yet. With this, and Haywire, and Contagion, and so on, you come for the carnal pleasures, and stay for the subtext.

9.      SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS. Unfairly written off by many as some sort of "Diet ADAPTATION," Martin McDonagh's metatextual follow-up to In Bruges isn't so much self-congratulatory as it is self-aware; a guilt-ridden takedown of the unending wave of faux-Tarantino gangster films that invite you to get off on violence and death. It's also, to borrow the parlance of Christopher Walken's character, hall-u-sin-o-genic.

10.  COSMOPOLIS. David Cronenberg's latest is a digital nightmare; an evocation of a world where money no longer literally exists and the only thing quantifiable is that which we "do not know". It also devolves into philosophical discussions centered on Robert Pattinson's prostate. It's scary, it's smart, it's simultaneously zany and brilliant - in short, it's Cronenberg,

FIVE LEAST BEST:

 KEOUGH'S FIVE LEAST BEST

1. CLOUD ATLAS. Loved the book. Hated the movie.

2. BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD. With all due apologies to my colleagues who loved it, I thought it was patronizing, pretentious, pseudo-magical-realistic poorism.

3. COSMOPOLIS. When Cronenberg goes bad, it's this kind of bad.

4. LINCOLN. Great president. Excellent automobile. Turgid, over-rated parade float of a movie.