Without further ado, here are my picks for the 26 best films of 2012!
- Anna Karenina
- The Cabin In The Woods
- Life of Pi
- Bernie
- Django Unchained
- The Master
- Silver Linings Playbook
- Skyfall
- The Avengers
- Les Miserables
- Take This Waltz
- Rust and Bone
- Cosmopolis
- Ruby Sparks
- Brave
- Damsels in Distress
- The Hobbit
- Lincoln
- Argo
- Looper
- Moonrise Kingdom
- The Hunger Games
- Sinister
- Silent House
- Mother’s Day
- The House AT The End of the Street
Through the Shattered Lens 
I like how it’s 26 and not the common — albeit odd-numbered — 25 that most people use.
So, House at the End of the Cleavage….I mean Street just sneaked onto the list. 🙂
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That’s because Lisa doesn’t do odd numbers. 🙂
House on the End of the Street made it onto the list solely on the basis of the performances of Elisabeth Shue and Jennifer Lawrence. They were so believable and sympathetic as mother and daughter that the film’s “thriller” plot because a metaphor for the powerful (if sometimes difficult) bond that all mothers and daughters share.
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Really disappointed that I haven’t seen Anna Karenina yet 😦 Great list!
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Thank you! 🙂 I would be interested to hear your thoughts on Anna Karenina after you see it. 🙂
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I love the list, very interesting; do you *really* think HATES was a better film than TDKR though?
Some nice choices from a not very strong year
🙂
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I do. While I respected a lot of things about TDKR, the film was too long, there were too many plot holes, and they killed off Nestor Carbonell. 😦
The relationship between Jennifer Lawrence and Elisabeth Shue in House At The End Of The Street reminded me a lot of my own relationship with my mom.
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From this list of 26 titles, I saw…three films! One because it was showing on 70mm, another because Lisa Marie recommended it, and a third because…well, because it was on a double bill with another feature that I saw!
So I’m guessing that you didn’t see “Searching for Sugar Man”? Nobody? I think that people have a strange tendency to ignore documentaries. It would be a rare year indeed for anybody to list a documentary as the “best film of the year”.
Also, it’s not often that you see a documentary that makes you say “I can’t tell you too much about it…to do so would reveal a stream of spoilers!”
I can tell you all about the classic musical documentaries “Woodstock and “Wattstax” without really “spoiling” them. “Searching for Sugar Man” is a film that I can’t really tell you much about at all without totally ruining the picture for you.
It also made me care about a legendary figure who, 90 minutes earlier, I knew practically nothing about.
“Searching for Sugar Man” was something “new”. Not only was it new, this British-Swedish co-production was done rather well.
All I shall say is that fact is often stranger than fiction. In a film industry where an increasing number of fiction-makers have resorted to the same-old same-old, “Searching for Sugar Man” was intriguing in ways that 99.9999 percent of Hollywood filmmakers simply couldn’t achieve these days. If you haven’t already seen “Searching for Sugar Man”, read as little as you can about it beforehand, don’t even read the blurb on the back of the DVD and just watch it already.
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Unfortunately, Searching for Sugar Man only played for two weeks down here and I was in Baltimore for one of those weeks. Sad to say but documentaries always tend to both come and leave town with little fanfare and next to no advance publicity.
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“Searching for Sugar Man” opened in Australia in October, if I recall correctly (not including any film festivals it would have done).
I saw it the day after New Year’s Day. Which is the same as saying that I saw it on the second day of the year. I tend to wait until films turn up at the Astor, rather than rushing out to see them as the arthouse or the multi-thingy.
At the risk of sounding like a pompous ass, I’m going to come right out and say it anyway: you’ll be readjusting your list after seeing “Searching for Sugar Man”. That claim will probably annoy some people considering how few films I saw from 2012. But hey, it’s not as if we didn’t have a million or so people who had already decided that “TDKR” would be one of the top ten films of the year even before 2012 started.
“Searching for Sugar Man” did one thing that few films released these days manage to do: it startled me. Not just for a moment here, a moment there, but throughout the whole film, start to finish.
It might be just as well it received little fanfare. It’s really a film where the less you know, the better. I wouldn’t even look at the IMDB page of this one, I wouldn’t read the blurb on the DVD, nothing like that, until after you’ve seen it.
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