Top 10 Best Movies of 2012
10. The Invisible War
Armed forces has a second, corrosive meaning when officers force
themselves sexually on the women in their command. In Kirby Dick’s
almost unbearably powerful documentary about rape in the military, the
brave women who testify onscreen argue that they were really violated
twice: once by their assailants and a second time by the tough-boy
network of commanders protecting the army. “The thing that makes me the
most angry,” says Marine Corps Lieutenant Ariana Klay, “is not even the
rape itself. It’s the commanders that were complicit in covering up
everything that happened.” These women — and the male victims too, for
more men than women suffer sexual assault in the military — needed the
scourging disinfectant of Dick’s spotlight, in one of the few movies
that has done provable good. On April 14, three months after its
premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won the audience
award), The Invisible War was shown to Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta. “Two days later,” we learn at the end, “he took the decision to
prosecute away from commanders.”
9. Frankenweenie
If Victor Frankenstein, the monstermaking scientist of Mary Shelley’s
1818 novel, were a suburban American kid … well, he is in Tim Burton’s
feature-length remake, in stop-motion animation, of his 1984 live-action
short. Victor (voiced by Charlie Tahan) is a little too weird for his
conventional parents (Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara) but a perfect
mate for his pit bull terrier Sparky. When Sparky is killed in a car
accident, Victor resolves to bring him back to life. The movie
transforms what is for most children their first shock of mortality —
the passing of a beloved pet — into a sympathetic tale of precocious
necrophilia, and a puckish pocket history of classic monster films.
Utilizing the stop-motion wizardry of the puppeteers at Mackinnon &
Saunders, this 3-D, black-and-white “family” comedy is the year’s most
inventive, endearing animated feature.
8. Dragon
When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s tribute to the wuxia (swordplay)
films of the late ’60s, became a megahit with American and European
audiences, Chinese producers enlisted renowned directors to elevate the
large-scale action genre with their gifts for visual composition and
narrative complexity. Zhang Yimou scored with Hero, Tsui Hark with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Peter Chan’s Dragon (original title: Wu Xia) enthralls both as an evocation of the classic One-Armed Swordsman films,
directed by Chang Cheh and starring Jimmy Wang Yu, and as a
sophisticated, stand-alone delight. The hidden dragon here is Donnie
Yen, as the quiet husband and father whose fierce powers are made known
when he saves a shopkeeper from a bandit attack — and reveals himself as
the renegade son of the bandits’ leader (a great comeback role for Wang
Yu). Yen also choreographed the splendid stunts, in a drama that
achieves both gravity and buoyancy, and balances a familial tenderness
with chest-caving kicks.
7. Dark Horse
Abe Wertheimer (Jordan Gelber) is an underachieving schlub. Fat and 35,
he lives with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) and stocks
his bedroom with fantasy-film posters and Simpsons action
figures more suitable for a 12-year-old. Yet when he kisses Miranda
(Selma Blair), a fellow chronic depressive, she muses, “Oh God, that
wasn’t horrible.” One or two women, including his father’s secretary
(Donna Murphy), love Abe, in the way a child may protectively cherish an
injured gerbil. Or their affection exists only in one of Abe’s
daydreams, which appear frequently and furtively in Todd Solondz’s
sweet, neurotic romantic comedy. Some folks see a sadistic, derisive
side to Solondz’s earlier films (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Life During Wartime);
we think they show a daring empathy for ordinary people capable of
awful behavior. Any misapprehension about the writer-director’s attitude
is erased by watching Dark Horse. Ugly is beautiful in Solondz’s gentlest triumph.
6. Zero Dark Thirty
In the war on terror, the frontline is everywhere, from Afghanistan to
Fiji to Manhattan. And among the U.S.’s most valuable soldier-tacticians
are CIA trackers like Maya (Jessica Chastain), a spiritual sister to
Claire Danes’ analyst in Homeland and the heroine of this powerhouse docudrama from Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the director and writer of The Hurt Locker.
That Oscar winner showed the war in a microcosm: a three-man unit of
bomb defusers in Baghdad. This is a grand macrocosm covering eight years
in the search for Osama bin Laden and climaxing in a scrupulous
depiction of the SEAL Team 6 raid that killed him. Bigelow turns Boal’s
superb reporting of a complex campaign into a lucid, thrilling action
movie for the brain. If the U.S. ever had to go to war, you’d want these
two to run it.
5. The Dark Knight Rises
Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and an idealistic young cop (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) must save Gotham from a blight named Bane (Tom Hardy),
with occasional help or intrusion from a lovely philanthropist (Marion
Cotillard) and the revived Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). All five are
orphans in masks; they repress or express their true natures by playing
roles. Christopher Nolan’s stupendous climax to his Batman
trilogy is a masquerade too. Nolan is pretending to be a director of
comic-book entertainment, when he’s really out to excoriate Americans’
greed, laziness and implicit yearning for an omnipotent father figure,
whether superhero or demagogue. In a tragic coincidence, another masked
man strode into an Aurora, Colo., movie house in a Bane-like gas mask
during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and
slaughtered a dozen people. The killer, identified as James Holmes,
hadn’t seen the movie, but he underlined its mordant thesis: that in the
real America, the creature that emerges from our dreams and into the
night sky is as likely to be a madman as a savior.
4. Anna Karenina
All the world — the world of landed Russian aristocrats — is a stage in
Joe Wright’s brazen, exhilarating film of Tolstoy’s story about the
lady, her lover, her husband and the train. Tom Stoppard’s script
manages a suave synopsis of the 900-page novel, while Wright stages most
of the action in a reproduction of a 19th century theater to underline
the artificiality and poisonous grace of high society. He sets dozens of
characters awhirl and aghast at the reckless affair that Anna (Keira
Knightley) pursues with the dashing soldier Vronsky (Aaron
Taylor-Johnson). Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui choreographed much of the movie: a
Moscow ball, a horse race, a ballet of waiters and accountants, even
the big love scene. The prima ballerina is Knightley, boldly dancing on
thin ice as her marriage to respectable Karenin (Jude Law) crumbles into
ignominy. This is tragedy played as comic opera soaring into grand
opera, and a triumph of art and artifice over the grubby banalities of
movie naturalism
3. Life of Pi
An Indian teenager, his family killed in a shipwreck, must navigate a
small boat across the Pacific Ocean with no company but a ravenous
Bengal tiger. Both creatures endure a rite of passage in Ang Lee’s
visually spectacular, emotionally resonant film of the Yann Martel
novel. Pi, played by Suraj Sharma as a boy and Irrfan Khan in the
framing story, channels millennia of seafaring heroes, from Noah to
Ulysses, and centuries of solitary survivors, from Robinson Crusoe to
the Tom Hanks character in Cast Away. But the real wonder of Pi
is Lee’s poetic use of 3-D — conjuring a looking-glass ocean, schools
of flying fish and about a million meerkats — and the motion-capture
technology that put an imaginary tiger in a real boat. The line of
ascension runs from Avatar to Rise of the Planet of the Apes to this entrancing feat of magical realism.
2. Beasts of the Southern Wild
Some people get hit by a ferocious weather system once every few
decades. In the soggy Louisiana delta area called the Bathtub, home to
Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her ailing daddy (Dwight Henry), every
day of the week is storm day. Six years old and ageless, Hushpuppy
converses with her farm pets and lost mother, endures a hurricane and
spends time with surrogate moms on a floating bordello. Benh Zeitlin’s
Sundance award winner, written by playwright Lucy Alibar, is a work of
cinematic imagination as vast and verdant as Hushpuppy’s. This wonder of
a film speaks in eloquent images and moves to the music of Wallis’
astonishing performance. As a wise, wild child, she is a tiny,
irresistible force of nature.
1. Amour
Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are wiry
80-something retired music teachers who have been together for more than
half a century. When Anne suffers two serious strokes and loses her
powers of speech and movement, Georges cares for her with the stern
ardor of a teen attending to his first love. Austrian writer-director
Michael Haneke is renowned for his forbidding parables of families beset
by a malefic outside force: Funny Games, Caché, The White Ribbon.
The villain here is the decay to which we are all heirs; granted, in
the filmmaker’s oeuvre, there is no happy Haneke. But this is his most
intimate, positive, human drama. The two great actors, icons of
French films since the 1950s, are at the peak of their art in a story of
devotion pushed to the limit. The body may wilt and perish, but love —
and Amour — will never die.
