Review: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

* * * *
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jessica Chastain

In a year seemingly filled with controversial films, Zero Dark Thirty may very well go down as the most controversial (although the Django Unchained action figures may have secured the distinction for that film). The story of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, as experienced through the eyes of one woman, Kathryn Bigelow’s film is brutal, fascinating, and absolutely gripping from beginning to end. Don’t let the debate scare you away: this is a film that ought to be seen, if only for the craft of its telling.

Top 10 Week... Films of 2012

#10: The Grey
From its film noir-tinged beginning straight through to its exhilaratingly open ending The Grey, Joe Carnahan’s man vs nature epic, is a compulsively watchable and tense film. Liam Neeson stars as a widower who lives in self-imposed exile in a barely settled part of Alaska, surrounded by “men unfit for mankind,” stranded along with several others after a plane crash. Relentlessly pursued by wolves, the men are picked off one by one and those that remain find their strength and resolve tested at every moment. The plot movements have a certain level of predictability, but the force of the film comes from the atmosphere that Carnahan is able to engender, which makes this one of the most haunting films of the last year.

Top 10 Week... Performances by Women in 2012

#10: Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild
Judging the performance of a child actor is uniquely challenging in that it can be difficult to tell how much of the skill of the performance is attributable to the child, and how much is attributable to the director’s ability to draw the performance out. Certainly, given that Quvenzhane Wallis was only five years old when the film was made, director Benh Zeitlin deserves a fair bit of credit for shaping the performance, but even so Wallis demonstrates a lot of natural talent. She isn’t overly precocious and never mugs for the camera, and the way that she engages with co-star Dwight Henry in the film’s darkest scenes is impressive. Her experience level may be small, but she carries this film easily with a strong, charismatic performance.

Top 10 Week... Performances By Men in 2012

#10: Jude Law, Anna Karenina
Ten years ago, if you heard that Jude Law was starring in a version of Anna Karenina, would you ever guess that he was playing Karenin rather than Vronsky? Or that he could do it so believably? As the by-the-books cuckold to Keira Knightley’s unfulfilled, outcast heroine, Law hits all the right notes and brings facets to the character that have often been absent in previous screen interpretations of the character. Not only is the performance free of vanity, but Law also manages to make Karenin a sympathetic character whose own moral crisis is deeply felt and compelling. Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson have the flashier roles, but Law is the standout of the cast, providing the moral backbone against which the sordid tale plays out.

Top 10 Week... Scenes of 2012

#10: The Vivisection, Looper
Looper’s time bending story doesn’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny (not that that makes it any less enjoyable as a film), but writer/director Rian Johnson certainly does a lot with the premise. In this scene in particular, in which protagonist Joe’s friend, Seth, faces the consequences of failing to close his own loop, he takes the time travel premise to what is arguably its limit. As future Seth makes a run for it, trying to escape a fate which is inevitable, his present self is captured by the mob and vivisected, which in turn results in devastating changes to future Seth’s body right before his eyes. By the time future Seth turns himself in to the mob, there’s almost nothing left of him, but the sequence itself is brutal, brilliant and memorable.

Top 10 Week... Posters of 2012

#10: The Amazing Spider-Man
Laying aside questions about the necessity of the franchise’s reboot (and ignoring the absolute lie of the poster’s tagline), this poster for The Amazing Spider-Man is just about perfect. The design is simple but also evocative, nicely teasing the story and suggesting a somewhat darker tone than the previous series.

Review: Django Unchained (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson

If there's any one thing you can say about Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker, it's that he always seems to be having a good time making his films, and that his joy in making a film becomes the joy of the audience in watching it. I have never seen a Tarantino movie that didn't leave me thoroughly entertained and Django Unchained is no exception. Forget about the manufactured controversy surrounding its subject matter. This is a film very much worth seeing.

Review: Life of Pi (2012)

* * * *
Director: Ang Lee
Starring: Suraj Sharma

That Life of Pi exists at all is amazing, that it exists in such excellent form is a minor cinematic miracle. Based on an "unfilmable" book, centering almost exclusively on two characters, one of whom is a tiger, and almost exclusively in one small location, and giving the bulk of the emotional heavy lifting to a first time actor, Life of Pi has more obstacles than any one film should be able to overcome. And yet, here it is, not just existing, but existing in a form that is best described as glorious. Not perfect, perhaps, but pretty damn close.

Review: The Queen of Versailles (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Lauren Greenfield

Timing is everything and the bad timing of David and Jackie Siegel, who decided to build a replica of Versailles in their home state of Florida only to watch the real estate bubble burst before it could be completed, turned out to be the good timing of filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who originally set out to document the building of what would have been the largest single family dwelling in the United States and ended up with a far richer and more relevant story about the ethos that fed the economic collapse. That is the story of The Queen of Versailles, which may just as well have been titled "Hubris: The Movie." It would be easy for a film like this to become a celebration of schadenfreude, but instead it is a surprisingly balanced and complex portrait of a long, hard fall from the heights of excess. It's pushing it to say that you end up feeling bad for the Siegels - but you do sometimes come close.

Review: Lincoln (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field

A film like Lincoln inevitably ends up being caught in a Catch-22. On the one hand, a story this important and compelling must be told. On the other, it's impossible to tell it without it having that aura of the "Important Story," which makes it feel like the kind of movie you see because it's "good for you," the cinematic equivalent of brussel sprouts. Lincoln is an "Important Story" - it just is, there's no fighting that - but it is told with a minimum of period piece fussiness and it takes material that might otherwise be dry and makes it engaging and even entertaining. Lincoln is a movie that is good for you, but it is also a good movie.

Review: Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

* * * *
Director: Malik Bendjelloul

They investigated every inch of his two album covers and combed through his lyrics looking for something, anything, that would provide a clue as to who Rodriguez was and where he came from. To the shock of his fans in South Africa, where he was as big, if not bigger, than Elvis, he was unheard of in his native America. His life and death were shrouded in mystery until two fans - journalist Craig Bartholomew Styrdom and record store owner Stephen "Sugar" Segerman - undertook the task of learning the truth about what happened to him. In the process they discovered a story more incredible than they could have imagined.

Review: Argo (2012)

* * * *
Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman

When it comes to movies and marketing, a little hype can go a long way. Sometimes hype sets expectations too high, making a perfectly good film seem disappointing, but every once in a while a film is equal to the advance word and Argo is certainly one of them. All the talk about the film being a legitimate Best Picture threat is entirely justified, which is all the more amazing when you consider that the film is so thoroughly a genre piece. A taut suspense thriller that plays all the right notes at exactly the right time, Argo is the kind of movie that is "old fashioned" in the best possible way.

Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

* * * *Director: Benh Zeitlin
Starring: Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry

Sometimes a film has to sit with your for a while before you grasp how special it is, and sometimes that specialness is immediately apparent. Such is the case with Ben Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild (adapted by Zeitlan and Lucy Alibar from Alibar's play "Juicy and Delicious"), a vibrant and fiercely original fantasy drama. I strongly suspect that come the end of the year, this is a film we'll see on a lot of critic's lists and picking up a lot of awards.

Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

* * * *
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Bill Murray

"Quirk" doesn't always play well. Done inelegantly, it can come across as "cloying" rather than "charming." Wes Anderson is a master of quirky movies, a writer and director who always manages to find that delicate balance that keeps his projects from careening out of control and becoming annoyingly twee. Anderson is able to create stories and characters that are overtly artificial but that also feel "real" within the context of their own rules because Anderson creates living, breathing worlds in which to house those stories and characters. His latest, Moonrise Kingdom, is no exception and is definitely a contender for his best so far.

Review: The Grey (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Joe Carnahan
Starring: Liam Neeson

"Bleak" is perhaps the best word to describe Joe Carnahan's man vs. nature film, The Grey. "Devastating" is another. It's the kind of film you really have to watch when the weather outside is nice, because otherwise it's just too damn depressing (in hindsight I'm very glad I didn't see it when it was in theatres in January). That it's capable of having such an effect is to its credit, given how easily it could have been a mindless thriller, or a horror movie with wolves playing the role of the killer.