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The 25 Best Films of 2012

Two thousand and twelve was, if nothing else, a banner year for uncommonly productive provocation.

The 25 Best Films of 2012
Photo: The Weinstein Company

Two thousand and twelve was, if nothing else, a banner year for uncommonly productive provocation. Audiences were galled by Rick Alverson’s divisive deconstruction of hipsterdom, The Comedy, beguiled by the taciturn charms of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and, um, probed by the penetrating cultural criticism of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. Masters of cinema both old and new even found time, between saucy bouts of male stripping and fellating chicken parts, to butt heads with every conceivable status quo, grappling admirably with hot-button issues as wide-ranging as colonialism (Tabu), U.S.-endorsed torture (Zero Dark Thirty, maybe or maybe not endorsing it itself), and the very nature of cinema (Jafar Panahi, who didn’t make a “film” at all). Even the infernal Batman reared his stiff-helmeted head toward something vaguely topical, despite the fact that The Dark Knight Rises had its ideological basis scrawled across its script in magic marker. The point is that at least everybody tried: It’s significant that the most “controversial” entry on this list, sure to incite cynical eye-rolls, attempted in earnest to articulate the hopes and fears of a post-Katrina New Orleans, and it did so with a spirit of awe and wonder. And when you consider that even self-identified trifles were to some degree about something (Amy Heckerling’s unsung comedy Vamps dealt with trends and aging, ab-fest Magic Mike faced the recession head-on, and the feature-length music video Girl Walk // All Day dropped in on the Occupy protests), it starts to look like everybody, from the vocally political to the willfully naïve, were ready to dig deep and really engage with the world as they saw it. Calum Marsh

Editor’s Note: Click here for individual ballots and list of the films that came in 26—50.


The 25 Best Films of 2012

25. Magic Mike

In this canny bit of cinematic legerdemain, Steven Soderbergh baits viewers with the spectacle of bronzed and buffed beefcake, while simultaneously serving up a subversive disquisition on the money-minded woes of America Today. One of Soderbergh’s most formally impressive films in years, Magic Mike boasts whip-smart editing that links antithetical scenes through disorienting sound bridges. It also displays the director’s penchant for full-on filtration: Jaundiced yellows, icy blues, and fiery reds fill the frame with a candy-coated expressionism that’s closer to Soderbergh’s early neo-noir The Underneath than the color-as-narrative-compass approach of Traffic. Not since Eyes Wide Shut has a film so ruthlessly equated finance and fucking. (Okay, maybe Showgirls.) The story may boil down to “All About Eve with male strippers,” but it’s merely the pretext. Per usual, devilish social satire resides in the details: dance routines mimicking traditional blue-collar vocations, a July 4th performance that appropriates patriotic iconography in order to, as Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas puts it, “pry the fucking money from these ladies’ purses.” Indeed, performance is essence in their line of work. Assuming otherwise can prove disastrous. And the performers at Tampa’s Xquisite Club never fail to put the bottom in bottom line. Talk about your commodity fetishism. Budd Wilkins


The 25 Best Films of 2012

24. Barbara

Communism isn’t just an ideological juggernaut in Christian Petzold’s Barbara; it’s a passionless system that produces collective numbness. As a result, any kind of emotional expression is a dangerous and courageous act. Nina Hoss’s titular doctor initially seems incapable of such feeling, as her movements are methodical and concise, her words strict and reserved. But this cold façade quickly begins to crack, and another identity is revealed beneath her chameleon-like surface, one completely at odds with the rigorously defined surroundings. Set in East Germany during the early 1980s, Petzold’s brilliant character study is first and foremost a morality tale about the conflict between individualism and selflessness. Barbara’s surprising capacity for compassion during doctor/patient interactions suggests a pragmatic woman trying to simultaneously transcend and circumvent an impossible living situation. Yet this amazing bedside manner consistently compromises her desire to escape with a lover to West Germany. When considering this duality, each tense dialogue sequence bristles with palpable anxiety, as if repression and suspicion have become organically linked to the surroundings. Therefore, the compromises Barbara makes to retain her patient’s human dignity can be seen as political acts devoid of rhetoric or posturing. Glenn Heath Jr.


The 25 Best Films of 2012

23. Attenberg

With his intelligent usage of the “poker face,” Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the greatest things to happen to cinema in recent years. Athina Rachel Tsangari appropriates and expands Lanthimos’s deadpan-with-depth ethos in Attenberg, in which a young woman may not know how to make out with another woman, but can have an honest conversation with her dying father about incest (“Do you ever imagine me naked?”). Greek deadpan as seen here is revealing and allegorical. It speaks of ideas, not of individuals. It opens up instead of foreclosing. It evokes instead of shouting. It’s bewildering and teeming with nuance. It isn’t just a pose, or a silly T-shirt. If the irony of American deadpan is a product of first-world privilege, as Christy Wampole has so brilliantly argued, Attenberg’s deadpan is a strategy for speaking the unspeakable, not a hipster twitch for shielding oneself from social relations. Tsangari re-signifies irony by transforming what in America has been crafted as a technique of the self to avoid sincerity, into a method for exploring intimacy. Intimacy here is messy, maladroit, cryptic, sometimes disgusting, queer really, and always short-lived. And that’s, of course, the whole point. Diego Costa

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The 25 Best Films of 2012

22. Almayer’s Folly

Bathed in an aura of gorgeous lassitude, Chantal Akerman’s fever dream matches its achingly etched jungle nightmarescapes to the zombie-like stupor in which its characters live out their existences. Loosely adapted from the Joseph Conrad novel of the same name, Almayer’s Folly begins with the set piece of the year, a night-lit assassination of a folk singer, whose inamorata is too stunned, too beat down, to do anything more than continue her trancelike motions. Rewinding to an unspecified earlier time, the film follows this woman, now identified as Nina, the daughter of a white colonialist and a Malay women living out their mutual hatred in a South Seas would-be utopia, as she learns racial difference during her years at a European-style boarding school and returns to her familial home, an emotionally dead woman. Riffing on such racially and sexually charged trouble-in-paradise films as I Walked with a Zombie, Akerman posits her heroine as a woman caught between two worlds. But everyone here is placed in a precarious position by the dictates of a colonialist system beyond their control, not least the girl’s father, too emotionally paralyzed to achieve his longed-for emotional release during the cruelly epic single-take close-up that brings Akerman’s remarkable film to a close. Andrew Schenker


The 25 Best Films of 2012

21. The Comedy

The title is as dishonest as that of Scorsese’s pitch-black comic masterpiece The King of Comedy. And like Robert De Niro’s deranged stand-up comic, Tim Heidecker’s bloated, well-heeled, aging Brooklyn ironist seems to stand outside of reality. Throughout Rick Alverson’s daring film, Heidecker slumps around Brooklyn and the surrounding suburbs, surveying a world that bores him with a vacant, middle-distance stare. Hedeicker’s Swanson and his buddies (including Eric Warheim, James Murphy, and Gregg Turkngton) relate to each other through their acute irony, their conversations tainted by a mean-spirited disingenuousness. Here, humor isn’t so much a crutch as an iron lung—a way to keep the world at arm’s length, while flattering an inflated, egotistical sense of self-worth. In its way, The Comedy is exceptionally funny, making its own case for the double-edged appeal of the kind of caustic insincerity its characters indulge, at once gratifying and slowly soul-crushing. An instructive lesson in the waning of affect, and the use of humor not only as a defensive mechanism, but a lens for viewing the world, maybe The Comedy’s title isn’t so much dishonest as deeply ironic. John Semley


The 25 Best Films of 2012

20. Beasts of the Southern Wild

Benh Zeitlin makes an assured feature debut with Beasts of the Southern Wild, a dreamy parable set in a remote bayou in the South, called the Bathtub, whose existence is threatened by rising swamp waters. The movie evokes the nightmares of Hurricane Katrina, depicting a marginalized community that clings to its pride, and dwellings, before a forced evacuation. The feverish imagination and spunk of the main protagonist, a six-year-old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), who narrates the movie, give it much of its hallucinatory energy, as she attempts to listen to chickens speaking in code, and burns down her shack trying to cook. Brought up by a father who’s often absent, and later ill, Hushpuppy must learn not only to survive, but to endure. Her rebellious streak, and the wondrous furry behemoths she imagines—drawing on Zeitlin’s background as an animator—recall Pan’s Labyrinth. But where Guillermo de Toro fled into fantasy, alluding to the afterlife, Zeitlin remains more bracingly earthbound: Hushpuppy’s taming of the “beasts” manifests her will to overcome her pained childhood. And even though some of the problems, particularly alcoholism, are rather thickly drawn, the movie sustains its tension with rapturous, intimate cinematography and a lyrical, offbeat tone. Ela Bittencourt


The 25 Best Films of 2012

19. Girl Walk // All Day

Like any true descendant of Buster Keaton, the Girl (Anne Marsen) wears discomfort badly. She enters a stiff ballet class in the early moments of Jacob Krupnick’s rapturous Girl Walk // All Day and her young dancer’s face instantly expresses a recognizable awkwardness when asked to perform “graceful” movements. Then, something magical happens: her insecurity breeds inspiration, the black-and-white visuals immediately colorize, the banal ambient soundtrack is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of mash-ups, and the Girl starts dancing to her own primitive beat. As she and two other grooving archetypes dance their way through the busy New York City streets, they use landscape and location to propel themselves forward, backward, upward, and downward toward some unknowable goal. It’s as if their mere presence turns everyday life into a playful block party. On the surface, Kurpnick’s nearly dialogue-less film could be labeled as a feature-length music video for Girl Talk’s All Day. But it’s so much more. By engaging the world at large with different art forms in such a seamless, joyous, and publicly improvisational way, Girl Walk // All Day becomes a musical of the people, by the people, for the people, a new kind of city symphony. Heath

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The 25 Best Films of 2012

18. Killer Joe

It opens (more or less) on a close-up of Gina Gershon’s pubic hair—or some stunt bush, maybe—and only gets odder from there. William Friedkin’s second team-up with playwright Tracy Letts, following 2006’s remarkable potboiler Bug, proves just as fruitful a collaboration. Starring Emile Hirsch as a pudgy fuck-up plotting to off his own ma for the insurance money, then leveraging his teenage sister (Juno Temple) as payment to the contracted hitman (Matthew McConaughey), Killer Joe is a richly realized piece of deep-fried Americana, as scary and shocking as it is darkly funny. Its more notable provocations, including a climactic home invasion that sees McConaughey’s Joe Cooper making resourceful use of a fried chicken drumstick, may eclipse its milder menace. But Friedkin has crafted a warts-and-all trailer-park gothic vision of America’s backslide into toe-headed avarice. In a year that saw the actor wresting free from his middling rom-com shackles, Killer Joe’s the gem in the crown of the 2012 McConaughey renaissance, for sure. It’s impossible to imagine anyone but the courtly, menacing McConaughey playing the part. And you’ll never hear Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” the same way again. Semley


The 25 Best Films of 2012

17. How to Survive the Plague

David France chronicled the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic writing for gay magazines in the 1980s, when mainstream press ignored the “plague.” Years later, the former Newsweek senior editor, reporter, and nonfiction author amassed 700 hours of amateur camcorder footage from the period that, after being pared down to two hours, resulted in an intimate, often heartbreaking, look at New York’s gay community at the time of crisis—increasingly embittered about how little was being done, divisive and decimated by mounting deaths. While feature films like And the Band Played On portrayed gay activists as backdrop for bureaucratic squabbles and moral quandaries of straight politicians and epidemiologists, How to Survive a Plague sets the record straight: no one on Capitol Hill handed down salvation; it was fought for, fiercely, as ACT UP and other activists faced down bigoted politicians, government agencies, and pharmaceutical giants, with demonstrations, sit-ins, and boycotts. By offering us a glimpse into the activists’ public actions, taking us behind the scenes at their meetings, and mixing in intimate footage, of home and hospital visits, and frank “then” and “now” interviews, detailing stories of coming out and illness, France delivers a haunting time capsule that captures survival and hope as much as it does despair. Bittencourt


The 25 Best Films of 2012

16. Lincoln

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that one of cinema’s most commercially successful directors would mount a portrait of one American history’s most exalted figures, each both revered and hated and beholden to satisfying the masses within a narrow and unforgiving range of expectations. Lincoln is Steven Spielberg’s most restrained film in decades, favoring process over action and completely sans score for long stretches, reliant instead on the rhythms of language fraught with moral inquiry and political struggle. Janusz Kamiński’s classically styled yet very much present-tense lighting schemes suggest a series of daguerreotypes, and, as propelled by Daniel Day-Lewis’s mountainous turn as the United States’ 16th president, Lincoln details a remarkable man’s struggle against intense conflict and ambiguous motivations amid his own personal grief. Tony Kushner’s inquisitive screenplay doesn’t need to emphasize paralleling trends in history to make its points known, among them the suggestion that it may be the intrinsically problematic yet necessary duty of a man clothed in immense power at the crossroads of history to manipulate the system for the good of the people, even when it’s against the wishes of said people and at their own personal risk. Rob Humanick


The 25 Best Films of 2012

15. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

How one reacts to the knowledge that Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s most thrilling scene is a tracking shot of an apple rolling down a hill and into a stream will likely foretell one’s response to the film as a whole. A sort of inverted police procedural in which a confessed murderer leads a group of policemen and other officials through the eponymous steppe in order to recover the buried corpse of his victim, Nuri Bigle Ceylan’s sixth feature is majestically shot, quietly devastating, and utterly absorbing in its slow approach to teasing out its characters’ inner anguish. Gökhan Tiryaki’s CinemaScope photography is arresting throughout, with the moonlight and early-morning sun lending an almost glowing quality to the otherwise miserable men trading increasingly personal stories to pass the time, and the deadpan humor that punctuates their exchanges comes to reflect how desperate they are for even a moment of levity. Such moments do sporadically come, but once they’ve passed all involved are merely left with something new to mourn. Michael Nordine

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The 25 Best Films of 2012

14. The Day He Arrives

Shot through with a vein of melancholy that’s perfectly in keeping with its moody monochromatic cinematography, Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives is ostensibly a comedy of (ill-) manners centered on Seong-jun (Yoo Jun-sang), a former filmmaker who returns to Seoul after several years’ self-imposed exile in the countryside. Within this characteristically shaggy-dog narrative, Hong puts into play themes he’s returned to time and again: masculine irresponsibility, the emotional and psychological ramifications of random events, the paradoxical incongruity between our interiority and the social self we present to others. Only the emphasis this time out is on compulsive repetitiveness: Hong keeps resetting the clock by returning his drunken band to the same bar (ironically named Novel), just as Seong-jun seeks out the bar owner because of her resemblance to an ex, only to wind up repeating the same self-serving behavior. What’s more, Hong’s forking-paths narrative possesses an improvisatory musical quality, akin to the piece Seong-jun plunks out on the bar’s piano, reiterating recurrent themes amplified by revelatory variations. For Hong, these twin qualities establish our existential limits, representing the warp and woof of our very lives. Wilkins


The 25 Best Films of 2012

13. Cosmopolis

In the end, it’s mere gravy that David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis unfolds in a world that eerily, and almost blatantly, reflects our modern headlines, its Occupy themes and global-capital woes perpetually looming. What’s truly depicted in this gorgeous adaptation of Don DeLillo’s prescient 2003 novel is the whittling down of the poster boy of individual, millennial anxieties, sparked by the deadly, rampant elixir of privilege, apathy, and telecommuting. From his rolling command center of a white limousine, the WiFi hot spot of the obscenely rich, billionaire Eric Packer (a revelatory Robert Pattinson) is at once linked up to the world and maddeningly removed from it, his personal, untried revolving door granting equal access to wisdom and delusion, personified by the limo’s parade of guests. Evoking its director’s past aesthetics and bodily interests with cool restraint, Cosmopolis is a wry, stylish nightmare of contemporary disconnect, and an audacious charting of all that crumbles when reality seeps in. With much dialogue lifted verbatim from DeLillo’s text, the film’s dizzying verbosity may be challenging to swallow, but in a cinematic year teeming with lone protagonists clawing for ways to survive, it has more to say—and to mull over—than maybe 100 movies. R. Kurt Osenlund


The 25 Best Films of 2012

12. The Color Wheel

With his second feature, Alex Ross Perry shows aspiring directors how it’s really done when you’re young, relatively unknown, not beholden to a producer, and have balls as big as Vincent Gallo’s. One of the most memorable, original, and daring American indies in a long time, The Color Wheel slyly explores the immature relationship of twentysomething siblings Colin (Perry) and JR (Carlen Altman) over a road trip to retrieve JR’s belongings from her ex-boyfriend/journalism professor. The Color Wheel wears the unpleasantries of its often unseemly characters on its sleeve, and like in other recent films where audiences are asked to endure nearly insufferable leads, the effect of this can be repelling. But Perry and co-writer Altman mix these salty and bitter notes with humor as dark, thick, and sweet as blackstrap molasses, the result of which is a lively tone that frequently throws one off, walking a fine line between brilliantly amateurish and inventively planned. The Color Wheel isn’t only the year’s most transgressive film in the way the brother and sister find redemption in the taboo, but like Girls, it’s a stinging portrait of a generation. Kalvin Henely


The 25 Best Films of 2012

11. Neighboring Sounds

Of course this upstairs-downstairs portraiture plays out with the tenor of horror. The class war is an inexhaustible source of terror—particular here, in Recife, Brazil, an affluent coastal town whose middle-class comforts are quite literally built up and around its history of poverty and oppression. Less social critique than abstract deconstruction, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is very much about the power of the cinema not to deliver, but to portend, and to that end its gears are always turning. Its sublime sound design, emerging at the intersection of ambient noise and musique concrete, offers a case study for how to suggest the existence of horrors we never see. Filho understands that an atmosphere of palpable dread sustains tension better than more sensational explication, and his commitment to withholding is, without exaggeration, worthy of Hitchcock. That it more or less forgoes the spectacle of an anticipated resolution is a necessary consequence of its methods; in other words, for Filho, process rather than payoff is the point. As Recife’s idle rich flaunt their privilege as lowly laborers circle them like sharks, conflict seems a guarantee. But the bubble of complacency in which these characters live doesn’t need to be punctured by violence. The status quo is damning enough. Marsh

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The 25 Best Films of 2012

10. Moonrise Kingdom

On the surface, Wes Anderson’s sixth feature doesn’t seem all that different from his previous work. The usual toy-chest mise-en-scène, the storybook colors, the deadpan line readings, the immaculate visual gags—it’s all there and as fanciful as ever. Yet the filmmaker’s brand of whimsy has rarely been put to such beautifully resonant a use. Anderson’s visual style has often exuded a sense of childlike wonder, and it’s perfect for a film that features, at its heart, two lonely children, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), who find refuge in each other’s company as they try to discover a world beyond their troubled home lives. But Anderson’s films are also as much about the disappointments that come with adulthood’s inevitable loss of innocence, and characters like Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp offer pointed reminders of the real-world difficulties that await our two young protagonists beyond this film’s joyous finale. But even if Moonrise Kingdom ends up being one of Anderson’s more optimistic films, that hardly means it’s any less rich in hard-won wisdom and generous human feeling. Kenji Fujishima


The 25 Best Films of 2012

9. The Turin Horse

An immersive exercise in temporality, The Turin Horse entraps us in intertextuality, from its philosophical evocations to the inevitable “a horse is being beaten” Freudian allegories, and the cinematic references it organically evokes: This could be Mouchette’s rickety house in a Sokurov parental eulogy, the horse Balthazar, the father a meeker version of the patriarch in The White Ribbon. But mostly, this is António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Trás-os-Montes, a counter-zeitgeist world where one simply cannot forget about time, where one must endure it, fight it, work through it as though it were the land. Everything seems to conspire against survival, against harmony, against pleasure. It’s only in the labor of the repetition that there’s solace. “You aren’t going anywhere” is how the daughter puts it to the horse, who’s just been flogged by the father’s crop and by Mihâly Vig’s assaulting score. The Turin Horse is essentially a film about the death drive, what happens between the “not going anywhere” of the subject, and the moment when “even the embers” go out. Costa


The 25 Best Films of 2012

8. Zero Dark Thirty

Much like Fritz Lang’s M, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty begins with violent death that’s aurally suggested rather than seen, and concludes with a woman’s ambiguously symbolic tears. These disorienting overloads of affect bookend a deceptively rational police-procedural thriller, cataloguing the steps taken by a steely C.I.A. operative (Jessica Chastain) to hunt down Osama bin Laden through a political decade defined by torture and mishap. Hyperkinetic drama trumps context throughout; discussion of Operation Cyclone and even Islam is riskily absent, as though Bigelow were writing history with lightning. The code-named characters meanwhile behave like they’re auditioning for HBO; Chastain’s self-proclaimed “motherfucker” of an agent, who scrawls angry notes on her male superior’s office window (a.k.a. “the glass ceiling”), has an anemically sketched inner life. Yet all of these vernacular tropes form a shrewd, daring rouse. In a move worthy not only of Lang but of Brecht, Bigelow has politicized her pop aesthetics. Her compulsively watchable film brings a global exchange of unthinkable pain down to earth while still retaining the essence of its ineffability. Zero Dark Thirty is ultimately about unknowable cost—not only the cost of keeping a worldwide hegemony afloat with grisly violence, but the cost of maintaining a worldwide entertainment industry with facsimiles of the same. Joseph Jon Lanthier


The 25 Best Films of 2012

7. Oslo, August 31st

Drug addiction is by now overly familiar cinematic terrain, and yet Joachim Trier finds new ways to investigate the struggle to manage dependency with Oslo, August 31st, a piercing snapshot of one man’s struggle to survive a day-long trip out of rehab for a job interview. Along that journey, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) also visits an old party buddy and attempts to reunite with his estranged sister, and Trier’s camera sticks to Anders with an intensity that’s matched by Lie, whose inner turmoil bubbles with increasing volatility beneath his placid, haunted exterior. Lie radiates wrenching confusion and aimlessness, lending Anders the quality of being on the constant precipice of either transcendence or doom. Throughout, the film never operates as a straight melodrama, instead assuming a tranquil, compassionately observant stance on its lost, ambiguous protagonist, who seems potentially incapable of not just big-picture change, but of making the daily transitions—in attitude, in emotion, in reaction—required by life. It’s a tragedy of personal proportions, imbued with greater dimension through Lie’s magnificent performance and Trier’s affectionate portrait of the titular Norway capital as a place of both perpetual change and of unforgettable, and inescapable, memories. Nick Schager

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The 25 Best Films of 2012

6. Tabu

“The image you keep of me hardly resembles reality,” reads one missive shared between doomed lovers in Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, a line that distills the beguiling play of memory and artifice in the Portuguese auteur’s sublime third feature. A trance-like work at once rigorous and playful, it starts off as a study of intertwined friendships in modern-day Lisbon, where the weight of a troubled past is never far off. Then, a deathbed revelation and an encounter usher in a tragic romance set decades earlier in colonial Mozambique, and Pedro Costa portraiture morphs gracefully, teasingly into Guy Maddin reverie. Titled “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise” and shot in lustrous black and white, these halves form Gomes’s inquiry into the emotional and political aspects of cinematic remembrance, where Portuguese melancholia is given pop expression by a cover of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and a crocodile lurks as an ineffably eloquent silent witness. Like the 1931 F.W. Murnau film with which it shares its title, Gomes’s film is a fable of phantoms and sensuality, an intricate puzzle that squeezes the heart. Fernando F. Croce


The 25 Best Films of 2012

5. The Master

Following There Will Be Blood, P.T. Anderson set his eyes once again to the American west for this defiantly odd consideration of man at once leashed and untamed. Pitting Joaquin Phoenix’s mangy, malevolent beast of impulse against Philip Seymour Hoffman’s silver-tongued monster-manipulator, Anderson quickly subverted expectations that his “Scientology movie” was mere furious exposé. In fact, the structured belief system scripted by Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd remains purposefully ill-defined, allowing Anderson to freely and brilliantly ruminate on will, dominance, suggestion, and fanatical compliance. In The Master, Anderson’s most intense and unique masterpiece to date, control over others is a refracted image of one’s own instability and lack of self-control, repression of the rambunctious animal within. As Dodd’s would-be Cerberus, Phoenix’s Freddie Quells is ferocious and, yes, dangerous, but also wounded and abandoned, haunted by a simple image of grace and adoration: his gentle, redheaded lost love singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me” softly to him. Dodd’s retort, a hair-raising climactic rendition of “(I’d Like to Get You on A) Slow Boat to China” underlines the heart of masculine conflict: that sad, long search for self-possession. Chris Cabin


The 25 Best Films of 2012

4. The Kid with a Bike

Like all of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s profoundly humane films, The Kid with a Bike isn’t without its allegorical implications. It’s in the heartbreaking embrace Samantha (Cécile de France) gives 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret) inside her car, a pieta of sorts that evokes the equally hungry bear hug forced on Gillian Anderson toward the end of Ursula Meier’s similarly themed Sister. It’s in Doret’s wild child, as viscerally single-minded as Igor, Rosetta, Bruno, and Lorna before him, pushing throughout the film a bike whose weight could be that of an enormous cross, a reminder of all that he’s inherited from a father he refuses to believe no longer wants him. And it’s finally in a frightening and heartbreaking scene that’s practically a test of the audience’s faith in matters that extend far beyond the spiritual: Having been doomed by fate to what would seem to be a life of trading hurt for hurt, Cyril falls from a tree and is seemingly resurrected from what looks like certain death, and in the sharpest cut to black we feel not only his life’s agony, but his relief at having been given a chance at rediscovering his essential goodness. Ed Gonzalez


The 25 Best Films of 2012

3. The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies’s shattering film possesses an uncommonly rich understanding of how erotic obsession turns the boundary between past and present almost frighteningly porous. We meet Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), the young wife of a High Court judge in 1950s England, right as her amour fou for a feckless former RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston) drives her to suicide. She survives, but the memories of their affair’s halcyon early days (first seen as a bravura burst of ecstatic fragments) and torrid disintegration continually float to the surface—as seductive and fleeting as the rings of smoke wafting off Hester’s ever-present cigarette. The Deep Blue Sea refuses to deny either the naked desperation of her longing or the wreckage her decisions have left behind. (The Vermeer-ish lighting and painterly compositions in Hester’s lengthy scenes with Simon Russell Beale’s cuckolded husband remind us of the film’s origins in Terence Rattigan’s 1952 stage play while remaining sumptuously cinematic in execution.) In Weisz’s transcendent performance, however, we ultimately discover less a lost soul than a woman in the midst of rebirth. Davies honors her wrenching crucible, with an ending as elegant in its formal symmetry as it is profound in its emotional catharsis. Matthew Connolly

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The 25 Best Films of 2012

2. Holy Motors

It would be tempting to describe Holy Motors as a gonzo sketchbook of cinematic flourishes that Leos Carax wasn’t quite able to fit into prior projects—and the film is, indeed, a wildly episodic meta movie-movie that abounds in references to past Carax films as well as seemingly every other movie ever made. On one level, this is a grand revel in unfettered excess that’s inclusive of every genre, every kind of set piece, and seemingly every living performer. But there’s also an unshakable despair that lingers underneath the inventiveness. Denis Levant’s strange mutation of actor and therapist at times literally races from one incarnation to the next in an effort to keep loneliness from finding him, an aspiration, that’s revealed, in the daringly slow final third, as a fool’s errand. There are moments in the film that are painfully sensual in their evocation of elemental yearning, and performers you think you know, such as Eva Mendes or Kylie Minogue, are reborn under Carax’s transformative gaze. But Holy Motors belongs to Levant, in a staggering performance, as a man who’s at once transparent and opaque, complicated and unfettered, and, like all of us, altogether unknowable. Chuck Bowen


The 25 Best Films of 2012

1. This Is Not a Film

The year saw its share of cinematic love letters, evincing their creators’ throbbing, all-consuming passion for film, but how many risked as much as Jafar Panahi? How many were as formally and expressively ingenious under such enclosed circumstances? Trapped under house arrest, legally prohibited from creating, the persecuted Iranian director brazenly flouted his sentence, assembling a virtuoso masterwork inside his own apartment, sneaking the footage out of the country on a flash drive hidden inside of a cake. With a cast comprised of Panahi himself, fellow director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, a garbage collector, and an iguana, This Is Not a Film is the work of a man wryly shaking the bars of his cage—staging scenes from prospective films he’s been barred from shooting, reliving moments from his oeuvre, capturing glimpses of the protest and celebration going on just outside his purview. Continuing his habit of tying fiction and reality into an indistinguishable knot, Panahi produces a movie that makes the most of the man’s restricted circumstances, ending with a beautiful finale that feels almost too perfect to be real. Jesse Cataldo

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