My Top 10 Films of 2012

Another year, another batch of good and bad films gone to the history books. To conclude, 2012 will not be remembered as a banner year for narrative films.

This year’s selection of cinematic offerings, meanwhile, was a bit better than 2011’s. Looking back at the films seen and the ratings given, I liked 49 out of the 89 films viewed, meaning they got three stars or higher in this reviewer’s opinion. That is four more recommendations than I gave in 2011, when I saw 90 films.

Hollywood’s output of narrative films could be summed up as decent, alright and good enough. The five biggest box-office hits of the year – The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hunger Games, Skyfall and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – all got a competent three stars from this critic. They were great entertainment but none of these should be mistaken for a great film.

There were also very few game-changers this year. I cannot think of a single film released in the past 366 days that I am confident will be marveled at in years to come as a milestone of cinema. 

Nevertheless, 2012 did offer us some excellent work from some breakthrough voices, whether it is Benh Zeitlin (the invigorating Beasts of the Southern Wild) or Josh Trank (Chronicle). Neither of those films made my list, nor did Holy Motors, Bernie, Looper, Rebelle, Headhunters, Searching for Sugar Man, Brave or The Raid: Redemption. There are moments from these ten aforementioned films that made the 2012 cinematic landscape a pleasure, even if the movies were stained with a few imperfections.

Well, here they are.

10: Indie Game: The Movie

(Dirs. Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky)

Few films dedicate the crux of their running time to chronicling the creative process. However, this Canadian documentary that explores the artistic struggle of four independent video game designers does not just make a supreme case for classifying this interactive media as a viable art form, but also introduces us to some of this generation’s most brilliant designers.

Among this collection is Phil Fish, whose cubist game Fez became an Internet punchline for its much-delayed production. The reason: Fish was so enamored by new technology that he redesigned the game three times over. Other subjects include the makers of Super Meat Boy, a character without skin whose objective is to find a healer named Bandage Girl. It is an animated personification of the creators’ lives: their perception and creative capacity will flounder if they do not sacrifice their bodies for their work.

Frequently fascinating and surprisingly moving, Indie Game: The Movie delves deeply into the creative psychology of unacknowledged artists hoping to rack up points and win on a personal and public level, even if those levels seem impossible to finish.

9. The Imposter

(Dir. Bart Layton)

A line of voiceover in my favourite film, Magnolia, sums up three stories of coincidence and change by claiming that, “if that was in a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.” In a year where films like Argo and Compliance get their material from the fascinating truths behind their stories, no film seemed as outlandish or improbable as The Imposter, a thrilling documentary about a true-life master of disguise.

The charlatan is Frédéric Bourdin, a cunning, smart-alecky Frenchman who assumed the identity of a missing Texan teen named Nicholas Barclay in 1997. The documentary tracks his journey of improbable deception as Barclay’s family picks him up in Spain and ends up believing that Bourdin is their missing son. Director Bart Layton has a sharp eye and re-enacts the drama with prime suspense, slowly peeling back the layers of what makes this master trickster tick.

The dramatic irony works in the story’s favour: if Bourdin had not directly revealed his fraudulent identity until the film’s end, the whole story would have seemed completely improbable. Instead, the film is a frightening and shockingly hilarious trip. Believe it.

8. Monsieur Lazhar

(Dir. Philippe Falardeau)

Canada’s recurring appearance on the Academy shortlist for Foreign Language film is well deserved. Incendies appeared on my 2011 list in the #4 spot, while Monsieur Lazhar is just as stirring and deeply moving. It examines the strong, although sometimes knotty, bond between an Algerian teacher working in Canada and his students.

Bachir Lazhar, played with quiet grace by Mohamed Fellag, gets a post at a Montreal primary school to replace a young teacher that hanged herself from her classroom’s pipes. The students are fraught with despair as the shadows of her death loom over their day-to-day interactions. The film’s most poignant moments involve the relationship between Lazhar and two of his despairing middle-schoolers: Alice (played by Sophie Nelisse, just 11 when she won a Genie award for this role) and Simon, a rambunctious student with deep regret played by Émilien Néron.

Falardeau’s drama balances grief and levity with ease, nary appearing too light or too somber. Led by nuanced performances in a class of the highest order, this humanist drama is an insightful look into loss and the lessons that teach both pupil and professor.

7. Wreck-it Ralph

(Dir: Rich Moore)

The most dazzling film from this year’s Disney vault, both in storytelling and visual heft, is surprisingly not their annual Pixar entry. Instead, Rich Moore’s comedy, which explores the existential crisis of a villainous, coin-operated arcade game character (voiced by John C. Reilly) is packed to the brim with audacious humour and verbal wit without failing to recognize the heartfelt story at its centre.

The film is both high-concept and character-driven. The protagonist is a giant villain with block-sized fists who questions the meaning of his role as his game’s eternal antagonist. He rebels by ditching his game to search for his own code in a video game world where he can prove to be the hero. His calling will come as the older brother figure for Vanellope (voiced by Sarah Silverman), who lives in an obnoxiously cute go-karting game, Sugar Rush.

Although the film’s story DNA and barrage of cameos from licensed arcade characters recall Pixar’s Toy Story, Wreck-It Ralph has enough charm, creativity and colour to nearly match that studio’s tour de force.

6. The Invisible War

(Dir. Kirby Dick)

The year’s most important documentary, Kirby Dick’s gripping examination of sexual assault in the American military deserves your attention. Dick is best known for docs about sexual secrecy and cover-ups, such as Twist of Faith and This Film is Not Yet Rated. This film, also a shocking indictment, already helped to influence military reforms after it won an award at Sundance.

Most of the assault victims are female, but a few are male. Many come from military families and believe it is their duty to serve and protect. The film’s most shocking revelation is not that 20 per cent of soldiers admit to being assaulted, but that so few of the assailants are reprimanded by their superiors.

Many of the women discuss their intense valour for wanting to serve their country and the vitriol they underwent later as victims of rape and harassment. While more than a dozen women show their faces with pride and open up to their traumatic experiences in this unflinching documentary, the shame is that there are so many who would not.

5. Zero Dark Thirty

(Dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

A searing, suspenseful recount of the 10-year manhunt to capture Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty is like a 21st century version of All the President’s Men – a thrilling fuse of first-rate investigative journalism and filmmaking.

Its biggest standouts are Jason Clarke as penetrating interrogator Dan and Jessica Chastain as Maya, the determined, no-bullshit CIA officer whose role in the manhunt becomes increasingly personal (and obsessive). They should both take group therapy with Jeremy Renner’s addicted maverick sergeant from The Hurt Locker, a film that comes from the same director (Kathryn Bigelow) and screenwriter (Mark Boal).

Like in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow shows the shadows that come as a side effect of serving your country. Meanwhile, the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad is the most gripping, edge-of-your-seat sequence in any film this year – even more impressive since we all know the outcome.

4. Marley

(Dir. Kevin MacDonald)

Before his anthems of love and freedom turned him into one of the world’s most revered musicians, Bob Marley’s home community in Jamaica rejected him for his mixed ancestry. As a result, he moved with his mom to Trench Town, a densely populated slum in Kingston, Jamaica. The rest is history. However, in Kevin MacDonald’s superb biographical documentary, it is an electrifying history. The film itself is as smooth and revitalized as one of Marley’s buoyantly optimistic singles. Unlike the figure at its centre, though, the film never drags.

Marley features incredible live performances of the man born Robert Nesta Marley, alongside jovial interviews with many of the key elements of his legendary career, from members of The Wailers to his children, the latter of whom noted their father's neglect for his family and his freedom to sleep with other women.

MacDonald got close access with family and friends to construct a sometimes enlightening, if not always esteemed, glimpse into Marley’s life. Regardless, this is the definitive film about one of the world’s most essential musicians, made with an immersive, explosive blend of archival footage and the sweet sounds of reggae.

3. Moonrise Kingdom

(Dir. Wes Anderson)

Wes Anderson is a filmmaker known for writing eccentric plots and directing with an intricate visual style, and his best films explore very adult themes but with a childlike imagination. An auteur as revered as he is mocked, Anderson can seem both overly precious and emotionally inert with his work. That is why Moonrise Kingdom is such a warm surprise. It is the first film from the writer/director that feels entirely in touch with human emotion.

Set on the fictional island of New Penzance in the mid-1960s, the film follows two pre-pubescent outcasts – Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop, played by excellent newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward – as they flee from their habitats to spend the last days of summer together. Both of these adventurous souls were made for each other, independent and misunderstood by societal powers, including a scoutmaster played by Edward Norton and a lonesome police captain (Bruce Willis).

Tonally and thematically, Moonrise Kingdom takes place in a realm between youth and adulthood – a place that Anderson knows well. In this case, the quirks of this inner space are delivered with emotional brevity by the two young protagonists, who are endearing, vulnerable and courageous.

2. Stories We Tell

(Dir. Sarah Polley)

Canadian actress-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley’s third turn in the director’s chair is something of a miracle. An insightful glimpse into the fragile secrets and tangled relationships from Polley’s actual family life, Stories We Tell also experiments with the tenuous strands that separate fact from fiction.

Many of Polley’s family retell the story of Sarah’s mother in their own words. Diane Polley  died from cancer when Sarah was 11 but also took a giant secret to the grave. In compiling this family history, Sarah gives many of the stories equal weight, although not all of these narratives reconcile with each other. Even in the framework of this documentary, the possibility of doubt remains.

This interviewing of family and friends becomes an interrogation into the skewed subjectivity of storytelling. It is also significant that many of the people shadowed in the film are actors, whose job is to reveal deep truths under a guise of artifice. Polley explores the intricacies of truth and memory, but is constantly reminded how she has the cunning power as the creative director of the film to alter the audience’s impression of the story. It is a feat of tender, intelligent filmmaking.

1. The Master

(Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

No film in 2012 was full of as many mesmerizing performances, striking sequences or as much accomplished technical precision as Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, a film built around the tormenting master-slave relationship between an erratic alcoholic and a mysterious spiritual leader.

Alternatively, is it a dysfunctional father-son relationship, like the ones Anderson has explored in his other films? Could it be about the psychological confrontation of an id and superego personality? Or is the fiery and often troubled relation between Freddie Quell, a hypersexual, Salinger-esque wanderer played by Joaquin Phoenix and Lancaster Dodd, a charismatic, if insecure preacher of sorts portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a friendship? I think it is a mix of all of these; unfortunately, most moviegoers would like to settle with one.

Quell is trying to adjust to the rhythms of postwar America and he finds refuge in the Cause, a hackneyed philosophical movement that Dodd commands (and which has clear parallels to the Church of Scientology). The most arresting moments come from the electrifying duels between Phoenix and Hoffman. Meanwhile, Amy Adams is terrific as Dodd’s harsh wife and, possibly, the master behind the exalted iconoclast.

As audacious as it is fascinating, The Master shows one of the finest American filmmakers working at the peak of his powers. Anderson's bold and bizarre journey into postwar American identity is a captivating and complex character study, as well as the year’s best and most daring film.

A Wild, Wild Western

Django Unchained

** out of ****

Directed by: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Jaime Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson

Running time: 165 minutes

Quentin Tarantino is a virtuoso wordsmith and one of our generation’s most ambitious directors. He’s made an astounding career for himself by taking the kinds of films he loves – whether they be crime noir, Samurai flick or World War 2 epic – and injecting these homages with his own brand of manic characters and humourous, unconventional dialogue.

However, Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, is his biggest disappointment to date. It is his least engaging and most wildly uneven effort that, while still terrifically performed, wavers around trying to find its tone. It is shot like a Spaghetti western, with its wide-angle long shots and whipped close-up zooms, but is structured like a serious vigilante drama.

Meanwhile, it features cheeky and cartoonish violence that would feel at home in a Blaxploitation flick, but instead distracts from the severity of the subject matter.

The film begins in the antebellum South as a chain gang of slaves move through Texas. One of these slaves, the titular character with the silent ‘D’ who is portrayed by Jaime Foxx, is granted his freedom by a cunning bounty hunter, Schultz.

Schultz is played by Christoph Waltz, who eats his words as deliciously as he did as the hotsy-totsy Nazi in Inglourious Basterds. Pinged with his own white guilt, Schultz vows to kill plantation owners. As Schultz tells Django, he “despises slavery.”

Django becomes Schultz’s valet and learns the rules of the gunslinger. The ex-slave is off to find his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is the property of notorious plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The best scenes in the film explore the tricky master-slave dynamic between Schultz and Django, and later on, between the moustache-twirling Candie and his subservient head slave, Stephen, played by a bristling, bittered Samuel L. Jackson.

The film belongs less to Foxx – who gets surprisingly few delirious scenery-chewing moments – and more to the wild, cartoonish semblances of the supporting cast, notably Waltz, as a cunning Bugs Bunny-like talker in Elmer Fudd’s costume. Jackson also gets a meaty role, with his character’s rabid belief in the hierarchical status quo a fascinatingly original characterization.

Although Tarantino dates the film in 1858, he is elastic with the history. He brings in the KKK in the film’s most cheerfully satiric scene, although a whole decade before their roots sprouted in the Deep South. The writer/director also plays modern, distractingly anachronistic music in the background to little effect.

Django Unchained tries to be a tribute to both the Spaghetti western and the Blaxploitation film. The protagonist, with his royal blue costume and sunglasses, dresses like a gaudy 19th-century version of John Shaft. 

The vulgar, sensationalist scenes of gunplay and retribution toward the end, however, don’t match up well with the tense moments that came before. Unchained wavers between a cheeky exploitation film and an adventure drama steeped in a savage historical context. Tarantino doesn’t find the right balance between these two extremes.

By shifting the realm of historical tragedy to the levels of a playful, genre-centric romp, Tarantino is a more effective entertainer than a politically relevant filmmaker.

The Weight of Water

The Impossible

** out of ****

Directed by: Juan Antonio Boyana

Starring: Naomi Watts, Tom Holland, Ewan McGregor, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast

Running time: 114 minutes

Too often, films about a true-life tragedy waver between authenticity and dramatization. Take the two films about 9/11 released in 2006: United 93 and World Trade Center.

The former is a gripping, intense docudrama about the hijacked flight that crashed into a field outside Shanksville, Penn. It is raw and immediate, a tribute to the heroes of that day without the need for melodramatic flourishes.

The latter also shows true courage, of the men and women who helped to save two police officers trapped underneath the rubble at Ground Zero. However, this patriotism overwhelmed the film, using the weight of the tragedy to make the onscreen action seem more stunning than what was actually happening. 

In other words, one placed you at the scene of the action while the other made you feel as if you were watching a movie. Unfortunately, J.A. Boyana’s The Impossible, about a family imperiled by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, feels too much like the latter.

Although based on the true story of a Spanish family, The Impossible focuses on the Bennets, a generic, English-born family from Japan who arrive at the film’s start on an idyllic beachside resort in Khao Lak, Thailand. The sands are as white and the waters as turquoise as the guidebooks probably suggested.

There is very little time spent with father Henry (Ewan McGregor), mother Maria (Naomi Watts) and their three boys – the eldest of whom is named Lucas and portrayed by Tom Holland, in an extraordinary screen debut – before December 26, 2004. That day, a tsunami barrels toward the coast, with the Bennets and tens of thousands of others in its relentless path.

Maria and Thomas find each other, miraculously, within the rushing waters. She’s gripping onto one of the last palm trees as her son tries to quell the tide and swim toward her. The water is up to the traffic lights. The carnage underneath the surface scratches Lucas and injures Maria.

Limping through shallower waters, son and mother try to find their way to the nearest hospital, since a bark bandage can only sustain Maria’s wound for so long. Lucas assumes the rest of the family is dead and gone but cannot waste a moment dwelling on the tragic news.

For many, especially parents, The Impossible will likely be an emotionally draining endurance test. Spanish director J.A. Boyana recreates the natural disaster itself with chilling details that recall the glimpses of flooding and devastation from the nightly news just over eight years ago.

However, while this account is viscerally pulse-pounding – the film starts on a black screen and an amplified volume of whirlwinds, which only emphasizes the dread we already know is coming – the story itself is too shallow, reducing itself to a streamlined cavalcade of clichéd moments that can only happen in the movies.

This dramatization wouldn’t be so inept if the words “true story” hadn’t stayed on the screen at the beginning for a few added seconds, emphasizing the film’s claims to reality. As spectacular as the carnage is, not enough of the film’s personal moments ring true – even though Maria Belon, the real mother, gets a story credit.

Meanwhile, McGregor and Watts, two strong actors, breathe heavily and cry and pant and wail like distraught parents, but are unfortunately playing generic characters. Holland, who looks like a young Jaime Bell (appropriately, he played Billy Eliot on the London stage), gets an enhanced arc as the stoic eldest son.

When Lucas uses his nimble legs to search a hospital for survivors, taking the names of the missing on a notepad with hopes to reconnect them with their anguished parents, Holland utilizes an impressive range, from buoyancy to dismay. It’s the film best scene and one of its only moments that focuses on any of the other disaster victims.

The Impossible broke box office records in Spain, likely due to its director, J.A. Boyana, who has been dubbed the ‘Spanish Spielberg.’ Due to the film’s financial longevity overseas, The Impossible could be his Jaws, also a massive hit and horror story that capitalizes on audiences’ fear of the underwater.

Boyana also uses, frequently, the same close-up, that of an awed human face realizing the unbelievable, that is one of Spielberg’s directorial flourishes.

The Impossible starts as an incredible story of survival and descends into one shaped by the need for big, climactic movie moments than for the credibility of the events. The more Boyana treads into unleashing spectacle, through overwrought dream sequences and larger-than-life moments of inspiration, the more he dilutes the film’s power.

Judd Apatow's Modern Family

This is 40

**½  out of ****

Directed by: Judd Apatow

Starring: Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Maude Apatow, Iris Apatow and Albert Brooks

Running time: 134 minutes

Judd Apatow is having a mid-life crisis and he is displaying it on film.

The comedy writer/producer/director started his career dazing back at the years of fortuitous adolescence with TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Then, he turned to telling stories about meek and wily men-children growing into adults (Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin). Since, he has been stuck with more dour and painful comedies, touching on themes of neglect amidst the family in Funny People and, now, This is 40.

Apatow, whose most recent triumph comes as producer (and occasional co-writer) of Lena Dunham’s excellent HBO dramedy Girls, is starting to frame his films more like television shows. This is 40 is largely episodic and often feels like the entire series of an inconsistent cable comedy thrust onto a big screen. The director's style, notable for its improvisatory, leave-the-camera-rolling realism - think of him as a modern, culture-savvy Cassavetes - is starting to turn tiresome.

Nevertheless, This is 40 is quite funny and usually painfully so, chronicling the staleness of marriage between Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow's real wife), who first appeared as the best friends in Knocked Up. Their children, Sadie and Charlotte, also return. The kids have fantastic comedy chops, which makes sense since they are played by the director's actual offspring.

The film is bookended by the couple’s birthdays – Debbie is in denial of turning 40 and so she turns the spotlight over to Pete’s milestone. Throughout, it tracks chapters of the couple’s experiences as they navigate through fussy children and financial strain.

Debbie, a boutique owner, has to figure out if her sex-crazed shopgirl Desi (Megan Fox) has been stealing funds from the store. Pete owns his own record label and is risking it all on selling a new album from underappreciated rocker Graham Parker.

Meanwhile, their family isn’t giving them much comfort either. Pete has difficulty relating to Sadie, his eldest, as she goes deeper through an infatuation of the hit TV series Lost, while Debbie takes out her aggression on one of Sadie’s classmates after the boy insults her daughter on Facebook.

Moreover, the husband and wife try to reconcile with their respective fathers, both of whom have remarried younger women and have children as young as Sadie and Charlotte. These fathers, played by Albert Brooks and John Lithgow, have intermittent relationships with their eldest children and are focusing their energy on new families. Along these first weeks as forty-somethings, the duo are constantly reminded not to blink as their lives unfold in front of them, although Pete and Debbie are seeing collision after collision.

This is 40 doesn’t have the propulsive narrative drive that some of Apatow’s other features have, and like many of them, runs a reel too long. The writer/director spreads around the chapters of Pete and Debbie’s lives so much that many of the scenes don't link to the ones before or after them. If any projectionist screening this film had switched reels (that is, if there was still one working an actual film projector), the audience would likely not notice.

Ultimately, the film works because of Rudd and Mann, who don’t just have prime comic timing but are terrific at changing their pace to the film’s trickier dramatic territory. Pete and Debbie are, inherently, deeply troubled characters who blame others for their financial, marital and parental problems. Well, at least they have each other to point fingers at. When a character remarks that Pete and Debbie are like a bland, artificial couple from a bank commercial, one can nod in approval of that cunning one-liner

Overall, one’s tolerance of This is 40 may depend on how much he or she enjoys spending time with two rich, rascally souls fretting about parenthood. It is strange to see Pete crying in a 5-Series BMW about the jeopardized future of his business. Ultimately, the film may work better as a satire of upper middle-class American families and their 'First World problems' than as the sharply observant comedy that Apatow intended. Mid-life crisis, not averted.