A list of 2012 theatrical releases that I caught on the big screen this year. In a future “films to watch for” post I will round up favourites from the festival circuit, some of which will get wider releases in 2013.

Footnote

It’s easy for me to pick a favourite on this list. Lior Ashkenazi and Shlomo Bar Aba are note-perfect as father-and-son Israeli Talmudic scholars whose natural conflict is exacerbated by academic differences and a thoroughly believable, deviously ironic mix-up. A case study in how a brilliant script can find the very great in the seemingly trivial.

Moonrise Kingdom

A Wes Anderson film so overloaded with Wes-Anderson-ness that it not only goes over the top but comes all the way back around to genuine brilliance. The stunt-casting of the supporting roles is inspired, and each of the stars takes the artistic license granted by the script and runs with it. But what really makes the movie is its riskiest moment, a moment of impulsive on-screen wounding that lets you know that the movie, with all its archness, is all in and invested in its protagonists.

Take This Waltz

Yes, there are unsteady moments, plot holes, a couple of cliched characters, but none of that seems consequential beside Michelle Williams’ searing performance. Bravely written, bravely acted, her character won me over single-handedly, although the unapologetically Canadian settings didn’t hurt either.

Django Unchained

I think I understand why Spike Lee doesn’t want to see this film, and I have to say I found it quite unsettling and, in moments, repellent. And yet the brilliance. Inglorious Basterds did not convince me but here is a very similarly conceived film that very much does. Tarantino seems to delight in indulging whims and tone/content swings that would ruin a film in less expert hands—it’s as if he has turned himself into the world’s leading expert in how to successfully make up one’s own rules of cinema.

Skyfall

If ever there was a character built to resist humanization, it’s James Bond, and yet Sam Mendes succeeded impressively at this unlikely transformation. Far and away the best popcorn flick of 2012, it manages one delightful surprise after another in defiance of the apparent creative exhaustion of the series. I have to wonder how it can ever be matched, let alone exceeded. Can I ask—how is it possible that the AFI has The Dark Knight Rises on their top 10 list, but not Skyfall?

also…

Favourite restored re-release of 2012: Raiders of the Lost Ark, immaculate and un-fucked-with

Mild pleasures, guilty or otherwise: Wreck-It Ralph, The Expendables 2, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dictator, Friends with Kids, The Dark Knight Rises

Disappointments: This is 40, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Savages, Prometheus, The Avengers, The Bourne Legacy

Next post: the festival roundup a.k.a. 10 films to seek out in 2013.

Because end-of-year film lists stacked with movies that haven’t even opened in your town are elitist in an annoying kind of way, and because, hey one year-end list just isn’t enough, I present the first of three “best film” lists for 2012.

Today’s post is really just a reminder of two fantastic films that seemed to slip unjustly into obscurity this year, and another one that didn’t. Without further ado, here are my three favourite films of 2011 that I saw in theatres in 2012.

Coriolanus

In a way it’s not surprising that this intense, vastly entertaining film was so widely slept on. Dumped into theatres in the dead season, it suffered a double whammy as a film of a Shakespeare play—a truly obscure one, and in the original English. It is, simply put, the best Bardic adaptation in at least 15 years. Reframing a Shakespeare narrative in a contemporary setting has been tried several times but this represents something like the perfection of that particular artistic challenge. The modern-day alternate version of Rome, shot in Belgrade, rings strangely true; John Logan shaves down the original dialogue and reframes it brilliantly; director-star Ralph Fiennes surrounds himself with a perfect cast, with notable performances by Gerard Butler and Brian Cox.

A Dangerous Method

Pairing Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud with Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung seemed on paper like it ought to have been a home run, but if it wasn’t quite that it is no reflection on these two strong performances, to say nothing of Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein. Somehow this talky movie does not quite have the bite that you might expect, but that is pretty much the only criticism I can make. This is a movie about ideas, and I wish there were more like it. Note to self: get around to reading John Kerr’s non-fiction source text.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The best production and set design in any movie since Children of Men. I found the visuals and setting of each scene so distracting that I missed a couple of significant plot points and went back to the theatre to watch the film a second time. If I wasn’t such a sucker for great design I probably would have followed the film just fine, but it really does offer much in a second viewing, and such films seem fewer and further between these days. And, um, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones. Come on.

Next post will be my best releases of 2012, a roundup of films that had wide(-ish) release this year.

I guess I missed the train, or rather, the limo, the first time that Mulholland Drive rolled into town.

When David Lynch’s masterpiece first came to my local multiplex, I chose to avoid it. After the sheer—and unforgettable—excess of Wild at Heart it really felt to me like Lynch had run out of ideas. Twin Peaks the series had stumbled to an unfortunate demise, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me played like the most unnecessary TV sequel movie ever, and Lost Highway gave it strong competition for the title of ultimate misfire. The Straight Story, charming though it was, as a kind of aesthetic sidestep almost seemed like an admission that Lynch had fully mined out his usual vein of inspiration.

When I saw the trailer for Lynch’s latest I couldn’t have been more disappointed. I wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t just stop repeating himself, and quit.

A year or two later I attended a living-room DVD screening and experienced something more than the mere pleasantness of low expectations exceeded.

Sometimes watching a complex film—whether or not understand everything you’re seeing—you have the sudden, vitalizing knowledge that what’s on the screen is more than story, it’s art. Tarkovsky’s Mirror did that for me. Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. And, definitively, Mulholland Drive.

Salon.com’s detailed 2001 dissection is still a pretty definitive interpretation of the film, but watching it again made me realize that the complexity here can only be reduced so far. I could probably write at length about why the dream qualities of the film have more to do with dream logic as an aesthetic mode than actual dreaming as a narrative device, but, maybe that’s more than I can take on in a single blog post.

The announcement of the 2012 edition of the BFI’s Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time list, a month ago, reminded me of my now decade-long crush on this film, and watching it in high def for the first time, last week, I was pleased to find that not only does the film hold up, it seems more brilliant than ever. Time, so far, has been kind to this one.

I guess it’s not a surprise, then, that in the BFI survey the film ranked #2 amongst films of the 2000′s (second only to In the Mood for Love), and #28 all-time.

What is a surprise is the continuing scarcity of Lynch’s oeuvre in Blu-ray format. Without my region-B Blu-ray player I wouldn’t have been able to watch MD in HD. Like most of Lynch’s films, it is not available in a North American edition. Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway are only available in editions from France.  The only BDs of Eraserhead and The Straight Story are from Japan. Inland Empire has only been released in the UK. There is a disc of Wild at Heart that is region-free, so it could be distributed in North America, but for some reason it isn’t. And earlier this year there arrived a UK box set of 6 Lynch films, but let’s just say it was a bit of a debacle and seems to be already out of mainstream circulation.

It’s a drag that some of cinema’s greatest directors are without honour, or at least high-def disc availability, in their own countries. But maybe the relative scarcity of films like Mulholland Drive does bring back a bit of their original mystique; exactly what the ubiquity of most mainstream entertainment has tended to drain out of the movie experience.  Goodbye cinema but, hey, hello cinephilia.