WTOP Film Critic Jason Fraley ranks his top 10
movies of 2012.
Best Movies of 2012 WTOP Film Critic Jason Fraley gives his picks for the Best Movies of 2012.
10. 'Silver Linings Playbook' Jennifer Lawrence rode "The Hunger Games" all
the way to the bank, but her best performance came beside Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro in "Silver Linings Playbook." David O.
Russell's tale of bipolar disorder felt a little bipolar itself, starting as a
gritty look at mental illness and ending like a cliched blend of "Dirty Dancing" and "The Fan." Still, the happy ending works because it's set up by Cooper's prior thrashing of Ernest Hemingway: "Why can't more stories be positive?" Russell likes spinning downtrodden individuals into heroic lovers (i.e. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams in "The Fighter"). "Silver Linings" may not win acting Oscars like Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, but the unique blend of laughs, heartaches and NFL superstitions earns a spot on my list as the feel-good date movie of the year.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
REVIEW:Romance, sports,
meds
and the joy of
'Silver Linings'
9. 'The Dark Knight Rises' Summer 2012 brought plenty of smash superhero
blockbusters, from
"Marvel's The Avengers" to "The Amazing Spider-
Man." Still, "The Dark
Knight Rises" takes the cake for style and
substance, as Christopher
Nolan turned the final chapter of his Batman
trilogy into a commentary
on the 99 vs. 1 percent. Tom Hardy made a back-
breaking villain, Anne
Hathaway dazzled as Catwoman and Joseph Gordon-
Levitt was
groomed to take over as Robin, the hints of
which make repeat viewings all the more
rewarding. Box office receipts
were stunted by
the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colorado, after
which Christian Bale
visited families of the victims and Nolan
issued one of the nation's best
statements of remorse. Despite the tragedy, lines
stretched around the
block at the Uptown in D.C. This is exactly how a
studio tent-pole flick
should be done.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
REVIEW:Nolan's final
Batman 'rises' to the
occasion
8. 'Life of Pi' Part of the magic of movies is their unique
ability to let us escape. "Life
of
Pi"
let us escape more than any other film this year,
thanks to Ang Lee's
wondrous visuals on the high seas. What starts
out as a Satyajit
Ray coming of age story transforms into a
Rudyard Kipling tale of jungle law, a modern day
Mowgli and Shere
Khan trapped in a lifeboat. The film is packed
with
impressive CGI tigers and seasick hallucinations,
putting Lee on 3D's
premature Mount Rushmore with James Cameron
("Avatar") and Martin
Scorsese
("Hugo"). More impressively, the visual effects
are layered with a clever
social commentary on storytelling, asking us why
we choose to tell --
and believe -- certain stories. This film fable isn't
for kids; it's for young-at-
heart adults still searching their souls.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
REVIEW:'Life of Pi'
brings crouching tiger, hidden parable
7. 'Django: Unchained' Destined to become this winter's most
controversial movie, Quentin
Tarantino's "Django: Unchained" follows an
African American slave
(Jamie Foxx) seeking swift bounty-hunt revenge.
Christoph Waltz
returns
after winning an Oscar in Tarantino's
"Inglorious Basterds," while
Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson make
stunning heel turns.
Equal parts horrific and hilarious, the film is rooted in exploitation flicks and laced with Peckinpah-style
violence and symbolic blood splatter on cotton
fields. Spike Lee
tweeted his disapproval: "American Slavery Was
Not A
Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A
Holocaust." Indeed, the film's
constant use of the N-word made me extremely
uncomfortable, unlike
its inference in "Blazing Saddles," and the last
40 minutes could have
been scrapped. Still, the film's underlying
moral arc is just, and a KKK mockery scene with Jonah Hill was the funniest I've seen
all year. An "off the chain" theater-going experience.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
6. 'The Master' What a year for America's art-house Andersons.
Wes
Anderson's
"Moonrise Kingdom" was adorable, while Paul
Thomas Anderson's "The
Master" remains the most challenging, gorgeous,
hypnotizing
theater experience I've had all year. Joaquin
Phoenix plays a sex-
crazed drifter taken in by Philip Seymour
Hoffman's founder of a cult
religion (i.e. Scientology). The Jonny Greenwood
score and Mihai
Malaimare Jr. compositions frame powerful
brainwashing scenes that
reveal some of the year's best acting. By the
time Amy Adams stares
directly at us, insisting her eyes are a
different color, Anderson has us
right where he wants us. Like Phoenix, we're
transfixed, brainwashed,
going along for what we think is a "purpose
driven" tale, only to leave
us grasping for answers. Daring filmmaking at
its symbolic finest.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
REVIEW:Phoenix rises
in new cult
classic 'The Master'
5. 'Amour' If "Life of Pi" engrossed us in wondrous
visuals, "Amour" forced us to watch tough end-of-life situations.
Director Michael Haneke's
extreme long takes allow no escape, earning him
the Palme d'Or at
Cannes
after such stunning efforts as "Cache" and "The
White Ribbon." Like
Henry
Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in "On Golden Pond,"
"Amour" casts
legendary French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant
("The Conformist") and
Emmanuelle Riva ("Hiroshima, Mon Amour") in the
twilight of their
careers.
As Trintignant describes a film he once saw as a
child, he sums up "Amour." You'll walk out
struggling to recall the story, but
will be overcome with emotion surrounding the true meaning
of love: in sickness
and in health.
★ ★ ★ ★
4. 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and
the Golden Camera at
Cannes, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" makes
mythic poetry out of
gritty, third-world conditions. Shot with non-
actors on real post-
Katrina locations, the coming-of-age story tells
of survival and
community after a levee breaks in the
Louisiana delta. Six-year-old
Quvenzhane Wallis
is a revelation as the adorably tough Hushpuppy,
who slurps crab meat,
survives a hurricane, bonds with her father,
searches for her mom and
stares down fantastical beasts known
as Aurochs. If a tear
down her tiny cheek doesn't give you a lump in
your throat, I don't
know what will. The Academy may not have the
guts to give her Best
Actress, but she deserves
to be there on Oscar
night.
★ ★ ★ ★
REVIEW:'Beast' child
performance lifts 'Wild'
to greatness
3. 'Zero Dark Thirty' While "Skyfall" revived 007, the year's best CIA tales
were real, from
"Argo" to "Zero Dark Thirty." Director Kathryn Bigelow
and screenwriter
Mark Boal reunite after their Oscar-winning "The Hurt
Locker" (2009) to
chronicle the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The story is
told through the
eyes of Maya, a determined CIA agent who shows
the boys how
it's done. Move over, Jodie Foster. There's a new
badass heroine
orchestrating a night-vision climax in the monster's
lair, and her name
is Jessica Chastian. At times, her character feels like
an on-screen
proxy for Bigelow, who layers the film with marvelous
detail, down to a
black cat crossing the screen before a suicide bombing.
Limited
engagements have begun in New York and Los Angeles,
before coming
to Washington on Jan. 11. Fifty years from now, Oscar
historians
may look back and say this was Bigelow's peak.
★ ★ ★ ★
2. 'Argo' If the story were made up, no one would have
believed it. The fact that
it
was
true made for one unbelievable movie. "Argo"
captured the zeitgeist of
the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi by telling
the tale of a CIA rescue
mission during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979,
where U.S. diplomats posed as a Canadian film crew in order to
escape. The
scenes in Tehran make for
nail-biting parallel action, while John Goodman
and Alan Arkin spit a
profane trademark that could catch on like
"FUBAR." I'm beginning to
like Affleck more as a filmmaker than an actor,
having co-written
"Good
Will Hunting" and directed "Gone Baby Gone" and
"The Town." Not since "Apollo 13" have we seen a real-life tale so
thrilling, so
inspiring and so patriotic as "Argo,"
celebrating the best of Washington intelligence
and the height of
Hollywood imagination.
★ ★ ★ ★
REVIEW:Art imitates
life in Affleck's new CIA thriller 'Argo'
1. 'Lincoln' I've seen it now three times and each time my
admiration
for Steven
Spielberg's biopic grows. While the film
should have ended with Lincoln's departure for
Ford's
Theater, Daniel
Day-Lewis' performance belongs to the ages, bringing
our greatest
president to life with nuanced politicking,
Euclid lessons
and
comic relief. Those with short attention spans
may echo a
cabinet
member who says, "Not another one of your
stories," but we
should all
lean in, listen and learn. The important should never become the
victim of the expedient, so in choosing the Best Film of 2012, I echo
Lincoln's choice between ending the war vs.
ending
slavery: "If you
could look into the seeds of time, which will
grow
larger?" In an era of
"Twilight" teens, "Lincoln" is a vampire hunter,
cloaked
in immense
power, settling the issue of instant gratification
forever and providing hope that inspired,
intelligent
films shall
not perish from this earth.
★ ★ ★ ★
REVIEW:History comes
to life in
Spielberg's 'Lincoln'
