Widescreen Awards: Recognizing the best of film in 2012

And here it is, my final accounting of the best performances and crafts of the year with links to more information in relevant categories.

BEST PICTURE
Into the Abyss (IFC Films)
Killing Them Softly (Weinstein Company)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Cinema Guild)
A Separation (Sony Pictures Classics)
Zero Dark Thirty (Columbia Pictures)



BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)
Asghar Farhadi (A Separation)
Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss)
Ben Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild)

The story of how Zero Dark Thirty came to be (and the fallout that resulted) is probably material enough for a movie itself. Bigelow took a lot of risks, both artistically and politically, in this examination of the people who killed Bin Laden. The risks pay off in a film that serves as a kind of instant history, a clear-eyed examination on 10 years of tremendous change, the ramifications of which we're still parsing.

Farhadi is working on the same level as Ozu. In A Separation, he uses ordinary tragedies and small gestures to reveal a lot about modern Iran and, more universally, the modern family. With Into the Abyss, Herzog creates a wrenching yet unaffected examination of capital punishment in America. Ceylan exhibits a magnificent understanding of his characters and their world in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Zeitlin, meanwhile, is a master of atmosphere, recreating a little of the magic and drama of childhood.



BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)
Richard Gere (Arbitrage)
Woody Harrelson (Rampart)
Joaquin Phoenix (The Master)
Denzel Washington (Flight)

Day-Lewis ventures beyond mere mimicry -- granted, it's difficult to mimick a historical figure who lived before sound or video recordings -- and captures the Lincoln we'd like to know. This Lincoln is a pragmatic politician, well versed in the brinkmanship of Washington. You can feel the weight of history on the president's shoulders, but Day-Lewis really brings the man to life in quiet scenes with common soldiers and Lincoln's own dysfunctional family.

There's a fire in Harrelson's crooked cop 'Date Rape' Brown that's stuck with me for the 11 months since I saw Rampart. Washington captures both the swagger and the self-loathing of a high-functioning alcoholic in Flight, or shall we say freefall. As tonally uneven as I thought The Master was, Phoenix is an unstoppable force as another self-absorbed alkie who finds a kindred spirit in a charlatan of a different sort. Arbitrage makes good use of Gere's movie-star charisma, positioning him as a slippery Wall Street operator in crisis.

Honorable mention goes to Payman Maadi as a father trying to hold his family together in A Separation; Peter Mullan as a rageaholic struggling with pangs of remorse in Tyrannosaur, and Matthew McConaughey as a sociopathic lawman/hitman in Killer Joe.



BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty)
Adepero Oduye (Pariah)
Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea)
Michelle Williams (Take This Waltz)

Maya, a single-minded CIA agent, presents a major challenge to an actress. How do you add nuance to a character with virtually no back-story and scant personal life? The script for Zero Dark Thirty offers very little emotion for Chastain to work with, but she made it work beautifully. There's no pat psychoanalysis here, but you get a very real sense for who Maya is and why she's so guarded. The final scene of catharsis feels earned after following the character's struggles for 2.5 hours (spread across 10 years).

Williams is smart and subtle as a young wife in Take This Waltz, drawn from her affectionate husband and toward a brooding artist neighbor. In Pariah, Oduye creates a spot-on portrait of a young woman's awakening and search for acceptance in a world (and family) hostile toward what she represents. Wallis is a force to be reckoned with in Beasts of a Southern Wild. The movie's success rests largely on five year old's shoulders and more than game. Weisz is heartbreaking as an woman in the midst of a self-destructive spiral over in The Deep Blue Sea.

Honorable mention goes to Stephanie Sigman as an aspiring beauty queen thrust into the world of gang violence in Miss Bala; Linda Cardellini as a reservist struggling with a fractured home front and impending redeployment in Return; Tilda Swinton as the shell-shocked mother of a bad seed in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
 


BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Michael Fassbender (Prometheus)
James Gandolfini (Killing Them Softly)
Samuel L. Jackson (Django Unchained)
Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln)
Seth Rogen (Take This Waltz)

Enigmatic and enchanting, Fassbender is perhaps the only living actor who could have successfully played a Peter O'Toole-obsessed android. In doing so, Fassbender steals every scene he's given in the overall disappointing "Alien" prequel Prometheus. There's so much complex stuff going on with this put-upon creation; it's ironic that the non-human is the most interesting character in the whole movie.

Gandolfini is revelatory as a hitman so full of booze and self-pity he can't shoot straight, or at all, in Killing Them Softly. As a strident abolitionist, Jones brings heart and humor to his handful of scenes in Lincoln. Jackson subverts the conventional master-slave dynamic with his funny and somewhat discomfiting role as the paternal house slave in Django Unchained. Rogen brings unexpected warmth and subtlety to his schlubby cookbook author husband in Take This Waltz.
 


BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Gina Gershon (Killer Joe)
Macy Gray (The Paperboy)
Salma Hayek (Savages)
Nicole Kidman (The Paperboy)
Carey Mulligan (Shame)

For the first time in years, it feels like Kidman is really having fun with a role. Charlotte Bless, a death row groupie with a heart of gold, comes to the screen fully formed. There's some potentially embarrassing scenes in The Paperboy, scenes that would have fallen apart if any restraint had been exercised. Luckily, Kidman throws herself into the role with aplomb, making it all seem natural.
 
Few actors are ever asked, and fewer still are willing to go, to the places Gershon goes with her trailer trash stepmom in Killer Joe. Hayek is a hoot, and surprisingly heartfelt, as the leader of a drug cartel also struggling to connect with a spoiled college-age daughter in Savages. Gray shines in the under-written part of a plain-spoken maid in The Paperboy, infusing her with an inner life and a frank understanding of her place in that world. I wasn't as taken with the sex addiction drama Shame as most, but Mulligan's live-wire Sissy almost makes the two hours of hopeless melancholy worthwhile.

Honorable mention goes to Vanessa Redgrave as a fierce matriarch in the modern-day Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, Kim Wayans as a conflicted mom in Pariah and Sally Field as a believably bipolar Mary Todd Lincoln.



BEST ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE
Another Happy Day
Moonrise Kingdom
The Paperboy
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
A Separation 

A Separation is one of those rare films that feels fully organic, as if the viewer is evesdropping on the struggles of real people. The movie falls on a continuum, presenting a poignant moment in the lives of characters with a past and future just off-screen. A lot of that magic can be attributed to filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, for sure, but he's assembled a fine cast--all unknown to western audiences--without a single weak link.

Other stellar ensembles include the group of old hands (Murray, McDormand, Norton, Willis) and talented newcomers (Gilman, Hayward) inhabiting Moonrise Kingdom; the motley crew (Efron, McConaughey, Kidman, Gray, Cusack) sweating it out in the Southern noir The Paperboy; the search party led by a killer back to the scene of the crime in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; and the family from hell (Barkin, Burstyn, Haden Church, etc.) reuniting for a wedding in Another Happy Day.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (Moonrise Kingdom)
Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty)
Asghar Farhadi (A Separation)
Sarah Polley (Take This Waltz)
Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Lucy Alibar and Ben Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly)
Tony Kushner (Lincoln)
Tom Stoppard (Anna Karenina)
Chris Terrio (Argo)



BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins (Skyfall)
Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty)
Mihai Malaimare, Jr. (The Master)
Seamus McGarvey (Anna Karenina)
Gökhan Tiryaki (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)

Skyfall is perhaps the most beautifully and cohesively shot Bond film ever made thanks to Deakins, shooting on digital for the first time. McGarvey's camera work is just one of the astonishing elements of Anna Karenina. Given the intricate set-ups, lighting must have been a daunting task. Malaimare uses the expansive canvas offered by 65 MM to create some of the year's most astonishing images in The Master. Tiryaki's cinematography makes clever use of space to create Once Upon a Time in Anatolia's unique atmosphere. Zero Dark Thirty's lengthy night sequences presented many technical challenges for Fraser.

Honorable mention goes to Bobby Bukowski for the L.A. atmospherics of Rampart, Bradford Young for the unique look and interesting club scenes in Pariah, and to McGarvey, again, aiding in the synesthesia of We Need to Talk about Kevin.

BEST EDITING
Joe Bini (We Need to Talk about Kevin)
William Goldenberg (Argo)
William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor (Zero Dark Thirty)
John Paul Horstmann and Brian A. Kates (Killing Them Softly)
Jeremiah O'Driscoll (Flight)

Goldenberg and Tichenor's cutting undoubtedly add to the suspense of Zero Dark Thirty, but they also know when to let a shot run long. Bini and O'Driscoll both rise to the occasion in technically challenging projects with We Need to Talk about Kevin and Flight, respectively. Goldenberg, showing up twice here, manages to maintain narrative clarity despite a complicated story and a large ensemble cast in Argo. Horstmann and Kates, meanwhile, adeptly handle both scenes of comedy and suspense in Killing Them Softly.



BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Laurence Bennett, Gregory S. Hooper, Austin Buchinsky and Robert Gould (The Artist)
Alex DiGerlando, Dawn Masi, Annie Evelyn and Erin Staub (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Sarah Greenwood, Niall Moroney and Katie Spencer (Anna Karenina)
J. Michael Riva, David Klassen and Leslie Pope (Django Unchained)
Adam Stockhausen, Gerald Sullivan and Kris Moran (Moonrise Kingdom)

The sets of Anna Karenina are both aesthetically beautiful and technically brilliant, providing a literal stage on which the human tragedy plays out. Moonrise Kingdom and Django Unchained both add a touch of whimsy to their period settings. Beasts of the Southern Wild is by turns gritty and enchanting, but the sense of place is always there. The Artist does a fantastic job of aping the look of big-budget studio pictures from the late '20s and '30s.

BEST MUSIC SCORE
Alexandre Desplat (Moonrise Kingdom)
Dario Marianelli (Anna Karenina)
Max Richter (Perfect Sense)
Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Bebo Valdés (Chico & Rita)

Marianelli's Anna Karenina score (sample) manages to be both sweeping and intimate in all the right places. Desplat's Moonrise Kingdom themes (sample), together with the other music chosen for the film, cast a magical spell. Richter burnishes the poignant melodrama of the apocalyptic Perfect Sense (sample). It's natural that Valdés should score a Chico & Rita, a film largely taken from his experiences as a Cuban jazz pianist; his score (sample) runs the gamut of emotions and styles. Romer and Zeitlin created a memorable and rousing theme (sample) for Beasts of the Southern Wild's young heroine.

BEST SONG
Adele and Paul Epworth for "Skyfall" (Skyfall)
Khaled Mouzanar for "Hashishet Albi" (Where Do We Go Now?)
Taylor Swift, Joy Williams, John Paul White and T-Bone Burnett for "Safe and Sound" (The Hunger Games)

Adele's "Skyfall" (listen here) may get all the glory -- and don't get me wrong, it's one of the better Bond themes -- but it's Khaled Mouzanar's pot anthem "Hashishet Albi" (listen here) that's stuck in my mind this year. Not only is the song a fun bit of aural confection; it also serves as more than just adornment for the opening credits. "Safe and Sound," a T-Bone Burnett production (listen here) that smartly paired Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars, is just a damn fine song.

BEST SOUND DESIGN
Flight
Killing Them Softly
Zero Dark Thirty

The sound of Zero Dark Thirty puts you there with Seal Team 6 through the use of very specific soundscapes. Flight crash sequence is among the best I've seen, due in no small part to the richly textured sound design. Killing Them Softly uses sound in interesting ways, incorporating radio chatter and political speeches to tell the story of a very specific time and place.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
The Dark Knight Rises
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Total Recall

Christopher Nolan knows how to combine CGI and practical effects to create a punchy action sequence, even if the rest of The Dark Knight Rises sags a bit. The Hobbit risks being old hat, but there's enough new stuff here to still inspire awe. When it came to wall-to-wall CGI spectacles this year, Total Recall was a step above the rest of the pack.

The Best Films of 2012

This was an odd and rewarding year to be a film buff. While 2012 offered few unqualified masterpieces (see the bounty that was 2007) and no tidy narratives (2010's Korean "New Wave" or 2011's nostalgia trip), there was an abundance of good-to-great stuff to wade through. With that in mind, I've expanded my usual selection of the year's best to 25, but even that seems inadequate to capture the depth and breadth of material.

I'll delve into this further with later posts, but there are plenty of praiseworthy performances and trade-craft outside of these 25 movies, even hidden in less than stellar films. As disappointingly one-note as Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" was, for me it held one of the best performances of the year. Ditto P.T. Anderson's "The Master," where the acting and cinematography go a long way toward redeeming a film that doesn't seem to know what it wants to say to its audience. Even a stinker like "Total Recall" showcased stunning set design and visual effects. 

Now, to my usual spiel: This list is just a snapshot of what I consider the most entertaining, enlightening and artistically fulfilling movies of the year. My only criteria is that the film had to have been first available for my viewing in 2012. This means some holdovers from 2011 show up here and some films yet to receive wide release won't (I'm looking at you, "Zero Dark Thirty"). Next month, my list may and probably will look different.

Without further ado, here are my 25 favorite films of 2012 with links to Netflix (quite a few are streaming instantly).

Best Films of 2012... so far

With the year slightly more than halfway through and U.S. studios prepping their fall lineups for Oscar consideration, now seems like a good time to review some of the cinematic wonders of the first part of 2012. Because of the way film distribution works in the United States, the best is typically saved for last. That means some of these films probably won't make my final top ten, and likely not even my top twenty. But they are all worthy of recognition and come highly recommended. Quite a few are currently streaming on Netflix. I've provided links where available.

10. PROMETHEUS (U.S., Ridley Scott)

So what if Prometheus isn't in the same league as Ridley Scott's sci-fi opuses Alien and Blade Runner? So what if the mythology is a little creaky and the characters a little thin? Sci-fi epics with this pedigree and this $120 million price tag don't come around often and they must be savored. The cinematography and acting come very close to compensating for the rickety plot and uneven visual effects. Michael Fassbender, as a Peter O'Toole-loving robot, and Charlize Theron, as a robotic corporate ice queen, both chew the luscious scenery with aplomb. For all its faults, Scott demonstrates a level of virtuosity here (at least when it comes to visual composition) that is rarely found in summer blockbusters.

9. SAVAGES (U.S., Oliver Stone)

Savages marks something of a return to form for Oliver Stone, who hasn't been this gonzo since U-Turn more than a decade ago. The intervening years have not been kind. Any Given Sunday was virtually unwatchable, ditto Alexander; World Trade Center was reverent to the point of tedium; W. chickened out on satire and ended up being schlock; and I skipped Wall Street II: The LeBoof Rises altogether.

But this story of a threesome of attractive, semi-legit marijuana growers facing off against a Mexican drug cartel is pure pulpy goodness. It's a platter of homemade jerk chicken and rice served after so many microwaved beef patty dinners. The ending is a bit of a lark, but the journey is full of tense face-offs and memorable one-liners. Salma Hayek, as the materfamilias of a fading cartel, is the highlight of a stellar supporting cast that also includes Demian Bichir, Benicio Del Toro and John Travolta.

8. ANOTHER HAPPY DAY (U.S., Sam Levinson)

If you can see past some of the self-conscious snark, Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day is a raw and funny film about a family of malcontents and sociopaths (i.e. similar to most families). In it, Ellen Barkin packs up her two boys and heads down to Annapolis for the wedding of a third, who she gave up custody of following a bitter divorce. While I don't often like movies that reek of rich people problems, Levinson's film managed to sneak past my defenses.

The very deep cast ― including a world-wary Barkin and an entertainingly brittle Demi Moore ― does an exceptional job of eviscerating one another (with words, with words). Even tender moments, such as a late-night mother-daughter chat between Barkin and old pro Ellen Burstyn, are saturated with the requisite amount of passive aggression and self-pity. Another Happy Day is available to stream instantly on Netflix.

7. TYRANNOSAUR (U.K., Paddy Considine)

Tyrannosaur is a surprisingly self-assured directorial debut for British actor Paddy Considine, best known for playing an ill-fated investigative reporter in The Bourne Ultimatum. Joseph, an alcoholic with a penchant for self-destruction, escapes a beating at the hands of a few hoodlums by hiding inside a Christian thrift store. There he meets and gradually strikes up a friendship with Hannah, a volunteer who has some problems of her own. The film is a slowly-paced character study, but it delivers a few gut-wrenching blows and two poignant performances by veteran character actors Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman. Tyrannosaur is available to stream instantly on Netflix.

6. RAMPART (U.S., Oren Moverman)

Set amid the paranoia of L.A.'s Rampart scandal, Oren Moverman's Rampart is an engrossing character study cloaked in the trappings of a police thriller. The monster under the magnifying glass is Woody Harrelson's David Brown, a Dirty Harry-style cop who two decades earlier would've been a well-regarded straight shooter. But the 1990s are not the 1970s, and even in the '70s Brown would've been a dinosaur. When faced with charges of racism, Brown replies that he hates everyone equally. That's not far from the truth, but it's also not a satisfactory answer. Rampart is a difficult film to take in. It doesn't provide any reason for Brown's behavior and it doesn't apologize for him, either; and that's really how it should be.

5. HAYWIRE (U.S., Steven Soderbergh)

From David Holmes' jazz-infused score to J.J. Perry's intense, hands-on fight scenes, Steven Soderbergh's Haywire exudes cool. The film also serves as an excellent showcase for the skills of MMA fighter Gina Carano as ass-kicking, globetrotting soldier-for-hire Mallory Kane. She's every bit as awesome as James Bond with one-tenth the baggage. And the ass getting kicked includes the likes of Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor and Channing Tatum. There's not much else to say. If you're into this kind of movie, you'll love it. If not, you weren't going to see it anyway.

 

4. PERFECT SENSE (U.K., David Mackenzie)

The world goes out with a whimper in David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense. A love story between a chef and an epidemiologist (Ewan McGregor and Eva Green) unfolds against the backdrop of a pandemic that causes people to lose their senses one by one. And each loss is accompanied by a wave of emotion; for instance people break down into sobbing fits just before losing their sense of smell.

Perfect Sense sounds like the epitome of high-concept, but it's actually a quite contemplative affair. I tend to think the apocalypse will look something a lot like this: less fire, more ice. Mackenzie and screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson do a great job capturing the ways in which people adapt to the loss as well as the gradual breakdown of society around them. The ending, which I can't spoil here, manages to be both wrenching and hopeful.

3. PARIAH (U.S., Dee Rees)

Buoyed by an uncanny performance by Adepero Oduye, who has nearly a decade on her 17-year-old character, Dee Rees' Pariah has drawn a lot of comparisons to Precious. Aside from the fact that both films are coming-of-age stories about teenage black girls, the two couldn't be any more different. Precious was given to ludicrous flights of fancy and over-the-top melodrama. Pariah, the story of a lesbian trying to survive pressures at home and on the street, is playing at a much higher level.

Rees, who also wrote the film, really seems to understand her characters and the film has empathy to spare. The relationships between young Alike and her sister, her strict nursing administrator mother and distant police lieutenant father are all fully realized. Alike's mother (played sensitively by Kim Wayans, apparently the most talented and under-rated member of the Wayans clan) could've been an outright monster, but her most hurtful actions seem rooted in a sense of love and desperation.

2. INTO THE ABYSS (U.S., Werner Herzog) 

Who knew it would take a German to make a clear-eyed, penetrating documentary about America's justice system? Werner Herzog makes his position on the death penalty clear very early in Into the Abyss, but his confession is more a function of integrity than advocacy. Unlike a lot of films on the subject, Herzog's documentary doesn't try to brow-beat his audience into adopting his view. Instead, he takes a comprehensive look at one grisly crime spree and its lasting impact on the criminals, the victims and law enforcement; and on a legal system that punishes one murder by sanctioning another.

Herzog has always had an eye for character and Into the Abyss has memorable characters to spare. A prison chaplain describes a chance encounter with a squirrel on a golf course in front of a cemetery of unmarked graves. He laments the mercy he cannot provide his fellow human beings. A woman whose brother and mother were slain over a car describes her anguish and the relief she felt when their murderer was put to death. But she still doesn't carry a phone for fear of another call with bad news. Although he made his position clear from the onset, Herzog's camera and narration doesn't pass judgment on the wrenching story that unfolds.


Into the Abyss is available to stream instantly on Netflix.

1. A SEPARATION (Iran, Asghar Farhadi)

This Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film is definitely worthy of the hype thrust upon it. Set in modern-day Iran, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation opens with the divorce proceedings of a husband and wife. They still love each other, but they are divided over where to raise their adolescent daughter. The wife insists there are better opportunities outside of Iran. The husband can't leave his responsibilities, including his senile father, for a foreign land. The magistrate, to no one's surprise, sides with the father.

What follows is a complex examination of morality and truth in a society where both are fraught with ideology. Farhadi's film deals with the clash of the fundamentalism and secularism in a refreshingly even-handed way. His parable scales that larger battle down to an escalating conflict between two families and, in doing so, illuminates greater truths about what we value and how we get by.

Honorable Mention:  I WILL FOLLOW (U.S., Ava Duvernay)

While it's true that most of these films are holdovers from 2011 that weren't released outside of New York or Los Angeles until this year, to include Ava Duvernay's stunning I Will Follow in the preceding list would be bending the rules too far. The film received a blink-and-you'll-miss-it release at 21 theaters in 2011 and showed up on DVD back in August to virtually no fanfare. According to RottenTomatoes, only 10 critics ever bothered to review it.

That's a real shame because I Will Follow is one of the most sensitive portrayals of grief I've experienced in any medium. After her aunt Amanda succumbs to cancer, Maye must sort through her aunt's possessions and prepare to return to the life and career she left behind more than a year ago when she decided to become Amanda's caretaker. The film follows Maye on this emotionally-charged day, dealing with neighbors and relatives and the fallout of her decision to put her life on hold.

It's a film about compassion and hope and loss and loneliness, but it eschews the triteness those subjects often engender. It's also noteworthy because it features a predominantly African-American cast. That probably goes a long way toward explaining why this gem has languished in obscurity. Nonetheless, the film's themes are universal and Duvernay handles them deftly. Thanks to the Internet, I Will Follow is now incredibly easy to see. It's currently available to stream instantly on Netflix.