2012 was a ho-hum year for "serious" cinema. As proof, the Oscar race has narrowed to films like the chipper Argo and dreary Zero Dark Thirty — a chase so routine that the alternative is a Steven Spielberg period piece as wholesome and agreeable as enriched bread. But it was also a banner year for the films that we'll still want to watch in 2022: Ambitious over-reachers (Cloud Atlas, The Master, Les Miserables), loony passion projects (Killer Joe, Magic Mike, The Paperboy), and perfect popcorn flicks (Step Up 4, The Expendables 2, Premium Rush).
That last category is frequently left off top ten lists, but it deserves our applause. When studios get tired of risking $250 million on a single blockbuster (and audiences get tired of paying $14 just to keep up with water cooler conversation), mid-priced modest hits like Looper will be our collective salvation — and help build the next generation of filmmakers and stars. The films that made my Top Ten did so because they were bold, memorable and flawless (or at least two of the three). But of course, if critics can judge art, we should take our own creative risks. And so I've written my remarks in haiku.
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There are no movie stars in Brazil. When a local comedy show asked people to list the most famous Brazilians, the top three were Gisele Bundchen, Pele, and Blanka — the green ogre from Street Fighter 2 who got his powers from the bite of an Amazonian electric eel. So far in 2012, not a single Brazilian-made movie has cracked the top ten in the country's own box office — in fact, to find a domestic hit, you have to go all the way down to the romantic comedy E Ai...Comeu?, which to date has made about half of as many reals as Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. [Ed. correction: The production Até que a Sorte nos Separe does rank as Brazil's #10 box office performer of 2012.] But Brazil does have soap stars. And at the Amazonas Film Festival in Manaus, Brazil — the heart of the Amazon — soap stars, dozens and dozens of them, all handsome and cheerful and thrilled by their own fame, were the main event.
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Long before Chick-fil-A fried their way into the center of a gay rights firestorm, Compliance director Craig Zobel was searching for the right setting to tell his chilling tale of order and obedience gone terribly wrong at a fast food joint. “In the back of my head, I probably could have told you that they were on the wrong side of history,” said Zobel, who rocked Sundance with the drama, based on incredible true events, in which a telephone prankster manipulates the manager of a fictional chicken restaurant into the increasingly dehumanizing treatment of one of her employees. "I just didn’t want to look at it."
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Every performer must pay their dues, but with this week’s old school-flavored ghost pic The Innkeepers character actor Pat Healy cashes in over a decade of memorable supporting turns and guest spots for the spotlight at an auspicious moment in his career. Having popped up in a number of great films over the years (Magnolia! Ghost World! Rescue Dawn!) Healy stars with Sara Paxton in the Ti West film as a sardonic desk clerk at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, where spooky happenings are afoot; meanwhile, Healy also earned writing credits on the award-winning In Treatment and recently took Sundance by storm with Craig Zobel’s controversial Compliance. And to think: It all began with the one-two punch of My Best Friend’s Wedding and Home Alone 3…
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As the 2012 Sundance Film Festival drew to a close with a flurry of sales, Movieline posed THE question to a panel of critics and bloggers: What was the best film of this year’s festival? While many of Sundance’s high profile offerings came and went with a whimper, a few notable titles rose to the top of Movieline’s poll; fest darling and Grand Jury Prize winner Beasts of the Southern Wild earned wild praise among our pundits, for example, but so too did some of this year’s more controversial entries. Hit the jump to see which top films the critics picked.
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Park City did indeed turn out to be a robust marketplace this year, with buyers snapping up over two dozen features and docs out of Sundance 2012. Ranging from genre pleasers to indie charmers to potential future Oscar picks and beyond – and veering from critical fest duds to overwhelming crowd favorites – the class of Sundance ’12 is an intriguingly mixed-but-mostly-promising bag of films that will be dotting the cinematic landscape in the year or so to come. Here’s an updated comprehensive look at what sold and which films you should be looking forward to.
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Every so often festivals feature films that so offend the sensibilities of audience members that post-screening Q&As take an ugly turn, with upset viewers voicing their beefs, and loudly, straight to the filmmakers in attendance. This year that provocation came in the form of Craig Zobel's Compliance, a drama based on an outrageous real-life crime that drew immediate backlash from some in attendance. Is being this year's The Killer Inside Me/The Woman a buzz-building coup for the film?
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