Barbara

Rating: 8

A German cold war movie in the spirit of The Lives of Others.  Beautifully gripping and atmospheric.

Jack Reacher

Rating: 7

Surprised myself by enjoying it quite a bit!!  What can I say, Tom Cruise is a kook but he branches out sometimes and does interesting stuff.

This is 40

Rating: 6

Some cute moments but I expected more.

Best/Worst of 2012

Best:

10: End of Watch - Jake Gyllenhaal cop movie

9: Flight - Denzel as an addict

8: The Grey - Made me like Liam Neeson. Already liked wolves.

7: Prometheus - Not Alien but still great

6: Bernie - True crime treat

5: Anna Karenina - Luscious

4: The Imposter - TRUE true crime!

3: Killing Them Softly - Gorgeous noir

2: The Big Picture - French noir

1: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry -  You think you won't like a documentary about a Chinese artist, but you will!!


Worst:

5: Beasts of the Southern Wild- So much hype, so little anything

4: The Dark Knight Rises - My hopes were too high I guess

3: Killer Joe - Why?

2: The Dictator - You can do much better, Sascha Baron-Cohen

1: Lincoln - Throw in the towel, Spielberg. Please.


Little Gems:

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Savages
Magic Mike
Wanderlust
Our Idiot Brother
Looper
Arbitrage
The Campaign
Sinister

Love / Hate:

The Master -
Love: Cinematography, acting, music
Hate: Script, acting

Cloud Atlas -
Love: Weird concept, weird casting (Hugh Grant?), acting, art direction
Hate: Awful face prosthetics, 172 Minute length

The Big Picture

Rating: 9

Gripping from start to finish, in what seems to be a sumptuous and hopefully lasting trend of French thrillers.

Killing Them Softly

Rating: 9

The first second of the opening credits alert us not to expect anything conventional here.  Extremely compact and total genius.  I hope the director, New Zealander Andrew Dominik, finally gets some much overdue recognition.

Lincoln

Rating: 3

Spielberg seems to have replaced all his scrappiness with sanctimony. I wish he'd stick to sharks & aliens and move slowly away from historical figures and ham-fisted morality plays. All around blech.

Life of Pi

Rating: 6.5

Magical realism and a beautiful look into the world of animals make the movie. I had to willfully ignore some of the heavy-handed spirituality. It was worth it for that fantastic tiger. The meerkats were pretty great too.

Silver Linings Playbook

Rating: 8.5

Another one I didn't expect to like as much as I did. Heartfelt but not sappy, quirky but not cutesy.

Savages

Rating: 7

I can't say I enjoyed it considering the amount of explicit murder and torture, but it's a pretty darn good movie.

Anna Karenina

Rating: 9

It's the perfect Thanksgiving day movie: lavish, overindulgent and enormously satisfying.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Rating: 10

I knew very little about Ai Weiwei going in, and now he is my favorite and most respected artist.  Just because of the movie!  That's saying something.

Bernie

Rating: 9

I once heard Jack Black say in an interview that he isn't really an actor, he just plays versions of himself. He's wrong. His performance in Bernie is as good as any I've seen.  The story is based on a true incident and the movie does something completely unique that I'm not going to spoil here.  If you can, please see it.

Prometheus

Rating: 9

There's a huge gap of movies I can't remember during the time I neglected the blog but I'm catching up on a few that stood out and deserve a mention. First: Prometheus.

It totally lived up to my expectation which is a feat since there were six months of trailers leading up to it. Ridley Scott turned me into a SciFi fan with Alien and Blade Runner and is a master of most genres.  Prometheus is horrifying and beautiful.

Flight

Rating: 9

Methinks it will get some Oscars, and methinks it deserves some.

Cloud Atlas

Rating: 7

The good: The sci-fi / future sequences are mesmerizing and it's a wonderful vehicle for Tom Hanks. Certainly the best I've seen him in a long time. All the actors play multiple characters and they seem to be having a blast.  The bad: Enough with the face prosthetics! They are nothing but distracting("Hey, that's Susan Sarandon with a fake nose!! Wait, is it just a fake nose or a fake chin too? What does her real nose look like? Perky, as I recall...." etc, etc, says Hilary's brain about a frillion times during Cloud Atlas) and until technology catches up which I'm sure it will eventually and quite frankly I can't figure out why we're not there yet except maybe we are and this is just a personal pet peeve I can't get over, which is my friend Edge's theory.

All in all, worth seeing.

Argo

Rating: 8

Almost as good as The Town, with bonus appearance by Walter White!

Sinister

Rating: 9

Not perfect but still scared the crap out of me.

The Master

Rating: 6

Sad to day how disappointed I was.  As a devoted PT Anderson fan and closet Scientology conspiracy theory observer I guess my hopes were a bit high.  Having said that, cinematography was stellar, music gorgeous and performances captivating.  Though Joaquin is getting high props for his work, his presence was so unpleasant I couldn't wait for him to exit the screen. The jury's still out on whether that constitutes a great performance or an overwrought one.

Looper

Rating: 8

Enjoyed everything about the movie except JGL's distracting face prosthetics.  For more on this topic, see my review of Cloud Atlas.

Haywire

Rating: 8

Did not expect to like it. Liked it!

The Artist

Rating: 9

That man. That dog. Oh my god.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Rating: 9

I'm irrationally bonkers for Gary Oldman. So, though the plot made no sense to me whatsoever, I adored it. Yeah, Gary played the Alec Guinness role and killed it. And Colin Firth is in it. And John Hurt. And Tom Hardy. And the director is the man who directed the original Let The Right One In. Fuck you, The Help! I'm rooting for Tinker Tailor!

Hugo

Rating: 7.5

I wish I'd seen it in 3D. I almost never think that.

The Descendants

Rating: 6

Whatever.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Rating: 9

Rooney Mara! Right?

A Dangerous Method

Rating: 8

Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen! OK the movie has a weird way of making sexual perversion - or the 1930s version of it - kind of boring. There's a pre-WWII metaphor lurking beneath the surface here which is a shameful waste of some naughty good ingredients.

Shame

Rating: 8

So I saw Shame and A Dangerous Method within a week of each other. Then I went back and re-watched Inglorious Basterds. Then Michael Fassbender turned up in Haywire and the next day he was on Terry Gross talking about his role in Jane Eyre, which I need to see now. So it seems like I'm a little preoccupied with Micheal Fassbender but it also seems like the universe just won't let me look away.

Young Adult

Rating: 7.5

Don't know how to describe it. Not sure I can recommend it. I did like it, though. Charlize and Patton Oswalt are great together.

The Muppets

Rating: 6.5

Jason Segel and Amy Adams are so good, as are the muppets and Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords, who did the music.

The Skin I Live In

Rating: 9

Just delightful, especially considering all the graphic rape and violence. Seriously. Did they go there? Oh yes they did.

Drive

Rating: 9

Maybe the most under-appreciated movie of 2011. Believe me, I hate car movies and car chases. This isn't about that.

The Help

Rating: 6

These actresses are great. But I think the material is bad. It will win the Oscar, probably. I'm glad for the actresses but there must be a smarter way to tell this story.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Rating: 6.5

Was reluctant to see it because of my rule against any movie with commas or apostrophes in the title but I'd say it's worth seeing for Ryan Gosling. It has some problems. It's not bad. But I stand by my rule.

30 minutes or Less

Rating: 7.5

Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson and Jesse Eisenberg? Come on. It's great.