2012 Best and Worst And Everything In Between

This was a good year for movies. These are films I saw during 2012. As I recall them, some of them have made an indelible impression while others, even as I loved them coming out of the theater, fizzle out in memory. Some gain in estimation, while the hatred I have for the ones at the bottom of the barrel has not abated.
Some of the following films have not been released yet. I am missing several major ones, opening this week and next, which will be added in the coming days.

Extraordinary

Amour. Michael Haneke

Rust And Bone. Jacques Audiard

Caesar Must Die. Vittorio and Paolo Taviani

Beyond The Hills. Cristi Mungiu

Like Someone In Love. Abbas Kiarostami 

The Gatekeepers. Dror Moreh

Very Good

Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino
Bernie. Richard Linklater

Life Of Pi. Ang Lee
Alps. Giorgos Lanthimos
Argo. Ben Affleck

Robot And Frank. Jake Schreier

Celeste And Jesse Forever. Lee Toland Krieger

The Queen Of Versailles. Lauren Greenfield 

Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry. Alison Klayman

Polisse. Maïwenn

Headhunters. Morten Tyldum

Monsieur Lazhar. Phillipe Falardeau

Tabu. Miguel Gomes

Good

Lincoln. Steven Spielberg

No. Pablo Larraín

Hitchcock. Sacha Gervasi
Silver Linings Playbook. David O. Russell 

Moonrise Kingdom. Wes Anderson

Frances Ha. Noah Baumbach

The Bay. Barry Levinson. 

The Cabin In The Woods. Drew Goddard 

Fill The Void. Rama Burshtein

A Late Quartet. Yaron Zilberman

The Dictator. Sacha Baron Cohen
Wanderlust. David Wain
The Woman In Black. James Watkins
Skyfall. Sam Mendes
Barbara. Christian Petzold
Our Children. Joachim Lafosse

Good but Flawed

The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson

Sound Of My Voice. Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij
The Sessions. Ben Lewin 
Footnote. Joseph Cedar 

The Deep Blue Sea. Terence Davies 

Bachelorette. Leslye Headland
How To Survive A Plague. David France

More Flawed Than Good
Zero Dark Thirty. Kathryn Bigelow
This is 40. Judd Apatow 
This Must Be The Place. Paolo Sorrentino

Annoying

Flight. Robert Zemeckis
Anna Karenina. Joe Wright

We Have A Pope. Gianni Moretti

Magic Mike. Steven Soderbergh

Dark Horse. Todd Solondz

Cosmopolis. David Cronenberg 

Something in The Air. Olivier Assayas
The Impossible. J.A. Bayona
Cloud Atlas. The Wachowskis, Tom Twyker
Goodbye, First Love. Mia Hansen Love

Arbitrage. Nicholas Jarecki

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. John Madden 
Take This Waltz. Sarah Polley

Killing Them Softly. Andrew Dominik

The Pits

Beasts of The Southern Wild. Benh Zeitlin

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet. Alain Resnais 

Les Miserables. Tom Hooper
Holy Motors. Leos Carax

Ginger And Rosa. Sally Potter

Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry

This is an excellent documentary by young filmmaker Alison Klayman, about Ai Wei Wei, artist, activist and giant thorn on the side of the Chinese government. It shows how a smart conceptual thinker like Ai is exploiting the capabilities of technology, namely twitter and the internet, to try to shift the balance of power from government to society at large. This movie made me think that the creators of twitter probably never imagined that a gossiping application would become a revolutionary tool for social change. Ai Wei Wei can see that, and is using it very smartly to raise hell.
Ai is one of the world's most famous artists, both because of his provocative conceptual gambits, like destroying an ancient Chinese vase on camera or painting another one with the Coca-Cola symbol, and also for using an amalgam of conceptual art and social media to single-handedly demand, at considerable personal risk, accountability, transparency, democracy, freedom and justice from the notoriously repressive Chinese government.
Ai is angry and fearless, informed (even if he denies it) by having witnessed his father's humiliation at the hands of Mao's "cultural" revolution, one of the most perverse totalitarian cruelties in history. His sense of outrage is visceral: provocation is in his blood. Ai is the product of a confluence of factors, a child of the Maoist persecution of artists and intellectuals, yet at the same time a beneficiary of the westernization of China, someone who was able to leave China and come to New York to start life as an artist. To judge from his global notoriety and his house in Beijing, he has been financially successful. He is the most famous Chinese artist in the world today. Because of his worldwide fame, he was courted by the authorities to collaborate on Bird's Nest stadium (something he later disowned). His twitter feed, accompanied by snapshots, is an abbreviated form of conceptual art. He gets beaten by police, takes a picture, posts it with a pithy remark and soon two hundred thousand people in China and many more the world over (there is a version of the feed in English) are spreading the word. He is a professional provocateur. As a fellow artist says in the film, there is something of a hooligan in him, so he knows how to deal with the hooligans of the Chinese government. In him, the Chinese authorities have met their match.
The terrible 2008 earthquake in Sichuan galvanized him to demand from the Chinese authorities they own up to their "tofu" buildings, badly built schools that collapsed and killed more than 5000 children. In a move that blurs the lines between art and activism, he enlisted a squadron of volunteers who went all over Sichuan asking for the names and ages of the children who died in the quake and then he published the endless list, something that the government should have done. Since then, he has been harassed incessantly by the authorities, who display petty, ruthless and arbitrary methods, which he never fails to meet in contrary acts of defiance. They commissioned him to build a huge artists' studio in Beijing and as soon as it was finished, they decreed to have it razed. He decided to counterattack by inciting people to join a massive party, which he could not attend, because he was under house arrest.
He is an interesting, if uneven conceptual artist, who communicates, through massive installations and acts of artistic defiance, his devotion to the idea of democratic change and a truer reflection of the reality in China today. His installation of millions of ceramic sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is pretty astounding. Devastating also is the colorful giant mural he made out of children's backpacks, stating the phrase, "She lived happily on earth for seven years", a quote from the mother of a young child who perished in the quake. Just as the Chinese authorities are unrepentant about hounding him, so Ai Wei Wei is unrepentant about provoking them. He was detained and incarcerated for three months and they accused him of owing the state over two million dollars in taxes. He just recently lost the case. He is a true agitator and living proof that art, now in cahoots with social media, can be a powerful tool of resistance.