This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 27, 2012 - In going over the movies I saw this year in search of my 10 favorites, I was struck with how many of the films I liked and considered for the year-end list were essentially action movies: "Skyfall," "The Bourne Legacy," "Argo," "Django Unchained," "Safe House," "Flight," "The Dark Knight Rises," "Zero Dark Thirty." What a concept: action movies with complex moral themes, action movies for grownups! Is Hollywood finally coming of age? (Or am I?)
Most of those grown-up action movies actually did reasonably well at the box office. Predictably, the franchise sequels did particularly well — the return of Batman in "The Dark Knight Rises" raked in about $450 million in domestic gross, second overall only to "The Avengers" (more than $600 million).
And "Skyfall," the latest James Bond movie, took in $273 million, fifth overall. (Third overall with $408 million was "The Hunger Games." Fourth was part two of "The Twilight Saga," $277 million.)
Of course, not all action movies were successful, either artistically or at the box-office. Two of the biggest financial turkeys of the year were high-budget high-promo high-computer-graphics low-brow titan-clashers — "Battleship" and "John Carter." I don't know anybody who saw "John Carter," me included. I sure heard a lot about it, though.
To continue in the personal vein, three favorite directors disappointed with sub-par offerings: Woody Allen released the stale "To Rome with Love," David Cronenberg put out the cold and maddeningly talky "Cosmopolis," and Paul Thomas Anderson directed the ambitious but not very enlightening "The Master." (I know I'll get a fair amount of argument on the last call, perhaps even from the thousands of people who vote for the Academy Awards. I just didn't find the characters in "The Master" very interesting.)
Added downer: there was no Coen brothers movie this year — reportedly their film about Greenwich Village in the folk era will be out early next year. On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino is back with one of his best movies, a very promising new filmmaker emerged from "the Southern Wild," and Wes Anderson is on target again after a couple of near-misses.
10 best movies of 2012
Anna Karenina: With breathtaking camera movements and operatic thunder and lightning, without ever sacrificing the essential themes of this great work of literature, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard bring new life to Tolstoy's deeply romantic story of Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) and her desperate, doomed love affair with the dashing Count Vronsky. A kaleidoscopic vision of a world long vanished from the earth.
Argo: Ben Affleck proved with his 2010 Boston heist flick "The Town" that he could simultaneously star in and direct a suspenseful thriller. With his riveting tale of six American hostages escaping from revolutionary Iran in 1979 by pretending to be a movie crew, he proves that he can tell a more serious story without losing an iota of the suspense. Wonderful acting in support by John Goodman and Alan Arkin.
Beasts of the Southern Wild: Young Quvenshane Wallis gives a magical performance as 6-year-old Hushpuppy in an extraordinary independent film set in lower Louisiana. The film is deeply mythic and at the same time grounded in the undeniable, gritty details of real life as Hushpuppy copes with a mentally unstable father, survives a flood, searches for her long-lost mother and anticipates the arrival of rough beasts unleashed by global warming.
Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino's Christmas Day release is a marvel, a spaghetti-style, over-the-top Western that is hugely entertaining and has a strong moral core. Jamie Foxx is terrific as a freed slave who teams up with an unlikely bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to rescue his enslaved wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of lascivious plantation owner Leonardo DiCaprio and satanic house slave Samuel L. Jackson. An audacious, exciting, sometimes quite funny revenge saga.
The Flat: A fascinating Israeli documentary about a filmmaker and his family sifting through the belongings of his deceased grandparents and trying to figure out why the couple, who had immigrated to Palestine from Germany after Hitler took power, had maintained over many years what seemed to be a close friendship with an aristocratic Nazi. A tantalizing mystery unfolds as the filmmaker travels to Germany to ask questions of his relatives and finally of a descendent of the Nazi.
Lincoln: Steven Spielberg had the good sense to hire Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") to write a screenplay, loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," about the final months of Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the fight to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a remarkably realistic and unforced performance as the president, Sally Fields is appropriately scolding as the First Lady, and Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader and a panoply of other skilled actors give marvelous performances as various political types who are not above bribery or blackmail to achieve victory for a worthy cause. I only wish Spielberg had ended the film about 10 minutes sooner, with Lincoln walking out of the White House, saying he had to go, but he wished he could stay.
Monsieur Lazhar: A guilt-ridden middle-age Algerian whose family was murdered in sectarian fighting seeks refuge in Montreal and becomes a substitute teacher. He takes over a class whose regular teacher had committed suicide in the school and, against the instructions of his principal, tries to heal the students’ pain by openly talking about their feelings about the suicide, befriending one girl in particular and helping to bring her out of a depression. An insightful, gently comic, bittersweet look at how human beings deal with a legacy of pain, and a telling portrait of the contemporary classroom, where rules, perhaps necessary, restrain teachers from becoming personally involved with their students.
Moonrise Kingdom: In the latest whimsical creation of Wes Anderson, it's 1965 and love seizes two lonely, neglected, bookish 12 year olds on an island off the coast of New England. The two run away to a beautiful, hidden inlet and, very briefly, make a life together, pursued by gaggles of police and Scouts of all ages. Anderson tugs us into his wonderland, a gently stylized version of the real world, and takes us on a memorable trip. The actors include Bruce Willis as a policeman, Edward Norton as a Scoutmaster, and Bill Murray and Francis McDormand as well-meaning but clueless parents. Magical.
Silver Linings Playbook: Bradley Cooper gives a compelling performance as a bi-polar school teacher in a barely controllable manic phase -- he caught his wife with another man and beat him nearly to death. At about the point that the grandiose paranoia and fuel-injected logorrhea of Cooper's character threatens to drive you from the theater, he meets Tiffany (the marvelous Jennifer Lawrence), who is only moderately crazy. Slowly and delightfully, the movie, directed by David O. Russell ("Three Kings"), turns into an almost formulaic romantic comedy, and thank the heavens for that. An intelligent heartwarmer, with a superb performance by Robert De Niro as Cooper's father, a crazed fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. (Everybody in this movie is at least a little crazy.)
Zero Dark Thirty: Jessica Chastain is masterful as iron-willed Maya, a CIA analyst obsessed with the search for Osama Bin Laden, in the new military thriller by Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker"). More than a decade seems to flash by in an instant as vast amounts of information gathered from a myriad of sources, seemingly including waterboarding of an imprisoned terrorist, comes together to point to a two-story house in Pakistan with a wall around it and at least one resident who never emerges. With impeccable acting and directing, and a stunning climactic scene shot almost entirely through night-vision lenses.