Here’s my list of the best films of 2012: 1) The Kid with a Bike, 2) Beasts of the Southern Wild, 3) Argo, 4) Lincoln, 5) A Separation, 6) Silver Linings Playbook, 7) Take This Waltz, 8) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 9) Elena and 10) Polisse, .
Continuing with my list of 2012’s best films, here are my honorable mentions: Monsieur Lazhar, End of Watch, Rampart, Moonrise Kingdom, Headhunters, Bernie and Detachment.
(Note: I’m saving room for some films that I haven’t yet seen, especially Amour and Zero Dark Thirty, which I won’t get a chance to see until mid-January .)
You can watch the trailers and see my comments on all these films at Best Movies of 2012.
According to Metacritic, all of my picks (except Detachment) were highly rated by prominent critics. I did disdain some well-reviewed films, most notably The Master, which made lots of critics’ end-of-year lists.
(Further Note: A Separation won the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and Monsieur Lazhar was nominated, but neither were widely released in the US until 2012. Similarly, The Kid with a Bike was screened in October 2011 at the New York Film Festival, but was not theatrically released in the US release until March 2012. These films are on my 2012 list because, like most Americans, I couldn’t see them until 2012.)