The List Season

I hear a lot of complaints about the "best of" year end critics' lists, how they're so reductive and they're so repetitive, and how everyone just ends up reinforcing each other's choices. There's a lot of validity to these arguments, but I love year end lists and often I depend on them for recommendations. There hasn't been a single year where I haven't come away from perusing the major and not-so-major critics' lists of the best movies or television shows without having dozens of new titles to add to my personal "to watch" lists. I always hear the same complaints every year around this time about how recent movies have been underwhelming, and there aren't as many good films as there were in years past. And every year, the critics' lists put my fears to rest, because of the sheer scope and volume and variety of different titles.

The professional critics are the most informed members of the media establishment, because it's their job to see and evaluate everything. I try to keep up with all the reviews and the festival reports during the year, but there are always titles that slip through the cracks. The year end lists are a handy aggregation of every critic's biggest recommendations, and a great way to suss out what I've overlooked. I get a huge number of foreign, independent, and documentary titles to look out for, especially the ones that haven't been very high profile. Sure, people are buzzing about "Amour," "Holy Motors," and "Rust and Bone," as possible foreign contenders in the Oscar race this year, but then you have titles like Ann Hui's "A Simple Life," that popped up on Roger Ebert's list today, and Kleber Mendonça Filo's "Neighboring Sounds," a Brazilian drama that appeared on A.O. Scott's. I didn't know either film existed before yesterday. "Bully" and "Searching for Sugar Man" have been the most talked about documentaries, but I'm more excited about tracking down "Detropia," "The Gatekeepers," and "How to Survive a Plague."

Sure, lots of these lists do largely look the same. According to Metacritic, which aggregates many critics' lists and keeps track of how many mentions each films gets, the most popular films of the year among the critical set are "The Master," "Zero Dark Thirty," "Moonrise Kingdom," and "Lincoln," which is not unexpected. However, you're not likely to see many lists that look exactly alike, and there's such a wide range of pictures that make appearances. Crowd-pleasing genre films like "Cabin in the Woods" and "The Raid: Redemption" show up on several lists apiece right alongside obscurities like "Dark Horse" and "Compliance." "Ted" is sitting pretty in the #2 spot of Peter Bradshaw's list, sandwiched right between "The Master" and "Amour." I didn't think much of "The Dark Knight Rises," "Premium Rush," or "Cosmopolis," none of which got a particularly strong reception, but I've seen them on individual lists too, because somebody out there loved them enough to save them a spot.

I tend to trust lists like this more than review aggregators or award wins, because the choices are very personal to a particular reviewer, and the limitation to ten or fifteen or twenty entries means they have to weigh all these different films against each other and weed out the mediocrity. Though they got roughly the same percentage of positive reviews, it's telling that a grand total of nobody put "Hitchcock" on any of these lists, but more than a few found room for "Cloud Atlas." And while every reviewer paid lip service to PIXAR's "Brave," when it came down to it, "Frankenweenie" and "Wreck-It Ralph" emerged as the best regarded mainstream toons of the year. I say mainstream, because there are a pair of independent animated features, Chris Sullivan's "Consuming Spirits" and Don Hertzfeldt's "It's Such a Beautiful Day," that have been picking up a lot of critical buzz despite tiny theatrical runs that didn't even qualify them for the Oscars.

As usual, my own best of the year list won't be ready until next October because I'll be busy tracking down many of these titles. Most people are getting down to the last handful of theatrical releases and ready to call it quits on 2012, but my current "to watch" list still has roughly fifty entries and I don't think I'm done adding to it yet. How could I write an honest list worth a damn without first getting a look at intriguing films like "Chicken With Plums" or "Berberian Sound Studio" or "War Witch"? "Holy Motors" has been such a divisive film, I feel I really should have an opinion on it. After all, at this point last year, I'd only seen six of the films that ultimately ended up on my 2011 Top Ten list. (And more on that in a day or two)

So it may be the end of the year, but for me 2012 movies are just getting started.
---