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7 Ruby Sparks
Directors: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Cast: Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Chris Messina, Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas
If you didn’t know better you’d swear that Ruby Sparks was a Michel Gondry film. In look, feel, tone, attitude and theme Ruby Sparks resembles the quirky, oddball oeuvre of the Gallic weird-meister. It even starts off sweetly, then takes an eerie, freaky turn towards the end.
It’s a high concept film: what if you could write your ideal partner into existence? What makes it slightly chilling even from the start is that the fictional ideal partner here, the eponymous Ruby Sparks, has no idea she isn’t real. And the social misfit author who creates her, Calvin, can keep rewriting her, so that if she decides that the relationship isn’t going anywhere, he can make sure she changes her mind.
So what starts out as whimsical comedy (“Let’s make her talk French!”) rapidly becomes a deeper tale about free will and obsession. It’s the kind of thing you need to watch with a mixed-sex group so you can all argue about it afterwards. Entertaining and thought-provoking – what more could you want from a film?
Intriguingly, the film is not only written by Zoe Kazan – the actress playing Ruby – but Kazan has also been dating the film’s star, Paul Dano, for five years. Knowing that somehow makes the film operate on a whole other meta level.
Dave Golder
6 Holy Motors
Director: Leos Carax
Cast: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
There was nothing else like Holy Motors this year. In terms of giddy self-knowing lunacy and sheer audacity, nothing even came close. Suffice to say, director Leos Carax really broke the mould with this one.
Following the exploits of Monsieur Oscar, a chameleonic actor who is ferried around Paris to various appointments, Holy Motors is an artistic examination of the masks we must wear everyday, that retains an incredible sense of fun and experimentation.
Denis Lavant gave one of the performances of the year as the actor, and whether eating a supermodel’s hair as the grotesque Mr Merde or performing an erotic dance for a strange computer simulation, he brought a commitment and physicality to the role that marked him out as a master of the craft.
More than anything else released this year, Holy Motors was highly affecting. Scenes of supreme sadness rubbed up against exuberant musical performances and beautifully-detailed character studies, shocking imagery quickly punctured by belly laughs. It didn’t just stay with you after you left the cinema; it infected your consciousness, making it one of the most memorable and downright impressive films of the year, hands down.
Rob Power
5 Dredd
Director: Pete Travis
Cast: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey, Wood Harris, Domhnall Gleeson
Finally, a screen version of the 2000 AD character fans can respect. It gets to the heart of the comic we’ve loved for 35 years – it isn’t about the width of Dredd’s Lawmaster tyres, it’s about his attitude and the way he enforces the law no matter what preposterous situation he encounters.
Karl Urban simmers as the badass lawman and although his world is even grimier than we were expecting, every performance in the film is note perfect.
It’s also beautifully brutal; slow-mo action scenes linger on every punctured body part, the hyperreal colours and editing giving the action scenes a balletic edge. Short, punchy and containing a few well-placed nods to the source material, ultimately Dredd is a deceptively simple cop-buddy drama.
What a shame nobody went to see it and we won’t get a sequel!
David Bradley
4 The Dark Knight Rises
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman
Even Christopher Nolan couldn’t top The Dark Knight . He knew it. We all knew it. But rather than let The Joker have the last laugh, Nolan and his screenwriter-brother Jonathan delivered a very different breed of bat with The Dark Knight Rises .
Instead of a battle of wits, Rises is a physical war of attrition. Bruce Wayne is a physical wreck, Bane is a force of nature and the action is more muscular than ever before. Nolan keeps the action grounded while still allowing this threequel to be the most comic-booky of the trilogy, bringing the themes of the first film full circle in the process.
But it isn’t the heavy-duty set-pieces that impress the most – it’s the emotion.
Women have been short-changed in Nolan’s Bat-verse to date, but not so here. Anne Hathaway’s sassy Selina Kyle is the highlight of an already spectacular ensemble. Her budding love affair with Bruce is the light at the end of the tunnel for the billionaire playboy, but the real love story is between Bruce and the men in his life – Alfred and Gordon. We defy even hardened cinemagoers not to feel a lump in their throat when Batman reveals: “A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a little boy’s shoulder to let him know that the world hadn’t ended.” Or the moment Alfred’s dream becomes reality in a Florence café.
The Dark Knight Rises has its fair share of problems and plot holes, but the sublime final 20 minutes, when Nolan fully realises the mantra he established at the beginning of Batman Begins – that as a symbol Batman can be everlasting (with a little help from Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s John Blake) – goes a long way to obliterating any misgivings about what comes before.
Bane’s peculiar voice, Hans Zimmer’s powerful score, Wally Pfister’s stellar cinematography… there’s little about The Dark Knight Rises that doesn’t scream class, and how often is that the case in blockbuster cinema, let alone the superhero genre? No-one will ever top Nolan’s bat-trilogy on the big screen, and while this might not be the best of the three, it easily ranks among the best of the year.
Jordan Farley
3 Avengers Assemble
Director: Joss Whedon
Cast: Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johannson, Samuel L Jackson
Over the past twelve months, we’ve seen Christopher Nolan complete his Batman trilogy, Peter Jackson return to Middle-earth and Andrew Garfield rejuvenate Spidey. But have no doubt: 2012 belonged to the Avengers.
It’s easy to see why. Joss Whedon is a genius, we all know that, and he brought together Marvel’s mightiest like the genre-striding colossus that he is. Herding superheroes like he’d been doing it all his life, Whedon produced a sparkling script full of instantly quotable one-liners and city-shattering action.
Somehow, Avengers was better than anyone had dared to hope. For the first time in the Marvel movie universe, multiple big-name superheroes clamoured for our attention on the screen, an embarrassment of riches when you consider the cast and characters involved. Robert Downey Jr, now firmly settled as the brightest star in the big screen Marvel firmament, dazzled as usual, alongside a supremely sultry Scarlett Johansson and a simply sublime Mark Ruffalo. Yes, Joss even got the Hulk right – who’d have thought it was possible?
The Avengers movie most of us never thought we’d see, it confirmed Marvel’s ascent to big screen dominance and had us all panting for more. The second instalment can’t come quickly enough.
Rob Power
2 Chronicle
Director: Josh Trank
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B Jordan
Chronicle achieved the impossible; it was so good that nobody cared it was a found-footage film. In fact, any criticism leveled at the film tended to be about how ludicrous it had to be to stretch credulity to justify the found-footage conceit at times. Few moaned about having to stretch credulity to believe that a slacker teen could fly.
That’s because Chronicle is exquisitely written, directed and acted. And while ostensibly it’s a film about three teenagers who discover they have superpowers, from the very first scene – with socially awkward Andrew making a video diary in his bedroom as his drunken, abusive dad beats on the door and swears at him – you realise that this is going to be more, so much more than a low budget X-Men . It’s a film about relationships. Broken ones, mainly.
While the film has many grim moments, it also has moments filled with an intoxicating joie de vivre, especially when Andrew and his friends are learning to fly. Amazingly for a low-budget production, it has some of the most believable and exhilarating “you’ll believe a man can fly” scenes ever committed to film. This possibly has less to do with the FX and more to do with the performances and direction.
Chronicle also boasts a stunning final battle. It’s pure comic strip action, underpinned by raw emotion and a sense of tragedy. The Avengers ’ finale may have been more spectacular, but Chronicle ’s somehow has just as much impact.
Dave Golder
1 Looper
Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Noah Segan, Paul Dano, Piper Perabo, Garrett Dillahunt
In a year dominated by prequels, sequels and trips to long-established worlds, Looper scores points simply for being set in an entirely new universe. Far more important, however, is the fact it’s also the brainiest, most inventive and most tightly-plotted sci-fi film of 2012.
Rian Johnson’s previous movies, Brick and The Brothers Bloom , had marked him out as a writer/director to watch, and he puts his considerable storytelling talents to brilliant use here. Working with the highest of high concepts – a hitman employed to kill victims sent back from the future misses when his older self is the target – Johnson packs the film with time travel, action, family drama and loads more, not to mention a couple of dramatic curveballs.
As with all time travel movies, Looper doesn’t make sense if you analyse it too closely, but that doesn’t matter, because Johnson has a Back To The Future -like knack for keeping his logic consistent. Besides, the time travel is a tiny part of the story, essentially just a cunning ruse to get the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a room with his older self (a similarly ace Bruce Willis). It’s unashamedly complicated, but with Johnson to hold your hand – every plot twist feels totally organic within the flawless whole – it’s one hell of a ride. An instant classic.
Richard Edwards
Oh, in case you’re interested, the bottom 10 films were (with worst at the top):
1 The Devil Inside
2 Piranha 3DD
3 The Darkest Hour
4 House At The End Of The Street
5 Love Bite
6 The Watch
7 Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance
8 Wrath Of The Titans
9 Chernobyl Diaries
10 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
