REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

DAILY | A Lists and Awards Update

The Lists and Awards 2012 Index posted on Tuesday has been beefing up nicely in the past few days, and I thought I’d round up notes on some of the most noteworthy year-end best-of items that’ve appeared since the last news update. Some of these are curious outliers that won’t be indexed, too, so do have a look.

This Is Not a Film

While Jafar Panahi’s ‘This Is Not a Film’ premiered at Cannes in 2011, it was only this year that it was released theatrically

“Two thousand and twelve was, if nothing else, a banner year for uncommonly productive provocation,” begins Calum Marsh, introducing Slant‘s juicily annotated list of the “25 Best Films of 2012”: “Audiences were galled by Rick Alverson’s divisive deconstruction of hipsterdom, The Comedy, beguiled by the taciturn charms of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and, um, probed by the penetrating cultural criticism of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. Masters of cinema both old and new even found time, between saucy bouts of male stripping and fellating chicken parts, to butt heads with every conceivable status quo, grappling admirably with hot-button issues as wide-ranging as colonialism (Tabu), U.S.-endorsed torture (Zero Dark Thirty, maybe or maybe not endorsing it itself), and the very nature of cinema (Jafar Panahi, who didn’t make a ‘film’ at all).”

And at the House Next Door, Slant‘s daily blog, Ed Gonzalez presents “a list of the films that just missed making it onto our list, followed by our contributors’ individual ballots.” Slant‘s other lists: Video Games, TV Shows, Singles, and Albums.

Day by day, the Guardian‘s been rolling out its list of the “10 best films of 2012.” Peter Bradshaw writes up the paper’s #1, The Master. The big surprise is #2: Henry Barnes on Ted, the “crass and sexist” but also “funniest film of 2012,” directed by the host of February’s Academy Awards, Seth MacFarlane.

The three Time Out New York critics present their top tens. David Fear‘s #1: The Master. Joshua Rothkopf‘s: Richard Linklater’s Bernie. And Keith Uhlich‘s: Chantal Akerman‘s Almayer’s Folly.

Two of the New Yorker‘s three film critics have weighed in. Richard Brody explains why Leos Carax’s Holy Motors and Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom are tied for first place on his list. And Anthony Lane: “The real imprint of 2012, to my mind, lay with a trio of European films.” And they are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike, Holy Motors and Béla Tarr‘s The Turin Horse.

Tabu

The German poster

Topping the list from Little White Lies: Miguel Gomes‘s Tabu.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty tops Ann Hornaday‘s list in the Washington Post.

#1 for Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn: Holy Motors. He also lists his “Top 10 Undistributed Films of 2012″ and his “Best Film Performances of 2012″ and you can be sure that Denis Lavant’s is among them. The Playlist is also highlighting the “Breakout Performances of 2012,” but also the “Best Movie Scenes & Moments of 2012.”

Anton Bitel‘s “favorite film of the year” is “Peter Strickland’s meta-horror Berberian Sound Studio, which casts its eye (and ear) back to the 1970s.”

At Artinfo, J. Hoberman presents his thoughts on “Ten Filmmakers That Will Define Cinema’s Next Decade.”

Dennis Cooper lists his “favorite music, fiction, poetry, film, art & internet of 2012.”

The film-related reads of the year for Marc Saint-Cyr have been Geoff Dyer‘s Zona, the newly revised edition of Robert Bresson, edited by James Quandt, and Olivier Assayas, the collection edited by Kent Jones.

Anthony Kaufman writes up the “Top 12 Political Films of 2012.”

At GreenCine Daily, Steve Dollar looks back on the year’s best “Lo-Fi Sci-Fi.”

The Film Doctor rages against his “10 most disliked films of 2012.”

Matt Singer asks Criticwire contributors: “Whether they overrated or underrated it, what movie did most critics get wrong in 2012?”

The AV Club reviews “best music of 2012.” Atlantic staffers and contributors look back on the “Best Book I Read This Year.” And “PANTONE 17-5641 Emerald, a lively, radiant, lush green, is the Color of the Year for 2013.”

Farewell, My Queen

The Louis Delluc Prize has been presented on the second Thursday of December every year since it was created in 1937

Awards.Benoît Jacquot‘s period drama Farewell, My Queen was awarded the Louis Delluc prize by Cannes Film Festival prexy Gilles Jacob and a jury of top French critics at a ceremony held on Friday in Paris,” reports Elsa Keslassy for Variety. “Cyril Mennegun’s character-driven sociopolitical drama Louise Wimmer nabbed the prize for first film.”

The AFI has announced its 2012 awards: ten movies and ten TV shows. “AFI is the only national organization that honors the creative ensembles as a whole, acknowledging the collaborative nature of the art form.”

Django Unchained and Beasts of the Southern Wild lead the the 44th annual NAACP Image awards nominations with four each.

Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook lead nominations for the Screen Actors Guild awards with four each, followed by Les Misérables with three.

At the Playlist, Oliver Lyttelton‘s got the nominations from “the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards (generally known as the Critics Choice Awards), a mainstream-leaning group now in their 18th year. A little more high-profile than some, thanks to having their ceremony televised of late, they’ve embraced stardom even more this year, with the introduction of various A-list-attracting categories like Best Actor/Actress in a Comedy.”

The San Diego Film Critics Society has named Ben Affleck and Argo the best director and film of 2012, while the Las Vegas Film Critics Society’s going for Ang Lee and Life of Pi.

Lists and Awards 2012: Index. For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed. Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily.

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