IT'S ALL IN THE LIST

Along with the usual bushels of dreck, 2012 brought some really remarkable movies. Below, by tradition, are the ten I found most rewarding.

You may notice that a high number—almost half of them—are movies aimed at children; another one has a child as its heroine, and yet another is a love story between two preteens. This phenomenon is due in large part, no doubt, to my availability for screenings often being dependent on my ability to take a ten-year-old along with me.

But even if I had been able to get to Django Unchained or Zero Dark Thirty or Silver Linings Playbook or Les Miserables in time to consider them for this list, I doubt that all of the kidflicks would have been muscled out. It was just an unusually strong year for the genre, and the issues underlying many of them weren’t just kid stuff.

Lincoln—Spielberg’s direction has the iconic power of the great silents, Tony Kushner’s dialogue is majestic, and so is the acting of Daniel Day-Lewis, among others. The movie is uneven in spots, but unforgettable.

Beasts of the Southern Wild—Set in a community outside the levee in Louisiana, Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature is magical realism that feels like a documentary. Quvenzhane Wallis is electrifyingly good as Hushpuppy, the neglected little girl at the center of the story, as is Dwight Henry as her ill father. Also, the musical score was the year’s most soul-stirring.

The Sessions—The story of the poet and essayist Mark O’Brien, who spent most of his life in an iron lung after childhood polio, and his decision to work with a sex surrogate, may sound like a depressing assignment. But Ben Lewin’s movie is bright, warm and funny, and features knockout performances by John Hawkes as O’Brien, Helen Hunt as the surrogate, and William H. Macy as O’Brien’s sympathetic priest, among others.

Argo—Ben Affleck directed and starred in this top-notch spy thriller, juiced-up from the true story of the rescue of six American embassy workers from Tehran in 1979. If Affleck wasn’t the fashionable figure of ridicule that for some reason he is, then on the basis of this film and The Town in 2010, he would already be acclaimed as the best director in this genre since at least Costa-Gavras, if not Hitchcock himself.

The Secret World of Arietty—Tiny people live in bourgeois comfort under the floorboards of a human house, appropriating tiny amounts of what they need from their unwitting hosts. This version of The Borrowers, imported by Disney from Japan’s Studio Ghibli, is a work of delicate enchantment, alternating between quiet comedy and poignancy.

Moonrise Kingdom—Set in Rhode Island in the ‘60s, Wes Anderson’s odd comedy is about a romance between two preteens and how it throws a coastal island community into a tizzy. There’s a misstep here and there, but overall this is Anderson’s best film since Rushmore.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi—This documentary about a master sushi chef in Tokyo would be just a rarefied and elegant specimen of food porn, if it weren’t leavened with humor and fascinating psychology. There’s even a bit of environmental consciousness to it.

Frankenweenie—Tim Burton’s stop-motion feature remake of his own live-action short from the ‘80s was neglected by audiences partly because it was black-and-white. But it’s a really delightful mixture of the Universal Frankenstein pictures with the Boy And His Dog theme. It’s out this month on video; check it out.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits—Give me a break; I love the already-obsolete art of stop-motion animation, and the fact there were two stop-motion features this year does my heart good. This piece of Brit silliness from Aardman Studios gave me as many (intentional) laughs as anything I saw this year.

Wreck-It Ralph—Though it’s another animated feature for kids, this story of an arcade-game villain who goes AWOL in an attempt to become a good guy can take its place with the best movies about trying to find yourself. John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman give wonderful voice to the leads.

A few runners-up and slightly underrated near-misses: Killer Joe, Brave, Safety Not Guaranteed, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Beauty is Embarrassing, ParaNorman, Rise of the Guardians, Big Miracle, Hotel Transylvania, Marley, Dark Shadows, Trouble With the Curve, Chimpanzee, Mirror Mirror, The Hunger Games, The Dark Knight Rises, Ice Age: Continental Drift (and its excellent accompanying Simpsons short The Longest Daycare), Skyfall, The Amazing Spider-Man, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, and an honorable mention for the splendid documentary Paul Williams: Still Alive, which might have cracked the Top Ten if it wasn’t a 2011 release, but which played the Valley Art in July.

THE MOON ALSO RISES

As much as any Tolkien geek or Star Trek nut, Wes Anderson delights in invented worlds of immersive detail. At times he’s like a little kid, showing you the pictures he’s drawn in a spiral-bound notebook. The difference is that his invented worlds aren’t fairy-tale domains or distant planets, they’re embellishments on twee upper-middle-class Boomer-era culture, especially as experienced by adolescents, and by the eternal adolescents that this culture produced.

The conceit of Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums (2001) was that we were seeing enacted a Salinger-esque midcentury Manhattan novel. In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) he went so far as to invent marine species, like the “Sugar Crab” or the “Jaguar Shark” (charmingly stop-motion animated by Henry Selick), for his titular TV star/explorer hero to chronicle.

His latest, co-written with Roman Coppola, is Moonrise Kingdom, a pubescent star-crossed love story set on fictitious New England coastal islands in 1965, and it’s as obsessively imagined as the rest. Anderson gives us maps, fake meteorological history delivered by an authoritative-sounding Chorus (Bob Balaban), a warren-like house with an intricate floor-plan, a made-up scouting organization for boys called the “Khaki Scouts”—with its own magazine, Indian Corn—and a series of “young reader” novels pored over by the heroine that truly look like the sort of thing you’d have found on a Bookmobile in that era. The movie is a ‘60s childhood as it should have been, but also, specifics aside, as it sort of was.

Said heroine is twelve-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward), whose cold-fish Dad (Bill Murray) and repressed Mom (Frances McDormand) are both lawyers. At first the stonefaced Suzy is a little creepy, peering through binoculars out the windows of her handsome home, but even though she’s capable of violent outbursts she’s no bad seed. She’s a romantic, keeping vigil for her beloved.

He arrives in the form of Sam (Jared Gilman) a runaway from a Khaki Scout camp on the island. A year earlier, he saw her as The Raven in a local production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, and knew immediately he’d found the meaning of life. They talked only once, but she invited him to correspond, and he did not shirk.

The two of them run away together. Sam, an orphaned foster child, tries to impress her with his woodcraft, unaware that his ardor has already won her heart. They camp out, and she reads to him from her favorite books as he smokes a corn-cob pipe. Needless to say, their idyll drives the rest of the island into a tizzy.

Besides Suzy’s parents, the worriers include the earnest Khaki Scoutmaster (Edward Norton) and the slow-spoken, sad-sack Police Captain (Bruce Willis). The other Khaki Scouts treat the operation not as a search for two missing children but as a manhunt for potentially dangerous fugitives; they fan out, armed to the teeth.

More complications arise, including a Deus ex machina storm, and eventually a Social Services representative (Tilda Swinton in striking blue) and a Khaki Scout bigwig (Harvey Keitel) enter the action as well. Willis gives one of those performances that he’ll be remembered for after most of his action roles are likely forgotten, Norton is touching, the kids are excellent, and Murray and McDormand are effective even if they get less than usual to do here. Robert Yeoman’s water-color-ish cinematography is ravishing—there’s a shot of Willis crossing a church roof that has the austere devotional beauty of an image from Dreyer—and so is the music, by composers ranging from Alexander Desplat to Mark Mothersbaugh to Britten.

For me, Anderson has never topped his first two features, Bottle Rocket and especially Rushmore—one of my favorite movies—but Moonrise Kingdom, despite some clunky missteps toward the end, falls only a little short of these. Some parents may be uncomfortable with the (non-graphic) scenes of Suzy and Sam’s physical intimacy, and with the period-realistic tobacco habits of both Sam and the Scoutmaster, and in the course of the story an animal meets a jarringly awful (and gratuitous) fate that might be a deal-breaker for some kids (and some adults). But with these caveats duly noted, Moonrise Kingdom borders on the sublime.