2012 NCFCA Awards
The North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA) will announce its awards for the best films and performances of 2012 next week.
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The Life of David Gale (Parker, 2003) — 10 Years Later
Film critics get asked what movie they hate the most almost as much as what movie they love the most. Such superlatives are more about defining your tastes than objectively separating the bad from the abysmal. The Life of David Gale has served as my go to answer for that question for the last few years, so revisiting it had its own trepidation. It couldn't possibly be that bad, could it? And if it wasn't, would I have to find a new whipping boy?
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2012 Top Ten
It was pretty apparent for me early on that 2012 was a banner year for documentaries.
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Signs — 10 Years Later
I imagine that if I had told fans of Signs that ten years after its release the film's most successful alumnus would be Joaquin Phoenix--followed by Abigail Breslin--I would have been looked at as being as nutty as one of the film's characters wearing a tinfoil hat.
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Red Hook Summer (Lee, 2012)
All of which might explained why Spike Lee’s latest film, Red Hook Summer, manages to seem fresh and provocative even as it’s undermined by some of the most uneven filmmaking I've seen all year.
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Les Misérables (Hooper, 2012)
Watching Les Misérables is a bit like listening to a young pop star do a cover of a Beatles classic. She can have all the talent in the world, but it still sounds somehow wrong.
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012)
Parts are camp comedy, parts CGI sword slashing, parts solemn intonations about fate and when not to kill.
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The Central Park Five (Burns, Burns, and McMahon)
The most depressing thing about The Central Park Five, for me, was its only hazy familiarity.
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For Better or Until Something Better Comes Along
Love is the secular American religion. It is the consideration around which all decisions are made and by which all questionable decisions are justified. Its pursuit is the pursuit of happiness, its attainment the validation of whatever process is used to achieve it.
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The Sessions (Lewin, 2012)
The same thing that makes The Sessions better than expected is what makes it naggingly incomplete: it takes sex seriously.