Best Movies of 2025

10. 28 Years Later


9. The Phoenician Scheme


8. Mickey 17


7. Bugonia


6. Bring Her Back


5. Black Bag


4. Sinners


3. Eddington


2. Weapons


1. One Battle After Another

Best Movies of 2012

I didn't manage to see a few movies I know I really should have, most notably Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty. Still, I managed to do a better job of getting out of the house and seeing good stuff than I usually do. Here was the best.

Best of 2012

8. The Dark Knight Rises


It was always unlikely that people were going to love this as much as they did The Dark Knight, and when the movie finally came out it seemed practically predestined to have a mixed reaction. I liked it a lot though; Tom Hardy's Bane is a wonderfully scary villain, Anne Hathaway is a pitch-perfect Catwoman, and it's just fun watching the elaborate schemes and action scenes Christopher Nolan puts together, even if it's easy to poke holes in their logic later. I kind of wish it was a bit more grounded, but it still manages to be the third part of the first ever superhero film trilogy that's good the whole way through.

7. The Cabin in the Woods


Usually when a movie sits on the shelf for a couple years like this, you expect bad things. But based on the people behind it and the seemingly reasonable explanation for its delay, I was pretty sure I'd like The Cabin in the Woods, and I turned out to be right. It's a horror movie that basically applies the reasons people like horror movies to the story itself, and what results is a movie that is at times genuinely frightening, but more often hilarious in the way it plays with and subverts expectations. I imagine you might get more out of it if you spend a lot of time with the genre, but even if you don't there's a lot of great moments and surprises.

6. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey


I was okay with Peter Jackson and company splitting The Hobbit into two parts for their film adaptation, since I knew they were adding material from the countless additional notes and writings of Tolkien, and it's not uncommon for studios to do that these days. Three parts seemed like a stretch, though. Still, I couldn't help but find myself again wrapped up in the world of Middle Earth, and enjoyed all of the time the movie took developing its new characters and really telling the story of the book without many gaps. Who knows if I'll get tired of it before the end, but I thought the first Hobbit movie was very well cast, as faithful to the book as you could hope, and just a pleasant thing to watch.

5. The Raid: Redemption


You hear a lot of people tell you how much an action movie kicks ass. It's hard to tell just from a description how much it actually kicks ass. You kind of have to take it on faith that it kicks ass. Believe me when I tell you that The Raid stands above most other movies when it comes to whether it kicks ass. No one's in it that you've heard of, and they use an Indonesian fighting style with less of a history than kung fu, but the movie still kicks ass. There's not much else to say about The Raid, which takes place entirely within a single apartment complex and doesn't have much of a story, but it doesn't need anything else because it really, really kicks ass.

4. The Master


Paul Thomas Anderson sure has changed a lot over the course of his career. You can definitely trace a line from movie to movie, but while movies like Boogie Nights were certainly different, it was still essentially understandable and often very entertaining. The Master is one of the most challenging movies that I've ever seen. I know basically what it was going for, and I know the three central performances were great, and I can remember specific scenes that were as entrancing and gripping as any that have been filmed. But I still find it difficult to love, and I don't get the feeling the movie really wants to be loved. It wants to be considered, and it deserves to be examined for a long time. It's an important movie, but you should only see it if you know what you're in for.

3. Lincoln


I'm not sure what else there is to say about Daniel Day-Lewis. He's probably going to win his third Oscar as a lead actor soon. He doesn't just say his lines well in this movie, he essentially reinvented the way I'm going to picture Lincoln looking, sounding, and acting for the rest of my life. He leads a truly outstanding cast in a movie that avoids overly lionizing the man, the war, or the time period, as it instead focuses on all of the political dealings and double-dealings that led to the passage of the 13th Amendment. Steven Spielberg doesn't try to do too much, he just lets the actors handle the great script and just seems to know where the camera should be. It's one of the best films in his long and profoundly good career.

2. Looper


Looper is one of those movies that comes along once in a while that you wouldn't expect to get made in the current Hollywood system. It's an R-rated science fiction movie with a budget large enough that it doesn't look cheap. It's also a really, really good one. Joseph Gordon Levitt (this is his third movie on the list, by the way) is more convincing as a young Bruce Willis than you'd guess based on the slightly distracting makeup, and he does a great job of making you care about this honestly pretty unbelievable world, where the mob gets rid of annoyances by sending them back in time to be executed. The story takes turns you don't expect, and in the end it's really not the action movie it looks like it's trying to be. It might be better than that though, with characters you get attached to and a story that can make you think about a lot of different things. Just make sure to take Bruce's advice when it comes to time travel logic.

1. The Avengers


It's not the edgiest or most sophisticated choice, but darn it if this isn't the best time I had in a theater in 2012. Pulling together the heroes from four different movies and making them argue, bounce off each other, and finally come together to achieve a common goal seems like an almost impossible task, but they nailed it as well as I could hope. And it's even more satisfying because it was done by Joss Whedon, someone who went from a beloved but relatively unknown creator of cult television shows to the director of one of the biggest movies ever. The cast is great, the dialogue is smart and funny, and the story is solid enough to hold up a bunch of sci-fi silliness and exciting action scenes. I'm really looking forward to what else they can do with this suddenly gigantic franchise.

Delayed Entry

This is the best movie that wasn't released in 2012 but I didn't see until then.

Brick

Rian Johnson directed Looper, one of my favorite movies in 2012, but I actually liked his first movie more, the low budget thriller called Brick. Joseph Gordon Levitt stars as a hard boiled 40s detective stuck in a modern teenager's body, holding together a film that inserts Film Noir elements into a high school setting much more effectively than you'd think possible. It's really one of the best neo-Noir films ever made, and I'd even hold it up to the real classics of the genre. The story hits every note perfectly, and it's incredible how Johnson manages to match the cadence and rhythm of Noir dialogue to phrases and topics high schoolers would discuss. Inventive filmmaking from start to finish.

Magnolia

This is only the second film by Paul Thomas Anderson that I've seen, but he's more than convinced me at this point that he's one of the most talented directors working today, and moreover one that will do nothing to compromise his vision in order to appeal to a wider audience. This is a movie I can easily see a lot of people hating, either because it's too long and boring or because it's pretentious or because there are some pretty eccentric scenes and performances or because the ending is one of the most out-of-left-field things I've ever seen. Only the first one really bothered me at all, not that it was boring, but that three hours is a lot for a movie about the strange connections between regular people, and they probably didn't need all that time. But the most part I loved the movie, enjoying the twists and turns of its coincidence-driven plot, laughing at the funny parts, and being impressed by the power of the dramatic parts.

The crazy part about the movie being three hours is that it's not even the whole story - there's a subplot with a body found in apartment that is touched on again but not resolved. It's tangential to the real movie though, which is about a group of characters played by an all-star cast of actors as they experience one of the most eventful and unusual days to go by in their city. A lot of the characters are larger than life, especially the ones played by Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore, who are both affected by the looming death of a bed-ridden old man.The main thing that ties everything together is a long-running game show that pits regular adults against smart children, a show that everyone seems to be watching as the current group of kids approaches the record for longest run on the show, and one that William H. Macy's character was on as a kid before he grew up to become William H. Macy. My favorite character was probably John C. Reilly's, a bumbling cop with a good heart and a particular distaste for foul language. If you're going to watch Magnolia it should be with the knowledge that it's a strange movie, but if you have the same taste for unique experiments and genuinely shocking and entertaining moments as me, you'll probably like it.

There Will Be Blood

When No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, I was happy for the Coen brothers, who have long been my favorite directors in Hollywood. Now that I've seen Paul Thomas Anderson's turn-of-the-century tale of oil and money however, I'm not sure the Academy made the right choice. The movie starts and ends with Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as Daniel Plainview. I hadn't seen any of his work before, and since he can't cross the street without tripping over an Oscar nomination, I was interested to see just how good he could be in his second winning turn. The movie begins pretty slowly, with no dialogue at all for more than ten minutes, just showing the beginnings of Daniel's drilling business. But the instant he started talking, I was immediately drawn in. It's really incredible how completely transformed he is, from his face to his voice to his mannerisms. If you've seen Day-Lewis in this and in real life, you'll know what I mean. He definitely deserved the awards.

His isn't the only good performance in the movie though. Paul Dano, recognizable as the big brother from Little Miss Sunshine, is also quite good as Eli Sunday, a preacher in the little town where most of the movie takes place. There are some really tremendous scenes between the two, including some sermons in the church and the pretty remarkable ending. I haven't seen any of Anderson's other movies, but his approach is quite interesting. There are lots of fairly long tracking shots, and there are a couple of instances where they allow some mud or oil to get on the lense without getting rid of it. The movie is quite long, and you get the sense he's just letting everything happen instead of making it into a tidy little production. Despite the length, there's not much I can say I would want to have cut. It's pretty enjoyable all the way through, if for nothing else than the great acting on display. It might be a little out there for some people, but I really liked it.