Decade Rewind: The Best Movies of 2012

As the 2010’s have officially come to an end, I will be looking back at each cinematic year to give a personal decade retrospective of the best movies and performances of each year. I will break down my Top 10 movies of each year, along with my favorite performances from that year. I will also be listing my favorite’s from each genre, like Best Animated Movie and Best Action Movie, as well as best of the technical aspects, like Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay. This will all culminate into my picks for the best movies and performances of the decade.

*Rankings of movies and performances are numbered from 1-5, with 1 being the best movie/performance.

*Gifs for each category are not specifically of the “winners” of each category, just one of the nominees.

THE YEAR: 2012

2012 was the year where my journey as a film critic began. I started doing short, one sentence reviews of movies that I saw in theaters and would post these review on Facebook. With this new-found passion, it forced me to see a ton of movies, which I did. I once again attended the Sundance Film Festival, something I would do for the rest of the decade, as well as began to dive more into modern day auteurs, like Wes Anderson and David O. Russell, as well as seek out more foreign films, indie films, and documentaries. 2012 continued to open my eyes to more cinema and more filmmakers.

However, 2012 was one of the weaker years of the decade. Obviously we got our share of great films, but there weren’t as many as in previous years and the years that follow. There were a lot of great directors who made movies this year, like Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, Ben Affleck, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis, and the Wachowski’s, to name a few, none of them hit heights of what we had seen from them in the past. But with that, the films and performances listed here are all really good and really special. Here are my picks for the best movies and performances from 2012.