Argo
Ben Affleck continues to atone for his acting career with another taut, smart thriller. The true story of a too-ridiculous-not-to-be-true CIA rescue scheme set during the Iran hostage crisis, Argo laces a patiently simmering suspense with a dark sense of humor. There’s no shortage of wide lapels, but the real evidence that Affleck studied up on the ’70s is in his All the President’s Men-inspired ability to create jaw-clenching tension in spite of a preordained outcome. His broad swipes at Hollywood idiocy are pulled back from the brink by the caustic banter between John Goodman and Alan Arkin as the movie industry insiders made unflappable by their everyday absurdities. —Shaun Brady
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Benh Zeitlin’s Sundance-heralded debut feature is as messy and heartfelt a patchwork as the Island of Misfit Cajuns that it depicts. While Zeitlin doesn’t entirely deflect criticism that he’s romanticizing poverty, his hand-crafted magical realism overcomes such pitfalls of privilege through the untethered ferocity of its imagination. The isolated community where its characters live is called the Bathtub, but it’s more of a kitchen sink, piled high with the wide-ranging, awe-inflected, emotionally fraught interior world of a young child. It has the overstuffed feeling of many a first feature, but it’s encouraging to find ambition, however indulged, rather than the tepid introspection of so much indie film. —SB
The Cabin in the Woods
Lined with so much nerd-Sorkin banter that it’s hard not to picture writer/producer Joss screaming “WHEDON-ED!” at his notepad as punctuation for each glib pen stroke, The Cabin in the Woods is kind of annoying. But it’s also kind of brilliant, a postmodern gore party less fascinated with what scares us than with why. Hot youngsters embarking on a weekend trip to a remote, foreboding destination — we watch this crap 25 times a year, right? Well, it’s never been framed quite like this, as an ancient exercise in cosmic balance that’s somehow become copy-room corporate. It’s funny, too, as unfunny as that sounds. —Drew Lazor
Chronicle
Best bros always butt heads. First-timer Josh Trank reminds us of as much with surprising savvy, impressive considering his trio of fragile high-schoolers packs enough otherworldly punch to outmuscle the X-Men. Andrew (Dane DeHaan), Matt (Alex Russell) and Steve (Michael B. Jordan), the core of Chronicle, are just like any other gangly awkward-teen klatsch, but their accidental acquisition of super-abilities amplifies every adolescent shortcoming. What each boy decides to do with his immeasurable power drives one of 2012’s more overlooked actioners. —DL
The Deep Blue Sea
Based on a Terence Rattigan play, Terence Davies’ welcome return to feature-filmmaking is a literal chamber piece, shut up in the dark and, at one point, in a gas-filled room where nobleman’s wife Rachel Weisz receives her working-class lover. Although her suicide attempt fails, the toxic cloud never dissipates, shrouding the film in a haze as the dust of World War II settles on London. Davies’ gorgeous film is at once melancholy and cruel, shot through with an affection for the days when crowds in pubs or bomb shelters could join in a life-affirming song as well as a hatred for the social codes that strangled their passions. —Sam Adams
Holy Motors
The return of enfant terrible director Leos Carax after thirteen years is a delirious ode to filmmaking. Carax hops into a limo with his shape-shifting muse, Denis Lavant, who is dispatched on a series of mysterious missions, from motion-capture sexual acrobatics to assassinating his doppelganger to transforming himself into a subway-dwelling mutant in order to kidnap Eva Mendes. At first these blackout gags seem tritely audacious, but as Lavant proceeds through his strange night’s work, the film takes on heft, gradually transforming itself into a moving (albeit bizarre) elegy on aging and loss. Each part he assumes recalls the many roles people play as their pathways cross and diverge with others. —SB
The Hunger Games
Can a mega-hit book converted into a mega-hit movie make a lasting impression outside its ferocious mega-fanbase? The answer is yes, but only if you’ve got an arrow-armed force like Jennifer Lawrence calling the shots. Without her, this big-budg take on the first part of Suzanne Collins’ crossover YA series might skew closer to Twilight-land than anyone would like. With her, it’s a way-long but well-wrought dig into a dystopia where children are made the literal breadwinners, feeding starving families on the strength of their televised fighting skills. The Hunger Games faithful might never stop to think how the franchise would unfold without her, but they should. —DL
Killing Them Softly
Director Andrew Dominik calls his polemical noir a “political cartoon,” posing seedy, strung-out hoods in front of billboards for the 2008 political election. But it’s also an aesthetic tour de force, highlighted by a tense robbery in which the camera navigates the narrow hallway to a backroom poker game. Critics faulted the movie for its lack of subtlety, but it’s clear that was never on Dominik’s agenda. It’s gonzo filmmaking, bold and broad and frequently electrifying. —SA
The Loneliest Planet
It’s hard to discuss Julia Loktev’s portrait of discord between a backpacking couple without making it sound like it’s something it’s not. In fact, it’s hard to discuss it at all. The narrative pivots on a moment that in any other film would be a mere plot point, but as the film is otherwise free of plot altogether, it’s as momentous as (and less contrived than) any gimmicky twist. In vast stretches of real time — think of it as a dysfunctional Before Sunrise — Loktev lays bare the way events that last seconds can lay bare vast fissures in a relationship’s surface that they may spend years trying to cover over again. —SA
The Master
Everyone slavering over the prospect of a Paul Thomas Anderson take-down of Scientology was left a bit perplexed by what actually arrived on screen: a monolithic, oblique study of the relationship between two inscrutable men. Joaquin Phoenix’s mannered approach has never been put to more appropriate use, while Philip Seymour Hoffman suggests an inner life far less savory than his cult leader’s genteel exterior presents. Their unlikely pairing is at different times one of father/son, mentor/student, leader/disciple, dictator/thug, and possibly lovers. Anderson traces their tempestuous relationship at a mesmerizing pace, as determinedly adrift as its characters and as equally set on conjuring its own mythology. —SB
Moonrise Kingdom
It all comes down to fishhook earrings. At a pivotal moment in Wes Anderson’s screwball fable, two young lovers rendezvous on an island beach, and the boy gives the girl — and children they remain — a pair of earrings fashioned from fishing lures. Pushing the barbed hooks through her unpierced lobes works as a canny metaphor for deflowering, but it also sums up the formula behind Anderson’s best movies: aesthetics plus pain. In The Life Aquatic, Anderson argued that artificiality — faked documentaries, Plasticine fish — can be a conduit to real emotions, and in Moonrise Kingdom, he proves the point. —SA
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
A novelist adapting his own film is dangerous enough, but when you add in the fact that he’s directing his first feature in 17 years, disaster is almost sure to strike. Luckily, Stephen Chbosky dodged every bullet, and in lead Logan Lerman he found the perfect actor to embody his mentally unstable high school protagonist, who constantly worries that he will again “get bad.” Tiptoeing right up to the edge of John Hughes’ turf, Chbosky chronicles the joy and pain of high-school outcasts with acute tenderness and impassioned clarity. —SA
Prometheus
Many viewed Ridley Scott’s long-awaited return to infinite-scope sci-fi as a coup for the admired but inconsistent visual master, but his Alien prequel deserves a little more standalone consideration. Our tendency to broadly compare and contrast (can you blame us?) siphons focus from the ace individual performances that jet-fuel Prometheus, especially Noomi Rapace’s no-quit Ripley predecessor and Michael Fassbender’s pernicious Bowie-inspired android. It’s far from Scott’s best work, but it’s best watched dead-on, not from a bench deep in the archives. —DL
Silver Linings Playbook
Few locally set films “do Philly” with as much honesty and heart as Silver Linings Playbook, and, just like the city that inspired David O. Russell’s adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel, it’s all thanks to the people. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Pat, a rabid Eagles fan whose violent psychotic break takes him from an institution to his childhood DelCo home, is textured and arresting, more than enough to permanently bail him out of square-jawed typecast prison. But it’s the shaky emotional bridges he builds to reach his co-stars — a tremendous Jennifer Lawrence as his equally tortured love interest, Robert De Niro as his caring-yet-careless father — that tighten the strings of a role that’d loosen in the hands of a less-engaged leading man. —DL
Zero Dark 30
Kathryn Bigelow’s depiction of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, written by her Hurt Locker collaborator Mark Boal, doesn’t flag in its relentless pace for more than two-and-a-half hours. Detainees are questioned and tortured, leads are followed into dead ends and sudden explosions, tactics are argued in terse, jargon-rich shouting matches. Through it all, Jessica Chastain’s CIA agent Maya is doggedly single-minded in her dedication to the task and Bigelow rushes headlong with her to the same end. The end is never in doubt, but in its final moment the means suddenly are. Bigelow keeps her distance throughout, but in those last, tension-relaxing seconds, questions never asked en route are suddenly allowed to rush in like a gust of air into a sealed room. —SB
