Film Comment, the only film magazine to which I subscribe (and you should too if you don’t already) has just posted online the results of its Readers’ Poll of the best films of 2012. I’ve seen 19 out of the 20 films featured on the list (the lone exception being the Dardennes brothers’ The Kid with a Bike), a whopping 12 of which I’m happy to report I also voted for.
Film Comment has also posted my thoughts on two of these films — Holy Motors and Bernie — on its website, which are slightly modified remarks of comments I initially posted on this blog. I’m reposting them here in their entirety:
Holy Motors (dir. Leos Carax – #3 in the Film Comment Readers’ Poll, #1 on my year-end Best of List):
Out of all the movies I’ve seen in the 21st century, none has struck me as more deeply personal (nor more embarrassingly private) than this. Although Leos Carax may not care about aggressively courting critics or even audiences, he still believes, like a child, that movies are magic. And when I watch Holy Motors, I believe it too.
Bernie (dir. Richard Linklater – #13 in the Film Comment Readers’ Poll, #3 on my year-end Best of List):
Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey are all great in this delicious true crime/black comedy but the real heart of Bernie lies in the performances of the residents of Carthage, Texas, who essentially play themselves and function as a kind of homespun Greek chorus. The result is so damn entertaining that I didn’t even realize the complex and even troubling questions being posed about morality, justice, and the American legal system by Richard Linklater and co-writer Skip Hollandworth until the second time through. Linklater is a national treasure and it is a shame that more critics and audiences didn’t rally behind this great, deceptively small film.
You can see the full Readers’ Poll results here: http://filmcomment.com/article/2012-best-movies-readers-poll
You can read the Readers’ Poll comments here: http://filmcomment.com/entry/2012-readers-poll-comments
(Incidentally, I noticed that the comments were heavily skewed towards Chicagoans–with Dan Pal and Alan Hoffman, neither of whom is a stranger to this blog, putting in appearances. Cheers, fellas!)
White City Cinema 
March 15th, 2013 at 9:22 am
I thought Premiere was “pedigreed” reading back in my yute! No Film Quarterly? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the Film Comment decade list for 2000-2010.
March 15th, 2013 at 10:03 am
Thanks for stopping by, Nick. Hey, Premiere was great back when Glenn Kenny was writing for it. Film Quarterly is estimable, as are Cinema-Scope, Cineaste and a number of other publications. But I have to eat too, you know!
The Film Comment decade list was great. I haven’t looked at it in years but I recall going through it when it first came out and watching a bunch of titles that I had missed.
One of the very first things I published on this site, way back in the summer of 2010, was my own list of the best films of the decade. You can compare my results to Film Comment’s below:
https://whitecitycinema.com/category/all-best-of-lists/best-films-of-the-2000s/
http://www.filmcomment.com/article/film-comments-end-of-the-decade-critics-poll
March 15th, 2013 at 11:50 pm
Thanks for posting this. I hadn’t heard they released “our” list!
March 24th, 2014 at 2:11 am
It has a special significance in the world of retro that is associated with.