The Best Movies of 2017

Before we dive into my Top 15 Films of 2017, I want to say that the Greatest Achievement in Moving Pictures in 2017 was David Lynch's return to Twin Peaks. But, since there's disagreement on whether or not it qualifies as a movie, I've chosen to include a screen cap of posts by Lucky McKee and Peter Avellino on this subject and leave it at that.

A few more odds and ends: I've seen all nine of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Picture and have commented on each of them in one way or another throughout this post. I haven't seen The Florida Project yet. It opens in Korea on March 7th, and I'm holding out for the theatrical experience.

Top 15:

1. Brawl in Cell Block 99: I haven't loved a Vince Vaughn performance in as long as I can remember, which is another way of saying I can't remember the last time I wasn't completely annoyed by him. But the sheer intensity of his star presence in Brawl in Cell Block 99 will blow your head off. (Or pound your face in. Or rip your guts out. They're all appropriate when talking about this most violent movie.) Writer-director S. Craig Zahler is one of the most exciting genre filmmakers working today. After successfully staging a cannibal holocaust in the Old West with his debut feature, Bone Tomahawk, Zahler switches to Chuck Bronson in prison territory, and it's just about the craziest, twistiest, and most exhilarating thing you ever did see.

2. Phantom Thread: There are no frogs raining from the sky, but this is still one of PT Anderson's strangest works. It has three of his most eccentric characters, didn't-see-that-coming plot turns, and an offbeat romance. That's to be expected from the guy who matched Adam Sandler with Emily Watson in Punch-Drunk Love (and John C. Reilly with Melora Walters in Magnolia, for that matter), but, believe me, you've never met a pair quite like these two. The movie's immaculate surface details can hide the characters' messy emotions for only so long, and it's a thrill to watch them come bubbling up.

3. Call Me by Your Name: This is a Luca Guadagnino film, and so of course from the opening credits onward every aesthetic decision is spot-on (perfect font for the credits; "Hallelujah Junction" by John Adams, hinting that Elio is a musical prodigy; statues of godlike male beauty, anticipating the appearance of Armie Hammer). I'd bet Guadagnino's last three films (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and now CMBYN) have been a boon to the European tourism industry. The director's latest, set in sun-dappled northern Italy in 1983, is his ultimate achievement in travelogue porn. All of that natural beauty gives the characters lots of space to fall in love, pluck peaches and get their hearts broken. A movie of blissful highs with a melancholy finish, CMBYN is the one Best Picture nominee of 2017 that's likely to be a cherished work of art for years to come.

4. Get Out: Not as scary as the Make-a-Wish sketch on Key & Peele, but really, what is? Jordan Peele's horror/comedy/documentary phenomenon exhibited storytelling economy, quickly getting us to the spooky Armitage house and then pretty much staying put. That's to be expected from Blumhouse Productions and a first-time feature director, but what's remarkable is Peele's confidence and poise. After Chris is hypnotized by the real Mrs. Armitage (almost everyone he meets is a two-faced monster), the following day is an astonishing exercise in escalating tension, peaking with that super creepy bingo game / slave auction. On second thought, I lied; Georgina's laughing/crying fit is way more unsettling than "Make-a-Wish". While the movie's highlights come too early and it's ultimately too easy for Chris to "get out", I wouldn't change the crowd-pleasing finale for anything. It reassures us that, in an age when the rise of Trump has Americans giving each other the side-eye, some people really are who they seem to be.

5. Logan: Finally, an X-Men movie worthy of the talents of Hugh Jackman. (It only took 17 years!) Deadpool may have dropped f-bombs and displayed graphic violence a year before Logan, but what's really new here is the artistic integrity of James Mangold's vision. He's conceived the adventures of Old Man Logan as a modern Western about an aging anti-hero, and the result is every bit as thrilling as his remake of 3:10 to Yuma. It's also surprisingly heavy and thought-provoking, as Logan and a certain telekinetic professor accept their mortality on the road to Eden.

6. The Lost City of Z: The Tree of Life, 12 Years a Slave, and now The Lost City of Z - props to producer Brad Pitt for helping another major movie director get a financially risky project off the ground. Like Terrence Malick and Steve McQueen, writer-director James Gray reaches for the stars. Does his reach exceed his grasp? It's an interesting question because it's the same one posed by The Lost City of Z. Did the British explorer Percy Fawcett find his fabled Lost City in the jungles of Bolivia? In this impossible dream of a movie, the journey is its own reward, especially with the likes of Robert Pattinson and Sienna Miller along for the ride.

7. Blade of the Immortal: The latest samurai film from 13 Assassins director Takashi Miike opens with one guy taking on about 100 other guys. It's the sort of thing that, if you grew up watching Bruce Lee movies over and over like I did, can make you feel giddy. Giddiness isn't a feeling I'm accustomed to while watching Miike, whose movies tend to make audiences recoil in horror. But there's real heart in this one, a sort of supernatural spin on Seven Samurai crossed with Leon: The Professional.

8. Last Flag Flying: Richard Linklater's buddy movie / war drama received a fraction of the acclaim and attention that Boyhood got, but it's unmistakably the work of the same deeply humane artist. It's also another one of Linklater's great hang-out movies, capturing the camaraderie of old friends in scenes that are frequently funny and sometimes heartbreaking. The performances are across-the-board amazing, including the only performance by Bryan Cranston that I've loved since Breaking Bad.

9. Marjorie Prime: I think some viewers will be turned off by the talky script (adapted from Jordan Harrison's acclaimed 2015 play) and the dearth of locations (the movie mostly sticks to interiors and exteriors at a dreamy beach house). But stick around if you can, because if you do you'll be in for one of the year's most unforgettable and emotional film experiences. The futuristic, sci-fi premise allows the characters, in lieu of therapy, to speak to realistic holograms that look like loved ones who have died. That sounds like a miraculous, healing gift, and the movie often has the power of a supernatural, back-from-the-dead weepie like Truly, Madly, Deeply. I didn't realize how much I'd missed Geena Davis and Tim Robbins until they showed up in this movie. The use of "I Shall Be Released" by The Band was one of the year's most perfectly timed needle drops.

10. After the Storm: Another powerful family drama by the Japanese humanist Hirokazu Koreeda, about a struggling writer and gambling addict who finds some hope for redemption while spending time with his elderly mother, his ex-wife and young son during a typhoon. Koreeda was my big discovery of 2017. This year I also watched Nobody Knows and Still Walking for the first time, and they're both all-timers in my book.

11. Star Wars: The Last Jedi: I was surprised by all the hate from fans (or "fans"), and I hope Rian Johnson's reaction to all of that was not unlike the gif of Master Skywalker I've included in this post. It's the first Star War since the 1977 original to invite comparisons to the work of Akira Kurosawa, who of course was one of George Lucas's key influences. And the critters were really cute, too.

12. Beatriz at Dinner / Brad's Status: Two squirm-inducing, class-conscious dramedies written by Mike White (and, in the case of Brad's Status, directed by White as well). A welcome showcase for Salma Hayek, Beatriz at Dinner feels like a continuation of Enlightened, the writer's acclaimed HBO show. It pits a passionate, possibly unstable massage therapist against a nefarious CEO (John Lithgow), and makes us wonder if she's not above a bit of murderous score-settling. Brad's Status gives Ben Stiller the chance to play another damaged, neurotic soul. The movie is wiser about selfishness and privilege than Greenberg was, and it gives outstanding supporting roles to Michael Sheen and Luke Wilson as two friends who, from Brad's point of view, have outshined him.

13. War for the Planet of the Apes: If Rise of the Planet of the Apes was an end-of-the-world, deadly-virus thriller a la Outbreak, and Dawn was a Mad Max-style, post-apocalyptic action movie about two rival factions, then War is the Vietnam War movie of this series. It even has a Colonel Kurtz-type villain (brilliantly played by Woody Harrelson, who had quite a year; see also LBJ and his Oscar-nominated turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Like the Star Wars prequels, Apes stretched the main character's arc over three movies, but the effect was even more powerful in this series, one of the great blockbuster trilogies of the modern era.

14. Split: The one moment when I truly geeked out at the movies this year happened at the end of Split. As the camera panned between two mirror images of James McAvoy, a very familiar and haunting piece of music by James Newton Howard began to swell on the soundtrack, and it slowly dawned on me that M. Night Shyamlan had finally returned to the world of Unbreakable. The last time we saw David Dunn and Mr. Glass on screen was 17 years ago, and I'd bet many moviegoers enjoyed Split without prior knowledge of Unbreakable. It holds up spectacularly well on its own, particularly the suspenseful second half when we wonder exactly what the nature of "The Beast" is.

15. Gerald's Game: Mike Flanagan (Oculus, Hush, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil) is one of the most talented filmmakers working in the horror genre today. He's taken a seemingly unadaptable Stephen King book and made it into one of the most gripping King adaptations ever. And he's given Carla Gugino the role of her career as Jessie, who finds herself chained to a bed and stranded after her husband's clumsy attempt at some marriage-reviving S&M goes south. Bonus points for the ultra-cool solar eclipse sequence, which ties in neatly with Dolores Claiborne, another first-rate King movie.

Honorable Mentions:

A Ghost Story, American Made, Personal Shopper, Song to Song, Lady Bird, The Devil's Candy, The Shape of Water, Let Me Eat Your Pancreas, Colossal, Free Fire, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Okja, Brigsby Bear, Dunkirk, It, Mudbound, Happy Death Day, The Post, The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Special Recognition for Audacity, Daring, and Originality:

David Cronenberg's Crash won the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival for what the jury called its "audacity, daring, and originality." I'd give the same prize this year to Darren Aronofsky's horrific, you've-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it mother! It often feels like an elaborate prank, and it should probably come with a trigger warning for people prone to depression, but that doesn't mean I'm not in awe of it. Aronofsky and his lead actress, a never-better Jennifer Lawrence, are so successful at making us sympathize with the heroine's predicament that when everything that could possibly go wrong does (in weirdly abridged sequences of events), we feel like our world is coming to an end, too. I wouldn't say it's fun to watch exactly, though Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, as the uninvited couple from hell, are an absolute riot.

Niftiest companion pieces:

Darkest Hour and Dunkirk

Best family films:

The LEGO Batman Movie, Coco, Your Name, Wonder

Best documentaries:

Kedi, Strong Island, I Am Not Your Negro

Best musicals:

Baby Driver, The Greatest Showman

Best Actor:

Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread

Supporting Actor:

Mark Hamill,

Brigsby Bear and Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Actress:

Carla Gugino, Gerald's Game

Supporting Actress:

Geena Davis, Marjorie Prime

Best Original Screenplay:

S. Craig Zahler, Brawl in Cell Block 99

Adapted Screenplay:

Mike Flanagan, Gerald's Game

The Year in Film, 2016

THE HANDMAIDEN: A twisty tale of two women.

The best movies of the year:

1. The Handmaiden: Seeing Park Chan-wook's stunning erotic thriller at the Busan Film Festival last October was my favorite moviegoing experience of the year. After nearly 2.5 hours of shifting perspectives, shocking plot twists, sliced fingers, and bells used in ways that will make you blush, I wasn't completely sure I understood everything. I just knew I never wanted the camera to stop exploring the many rooms of Lady Hideko's house, where a pickpocket named Sook-hee arrives to pull off a con game. This is by the same director who gave us the Vengeance Trilogy, and so of course Sook-hee enters a veritable house of horrors. Hangings, a monster in the basement, and the world's most perverse book club — Lady Hideko's house has it all. Ultimately, though, the movie is a touching and lushly romantic celebration of women. It just might be Park's lurid masterpiece.

2. Silence: Audiences and Oscar voters may have given it the silent treatment, but I am in complete awe of Martin Scorsese's 25th feature film. Inspired by real events, it tells a remarkable story about Jesuit priests in Japan when that country had outlawed Christianity. Silence addresses questions of faith and the possibility of transcendence in a way that affected me deeply, more than any other Scoresese picture except for maybe The Last Temptation of Christ and George Harrison: Living in the Material World.

3. Arrival: Grandly ambitious, touching and humanistic sci-fi in the tradition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Contact.

4. The Nice Guys: From director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), this is a wildly entertaining L.A. crime film / buddy comedy. We need at least 10 more cases for Healy (Russell Crowe) and March (Ryan Gosling) to solve.

Under the same moon: Alex Hibbert in MOONLIGHT.

5. Moonlight: Feels as vital and distinctive as the works of Oscar Micheaux and Charles Burnett. At first I thought the movie had peaked early with the really wonderful performance by Mahershala Ali as Little's mentor, but then the diner scene at the end blew me away. 

6. Midnight Special: For my money, a subtler, more magical homage to vintage Spielberg than Super 8.

7. Allied: The best wartime romance set in Casablanca since... well, you know.

8. The Childhood of a Leader: Best new director goes to Brady Corbet for his eerie portrait of a psychotic brat turned fascist leader.

9. Fences: Powerfully acted adaptation of August Wilson's play about an African American family in post-war Pittsburgh. The final moment of grace has stayed with me.

No escape: Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE.

10. 10 Cloverfield Lane: Not quite a prequel or sequel to Cloverfield, but it's definitely part of the same universe. It manages that neat trick within a tightly written suspense picture about a determined young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her mysterious captor (John Goodman, the movie's volatile MVP).

11. Hail, Caesar!: A lark by the Coen brothers. Their recreation of the Golden Age of Hollywood (Westerns, Biblical epics, musicals and more) gave us several of the year's most delightful movie scenes.

12. The Wailing: Reminiscent of Angel Heart and The Exorcist, but really you've never seen anything quite like this 2.5 hour, hallucinatory Korean horror film. It ends with a demonic encounter you won't soon forget.

13. American Honey: Writer-director Andrea Arnold's first American movie is a long and loosely plotted road picture about a "mag crew." It's sometimes sad, often very funny and almost always beautiful to look at. All is forgiven, Shia.

14. The Witch: Best villain goes to Black Phillip, horned prince of darkness. "Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"

Samantha Robinson casts a seductive spell in THE LOVE WITCH.

15. The Love Witch: How to describe this cinematic oddity, which has the makings of a cult classic? It was shot in Technicolor on 35mm film, which is almost unheard of for a low-budget horror movie these days. It's a master class in interior decorating, and it apes the style of earlier "bad" movies it clearly has a lot of affection for. The closest comparison I can think of is Psycho Beach Party. Just watch it and be amazed by all of the gloriously deadpan performances and striking color schemes.

GREEN ROOM, which features one of Anton Yelchin's final performances.

Honorable Mentions:

Love & Friendship, Louder Than Bombs, Other People, Knight of Cups, Green Room, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Hush, The Shallows, Café Society, Train to Busan, Hell or High Water, Florence Foster Jenkins, Demolition, Hidden Figures, The Invitation, Don't Breathe, Doctor Strange, Tale of Tales, Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Best musical: La La Land. Much better the second time.

Concert film: Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids

Family films: Zootopia, Pete's Dragon, Kubo and the Two Strings

Using archival footage, eyewitness accounts and rotoscopic animation, TOWER is a masterpiece about the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

Documentaries: Tower, 13th, De Palma, Where to Invade Next

Guilty Pleasures: Gods of Egypt, Sausage Party, Yoga Hosers

Underrated: Blair Witch, Snowden, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Stars-and-bars bikini: Riley Keough gives a standout performance in AMERICAN HONEY.

Best Actor: Denzel Washington, Fences

Best Actress: Amy Adams, Arrival

Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight

Best Supporting Actress: Riley Keough, American Honey

California dreamin': The dazzling opening scene in LA LA LAND.

Favorite scenes:

Hail, Caesar!

"No Dames" and "Would that it were so simple?"

The Handmaiden

Lady Hideko takes a bath; even dental work is sexy in this movie.

La La Land

"Another Day of Sun"

Moonlight

The diner scene.

The best movies of 2015

1. Mad Max: Fury Road: Remember when the trailers made this look like it was going to be the coolest thing ever? And then it came out on May 15th, and it actually was the coolest thing ever? What a lovely day!

2. It Follows: Indie director David Robert Mitchell follows up The Myth of the American Sleepover with another sensitive, curiously timeless portrait of suburban teens, except this time it's in the context of a remarkably poised and ferocious horror movie. After sleeping with the wrong guy, a college student (Maika Monroe) finds herself hunted by a relentless, shape-shifting killer. More than just a clever allegory, it's an instant genre classic. The spooky, stylized score by Disasterpeace was easily the year's coolest.

3. The Hateful Eight: Quentin Tarantino's 8th feature film divided critics and fans alike, but for my money it's the auteur's greatest achievement since Kill Bill. Just as Kill Bill was a pastiche of samurai films (Vol. 1) and spaghetti westerns (Vol. 2), The Hateful Eight is really two or even three movies in one. First, Tarantino touches down in John Ford country, then we're drawn into a tense locked-room murder mystery, which gives way to... well, something entirely sadistic. The change-up left many an unsuspecting viewer feeling betrayed, but I think it's the source of the film's bleak power. Shocking and howlingly funny in the best Tarantino fashion, it's a strikingly pessimistic piece of work that's obviously not for everyone. Even if it's not your cup of poisoned coffee, you've gotta love the cast Tarantino has assembled to play some of his most vivid characters ever.

4. Love & Mercy:

                                 

5. Ex Machina: Alex Garland published a generation defining novel (The Beach) in his twenties, wrote a groundbreaking fast-zombie movie (28 Days Later) in his early thirties, and now he's written and directed a mind-blowing A.I. thriller (Ex Machina) in his forties. I think it's safe to say this guy has my dream career.

6. Spotlight: Tom McCarthy's quietly devastating drama is not only about the Boston Globe reporters who exposed rampant child sex abuse by Catholic priests; it's also about how our entire society failed to put a stop to it. Such acting heavyweights as Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams do more than right by the story's real-life investigative heroes. If Fury Road isn't "respectable" enough to win, then this absolutely deserves to beat The Revenant in the Oscar race for best picture.

7. Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Considering all of the hype surrounding this project, director J.J. Abrams has pulled off the near miraculous: a spectacularly good Star Wars movie, with fresh-faced heroes and a memorable villain (not to mention Leia, Luke and Han) in a rip-roaring adventure story. To the fans who complained Abrams outright stole scenes from the holy trilogy, I offer the following rebuttal. Yes, I was often reminded of episodes IV, V and VI while watching The Force Awakens, especially near the end when a beloved character gets killed off. You know what I was never reminded of? This:

8. Bone Tomahawk: The Hateful Eight wasn't the only horror western starring Kurt Russell to be released in 2015. "Barely released" in the case of Bone Tomahawk, but no matter: this thrilling mash-up from first-time director S. Craig Zahler will find its audience in due course. Working from Zahler's literate screenplay, Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins and Matthew Fox brought true grit to the members of a rescue party who walk willingly into hell on earth. Imagine The Searchers crossed with The Green Inferno and you're not far off.

9. Brooklyn / Room (tie): What do these two Oscar nominees for best picture have in common? You mean, besides a bucket of my tears? ;) Well, for starters, each offers a textbook case of how to adapt a book to the screen. With a radiant lead performance by Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (those eyes^ were the the best special effect the movies had to offer this year), Brooklyn is both a compassionate Irish immigrant story and a valentine to an earlier era of New York City a la A Bronx Tale. With its child's-eye POV, Room is a profound subjective experience from the very beginning ("Good morning, sink"). As the film's indomitable mother-son duo, Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay got me caught up in the emotional lives of their characters in a way no other movie this year could.

10. The Big Short: How did Adam McKay, the guy behind Anchorman and Step Brothers, make one of the year's best and most important movies? He assembled an A-list cast (including Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell, all of whom are clearly having a field day). Also, he approached the 2008 collapse of the world economy the same way one of the masters of cinema approached mutually assured destruction...

"My idea of doing [Dr. Strangelove] as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny." – Stanley Kubrick

11. Wild Tales: I've never forgotten one of the standalone sequences (there are six total) of Damián Szifron's wild, Oscar-nominated dark comedy. A driver refuses to let another man pass him on an isolated mountain road. One of them flips the bird, and somehow this escalates to the point where we're looking at two charred skeletons under a bridge. Each sick-comic episode intensifies to such an insane degree that by the time we get to the finale at a wedding, we're left giggling nervously at the possibilities. Believe me, that sequence doesn't disappoint; it's the most hilariously awful wedding since Melancholia. Wild Tales reminded me of Amores Perros, another Spanish-language anthology film, which was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Iñárritu went on to make 2014's best picture winner and this year's frontrunner, and I think we'll see similarly great things from Szifron in the years to come.

12. Creed: Sure, Rocky 7 followed a decades-old formula, but in the hands of the gifted young African-American filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station), everything old was made fresh and rousing. As a fighter with a famous last name and the singer he courts outside of the ring, Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson formed what was arguably the film's most dynamic match-up.

13. Grandma: It sounds provocative on paper: an aging lesbian author helps her granddaughter find the money the teen needs for an abortion. Running a near-perfect 75 minutes, the movie handles its plot in a practical way, putting family ties front and center. Lily Tomlin (who hasn't been this wryly funny since Flirting with Disaster) has wonderful screen chemistry with Julia Garner (who played Joseph Gordon-Levitt's baby-doll girlfriend in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For). Written and directed with disarming emotional authenticity by Paul Weitz.

14. Tangerine: When Sin-Dee finds out her boyfriend/pimp has been cheating on her, she spends Christmas Eve looking for him and the cisgender girl he had an affair with. A gorgeous, energetic and hilaaarious West Hollywood comedy, Tangerine works up a level of pop music-powered excitement comparable to Run Lola Run. In the final scene, we realize we've been watching the year's most touching platonic love story.

15. The Visit: After a string of big-budget disasters, M. Night Shyamalan switched modes by teaming up with Blumhouse Productions and going low-budget horror. The result: his best movie in years and the creepiest grandparents since Weird Science. "Yahtzee!"

Runners-up: Crimson Peak, Unfriended, The Jinx, Mississippi Grind, Far from the Madding Crowd, Slow West, The End of the Tour, Goodnight Mommy, Maps to the Stars, Bridge of Spies, The Martian, Blackhat, The Duke of Burgundy, The Final Girls, World of Tomorrow, The Walk

Family films: Paddington, Inside Out, Shaun the Sheep Movie

Best Actor: Paul Dano, Love & Mercy

Best Actress: Lily Tomlin, Grandma

Supporting Actor: Walter Goggins, The Hateful Eight

Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina

A few other acting favorites: Teyonah Parris, tearing through Chi-Raq as the leader of a "no peace, no piece" movement; Jason Statham, who had great fun sending up his stern tough guy persona in Spy; Al Pacino, who gave a ridiculously entertaining late-career performance as a Neil Diamond-type singer in Danny Collins; Sean Harris, lowering the room temperature about 20 degrees every time he appears in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation; Bel Powley as a young cartoonist exploring her sexuality in the frank and honest The Diary of a Teenage Girl; in The Gift, Jason Bateman added the mean streak of a bully to the exasperated nice guy we're used to seeing him play; and, as much as I enjoyed Johnny Depp's Nosferatu take on Whitey Bulger in Black Mass, he was no match for Peter Sarsgaard, who was on a whole different level in his brief appearance as a sweaty, nervous, homicidal gangster.

That's entertainment! American Ultra, Knock Knock, San Andreas, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Jupiter Ascending, Terminator: Genesys, Krampus

Movies I haven't seen yet but want to: Carol, Son of Saul, 45 Years, Anomalisa, Mustang, The Look of Silence, Listen to Me Marlon

Best animated movies of 2012

If I had to make a guess, I'd say Pixar's Brave will win this year's Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I like that movie a lot, almost as much as I like Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, which has a good chance of upsetting Brave at the Oscars. It's a testament to what a great year this was for animation that neither of those movies made my list of favorites, which I wrote about for the Augusta Gazette. You can read it by clicking here. Consider the images below a sneak preview.