Critics’ choice: The best films of 2012

1. Zero Dark Thirty

This riveting account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is “cinematic storytelling at its most effective,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. In her follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow “proves herself once again to be a master of heightened realism and narrative drive.” Jessica Chastain plays Bigelow’s heroine, a CIA analyst whose years of work made the raid on bin Laden’s compound possible. Bigelow’s portrayal of U.S. torture methods ignited debates, but there’s no denying the film’s artistry.

2. Lincoln

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Steven Spielberg’s latest epic ranks alongside “the finest films ever made about American politics,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Strong performances by Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones support the predictably masterful work of Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Abraham Lincoln during a particularly challenging month of his presidency. “Energetically staged and alive with moral energy,” this “democratic masterpiece” could be used to teach children about the messiness and potential glories of our nation’s political process.

3. Argo

Ben Affleck’s “captivating” political thriller “jumps through every hoop the naysayer can set up,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. “It’s serious and substantive, an ingeniously written and executed drama fashioned from a fascinating, little-known chapter of recent history.” Director Affleck also stars—as a CIA expert who hatches a plan to rescue six U.S. Embassy workers from revolutionary Iran by pretending they’re the advance team for a Hollywood sci-fi film. Once a gossip-page pretty boy, Affleck has emerged as “a filmmaker of astonishing assurance and depth.”

4. Beasts of the Southern Wild

“Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Directing his first feature, Benh Zeitlin used a cast of untrained actors to create a portrait, touched with magic realism, of a poor but impressively self-reliant Louisiana bayou community. The movie “is a fantasy in many ways,” but singular performers like 6-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis make each moment “effortlessly convincing.”

5. The Master

“Brilliant performances” by Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams highlight this “sharply written” character study, said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. Hoffman plays the title character—a charismatic leader of a Scientology-like cult—but Phoenix provides the story’s real focus, as a deeply disturbed war veteran who falls under the Master’s influence. Some viewers might be disappointed that director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t directly take on Scientology. But the director of There Will Be Blood has made yet another intensely masterful film.

6. Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson’s latest could be called too precious—“but so what?” said Steven Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer. When young love inspires two 12-year-olds to run away together on the New England island where they’re summering, the diorama-like universe they occupy feels right for the story. Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, and Edward Norton join the hunt for the runaways, while Anderson’s oddball worldview seems to get “richer and more revealing” with each picture.

7. Amour

This quiet French film offers “an unforgettable love story,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Screen legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva deliver “heartbreaking” performances as a dignified couple trying to maintain their daily routine as the end approaches for one of them. Amour includes passages that defy straightforward interpretation, yet it is at all times a moving portrait “of the impossible beauty and fragility of life.”

8. Silver Linings Playbook

Director David O. Russell’s dark comedy follows a golden rule of cinema—“get the casting right and everything else will fall into place,” said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper generate an easy chemistry as a pair of psychiatric cases who bond over their troubles. In a supporting role, Robert De Niro stands out as Cooper’s football-obsessed father.

9. Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino’s tale about slave vengeance packs in everything you might love or hate about the director, said Bill Goodykoontz in the Phoenix Arizona Republic. A spaghetti Western on steroids, it’s too long, violent, and profane. But it’s immensely entertaining scene by scene, as a benevolent dentist liberates a Southern slave (Jamie Foxx) and the two set out to rescue the freed man’s wife from a menacing slave owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).

10. Life of Pi

This spiritually tinged thriller “employs technology brilliantly,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. Using vivid 3-D, director Ang Lee impressively adapts for the screen a 2001 Yann Martel novel about an Indian teen trapped on a life raft with a hungry tiger. Scenes in which an adult Pi looks back on the adventure feel forced, but the action and visuals at sea are magical.

How the list was created

We generated the rankings above by weighting the end-of-year Top 10 lists of 40 print and Web publications, including The Boston Globe, the Charlotte, N.C., Observer, the Chicago Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Denver Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Portland Oregonian, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Salt Lake Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.