32nd Shadows Awards: Best of 2012

Here are my top 10 films of 2012, as well as my favourites in the main categories. Full top-10 lists in each category, and rather an awful lot more, are on the site...

TOP 10 FILMS OF 2012:

1. Life of Pi (Ang Lee)
2. Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard)
3. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
4. Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow)
5. Amour (Michael Haneke)
6. Chronicle (Josh Trank)
7. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
8. The House I Live In (Eugene Jarecki)
9. Sightseers (Ben Wheatley)
10. Pitch Perfect (Jason Moore)

DIRECTOR:
Ang Lee (Life of Pi)

SCREENPLAY:
Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain (Rust and Bone)

ACTRESS:
Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, The Hunger Games)

ACTOR:
Denis Lavant (Holy Motors)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises, Les Miserables)

SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Eddie Redmayne (Les Miserables)

ENSEMBLE: Pitch Perfect

BREAKOUT FILMMAKER: Bart Layton (The Imposter)

BREAKOUT ACTOR: Dane DeHaan (Chronicle, Lawless)

MUSIC: The Master (Jonny Greenwood)

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Life of Pi (Cloudio Miranda)

EDITING: Argo (William Goldenberg)

PRODUCTION DESIGN: Berberian Sound Studio (Jennifer Kernke)

EFFECTS: Life of Pi

STUNTS: Haywire

~~~~~~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~
GETTING BACK TO NORMAL:
OK, so arriving back home with eight hours of jet lag on New Year's Eve is great if you want to stay up late, but it's not going to help me get back in the correct time zone very quickly. Especially since I have hours (if not days) of work ahead to get caught up after a few weeks away. On the flight home, I was able to revisit Pitch Perfect, cementing its place in my top 10 of the year (it's just as funny and clever the second time round). And ahead of me this coming week is a teetering stack of DVD screeners to catch up with. My first actual press screening will be the indie horror film Midnight Son on Friday, with Ryan Gosling's Gangster Squad, Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand and the film doc Side by Side following soon behind.

Olympics Day 4: Go ahead, jump

London turned grey and cool this morning, with threatening skies and weather forecasts that have begun to sound far too familiar this summer: temperatures well below the seasonal average and more rain than normal. So apparently last week's gloriously hot summer days were an anomaly. Sigh.

I stayed out of the Olympics' way today, only catching up on a few things on TV and reading results online since I've been reporting all day on the events. I also made one trip across town to a film screening - an uneventful journey with fewer tourists than normal for a London summer. Clearly all the visitors are in the venues!

The big Games news today was Michael Phelps' unprecedented 19th Olympic medal - his first gold here in London - making him the most decorated Olympian in history. And he still has a few swimming events left here. Also, Britain won equestrian silver, but has yet to earn gold in these Games. Thankfully, several more hometown favourites are coming up in competition.

CRITICAL WEEK: Film-wise this week, I've caught screenings in between Olympic responsibilities. Two notable Cannes films were finally shown to UK critics, and I loved both of them: Ben Wheatley's Sightseers is yet another genius blending of genres (this is a road movie romance with a serial killer twist), and Leos Carax's Holy Motors is an indescribably strange and wonderfully wacky odyssey about fate and humanity. I also saw Step Up: Miami Heat (aka Step Up Revolution), the fourth entry in the throwaway dance mash-up series with cut-and-paste scripts and sexy cast members; Brit Marling in the moody but unsatisfying semi-sci-fi drama Sound of My Voice; and Ron Fricke's super high-def non-narrative globe-hopping exploration of humanity Samsara.

Coming up, there's every action hero you can name in The Expendables 2, Ben Stiller in the alien-invasion comedy The Watch, Tahar Rahim in the French romantic drama Our Children, and the restored and re-scored version of Alfred Hitchcock's silent classic The Lodger.