Best. After Lincoln everything is basically tied.

1) Lincoln (the only movie I truly loved this year)
2) Skyfall
3) Django
4) Dredd
5) The Invisible War (on Netflix instant if you haven't seen it)
6) Pitch Perfect
7) Argo
8) Zero Dark Thirty
9) Hunger Games? I dunno. Why not.
10) Your Mom

Worst. I know most of these are fan favorites but I'm not trolling. They sucked the hardest of what I've seen in 2012.

1) Looper
2) Prometheus
3) Battleship
4) Dark Knight Rises (taking its predecessors into context)
5) Avengers (try arguing that the last 30 minutes is anything but meaningless noise)
6) Amazing Spider-Man (le yawn)

Special Mention. Titanic should be #1 but that feels against the rules.

I dunno. Either this year *really* sucked or I'm entering a new phase of my life wherein movies (not just new ones - all movies) are rapidly feeling like a waste of my time. The returns are diminishing. I'm getting more entertainment from ripping on bad movies than experiencing good ones. Almost invariably the good ones feel recycled. So while I can't call well constructed movies bad, I don't feel comfortable calling the above "best" movies good either. Just well made. The amount of data mining that has to happen before finding a Lincoln or Dredd makes me question the value of searching at all. I mean. End of the day, the payoff for Lincoln wasn't that big. 35 hours of work and nearly $200 (just from the list above) for maybe 4 hours of legit payoff.

It has been more than a year since a movie has been better than its resulting conversation. Or maybe I have really interesting friends. People capable of making any topic interesting. But I guess I'll keep going so long as the conversations work. Just don't know how long that lasts.

Is this a a documented phenomena? Like the Tarantino/Kubrick/Film Snob phase?

Oh no. I have Age Assisted Being a Cynical Asshole. AABCA.

What's on the other side?

I passed through the everything is bullshit phase and I find myself in this weird place of "Of course it's bullshit, but that's ok as long as we understand why."

It's very rare to be unique in film, and I've realized now that the line between genius and failure is often razor thin. The thing that pisses me off the most these days is cynicism, certainly in watching films, but definitely cynicism while MAKING films.  There are some films where you can just smell the apathy by all people involved in making it.

"Everything is bullshit" phase is bullshit, is itself bullshit, but only sometimes