Moonrise Kingdom
Dark Knight Rises
Damsels in Distress
Zero Dark Thirty
Haywire
The Master
Beasts of the Southern Wild
The Exam
Room 237
Anna Karenina
A pretty good list, and we don't get to A- until Number 10, and we stay in A- country all the way through Number 19. The next ten, for the curious: Safety Not Guaranteed, Lincoln, Django Unchained, Looper, John Dies at the End, Keyhole, Black’s Game, The Avengers, Shut Up and Play the Hits, and Lawless. The Bs start with Lawless at Number 20, and grading on a curve, don't stop until Number 27 and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which is on the B-/C+ bubble, but let's go ahead and let it slip up to B-. Worst? Barely beating out Skyfall for that coveted spot was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, unless you count the 2012 release of the turgid and sneering Snowtown, which I saw in 2011. But then I didn't see any real dogs this year, which is either down to dumb luck or rude cunning on my part.
What about the Ten Best 2012 Movies I Haven't Yet Seen? This is even a bigger guess than usual, but let's say: Life of Pi (which
mollpeartree saw without me and loved) followed by Magic Mike, The Gatekeepers (which if it were about Mossad instead of Shin Bet I would have already seen), Cosmopolis, The End of Time, Silver Linings Playbook, Pitch Perfect, Wreck-It Ralph, Dredd, and (with great trepidation, as the only other Leos Carax film I've seen was his crappy third of Tokyo!) Holy Motors. But here, scores can really change: when I made this list last year, I didn't even put Mike Flanagan's terrific lo-fi Machenesque horror film Absentia on it, and that would have been the eighth best 2011 film I saw if I'd seen it that year instead of last month.