Best of cinema by Mad Movies. Part 5: 2011-2012

Every year my favorite magazine for action/horror/thriller/SF (Mad Movies) publishes the list of the best movies of the previous year (and the worst ones), according to its editors and an average for the whole magazine team.
I have gathered them for your here with a few comments. Enjoy!
All parts of this article can be found under this link.

2011 seems to be more a year of Thriller or fantastic Thriller rather than other Genres: Horror, Fantasy, SF. I have seen a lot of the movies from the lists above, and many of them have been reviewed on JoRafCinema that kicked-off the following year, so that I can provide you with links to the reviews.
For once let me start from the bottom's up. I will skip the worst movies of the year: I am Number 4, Hobo with a Shotgun, Shark Night 3D, the useless remake of Conan... I was disappointed by Alex de la Iglesia's Balada Triste de Trompeta and Christopher Smith's Black Death.
Then come the blockbusters Thor (not really good) and Transformers 3, even more a joke than its predecessors. Tron Legacy was a good idea and the music by Daft Punk excellent, but the movie was quickly forgotten. Green Lantern is a super-hero movie with Ryan Reynolds not to be taken seriously (in the spirit of the up-coming Guardians of the Galaxy). The Thing in an OK prequel/remake to John Carpenter's masterpiece but still far from equaling it. The Korean How I met the Devil became renowned because it was released in Europe, but it is not as good as a Memories of Murder or Old Boy. Paul is a bit disappointing for the fans of Simon Pegg and Edgard Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
Among less advertised movie one can find some efficient productions: Triangle, The Innkeepers, The Woman, Eva, or the fast and furious Japanese animated Redline. I had the opportunity to discover the life of a great independent  filmmaker in the documentary Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel. Troll Hunter is a nice tale with beautiful landscapes as in every Norwegian movie. Hugo Cabret was not a big hit but I liked that it depicts the life of Georges Méliès and the birth or Cinema. Cars 2 was a nice direct-to-video surprise that I preferred to the first one.
Moving up the scale, we find Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch that disappointed me a little after his excellent version of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, cleverly departing from a simple remake. Captain America turned out to be one of my favorite Marvel duper-hero movies, In Time was a simple Twilight Zone story well executed, and J. J. Abrams was again showing his love for the 80's cinema with Super 8. Contagion was ultra-realistic on the topic of global disease spreading, setting a new quality standard for this sub-genre. Always difficult to classify, I liked Kevin Smith's Red State. Nicolas Winding Refn succeeded with his first Hollywood movie Drive and Brad Bird from Pixar with his first live-action movie Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Spielberg's vision of Tintin is incredibly photo-realistic and well done, but a little something is missing. Mention has to be made of the first season of the TV-series Game of Thrones that opened the door to a new era of high-budget productions like we had never seen in this format.
Some movies from that year that I still have to watch: Detective Dee, Melancholia, and James Cameron's Sanctum (this one is already on my Blu-ray shelf).
And now my top 10 list, in a random order (this exercise is already difficult enough):
- Black Swan, maybe Aronovsky's best film to date
- Sleep Tight (Malveillance), so spooky and disturbing if you fear home invasion.
- World invasion: Battle Los Angeles, maybe my favorite alien invasion movie.
- Real Steel: a simple father and son road-trip a-la Over the Top, but with fighting robots!
- Super: shut up crime!
- X-men: First Class: a good start for a second trilogy.
- Origin of the Planet of the Apes: an original new take at the classic story, very nice.
- The Hidden Face: unknown Colombian thriller seen at the Munich Fantasy Filmfest, but that will make your hair stand on end.
- Heartless: Dark British thriller.
- Don't be afraid of the dark, a renewal of haunted house movies.

2012 was for me a bipolar year, i.e. it seems rather easy to categorize the movies from that year into the "good" or "bad" category.
Some good ones that I can find on the Mad Movies list as well start with Killer Joe, maybe the best thriller of the year for me thanks to the great performance by Matthew McConaughey. I also enjoyed the independent Iron Sky and its Moon Nazis, the humour comedy Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, the crazy Japanese Symbol, the Filipino ass-kicking The Raid and the Dark comedy God Bless America. Three good anthology films were V/H/S, The Theater Bizarre and The ABCs of Death, showing that this format can yield some quality movies, at least in the Horror genre. I also liked both thrillers by Ben Wheatley released that year: Kill List and Sightseers (Touristes). And what a great turn of events in The Cabin in the Woods.
Animated movies are mostly absent from Mad Movies' list, in particular Wreck-it Ralph that I liked. Some big budget films in 2012: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (better in extended version and after watching the Blu-ray extras, The Avengers by Josh Whedon, The Bourne Legacy, the time-travel story in Looper, the kind of Alien prequel Prometheus, and Men In Black 3 that I found much better that the usual third episode of a trilogy produced ten years too late. The blockbuster Battleship inspired by the board game of the same name is very laughable but fun to watch. 
Many Festival movies are absent from the Mad Movies list, maybe because they were not released in theaters: the touching Robot & Frank, the weird Franco-Lithuanian Vanishing Waves, the simple Giallo-thriller revival Tulpa, the horrific Thale, the Belgian dark comedy In the Name of the Son, the Canadian futuristic and very good-looking Mars & Avril, and the Mexican diabolic Here comes the Devil. I have learned a lot about cinematography history by watching the documentary Side by Side. The Dinosaur Project is the best-looking dinosaur movie since the Jurassic Park series. Missing from the list is also the excellent animated Starship Troopers: Invasion, best of the franchise since the first.
Now about the flops, The Dark Knight Rises (also missing from Mad Movies' list as all Batman movies) was far from equaling The Dark Knight. The Hunger Games was better than I expected but still not worth the hype. The new Dredd was quickly forgotten, as were the found-footage super-hero movie Chronicle, the totally useless new adaptation Total Recall, the 200 millions dollars John Carter, the Luc Besson-looking Lockout, Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, The Tall Man (The Secret) with Jessica Biel and Timur Bekmambetov's Alien Invasion production The Darkest Hour. The return from the legendary British Hammer studios with The Woman in Black (and an attempt by Daniel Harry Potter Radcliffe to change his image) was a noble enterprise but not very successful. After the incredible (but too long) Love Exposure, I also found Sono Sion's second movie in the 'trilogy of hate' Guilty of Romance to be too long (I will watch the third Cold Fish anyway). I was not enchanted enough by the independent Beast from the Southern Wild.
And in the section of worst movies of the year we find Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Detention both starring the trendy Josh Hutcherson (and in spite of the presence of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in the second), Francis Ford Copolla's Twixt, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, the useless reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, Snow-White and the Huntsman (I have yet to watch Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts to see if it is any better) and the utterly disappointing Piranha 3DD.
A few movies from that year that are on my Blu-ray shelf and that I still have to watch: The Violent Kind and Ang Lee's The Odyssey of Pi. I should also watch The Grey with Liam Neeson.

Stay tuned for the next episode, Part 6: 2013-2014