V/H/S Viral (2014)

Lots of things go viral now. The Internet has become a sort of do-it-yourself paradise for people who aren't talented enough to get famous any other way. Hell, look at my own blog for a perfect example.

...I think I need to go re-evaluate my life choices. In the meantime, here's a review of V/H/S Viral I had previously written and will now somehow play back to you even though this is a text-based blog post and that makes no sense.

Director: Various

Starring: Justin Welborn, Emmy Argo

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

Yes.

We start this off with one of the most realistic things ever according to modern horror filmmakers – people playing around with cameras and filming their girlfriends' cleavage:

What amazing cinematography and lighting.

I'm sorry, I gotta break character so early in the review but really...who acts like this? Who in real life ever plays with a fucking camera like this? Nobody does! Absolutely nobody in the world ever uses a video camera this much and just follows their girlfriend or friends around filming all day! You'd probably be slapped with harassment fines if you filmed your significant other this much! They'd leave you in a second! But the way these movies tell it, no, filming your loved ones is the highest mark of respect! Truly it signifies decency and respect, and doesn't at all mean they're about to cut you up into little pieces and store your body parts in a freezer while masturbating to the video later.

Sigh. I dunno. At least this time we get a sort of story here with Camera Boy seeing a car chase going on outside. I guess the idea is that it's actually a rogue ice cream truck going mad, which to me sounds like the kind of thing Stephen King could only dream of writing.

Anyway, a cop stands in the road telling Camera Boy to stop filming, because I guess the cop just feels insecure about his looks today. The ice cream truck hits him and immediately kills him, severing an arm in the process – I'm so glad we're letting our kids buy ice cream from these trucks which can kill a man in a second!

Dante the Great

Then we get the first of the anthology stories – this one is a documentary about a magician called Dante the Great. Apparently Dante used to be trailer trash up until he randomly found a magic cloak that used to belong to Houdini. Then he started being able to do cool things like pull rabbits from his cloak.

"Holy crap, I forgot I had left this in my back pocket for so long! Now I get why my clothes smelled like rabbit shit for months!"

After that it was apparently a fast ticket to success, as he gets huge sold-out exclusive shows in big cities and seems to be wowing the entire world. I love some of the people interviewed...like this one couple who say Dante the Great teleported them across the country during his act, from New York to San Francisco. Gee, honey, that magic show sure was worth the hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket back to our home and missing work the next day!

"Dude, he teleported us to the Antarctic Circle! I'm so in awe of the power of stage magicians!"

Another guy says Dante the Great picked his pocket on stage. Well that's great. You really spellbound me on the art of magic now! He stole money from you after you already paid for a ticket. The guy doesn't elaborate if Dante ever gave him his money back, but given the rest of the story, I'm inclined to think he didn't. Boy, Dante's kind of an ass, huh?

As the documentary goes on, it chronicles how Dante went slowly insane because of the cape. This magician's assistant tells most of the story, about how he made friends with her (though really he's just trying to get in her pants). He does creepy things like tie up her hands with rope without warning her first:

"Next I'll use X-Ray vision to see through your already skimpy clothing...isn't that amazing?"

And also beating the shit out of her abusive boyfriend, Chronicle-style!

Assault and eventual murder? Whimsical!

Though not all of his super macho-aggro fighting exploits are so noble – for example, I really don't think killing random women who you conned into sleeping with you is kosher.

I just love the amount of logic this guy has...hey, I'll try and get this hot magician's assistant to be my girlfriend! Oh, but I'd probably have a fucking girlfriend if I didn't keep murdering every woman who came home with me! Eh, what can you say but, magical cloaks turn you into a giant dildo of a human being.

Then we see more of his logic as the cops find out he's been killing people and arrest him. He escapes and gets into a huge fight with them, apparently figuring that will persuade them. Hey, maybe if I kill the cops, they'll leave me alone and I can go back to selling out theaters to perform magic! Yeah! And maybe if you try hard enough, you can also pull a rabbit out of your ass next time.

"This is great publicity for my shows!"

Assistant chick, meanwhile, is sitting in some cop's office and the cop is telling her magic doesn't exist. Then to prove her wrong, she gets magically sucked through a portal in her chair to where Dante is:

"Hmm, my sense of irony and comedic timing tell me this moment means something..."

In the fight she has with Dante, she of course never even has any dust on her face, and doesn't have a single hair out of place or makeup smudge. What can I say about this? Clearly it's important for women to look good while fighting for their lives.

Also, why isn't he just killing her? He's clearly an omnipotent super-god of a man; why not just kill her and get it over with? Or is it really still a possibility in his mind that he could get together with her if he just beats her into submission? Really proving how different you are from the abusive jackass that you saved her from before, guy! But whatever. Clearly he's just crazy now, so that excuses everything.

The guy can teleport anything he wants and rip open bunny rabbits without touching them, but his best recourse here is just strangling her with one hand. Brilliant combat strategy.

He gets sucked into his own cloak like it's a giant vacuum cleaner, and she goes home and uses a webcam so she can show off her own ass:

"Oh, I had an extra cloak after all!"

Then she gets sucked into the cloak too, and that's the end of that!

Bonus – there's a documentary scene where it shows his mom after his disappearance, still living in the same trailer park as before. So even when Dante the Great got all that money and fame, he didn't help his own mother move out of a trailer park. That is just the epitome of class!

Parallel Monsters

The next story is about this guy who builds a dimensional portal in his bedroom. You know, like you do. He meets up with himself from another dimension, which is super cool!

“Hey, Me from Another Dimension, I totally trust you even though you're acting suspicious as fuck and I don't know what kinds of dark secrets or fucked up shit are in this other world! Let's trade lives and explore each other's dimensions!”

“Okay!”

In the parallel universe, main dude meets up with a double of his wife, who apparently finds it fun to invite two wannabe porn stars over to sit on the couch and watch reruns of The Wicker Man.

"What? They don't do this in your dimension?"

He sits on the couch with his parallel-dimension wife, who complains that he ignores her too much. To alleviate her worries, he looks out the window and ignores her some more. What a class act, man.

Then some noises sound outside and he goes outside to find that the two porn stars from before actually have worm monsters in place of dicks, which is totally what I wanted to see. This movie is really hitting all the right notes! I don't think their porn careers would be very fruitful though – they have labor unions for shit like this now.

Hey, his facial expression is the same one all the viewers of the entire movie had after it was over!

Back in the real world, the alternate reality version of the main guy pulls out his own monster-worm-dick in front of the real-world wife. I thought he raped her the first time I saw this, but really we see her again later, and she doesn't look like she got violated by a worm monster...I mean, so far as my eyes can tell on the other side of this computer screen. So maybe he just wanted to show it off. Truly, the lesson learned here is just to use protection when you enter a parallel dimension. Always play on the safe side.

It's also never explained WTF that is, or why they have them - it's just, hey, this is weird alien shit!

I also wonder what her reaction was...

“I've been married to you for 6 years! How did I not notice this?!?”

Yeah that sounds about right. Anyway, both of the wives, in both universes, kill their husbands, which ends this time travel story on a bit of a sour note. I mean, it really isn't much of a selling point for interdimensional travel, is it? I mean, double homicide on both ends probably isn't going to have NASA barging into the basement of the next weirdo who makes a portal.

Wrap-Around Land

In the wrap-around segment, more teenagers try to film the car chase with the demonic ice cream truck, which is a sentence that really makes me question what I do here. Don't I have anything else I could review? No, probably not. Am I having a conversation with myself in the middle of a review? Yes. Yes I am...

We get some dumb enlightening, powerful plays on filmmaking like a shot from the prospective of a kid being dragged along on the back of a truck. KEEP FILMING, BRAVE SOUL!

Bloody feet? No problem! KEEP FILMING!!!

Or this masterful one, which shows from the perspective of a kid falling off a bridge to his death:

Truly this is the commentary on suicide we've been waiting for. Nobody will want to kill themselves now that they've seen what it looks like from this perspective!

Ugh. Okay, I'm done talking about this part.

Bonestorm

The last actual full-length story is about kids skateboarding and making literally everyone they come across mad. I'm not shitting you here. They skateboard on a roof and make the owner of the roof shout at them. They're on the sidewalk and one kid runs into a guy's jeep and damages it, and that guy gets mad at them. What kind of ingenious recourse do they have against all these angry squares who just don't get it? Well, they mostly just flip them off and keep going.

Nothing to do with what I described just now, but funny all the same just for causing these three morons pain.

Also, filming everything is TOTALLY radical, dude. I dunno, just show me the scene where they fight Scott Pilgrim and get exploded into a handful of coins.

They then decide the United States just can't handle their douchiness, so they go to a remote, desolate part of Tijuana, where I'm sure they will be in good company with the drug dealers and slum lords in the area!

"In America they just have photos of Kim Kardashian and Sarah Palin at their skate park ritual religious temples!"

Frankly, though, the dangers of drug cartels are nowhere near as perilous compared to the dangers of Satanic voodoo ritual cults. I can see why so many of them are eager to cross the border to the States now.

Fortunately for them, though, skateboarding means you get superpowers – again, Scott Pilgrim. Read up on it. So the skater-douches go to town on the cult members, even though they're violently outnumbered and smaller, and somehow turn into Sylvester Stallone mini-me's.

Wrap Around...Again

There's a short story in between the main ones about some girl taking off her clothes in a cab for a camera and then pulling a gun on the sleazebag making her do it, saying something about revenge porn. Unfortunately she doesn't kill him before a truck slams into the cab and presumably just kills all three of them. It's kinda just an excuse for boobs, which every V/H/S movie has some sort of insane quota of that I guess this one hadn't met yet.

Will this drive up my site traffic more? I think so. That's why I put it here.

After that we get the conclusion of the main story, where Camera Boy finds the ice cream truck in some abandoned field and finds inside it...well, look:

Hey, you found the neighborhood child predator's hideout!

What were they originally doing in that truck before the apocalypse? I mean, I can't imagine the demonic truck putting all those TVs in there by itself. So that means that, before all this crazy shit started happening, somebody else put all that shit in there...people really need to ask more questions of the ice cream man.

Then what happens next is...honestly kind of hard to describe. Camera Boy sees his girlfriend on the screen bashing her own head into a wall unless he takes his own picture and “goes viral,” I guess – maybe the whole thing is some weird-ass allegory for what technology and “viral” video culture do to us. I dunno, it really isn't elaborated on much.

A new way to take a selfie.

So that's V/H/S Viral. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with most of this, but it was a bit entertaining at least – certainly moreso than the lame second installment, which felt recycled and like an afterthought to the first one. This one, while dumb and mostly nonsensical, did at least keep you guessing and wondering what was going to happen next. I wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but it entertained me more than I thought it would.

Now, my minions, go and spread this review and make it...VIRAL!

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

REVIEW: V/H/S (2012)

Found footage movies are really something these days – pretty much, they’ve morphed into their own genre. With Blair Witch Project being a cultural phenomenon but in actuality a boring, dull movie, and its next-generation spawn Paranormal Activity being along the same lines, it’s surprising that the genre has produced such good works in other, less known capacities. First there was [REC], and then Grave Encounters, and now this, perhaps the best of them all. Ladies and gents, I am talking about V/H/S.

Directors: Various

Starring: Video tapes, static, annoying douchebag criminals, cameras

IMDb

Aside from being annoying to type out because of those dashes in the title – WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS! – this is one of the best horror movies of recent times, with strong directing, strong writing and a hell of an intuition to scare its audience. V/H/S is just totally Satanic, gleeful fun, and while I could just espouse more words to tell you how awesome it is, it’d be more fun to just watch the thing again and take you all on a tour…OF HELL!

So we start off with some assholes…being assholes. They go around and lift up girls’ shirts and get paid for it on the Internet. What a bunch of wastes of air. They get hired to go into this house and steal a video tape, and they get mad when it’s not in the cupboard in the kitchen, which is obviously the first place to look for a video tape:

"I always keep video tapes in the cupboard! It's not weird!!!"

Then they come across a dead guy in a chair surrounded by video tapes, and they decide to sit down and watch the videos, because that’s a good idea. Don’t these morons get enough cash from their, ahem, titillating videos online that they wouldn’t need to do a job where a dead guy is sitting around? I guess not.

Anyway, we then get the first story, told rather brilliantly from a camera embedded in a pair of glasses. It’s about a bunch of idiots going out to pick up chicks at a bar. They’re driving along and they talk about how much they really want to talk to some girls tonight. That’s right – talk to them. Not have sex with them, or even make out with them…talk to them. Conversation, ohhhhh yeah…that’s some steamy stuff going on there!

They get kicked out eventually and go back to their hotel room with two girls, one of whom looks like Emma Stone and the other like an anorexic Helena Bonham Carter on meth. At least we can’t say they don’t try to get some variety…instead of just filming these girls for an Internet show, though, they try to have sex with them! Except one of them, the Emma Stone chick, just passes out. The other one turns into a vampire and devours them all! Always a mood killer when you’re trying to get laid.

Well, you can't deny, they got what they came for...and a whole lot more...

The main guy runs out and tries to get help, but gets mauled by the crazy vampire chick, who now looks like she spent waaaay too much time at a GWAR concert:

Then the guy tries to run outside after the girl starts weeping in the corner, and tries to get help. For some reason, nobody does. So he runs across the pavement and the vampire chick flies out and grabs him, presumably taking him off to have a nice, ahem, conversation somewhere…and that’s the end of the story.

And it was awesome. This story perfectly captured the feel of a loud, claustrophobic, intoxicated night, and the characters, silly and immature as they were, got what was coming to them for it. The acting was great and the snappy, aggressive pacing just went straight for the throat. How can any fan of horror argue with stuff like this? And, hell, this wasn’t even the best story V/H/S has to offer…let us continue our journey into the strange, depraved recesses that V/H/S wants to show us.

The second story is set in Arizona! We follow a likable young woman and her likable fiancé as they go on a road trip through Arizona, hitting all the tourist destinations like the Grand Canyon as well as the Old Wild West. Most of the story, though, is set in their motel room. Hmm, a horror story that builds atmosphere with likable, realistic characters and a slow pace? Why does that sound familiar…

That’s right, it’s a Ti West story. So expect lots of semi-cutesy romantic moments broken up with realistic couple bantering and lots of petty drama, before the eventual payoff of a great horror twist at the end. Fortunately…I really like this formula, and this might be my favorite Ti West directed film yet, actually. The setting is cool and the characters are really well done, being simple enough to work in a short film setting, but still with enough layers and hints of depth to make them interesting to watch. The pace is excellent, and shows Ti West is really getting a style down, with a hell of an attention to detail and atmosphere. The acting is also very well done.

The end of the story comes so fast you barely even see it coming – basically what happens is, the mysterious stranger who showed up at the couples’ door the previous night comes back and slits the guy’s throat. The girl, as it so happens, was conspiring with this mysterious stranger, who apparently she had a relationship with in the past. The story ends with her saying, frantic and rushed, “Did you get rid of [the video]?”

"Did you make sure to show the audience that shocking footage to explain everything? Good."

That is friggin’ cool, and a twist nobody would have seen coming. Hats off – this might be my favorite story in the compilation, but there are still more to come!

The next story is about some kids going out to a cabin in the woods to reenact a Friday the 13^th film. How retro of them. The group consists of a kinda normal guy, a kinda normal girl, a slutty girl and a nerdy guy. Never seen that combination before, have you? Fortunately, like everything else in V/H/S this is actually done competently, with some really good actors who make the characters work. They’re not that likable or anything, but they’re realistic, and they pretty much get the job done.

They go out in the woods and do the things that dumb kids always do in movies like this – they jump in the water naked and smoke pot for about two seconds. In true 80s fashion, the one nerdy guy even goes on a whole anti-drug rant that’s frankly pretty hilarious. But the odd thing is that the one normal girl, who drove them all there, keeps stopping them to look at places where she says her friends got hurt. And at one point, while everyone else is walking ahead, she turns around and actually says, “You’re all gonna fuckin’ die out here!”

Pretty odd thing to say…especially if she’s trying to make sure they DON’T get suspicious. And who wouldn’t, when in the forest lies a red-faced man who is invisible except through the glitches in a video camera?!

When you see it...you'll see it...

That’s a frigging AWESOME concept. And the movie does well by it, as we see everyone get killed off bloodily and in true slasher horror fashion, probably the best slasher stuff since Hatchet, easily. Gleefully, bloodily evil and lewd. The one surviving girl sets up traps for him, and it appears she catches him…

…but then we get backhanded by one of the most cold, brutal endings in a horror film lately. Just chilling.

Oh, the next story is really something…this one is about a couple who live far away from each other and chat via webcam all the time. The guy looks bored all the time and the girl is, well…a complete idiot, for reasons you’re about to see. It’s revealed that there’s a weird bruise on the girl’s arm, and that she sometimes hears ghosts in her apartment. The guy reacts to this with a perfect monotone expression:

"Hmm...round, symmetrical and proportionate. Your boobs get an 8.5/10."

Amazing how invested he is!

We find out that apparently, rather than going to a hospital, this girl responds to a weird bruise on her arm by cutting into her arm with a knife:

Isn’t that just perfectly sane? No, really. I’m convinced now – this chick is just nuts. She clearly needs to be admitted to a mental hospital. That vacant, bright eyed look in her eyes while she’s holding up the knife is just scary more than anything; even scarier than the ghost in this story! God damn, is this nuts. And, what, her plan is to close her eyes, carry her laptop around and have the boyfriend tell her if he sees a ghost, so SHE can talk to it and “find out if it wants her to find its body or something,” as she puts it? That’s so stupid you could see it from space. I love that bit about finding out if the ghost wants her to find its body. That’s just a great mental picture, isn’t it? “The adventure of the crazy knife-wielding webcam girl to find the ghost’s body! Starring Lindsay Lohan.”

OK, OK, so she goes and hunts some ghosts until one of them shines a bright Men in Black-esque light in her face, and then she passes out. It’s revealed that apparently, the boyfriend was in the same building the whole time, as he comes down and cuts a strange fetus-like alien out of her – what a nice guy!

So, what, these two NEVER ran into one another outside, if he really lived that close? I don’t buy that. There was never any instance in their conversation where it seemed implausible or unlikely that the boyfriend was far away? Boy, the levels of total implausibility are just stunning me!

And, what, that stupid ghost is like, his sidekick or something? That’s hilarious. The magical abortion doctor, who travels the world with his ghost buddies and his trusty webcam, ready to save the women of the world from demonic babies AAAAAAAAND getting to see their tits as a bonus!

"Now now, move your arm or I won't be able to judge for the boob judging contest! Because I'm a creep-o!"

That’s right. He’s just a pervert this whole time. That’s the big plot twist with this story – the guy has more than one girl he’s doing this to. Well, we should praise this individual for standing up for our right to…to have abortions? No. Definitely not going there. Next story!

The last story is about a bunch of guys on Halloween, and with costumes like this:

…you know it’s gonna be good!

They go to some haunted house party and find that they truly know how to pick ‘em when the whole house is totally empty and vacant of anyone at all. They wander around for a bit and goof off, and it’s all pretty well and good, until they find a cult in the basement trying to sacrifice some poor girl tied between two poles, like King Kong replicated in a suburban basement. Only instead of a giant ape, these guys are trying to appease a house full of angry ghosts!

The Attack of the Killer Tableware...next month on SyFy!

They escape, taking the girl with them, only she turns out to be a bad omen when she lures the angry spirits right to them! They stop on some train tracks and, even though the guy driving tries his best, they end up stuck and a train runs them over. And the other guys in the car all die thinking that their buddy driving was actually a murderous asshole trying to kill them all by not moving out of the way of a moving train.

"Can I take a moment of your time to talk about Our Lord and Savior?"

Splendid!

So that’s V/H/S, and boy, is it awesome – this has got to be the best horror movie of 2012, and maybe of 2011 as well. I especially love how creative this is in delivering its stories. Far from just giving us pandering jump scare moments, this invents clever new ways to shoe in a camera to tell the story every time. The first story had that kid with the camera in his glasses, the second was a couple taking a vacation and filming it, in the third, you could only see the killer if you had a camera, the fourth had webcams and the fifth had a camera built into the guy’s Halloween costume.

Those are all really good, inventive ways to tell a horror story, and after all, we do live in the age where horror is about firsthand experience, about imagining the fear literally through another person’s eyes rather than a detached view like the classic stories. There have been bumps on the road, but with fierce conviction, excellent acting and creative storytelling, V/H/S has delivered a bloody, screaming good time of a horror movie. Go see it.

Images used here are not mine, they are copyright of their original owners.

The Best Movies of 2012

Now we come to our final countdown, the best movies of the year - or rather, at least what I thought were the best. Of course opinions will be divided, but to hell with it, I'm here to force mine down your throats!

THE BEST MOVIES OF 2012

11. Lincoln

Steven Spielberg’s biopic on Abraham Lincoln is a monument of stately, comfortable filmmaking from one of the masters of the business. Everything about this is well-made, polished to a professional sheen that does justice to this great man and really brings him to life on screen for the first time ever. This is a long movie, but it’s incredibly lavish and detailed, with that classic Spielbergian charm that shows he is still the master of thoughtful, uplifting cinema. Daniel Day Lewis is fantastic as Lincoln and the story, about the passage of the 13^th amendment, is carried with maturity. The portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln is also very much worth noting.

10. ParaNorman

Children’s’ movies might get a bad rap, but that’s slowly changing with movies like UP, Ratatouille, How to Train Your Dragon and now ParaNorman. The story is pretty basic, just a tale about a kid who can see ghosts who gets called to save the town from a witch, but basic is the way to go sometimes, and ParaNorman is great because it has well written characters who play off each other quite nicely, stunning visuals (though this is the norm for movies today) and subtle, flowing messages that can resonate with children as well as adults. A clever, deft and energized romp that should not be missed.

9. Dredd

Great action movies are almost as hard to come by as great horror movies these days. Dredd is a great action movie, in the style of Die Hard and Terminator if they were done up in a 2010s style. I’ve never read any of the comics about Judge Dredd, but this movie explodes with huge action scenes, delicious gore and a rocket-speed pace that doesn’t let up. It’s got a cool setting, cool villains and doesn’t pull any punches. This movie is like a metal-plated fist to your gut.

8. Killer Joe

This is the most irreverent movie of the year with how outrageous and indecent it is, and Matthew McConaughey delivers as the titular character with one of my favorite performances all year – he is possessed with a manic, quick-witted furor that almost carries the whole movie on its own, if not for standout performances from Emile Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church, too. This is a bloody good time of a movie that speeds through its runtime like a coked up Hell’s Angel with an attitude problem, unraveling a story of betrayal and greed without any sugar coating. Killer Joe revels in its unholiness and I love it for that very lack of restraint.

7. V/H/S

The best horror movie of the year, and an almost revolutionary experience compared to the sad sacks at attempts the last few years have given us. V/H/S’s strength lies in absolutely genius scares and inventive storytelling. It’s a found footage film that actually uses that to its advantage with some creative framing – a family vacation tape and a webcam chat log – and, here’s a shocker – no obvious jump scares! Yes, instead we get brilliant storytelling that unravels itself in short, sweet bursts of sheer gleeful evil and mayhem; stories that set up their atmospheres and settings quick and then deliver a hell of a punchline with great end twists and fascinatingly gruesome concepts. This is seriously awesome, and horror devotees who love the genre for its imagination will find much to love here.

6. Wreck-It Ralph

A sheer joy to behold, Wreck-It Ralph is the best children’s movie I’ve seen in a long time, hearkening back to the kind of grace and power that 2009’s UP possessed in spades. The key to making a great kids’ film is making sure you tell a great story first and then make it kid-friendly second. And Wreck-It Ralph is good at that because it has hugely memorable characters, a great setting – seriously, arcade games! That’s so cool I’d give it a good rating even if the movie was lame. And a tight, fast-paced, electrically charged plot that never stops moving and is constantly inventive and clever. There are laughs to be had, there are emotive moments and there are fist-pumping action and car chase scenes. Wreck-It Ralph is a treasure of a film.

5. The Avengers

Joss Whedon is one of the best storytellers of our generation, weaving Shakespearean drama with modern sci-fi intrigue, explosive action and even some wry comedy here and there. The Avengers is his new big-screen blockbuster, the big movie that every superhero fan was waiting for, and it’s pretty much the summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters. Huge, sweeping action scenes are really only icing on the cake of the characters themselves, who are acted brilliantly and written brilliantly, with Whedon’s strong writing tying together a series of films dating back five years. Important for how conceptually brilliant it is, but also incredibly entertaining, and one of the more satisfying movies of the year. A mighty thunderbolt of a film, down from the heavens.

4. The Amazing Spider-Man

I love Spider-Man and have since I was really young, and this was a revolution for me because it proved we could have a really, really good Spider-Man movie. Not that the Raimi stuff was bad, but Marc Webb’s reboot is just so much better in every way. Everything about this is just grade-A stuff and flows like a charm. This is really Andrew Garfield’s movie as he proves he is a dynamite actor, with a ton of range and bursting emotional power, too. Emma Stone as well delivers maybe my favorite performance of hers yet. The action kicks ass and the story has emotional power and can resonate with audiences today just as well as the original comic book could back in the 60s, with the updates made and the clever, snappy directing. This is a smooth, well put together film that I will never tire of watching.

3. The Hunger Games

This was a real surprise for me, because I thought the first book of the series was good, not great – I really didn’t expect much from this movie. I mean, how many times has a YA book series actually produced something meaningful to cinema? Well, this is my mea culpa – The Hunger Games is a big, sweeping and epic hammer of a film that completely washes over you in waves with how much is going on, submerging the audience in the world entirely. You will feel every chaotic action scene rattle in your bones and the world the movie creates will seem as real as your own every day life, and twice as terrifying. First rate acting from Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson only adds to the vitality and strength this movie has in spades. Truly a story more meant to be seen than read, The Hunger Games is one of the best movies of the year.

2. Chronicle

I knew nothing about this movie when I went into the theater, and it floored me. A powerful, individual tale of three young men in the suburbs who come across a mysterious rock in the ground that gives them superpowers – only for one of them, with an unstable family life, to start losing his mind and using the power for criminal means. The three lead actors are all really great and sell their characters superbly – I fully believed they were who they said they were. The story is a very compelling take on troubled teenagers and the sci-fi twist makes this probably the most original film I saw all year. For its depiction of the unfortunate marginalized kids who just can’t get anywhere even despite their efforts, Chronicle is a powerful film that you shouldn’t miss. Essential.

1. Moonrise Kingdom

I never expected to love a Wes Anderson film, but here it is anyway – Moonrise Kingdom. This is just a lovely movie, with charm, grace and power, as well as a wry, fine-tuned dry sense of humor. There’s so much going on here that it’s too much to comprehend on one viewing alone, but at its core this is a love story, and one of the best love stories, in any medium, I have witnessed in a long time. The thing is that Moonrise Kingdom is not just a love story about two kids getting together, but about family in general – about the ties that bind us together and the fissures that break us apart, and about solace found in unexpected places. With a powerful story told by first rate actors all around, this is funny and romantic and everything in between all at once, integrating everything into a melting pot so well that you stop picking apart the different aspects and just accept it as it is: a force to be reckoned with. And for all the estranged and the lonely out there, this is a light in the dark. Magisterial, unforgettable and powerful.

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