Indiewire 2012 Year-End Critics Poll Ballots

"No list is complete. Mine bears plenty of lacunae including the very capacity (intellectual wherewithal?) to either include or exclude two banner features set to release after this list's due date: namely, QT's Django and Bigelow's ZDT. There's also movies I just didn't get to see. And others I avoided seeing. I've said it before: I'm a lousy cinephile when compared to many of my friends, and I'm certainly nothing like a critic in any strict or professional sense. Which puts these polls in a rather dubious position: a human may contain multitudes but she is never an aggregate of others. That is, the real value of a practice such as this is to be found in the individual lists. Lord knows I don't want others to speak for me, nor do I claim to speak for others, because I'd much rather have a conversation. How does my list compare to, say, my friend and colleague Danny Kasman's? To a list belonging to somebody I don't know? That's how I will pore over whatever results come out of this thing. After all, I'm sure I forgot something as much as I didn't have space for films like the two other Hong Sangsoo movies that saw release this year, Oki's Movie and The Day He Arrives, or any of the following: Moonrise Kingdom, The Deep Blue Sea, Flight, The Grey, Miss Bala, Attenberg, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Keep The Lights On, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Oslo August 31, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Kid With The Bike (and even Lincoln). And then there's stuff that I'm not allowed to vote for, like the latest film by Alain Resnais, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, which is probably my favorite thing that I saw in 2012. Or some music videos. Or other internet-based movies of various lengths. The point is: the marketplace isn't the only arena for the cinema, and neither are film festivals. I honestly don't know what the best arena is, but there's a political spark in my heart that says we needn't worry about such a consideration at all. Then again, I'm participating here, so, I'm plenty complicit within this smaller ball of wax that you can't quite detach from the ever-growing blob of magma that is the world and all its money-mad machinations. I mean, I'm an American: I don't see myself as a cog, a true member of the proletariat (scary syllables!), my ego tells me to see myself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. " -- Ryland Walker Knight