A good year for cinema is usually a year full of surprises and 2012 offered good ones aplenty. Among them, writers such as Stephen Chbosky adapting his own best-selling rites of passage novel ‘The Perks Of Being A Wallflower’; actresses who also delivered the goods as screenplay writers (Zoe Kazan with ‘Ruby Sparks’) or directors (Julie Delpy in the hilarious comedy ‘Two Days In New York’); from the Australian feel-good treat ‘The Sapphires’, showing Chris O’Down as the shabby manager of a native girl band playing for the US troops in Vietnam; to the darker corners of South Africa with a study on repressed homosexuality in ‘Beauty’ or the explosion of Scandinavian noir, not only on television, but also in cinemas with more successful adaptations such as Jo Nesbø’s ‘Headhunters’.
The arthouse scene provided the long awaited return to form of Robert Guedeguian, who brought his usual acting troupe once again for another blend of humane comedy and working class leftie politics in ‘The Snows Of Kilimanjaro’; Christi Puiu took his time to follow up is multi-awarded ‘Death Of Mr. Lazarescu’ with the formally impressive yet patience challenging ‘Aurora’ and the umpteenth register change in Michael Winterbottom’s career with a simple experimental drama, shot over five years to portrait the impact that a dad in prison had in the lives of his family.
Genre films were another strong source of joy with the superb martial arts feast of ‘The Ride’; the clever dissection of trickery used by horror movies in ‘The Cabin Of The Woods’; the larger than life sci-fi epic ‘Cloud Atlas’, in which the Wachowskis and Tom Twyker aided by a starry cast faithfully recreatef a story without such time boundaries as past, present and future; the lightly politically-tinted literary saga of ‘The Hunger Games’, hugely successful and a worthier teen proposition than the finishing Twilight franchise; the superb reconstruction of the recent tsunami tragedy in ‘The Impossible’ or the impressively restrained existential fight between man and nature in ‘The Grey’.
Any of them would have proudly featured among our Top 10 surprises any other year. In 2012, though, there were some bigger ones.