2012 is halfway done and although I’ve been out of the American commercial loop for almost two months (I’m flying back to NY today), I’m dead certain of the year’s best so far. Cannes favorites are included because I’ve seen ’em and I know what I know. Beyond the top category is a mashup of my April-June assessments plus January-March judgments. The usual admonishments, corrections and disputes are requested.

Best Films of 2012 So Far: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Magic Mike, Miss Bala, Holy Motors (Cannes), Haywire, Bernie, On The Road (Cannes), No (Cannes), God Bless America, Killing Them Softly (Cannes), Amour (Cannes…continues to grow upon reflection but a grueling sit), The Three Stooges, The Sessions (formerly known as The Surrogate), Michael, Rampart, 21 Jump Street, The Grey, Rust and Bone (Cannes) (18)

April through June Toppers (commercially released): Beasts of the Southern Wild, Magic Mike, God Bless America, Bernie, The Three Stooges (5)

Austere, Penetrating, Disciplined, Bressonian: Beyond The Hills (Cannes) (1)

Good Things (April-June): The Dictator, Moonrise Kingdom (2)

“Impressive” But Bothersome/Cumbersome, Don’t Wanna See it Again, Eff It: Prometheus (1)

Not Half Bad (January through June): Safety Not Guaranteed, The Hunt (Cannes), Take This Waltz, Neil Young Journeys, Polisse, Your Sister’s Sister, Under African Skies, We Have a Pope, Monsieur Lazhar, Jeff Who Lives at Home, Declaration of War, Coriolanus, Footnote, Friends With Kids, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Woman in Black, Damsels in Distress, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope.

Stirring Production Design (April-June): Dark Shadows, Snow White and the Huntsman (2)

Enhanced, Undiminished: Titanic 3D (1)

Reportedly Awful (March-June): Rock of Ages, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2)

Passable with Great Musical Finale: Mirror Mirror (1)

Special Awfulness Distinction: The Paperboy (Cannes) (1)

Arousing/Primitive/Punishing: The Avengers, Hunger Games, The Raid: Redemption, Lawless (Cannes) Cabin in the Woods, Lockout (5)

Catastrophes (April-June): John Carter, Battleship (2)

Mostly Grotesque: Peace, Love and Misunderstanding (1)

Unseen As We Speak (a ridiculous amount given my absence from the American megaplex for the last two months): People Like Us, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Brave, Seeking A Friend For The End of the World, To Rome With Love, Men in Black 3, Five Year Enagegement, Piranha 3D, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Bel Ami, Paul Williams Still Alive, Lola Versus, Dark Horse, El Gringo, My Way, Life Happens, The Lady, etc., etc.

Entirely Decent Tony Scott Film With An Ending That Underwhelms: Safe House (1)

Mildly Gripping: Silent House (1)

Mildly Likable, Amusing: Wanderlust (1)

Best Docs: Undefeated, Bully, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Pray for Japan, The Island President (5)

Slow-going: Turn Me On, Dammit!, 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2)

Lesser Dardennes: The Kid With A Bike (1)

Unfulfilling, Irksome, Bad: Contraband, Red Tails, Man on a Ledge, One for the Money, Flowers of War (5)

Labored, Less-Than-Likable Family Relationship Dramas: Being Flynn, The Snowtown Murders, Boy, The Deep Blue Sea, W.E. (5)

Didn’t See (January-March): Chronicle, Act of Valor, The Forgiveness of Blood (3)

Avoided Like Plague: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, Let the Bullets Fly, Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, A Thousand Words (4)

“Magic Mike delivers on its promise of gyrating and pelvic-thrusting, barely-clothed men as the music plays and the lights shine, but beyond that you get a film that comes across as a truly authentic drama with a performance from Channing Tatum that makes you believe you may actually be looking at the movie star Hollywood so desperately wants him to be.” — Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet in a review that posted today at 10:26 am.

“Most audiences, expecting something closer to a masculine Showgirls, might be surprised by the relatively serious tone: Magic Mike crams together several derivative subplots that dangle (sorry) around energetic striptease sequences enacted with the ostentatiousness of an MGM musical. It’s such a slick…er, package that one can easily overlook the lack of originality as things veer toward a series of clichéd resolutions. [And yet] a lot of its shortcomings are only apparent in retrospect. Soderbergh hugs a familiar arc that makes its path visible long before it arrives at various twists, but even when revealing its secrets, Magic Mike casts a seriously entertaining spell.” — Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn in a review that posted today at 11:33 am.

Somebody at Cinemacom (or was it after Cinemacom?) told me that Looper was a lot better than Total Recall. Damnation with faint praise? Maybe. How did he know this? He didn’t — he was just passing along what he’d heard. So it’s all bullshit, right? Maybe not. Looper might be half-good, pretty good or just plain good. Or at least fair.

Is it possible for an actor’s dignity to be all but destroyed in one fell swoop? If you ask me John Phillip Law (who died in 2008 at age 70) managed this when he strapped on huge white swan wings in Roger Vadim‘s Barbarella (1968) as the blind angel Pygar. There’s a shot of him flying into the heavens with his flamingo legs dangling — he looks like a peroxide dodo bird. When I first saw this I muttered, “You poor man…your agent really screwed you.”

Law was quite the hot guy in Hollywood for about five years. A breakout performance as a Russian submarine sailor in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! got him started. But what man or woman, for that matter, would have been willing to take him half-seriously after Barbarella? The knockout punch was Jack Haley, Jr.‘s excruciatingly bad The Love Machine (1971), in which Law played randy news guy Robin Stone.

Law made 14 more films over the next 30-plus years (including 1995’s Free Willy 2) but once you’ve surrendered your on-screen dignity, there’s no getting it back.

What other actors have committed a similar kind of career hari kari, i.e., one or two bad choices that took them out of the game in record time?

The Barbarella Bluray (out 7.3) brought all this back.

The addition of RAM to HE’s memory, implemented a few hours ago, seems to have made everything — posting, loading — much faster. If it doesn’t seem that way to anyone, please advise.

“There is likely no major American filmmaker so tuned in to the intertwined axes of life and work as Steven Soderbergh,” writes Boxoffice.com’s Mark Olsen in his review of Magic Mike (Warner Bros., 6.29). “In film after film he’s explored the way jobs both build up and destroy the contemporary American soul.

“If at times it is hard to parse from Soderbergh’s prolific output which films are proper, big-time movies and which are in-the-margins sidebars (‘They’re all for me,’ he notoriously likes to say), Magic Mike combines those conflicting impulses perhaps more than any of his other films. The flick is a study of modern economic reality and the rationalizations that get us through the day, acknowledging the glamour and the glitter and sweat required to get us there.”

The DVD Beaver screen captures and comparisons of Olive Films’ Bluray of High Noon (out 7.17) are thrilling. For the 189th time, here’s my 7.27.07 piece arguing that Fred Zinneman‘s 1952 classic is a far better film than Rio Bravo. Topped off (or resting upon, really) a Dimitri Tiomkin score that just kills, there’s really no argument.

Okay, with Kevin James-type laughs. Which have worked before with a certain sector of the public. Will Gavin O’Connor get some kind of “thanks” acknowledgement in the closing credits?

I’m sorry but portions of this trailer for Hit and Run (Open Road, 8.24) really made me laugh, particularly the running joke about Hershey sex and presumed sexual dominance of one race over another, etc. The bit that doesn’t work is when Dax Shepard (who co-directed, produced, wrote the screenplay and stars) and Kristin Bell walk into the wrong motel room. The residents just stand and lie there like Duane Hanson statues. Nope.

The poster calls it Hit & Run and the movie sites are calling it Hit and Run. Which?

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott is calling Benh Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild (Fox Searchlight, opening today in NY & LA) “a blast of sheer, improbable joy, a boisterous, thrilling action movie with a protagonist who can hold her own alongside Katniss Everdeen, Princess Merida and the other brave young heroines of 2012. There are loose threads you can pull at — sometimes the wide-eyed wonder slides toward willful naivete, and there are moments of distracting formal sloppiness — but the garment will not come unraveled.

“A lot of thinking has gone into Beasts of the Southern Wild, about themes as well as methods, about the significance of the story as well as its shape. And it is certainly rich enough to invite and repay a healthy measure of critical thought.

“But its impact, its glory, is sensory rather than cerebral. Let me try out an analogy. Discovering this movie is like stumbling into a bar and encountering a band you’ve never heard of playing a kind of music that you can’t quite identify. Nor can you figure out how the musicians learned to play the way they do, with such fire and mastery. Did they pick it up from their grandparents, study at a conservatory, watch instructional videos on the Internet or just somehow make it all up? Are you witnessing the blossoming of authenticity or the triumph of artifice?

“Those are interesting questions. They are also irrelevant, because right now you are transported by an irresistible rhythm and moved by a melody that is profoundly, almost primally, familiar, even though you are sure you have never heard anything like it before.”

I’ve posted this a couple of times since Sundance but here, again, is my original review, which I titled “Rank, Robust, Ecstatic”:

The passionately praised film “is everything its admirers have said it is. It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers who live there.

“It’s something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of.

“Beasts is much more of a naturalistic object d’art than a narrative-driven drama, at least as most of us define that term. The emphasis is on sensual naturalism-wallowing — lush, grassy, muddy, oozy, leafy, stinky, primeval, non-hygenic, slithery, watery, ants up your ass — with a few story shards linked together like paper clips.”

The very-good-when-she-was-good Nora Ephron died yesterday at age 71 — hugs and condolences to friends, family, fans. A blood disorder rooted to lukemia, and a shock (nobody outside Ephron’s immediate circle seemed to know it was coming) and very sad — she left way, way too early. But she lived a very full life and experienced the kind of excitement and fulfillment and creative satisfaction that many of us only dream about.

I always think of Bob Dylan‘s line about “death’s honesty” when someone goes. That’s what it is, all right — honest. But keep your distance, pal.

Ephron was an expert, witty, self-deflating writer of a neo-feminist slant. Her best years in this vein began in the late ’60s as a journalist-essayist. Her ’70s articles in particular (largely about food, sex, life in Manhattan) were really, really good — amusing, cutting, confessional, clever. Her screenwriter mother Phoebe once told her that “everything is copy”, and she certainly seemed to have followed that rule. Yes, some of Nora’s ruffs and bon mots were mean at times, but if you’re worried about pissing people off you’ve no business being a writer. Ephron had her voice, and no one can ever take that away.

While married to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein Ephron and he did a re-write of William Goldman‘s All The President’s Men script, and if I’m not mistaken at least one of their scenes made it into that 1976 film — the one in which Dustin Hoffman (as Bernstein) fakes out the chilly, brittle secretary of Dade County investigator Martin Dardis (Ned Beatty) by calling and pretending to be some guy in the County Clerk’s office who needs some records picked up that Dardis wants, etc.

That was a really good scene, and on the strength of it and the screenplay Ephron got a screenwriting gig for a TV movie, and eventually a ticket into the movie bigtime. The ’80s were great for her.

Ephron’s first highly acclaimed screenplay was for Silkwood (’82), which Mike Nichols directed with Meryl Streep as the brave but doomed Karen Silkwood — a strong, commendable, well-acted drama.

And then came her screenplay of Heartburn (’86), which was based on her book of the same name about her marriage to Bernstein and the infidelity that led to their breakup. The Mike Nichols-directed film was quite satisfying during the first half, and less so during the second. The ending was flat.

For me Heartburn was the first movie that told me that Ephron, good as she was, was unwilling to step outside of her well-tended box. She couldn’t seem to admit to any kind of marital failing on the part of her stand-in character, Rachel Samstat (played by Streep), and that was trouble.

As I wrote a few weeks ago after re-watching the film, “The problem is that Jack Nicholson‘s affair with the unseen giraffe lady with the big splayed feet (inspired by Bernstein’s affair with Margaret Jay) happens entirely off-screen and reveals nothing at all about Nicholson’s psychology. All you can sense is that he feels vaguely threatened by fatherhood and responsibility. It just feels bizarre that the affair just happens without the audience being told anything. Nicholson’s Mark is just a selfish shit (which may well have been the case except it takes two to bring a marriage down), and I felt bothered and irritated that I wasn’t getting the whole story.”

And then then came her much-beloved screenplay for When Harry Met Sally (’89), which included that famous Meg Ryan orgasm scene in the diner. That and the film’s nicely-woven emotionality solidified Ephron’s rep as the seasoned go-to lady for romantic comedies, and she was more or less set for life…as far as anyone who lives by their wits and the task of catching and condensing ephemeral pollen can have anything “set.”

Ephron’s first directing effort, This is My Life, a dramedy about a mom (Julie Kavner) who works nights as a stand-up comic, was a critical and box-office dud. But her next film, Sleepless in Seattle (’93), was a huge hit, and was reasonably well handled for the most part. But — sorry but I think it’s true — after that it was all downhill as far as Ephron’s mise en scene-ing was concerned. For she had stepped into another box — that of the highly-paid hyphenate who could presumably deliver sharp, well-sculpted romantic comedies that connected with women and men alike — and the demands of that business or that genre plus her inability to really dig in and go for the challenge and somehow deliver soulful relationship meals in an ’80s and ’90s James L. Brooks-like vein….I don’t know what happened exactly, but it was all diminishing returns, or so it seemed to me.

Mixed Nuts (’94), Michael (’96), You’ve Got Mail (’98), Lucky Numbers (’00), Bewitched (’05) and Julie & Julia (’09) — none of them really worked. And yet I was mostly okay with the screenplay she co-wrote with her sister Delia for Hanging Up (’00), a Diane Keaton-directed film about three sisters (Keaton, Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow) coping with the death of their cantankerous dad (Walter Matthau).

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis was pretty rough on Ephron in this December ’09 interview with Jezebel.

The last time I heard Ephron speak was during a 4.18.09 tribute to Mike Nichols panel at the Museum of Modern Art. She and three of Nichols’ legendary collaborators — Streep, Elaine May and Buck Henry — delivered a “moderately dazzling, often funny, at times chaotic group discussion,” I wrote, “like a spirited dinner-table thing between Uncle Mike and the in-laws…a nice, raggedy, catch-as-catch-can vibe.” Here’s the mp3. Really good stuff.

Here’s a portion of an introduction that Ephron wrote for the Kindle version of her last book, “I Remember Nothing””

“When you’re young, you make jokes about how things slip your mind. You think it’s amusing that you’ve wandered into the kitchen and can’t remember why. Or that you carefully made a shopping list and left it home on the counter. Or that you managed to forget the plot of a movie you saw only last week.

“And then you get older.

“Anyway, at some point, I thought it might be fun to write a book about what I remember, and what I’ve forgotten. I still feel bad about my neck, but I feel even worse about the fact that huge bits of my life have gone slip-sliding away, and I thought I’d better write them down while I still had a sense of humor about it all.”

411’s Roger Friedman has posted another portion in which Ephron lists the things she’ll miss when she’s gone:

“My kids, Nick [Pileggi, her husband), Spring, Fall, waffles, the concept of waffles, bacon, a walk in the park, the idea of a walk in the park, the park, Shakespeare in the Park, the bed, reading in bed, fireworks, laughs, the view out the window, twinkle lights, butter, dinner at home just the two of us, dinner with friends, dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives, Paris, next year in Istanbul, Pride and Prejudice, the Christmas tree, Thanksgiving dinner, one for the table, the dogwood, taking a bath, coming over the bridge to Manhattan, pie.”