THE LISTS: Best performances of 2012 thus far

At this point I have a tendency of wondering if we're really at the halfway point of this year already. It's true that often times this period of the year is marked by a stunt of intellectual cinematic properties and an abundance of blockbuster diversions. This year, however, it seems like things are just heating up exponentially with a rush of quality cinema. The past two weeks alone have offered not just one, but two films that may qualify the best of the year. But if I'm to be perfectly honest, the last thing I feel like doing at this point is putting the films to task in an effort to rank them. I leave the placing of favorites as a year end routine.

What's more, we're still waiting on plenty of films that seem ever so slightly outside our reach and prove to dramatically change the order of anyone's lists at this time. In just two weeks time we'll finally be able to take in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises", putting an end to suffocating fanboy hype and finally giving us a chance to judge it on its own humble merits. I'm waiting in eager anticipation to see how Yorgos Lanthimos' "Alps" turns out, since that's the real ticket premiere of this month, at least from where I'm looking. And we know that Venice, Telluride, and Toronto are just around the corner with more to bring to the table.

Film Review: "Snowtown" (***1/2)

Extraordinary cinema isn't always a pleasant thing to behold, and these days it seems like the norm for films to gloss over the ugliness with glitz and flash. Enter Justin Kurzel's "Snowtown", domestically known as "The Snowtown Murders", though I absolutely refuse to address it with such a clinical title. "Clinical" is the last word I'd use to describe it, since most of the shocks and pains of this picture do come from a place of honesty.

While describing some of what was going on in the film to my roommates, they were repeatedly asking if this really happened, as if the truth of it would somehow degrade over time. Indeed, that is very much the emotion that I had while watching the film, was one of denial. The film starts out so smoothly, and indeed is able to continuously trick us into feeling that smoothness again and again, all the while a storm outside is brewing, and it's right there for us to see anyway.

Based on the real Australian murder story between 1992 and 1999, "Snowtown" focuses in on a lower-class suburban family in the titular town, who undergo abuse from the mother's deceitful boyfriend. Out of the distress of the situation comes John Bunting, who lifts the family up out of banality as protector, leader, but eventually master. Things soon fall out of the family's control, and they find themselves in a situation from which there is no escape.