1. Frances Ha
I first saw Frances Ha at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. Having been a fan of some of director Noah Baumbach's previous work, such as The Squid and Whale and Greenberg, I was looking forward to seeing the film, but it was hardly my most anticipated film of the festival. I was quite stunned then to find that, not only was Frances Ha my favorite film at Toronto, but it was one of my favorite films of the last few years. Had Frances Ha debuted last year, it would have topped my personal top ten films list, which isn't insignificant because I felt 2012 was a fairly strong year for movies. Frances Ha chronicles the misadventures of Frances (Greta Gerwig), a late-twenties wanna be professional dancer who sort of slums out an existence in New York City. Frances thinks she wants to dance for a living, but as an apprentice at a dance company, her future doesn't look too bright. She lives with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), but when Sophie decides she's ready to move on with her life, it leaves Frances scrambling to find a new place to live. Enjoying the present, but no eye towards the future, Frances is living life adrift in the Big Apple, stuck in an emotional limbo she doesn't really want to escape. The word zeitgeist is thrown around a lot, but even more than the "spirit of the age", Frances Ha captures the psychology of a generation. Like John Hughes in the 1980's, or Richard Linklater in the 1990's, Noah Baumbach (along with Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the film's screenplay) shows an intuitive understanding of a group of young adults who have had the privilege of living in a world that protects them to the point of not feeling entirely real. Frances is about as affable as they come, and she shows no sense of malicious entitlement, but her inability to take things seriously leaves her in a kind of addictive suspended animation, unable and unwilling to move forward. Beyond this brilliant and shockingly apt character study aspect of Frances Ha though, the reason why the movie is unquestionably my favorite of the year (and may very likely remain there by the end of the year) is that above all else, Frances Ha is a pure expression of cinema. No other film I have seen that was released this year pays homage to and takes advantage of the narrative techniques that are unique to the medium of film as much as Frances Ha does.
Shot in a beautiful black-and-white and filled with the very essence of contemporary New York City, Frances Ha will and has immediately drawn comparisons to Woody Allen's classic Manhattan, and for good reason. Beyond this most obvious comparison though, the film is also extremely reminiscent of the French New Wave movement. In particular, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows comes to mind in how brutally yet lovingly honest the film is in dissecting the protagonist's motivations and insecurities. Realistically, the film probably has two shots at Oscar recognition. The first would be a Best Original Screenplay nomination. As I previously stated, the Writers Branch more than any other branch sticks up for smaller independent films that would get no awards love otherwise, as was the the case with Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, whose sole nomination was for Baumbach's script. The other possible nomination would be a Best Actress nod for Gerwig's remarkable incarnation of Frances, but this will depend on how stacked the field is. Of course, at this stage of the game it's tough to say how many legitimate contenders for Best Actress there will be, but just from the synopsis and the actresses involved, it looks to be a crowded year. Alas, if I had my druthers, just for the scene of Frances running and dancing through the streets of New York City to the sound of David Bowie's infectious Modern Love, the film would be the front runner for Best Picture, but I'll settle for any nomination just so Frances Ha can claim to be an Oscar nominated movie, as it deserves to be.
Those are my five films I would like the Academy to remember when filling out their ballots in late-December/early-January, but let me know in the comments section below which movies released so far this year that you would like the Academy not to forget come nomination time.