Since December 17 we’ve been counting down our favorite genre movies of 2012 on the Bleader—animation, documentary, comedy, sci-fi, suspense, horror—as well as the year’s best revivals and worst new releases. Now it’s time for the big tamale, our favorite movies of 2012. Check online for links to blogs and long reviews. —J.R. Jones

4God Bless America Bobcat Goldthwait’s comic riff on Taxi Driver might seem more scary than funny after the Newtown massacre, but it isn’t any less important. A middle-aged office drone, disgusted with the crassness and cruelty of American mass media, learns that he’s terminally ill and goes on a cross-country shooting spree. Though Goldthwait conceived of the movie as a riposte to progun wackos, its comic charge is the fantasy of gun vengeance that we’ve all come to enjoy on the big screen.

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

5Le Grand Amour Hats off to Gene Siskel Film Center for its November retrospective on Pierre Etaix, a comic genius who began his career as a circus clown, wrote gags for Jacques Tati in the 50s, then blossomed in the 60s with a series of droll, visually inventive features. The crown jewel of the series was Le Grand Amour (1969), receiving its Chicago premiere; onscreen, Etaix has the physical grace and quiet self-possession of a silent-film great, and his story of an unhappy married man who falls for his 18-year-old secretary is studded with witty sight gags.

9Compliance One doesn’t expect to see sharp psychological drama in a fast-food restaurant—something about the matching shirts—but this cagey indie from Craig Zobel turns a chicken-fillet place into the setting for a sinister behavioral experiment. A prank caller persuades the gullible manager that he’s a police detective and orders her to strip-search a young employee suspected of stealing from a customer. No one could be dumb enough to fall for that, you might think, though in fact close to 70 incidents like this transpired between 1992 and 2004.

3A Simple Life Another Hong Kong masterpiece about contemporary social ills, Ann Hui’s deeply felt domestic drama considers the fate of isolated people, particularly the elderly and disabled, in a culture that values individualism at the expense of community. Remarkably subtle, the film feels gentle and unstructured while you watch it, but pointed and heartbreaking when you reflect on it. This received its local premiere in May at the River East 21 with no fanfare whatsoever, but Facets Cinematheque brought it back to Chicago in August.

8The Paperboy In adapting Pete Dexter’s southern gothic novel, director Lee Daniels radically presents all outward expressions of sexual, racial, and class identity as forms of theater, which strengthens, rather than distracts from, his theme of impossible love. Like his characters, Daniels believes in a desire so powerful that it can obliterate social barriers, but he also understands how firm those barriers are. Beneath the movie’s campy surface lies a profound sense of tragedy.

  1. Paul Thomas Anderson’s uniquely American The Master . . . 2. Ben Rivers’s gorgeous, idiosyncratic documentary Two Years at Sea . . . 3. Steven Soderbergh’s jazzy international thriller Haywire . . . 4. Wes Anderson’s touching coming-of-age story Moonrise Kingdom . . . 5. Rick Alverson’s PBR-soaked cautionary tale The Comedy . . . 6. Mia Hanson-Love’s somber romance Goodbye, First Love . . . 7. Quentin Tarantino’s electric neowestern Django Unchained . . . 8. Hong Sang-soo’s playful ode to Eric Rohmer, The Day He Arrives . . . 9. Terence Davies’s soulful chamber piece The Deep Blue Sea . . . 10. Philippe Garrel’s emotionally charged drama A Burning Hot Summer