50 best movies of 2012

11. Martha Marcy May Marlene

The Movie: While everybody else in movies was busy joining a cult - The Master, Sound Of My Voice, Wanderlust - Elizabeth Olsen was making her escape. But it's not as easy as that to adjust to real life in Sean Durkin's disturbing, acute thriller.

Impact: At the beginning of the year, it was obligatory to point out that Olsen is the kid sister of TV stars Mary-Kate and Ashley. Now, it's simply accepted that she is Elizabeth Olsen, one of the best actresses of her generation.

10. Skyfall

The Movie: Bond turns 50, and people are asking awkward questions about whether he's still got what it takes. He does. With the help of bar-raising director Sam Mendes, 007 shows everyone that (still) nobody does it better.

Impact: A perfect storm of anniversary fever, that Olympic appearance and a film that knowingly straddles Bond's retro and modern wings, resulted in Skyfall becoming Britain's biggest ever box office hit.

9. Looper

The Movie: Joseph Gordon-Levitt's killer has to track down and kill his future self (Bruce Willis). As if that wasn't trippy enough, Rian Johnson's action thriller further befuddled us by changing direction entirely in its second half.

Impact: "This year's The Matrix," we bellowed. Certainly, it's been a while since Hollywood has produced a sci-fi movie so exuberant in its blend of entertainment and head-fuckery. Also, the sound of a million pennies dropping as audiences realised that young Bruce was the dude from The Dark Knight Rises.

8. Avengers Assemble

The Movie: Superhero mega-match time, as all of your fanboy dreams come true watching Iron Man, Hulk et al join forces. That is, after they've batted the living shit out of each other in a petty grudge match.

Impact: It took something special to beat The Dark Knight Rises at the box office, but Joss Whedon's lighter-than-air, mismatched-superbuddies comedy was the bigger hit, and justified Marvel's long-game approach to its franchise.

7. Argo

The Movie: Director/star Ben Affleck tells the unlikely but true-life story of the "making" of sci-fi epic Argo, in reality the cover for a CIA mission to rescue U.S. diplomats from troubled Iran in 1979.

Impact: An unfashionable subject (real-world politics seldom do well at the box office) given a makeover by combining white-knuckle tension with satirical comedy at Hollywood's expense. That makes it three for three in Affleck's directorial career. A dark horse for Oscar glory?

6. The Dark Knight Rises

The Movie: 2012's most anticipated blockbuster saw the Batman trilogy conclude with an operatic, apocalyptic, IMAX-sized epic, as Tom Hardy's Bane put Bruce Wayne on the back foot.

Impact: Finally, the curse of the superhero threequel is lifted. Christopher Nolan's reinvention of the genre achieves a satisfying conclusion, provided you could understand Bane.

5. Shame

The Movie: Steve McQueen sends Michael Fassbender on a long dark Manhattan night of the soul, as the arrival of sister Carey Mulligan sparks a downward spiral of joyless rutting, existential embarrassment and bravura tracking shots.

Impact: Fassbender and McQueen confirmed (after 2008's Hunger) that they are probably the finest actor/director combo in British cinema, but the sight of Fassbender's manhood proved too much for the Academy, who thwarted a much-deserved Oscar nom.

4. The Raid

The Movie: If you put money on the year's finest action movie being made in Indonesia and directed by a Welshman, well done you. As for the rest of us, we were too busy picking our jaws off the floor at the sheer number of 'OMG, how did he do that?' fight scenes.

Impact: A new star in martial artist Iko Uwais, and the start of an unlikely renaissance for setting action movies in tower blocks. See also: Dredd.

3. The Cabin In The Woods

The Movie: Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon deconstructed the rules of horror in head-scratching fashion by revealing why so many nave young kids are prepared to unleash hell in a rural retreat. The twists mount up from the first scene until the entire genre has been turned inside-out.

Impact: You'll never watch a traditional horror film in the same way again. Also, due to Cabin's two-year delay in release, it suddenly looked like Whedon and star Chris Hemsworth ruled the world when Avengers Assemble was released in the same month.

2. The Imposter

The Movie: Bart Layton's ingenious documentary about titular fraud Frdric Bourdin, a Frenchman who pretended to be missing Texan teenager Nicholas Barclay... despite not looking or sounding anything like him.

Impact: The clich that truth is stranger than fiction has never been more apt. Bourdin's story had already been turned into a film (The Chameleon) that nobody watched. Here, by interviewing everybody involved, Layton makes a fiendishly intricate thriller, whose layers of twist and counter-twist are enthralling and disturbing in equal measure.