Best of 2012: My Favorite Reviews I Didn't Agree With

When did we stop engaging in good-hearted debate? Whatever happened to the lost art of agreeing to disagree? Personally, my favorite part of analyzing a movie is never writing the review. I enjoy the conversations that follow, the heated discussions and debates. I like trying to convince someone to give a movie they hated a second chance and I love when someone forces me to reconsider an opinion of my own.

So in the name of that lost art, here are my favorite professional reviews I read this year that made me reconsider and reevaluate a select few movies.

Though the movie didn’t do much for me, I understand why people enjoyed The Avengers. But I’ll always be amused at the outrage some people felt when they found out someone actually could have been unimpressed by the movie. I thought it was the same old product I'd seen a hundred times before (except this time a little bigger, a little louder and a lot longer) but Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe gave what I found to be the most persuasive argument for its existence. The movie, he writes, “is as close as a movie can come to the fantastical reality of a really good comic book.” And the fact that the movie offers no surprises isn't important. “I might not remember any of the sequences in The Avengers, but I’ll remember the rush. I don’t need anything else.” Fair enough.

And besides, how I felt about The Avengers is pretty much how a lot of other people felt about The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie I had a blast at. Its story, writes Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, is one “that many moviegoers older than 10 may think they’ve seen because they probably did when the first movie burned up the box office.” The filmmakers, she contends, “weren’t allowed to take true imaginative flight at a company that’s conspicuously banking on a resuscitated franchise to carry it through its next fiscal quarters.” Ouch. I suppose corporate products are as prone to subjective interpretation as art.

Speaking of art, I was one of many left in awe by Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, The Master. But I completely understood the reactions from friends and critics alike who were left cold by what they felt was a pretentious mess. Richard Corliss of Time magazine points out a number of issues that he feels holds the movie back from greatness. It “violates the cardinal rule of the father-son or master-servant plot: that the acolyte will somehow change his mentor” and once this becomes clear, “after about an hour, the story flatlines into repetition without development.” It’s a solid argument and one that I can't yet counter. But I suspect that this lack of change, while certainly counter to any intuitive sense of what drama should be, is part of the film's challenging message.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was thoroughly disappointed by Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. But I found New York Times critic A.O. Scott’s scholarly defense of the film enlightening. I felt Tarantino’s characters were flat and one-dimensional. Scott argues, however, that Tarantino “does not hesitate to train his revisionist energies on some deep and ancient national legends” and “exposes and defies an ancient taboo” – that a black man can be the agent of that classic literary motive: revenge. And the violence is not exploitative as much as it embodies Tarantino’s “moral disgust with slavery, instinctive sympathy for the underdog and an affirmation (in the relationship between Django and Schultz) of what used to be called brotherhood.” Scott views the movie from an interesting perspective, one I wouldn’t have thought to take. I’m still not sure the movie clicks for me but let’s just say I agree to disagree.

- Steve Avigliano, 2/23/13