The Best Films of 2012: #5

After the mediocre, name-dropping "Midnight in Paris" (which the masses loved because it let them feel sophisticated for picking up on literary references from high school English), Woody Allen returned triumphantly to form with "To Rome With Love," his richest work since "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," brimming with great ideas cleverly realized and chock full of outsize laughs.

The Eye of the Storm

Who’d have thunk it? A film uniting Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, and Geoffrey Rush would be one of the most boring, depressing and suffocating of the year. Rampling stars as Elizabeth Hunter, a senescent Australian matriarch who feels it’s unbecoming for a lady to die before she chooses. That’s bad news for her two money-grubbing children, Basil (Rush), a once-knighted thespian whose King Lear has made him the laughingstock of London, and neurotic, unhappily divorced Dorothy (Davis), who married a prince and only got to keep her title. They’ve come to Sydney to pack Mummy off to an old-age home, but she seems to relish their frustration. She’s not going anywhere.