The D was silent

I begin this 90 minutes before the new year comes to my time zone, and I don't expect to finish before I break for the split of Veuve Clicquot, but the rules are the same as the past two years: I'm just going to sift through the past 365 days' first-time screenings, no matter when released, and hang the notables on the wall, perhaps for some sort of numeric judgment, perhaps not . . .

January, typically, was notable only for a leftover from the previous year, but A Separation was one hell of a leftover; remind me: did it win the foreign-film Oscar®? Even if not, it wins my award for best Iranian film I've seen in any year.

February began with the breathtaking dance performance-cum-documentary Pina--also a 2011 Oscar® nomination (and yes, I just checked: A Separation won foreign). The coming-of-age, coming-out-in-a-middle-class-African-American-community Pariah is an excellent film with an awful trailer.

OK, I know I didn't spend the whole year being impressed only by art-house and/or foreign films, but the first best of March was the Albanian revenge feud drama The Forgiveness of Blood. OK, here, honorable mention for a studio film, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a minor gem with a meaty part for sexygenarian Susan Sarandon. Enough slumming, though: from Israel comes Footnote, academic Aristotelian tragedy. And from Japan, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: father, sons, beautiful and delicious fish.

In April, a couple of very different films that wouldn't be on this list under old rules: Temple Grandin, a 2010 HBO film about the autistic pioneer in humane treatment of livestock, featuring a mindboggling performance by Claire Danes; and Attack the Block (2011), maybe the best of several very good schlocky sci-fi flicks in recent years. Back to the art house for Boy, your standard coming-of-Maori-age story. Then, at home, having been cheated out of it on an M4, Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's crime-and-punishment documentary. Damsels in Distress: pure goofy pleasure from Whit Stillman.

Brit Marling is the highlight of a slow May as a creepy-beautiful messiah in Sound of My Voice, which she also cowrote.

In June, I was mostly distracted, but when I came home, Wes Anderson's magical Moonrise Kingdom was waiting for me.

Speaking of magic, Beasts of the Southern Wild is magical realism for us who don't much care for magical realism. But even with the June asterisk, this is three consecutive months with just one notable each.

August brought Ruby Sparks, which you'd expect from the poster and the trailer to be a smart but safe romcom. Well, there's nothing safe about it, and I'm not even sure if the "com" is accurate--maybe the best surprise of the year. But that's 4 straight one-notable months.

Hope Springs in September (well, not for Mets fans, but let's not talk about that), which I may overrate because it surprised me by not being schlocky. Chicken with Plums, heartbreaking beauty from Marjane Satrapi. Hello I Must Be Going I filed under expected-to-like-but-not-this-much. And then I saw the rough cut of Scary Normal, but let's save that for 2013.

October, Pitch Perfect, one of the funniest films of the year; my daughter has passed along the book on which it's based, with annotations by her & my son-in-law, and I look forward to reading and commenting on that in the new year. Searching for Sugar Man may be the most implausible music documentary I'll ever see, and I mean that in a good way. "Argo fuck yourself!" Cloud Atlas is a flawed, magnificent adaptation of what is probably my favorite novel of the millennium to date.

November takes Flight, which morphs from action entertainment into moral ambiguity, with Denzel. But for moral ambiguity, it can't hold a runway flare to The Flat, a documentary about an Israeli couple and their friend in the SS and his wife. Holy Motors is one of the trippiest trips of the year, and (dammit, Jennie Tonic, I've given you plenty of time to find this out for yourself) its soundtrack includes the #1 pleasant stunner of the year: Sparks, "How You Getting Home?" Yes, dammit, a Bond flick: Skyfall. And then a Spielberg one: Lincoln is pure magnificence.

In December, Anna Karenina didn't quite hit me like a runaway train, but I was prepared to dislike it, and it made that impossible. This Is 40 is all but great. Django Unchained is great, bloody great.

And that's the year, and it's 4 minutes to midnight in Illinois, so instead of figuring out a top however many now, I think I'll call my favorite filmmaker and return to the question in daylight.