The end of the year is upon us which means that the Fall Semester is officially over. With that said looking back at 2012 there were some good times and I thought I’d make a list of my best of 2012.

Best Movie of 2012: To be honest this year was a little lacking in 2012 in my opinion. I didn’t go out and watch as many movies and a big reason why was because of the lack of films I was interested in. Sure there were a bunch of blockbuster/summer films this year but aside from that there weren’t any big indie films that caught my attention:

1-Dredd: There were three big comic book adaption films this year. Dredd was the fourth one comic book adaption and in my opinion was the best. It didn’t have the big budget or stars like the other three but it that didn’t stop it from being King of Comic Adaption in 2012 (which is saying something). The film has action, a well structured story, good acting, and fantastic visuals. It had style and substance and was honestly just fun to watch.

2-Marvel’s The Avengers: This movie had a bunch of build up and hype behind it and it lived up to it for the most part. The thing about Avengers was that it was almost all style and some substance. The story in the film was extremely lack luster but it was good enough to transition to the action perfectly. There were funny moments, action packed moments, and touching moments. Clocking in at about two and a half hours it made a perfect summer blockbuster action film.

3- Coriolanus- The film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play of the same name. I must admit that for the first half I wasn’t too into the film but as it went on it got a lot better. However, I must say for how good the film is I don’t think I really liked a single character in the film/play. The fact that the story, setting, and acting was so well made up for this.

4-Prometheus/The Dark Knight Rises: These two movies were suppose to be the best of the year for me. I had such high hopes for both, but they both fell a little short (especially compared to the previous films in their franchises: Alien and Aliens/ Batman Begins and The Dark Knight). None the less they were good blockbuster films that were worth watching (in fact I actually own both these films on DVD mostly because I wanted to complete my franchise collections), particularly for the visuals in each (even more so for Prometheus). My major complain for both of these movies is that the story/plot seems a little off and had some major holes and questions and the characters weren’t as strong as they could have potentially been.

5- Skyfall- The newest James Bond film is the best of the Craig movies. The film gave an interesting look at the 007 mythos by having an ‘older’ Bond who was at the end of his career/peak. Much like the other movies on my list it had fantastic action scene and good characters and plot to complement the action.
Honorable mentions: The Amazing Spider-Man- Better than Spider-Man 3 and takes a lot of influence from the Ultimate Spider-Man mythos.

Best Books: I don’t really read any contemporary fiction so this list is basically my favorite comic books/graphic novels of 2012:

1- The Under Water Wielder by Jeff Lemire
2-Hawkeye by Matt Fraction and David Aja
3. King City by Brandon Graham (although the individual issues came out years ago it was collected for the first time this year).

Just read these three, I feel that trying to describe them doesn’t do them any justice. You’re going to have to take my word that these three things are worth the time to read and the money you will spend on them.