good kid, m.A.A.d city
2012
Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.
★ 8.6
Browse by time · year
2012
Showing 133 works across all media from 2012
Channel Orange
2012
Days before it came out, Ocean published an open letter about falling in love with a man, and then let the record speak.
★ 8.2
The Act of Killing
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn
2012
Oppenheimer asked the men who carried out Indonesia's mass killings to restage them as movie scenes, and they agreed gladly: no documentary has ever been braver or harder to sit through.
★ 7.8
M.A.A.D City
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
Sounwave and THC build the first half, Terrace Martin the second, and MC Eiht walks in from Compton's own past.
★ 7.7
Money Trees
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
DJ Dahi slowed Beach House's guitar intro and ran it backwards, and Jay Rock's verse steals the whole record.
★ 7.6
Amour
Directed by Michael Haneke
2012 · France
The film everyone should see once and nobody wants to see twice: Haneke barely leaves one Paris apartment while a marriage of decades reaches its last stretch.
★ 7.5
Thinkin Bout YouFrank Ocean
Thinkin Bout You
2012 · From Channel Orange
Ocean wrote it for Bridget Kelly's album, kept it instead, and the falsetto he reaches for does the rest.
★ 7.5
Swimming Pools (Drank)Kendrick Lamar
Swimming Pools (Drank)
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
T-Minus made the beat for Trey Songz, who passed; Lamar turned the rejected demo into a study of addiction.
★ 7.4
PyramidsFrank Ocean
Pyramids
2012 · From Channel Orange
Cleopatra dragged into the present, two halves hinged on a midpoint beat switch, and John Mayer's uncredited closing solo.
★ 7.4
Breaking Bad · 2012
Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2012
Tarantino turned American slavery into a spaghetti western and got away with it: a freed slave rides with a German bounty hunter, and the dialogue never stops crackling.
★ 7.2
Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2012
Bigelow filmed a decade-long manhunt as pure procedure and let the audience sit with what it cost: the torture scenes started an argument that has never been settled.
★ 7.2
Wicked Games
2012
Doc McKinney and Illangelo built the guitar figure and the fog; Tesfaye gave away House of Balloons for free.
★ 7.0
The Hunt
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
2012 · Denmark
Few films are this hard to endure: a kindergarten teacher is accused of something he did not do, and Vinterberg shows how fast a village makes up its mind.
★ 7.0
Latch
Disclosure and Sam Smith
2012
Too weird for radio, not clubby enough for clubs, by the duo's own reckoning; Sam Smith's falsetto settled it.
★ 6.8
I Knew You Were Trouble
2012 · From Red
A wobble bass drop grafted onto a country breakup song, and Swift's full move to pop became inevitable.
★ 6.8
The Passage of Power
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV
2012 · 712 pages
Three years of humiliation as Kennedy's vice president, then Dallas, and Johnson seizes a stunned government. Caro tracks it week by week to the civil rights bill the South had blocked for decades.
★ 6.7
The Sleepwalkers
How Europe Went to War in 1914
2012 · 736 pages
Clark reconstructs the July crisis of 1914 and finds no villain, only leaders watchful but unseeing, each rational step carrying Europe closer. He reopened the fiercest fight over war guilt in decades.
★ 6.7
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
2012 · 288 pages
Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a slum beside the Mumbai airport, following a teenage garbage trader, a woman scheming her way to power, and the neighbor whose self-immolation puts them on trial.
★ 6.7
Skyfall
Directed by Sam Mendes
2012
Roger Deakins photographed a James Bond film and the series has never looked the same: the Shanghai fight plays out in silhouette against neon, and the plot finally asks what Bond is for.
★ 6.6
New SlavesKanye West
New Slaves
2012 · From Yeezus
Projected onto sixty-six buildings worldwide before anyone had heard it, with Frank Ocean closing over a Hungarian prog sample.
★ 6.5
Moonrise Kingdom
Directed by Wes Anderson
2012
Twelve-year-olds run away together across a New England island in 1965: Wes Anderson's warmest film, and the adults chasing them are lonelier than the children they are trying to catch.
★ 6.4
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
2012 · From Red
Twenty-five minutes with Max Martin and Shellback, by Swift's account, and her first Hot 100 number one followed.
★ 6.3
Summertime Sadness
2012
Two labels rejected Cedric Gervais's remix; Radio 1 played it anyway, and the remix took a Grammy and number six.
★ 6.3
Argo
Directed by Ben Affleck
2012
The CIA really did produce a fake science fiction movie to get six Americans out of Tehran, and kept it classified until 1997: Affleck plays the operation completely straight.
★ 6.1
Poetic Justice
Kendrick Lamar and Drake
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
Scoop DeVille built it from Janet Jackson's "Any Time, Any Place", heard on the studio radio, and Drake glides in.
★ 6.0
Life of Pi
Directed by Ang Lee
2012
The tiger is almost entirely digital and you will not be able to tell: Ang Lee made the most beautiful 3D film there is, about a boy sharing a lifeboat with a predator.
★ 6.0
Lincoln
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2012
Day-Lewis found a high, reedy voice for Lincoln because the historical accounts describe one: Spielberg and Tony Kushner build a whole film out of counting votes for the Thirteenth Amendment.
★ 6.0
Mercy
Kanye West and Big Sean
2012 · From Cruel Summer
An old dancehall toast opens it, the beat switches mid-song, and 2 Chainz walks off with the whole posse cut.
★ 5.8
Merry Go Round
2012
A pun on two Marys, overheard from a co-writer's mother, seeded a debut single that won a Grammy.
★ 5.8
Closer
2012
Greg Kurstin's four-on-the-floor and mid-nineties Erasure worship turned the Quins into a dance-chart number one.
★ 5.7
Hold On (Alabama Shakes)
2012
Four Alabama day-jobbers paid for their own sessions at a Nashville home studio, and Rolling Stone named it 2012's best.
★ 5.7
Blue Jeans
2012
Del Rey wrote it with Emile Haynie and Dan Heath, then sings a doomed vow over surf guitar and strings.
★ 5.6
Gangnam Style
2012
First video on YouTube to pass a billion views, built on a horse dance Psy worked out over thirty nights.
★ 5.6
Dark Elderberry Branch
2012 · 80 pages
No more passionate voice ever sounded in twentieth-century Russian poetry, the poet Brodsky said of Tsvetaeva. She came back from exile to Stalin's Russia, where the secret police took her husband and daughter.
★ 5.5
Silver Linings Playbook
Directed by David O. Russell
2012
A widow and a man just out of a state hospital strike a deal: David O. Russell keeps the camera close enough to be uncomfortable, and Jennifer Lawrence shot it at twenty-one.
★ 5.5
Call Me Maybe
2012
A folk song on tour until Josh Ramsay poppified it, then nine weeks at the top of the Hot 100.
★ 5.5
2012
Emmylou
2012
Mike Mogis produced it; the Söderberg sisters name Gram and Emmylou, June and Johnny, and sing harmony like devotion.
★ 5.4
When I Was Your Man
2012
Voice and piano, nothing else, Mars playing it himself at Levcon and singing a regret he cannot take back.
★ 5.3
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Directed by Benh Zeitlin
2012
Quvenzhane Wallis was five when she auditioned and became the youngest Best Actress nominee ever: a bayou community below the levee refuses to leave, filmed like a child's own mythology.
★ 5.2
The Mother We Share
2012
Cut in the trio's Glasgow basement studio, sibling estrangement wrapped in synth glitter and Mayberry's bright clean vocal.
★ 5.1
Simple Song
2012 · From Port of Morrow
Mercer wrote it in his living room about his marriage, with Greg Kurstin on guitars, Mellotron and piano.
★ 5.0
I Love It
Icona Pop and Charli XCX
2012
Charli XCX passed on her own demo; Icona Pop roughed it up, and HBO's Girls did the rest.
★ 5.0
Don't You Worry Child
2012
Michel Zitron lifted the chorus line straight from his father, John Martin sang it, and the trio had its farewell.
★ 5.0
22
2012 · From Red
An acoustic guitar riff opens it, then Max Martin and Shellback's synthesizers turn a birthday into a full night out.
★ 4.8
I Will Wait
2012
Markus Dravs produced Babel; the video was shot at Red Rocks, banjo running flat out under a vow.
★ 4.8
How Music Works
2012 · 384 pages
Byrne argues that music is written backward from the room it will fill, cathedral or CBGB. He works outward through recording, technology and money, explaining everything that shapes what reaches your ear.
★ 4.6
Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)
2012
Nietzsche by way of a co-writer's mother, Greg Kurstin's production, and Clarkson's third number one.
★ 4.6
Wine Grapes
A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavours
2012 · 1280 pages
Every grape that makes wine, 1,368 of them, traced by DNA to its parents and described by flavor. Zinfandel is revealed as a Croatian vine, and Sauvignon Blanc descends from Savagnin.
★ 4.5
The Avengers
Directed by Joss Whedon
2012
Five years of separate films paid off in one: nobody had tried a shared universe at this scale, and the circling shot of the assembled team explains why every studio copied it.
★ 4.5
Other PeopleBeach House
Other People
2012 · From Bloom
Cut to 24-track analog tape at Sonic Ranch in Texas, gauzy organ, Legrand singing a relationship dissolving.
★ 4.5
Take a Walk
2012
Angelakos built each verse from a man in his own family who immigrated, then set financial ruin to synths.
★ 4.5
Where Have You Been
2012
Ester Dean's hook borrows Geoff Mack's 1959 I've Been Everywhere; Calvin Harris and Dr. Luke supply the drop.
★ 4.5
Thrift Shop
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis
2012
A looping saxophone, a software test engineer named Wanz on the hook, and six weeks atop the Hot 100.
★ 4.4
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Directed by Stephen Chbosky
2012
Stephen Chbosky wrote the novel, wrote the screenplay and directed it himself, which almost never works: a freshman is taken up by two seniors, and the tunnel scene earned its reputation.
★ 4.4
Fineshrine
2012
Beats emailed from Montreal to Halifax, and James turning anatomy into a love language over Roddick's synths.
★ 4.4
2012
Shields
2012
They threw away a year's work and began again. All four of them write, which is why nothing quite resolves the way you expect.
★ 4.3
Cruise
2012
Twenty-four weeks atop the country chart, a Nelly remix, and the first country single ever certified diamond.
★ 4.3
Some Nights
2012
Ruess wanted a hip hop producer and Paul Simon's harmonies; the sleeper took seven months to reach number three.
★ 4.3
Ho Hey
2012
Schultz wrote those shouts to snap indifferent Brooklyn crowds to attention; the record sat sixty-two weeks on the Hot 100.
★ 4.2
Forever (Haim)
2012
Three sisters gave this away as a free download in February 2012; NME named it the year's fourth best track.
★ 4.2
Wide Awake
2012
Written for her own concert film with Max Martin and Dr. Luke, it climbed to number two in America.
★ 4.2
You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think it counts as love.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower · 2012
Silver Linings Playbook · 2012
Hero (Family of the Year)
2012
Richard Linklater put it in Boyhood and its trailer, and the Keefe brothers' harmony now sounds like growing up.
★ 3.7
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
The Fault In Our Stars · 2012
Beasts of the Southern Wild · 2012
Freedom is life's great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart, you will know peace.
The Avengers · 2012
Starships
2012
RedOne, Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub behind the board, Minaj's vocals cut at Conway, diamond certified in America.
★ 3.5
Les Miserables
Directed by Tom Hooper
2012
Every note was sung live on set instead of lip-synced to a recording, which nobody had attempted at this scale: the camera sits inches from faces the entire time.
★ 3.5
Obedear
2012
Roddick emailed tracks from Montreal to James in Halifax, and the album took its title from this song's lyric.
★ 3.3
Give Your Heart a Break
2012
Josh Alexander played every instrument on it, and Billy Steinberg's melodic instincts date back to Like a Virgin.
★ 3.1
Let Her Go
2012
Rosenberg cut it in a Sydney studio with Australian session players, and a Dutch fan's email set it loose.
★ 2.8
Catch My Breath
2012
Clarkson wrote it for the ten-year mark since Idol, and the chorus lands like someone taking stock mid-sprint.
★ 2.7
One More Night (Maroon 5)
2012
Nine weeks at number one, Maroon 5's longest Hot 100 reign, and a reggae lilt under the ache.
★ 2.7
Give it All We Got Tonight
2012
A fan campaign called 60 for 60 pushed it to a Mediabase number one, Strait's sixtieth, at sixty.
★ 2.6