The very best films of 2012 accurately depicted the fragility of mankind and of its spirit. These are not new topics meant to provoke awe. Every year, cinema depicts the most inconceivable of situations and pits characters in them to fend for their lives. In 2012, the best of cinema took an intense foray into pain and suffering but with an unerring intent to discern what it was that permitted or encouraged particular characters to endure certain tragedies.

What was discovered in these elite films was the profoundest reverence for togetherness and dependability. The police, being dragged around the uninhabited fields of Anatolia searching for a dead body, still managed to cooperate with two murderers in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. If it was not for a fast-thinking scout master who gathered Camp Ivanhoe’s finest boy scouts to search for two young lovers who fled the coop in Moonrise Kingdom, they would forever be stranded on their own magical island (is that really a bad thing?). Instead of two souls aimlessly suffering existence alone in The Master, they endure together and astonishingly discover what each one so desperately needs in the other: a sense of worth. The father and daughter in Beasts of the Southern Wild would not survive the aftermath of the storm if it were not for their true, illustrious relationship. And the octogenarian couple in Amour is the only proof we need to know that it takes two people, solidified in an unbreakable relationship, to stand firm, face life and to stare the inevitable square in the eyes.

The following are my picks for the 30 best films of 2012.

Beasts of the Southern Wild
Directed by Benh Zeitlin
Written by Lucy Alibar, Benh Zeitlin
Starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Jonshel Alexander, Marilyn Barbarin, Kaliana Brower
Fox Searchlight Pictures
92 Minutes | PG-13
Release Date: June 27, 2012

Directed by Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a fearless six-year-old girl who lives with her father (Dwight Henry) in “the Bathtub,” a southern Delta community at the edge of the world.

Hushpuppy’s father comes down with an unknown illness and Hushpuppy’s universe begins to unravel – literally. Suddenly and without reason, temperatures rise and the planet’s ice caps melt, unleashing a horde of prehistoric beasts known as Aurochs. As the world seemingly comes to an end, Hushpuppy embarks on a dangerous adventure to a land of concrete and steel – a land beyond the levees – to search for answers.