The 2012 RopeofSilicon Movie Awards

Earlier this year, after seeing and loving Moonrise Kingdom at Cannes, I wrote up a list ranking Wes Anderson‘s films and Moonrise came out on top. The sentiments I felt while making that list are why I’ve named him the Best Director of the year. For me, Moonrise Kingdom is the embodiment of everything I love about Anderson’s films. It’s a perfect storm of everything great his films have to offer and I say this as a bit of a different kind of Anderson fan.

While most praise his work on films such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, it’s films like Bottle Rocket, Fantastic Mr. Fox and even The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited I’m drawn to. Moonrise took what was best of all of those — Fox and Aquatic especially — and put it into one film. The film’s off-beat, French New Wave feel captured my attention. It’s whimsical while, at the same time saying something. He never gets too showy, at least not with the camera and allows his actors to explore the space they’re given. He plays to his actors’ strengths and as a result there’s rarely a misstep, at least not when he’s moving along full steam ahead as he was here.

I don’t like ties so in the spirit of making sure only one score is named the “best” I would have to go with Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin‘s score for Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I wanted to be sure and highlight scores for both Beasts and Cloud Atlas, which is why I’ve included samples from each up above.

As far as runners up are concerned, I cam close to loading this up with Alexandre Desplat scores as his scores for both Argo and Rust and Bone are both quite good, but I didn’t feel adding one more just to ensure there were five total listed was necessary. I did consider, however, John Williams‘ score for Lincoln had I felt the need to go with one more.