Eric Lavallée

Of the pair of Tim Burton releases this year, it's the stop-motion animated film that wins over the television to film adaptation (Dark Shadows). The beloved member among Burton's trove of characters is served up with a great set of speaking voices by folks that have been in his films before (Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Martin Landau). Quality-wise, we think the stop-motion will be up there with “Corpse Bride” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas".

We never get tired of Woody and Woody never gets tired of making movies. These extended euro-vacation has definitely given us plenty to cheer about with Vicky Cristina Barcelona being his best so far we can hope that a bit of Penelope Cruz and a bit of everyone else (international cast plus Greta Gerwig meets Italians) will make for some ecstasy-filled, emotionally weighty comedic scenes.

His cinema-verité styled aesthetic demonstrated in 2004's Take Out and more recently, the well-traveled Prince of Broadway (2009) makes Sean Baker's POV better than Google's streetview. When it comes to detailing the microcosms, his docu-treament will most certainly aid in detailing one young adults journey into the seedy world of porn. Could be a break-out role for Dree Hemingway (yes that family).

An indie project that has been in the works for quite some time now (it was workshopped at Sundance in 2007 and was one of the 2009 Sundance NHK Filmmaker Award winners) it would be an understatement to say we can't wait to see how David Riker follows up 1998's La Ciudad with this sophomore picture which could incidentally become more political due to the 2012 presidential climate. We imagine this to be a back breaking drama and Cornish might fall into the heroine/best actress territory that a Jennifer Lawrence was in for Winter's Bone.

Among the several contemporary indie vampire flicks in this top 100 list (more to come in 2013 with Jim Jarmusch interested in the genre), it is this coming-of-ager that we feel holds the most promise as the form, from the book description, is reminiscent of some of those plot-twisting Spanish thriller titles. The Killer FIlms folks usually don't do horror but instead the human condition, and that the one helming the pic is Stephanie Daley's Brougher - who gave us a strong, underappreciated directing debut which did feature some rather strong female performances means that with a better production value we see this female filmmaker making huge strides.