Third place:
The Master (Leslie Jones & Peter McNulty) [117 points / 17 votes]
Second place:
Cloud Atlas (Alexander Berner) [120 points / 20 votes]
And your winner...
Zero Dark Thirty (William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor) [148 points / 21 votes]
"Zero Dark Thirty is a minefield of thorny contradictions. Its lead character, Maya (Jessica Chastain), a C.I.A. agent who spends the better part of a decade hunting Usuma bin Laden, is at once juvenile and professional, driven and lethargic. The film itself explores the intimacy of her obsessive qualities while also addressing the epic weight of her decisions elsewhere offscreen. Even director Kathryn Bigelow's key themes of professionalism, impotency, addiction are stretched, drawn and quartered, pushed to the breaking point within a brilliantly constructed procedural that values the aftermath of situations just as much as the action itself.
Maya, like post-9/11 America itself, is spun into motion by trauma, driven to rectify these audible/visual nightmares by any means necessary, and through relentless dedication and study is re-born as an unapologetic creator of more trauma. Themes are cyclical in Zero Dark Thirty, and the film reveals through careful craft - especially via its tough, effective editing - how dire human consequences reside in the successes of brutal human procedures. The Bin Laden raid climax is not only a technical marvel, but a subtly explosive, real-time realization/distillation of this idea. The contrast between expectation and realization, between obsession and completion, resides in between those cuts. Those are not tears of joy." - Glenn Heath
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