2012 has been widely hailed as an exceptional year for film, but I’m at a loss as to where all these great films are supposed to be. (But then, if we’ve lowered our standards of “greatness” to the point that something like “Silver Linings Playbook” is being proclaimed as a masterwork ... .)

I fancy myself a halfway intelligent person, but I always seem to make the most head-smackingly stupid mistakes. A “for instance” would be the fact that I didn’t realize the News-Sentinel had an early deadline for the Fourth of July holiday, and found myself prepping for a late screening of “Magic Mike” as I discovered that the Lodi Living section was getting ready to go to press. It seems my stupidity knows no bounds.

It has occurred to me that I discuss my personal goings-on a bit less than my fellow News-Sentinel columnists do, but in the interest of partial disclosure, I must confess that life has gotten significantly more difficult for me in the past few months. I’ve started a new job that requires many long, grueling, thankless hours in an undesirable environment. The possibility of complete physical and mental collapse is now very real.

So far, this has been the year of Every Bad Thing. International strife is intensified with each passing day. The world’s economies are teetering on the verge of collapse. No matter who U.S. voters elect as president, we all are completely screwed in one way or another. The list of horrible things that are occurring or await us is too ponderous to even attempt to enumerate, and that’s without even getting into the personal burdens that have been weighing on my mind, rendering me an insomniac. Yet the thing still troubling me most out of all this turmoil is the fact that it’s getting harder and harder to find a decent movie.

This week, we venture even further into “The Cabin in the Woods” with an in-depth examination of the film’s deft deconstruction of gender-based archetypes. I kid, I kid ... as much as it would please me to spend the next many weeks harping on (thus far) the year’s best film, surely it is time to move on.

February typically serves as a dumping ground for weak studio films that offer an easy alternative to “mainstream” audiences who don’t see Oscar bait, but this year has brought some welcome surprises.

Typically, I spend the first six weeks or so of each new year playing catch-up with all the Oscar bait that was released around Christmas. But as it turns out this awards season didn’t produce as many true prestige pictures as expected, so starting next week we’ll be returning to new releases with a look at Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed action flick “Haywire,” followed by a review of the Liam Neeson vs. wolves survival thriller “The Grey” (I’ll also briefly return to the 2011 awards contenders with a piece on “The Artist,” if it ever opens in the Lodi-Stockton area).

Hope you all enjoyed my top 10 list last week, and gleaned some useful recommendations. This week I’ll take a very quick look at “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which made my “most promising films I didn’t see” list but ended up being one of the most spirit-crushing disappointments of the year. I honestly don’t have much to say about such an empty film, so I suppose I might as well squeeze in my predictions for the Oscar nominations, set to be announced on Tuesday, Jan. 24, at which point you will surely marvel at my peerless prognosticative abilities.

We’re moving into the fall movie season this week with a look at Steven Soderbergh’s disease pot-boiler “Contagion,” with a review of Nicolas Winding Refn’s hotly anticipated crime thriller “Drive” coming next time. After that we’ll hit a bit of a lull with (tentatively scheduled) reviews of the lighthearted inside-baseball flick “Moneyball” and the cancer dramedy “50/50,” but I’m confident that things will pick up again soon. And, as I said before, be on the lookout for periodic horror-themed DVD picks as we approach Halloween.

Times like these, you have to seek comfort wherever you can find it. I often look to movies for some extra degree of solace, and it seems that sometimes it can be found in the unlikeliest of places.

We’re back to standard reviews with a largely ambivalent look at the “Fright Night” remake, which if nothing else has at least gotten me psyched for the roster of horror and thriller titles rolling out over the next few weeks.

I had intended to tackle “30 Minutes or Less” this week, but horrible reviews and the film’s highly questionable subject matter have tilted me toward using this column as an opportunity to take a quick look back on the summer movie season as it winds down, and preview some promising fall/winter releases.

The end of the decade coincides with the 10-year anniversary of this column, and what better way to mark the occasion than with an obsessive ranking of the decade's best films?

Still waiting for things to pick up on the movie front.

Given that the third entry in a series of films is usually the weakest link - a tradition that has continued in full force over the course of this summer movie season - "Ocean's Thirteen" should be seen as a success if for no other reason than its clear improvement over its most recent predecessor. It's not as tightly plotted or clever as "Ocean's Eleven" (not many heist flicks are), but it's most definitely a return to form for filmmaker Steven Soderbergh and his all-star cast after the narcissistic, self-congratulatory claptrap that was "Ocean's Twelve."

I usually preface my year-end roundups with some brief comments about the year in movies, but in this case, I think the less said about 2006, the better.

The screen is black, as a male voice reads a passage from Dante's Inferno, while another voice reads the translation in Italian.