My top ten list for 2012 usually arrives in mid-January because I don’t have access to some of the films I want to consider until then (and sometimes I have to make a revision or two!).

I feel The Sessions has not received its critical due, so I’m pleased that New York Times critic Stephen Holder found a spot for it on his top ten…and for some of the same reasons I responded so strongly to the film:

10. THE SESSIONS John Hawkes and Helen Hunt bring an astonishing sensitivity to the true story of Mark O’Brien, a seriously disabled poet, writer and journalist in his late 30s, and Cheryl Cohen Greene, the sex surrogate who guides him to his first experience of intercourse. This profoundly sex-positive film is the unusual movie that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest.

Indeed.