Well, sometimes the hot dog fingers win.
As you may or may not know (put probably don't), I injured my left arm at the end of January. And it's getting better quickly (I can generally use my fingers! I accidentally spread peanut butter with my left arm the other day and it wasn't even a big deal! It doesn't even hurt to do a thumbs up anymore!), but the issue is that it still hurts to type for any significant period of time. I've been leaving off doing these for as long as possible, in hopes that I'd get to a place where I could do my usual 3 day, 12-15.000 word bonanza just as the prophecy has always foretold, but that's just not in the cards this year. But I'd rather do something than nothing at all!
So here's this year's format: rather than my demanding and unseemly massive wall of paragraphs about my top movies, I'll list them with an illustrative picture and a version of my review from Letterboxd (if I don't have one of those ready to go, I'll write up something short and snappy). While this is maybe a bummer if you already follow me on Letterboxd, or if you are a big fan of huge paragraphs,it'll be a great advertisement for those of you have yet to opt in to the pulse-pounding, year-round excitement that a social media site just for movie reviews provides (and you can find me at this link).
It's been a massively strange year in my life for one million reasons, but it's also been a strange year for my relationship to movies: I watched more than 10% of all the movies I've ever seen in my life during 2022, which no doubt contributed to me logging a record-tying 100 movies before beginning my annual write-up process. But to some degree, I feel move removed from movies than I have in a long time--maybe because I don't live anywhere near a theater anymore, maybe because the pandemic and post-lockdown world changed what it means to go to the theater, or maybe just because the concept of American studio filmmaking--or Americans going to the theater--feels pretty definitively on its way out. Still, I found plenty to love this cinematic year, and I'm sure you will too if you take a chance on some of the movies below.
Now, I'm embarrassed to admit that my hand is already shaking just from doing this intro, so maybe we ought to get to it. Normally, I'd add an alphabetized list of all the movies I've seen, but this year I'm just going ask you to trust that I've seen those 100 movies, and encourage you to look at my letterboxd if you're curious what the full list contains. Or better yet, if you're curious if I've seen a movie, or what my opinion is, just ask me!
I'm also going to eschew my usual tradition of telling you where you can find a movie (sorry--trying to spare as many words as I can), but I will point you in the direction of Justwatch, which is a fantastic service that will do exactly that.
All that said, I still plan to include my 10 best scenes of the year, as well as the 5 worst movies, so look for those after the list! And speaking of, without further ado (I lost all my ado in...the incident), here we go:
Honorable mentions: though they didn't make my top 20, I'm grateful for the laser-etched pasts and presents of Saint Omer, the zany, earnest heart in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and James Cameron doing what James Cameron does best with Avatar: The Way of Water.
Plays like gangbusters and works even better the second time around, which is strange,
given I'm not sure that anything about this movie works at all, but the
spectacle manages to pull me downstream with it. Lurid maximalism for maximalism's sake, and where's it say that that's a bad thing? Still have my reservations about the last
half hour, but I also kind of suspect that this is the best music biopic that's
come around in a while.
45 minutes of tension and worldbuilding followed by 45
minutes of meticulously scaffolded and executed action scenes erupting like
coiled springs. Crafts excellent, particularly Sarah Scachner's jangly and
bombastic score, as well as the incredible sound design--the bear-in-the-river
scene made me gasp more than once (because I am the kind of person who likes to
gasp at really good sound work). Just a blast from start to finish. (Also,
watch it in the Comanche dub, because why wouldn’t you.)
17. The Banshees of Inisherin (dir. Martin McDonagh)
Misery and no outlet, a whole world of people with dreams
and no way to execute them and no explanation for their absence, and the only
way out the lake or running into someone else's arms, torch in hand. 100 tight
minutes about what we owe each other, and how maybe the only answer is
promising to hate each other forever. Colin Farrell for the Nobel, Barry Keoghan
for King of the Goblins that Live Under the Stairs, and the costume designer
for Eternal Sweater Empress.
16. Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-wook)
Plotted and staged like a venn diagram, all the lovely or
uncomfortable moments pushed into one another and asked to mingle. Fun to watch
Park Chan-wook get a little giddy with visually conveying cell phone drama, the
endless romance of having someone pay attention to you, whatever the context,
and with how the sea doesn't give a shit about any of this.
15. Please Baby Please (dir. Amanda Kramer)
Horned up queer fantasy for anyone into the chemical spill façade of the 50s, gender performativity, or wanting to watch Karl Glusman romp around in leathers while making eyes Harry Melling. Something of a national tragedy that this wasn't Andrea Riseborough's Oscar-nominated grassroots triumph this year.
14. The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers)
How neat is it that we've got a director like Robert Eggers,
making million-dollar exacting historical sandboxes to play in and trace the
impossible line between magic and insanity. Kidman doing her best film work
since The Paperboy, at least--an absolute joy to see her working in this
register. Very much hoping for a spin-off where Olga goes back home and becomes
Baba Yaga, thus completing Eggers' Anya Taylor-Joy Angry Rural Pagan Girl
trilogy.
13. Babylon (dir. Damien Chazelle)
God help me but I really enjoyed this one. The kind of movie
that generates more with its flaws than it would as a tighter version of
itself, offering up a wobbly amalgam of piss and stupidity that other people
might have tried to mop into the shape of a heart. It's a mess, but I ended up
not minding. The criminal/wild-eyed torture/ecstasy of Spike Jonze trying to
move heaven and hell (and succeeding in at least one of those realms) to get
his shot before the light disappears is one of the comic highlights of the year
for me. And bless Jovan Adepo as well, who has deserved to be a huge star for
years now, and takes this opportunity (again) to be the most interesting part
of a movie that isn't entirely sure what to do with him. All in all I dug it,
but then again I'm always a sucker for people watching time pass by.
12. Mad God (dir. Phil Tippett)
At the very top of the pile of 2022 movies that make you
want to shout "Moloch!" at the screen. One of the most spectacular
visual experiences I've had with a movie recently--the kind of work where you
don't really need to be told that someone spent 30 years making this to know
that it's true. Like someone read Inferno and decided that it was good, but not
angry enough, and needed more dead gnomes and 2001 allusions. Hideous and
creative and punishing and black-hearted and not at all what I'd expected for a
quick watch on a Sunday morning.
11. Fire of Love (dir. Sara Dosa)
A 9-year old me had a VHS tape about the Kraffts and their
work (part of a larger cardboard box of used VHS tapes about volcanoes), and
was enchanted by the silliness, the beauty, and by the impossible and
inevitable heartbreak of watching these two people so hopefully talk about the
event that would end their lives. I was just as enchanted by the silliness, the
beauty, and the ticking of the clock with this iteration, and even more so with
the romance of it all, both the love the Kraffts showed for each other and what
they showed for the world. And for the stunning images they caught on camera,
the artistry of which seems just as striking as the science.
10. Great Freedom (dir. Sebastian Meise)
Feels largely like a movie about light in all its
iterations, moving from a match at the beginning to full neon glow at the end. Stunning
to look at and listen to, with an ending that has kept me thinking since I saw
it, and with Franz Rogowski giving a holy shit kind of career-making
performance. A gorgeous moment spent staring at isolation, absence, and the way
that time breathes life into and kills relationships, depending on the day (if
and when you can decide what day it might be).
9. Living (dir. Oliver Hermanus)
Oliver Hermanus has always been my favorite director of
movies I didn't completely love. I admired his ambition and I was astounded by
his formal control and aesthetic sensibilities, but nothing he made ever quite
found its way to me. Not sure what changed, but I limped to the end of this one
as a boneless wreck. As always, quietly bowled over by how Hermanus generates
isolation in crowded rooms, and places lights and sounds that seem cold or
sarcastic in one moment and then morph into earnest as the moment progresses.
And the end, suggesting that it's always better to find something small and
ugly and make it beautiful--even if it feels too late, even if it won't
last--than to let things linger; to find some way to marvel at how strange it
is to be anything at all.
8. Benediction (dir. Terence Davies)
The passage of time as an act of strangulation, how easy it
is to be hollowed out by all the things that can't remove their fingers, age
itself just proof of how easy you are to lose. Gentle and wounded compression
of too many hideous realities in one body. Immediately moves up near the top of
the WWI movie pantheon, not that that's an especially deep roster. Jeremy
Irvine's performance is like he prepared by doing nothing but internalizing
every one of the Wicked Witch of the West's line readings whilst America's Next
Top Model played in the background, but somehow it totally works. Lowden as revelatory
as everyone has said--a real thrill to watch an actor drag something this
fine-tuned and vulnerable out of some as-yet unseen pit.
7. Close (dir. Lukas Dhont)
One aspect of growing up queer in a space that doesn't welcome
that queerness is how quickly, gladly, and desperately you can come to ripping
out and suffocating pieces of yourself, pieces you'll then spend the rest of
your life trying to find and reconstruct. You can imagine ghosts of your other
selves trailing behind you, waiting to be reborn, but they never will be,
because they have nothing to do with the life you've led in their absence. Just
decorations, reminders of a hook that was pushed under your skin before you
knew what it meant. And it's not important now, who you are now was (and is)
hard won, but sometimes you might make awkward eye contact with a ghost as it
flashes past your eye, and there's nothing either of you can do but shrug and
look away.
Close might not be explicitly about that, it speaks right to
it, and all the ways that people can choose to replace silence with noise. I
get the criticisms of this movie's second half, and I get that it's a
three-hankie weepie, but I have to admit that it doesn’t bother me.
6. Petite Maman (dir. Celine Sciamma)
As good a moment as any to point out how many of my favorites this year are about the passage of time, how it shapes a life just by continuing to move, and how the past and present converse with each other, across decades or face to face. Sciamma's film, about a girl who finds a portal into the past where she meets her mother as a child, certainly fits that mold, and achingly, lovingly so. "You didn't invent my sadness" deserves its own
star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
5. Nope (dir. Jordan Peele)
Is it better to look or to die? Yes, or alternately, no. A
world-sized terrarium full of vomit, atrocities, and used film stock, in that
order. Everyone everywhere is hungry, but that's part of the fun.
Even more convinced on a rewatch that Peele's made something
really special--a pretty-ugly gnashing of teeth about how (and why) to look at
all the bad miracles and a love letter to filmmaking and the pressures of its
history. Huge leap forward on a visual/craft level, and a high-wire blend of
big summer fun and some legitimately disturbing visuals and content.
4. RRR (dir. S.S. Rajamouli)
Honestly nothing on god's green earth could have gotten my
loins properly girded to see this in theaters. The most movie I've ever seen in
a movie, maybe, and I'm still giggling thinking about the absurd giddy heights
it reaches, parkouring from bromantic music video to face-melting action scene
to some real Gene Kelly dancing excellence and then back again. This should
play at least once a day in every theater for, like, 800 years minimum. Hearing and reading what some Indian writers feel about some of its political undertones has dampened my enthusiasm for this movie just a hair, but I can't deny when great cinema is great cinema, and that's what RRR is.
3. Tár (dir. Todd Field)
Daring and Hugely rewarding--clearly some real virtuoso shit
at work. Maybe one of the strangest, prickliest and most deliberately
misleading recent (relatively) mainstream movies to appear, refusing to be
nailed down to any one moment, mindset, impression, or genre (is this
fundamentally a ghost story? A fantasy? a comedy?). Most viscerally impressed by
the sound design, which drags entire labyrinths out of the darkness. Also by the
carefully crafted tempo that hides the chaos engine pumping steam into all of
the moving parts. A movie about stopping and starting time, whatever that can
mean, until time refuses to stop at all. Blanchett deserves the accolades,
obviously, but I really hope we make room for Nina Hoss in the conversation as
well, who can move continents with one shifting facial muscle. How fun is it
that this movie exists exactly as it does?
2. The Fabelmans (dir. Steven Spielberg)
I am not at a place in my life where I could bring any level
of objectivity to this, but I loved it with my whole heart and was weepy for at
least 50% of the runtime. A freight train full of Spielberg doing what he does
best, from the opening original Spielberg Face to the dorky and joyful moving
camera punchline at the end. Embodies deep in its bones the Truffaut cinema as
agony or joy quote, and finds room for both (and for some other feelings in
between). Holding your passions in your hand as if afraid they'll
disappear--and if you let go, sometimes they do. Follow your dreams! Or don't
and be shattered! Or just watch a movie about it instead! I saw this in theaters
five times—more than anything in my life other my childhood obsession with Titanic
that convinced me that I wanted to make movies. At this point, I just need to
accept the inevitable, buy a copy of this movie, and play it every night when I
go to sleep like it's whale sounds or something.
1. Aftersun (dir. Charlotte Wells)
I really struggled on my first watch to find words that do
it justice--like looking through the little mind camera Sophie mentions, where
everything is made of skins, one piled on on top of another, some hot and
unfamiliar, some ornamental, some almost thin enough to see through, something
that exists in the absent space between dreaming and waking up and ends feeling
like the kind of day the characters describe, where everything has been
wonderful but it still feels like your bones don't work.
And if it hits like a train the first time around, the
second time feels like the same train is backing up over you again--you already
know how it feels, but that doesn't make it any easier. Fascinated by how taken
this movie is by textures, physical or otherwise, the moments you can slide
your fingers across in your mind and feel the bumps and ridges. And while the
talk (rightfully) centers how strong the central relationship is, Aftersun is
also a stellar evocation of a very specific piece of adolescence, fully
inhabiting the brief moment in between discovering that you want to desire and
learning what that actually means. A bursting world inhabited by sideways
glances without much intention beyond learning how to glance sideways. Really
phenomenal movie--almost impossible to believe that it's a debut.
And there's that! This is normally the point where I'd say that I'd take a quick break to weep quietly in a corner before continuing, but I'm all fired up (and/or am somewhat desperate to stop), so why don't we skip the break and go right into the best scenes and the worst movies of the year.
(I'll try to link to a clip of the best scenes if possible.)
(Note: generally I try and avoid spoilers or picking endings
here, but I'll still mention which clips
might be spoilers when I hit them.)
Best Scenes of the Year
10. "The Defense is Wrong!"-Fire Island
(the apotheosis of comedy scenes written for gay film enthusiasts)
9. We're Losing the Light-Babylon
(also no video, so here's a picture of a dinosaur that kind of captures the essence of it)
8. Bheem Unleashes a Very Specific Kind of Hell on the British-RRR
(If you haven't seen RRR, you should definitely wait to see this in the context of the movie, but this is also a great snapshot of the movie's bananas energy if you need convincing)
7. Elvis sings at the Hayride-Elvis
(huge, silly/comitragic encapsulation of the film's energy and where it wants to go)
6. Fanny Pack Rumble-Everything Everywhere All at Once
(creative and wild, accentuated by great performances, shows up before the movie's many action scenes start offering diminishing returns)
5. The Star Lasso Experience-Nope
(definitely spoilers if you haven't seen. Hideous and gorgeous in equal measure, scary as shit by the end)
4. Family Dance Competition-After Yang
(Introduces all the characters, is a total riot--why don't all movies start with a context-less dance number)
3. How to Talk to Your Bully After You Have Inadvertently Upset Him by Making a Movie Where He Looks Like a Cool and Competent Guy-The Fabelmans
2. Sammy in the Editing Booth-The Fabelmans
(spoilers in the clip: a wordless demonstration of the intersection of art and your own life, and how one devastates the other)
1. Naatu Naatu-RRR
(the most fun four minutes of the year! Choreography for days! This movie rocks)
And finally, the worst movies of the year! While I don't
want to dwell on negativity or end on a down note, there's some catharsis to be
found in pushing the things that wasted your time right off their roller skates. So
let's push away! Note that I generally avoid movies that are supposed to
be awful, so this can just as easily be seen as a list of most disappointing
movies.
Honorable Mention: while I acknowledge that it's generally too competent in too many ways to call it the worst, I still think All Quiet on the Western Front is execrable trash that I deeply despise, and if you ask me why I will be happy to speak to you for at least eight hours about it
5. Uncharted-The Muppet Babies already did an Indiana Jones episode, why did we need to do it again?
4. The Black Phone-so thrilled by its own blackness, and so excited to rub its audience face in the shits it keeps laying down. Strong child performances can't save this useless exercise in miserablism.
3. Empire of Light-Not sure I have anything to add about this movie that that Julia Louise-Dreyfuss wtf gif doesn't already say.
2. Lightyear-Is this the most unintentionally funny opening text in the
history of film? The Hindenburg of Pixar movies.
1. Death on the Nile-I'm just a boy, standing in front of a computer, asking who
is going to slap that camera out of Kenneth Branagh's hands.
And that's it for today! I will be back...sometime this week! To finish this with some number of posts in some kind of format! In the meantime, what do you think? What am I missing? What should I give another chance?
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