I noticed something while going over the 10-best lists of other critics I know, something arguably not too extraordinary on the face of it maybe. That is, the presence of films that I had not only not seen but that I had not even heard of. From the very beginning of my year-end movie list making days, which were only ever in a professional context, I had a sense that my colleagues and I more or less covered the same beat, the same waterfront such as it was, and that a certain homogeneity would result across the board, for better or worse. This year there seemed a kind of palpable break from that, albeit one that's been a long time coming. The reasons for that? We all know some of them already: the overall fragmentation of movie viewing/cinephilia, its exacerbation due to the pandemic, the perfidy of streaming, all that. That's the overall situation. For me personally, it's that I'm reviewing films in a narrower range at times, and I'm reviewing less. I'm invited to fewer screenings as just a matter of course, and I don't chase stuff unless I really feel I have to have an opinion before the year is out. (And so it came to pass that I saw Babylon, my most dire viewing experience of 2022.) Sometimes a viewing omission just boils down to my own old and ornery inclinations; I've dragged my feet seeing Neptune Frost because I still remember Slam, and you may chastise me in comments for that. What follows is not ranked, and doesn't necessarily follow the chronological order of viewing. At times I've added a movie to my Evernote file weeks or even months after viewing. Was it a weak year for movies/cinema? Yes, and in a way that's more disturbing than most weak years; the great movies I saw this year felt more and more like acts of defiance, minor blows against an encroaching empire.
TOP STUFF
The Cathedral (Ricky D'Ambrose)
For Ebert.com I wrote: "director Ricky D’Ambrose’s carefully composed Academy-ratio frames, evoking not just Bresson but staged family snapshots, depict traps that the fractured families of the film can’t escape. D’Ambrose is, I should say, someone I know and have worked with, having appeared briefly in two of his prior films. It’s not partiality that compels me to say that with this feature he vaults from an interesting talent to a major voice." I have a funny story about this movie. As some of you may already know, prior to The Cathedral, I had acted — or perhaps it's more accurate to say I made my corporeal presence known — in two other films directed by D'Ambrose, the feature Notes on an Appearance and the short The Sky Is Clear And Blue Today. Aside from the fact that he likes to put New York based writers and critics in his films I have really no idea why I was cast but I was happy to be of service and the money was unbelievable. In any event, when I got word that his new project had been selected to be completed by the Biennale College I was delighted. But also a little concerned. It would look weird, I thought, to be in a film that I'd be assessing and discussing in a live panel. So I wrote to Ricky and explained my position and bowed out of acting in the movie before I was even asked. And of course he was fine about it. Although as it happened he'd already mapped out a part for me. When I saw the movie in Venice I was overwhelmed; I think it's a truly great picture and honestly, as such, I'm a little sorry not to be in it. In conversation with Ricky I mentioned that I had an idea of the role he'd wanted me to play, a small part to be sure. And he said no, the part he'd actually had me in mind for was a drunk uncle on the couch.
Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen)
Kimi (Steven Soderbergh)
From Manohla Dargis's 10 best list: "There isn’t a false or wrong note in this witty thriller about a woman facing multiple challenges, including her own (well-founded!) anxieties about the world. Set very much in the now — our heroine, a resourceful tech worker played by a terrific Zoë Kravitz, wears a mask when she goes outside — the movie touches on a number of intersecting subjects, including isolation and surveillance technology as a means of oppression. But it’s Soderbergh’s supremely assured filmmaking that has repeatedly brought me back to this playful delight."
Deception (Arnaud Desplechin)
I don't even know that this got a proper U.S. release — I saw it at the Walter Reade as part of some compendium. Desplechin has been doing the virtual twist with Roth for so long that one can't be blamed for thinking that once he actually got around to making an Official Adaptation of one of the man's books it would be a real barn-burner. This is not — it's consistently low-key, restrained, mature. But equally assured.
The Worst Person In The World (Joachim Trier)
Does this count for 2021 or 2022? I dunno. I saw it in 2022, under the pressure of a particular recommendation. It went like this: in spring I made a lunch date with a reasonably prominent American filmmaker to discuss a potential book project with him. He was in New York, a town he has little affinity for, to pick up a couple of awards. I met him at his hotel, which was near the restaurant I'd booked. When he appeared, some of the mooks I had noticed swarming around a nearby bench descended on him for autographs. Professional collectors, they were, and my lunch date grumbled that they weren't actually interested in him anyway; as it happened, Will Smith was staying at the hotel. We went and had lunch and it was great — this filmmaker and I get along and converse well, and have since 1997 — even though no resolution was reached with respect to the project. It was a pleasant day and walking back to the hotel my lunch date saw a couple with a baby sitting at a sidewalk booth by another restaurant, and cried out with delight. For this was his friend, Joachim Trier, with his wife and their new child. They too were in town to pick up some awards. Trier was a very pleasant guy and noticed my date was carrying two books: Tom Milne's Losey on Losey, and my own Made Men. Of the Milne he said, "Oh, that's a great book" and of Made Men he said, "Oh someone wrote a book about Goodfellas, fantastic!" These books were provided by myself to my lunch date to give him an idea of what I had in mind for the proposed project. And here I am, standing there like a doofus, having not seen The Worst Person in the World. I sheepishly apologized for this, explaining that I wanted to see the film with my wife and that she was out of town and my lunch date said, "No, you cannot sleep on it, it's the most fantastic film" and so on. So the very next day I went and I saw it and it is really good. Trier as a filmmaker knows his stuff, I intuited traces of Renoir and Cassavetes and more but also felt the whole thing had a daring all of its own. As it does. Check it out.
The Automat (Lisa Hurwitz)
The Tale of King Crab (Alesso Rigi de Rigi and Matteo Zoppis)
Petite Maman (Caline Sciamma)
Both Sides of the Blade (Claire Denis)
Vortex (Gaspar Noe)
Lux Aeterna (Gaspar Noe)
Does the poison-pen-letter-to-cinema thing that Chazelle's wretched Babylon thinks it's doing, and to actual galvanic effect, and in less than a third of the Chazelle movie's running time. Thus underscoring how rank an amateur Chazelle is — in the arena of contempt and pretty much everything else. Not that I think this was Noe's point. Call it added value.
Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland)
Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)
Beavis and Butthead Do The Universe (John Rice and Albert Calleros)
Murina (Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic)
Mad God (Phil Tippett)
Some form of this movie has been in my head since I was about six; Tippett has my eternal gratitude for making it a corporeal reality.
Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford)
Saloum (Jean-Luc Herbulot)
Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller)
A Couple (Fredrick Wiseman(
Pacifiction (Albert Serra)
Another one that didn't get an official U.S. release, but made an impression when I saw it at the NYFF. An impression as in "what on earth is he really on about here?"
The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)
Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)
Tár (Todd Field)
Dan Kois' consideration of the movie in Slate is worth considering, especially given all the stuff in an early trailer that didn't make it in to the finished film.
Armageddon Time (James Gray)
See K. Austin Collins' review in Rolling Stone. And particularly how he draws the important distinction between guilt and shame.
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)
Dazzling and enigmatic; what's darting about below its surfaces is impossible to grasp and impossible to put aside.
Petrov’s Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov)
Whoa.
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)
It's all they say it is.
Utama (Alejandro Loayza Grisi)
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
From the Ebert.com 10 Best of the Year summary:
Contrary to its advertising, this is not a picture celebrating the "magic" of movies or completely espousing them as "dreams." It's a picture about falling under a certain spell, to be sure. The opening scenes, in which a wide-eyed little boy is overwhelmed by a fake train wreck in what most of us now dismiss as a cheesy Cecil B. DeMille movie, make the case that the theatrical experience once was, and still can be, a sensory steamroller. But once out of that theater, "The Fabelmans" goes into an affectionately recreated and vividly acted late-20th century real life and a story of a kid who joyfully learns a craft. And then, as his family and social life fall apart, he uses that craft to keep the world at arm's length or to create worlds one likes better than one's own.
The emotions at play in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical story are rawer and sometimes more unpleasant than we've seen from the filmmaker in such concentration for a while. We admire Sammy Fabelman's inventiveness and stick-to-itiveness even as we see him become a kind of voyeur in his own life. His feelings about his passionate mom and his kind but buttoned-down dad yo-yo like crazy, as his moviemaking provides something he can actually control. And then he learns that something he controls himself can also be used to manipulate others. As is common in every Spielberg film, every shot here is a kind of miracle, a celebration in and of itself. But don't mistake this for an uncritical cheer for image-making. It's worth remembering that at the end, when Sammy visits "the greatest director who ever lived," that director is cooling his heels without a project in an office across the hall from that of "Hogan's Heroes." Like Sammy's uncle says, art will tear you apart.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)
Causeway (Lila Neugebauer)
One Fine Morning (Mia Hanson-Love)
Nepo baby my ass.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson)
Sr. (Chris Smith)
The Treasure of his Youth (Bruce Weber)
Broker (Hirokazu Koreeda)
No Bears (Jafar Panahi)
HONORABLE MENTION
The Duke (Roger Michell)
The Torch (Jim Farrell)
The Long Walk (Mattie Do)
The Unknown Man of Shandigar (Jean-Louis Roy, 1967)
Men (Alex Garland)
A form of special pleading pulled off with...brio?
Miracol (Bogdan George Apetri)
Faith (Valentina Pedicini)
Prey (Dan Trachtenberg)
Gets the job done.
Hustle (Jeremiah Zagar)
Ditto.
The Princess (Ed Perkins)
Costa Brava Lebanon (Mounia Akl)
A Love Song (Max Walker-Silverman)
Rated it kinda low initially. A grower.
The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)
Conversely, this might belong in the upper list. I do think of it — fondly, I assure you — as Art House Amicus.
Barbarian (Zach Creggar)
One of those movies that kind of cannot win, in a way. The first forty-five minutes were the most uncomfortable ones I've spent in a movie theater in years if not decades. The midpoint break certainly is a relief but also, Justin Long's hilarity notwithstanding, a winding-down and weakening. Still pretty hot.
Athena (Romain Costa-Gavras)
Super virtuosic filmmaking in the service of a relatively crude (albeit certainly sincere) vision.
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Moderately confounding to this viewer — a film of remarkable tension and restraint that collapses into a conventional semi-sentimentality at the close.
Confess, Fletch (Greg Mottola)
About ten minutes in my wife and I remarked to each other how great it was to finally watch a real Greg Mottola movie again. Hope the next one follows soon.
Adopting Audrey (M. Cahill)
My cousin Britt executive-produced. And the acting is first-rate.
Amsterdam (David O. Russell)
Neither as noxious nor as simplistic as the winky-wink trailers made it seem. Not entirely successful either, I should add. I thank Richard Brody for convincing me to check it out.
White Noise (Noah Baumbach)
Don DeLillo, a married author with no children, does not ultimately embrace hope. Noah Baumbach, a married writer-director with a couple of children and maybe one more on the way, seems to feel as if he has to ultimately embrace hope. Feh. Lots of good scenes in here though. I'm sorry, for a variety of reasons, that Michael Almereyda didn't get to do his version of the novel.
Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric)
Thanks for ruining a perfectly pleasant evening at home with my wife, Mathieu and Vicky!
Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron)
Cameron's a real filmmaker and it's never not interesting to watch him grapple with what he believes the future of cinema ought to/has to be.
The Biennale College films of 2022, all outstanding, were Come Le Tartarughe, Mountain Onion, Palimpsest, and Banu, and are considered here.
NICE TRY
Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniels)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: for all its energy and inventiveness it ultimately devolves into treacly (and frankly disingenuous) "Ohana means family" pablum.
The Northman (Robert Eggers)
About an hour and ten in it hit me: "He's not the guy."