It is already May June The End of the World July August Fuck off, September 2023 and it’s not like I’ve been marathoning movies from last year that I missed, so I may as well just put it to internet ink now. Look… when I look at the difference between 2021 and 2022 as stock against a heavily transformed movie landscape in the wake of 2020’s desolation, there’s probably not a HUGE difference. It is especially tempting to consider 2022 a major return of proper popcorn cinema when 2021 had Dune breaking through and (regrettably) Spider-Man: No Way Home broke the $1 billion dollar barrier once more. But y’know what? 2021 didn’t FEEL like a popcorn movie season. 2022 REALLY FELT LIKE ONE, with Top Gun: Maverick right there in the middle of the summer demanding a big-screen watch the same way Dune or Malignant did. And then it just kept going, we got more MOVIE MOVIES (if I may be allowed to sound manic) now than it seems we did in the last two years (especially if we consider Memoria a 2022 wide release given its tour having begun proper last April, but my 2021 list is already set in stone).
And 2022 specifically stuck the landing: this was the first Oscar season in a long while where I liked half of the Best Picture nominees and as you’ll see, many of the various contenders ended up highlights of the movie year for me. Which is a nice feeling of alignment with the public consensus, chiefly when the highest-grossing film since COVID is one of my very favorite movies to have come out from the last five years.
So I feel in a better mood about movies to come than I did about 12 or 17 months ago and looking back on my superlatives below… I think I have good reason to feel that optimism. But we’ll see, it’s not like 2023 is doing much special and we’re still in some post-COVID desolation.
BEST EXPERIENCE WATCHING A MOVIE IN A THEATER
Moonfall at the Cinemark Seven Bridges IMAX
It was an extremely late Wednesday night (for the record, my Thursday workdays are the ones that require I get up the earlier) because it was the very last screening for a 15/70 IMAX theater that’s the only one remaining in Illinois but a full 1 hour and a half drive from where I live and another hour and a half back. The theater was almost completely empty except one other person far down and away from me. And yet it felt thrilling being engulfed in my tired state under the deranged pseudoscientific cosmic disaster dwarfing me in my seat. You know I just said 2022 felt like a real MOVIE MOVIE year? I’ll be quite honest, even in my lonely enthusiasm, Moonfall was the movie that first jazzed me up to that fact, box office failure be damned.
(Special Mention to finally seeing Gremlins 2 in 35mm at the Music Box, fulfilling my long-time dream of watching Hulk Hogan scream at Gremlins and save the picture with a movie theater crowd. Still wish I got to see it as a kid for the first time that way, but this is the best it gets.)
MOST AMBIVALENT REGRET ON MISSING OUT A THEATRICAL VIEWING
RRR at the Music Box
I love the Music Box crowds for certain movies and I’m a little bit apprehensive about other types. I must say RRR fell into the latter and I didn’t originally plan on attending the screening (which would have seen the attendance of S.S. Rajamouli), but a friend of mine – one whom I had already seen RRR in a theater with – bought a plane ticket for us to catch it together on a whim. We just missed the final available tickets before the show sold out and while I regret missing a chance for us to hang, I’m not convinced I missed out on a real experience there.
BIGGEST REGRET ON MISSING OUT A THEATRICAL VIEWING
Gabriel Over the White House in 35mm at Northeastern Illinois University (courtesy of Chicago Film Society)
In my defense, I was flying to Vienna on that date. Yeah, humblebragging but I still haven’t seen Gabriel Over the White House, so who’s the real loser here.
2022 RELEASE I MOST REGRET MISSING FROM THE THEATERS
Fire of Love
Blame it on my bias, I was expecting a conventional biographical documentary and it’s not NOT one. But the archival material captured by its subjects – late volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft – is breathtaking and was deserving of a large-scale exhibition in the manner that the movie presents. My goof and I pay for it but good.
2022 RELEASE I MOST REGRET MISSING
Aline with Petrov’s Flu a close second.
Aline is more embarrassing on account of being my type of camp and having been available on Amazon Prime for quite a minute. I just lost time and couldn’t wait anymore with this post. Watch I log it on letterboxd a few days later.
WORST TRAILER
Bodies Bodies Bodies – Trailer 1
This is just a me thing: slasher movies with a level of distance from themselves is already a pet peeve of mine, but this trailer felt like it was made out of dialogue from any given tumblr scroll. Feel fortunate that in spite not liking the movie, it was more than a collection of hashtag talk that this trailer presented itself as.
BIGGEST GAP BETWEEN QUALITY OF TRAILER AND QUALITY OF MOVIE
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever teaser trailer
It didn’t hide the ugly cinematography, but the mood and progressive pacing of the trailer lent sobriety that ended up making this piece of marketing feel like a more sincere attempt to grapple with the absence of Chadwick Boseman than the actual feature turned out to be (maybe it helps that a trailer can’t shovel in teasers to Ironheart and whatever the fuck Julia Louise-Dreyfuss will be doing). The movie? The fucking worst feature release by Marvel at the time (congratulations to Ant-Man and the Wasp 3 for dethroning that before I could post this). The trailer? Genuine art, from the delicate shift between “No Woman, No Cry” and “Alright” to a clip of Angela Bassett’s anguish that we knew would be the Oscar nod clip on sight right down to the ambiguous final beat just daring you to lean in and try to find out who the new king is.
BEST TRAILER
Barbie – Teaser Trailer
I’m not a Greta Gerwig fan and I’m not a Noah Baumbach fan (anymore, the man stopped being vicious to his characters and lost his edge) so there’s almost nothing about this that would be promising for me on paper (except that I’m both a Margot Robbie fan and a Ryan Gosling fan). And then this thing drops, painstakingly recreates one of the most iconic sequences in movie history and uses it to push the brand’s recognizability into something that could dig into even the more straight-faced of moviegoers. It’s funny, it’s sharp, and it suggests maybe there’s a little more charm in here than I’d expect to land with me. It has my curiosity.
WORST POSTER
Orphan: First Kill
Even Fuhrman is giving us a look like “you see this shit?” And I don’t know what the airbrush artist had against Julia Stiles.
BEST POSTER
Tár
Come on, just look at the way Blanchett fills the frame. Solid, impactful, centered, all of which describes the text too (I love how she only needs to be credited by her last name to make the point now) and feels physical and volatile in the context of what she’s doing in the poster. Also, it’s way too easy to make a Jeb joke.
(I’m also fond of Three Thousand Years of Longing – the solid red triangle of Elba’s hood engulfing Swinton’s lanky and cross-armed body in a protective manner – but I think I just prefer the neatness of Tar).
WORST TITLE
Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank or Prey for the Devil
PUT A FUCKING COLON IN THESE TITLES
DC League of Super-Pets and Jurassic World Dominion
MOST INACCURATE TITLE
Wendell & Wild
MOST “OH THAT’S CLEVER” TITLE
Prey
BEST TITLE
Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko
(I am also very fond of Mad God, The Banshees of Inisherin, Armageddon Time, Flux Gourmet, Three Thousand Years of Longing, X, Tar, and Crimes of the Future)
WORST CAMEO
Ryan Reynolds just popping into Bullet Train late in the game to tell us that Deadpool 2 is now definitely closer to David Leitch’s default style and tone than Atomic Blonde.
MOST BAD LUCK CAMEO
Can’t say I have any tears for Henry Cavill since I think his appearance in Black Adam was not very appealing (partly because I think his story as Superman was closed by the Snydercut), but what an unceremonious way to lose TWO jobs after being trumpeted so hard by that sequence.
BEST CAMEO
Björk in The Northman
Few contemporary artists I can think of as a force of nature the way Björk is and here she is literally embodying a force. I imagine the rarity and reluctance with which she’s been willing to return to screen acting (yet another reason to hate Lars von Trier) adds to the ceremony. A stately appearance and declaration of the film’s heightened attitudes that could not come from anyone else.
(Also want to give it up to Jessica Harper in Bones and All)
WORST LINE
“Try anything and you’re cancelled, bro”
-Some influencer (imdb is no help on who the actor is) in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (written by Chris Thomas Devlin)
MOST DIVORCED FROM REALITY LINE
“The job of a banker is to help people reach their dreams!”
-Alan Gardner (Jonah Platt in the English dub I saw in theaters) in Pompo the Cinephile (written by Hirao Takayuki)
BEST LINE
“I know it hurts. No one asks to be left behind. But in a hundred years, when you and I are both long gone, any time someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you will be alive again. You see what that means? One day, every person on every film shot this year will be dead. And one day, all those films will be pulled from the vaults, and all their ghosts will dine together, and adventure together, go to the jungle, to war together. A child born in 50 years will stumble across your image flickering on a screen and feel he knows you, like… like a friend, though you breathed your last before he breathed his first. You’ve been given a gift. Be grateful. Your time today is through, but you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.”
-Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) in Babylon (written by Damien Chazelle)
WORST SCENE
Alexei Navalny flop-sweating his way into explicitly refusing to condemn neo-Nazism in (the now Oscar-winning) Navalny.
WORST NON-DOCUMENTARY SCENE
Either sequence in DC League of Super-Pets where the turtle voiced by Natasha Lyonne gets a bleep.
BEST SCENE
I feel very biased and basic saying it’s the ending of the Fabelmans but you must understand that moment was sacred lore between my film school friends and I sharing the youtube clip where Spielberg talked about that moment and the fact that the punchline of the scene is an impish final camera movement is the cherry on top.
AUTHOR’S NOTE, August 2023: The following two sections revolve around movies that I have in fact rewatched since these were drafted. I’ve reworded the usual sentiment of anticipating a change of attitude. Also, both of these rewatches were in the same weekend and context: The Music Box’s annual 70mm showcase las month (though I’m disappointed this year was devoted to 21st century cinema).
MOVIE THAT WAS MOST LIKELY TO DEPRECIATE AND ALREADY HAS SINCE I TOOK SO LONG TO POST THIS
I like backloaded strengths in cinema, I really do, but normally that doesn’t yield very well to rewatches when it becomes a waiting game to get to the good stuff. Even less so when it’s a movie that edges close to 2 1/2 hours the way that Nope does, because now that waiting game is hung up on the story and… man, Nope‘s writing really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, jerry-rigging itself with no care towards character consistency or momentum to project its ambiguous musings on the concept of spectacle. It only works once it gets to that later spectacle and captures us in a way contradictory to the peril the film suggests about that captivation, like an anti-Spielberg picture.
MOVIE THAT WAS MOST LIKELY TO APPRECIATE AND ALREADY HAS SINCE I TOOK SO LONG TO POST THIS
It’s a mess and there’s still parts that I outright don’t like, but Babylon clicked a lot more with me this time around for a few reasons related to how I’ve long felt for movies (self-indulgence is good; Damien Chazelle and I align on what art means) and a couple of things related to my last rewatch (being miffed by the smug online reception of the movie; watching Boogie Nights the same night which is a lesser version).
OTHER MOVIES FROM 2022 WHERE THE DISCOURSE WAS UNFAIR HORSESHIT
- BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
- Blonde
- To Leslie
The internet really does fuck things up sometimes. I don’t even love these movies but seriously…
MOVIE I LOOK FORWARD TO REWATCHING MOST
Crimes of the Future. I really do feel like there’s something that clicks about this in its positive lens on the body and all its morphing that may unlock a new angle on all of Cronenberg’s masterpieces previously that would be slapped with the “horror” brand specific to their tone.
STREAMING RELEASE THAT MOST BELONGED IN A THEATER
Prey. Disney’s reign of evil strikes again.
MOST “I NEED TO FIND NEW FRIENDS” RELEASE
Smile. It’s got a 79% on Rotten Tomatoes so I know that there’s people who love it as much as I did, but they’re not living around me.
MOST “COME ON, IT’S BAD BUT IT’S NOT AS BAD AS Y’ALL KEEP SAYING” RELEASE
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In terms of “online slashers of 2022”, I think Bodies Bodies Bodies surpasses it in unbearable writing and it maintains a mean streak in recent horror that I was surprised to see more frequent than possible (see also: Scream ’22, Slumber Party Massacre ’21, Barbarian, X, Pearl, The Black Phone).
MOST UNDERRATED
I can’t say the hostility to The Munsters was unexpected, but I still can’t abide it one bit. That movie is more fun than any of its haters have ever had and I’m glad Rob Zombie enjoys the same things I do.
MOST “I AM A MONSTER” RELEASE
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I swear you don’t want to know what I think about that fucking twerp of a character.
MOST OVERHYPED
Barbarian. It’s good – see where I mentioned it as a “mean” horror film – but I swear the “big twist” people were raving about is just the inciting incident of the movie proper and really every single person comparing it to Malignant needs to stop.
MOST OVERRATED
I’d made my inner peace enough that Everything Everywhere All at Once was going to win all its Oscars long before the award season discourse and I don’t doubt the people affected by the movie are genuine in their feeling (it also is undeniably the most idiosyncratic Best Picture winner since Birdman). But personally speaking, it’s among the unfunniest comedies of the decade and it was 2 ½ hours of that.
GUILTIEST PLEASURE
I’ve already praised Moonfall as a tremendous moviewatching experience up above, but even beyond that: it’s absolutely my kind of stupid and mixes the committed verve of its premise with the immaculate scale of disaster popcorn movie (including some of the best special effects of the 2020s so far). It may very well stop being an ironic pleasure on rewatch and the guilt may simply come from the horseshit conspiracy theories it fully believes in. But boy do those theories yield entertaining genre cinema.
MOVIES ABOUT THE FILMMAKER RECOUNTING HIS CHILDHOOD AS A YOUNG JEWISH CREATIVE COMING TO RECOGNIZE THE BLUNT REALITY OF THE WORLD AND PROCESSING THEIR POWER OR LACK OF TO CHANGE THINGS, RANKED:
- The Fabelmans
- Armageddon Time
COLIN FARRELL WAS HAVING QUITE A YEAR, LET’S RANK HIS FOUR RELEASES (all four of which he is excellent in):
- The Banshees of Inisherin
- After Yang
- Thirteen Lives
- The Batman
BIGGEST WASTE OF CASTING THAT YIELDED A GREAT PERFORMANCE:
Jamie Clayton as the Lead Cenobite in Hellraiser is fantastic on her own merits. Beyond Doug Bradley’s history in the role and well beyond what that remake deserved.
BIGGEST WASTE OF CASTING WHERE EVEN THE PERFORMANCE FELL FLAT:
Robert Pattinson as Batman is one of the most interesting choices you could bring to me and the movie opted to waste it on a doofy Kurt Cobain impression.
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
Jerzy Skolimowski has been one of the great Euro-arthouse directors I hadn’t broken into prior to 2022 so it feels like a big mistake that my first watch was his handsome but nevertheless straightforward off-brand Balthazar homage, EO.
BEST SURPRISE
Honestly so many, this was a pretty thrilling year of movies beating my expectations. I guess listing the top 4:
- Living transposing one of the great Kurosawa masterpieces Ikiru to post-war British stuffiness immaculately.
- The Black Phone showing that Scott Derrickson could provide a rather ruthless and depressed view of the world beyond his usual Christian impulses.
- Armageddon Time engaing with James Gray’s privileged background with an honest ambivalence that made for one of the richest autocritiques of artist’s memoirs I’ve seen in the 21st Century.
- The Woman King restoring my faith in Gina Prince-Bythewood as a classically minded dramatic storyteller with a stylistic and tonal versatility.
BEST POPCORN MOVIE
The real answer is likely my number four of the year, but I mean… it’s on my top ten so customarily I gotta give a seat to another movie. And I know we got a whole lot of “movies is back” movies but nothing felt more “movies is back” than Top Gun: Maverick. Taking familiar crowdpleaser tropes with nothing but sincerity, punctuating them with heartstopping aerial photography and choreography, and then mixing the two of them in an outright masterpiece of a third act that’s basically Star Wars‘ trench run.
WORST MOVIES OF 2022
- The 355 (Simon Kinberg, USA) – There’s nothing I could say about this that Devan Scott hasn’t already.
- Pinocchio (Robert Zemeckis, USA) – Look how they massacred my boy.
- Jurassic World Dominion (Colin Trevorrow, USA) – I guess if my movie’s dinosaurs looked like that, I’d be disinterested in them too.
- Prey for the Devil (Daniel Stamm, USA) – There’s always one release that looks “so bad it’s good” and then they just fucking get ya.
- Hocus Pocus 2 (Anne Fletcher, USA) – The same year as Top Gun: Maverick, this movie reminds us nostalgia is a scourge sometimes.
- Bros (Nicholas Stoller, USA) – Whatever this is the first of, I’m waiting for the first good one.
- Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green, USA) – Its disinterest in being a Halloween movie is only less irritating than its disinterest in Halloween as an atmosphere.
- The Requin (Le-Van Kiet, USA) – Incredible to have the worst CGI water in the same year as the best CGI water.
- Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (Stephen Donnelly, UK/USA) – Look how they massacred that boy too, I guess.
- Choose or Die (Toby Meakins, UK) – I die.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen, India/USA/UK)
Armageddon Time (James Gray, USA)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, Ireland/UK/USA)
Benediction (Terence Davies, UK/USA)
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, South Korea)
Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, Australia/USA)
Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko (Watanabe Ayumu, Japan)
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo Del Toro & Mark Gustafson, USA/Mexico)
Haulout (Maxim Arbugaev & Evgenia Arbugaeva, UK/Russia)
Ice Merchants (João Gonzalez, Portugal/UK/France)
Mad God (Phil Tippett, USA)
Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski, USA)
Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, USA/Australia)
X (Ti West, USA/Canada)
The Woman King (Gina Prince-Bythewood, USA)
AND NOW MY TEN FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2022
10. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Joel Crawford & Januel Mercado, USA)
There’s a high risk at this point of overrating the film – I don’t yet think it surpasses the How to Train Your Dragon films as Dreamworks Animation’s masterpiece – but I guess that could only come as overcorrection to the low expectations the sequel to a spin-off of a franchise that ruined American animation could get on default. The fact remains that this feels more impressive as a successor to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s gamechanging work than that movie’s own sequel: trading the show-offy ambition of those films for an idiosyncratic playing around of lighting, textures, and frame rates that accomodates the cozy storybook structure and rich introspective themes tremendously well, like moving illustrations to a fairytale with extra punch in its fragmentary and revolving fight sequences. That still doesn’t get us to the perfection of its surprise villain: kids movie scary enough in his first scene, but abstracting and breaking down the film with every appearance until his proper introduction explains exactly why things feel dangerous whenever he interrupts the film. I guess maybe one can say the movie getting acclaim largely for having a panic attack scene is overrating, but to be fair, it’s an emotionally strong one.
9. A Couple (Frederick Wiseman, France/USA)
59 years into his career and 92 years into his life, one of the great documentarians has decided to make his first narrative feature. Except there doesn’t seem to be a real shift to Wiseman’s M.O.: he’s still dissecting and presenting the intricacies of an institution, just now it’s the institution of marriage rather than a physical institute. And to my real surprise, Wiseman and star Nathalie Boutefeu have made a point of building this out of the empty spaces in between what’s on-screen: the absence of Leo Tolstory, the addressee of the material. The ebb and flow between tranquility and agitation. The moments in between that map out where we are in Sophia’s feelings about this off-screen marriage and why she is so. It matches with Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth as a film that sticks in my head specifically because of how totally unlike anything its director made before but I’d dare to say that Wiseman’s confidence in using the specificity of the Tolstoys’ scenario to draft a universal image of the intangible emotions and psychology of this social concept stands a little more in conversation with the surveys he takes of government-funded buildings.
8. The Northman (Robert Eggers, USA)
If this is dead last in my rankings of Eggers’ three features so far, it must say something how even the “least” of his films is an aweinspiring immersion into not just a distant place and time with unfathomable plausibility but the firm state of mind that setting forces out of you if you want to meet your destiny. It’s a one-path train to find vengeance, disinterested in any contemporary lens towards such an act. Every element of it – particularly its lateral camera movements – to stress its end point as an inevitability and an aspiration, quietly defining the singular psychology of Amleth as a protagonist. All the rest of the craft is to servicing that in defining the world he’s stomping through to get blood and result in a muddy and earthy adventure picture. Simple ambitions, but impeccably accomplished.
7. Lux Æterna/Vortex (Gaspar Noé, France/Belgium/Monaco)
I confess, I couldn’t just pick one. One of these was one of the most emotionally devastating works I’ve seen in a long while, the other was the most assaultive experience I had in a movie theater. At the center is one new technique Noé is flexing out: splitting the screen in half and letting the focus of the shot separate in dizzying and alienating directions. Which makes it all the more impressive how he’s exposed the range of such a technique by presenting a lengthy and emotionally painful stretch of time with two slowly collapsing minds and bodies (somehow without even the slightest hint of exploitation as one would expect of the enfant terrible that Noé embraced as his role), followed by physically disorienting colors and mania that escalates into a complete collapse of the film-within-film and then the film itself (at least referring to the order in which I watched these films. The order of their production and original premiere is reversed). Both of them finding room to deliver two of the most affecting endings of the year, making me feel like I was punched in the gut and left for dead.
6. Inu-Oh (Yuasa Masaaki, Japan)
At this point, Yuasa has shown himself quite a master of the soaring power of song as a character beat (his last three movies all have spectacularly dazzling and joyous musical numbers), but it didn’t stop Inu-Oh from blowing me away in using its period stylings and settings as a counterpoint against the fierce punk rock rebellion that kickstarts this movie’s heart. All its anachronisms as either animation or glorified music video is to break complete away from its otherwise sober representation of a distant time and place intent on making art subjugate its audience rather than liberate them, celebrating that art’s ability to carry the spirit of its artist through its liberal variety in musical and artistic influence.
5. Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammertino, Italy)
I don’t want to dare claiming that it made cave-diving and -mapping into a thrilling act of drama, because that would have to be specific to the type of viewer you are and anyway there’s absolutely no drama to speak of. This is a fine quiet and slow picture, happy to linger on the textures of the cave in question and soothing ambience of the mountainous region outside the titular “buco” with barely any editorializing to it. Just watching light craft the lines and crags of this underground adventure and steadily pacing itself all the way to the end. A meditative experience that was worth the 5 hours of driving I had to do to see it in a theater.
4. Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, USA)
Look, sometimes the populist choice is so for a reason. Enough has been said about Avatar: The Way of Water‘s bleeding edge visual effects and it earns every single one of them for the immersive nature of this film taking you to a full realized world of complete invention. But I also feel protective of it against those “great technique, shallow storytelling” notes it seems to receive: I think this is the efficient and effective storytelling Cameron has give us since the first Terminator. Wisely slotting one of its swift three hours for exploring this new world the central characters are forced to move into – gloriously realized in a welcoming and hypnotic way – and then a second hour to the building of the broad central drama that is at the end of the day just two guys who really hate each other in cat-and-mouse and the final hour to a bombastic climax that combines all the best elements of virtually every film Cameron ever made (even the flying fish creatures are basically his long-forsaken Piranha II). That last hour particularly is not just the best popcorn cinema since the pandemic, it’s the best popcorn cinema since Mission: Impossible – Fallout‘s helicopter chase: an escalating set of situations in one extended battle-heavy night making this family we’ve grown close to over 2 hours a rather urgent stake and building its tension up to the point where two Marine-trained aliens just decide to whup each other’s asses. If it doesn’t hold up on a small screen, that’s not my problem. It’s not like Starry Night holds up as a jpeg, some works of art demand to be watched a certain way.
3. The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, USA)
I’m not going to go off and pretend I have an aversion to filmmakers talking about their young memories about their parents (see also: the same year’s Belfast, which I didn’t love but I seem the only person who liked), but interjecting that with the wide-eyed idea of “movies are magic” seems like it’s a touch too saccharine for my appeal (see also: the same year’s Cinema Paradiso, absolute dogshit). The thing is that The Fabelmans is that if you approach it at a surface-level but if you cut even a little bit slightly, Spielberg has not just recounted the way he’s felt himself get an early handle on all the emotional potency of cinema as an unspoken language for him, but also as an ignorable blockage from the real flesh-and-blood people around him and how to deal with the angles he cannot change. It’s a rather plaintive and self-examining thing, even as it never feels difficult or less pleasurable to look at because when Spielberg confesses to bein so good at making movie images… he’s telling the truth. A relaxedly adult bit of auto-critique on all the ways Spielberg recognizes he couldn’t figure as a young man, maybe less interesting to people who don’t like his movies but their loss.
2. No Bears (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
A film even more vicious in its auto-critique than The Fabelmans was. Not to make light of Panahi’s imprisonment while this movie was playing in cinemas, but it gives me the sensation that Panahi had even less enjoyment being stuck with himself than being stuck between walls. His latest of post-ban films is the first that seems required that you’re at some level familiar with the previous films in that line, but even beyond that, this is a rather disarming navigation of a movie-within-a-movie conceit that pulls back precisely when we could not expect it (including an opening sequence that made me feel like someone hung me upside down once it revealed its hand). And then that’s woven into a rural tragedy that even as fiction recontextualizes the plight of Panahi as one of a forgiven privilege that clashes with the film’s quiet introspection wondering if that forgiveness should be, subject to an ensemble of locals that is lived-in as Taxi and 3 Faces but also a lot more dramatically hostile and a performance by Panahi that shows an impeccable ability to reserve his inner commentary so that this remains one of the most challenging films of the post-pandemic era. Like an anti-Close-Up in how bothered it feels by the camera’s place in human lives.
- Earwig (Lucile Hadžihalilović, UK/Belgium/France)
A film almost exclusively set here on the basis of its means of being rather than what it is being about. If there’s one thing you need out of a film, it’s light and duration and Earwig seems to have some of the most unique and lulling presentations of that I’ve seen since Jodie Mack’s work. It’s not even particularly beautiful work, mostly of a dungy brown shade as would be appropriate to a film about the misery of such fragile lives and the unnerving tether their fates have together (it occasionally shifts to gray for the outdoor sequences), but the way the camera simply lets the necessary lights seep in and reveal all that unpleasant imagery in their invisible paths feels like watching a chiaroscuro heavy painting simply fade onto the canvas rather than be composed. It does wonders for its atmosphere and ambience, neither of which are promising a particularly good time but I guess all of that establishes – like Evolution beforehand – that Lucile Hadžihalilović is as good at getting under our skin as her more infamous husband (the one whose movies are up at number 7) and where he makes it a provocative experience, she makes its an unconscious and frankly more artful one. Joins Memoria as one of the “there are still masterpieces” around post-pandemic films.
Movie Motorbreath 