Notable Films of 2022

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-20^th 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.”