My Best Films List For 2022
What is the point of publishing such a thing in a world that feels like it’s moved on from the printed word? Why approach writing about film as a journalist when journalistic ethics are viewed as obsolete by so many in the “anything goes” age of the internet? Why try to encourage critical thought in a population that not only lacks a necessary attention span or educational tools, but may eschew the very concept of it?
In many circles, editorials have become marketing tools or political propaganda in disguise and I’ve suspected for a while now - judging by what films certain demographics respond to - that people are so entrenched in their factional mindset that they reward entertainments just for shaking a stick at their politics. Are the best-of-the-year lists of so many other bloggers and online critics just rundowns of which films did the best job of stroking them? As if cinema were one more means of artillery in the bullshit culture war we all have to live with? One more means of wallpapering our shallow, over-emphasized assessment of individual identity? What does illustrating the evolving nature of an artistic medium mean in a landscape where the discourse has devolved into a toxic battleground for social media shitposting and niche blogging?
And what about the act of going to the movies itself? Has home streaming made it an archaic practice, as the year’s many, many underperforming studio titles outside of mega-budgeted tentpole offerings would suggest?
I can’t presume to have definite answers to these questions. I could speculate about how Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s critical text, Manufacturing Consent, could be applied to mass entertainment. I could mention that Hollywood products are largely promoted and not reviewed and that this practice is part of the commodification of art as “content.” For the accounting firms in charge, this eliminates risk, enabling studios to make safe bets, despite chipping away at the integrity of the profession. That buzz and the fanaticism of the lowest common denominator (which sets the bar in America) ensures what will be made and promoted, and what will be ignored or reviewed apathetically so long as the narrative can be controlled by corporate-think.
Art becomes “content.” Criticism becomes “marketing.” Audiences will be offered more of what they know, with less chance for challenging, unfamiliar facts and ideas being presented on screen. People are conditioned over time to be satisfied only with fictions that pander to (rather than articulate or heaven forefend, challenge or criticize) the acceptable 21st century viewpoints, presented passively and pumped with enough visual or conceptual fat and sugar to render any threats to the existing social order harmless.
Of course, this corporatized pandering is based largely on potential franchisable fanboy dollars, through which the studio IP mills dictate what will be gambled on. The culture that studio corporations dictate in regards to how their products are written about is distinctively anti-opinion, anti-art, anti-debate and anti-free thought. However, this process can be negated by You, The Patron, in choosing to go elsewhere for reading criticism (away from the Tomotometer) before you make a choice to devote precious time in your life to something. Or choosing to read any serious criticism at all. Going to see something in an independently run theater is also an effective way to undercut studio practice.
In choosing to support brick-and-mortar movie theaters, rather than settle for dull, unchallenging offerings programmed into the algorithmic matrices of major streaming platforms, you have agency in this landscape. Your local theater, programmed by humans rather than algorithms, and the sense of community that it offers are what comprise the fringe movements and subcultures that could chip away at the dominance of the monolithic, focus-tested, studio/multiplex mentality in creating a gravitational center for movie lovers to coalesce around.
Think of an inclusive community. Its members get up off the living room couch, away from streaming’s predictable offerings to seek film culture. Remember that one time this year when you went to a midnight screening of The Room at the one indie theater, with everybody laughing and reciting all the best lines along with Tommy Wiseau’s stilted cast? Your enjoyment of that was based on a common understanding of language, manners and traditions and how that movie’s bottomless ineptitude perverted them all. The recognition you shared with that audience of this perversion is the answer to the great question, “Why Are We Here (at the movies)?” You affected the future of cinema for the better when you did that.
I could go into all that. But I’ve already blown enough space trying to summarize it.
So my list for 2022, and the justification for it, can not be offered as a picket line against the changing times. I can only say that in little fits and starts, I’m noticing previously well-regarded film cultures die in the minds of the film establishment and of regional programmers, who have to pander to fill seats. A fair bit of this can be expected but there is a sense of lament in the failure (though not for lack of trying) of cinephile-friendly streaming platforms, which have to take the on the task of compensating for the decline of repertory cinemas and the lack of adventurousness in arthouse programming, in their limited capacity to fill this gap. And in titles like Damien Chazelle’s Babylon or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, which have to argue for the endurance of the moviegoing experience itself.
What I’m interested in are the questions raised by films. If I had to choose a common criteria for structuring the analytical goals of my writing, that would be it. What questions does the film generate and how worthy are those questions? More importantly, what are the questions that arise as an unintended result of watching the film? The answers are less important, nor is a given film worthy for simply asking questions. It is the sense of exploring possible answers - without arriving at conclusions - that makes a given experience at the movies more worthwhile for me.
Give me a suggestion and then point me in the general direction. Let me ponder structuring absences. Don’t explain everything. Let me do the work. Get me working with you and you have my attention. I refuse to believe that today’s culture has turned against these kind of works. Those who take the effort to learn and understand them (and that goes for the influential achievements of film history) will feel their impact. Curiosity about learning how to read film more deeply pays dividends.
Note: There are twelve films in this list. Thematic tie-ins are my way of cheating the number 10 as an absolute.
1. Petite Maman - Céline Sciamma, France
Concise and sparsely crafted at 72 minutes, Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman is like a fairytale or a piece of time-travel science fiction, exploring a fertile idea - that the Child is the Mother of the Woman - in a way that’s as intricate or simple as you want it to be. In interviews, she’s cited anime master Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away) as an inspiration and it’s not hard to see the influence in a story that feels like an adventure rooted in mythology or the supernatural that’s anecdotal, insightful about childhood and carried along with the lightness of a dream. It feels timeless.
I don’t doubt a host of intriguing psychological theories about child-development could be read into the film, but such a reading wouldn’t be crucial to get a profound experience from watching it. Every scene radiates the ambivalence of childhood, and the way love and friendship shape our psychology in early development. We follow an eight year-old girl named Nelly, left to her own devices as her parents clear out the house of her recently deceased grandmother. Playing in the nearby woods, she finds an identical house, and an identical girl named after her mother, Marion.
As the concept unfolds - that of meeting your mother as a child at the same age - the invented drama the two girls enact in the woods sets the act of play as a means of coping with loss against any number of questions about cognitive and emotional development. That is, the way children formulate their world and process their experiences with a sense of detachment, while tackling ideas they don’t yet have the vocabulary to fully grasp.
This is a major leap forward in Sciamma’s filmography in terms of exploring the female identity and female consciousness. It’s a radically different approach from her ambitious Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019), in terms of perspective and style. In twins Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz, she gets no-frills, naturalistic performances that are nothing short of extraordinary, even to someone like me who’s cautious about overpraising child actors.
They don’t act. The children seem to be simply existing in front of the camera. The anti-cute naturalism with which their activities unfold has a formal quality to it, as if Sciamma were channeling the pared-down approach of Robert Bresson. A solemn, quiet method of performance and delivery that makes you feel ageless when you watch it, it’s magic unfolding minute by sublime minute.
2. Freda - Gessica Généus, Haiti
From the looks of it, articulating the feelings of Haitian nationals towards their country, something the legions of Haitian audiences who lined up for this film would argue had ever been done before, should be reason enough for it to have received more attention than it did. A film that positively sparkles in color, language, culture and music, Freda is as vibrant as anything I’ve managed to see this year.
The ongoing instability of Haiti, which has suffered numerous traumatic events since its declaration of independence from France in 1804, has made the film’s production and distribution something of a miracle in itself. The effects of this tumultuous history are still being felt today, but director Gessica Généus is also a teacher, incisively illustrating the everyday conditions of life in a turbulent society from a female perspective, in addition to telling a warm and vibrant story.
Haiti, her film argues, is not the failed state as TV pundits have claimed, because hope survives in it. Freda’s title character, beautifully articulated by Nehemie Bastien, faces a choice about her destiny in which seemingly every aspect pertaining to life in the harsh and often volatile setting - history, religion, identity, education, gender, community - plays some role.
I’ll be blunt. It is a travesty that you’ve been unable to see this film yet. Scene after scene, I was impressed and moved by Généus’ ability to articulate both long-standing and current national woes while balancing lament with hope and negotiating the ancient standoff faced by citizens between the rights of the individual with the obligations of community. At no point did it feel like a high-wire act. The fruitful efforts of her smart script, attractive photography and largely inexperienced cast left an indelible impression in my mind. I wanted to hug everyone involved with the making of this movie. This film passed like so many other great Third Cinema features under the radar. Let’s do something about that.
3. After Yang - Kogonada, US
Like Michael Almeryeda’s equally masterful Marjorie Prime, the placid, halcyon future depicted in After Yang, with its no-hassle self-driving cars and Taoist-inspired decor actually seems like a nightmare in disguise. Mass automation seems to have shaken everyone into a state of effusive calm that feels like it’s covering a deep sense of loss of purpose. The characters in After Yang clamor for any semblance of what it meant to live life in the time before the arrival of humanoid robotics. The irony is that it’s through those very robots - the agents of their own redundancy - that the human inhabitants of this world try (and fail) to become archeologists of their own humanity.
A museum specialist named Cleo (Sarita Choudhury) believes a camera hidden inside the unresponsive Yang (Justin H. Min), a product of a company called Brothers and Sisters Incorporated, contains memories that are of vital social importance. The keys to unlocking the memories of Yang’s previous ownership point to an emotional connection in a relationship Yang had with a young woman. Was this part of his programming or a miraculous new incarnation of AI?
Tea shop owner Jake (Colin Farrell) and his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) bought Yang for their Chinese adopted daughter to teach her about her heritage. That they’ve outsourced this task to a robot speaks of a tone-deafness about information, parenting and the world around them. Chinese culture and aesthetics look to have become dominant in this part of the West, suggested by clothing styles and architecture. But the cluelessness of everyday people about the nature of their ennui suggests a detachment of the individual from engagement and experience that the serene surface of this world belies.
In absence of the traditional tools for educating a society about its history - books, museums, classrooms - none of which are visible in After Yang, technology is the only entity with enough prevalence to fill that role. But it is not up to the task. Director Kogonada’s adaptation of a short story by Alexander Weinstein paints this as a misplaced reliance. The tragedy of this structuring absence, of what was left behind in this future, is that the characters lack the awareness of just what has been lost - the fragile and precious nature of human emotions like love and loss that no machine, no matter how elaborately programmed and designed, can articulate.
This is a mysterious and profound film (containing a monologue about the existential quality of tea that is just perfect). It speaks eloquently and lucidly to a wide range of concerns about AI and automation that will face us in the coming years. Its bleakness is perhaps an unavoidable side effect.
4. We’re All Going To the World’s Fair - Jane Schoenbrun, US/Something in The Dirt - Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, US
Two deeply disturbing cautionary tales - one scary and heartbreaking, the other a riot - whose subjects and stories exemplify the failed promise of the internet as an engine for expression, information and meaningful human connection.
In We’re All Going To the World’s Fair, director Jane Schoenbrun and their teenage star Anna Cobb paint a very grim portrait of the online culture of cultish viral challenges and the self-destructive relationships their detached, unparented victims become subsumed in. Cobb is brave and committed as Casey, a lonely girl who spends all day in front of her computer screen as a loyal follower of an underground online community whose initiation requires filming herself taking the “World’s Fair Challenge,” as she’s strung along by a mysterious (and ultimately pathetic) online figure.
Actual Youtube performers and online content creators appear in the real and staged Youtube videos in the movie and for this we get an updated look at what coming-of-age looks like in a society obsessed with media validation and dominated by the technologies of control. A number of scenes feel superfluous and not central to the main development, but perhaps this is a summation of a life lived through a computer screen - shapeless and random. I haven’t left a movie theater feeling so angry at online cowardice, so old and so detached from younger generations and the social pressures they face in a long time. Calling World’s Fair a horror movie isn’t entirely inappropriate, if not for the tragedy at the center, highlighted with original music by DIY artist, Alex G.
Something in the Dirt is the latest sci-fi/horror outing from the team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who write, produce, direct, shoot, edit and usually star in their films and at this point, it’s fair to say that they deserve a larger audience beyond their cult following. They’re making some of the most compelling, intelligent and relevant genre features to be found in this country. The way their possessed, scatterbrained characters process the phenomena they stumble upon reveals how their generation’s raised-by-the-internet schemas for processing information and experience actively work to ensure a bad end for themselves.
Underemployed, single Los Angeles layabouts John and Levi (played by Moorhead and Benson respectively) experience unexplainable phenomena in Levi’s nearly bare apartment and begin filming a documentary into which they feed every offhand fact, paranoid conspiracy theory, urban legend, pop culture-tainted revelation, random coincidence and personal story they come up with, personifying the unreliable narrator.
As they lose their grip on reality, their video project eventually becomes a testament to the slippery, uncontextualized, and arbitrarily bi-sociative mental world of 21st century millennials - all self-absorption, rootlessness and squandered potential - considered with dubious filmmaking ethics to boot. We never know how much of what the two men experience is really occurring. The action is mostly confined to their apartment complex and we’re at the mercy of their overactive imaginations and underutilized talents. Funny, absurd, compulsively watchable and more than a simple mindfuck.
Together these two lacerating portraits of high-tech boredom and self-destruction convey a sense of urgency in their enactment of what’s really going on in America. A nation of isolated, detached nihilists and narcissists, lost in a fog of online confirmation bias and cultural white noise, searching for meaning and fulfillment in the most disastrous places.
5. Three Thousand Years of Longing - George Miller, UK
One big budget, large-scale production usually makes it on my list and George Miller’s spirited adaptation of A.S. Byatt's short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye,” is an unpredictable and imaginative fable well-suited for the era of mass incredulity we’re living in. The internet continues to cultivate a culture in which information and sources are ever more dubious, opinionated and suspicious, making the act of storytelling (and listening) an ever more precious social commodity.
Stories are how we process experience. It’s one of the biggest tools humans have to differentiate us from any other species. So the fitting interrogation Tilda Swinton’s nebbish narratologist conducts on Idris Elba’s put-upon genie as an attempt to suss out any potential tricks to his promise of three wishes (because these stories don’t always end so well for the wisher) could be looked at as a kind of emotional or cosmological form of vetting. Think of it like a fact checking for potential fake news within literary tradition.
Not only are Miller’s special effects smart and impressive. He knows when, how and to what degree to employ them to tell the story rather than having the story tell them. It’s an epic fantasy for bookish people that can hold your attention while refusing to pander to the increasing attention deficits of a large portion of the audience, making it quite an achievement.
6. Runner - Marian Mathias, US
At the time of this writing, Runner, the most impressive debut I saw at this year's Chicago International Film Festival, does not appear to have a deal in place for distribution. This is a shame because it’s a remarkably sustained tone piece, where the rural Indiana locations (shot for southern Illinois) highlight the emotionally deadened air that hangs over the characters and their community.
The story, about a withdrawn teenage girl swept along by the delayed burial of her outcast single father, appears to take place in a indeterminate 20th century past that looks like an amalgamation of earlier periods along with a few anachronisms - likely not hideable on the film’s small budget - that help to add a sense of mystery. This is a quiet, underplayed film, composed in medium and long shots. It places subjects in dilapidated, antique midwest structures of water-damaged plaster and creaky, varnished hardwood that are so tangible it’s easy to overlook the simple power of the story.
Director Marian Mathias, whose passion in scouting the authentic midwest locations was noticeable in every frame, finds dark gray skies prettier than sunny blue ones, like me. Her imagery has the flavor of a Wyeth or Hopper painting and the mise-en-scène - evoking the dread landscapes of Bela Tarr, Kelly Reichart or Terrence Malick - highlight the possibility of rural grief and despair. Learn more about the film and news on distribution and screenings here: https://runnerfilm.com/
7. All The Beauty and the Bloodshed - Laura Poitras, US
Part biography, part protest journal, Poitras’s masterfully constructed documentary introduces us to Nan Goldin, whose highly influential art and photography installations in the 70’s and 80’s showed the world the vibrant and tragic underbelly of New York’s underground queer scene. It alternates this with depicting Goldin’s present-day work with P.A.I.N, an activist group she founded for aiding victims of the opioid crisis.
Poitras is savvy not just to convey the urgency of the art that cemented Goldin’s reputation, but the connection to political action and agency that that art implores. A tireless fighter, Goldin leads protests at the world’s most prominent art museums against the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharmaceutical company is responsible for the production and distribution of dangerous narcotic prescriptions like Oxycontin. The Sacklers use their status as art patrons to launder their reputations and getting the Sackler name off the entrances to museum wings is only the first step in Goldin’s mission.
There’s a scene late in the film involving a court-mandated address to members of the culprit family by the opioid victims and their loved ones that’s truly harrowing. Never do you expect to see the people at the top of a monstrous corporate entity having to face the people at the opposite end of the ladder of power whose lives they destroy. This astounding scene alone makes the film a must-see.
8. Riotsville U.S.A - Sierra Pettingill, US/The March on Rome - Mark Cousins, Italy
Two highly trenchant views on the development of fascism in the 20th century, using little-seen archival footage for their respective examinations. Both features can be presented as clear-eyed arguments for the study of history in understanding how modern fascism meretriciously deploys evolving forms of media as both a propagandistic selling point and an ideological figleaf for its malicious intent.
In the wake of the Watts Riots of 1966 and other incidents of social unrest, the US government commissioned a study that looked at the causes and social breeding grounds for urban riots and in 1967, the Kerner Report was the first and perhaps last time the federal government took a hard look at its role in the violence, systemic racism and police brutality that was causing these outbursts. But in ignoring the study, and removing whatever findings were too damning and complicated to be made politically palatable, its reaction formation became a turning point in the militarization of American policing.
It set up model towns in painted wood - like cheap movie sets - and conducted what it saw as simulations of city riots to prepare local police in major cities in the suppression of ostensibly peaceful protests against racial injustice and the war in Vietnam. Soldiers posed as rioters modeling demonstrations as the Warrior Mindset began its installment in law enforcement training. Military brass watch the exercises from bleachers as if at a sporting event and news media personalities seem to be rehearsing the pro-establishment, pro-suppression narratives they will deploy when the real thing happens.
Sierra Pettingill’s Riotsville USA rigorously details the process by which the ruling authority’s imagination of the threat of violent reprisal becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, we learn what our downtrodders tacky imagining of their operative function says about them. The poetic narration by Pettingill gives the bleak proceedings a feel that broadens the material, so that it can apply to any struggle against the state oppression in the world. Law enforcement and its fantasies of violence and repression tip their hand in this, the most politically vital film you’ll see this year.
Director Mark Cousins (The Story Of Film, I am Belfast) uses his examination in a different, more investigative way, engaging with the images of emergent fascism like a detective or a prosecutor piecing together a conspiratorial crime. The March On Rome studies the film taken of Mussolini’s blackshirt revolution in 1922, in what was ostensibly 20th century fascism’s coming out party on the world stage.
In sifting through days worth of footage provided by Italy’s Cinecitta film studio, Cousins - narrating as always in the seductive lilt of his Belfast brogue - freezes, rewinds, and cuts back and forth in the procession of marchers on the capital. Far less violent and crude than America’s insurrection on January 6th, 2021 in Washington D.C., but an insurrection nonetheless. Cousins points out numerous fudgings of the details and timeline by the fascists, using the tricks of filmmaking - still a very young medium at the time - to present a puffed up version of reality. Edits and movements used to exaggerate the number of supporters and marchers or make the process of transition look fluent, efficient, well-received and inevitable.
This is perhaps history’s first instance of the filmic medium being used to lie for political purposes and one hundred years later, the parallels to the media manipulations proffered by today’s fascists are revelatory. Cousins highlights fascism as a creation of toxic masculinity, describing his film as understated and even gentle - the opposite of fascism. His cinematic history lesson bypasses any expression of rage at the atrocities of fascism, trusting that the audience knows and understands them, all the while humanely and poetically detailing the power of both fascism and cinema to exploit our fears and insecurities, making for the ultimate political hoodwink.
9. The Fablemans - Steven Spielberg, US
Steven Spielberg reaches deep into passages from his own life - both uncomfortable and formative - to come up with a kind of emotional resume to a fifty year career which has seen him become the most financially successful and one of the most influential film directors of all time.
Admittedly, I’ve had a number of reservations over the years with respect to Spielberg’s sentimentalizing and oversimplification of the human condition that’s hampered my ability to join the ranks of his more avid fanbase. He may vote Democrat but his manipulative agenda has always come off to me as a conservative charge to re-assert certain traditional social hierarchies and paradigms that have become antiquated and/or oppressive. But in this personal, small-scale memoir, he makes a strong case for family - especially supportive, encouraging parenting - as the best institution for producing a healthy, useful and successful adult, in spite of all its flaws.
Using the development of his own relationship to filmmaking as an example, he demonstrates from multiple angles the power that cameras have to affect and influence our lives. They can inspire or touch us deeply. They can see what the eye doesn’t and in so doing, ennoble the people they look at. Or hurt them. They’re weapons for speaking truth to power or speaking up for the underdog. They make subjects sacred or make history come alive. Spielberg’s young protagonist, jolted by the train crash scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), learns all of these lessons.
We see the way his disposition and preoccupations - as a film lover and dreamer in love with classic Hollywood, as a bullied nerd, as an enthusiast for the technical aspects of filmmaking, as a persecuted Jew in a gentile school and community - could form the basis for his choices and treatment of the material subjects of his work, in which ordinary people overcome long odds or bump up against the sublime. This without ever resorting to a cheap moment where anything specific inspires the boy to want to make, say, Jaws.
The deep respect for the power that movies have is a theme I can get behind, and its heartfelt articulation makes The Fabelmans, for me, Spielberg’s best feature in a decade and a half. The anecdotal finale, in which young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) meets a famous filmmaker played by another famous filmmaker, made me smile, right up to the final camera movement, which is like a signature on a self-portrait testifying that this art student learned the master’s lesson well.
10. No Bears - Jafar Panahi, Iran
Following the arrest of Iranian director Jafar Panani (along with other notable Iranian filmmakers charged - ludicrously - with subversive activity by the repressive government), a court-mandated ban on making films saw the director taken to producing features out of his home in Tehran. No Bears is the fifth feature made in defiance of the ban and the last film Panahi was able to complete before having to serve the six-year prison term to which he was sentenced in 2010.
It's an open-ended, self-reflexive piece of work, raising many questions about the responsibilities of artists, the presence of cameras, the failings and archaic practices of rural life and stifling nature of life under authoritarian rule. It felt at first like the work of an artist shaking his head at his fellow countrymen - their rash judgements and herd mentality - with Panahi, again playing himself, unable to come to an understanding with the society he spent his entire career empathizing with through his camera. A sense of defeat hangs over the proceedings, not the least of which is Panahi’s, as the story examines what he ponders may be his role in worsening the suffering of others by filming it. No Bears is like an anti-Fablemans.
Iranian film, more poetically and humanely than any other cinema, continuously explores the way cameras change events and the lives and actions of the people on screen. Panahi’s brave interrogation of his own culpability in the damaging role that the camera’s gaze plays in the lives of its subjects - illustrated here by his implication in increasingly complicated and emotionally fraught local skirmish involving a forbidden relationship - speaks to the humbleness that has always marked his career. It also speaks to the interrogative quality that directors like Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami and the Makmalbaf family have explored that has torn down the lines between fiction and non-fiction. Panahi was part of a crop of filmmakers who helped create a new kind of cinema, and his country rewarded him with a prison sentence.
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