Were the films of 2022 unconsciously trying to revive the excesses of the Roaring Twenties? One title, the 189-minute bacchanal that is Babylon, actually took place then. An atypical number of other Hollywood titles flirted with or stretched past the three-hour mark: Avatar: The Way of Water, The Batman, Blonde, TÁR, Elvis. There was also the crossover Tollywood sensation RRR adding a further epic dose of maximalism to the year's cinematic landscape. Meanwhile, the 139-minute Everything Everywhere All at Once delivered on its title with a deliberately overstuffed, enervating/innervating cornucopia of genre-trotting action. Maybe it was high time to indulge in the wake (can we call it that?) of pandemic-era deprivations and sociopolitical unease. Of course, 2022 offered plenty of smaller-scaled gems as well, many of which proved more enriching than their distended counterparts.
My top ten films of the year are after the jump:
10.
9.
One of the year's most sorely misunderstood films is Damien Chazelle's raucous, scathingly sardonic mash note to early Hollywood. An exhilarating showcase of kinetic, voluptuous cinematic craft - producing some of the most arresting images of 2022 (see above!) - the film should be taken less as a nuanced examination of industry inequity and malpractice than as a farcical exploding of a debauched, heavily mythologized past that has left very real casualties in its wake.
8.
Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg
Feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz wrote that "the body must be seen as a series of processes of becoming, rather than as a fixed state of being." Perhaps no filmmaker has better embraced this philosophy than David Cronenberg, whose latest body-horror outing finds him wrestling with corporeal transformation in an age of cultural desensitization and environmental degradation. Surprisingly less gruesome than many of his films, it has a chamber piece-like austerity that makes its provocations only more potent and tantalizing.
7.
A courtroom drama that eschews raised voices and ends without a verdict; a story of personal obsession in which the two protagonists never meet or exchange words; a postcolonial portrait of diasporic African identity that doesn't attempt to translate subaltern perspectives into the language of Western hegemony. Diop's first fiction film is all that and more, using a spartan visual style and rigorous structure to excavate truths about motherhood, daughterhood, cultural displacement, and assimilation.
6.
Thoroughly dispelling the idea that old dogs can't learn new tricks, EO sees octogenarian veteran Skolimowski masterfully harnessing a fresh wellspring of formal invention, from his use of soaring drone footage to his almost free-associative montage, flouting narrative convention. On paper, it's a contemporary retelling of Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, but in practice it's a hypnotically immersive, empathic journey into imagined non-anthropocentric experience.
5.
Poitras's documentary nimbly interweaves a number of narrative modalities that could very well occupy their own individual films: the career of famed underground New York photographer Nan Goldin; her present-day activism against the Sackler family; and her troubled family history and health struggles. Instead of feeling unfocused or weighed down, the film lucidly testifies to how these strands - art, politics, identity - are inextricably bound.
4.
Despite having already announced their outlandish style with Swiss Army Man (2016), the sophomore feature by the duo known as Daniels feels like something of a bolt from the blue. More ingenious, hilarious, sneakily poignant, and did-that-really-just-happen?! bonkers than their debut, it's an obscenely entertaining, tirelessly inventive cataract of genre-blending maximalism that also ends up being a Zen treatise with rocks. It's all really too much, which is probably just right.
3.
Of the many films to home in on the unique, inchoate psychosocial textures of childhood, Lukas Dhont's Close is among the most astute and sensitive in recent memory. The film charts the roiling emotions and shifting perceptions of its preadolescent protagonist largely without words, shrewdly inhabiting his inarticulate navigation of feelings he's not yet equipped to verbalize. With a face as expressive as Eden Dambrine's as its nucleus, it's a quiet film that speaks with primal, plangent force.
2.
Another superior Bildungsroman, James Gray's autofictional account of his early adolescence in Queens is a coming-of-age story framed in an explicitly sociopolitical context. Set against the backdrop of incipient Reagan-era conservatism, it peers through the eyes of aspiring artist Paul (a phenomenal Banks Repeta) as he painfully awakens to the unjust systems in which he's situated, and from which he often benefits at the expense of the less privileged. The film's milieu is immaculately realized, and the cast - featuring Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway, and Jeremy Strong in knockout performances - never hits a wrong note.
1.
What is the connective tissue between a Black-owned Hollywood horse ranch, an amusement park centered on extraterrestrial sightings, and an old television sitcom starring a ballistic chimpanzee? Wild imagination and piercing cultural insight, it turns out, as Peele builds from that crazy equation an elaborate commentary on animal exploitation, institutional racism, the commodification of trauma, and our penchant - maybe even death-drive longing - for shocking spectacle. Peele has one-upped himself in every way here, delivering a bonafide summer blockbuster that's so assiduously written, designed, shot, and edited that you remember, yes, big-budget genre entertainments really can be this thoughtful, original, and exciting.
And a few close runners-up:
The Banshees of Inisherin, directed by Martin McDonagh, for its biting, quintessentially Irish tragicomic existentialism and superb ensemble performance.
Moonage Daydream, directed by Brett Morgen, for its philosophical and densely kaleidoscopic portrait of David Bowie, evoking a posthumous missive from the artist's mind.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, directed by Richard Linklater, for being one of the most detailed and blissfully nostalgic Boomer nostalgia trips ever committed to film, while also being wise about the limits of nostalgia.
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