My Year in Film 2022
OK, Oscar night, for the few who still care. For those who REALLY care, it’s the ISTIC ILLIC Year in Film. My categories, my picks. Always “favorite,” never “best.”
Favorite Picture
Actors
Aftersun
Anonymous Club
Funny Pages
Memoria
Petite Maman
Ted K
Tár
In the dwindling world of serious film, Tár was the event of the year. Its precedent, in my mind, was There Will Be Blood. Each is a grand portrait of an exceptional, highly ambitious and very unrelatable character. Each is completely dependent on a keystone performance that delivered, by the best female and male actors, respectively, of the past 30 years. Tár targets cinematic greatness perhaps even more unapologetically than Blood, and both films achieve that for the first two thirds of their running time before their scripts bring them down a notch.
There Will Be Blood faltered because it simply did not have a character arc. From the first moment of the film to the last, Daniel Plainview’s only motivation is greed, and he ends up where we expect. He is Charles Foster Kane with no Rosebud, no hint of the humanity that is necessary for the audience to hope and wonder whether he will be redeemed. There Will Be Blood’s wild popularity and staying power is ultimately an endorsement of spectacle.
Quite the opposite, Tár continuously teases us with its eponymous character’s depth and humanity. The film is not about a monster, but about a singular person whose formidable strengths are matched by formidable weaknesses.
In the not-distant past, Lydia Tár’s flaws would probably have remained hidden within the shadow of her greatness; today, to her great misfortune, they reflect the hottest topics in the social discourse. My issue with Tár is that it lacks the courage to follow through on its own themes. This doesn’t feel like a movie that wants to be a blank slate upon which a viewer can find support for their positions — or if such viewer prefers, be outraged that their positions were not more explicitly supported. This is, however, exactly what Tár ends up being. It feints toward investigations of cancel culture and privilege, but it neither provides answers to the questions it raises nor leaves them hovering for the viewer to contemplate. By making Tár’s behavior inexcusable by any standard, the film creates an escape hatch and slips through it. I suggest that anyone who has a heated opinion on the politics of Tár is someone who simply loves having heated opinions.
Ted K tells the story of the Unabomber’s years of terrorism almost exclusively from his own perspective. It is an untraditional story told in a traditional way. No attention-attracting edits; no emotionally manipulating music; no low-fi aesthetic or shaky cameras to mimic documentary; no attempt to read Kaczynski’s mind other than through his own written words and Sharlto Copley’s expressive face. Ted K appears to have had the budget to present Kaczynski’s reclusive life as accurately as possible and that is what it does. What I want most in movies is for them to depict something that happened. I know that this sounds comically simplistic, and it kind of is. People are endlessly fascinating and I just want to see what they do, not be told what to think about them. Ted K has the restraint to simply show.
2022 was certainly the biggest year ever for mental health documentaries. Jonah Hill’s Stutz and Selena Gomez’s My Mind & Me raised the bar on celebrity vulnerability. But I point my reader to Anonymous Club, about the Australian singer/songwriter/Guitar-God Courtney Barnett. Director Danny Cohen had several big ideas. He used 16mm film — a crazy decision for a no-budget documentary. He gave Barnett a Dictaphone voice recorder and, for three years, mostly late in the evenings and often when her depression was at its worst, she recorded whatever she was thinking. This is the film’s narration. He kept Barnett completely out of the filmmaking process but gave her the finished edit so that she could compose and perform a score. The final product is an immersion in another human’s world that feels like both truth and a dream.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is apparently incapable of making anything but masterpieces.
I read this many years ago and I wish I could find the quote on Google to give credit where it is due. In any case, it remains true.
Weerasethakul is not for everyone. That is for damn sure. If you saw one or more of his previous films and did not like them, I doubt that you will like Memoria. His films all exist in the same dreamy, half-logical milieu. But each is very much its own entity— at least as distinctive from one another as, say, Marvel movies. One can look at Weerasethakul films as being a bit redundant in retrospect, but that’s an intellectual exercise. During the actual act of watching them, you will be drawn in and you will have no idea what is coming next.
Amazingly, Memoria will never be available for at-home consumption. As a theatrical advocate, I think that is just a wonderful thing. I can’t say enough about NEON and Memoria’s other funders for supporting this release strategy, which presumably leaves a 0.0% chance of making a profit. If you are lucky enough to have it play in your town, you must see it. Interestingly, it’s probably more the sound experience than the visual experience that demands the theater. The easiest of my “award” choices this year is Memoria for Favorite Sound.
Favorite Performance
Cate Blanchett — Tár (Lydia Tár)
Sharlto Copley — Ted K (Ted Kaczynski)
Tilda Swinton — Memoria (Jessica)
Michelle Williams — The Fabelmans (Mitzi)
The cast of Funny Pages
Sharlto Copley should probably be happy that not many people saw Ted K. Appearing in each of the film’s 122 minutes and absolutely nailing the real Ted K.’s Kermit the Frog voice, I will never, ever be able to separate the actor from the character.
Cate Blanchett fundamentally changes the films she is in. Of course, many actors do this — make Dave Bautista the dad in Petite Maman, and you have a very different film. That’s tongue-in-cheek but imagine George Clooney in The Fabelmans. It changes the movie because George Clooney is in it. The unique thing about Blanchett is that you don’t know how she’s going to make a movie fundamentally better (I certainly couldn’t have predicted her conservative news host character in Don’t Look Up), but you know that she is going to make it fundamentally better.
My Favorite Lead Performance of 2022, though, was that of her closest peer, Tilda Swinton. Not for her stunning performance as both major characters in The Eternal Daughter, but for Memoria. I never would have thought a movie star could lead a Weerasethakul film and have it remain a Weerasethakul film, but her masterful naturalism is magnetic. Playing a Scottish expatriate in Colombia, she delivers about half of her lines in Spanish. Apparently, Swinton and Weerasethakul are long-time friends who had been planning this unexpected symbiosis for years.
Michelle Williams, on the other hand, stood out in The Fabelmans by moving from the “minor-key naturalism” of many of her roles, notably in her bountiful collaboration with Kelly Reichardt, to a performance that reaches for ecstatic truth. Mitzi Fabelman is a caring mother, a torn wife, and an incarnation of the caged bird singing. Williams’ interview in the New York Times provides insights into how she changed her process for the role.
My Favorite Ensemble was undoubtedly the peerless cast of Funny Pages. A love letter to comic books — and a “you disgust me!” letter to the people who make them — the movie is populated by a murderer’s row of the dozen strangest looking actors in Hollywood (or perhaps they found them in Jersey). They are R. Crumb comic book characters come to life. Daniel Zolghadri is perfect in the lead and Matthew Maher gives my Favorite Supporting Performance of the year. For good measure, Funny Pages wins my Favorite Hair and Make-up (but really it’s just the hair).
More Movies I Totally Dug
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Banshees of Inisherin
The Fabelmans
Jeen-Yuhs
Sr
This Much I Know to be True
Three Minutes: A Lengthening
Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic Story
Favorite Editing. In 2009, the writer David Kurtz found a home movie that his grandfather shot in 1938. Amongst the vacation videos was a bit of footage of Nasielsk, a town in eastern Poland. Three and a half minutes of innocent bustling happiness just months before Poland was invaded by the Nazis. The 15 people that the filmmakers were able to identify, and likely all 150 people featured were murdered. This footage comprises the entirety of Three Minutes: A Lengthening — first shown straight through in silence, then zoomed in, played back in slow motion, freeze framed, and cut apart. In its complete immersion in those moments in the past, Three Minutes acts as something of an inverted Shoah, the classic documentary that investigated the Holocaust entirely through testimonies recorded decades later. The Holocaust, obviously, is impossible to wrap your head around. In Stalin’s infamous turn of phrase, eleven million murders is a statistic, not a tragedy. In its investigation of these 150 people, Three Minutes: A Lengthening does a little bit to humanize the loss.
Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic Story is as dumb as you’d hope. If you are looking to laugh and nothing else, this is my choice for the year.
This Much I Know to be True is the bromantic dramedy of the year. Lord, I could see someone wincing at that sentence. But Nick Cave’s relationship with his creative partner and best friend Warren Ellis is like a romance, and this movie does present them in tragedy and in hilarity. This Much I Know to be True followed a new and, I think, pretty cool strategy of a one-night global theatrical screening. Those of us lucky enough to participate left the theater a little lighter in our shoes, happy that the Universe brought these two together.
It’s hard to believe that Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy premiered on Netflix in 2022. It’s a sign of both the ephemerality of movies today — the movie shattered the financial record for a price paid for a documentary and now seems completely forgotten — and, of course, it’s a sign of how dramatically the Ye (Kanye West) story changed before the year was out.
Ye’s polarizing power was unique. It wasn’t just love him or hate him. It was that most of the people who hated him became convinced that he wasn’t talented. I have heard people who would never opine on another hip hop artist say that his music was nothing special. Meanwhile, many of the people who loved him believed he was willfully misunderstood and mistreated by a pitchforked media mob. Jeen-Yuhs proves them both wrong. For those who ever doubted that Ye is unique in his complexity, the entire film is a refutation. At four and a half hour long, it does not feel padded, even though all of Ye’s most famous moments — interrupting Taylor Swift; saying George W. Bush “does not care about black people”; his entire experience with the Kardashians — are covered in a two-minute montage.
Ye’s defenders latched on to the first of the film’s three parts, which show those years before he broke through. These early years are, indeed, the highlight of the film, and they irrefutably prove that he earned his way to fame through talent, grit, and, yes, extreme confidence. The second part ends as Ye wins his first Grammy…and then the film shows him abandoning all of his non-famous friends. This sad group included Coodie Simmons, the director of Jeen-Yuhs, a man who supported Ye from his earliest days. Coodie expresses his hurt, and the film pivots to Coodie’s personal life over the next ten or fifteen years, which was enviable if nondescript, observing Ye’s rise to the heights of celebrity from a distance. Then, with his music career in a deep downturn, Ye briefly lets Coodie back into his circle (in this section, we see Ye surrounded with sycophants who heap praise on early cuts of songs from the worst two albums of his career; this is how it always goes). The movie ends on what is presented as a touching note — that two old friends have made up. Except that Coodie never did anything but support Ye and was shut out for no good reason. To me, it seemed obvious that Ye had become aware that a movie was going to be made from all the footage Coodie captured over the years, and this was his last chance to affect its direction (although Ye did attempt that one more time, tweeting a toothless demand for full creative control weeks before the film’s release). Coodie has since said in interviews that Ye has, again, broken off contact.
Over the past year, Ye has crossed lines that have cost him the bulk of his supporters, making the most unapologetically bigoted statements of any major American public figure in the past 50 years. He has publicly called out many of his biggest and most famous supporters for not standing with him 100%. Is Ye mentally ill? He is, and I wouldn’t dare opine on how his mental illness plays into his behavior. I will opine, though, on what Jeen-Yuhs and pretty much Ye’s entire career have made plain: the man is an incorrigible asshole. That the movie says this only unintentionally is a sad statement on just how easily proximity to fame overwhelms anything and everything else. Except maybe proud, naked bigotry. We can hope.
Scenes of the Year
Tár
The opening New Yorker Festival scene and the Juilliard class scene. Plenty has been said about these scenes. Rightfully so. Each is a single shot that lasts more than ten minutes and consists of little more than conversation. The opening scene acts as an argument that explication can be incredibly engaging (it helps a lot to have your explication done by a deep-in-character Cate Blanchett). By the end of this scene, you know the character well, but you want to know her even more. The Juilliard scene is riveting — funny and very tense. You don’t know what Lydia Tár will say or do next, or what trouble her indiscretion will cause her later in the film (spoiler alert…didn’t end up mattering).
Sr
Sr is Robert Downey Jr’s tribute to his father, one of the most prominent directors in independent filmmaking throughout the ’60s and ’70s. It was filmed over the last year or two of Robert Downey Sr’s life, and his mortality informs every moment. Through the first 75 minutes, the black and white cinematography feels like a nice but unnecessary choice. When Sr passes away and the film moves to his small family memorial service, the film is lifted by the beauty of the imagery. Light flickers through the trees as Robert Jr sits on a designer hanging loveseat and pontificates on the film we have just watched. This should not work, but it does.
We had no overt agenda with this project. I had a sense of what it might be and I always knew that part of it was going to be the end of his life. Is it a father / son story? I don’t think so. Is it a story about what it means to be an artist? I don’t know. Maybe. Is it a contemplation of death? I think it’s kind of turning into that, and not in a morose way, but just in a way, we’re here, we do stuff, and we’re gone. I love him for what he did. I love him for what he didn’t do.
And from this austere moment, we cut to a vividly colorful scene from Sr.’s 1972 film Greaser Palace where — OK, I’ve spoiled enough. Let’s just say that the self-described “tender but appropriately irreverent” tone of the film comes to its full fruition.
Norm MacDonald: Nothing Special
So actually two of my favorite film moments were tender but appropriately irreverent reflections on what it’s all about, coming at the very end of life. Indeed, ridiculously irreverent and heartbreakingly tender. Norm’s last joke is so goddamn funny and so goddamn touching. A legendary smart ass, Norm’s fans could see him grappling with meaning in his later years during which, we would come to find out, he was in a long secret battle with cancer. We didn’t, however, see Norm losing his basic belief in the underlying absurdity of life. Or as he believed, this life. While he is telling that last joke, for a fraction of a second the emotion of the moment, of life itself, breaks through his countenance. His voice cracks, just a little. It’s barely there, but you see it and hear it. What a unique and beautiful human we lost. We’re here, we do stuff, and we’re gone.
Anonymous Club
Almost claustrophobically focused on one individual for almost its entire run time, the final sequence of Anonymous Club is a tribute to the fans and the overwhelming connecting power of live music.
Funny Pages
Both the opening scene and the scene where Robert “fucks with the pharmacist.” 😂
The Fabelmans
Mitzi Fabelman dancing in the car headlights. The movie comes into focus in this moment. It’s a long film, with room for all of Sammy’s (young Steven Spielberg’s) personal story, but this is where we suddenly realize that we are watching a movie with two hearts. Mitzi’s yearning for something more and Sammy’s growing comprehension that his parents have depths he had never considered. His mother’s aspirations, it turns out, are not so dissimilar from his own, even as his potential to mine them lies ahead while Mitzi’s lay in the past.
Actors
Actors is about many things, but most of all, I think it is about love between siblings and narcissism. That pinnacle insights into both of these notions could be captured in a single scene is unintuitive, to say the least. But perhaps “insights” is not the word that I’m looking for here because the scene is not overthought. It doesn’t feel thought out at all. It feels like an authentic, real-time emotional experience. Betsey and Peter “cheek to cheek” is my Favorite Scene of 2022.
More Recommended Movies
All That Breathes
Band
Barbarian
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Catherine Called Birdy
The Eternal Daughter
Fire of Love
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Icahn: the Restless Billionaire
Jackass Forever
Met Mes
Navalny
Nope
Nothing Compares
Prince Andrew Banished
Rojek
The Super Bob Einstein Movie
Stutz
The Worst Ones
Each year, I must point out that there are movies that you have to scroll down a long ways for that are quite good! I only rate movies that I finish, so most of them I do recommend. I love that Jonah Hill made Stutz. Met Mes and Pinocchio are visual delights. Prince Andrew Banished — holy schadenfreude! The early 1990s story of Nothing Compares, about Sinead O’Connor, recalls events that are so relevant today that I would likely think they had been molded to appeal to a contemporary audience had I not witnessed them in real time.
Navalny is very good, and I can understand why some people think that it achieved greatness, but believing that it is important requires naiveté. Everything important that happened in that movie was on YouTube in real time, and for every one person who saw the film, many thousands of people saw those YouTube videos. Navalny is, essentially, a missive to a demographic that is out-of-touch, ineffectual, and shrinking. As a film lover, I appreciated the story and the characters; as an observer of world events, it made me sad about the relevance of the art form.
Yes, Bardo: A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is absurdly similar to 8 1/2. And yes, as Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich wrote, “Imitations of 8 1⁄2 pile up by directors all over the world.” Comically, Kezich created a “short-list” of such films: Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), “Day for Night” (François Truffaut, 1974), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980), Sogni d’oro (Nanni Moretti, 1981), Planet Parade (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), La Pelicula del rey (Carlos Sorín, 1986), 1993), Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995), 8+1⁄2 Women (Peter Greenaway, 1999), ‘ 8 1⁄2 $ (Grigori Konstantinopolsky, 1999) and Bardo (Alejandro G. Iñarritu, 2022). Most of these movies aspire for greatness that their redundancy makes nearly impossible. Nevertheless, Bardo is a trip (and 1/2?) of a movie.
Ambitious movies with weaknesses that offset or overwhelm their strengths
After Yang
Ahed’s Knee
Apollo 10 ½
Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille
Blonde
Corsage
Crimes of the Future
Decision to Leave
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Meet Me in the Bathroom
The Northman
Patrick and the Whale
Phoenix Rising
Terra Femme
Triangle of Sadness
White Noise
A friend’s thoughts on Everything Everywhere…
i understand eeaao working for the same audience that are really excited when spider-man acknowledges the existence of star wars or whatever, but it is sort of confounding to see it become the prestige film of the year and ostensibly be at the centre of film culture, when its idea of cleverness is a bad pun like the whole of existence being an EVERYTHING bagel… have some dignity people
Controversial Films
Alex’s War
What is a Woman?
Variety on Alex Lee Moyer’s Alex’s War:
So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Alex Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age verité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality. Still, one might ask: Doesn’t this neutral perspective create a danger of making Jones look more reasonable and compelling than he is? I’d argue that that’s the film’s strength. Alex Jones is a compelling figure — to millions of his followers. He’s not just an alt-right talk host you might disagree with; he’s a cult leader, the way Donald Trump is. In both cases, if you don’t grasp the fundamental appeal of that, you’re just keeping your head in the sand.
Dante James of Film Threat, the only major or mid-sized outlet to review What is a Woman?, despite it almost certainly being the most popular documentary of 2022:
Many so-called “film critics” chose not to review What Is A Woman? for fear of backlash…Our job is to review movies, good or bad, not base what we review on our political leanings. This sort of bullshit is killing the film industry right now. I’m calling on ACTUAL CRITICS to start showing more guts and integrity with the understanding that the only reason people even read our reviews is for our honesty.
Films that weren’t for me
Daliland
God’s Creatures
Million Dollar Pigeons
Elvis
Good Life
The Swimmers
Unrest (Unrueh)
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Women Talking
I saw a sneak preview of Elvis and director Baz Luhrmann personally introduced the film. “Some people don’t like the way I make films,” he told the audience with a whimsy that foretold how the thought would finish, “But enough people do that I can keep making them. In any case, it’s the only way I know how, so I am stuck with it.” Over the following 159 minutes…I mean, it had its moments, but goddamn, 159 minutes?…I learned what side of the Luhrmann divide I fall on. God bless the people who loved this movie. I get it, but I didn’t get it.
On the eve of Oscar Day 2016, the critic Matt Zoller Seitz shared his thoughts on Paul Haggis’ Crash in a piece titled “Anything But This.” He described the film as “an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank.” Crash did go on to win Best Picture that night, and so it is that Sarah Polley’s own Rolling Tank of Importance Women Talking is heavily favored to win Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars tonight.
If Elvis decided to crush its audience through sensory assault, Women Talking does so with polemics. In the queer tradition from which Luhrmann both emerged and influences, Elvis screams, “Here I am! Love me or hate me, this is me!” In a film based on a true story that calls above all else for a scream, Polley instead expounds. If a more didactic film than Women Talking exists, I have not seen it. Its appeal has been surprisingly broad; whether that appeal extends beyond devotees of the “tell me what I already think” school of art appreciation, I do not know.
The Ringer’s Adam Nayman:
Polley’s good intentions are suffocating her sense of drama — even as she hews closely to her source text, she’s straining to hit contemporary sociological talking points rather than letting them emerge organically. (The treatment of the film’s sole trans character is telling on this point: He’s defined exclusively by his trauma to the point that he feels like a prop). As Women Talking goes on, even the most vivid actors start to feel reduced to positions in a rhetorical exercise caught between blistering urgency and tentative base covering.
One More Thing
Tár was the film cognoscenti’s most important and discussed piece of cinema; television’s equivalent was HBO’s The Rehearsal. I didn’t name my Favorite Film of the Year at the beginning of this thing. It was kind of a three-way tie. If The Rehearsal qualified as a film, it would be my choice.
Reality-based cringe comedy is a genre at this point. You know, when a brave-to-insane comic is turned loose on unsuspecting people: we’re talking Ali G and Borat, Stuttering John from Howard Stern, Nathan For You, Nirvanna The Band The Show, parts of Jackass and Actors’ meta-prequel Assholes. In this space, taking it to the limit is the point. The Rehearsal found a way to go well beyond that limit. It applies the “Oh my God, he did that!?” credo to people in situations that truly matter to them. The ethics are questionable; the result is transcendent.
Til next year 🙏🏻
