Photo Credit/Universal-Focus Features-Sony Pictures-A24-UA Releasing-Sony Pictures Classics
Now more than ever, we need movies to stir our souls and enlighten our minds, and 2022 ensured they were not in short supply. From big blockbusters to small indies, here is my personal list of the ones that left me the most moved and enraptured. This is, of course, a subjective exercise and should not be interpreted as other than such.
First, since it was truly such a stellar year for film, here is a list of 10 honorable mentions (presented alphabetically): After Yang, Babylon, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Eternal Daughter, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Happening, RRR, She Said, Top Gun: Maverick and The Wonder.
10. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Growth is the only evidence of life. A cinematic iteration of the popular YouTube short films, featuring a one-inch-tall sentient shell with googly eyes and plastic sneakers, seemed like it would be too cutesy for its own good, but co-writer/director Dean Fleischer Camp and co-writer Jenny Slate, the original creators of the beloved shorts, defy expectations with this whimsical yet dramatically resonant stop-motion delight. The adorably plucky yet insecure mollusk (wonderfully voiced by Slate) lives a lonely existence with his grandma shell in vacant, dusty Airbnb, but when a down-on-his-luck documentary filmmaker (played by Camp, whose presence adds a biting mockumentary framework) moves in, he helps Marcel embark upon a journey to find his community that mysteriously vanished. It’s an elegant wisp of a movie with wallops of mammoth philosophical force, underlining our surprisingly porous relationship with nature itself, and the result is a bittersweet reflection on grief, loss, and how those processes are just as innate as the enormity of the world as it spins on its axis.
9. Tár
Renowned conductor and composer Lydia Tár (an engrossing Cate Blanchett) unwittingly orchestrates her own downfall in writer/director Todd Field’s tightly calibrated character study and timely treatise on cancel culture. Field’s extensively researched and immersive script breathlessly navigates the minutiae of the international classical music sphere, all for a searing portrait of modern power dynamics and artistic genius. Tár, a brilliant yet conniving woman, has insulated herself so deeply from any repercussions as she postured and leveraged her way to the top of her industry’s hierarchy, and Tár aptly evolves into a gothic psychological drama as this haunted soul’s past finally catches up to her.
8. The Woman King
2022 was a banner year for mainstream studio fare (The Batman and Top Gun: Maverick are near the top of the pack), but the one that enraptured me the most is director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s rousingly fresh historical epic, depicting the African kingdom Dahomey and its all-female warrior unit, led by the fierce yet jaded General Nanisca (a towering yet vulnerable Viola Davis), during a watershed moment of their complicated history. The Woman King is classically compelling in its handsomely mounted theatrics, from sumptuous sets, textural costumes and muscularly helmed battle sequences, but Prince-Bythewood’s penchant for empathetically realized character dynamics truly makes it sing. The invigorating action and sweeping spectacle vigorously pound your pulse, and the sensitive storytelling pierces your heart in surprising and touching ways.
7. Bones and All
A classic tale from the annals of midwestern romanticism- two star-crossed lovers aimlessly drift across the vast emptiness of the region as they gradually find solace in each other and try to escape their treacherous pasts. The catch this time? They’re cannibals. Maren’s (Taylor Russell, a riveting revelation) and Lee’s (Timothée Chalamet, as charismatic and poignant as ever) hunger for human flesh is innate and insurmountable, pushing them to the margins of society. Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich compellingly frame their disenfranchisement and repression as a broader societal allegory on otherness through a heightened lens, and the result is a sophisticated and spellbinding genre fusion that is both gushing in its bloody terror and unabashed tenderness.
6. Women Talking
Leave. Or stay and fight. They will not do nothing. Writer-director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, adapted from the acclaimed Miriam Toews novel, is a work of profound cinematic wonder. A timely parable that scorches with righteous fury as much as it caresses with delicate empathy, Polley’s electric ensemble drama chronicles a group of women in an archaic, isolated religious colony as they struggle to reconcile their faith with the harsh realities of the patriarchy after a series of sexual assaults perpetrated by the colony’s men. The film courses with an aching, rustic beauty as these women tethered to the past doggedly gaze toward and try to secure a better future, with the muted color palette scintillating with moments of hope as they hurt, heal and (yes) talk in a barn as time runs out. Though the movie reckons with the tyranny derived from much of theology and its adjacent culture, Polley’s dynamic direction and tender script still extol their faith and resilience (elements inextricable to female existence) for a downright spiritual experience.
5. The Fabelmans
Autofiction, or filmmakers exploring their own pasts through the artifice of movies, is the new fad in Hollywood these days, so a cinematic autobiography from the legendary Steven Spielberg seemed inevitable and, as some feared, like it would succumb to a standard schmaltz. And yet the 76-year-old filmmaker continues to compel and innovate to rapturous effect, retaining the brisk ingenuity that has defined his chaptered career while unveiling the sage introspection of a more seasoned artist. A wondrous yet sobering meditation on the foibles of memory and adolescence, The Fabelmans sees Spielberg turning his rugged camera inward for his most vulnerable and candid film yet, a deeply personal coming-of-age story with universal emotional clarity. What on the surface seems like a silky domestic melodrama is given more nuanced human texture through an incisive lens and swooning cinematic flair.
4. Return to Seoul
Watching writer-director Davy Chou’s enthralling character study, which is also Cambodia’s official entry for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, is like a visceral shot of adrenaline to the heart and a tender caress to the soul. Adopted out of Korea during infancy, the volatile yet self-possessed Freddie (Ji-Min Park in a stunning debut performance) abruptly decides to visit her country of origin and locate her biological parents. The framework of this story may be recognizable, but Chou’s shrewdly jagged execution takes thrilling turns as it interrogates the most fraught elements of identity. This spiky and rueful film is utterly electrifying as it constantly shifts totally and stylistically with its complicated protagonist. Its edge may be heavily serrated, but as it lacerates toward Freddie’s truths, it hits something unexpectedly profound- an achingly human soul trying to look back as she relentlessly forges forward.
3. Nope
Two siblings (a pointedly reserved Daniel Kaluuya and an explosive Keke Palmer) bear witness to an uncanny discovery in a lonely California gulch, wonder and frights galore. This seems like the premise of a traditional blockbuster of yore, but writer-director Jordan Peele, the astutely subversive comedian-turned-filmmaker behind modern horror classics Get Out and Us, somehow continues to zig just when you anticipate a zag. Like many of its greatest populist predecessors, Nope synthesizes sprawling awe and blood-curdling terror for a viscerally human experience. However, it’s as much of a lampoon of blockbusters and their complicated history as it is a rapturous embodiment of them. In peel(e)ing back the layers of the artifice of this country’s favorite pastime just as much as it honors them, Nope is simply about the power of breaking a cycle of trauma that is quintessentially American: tearing away our fixation on corrosive spectacle and gazing toward something more powerful- each other, bruised and damaged but utterly majestic with the right set of eyes.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Writing-directing duo Daniel Kwan’s and Daniel Scheinert’s latest bizarro odyssey Everything Everywhere All at Once is many things. An intimate family drama. A sweeping martial arts epic. A gonzo multiversal comedy that features hot dogs for fingers; a fanny pack used as nunchucks; rocks ruminating on the meaning of life; and, above all, plastic googly eyes that symbolize a philosophical antidote to existential dread. It’s objectively a lot (so is literally being a person during such a turbulent time for humanity), but the Daniels are trenchantly aware of both. What begins as a jaded Chinese immigrant woman (played by the gripping Michelle Yeoh in the year’s best lead performance) struggling to do her taxes and keep her strained relationships with her daughter and husband intact somehow culminates in the act of her reconciling every known dimension: It just makes sense when the notion of infinite possibilities constantly suffocate and encroach upon us, even in the mundane. Yet the monumental feat of EEAAO is how it underlines the profundity of the inane, seemingly trivial details of this futile rock in space we’re all confined to. Nothing matters, and that’s precisely why we get to choose what does. It’s a tightly calculated cacophony on the senses and mind, and the Daniels earnestly find the singular human meaning that transcends all the tumult.
1. Aftersun
Memory burns indeed, like the grainy image of a Polaroid finally materializing. Writer-director Charlotte Wells’ spellbinding debut is a work of pensive splendor, pulled from the deep annals of the auspicious filmmaker’s own memory. Told through delicate impressionistic strokes yet charged with visceral poignance, Aftersun follows Sophie (the narrative conduit for Wells) as she ruefully reminisces on the last time she was with her father (a sharply nuanced Paul Mescal) at a vibrant resort in 1990s Turkey, struggling to reconcile the parent she knew with the complicated man he actually was. The film mirrors its lush setting with a lyrical beauty and emotional interiority that ebb and flow like the sea itself, pulsating with a discreet melancholy in wisps of joy. Though it’s a ghost story of sorts, Aftersun washes over you with unmistakable vitality, and Wells is the assured commander of these waters, utilizing the evocative cinematic medium to illuminate the most elusive elements of the human condition. Like all great cinema, Aftersun is not to be seen but felt in its almost ineffable majesty.
