Best of 2022
My top 25 films of 2022, with bonus categories as per tradition
Foreword
I didn’t think this was a great year for movies although I enjoyed myself plenty. Where and how I watched movies this year was as varied as ever: I saw only one movie on this list at a large chain (Regal), though I saw many others at Landmark theaters; one on Netflix, one on Criterion Channel, two on Mubi, and one rented on Amazon (sorry); I saw one at the Sundance Film Festival (streaming-at-home option), four at New York Film Festival, and two at the AFI Silver’s European Union Showcase; and the rest I saw at the Avalon Theatre in Chevy Chase, the Angelika Pop-Up in D.C., Suns Cinema in Mt. Pleasant, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA, and the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art. I try not to take for granted that I have access to a fairly diverse and vibrant in-person film culture, and my hope for 2023 is that I will continue doing my part to keep it alive.
My Favorite Films of 2022
Where I’ve written about a film previously, I’ve included a link to the prior writeup.
25. Aftersun
24. Glass Onion
A silly, amusing movie the reactions to which have largely bewildered me. But I must file one complaint: for all the trouble he goes to in setting his whodunit in the Aegean, Rian Johnson stages most of the movie inside a house. I suppose the location scouting will pay dividends in 3–5 years when a second director from the production’s Greece unit shows up at Cannes with a competent yet forgettable first film in Un Certain Regard.
23. Fire of Love
I learned more about volcanoes than I did about love in this found-footage documentary about volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, but my does the footage make this worth the watch.
22. RRR
Not without its problems politically, S.S Rajamouli’s teflon epic of friendship, anti-imperialism, and tigers hits different (I’m told) from the quiet of home, where you can’t just turn around to the person behind you and mouth are you seeing what I’m seeing?
21. In Front of Your Face
Kim Min-hee shows up in the opening credits of the first of two Hong Sang-soo movies on this list not as an actress but as a production assistant. A rare late-period Hong in color—Kim’s recommendation?— all the better for the story of a terminally ill thespian’s attempt to ground herself in the present until, in typical Hong fashion, a director and a bottle of soju get in the way.
20. Les Amours d’Anaïs / Anaïs in Love
One of this year’s two very good bisexual movies, Anaïs Demoustier is introduced outrunning the camera and very nearly doesn’t stop until she’s cornered Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in an elevator.
19. Starfuckers [short]
Alt. title: Can the Subaltern Snatch Wigs?
18. The Banshees of Inisherin
I want to preempt my thoughts on this movie (it’s good, I liked it, I laughed a bunch and enjoyed how macabre it is) for an extremely important PSA from cinematographer-critic Devan Scott about something that was bothering me the whole way through: that godawful cinematography.
As is customary in McDonagh's collaborations with [cinematographer] Ben Davis, this is actively shabby-looking; unfortunately, unlike Three Billboards, Banshees has a screenplay that's actually worth saving, so this one actually hurts. It's not a visual failure in an Iñárritu sort of way, either: there's no ambitious-as-all-get-out concept that explodes on the launchpad or anything of the sort. No, this is that mundane type of crappiness wherein every moment is characterised by a sort of anything-goes carelessness.
[…]
[T]he basic issue here, and this is not uncommon, is that the visual scheme of this film has not one tenth of the thought or care put into it as the script has. The notion that a great script gives one license to present it using the most rudimentary possible tools applied in the clumsiest ways makes about as much sense as the argument that, if one were to write a sufficiently great piece of music, one need only hire an orchestra of rank amateurs to do it justice. It's nonsense.
17. TÁR
16. The Novelist’s Film
15. Saint Omer
14. The Fabelmans
One of my reading goals this year was to read a bit of psychoanalysis, so I hit up the Freud archives (and then Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives), did some time with Fromm, and took a weekend trip to the asylum where we keep Lacan locked up. The result of all this is that I could chuckle along with the handful of critics I saw proffering psychoanalytic readings of Spielberg’s autobiographical opus, one of the more thoughtful and pleasurable of this subgenre to debut this year. I have been putting Spielberg movies on these lists at least as far back as 2012 yet I am consistently amazed at just how good he is at placing a camera. No longer, I say! 2022 is the last year I’ll let Steve take me by surprise.
13. Un beau matin / One Fine Morning
12. Sycorax [short]
Matías Piñeiro’s passing interest in Shakespeare meets Lois Patiño’s otherworldly audiovisual tableaux in a sketch of The Tempest featuring some 20 women from town who all get to audition for the part of Caliban’s mother in one of the most moving yet formally straightforward filmmaking gambits of the year: keep the camera in one place and let everyone step up to have their fifteen seconds of stardom.
11. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
A blissfully pre-TikTok horror film about the powers and dangers of online communities that would have looked vastly different had it been set even fifteen minutes into the future.
10. Serre moi fort / Hold Me Tight
Vicky Krieps, playing the mother of a piano prodigy-to-be, is in the midst of either a manic episode or something else that resembles it; there’s lots of slippage between memory, imagination, and reality either way. Actor-turned-director Mathieu Amalric cranks out “magic of cinema” moments a mile a minute and, more impressively, makes all of them feel necessary for understanding the psyche of his troubled protagonist—and what happened to make her that way.
9. A Night of Knowing Nothing
Documentary footage of leftist student organizing in India is strung together with the narrative framing device of a box of fictional correspondences between a woman on the frontlines of the movement and her lover. The movie would be valuable enough just for what it depicts (political education and solidarity intermingling with friendship), but director Payal Kapadia’s strength lies in her formal choices, particularly how she paces the film to resensitize the viewer to images of police brutality that have elsewhere become commonplace.
8. El Gran Movimiento / The Great Movement
A movie that really clicked for me (as so many often do) after reading Michael Sicinski’s take on it. Kiro Russo cycles through all of the standard tropes of 21st-century international art film-making—the slow, depersonified shots of urban life, the Weerasethakulian deployment of nonprofessional actors engaged in a game of telephone, the smatterings of folk superstition, the mid-film dance number—in search of an adequate means of depicting the current state of Bolivia under modern capitalism before throwing his hands up and throwing it all into a proverbial blender.
7. Benediction
6. Nope
My favorite of Jordan Peele’s movies in a walk. Whereas Get Out and Us were instantly iconic owing to the wedges they respectively drove into conventional Hollywood treatments of racism, NOPE earns its laurels more on the power of its spectacle than on expository thematics, which are here sublimated into disturbing ambience.
5. The Cathedral
Another autofiction of sorts, Ricky D’Ambrose charts the life of a boy like him from birth through high school, with special attention paid to the materiality of middle-class America as it shapeshifts from the peak of the AIDS crisis up to 9/11. Like all of his previous work, The Cathedral is characterized by persnickety compositions, low-budget filmmaking hacks, archival inserts, and deadpan humor—stylistically quite different from both Aftersun and The Fabelmans, but the only one of these films to provoke from me the confession: “It me.”
4. Unrest [reviewed for Plough]
3. France
2. R.M.N. [reviewed for Plough]
1. Godland
If the title cards are to be trusted—and there’s reason to believe they aren’t—Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland is a narrative interpretation of the history behind a set of photographs found in Iceland from the 19th century. Lucas, a Danish photographer-priest, is sent on a missionary trip to build a church in Iceland. He takes the scenic route so as to better document this new land and pays the price for his curiosity. While there is a crisis of faith in Godland, the film is less about that than it is about the dangers of exercising one’s vocation as a photographer when one is a foreigner—and, more humorously, about what happens when you’re better at your secular vocation than your ecclesial one. Shooting on film out of necessity (it travels better up Iceland’s unwelcoming mountains), cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff ought to be credited as co-author of the film: formally, the movie is both visually enrapturing its own right and perfectly suited to the premodern moment being depicted. Earthy, gutting, far from humorless, and dare I say monumental: see it this spring on the biggest screen you can find.
All the Other Good Stuff
And now for the traditional bests by category—
Best Director
Terence Davies, Benediction
Alice Diop, Saint Omer
Cristian Mungiu R.M.N.
Hlynur Pálmason, Godland
Jordan Peele, NOPE
Best Actor
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans
Jack Lowden, Benediction
Paul Mescal, Aftersun
Benjamin Voisin, Illusions perdues
Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, TÁR
Vicky Krieps, Serre moi fort
Guslagie Malanga, Saint Omer
Léa Seydoux, France
Léa Seydoux, Un beau matin
Best Supporting Actor
André Cabral, Will-o’-the-Wisp
Paul Dano, The Fabelmans
Brandon Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brandon Perea, NOPE
Melvil Poupaud, Un beau matin
Best Supporting Actress
Jeanne Balibar, Illusions perdues
Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Chloe East, The Fabelmans
Nicole Kidman, The Northman
Keke Palmer, NOPE
Best Guest Appearance
Björk, The Northman
Jessica Harper, Bones and All
David Lynch, The Fabelmans
Emmanuel Macron, France
Anna Mouglalis, L’Événement
Best Ensemble
The Fabelmans
NOPE
R.M.N.
Saint Omer
Un beau matin
Best Editing
El Gran Movimiento
The Fabelmans
Godland
Saint Omer
Serre moi fort
Best Original Screenplay
The Banshees of Inisherin
Benediction
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet
R.M.N.
Un beau matin
Best Adapted Screenplay
L’Événement
Illusions perdues
Best Cinematography - Film
Aftersun
Bones and All
Godland
NOPE
Un beau matin
Best Cinematography - Digital
The Cathedral
EO
France
Saint Omer
Unrest
Best Original Score
The Banshees of Inisherin
EO
The Fabelmans
Glass Onion
Best Adapted Score
NOPE
Saint Omer
TÁR
Best Sound
The Girl and the Spider
Godland
R.M.N.
NOPE
Unrest
Best Hair and Makeup
Bones and All
The Fabelmans
France
Three Thousand Years of Longing
The Woman King
Best Costume Design
The Banshees of Inisherin
Neptune Frost
Saint Omer
TÁR
The Woman King
Best Production Design
The Fabelmans
Godland
NOPE
RRR
Unrest
Queer Palme
Benediction
(Runner up: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair)
Palme d’Onkey
Jenny, The Banshees of Inisherin
(Runner up: EO, EO)
Inaugural Unintentional Camp Award
Anne Hathaway, Armageddon Time
Horniest Movie
Illusions perdues
(Runner up: Will-o’-the-Wisp)
Best Theatrical Experience
Bones and All
(Runner up: R.M.N.)
Best Movie Posters
Scenes of the Year
Naatu Naatu, RRR
Coly smiles, Saint Omer
The waterfall, Godland
Town hall, R.M.N.
Closing montage, El Gran Movimiento
Best Old Movies I Watched in 2022
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915–16)
Madonna and Child (Terence Davies, 1980)
Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972)
Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986)