I’m putting this out at least a month later than I would’ve liked. Now I’m no longer on a hospitality schedule, it’s not as easy to come home in the night when no-one else is around and crack on with it. But I always like doing this one even as it gets easier to brush aside the idea of doing accompanying ones for television and comics the second I fall behind. Perhaps it’s easier that films are (largely) distinct units compared to needing to consider the peaks and valleys of serialised media and I think that’s true of all the ones you’ll find below. Even the Hongs, from a director who gets pigeonholed into “variations on a theme”, are distinct despite their contributions and continued expansion of his wider project. There’s a couple things I would’ve liked to see before the year was out — All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Saint Omer are two that I’ve already caught up with that would’ve placed, while EO and No Bears have eluded me thus far — but as usual, I’m happy with it came together. Without further ado, my top 25 of the year:
25. The Novelist’s Film
What Hong did with colour this year is nothing short of astounding, but more on that later.
24. The Girl and the Spider
Would probably be higher up the list if I hadn’t felt the need to catch up with the Zürchers’ debut prior, as their meticulous formal approach is most surprising the first time you see it in the ways they establish space and then cause ruptures in just as controlled a fashion. Their world is getting bigger, as evidenced by opening on two front doors, one by one, just not for everyone, not the ones who remained. And yet their dialogue never truly opens things up, it remains opaque in what is said and thus what is not as well. Around the time this came my way, a close friend was moving away. That last time we were all in the kitchen, animatedly talking away, it lingered in the back of my mind that the conversation will continue (and has since), just not there. Helped to crowdfund their next film, hopefully the time between this and that isn’t quite as long as between The Strange Little Cat and this.
23. One Fine Morning
Not sure there’s another face in modern cinema as entrancing as Seydoux, in particular she has some of the saddest eyes you’ll ever see. Hansen-Løve said in her BFI Screen Talk that she attempted to balance the tragedy of the family’s situation, the mental decline of an elder, with moments of brightness, but it’s most moving as a depiction of the pain that the circumstances create. How much we’re willing to put ourselves through in order to preserve love. Even having to hold it at arm’s lengths to prevent any echoes of real-life reverberating through my mind, it paints a picture of a person she loves even though we never really meet them.
22. Top Gun: Maverick
The thing about the original is that the planes might as well be incidental. They’re not perfunctory by any means though, when talking about the volleyball scene, Tony Scott himself said he shot the shit out of it, and that’s true for every other frame in the movie. Just its real pleasures don’t come from the jet combat, but getting to hangout at the academy. In an alchemic blend of Hawks meets Sirk, the professionalism is just as intense as the photography and the homoeroticism. The Hawksian is retained here, as now we have the best of the best of the best, but the latter is missing. With Cruise at a distance from the cadets and it being his film to the point that the third act rejects its own legacy sequel designation, their interpersonal lives are skimped on. The absence is filled however by ruminations of fleeting life, relationships past, digital simulations, birds and a climax that if all goes well will only last a few minutes; better known as late Eastwood, which I just so happen to like quite a bit. The original is one of a kind, Cruise and Scott couldn’t replicate it 100% when it came to Days of Thunder, but this is as good as this could’ve possibly been. What has proved to be most interesting about it for me is the reaction to it; in macro that this has become the most celebrated work to come out of the Cruise/McQ partnership, in micro that my Mum walked out saying that the man putting in overtime to be Our Last Movie Star was somehow less cocky here, at a moment where he put the world’s multiplexes on his shoulders and said he would carry them to safety. But I don’t see much point pushing back on him too hard, like he said, see you at the movies.
21. Bones and All
The wooziness draws you in so someone can take a bite, there’s great tonal management on display here, as Guadagnino and Kajganich navigate desiccated landscapes that allow for as much swooning as they do let it haunt you. Violence is sharp and blunt, right up until it isn’t in the final moments, so they can deliver a beat grosser than anything than anything they swung for with Suspiria. They never let themselves get as giddy as they were with getting away with that though that doesn’t stop Rylance from having as much as fun as he evidently did. Was not a performance I came out of my screening expecting to be divisive, I’m still a big fan; it’s not often that you can see someone wearing all white about to settle in for a meal like that and laugh only for him to scare the shit out of you just a little ways further down the road.
20. Benediction
The poetics of late style. Immediate reaction was more focused on how catty it was, barbs being traded like a tennis rally. With time, that aspect hasn’t faded away, just the wounded soul has risen to the surface. Davies has never aimed for histrionics, and the milieu here lets the pain sneak its way into your brain and body like a trojan horse and then claw its way back to the surface.
19. A Hero
“Nothing in this world is free.”
Enhanced by the fact that a year ago this was a return to form for Farhadi and in the time since, the plagiarism scandal is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to one of his protagonists.
18. Hold Me Tight
Amalric grants you fragments that fit together faster than most would rather than waiting until the end to see what it’s really a picture of. Doing this earlier means you ascertain there’s a hole in the world that can’t be so easily filled, some pieces are missing. Another great Krieps performance, from holding her own (at worst) against DDL, to fitting into as dynamic and lively an M Night ensemble can be to how much she commands the screen just by herself here.
17. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
Would’ve been content for this to eschew the actual space stuff that it was sold on in favour of the channel surfing-akin memory film, however the way that Linklater brings those two strands together in the end is wonderful. “Even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.” An age so vivid because it’s been filtered through the warm glow of a colour TV.
16. Tori & Lokita
The thing about the Dardennes is that I always think they’ve made more than they actually have, which might just be because their style became the de-facto social realist aesthetic. As such, I always been cautious of burning through their work too quickly. Seeing this was a reminder of how short the imitators come to matching the heights they can reach. The makeshift brother and sister have a dynamic that staggers you in the sense of how the collaboration achieves that palpable proximity without it having become too rehearsed, yet their strongest gambit is dividing them. Their narrative decision fits neatly with their existing aesthetic concerns as you’re always aware of the danger the other sibling is in.
15. Ambulance
Haven’t wholly succumbed to the Bayhem in the months since — the Transformers series demonstrated to me the ceiling on my vulgar auteurism, though 13 Hours proved to be the platonic ideal of military tech fetishism that teenage highly-aware-of-the-arsenal-in-any-Call of Duty me would’ve gone even crazier for — but I don’t see anything hitting the highs of this overwhelming experience. Picture Unstoppable, with its depiction of a geographical area and its inhabitants being drawn into the orbit of increasing calamity, only made made by a nihilist. Even as these people come together, they can’t help but shoot venom at one another, which coupled with how Eiza Gonzalez’s character is introduced means that the ending has always felt phonier than people seem to have bought into. This isn’t to say there’s an absence of emotion however. Amidst the careening drone shots, California Dreaming getting drowned out of the sound mix almost as soon as it gets cued up and sheer sensory overload of the assemblage, Jake G’s coked-up love for this Yahya Abdul-Mateen is felt. It’s a situation born out of strongarming, and the latter’s screen-coolness is frequently tested but it might be the most genuine aspect of his work, save for Revenge of the Fallen‘s tears down the illusion of Spielberg aping in order to do the same dog-humping joke in the space of fifteen minutes.
14. White Noise
Still not sure what to actually say about this. Haven’t read the novel, many who have seem to think this a failed adaptation. Perhaps it is. Still a heck of a movie, even if you take it as part and parcel to the trajectory that him meeting Gerwig set off.
13. Stars at Noon
The Midnights visual album. What separates this from Denis’ previous overt stories of colonialism — her debut Chocolat and collaboration with Isabelle Huppert, White Material — is how she nods to the perverse humour of it here. Qualley and Alwyn traipse and fuck their way through Nicaragua leaving a trail of bodies in their wake and they just don’t care. It’s a hangout movie because they have nowhere else they’re able to go but to each other and the former in particular gives a physical performance up with there with the best of Denis’s collaborations. That this got laughed off the Croisette is a tragedy, not to mention reason enough to be skeptical of anyone contributing to said cacophony, like for gods sake, Holy Spider was right there.
12. Glass Onion
Rian Johnson has been a director destined to be miscategorised since he had the gall to make the best Star Wars movie. In a general sense, people just don’t understand what he does, deconstruction is not the aim, but reconstruction and the genre here is his own work. To break himself down and build himself back up. People aren’t really noticing because it clicks into place so easily, the old money of the original phenomenon and the new money on display here, to the point that you wonder what he could do with a third one, much less Poker Face later this month. Just look at how this ends, he doesn’t quite put everything back together the way he usually does in a way that suggests where he’ll go from here. The path he’ll take isn’t that obvious, and perhaps it wasn’t to him either, which makes this the most exciting point in his career because where will he go? I wouldn’t be so confident about that optimism if this wasn’t the superior of the franchise thus far.
11. Nope
Cowboys and cameras; point and shoot.
Much smarter people have written about this one. I’m already getting this out later than I intended, I’m not sure I’d have it out at all if I tried to say anything at large, but I will note that everyone who argues that Peele gets caught up in overexplanation and allegory is ignoring how much he’ll let you sit with the images and see where that pushes your mind.
10. Crimes of the Future
Cronenberg from A Dangerous Method onwards is a discourse, this in particular being him in conversation with himself, one that clearly started 20+ years ago whenever the original version of this story first came to him and has continued in the years since in order to deepen the impact of it. It’s a true shame that he hasn’t made a movie in 8 years, yet that gap also manages to have resonance as others have tried to fill the space without being that successful, so to return with something this muted suggests a concern with if the world has been so desensitized that it won’t even register what he’s doing. (Which I suppose is true considering some have been unsatisfied with the level of body horror and Neon’s attempts to promote it off the glimpses it can). Existing in the space of looking forwards and backwards simultaneously, a time which is always changing as are we, makes that final shot’s callback to Dreyer and one of the most moving pictures that much more successful as he finds a way to repurpose it, his fascinations. It’s a new world, it’s an old world, it’s a dying one and it’s changing. But he is him, thus he is changing too and he finds the beauty in that.
9. The Batman
The third act is great, you fools. Admired it quite a bit at the time, but after the 8(!) MCU projects that dropped through the remainder of the year, the fact that this is actually directed from start to end in service of a vision that’s everyone committed to deserves even more props. Bruce Wayne shambling downstairs in a black t-shirt, having missed most of the morning – finally a superhero for the failson generation.
8. Armageddon Time
They say write what you know and that’s key to understanding Gray’s approach here, in that there’s much more of Paul than there is Johnny. He has his own perspective on the events that have rippled through memory and on to the screen, and in addition, knows that he can’t really put himself in the shoes of his counterpart. And so he doesn’t attempt to. Perhaps because we’ve seen these types of films before — and will again considering Empire of Light allegedly threatens to be Mendes’ treatise on racism — this has been treated as a deficiency, that Johnny’s perspective is lacking as if the first day at the private school isn’t build around his structuring absence. Instead, it’s much easier to comprehend, without being any easier to process, as a movie that approaches their relationship, like the others in the film, as one of class, about the world at large and the way it is fragmented into a bunch of smaller ones. How much they accept you, and you them. There are the things we can’t change, our elders will pass. There are the things that will, but not until we realise that moment has already happened, kids being beaten becoming an action of horror. There are the things we hope will change, that our youth will be better than we were. It understands personal responsibility and culpability, putting the onus on us to break down the barriers that keep others out of a particular ecosystem while also acknowledging how much one person can really impact these. Without the Reagan bookending, the title is still appropriate on a familial level, found its first half carried a crushing weight to itself even before the real troubles began. He establishes such a web of relationships around the dinner table that one of them was bound to go off, mutually assured destruction, no-one has a choice about the first world you’re born into.
7. Women Talking
This might stand as the most controversial entry on this list and reading the reviews of detractors, I get it, whether they take issues with it in terms of its aesthetic properties or its characterisation of the collective. My screening at LFF was just a couple of days away when the trailer dropped and the wave of “but why does it looks like that” began, so out of curiosity, I scrubbed though a few seconds without watching it in full and was off-put by that first glimpse of Polley and Montpellier’s desaturation. My qualms faded quite quickly into actually sitting down and watching the full thing, the images proving more fluid in sequence than expected, they never lean all the way into b&w or give way to complete colour but navigate the spectrum between the two throughout. As for the narrative that the images are in service of, they deliver this deliberations with urgency. Every silence is a moment lost that they could’ve settled a decision as much as it necessary to process the traumas that have led the ensemble to this barn. It’s not just about the dream of a better world, but the strength it takes to turn it into something beyond the theoretical. The grass must be greener elsewhere.
6. Il Buco
A dialectical film, but not a didactic one as the ideas at play between north/south, up/down and rich/poor are largely left unsaid after the text and television footage set them up, instead letting you luxuriate in the textures as if you’re exploring the caverns alongside the crew while also situated within the makeshift cavern of a darkened screening room. And for a visual medium such as this, light and shadow might as well be the original dialectic of both its creation and distribution. That paper just falls all the way down, huh?
5. In Front of Your Face
A major experience to finally see a Hong on the big screen — his first here since Nobody’s Daughter Haewon — and what a one to see that way. Have been gradually catching up with his work over the past four years, but being able to lock into the conversations on a screen that isn’t my laptop was like encountering him for the first time. The embodiment of grace; Sangok has made peace with what will come, she doesn’t let it colour the way she experiences the world. It’s in keeping with how his production model was already equipped to handle the last couple of years. And life goes on, I guess.
4. Avatar: The Way of Water
Biggest cinematic regret for the year is that I somehow haven’t found the time to take repeat trips to Pandora over the past couple of months. The original looks better than practically every visual effects-orientated movie since and this makes it look like a PS3 game in comparison. Back when Josef von Sternberg was making Anatahan, he was annoyed he had to use real water, what do you imagine he’d think if he could see this. Big Jim’s best sequel, how good it is to know we’re getting three more.
3. The Eternal Daughter
The Tildas only share the frame once, reflected; in keeping with The Souvenirs’ interrogating the ideas we believe of people we think we know. However more crucial in situating this within Hogg’s filmography is that it plays like an Archipelago follow-up. She’s finally tuned into the particulars of family holiday stressing, the kind that arises when you want to be free and easy-going and not worry too much about what you do for dinner, only to be met by equally attempting-aloof forces, leaving you in a holding pattern of no-one really wanting to become the decision maker because you all know it won’t just be a one-off. It’s also quietly the best covid movie too, and not just because it was secretly shot during the early stages of the pandemic, the central conceit necessitates shot/reverse shot. The isolation is there in every cut and her filmmaking is so nimble that she can convey this with every cut and still increase the distance when the time comes.
2. After Yang
The constellation of memory. The film that Farrell should be nominated for. Someone is not just how you remember them, it encompasses all they remember as well.
1. The Fabelmans
Can’t say that I’ve ever found such a clear organising principle in an end of year list before, but my top five here speaks to the many facets of family. This one also speaks to a lot more, in the sense that how often do you get a film which lets you see an entire career differently. The best of the decade thus far, Kushner is obviously no slouch, but you really just have to take a moment and recognise how fascinating it is that Spielberg rarely writes yet his best works are the ones he’s had a credited hand on the pen for.
Here’s what I said in the immediate wake of seeing it. For something I was desperately trying to process into coherency, I think it gets just how astonishing it is beyond a basic magic of the movies memory play that some people are somehow looking at it and seeing.
Speaking on The Big Picture, Adam Nayman said late Spielberg is a matter of the film it looks like he’s making and what he’s actually making. Here it is a case of dialectics, albeit not the one that the opening moments set up via Bert and Mitzi’s explanations of what Sammy is about to see. It’s not a case of the scientists versus the artists, instead it is of a born(-again) formalist whose mind is blown apart by Cecil D Demille, pieces together the fragments and then devotes his life to doing that in as wide an array as possible and the way the family unit destabilises over the years. If we didn’t know it to be semi-autobiographical, we’d call it a masterstroke that Sammy’s eye comes about before domestic crisis rather than the other way around and what would be easy pathologising in the form of an origin story. And Spielberg can get away with it because we’ve have 50+ years of seeing the results, he’s long walked the walk and is now choosing to talk.
But even in laying it out in this way, there’s no straightforward path through the material. That Sammy’s talent is what uncovers his mother’s torn heart, much less the meeting with Ford, are both ideals of “you can only make this stuff up, it’s too perfect and writer-ly to be real life” and yet they appear to be true to life. Or at least, this telling of life. The echoes and inversions of his career — Close Encounters as the story of a dad who left, The Sugarland Express‘s overlaying of cartoons against the skin of convicts, Crystal Skull‘s explosion of nuclear family so the Jones’ can take another crack at it amidst the wreckage, how the introduction of the gun West Side Story is close to how the camera almost exits this — grant a metatextuality that enriches them, this and further complicates it.
Dancing in the headlights, perhaps the most unnerving sequence he’s shot in the past twenty years, the characters themselves grapple with what’s being shown, obscured and if they should look away. But you can’t take your eyes off Williams’ performance here or at any point. From the first moment she speaks, she’s evoking Garland as much as she must Spielberg’s own mother. This composite is not just those two people of course, Williams herself factors in as much as anyone else from her life she brings to the performance that only she knows internally. They are the closest he’s ever gotten to laying it all bare on the screen and they still remains ideas of the real life people. Thus if we follow the connection of what was the biggest influence on her performance, we come The Wizard of Oz (an association which can also be backed up by Lynch’s presence). It ends with Dorothy waking up on the farm, surrounded by the people she knows. But they’re no longer just those single entities, she just saw them as others. Were they real? Perhaps not, but her internal truth — “and you were there” — is that they are. She says there’s no place like home, yet any recreations, facsimiles and memory plays at hand here demonstrate that you can’t go home again either.
Streamed Consciousness 