The Best Films of 2022

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.

The Best Films of 2021

Looking back at my list for last year, I saw just 3 of the films featured in a cinema, which really drives home just how much viewing was done at home on a tv or my laptop. This year, it’s almost 50/50, with cinema viewing just taking it. It was a real joy to be able to go *Tom Cruise voice* back to the movies on a regular schedule, and in particular have an in-person London Film Festival experience where I saw a good deal of what features below. As usual, there were a few films that I wasn’t able to get to before the year was up — Licorice Pizza (which ended up disappointing me anyways), Red Rocket and Parallel Mothers being the big three in my mind — but also as usual, I’m quite happy with how this list ended up coming together. So presenting my top 25 of the year:

25. The Lost Daughter

Snuck onto the list just under the wire, hopefully Netflix releasing this on the last day of the year won’t cause it to get buried by the algorithm. (Although considering by the time you read this it will have been over two weeks since then), maybe it already has. Regardless, this is what you hope for when performers turn to directing in that they utilise the foundations of rock-solid material — in this case, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adapting a slippery and thorny Elena Ferrante novel — and allow their own actors to inhabit the space and build out the characters. Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley (the latter of whom is the best she’s ever been and finally made me see the hype around her) work as a collective to strike up a complex portrait of motherhood from multiple angles, one that doesn’t shy away from acknowledging not everyone is right to handle life’s most entrenched expectations.

24. Procession

aka The Act of Healing. Robert Greene looks at cinema, the sheer capability of storytelling potential found within and believes in both without reducing them to saccharine ends. Collaboration is communication.

23. Memoria

The botched release strategy in the middle of an ongoing pandemic hasn’t made this easy, but as long as you can, you’ve got to see this big. And you’ve got to see it loud. To let that sound burrow its way into your head just as it does to Tilda Swinton’s Jessica Holland. It needs to make you feel small in order to make you think about how big the universe really is in order to make you think about your place in it all. The guy diving to the ground while in the middle of crossing the road has not strayed far from thought since I saw him do it.

22. The Many Saints of Newark

A work of anti-nostalgia; the past existing only to remind that it traps us. In about five years, every Twitter personality that loves the show but said this was like a miniseries cut down to movie-length will love it too. I’ll welcome them with open arms, but I’ll also never forget that I was one of the people there from the jump. Wrote a touch more here about the nature of prequels, the line between performances and impersonations and how David Chase finds a new way to link the damning ending to the original series to its first conversation between Tony and Dr. Melfi.

21. The Inheritance

Blurs the line between realism and fiction while also observing the arc from personal inheritance to a communal one within the space of the house to then passing knowledge onto its audience. Creating a better world might not be something that we can accomplish and Asili acknowledges this by leaving us with a reminder to pass on the teachings and methods to the next generation in the hopes that they might be the ones that can.

20. All Light, Everywhere

Imagemaking has been weaponised in order to aid the agenda of the powerful. A company called Axon makes both tasers and body cams. Like Alice said in Resident Evil: Retribution, “It’s just like a camera. Point and shoot.”

19. Drive My Car

When discussing the credits-drop some forty minutes into the film, what people neglect to mention is how this is indicative of Ryusuke Hamaguchi bridging his long-form feature-making (despite being three hours, he has made two longer works already in the four+ hour Intimacies and Happy Hour which is just shy of five and a half) and his shorts. The opening prologue that centers on the Kafuku marriage could stand alone in theory as its own narrative instance capped off by a grim irony, yet it accrues further weight from how the following two hours and change continue to explore the nature of communication in a variety of different ways — rehearsals, the drives with Watari and the overlap between these interactions and those with the play’s performers — which in turn are more charged knowing this is all spinning out of a conversation that could never be had. That second stretch spent with Takutsuki is the most entrancing in my book.

18. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar

The greatest movie that ZAZ never made. Always finds the time to throw in another gag from a direction you’d never expect. In honour of Richard Cheese, we’re gonna take a short break. And we’re back; everyone commits to every bit, but perhaps none moreso than Jamie Dornan who relishes in an absurdity he’s never been allowed to play before. Already looking forward to the day that this gets a screening at somewhere like the Prince Charles Cinema and I can experience it with dozens of others that are on its wavelength.

17. Swimming Out Until the Sea Turns Blue

An elegiac ode to a country and a people that are no longer are. Which could be said of every one of Jia’s works, as his filmography continues to spiral and stack upon itself, so it’s a good thing that they’re all good. If only every talking head documentary could be this considerate with regards to its staging.

16. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Starting to see more and more people say they prefer this to Drive My Car and proud to say that I’m one of them. The narrative conceits of each of the three shorts all recall Hong at points, and in turn Rohmer’s Les Rendez-vous de Paris. As with those two great directors, this is a carefully modulated piece of work designed to center the performances in, but his style also leads to moments like a quick zoom-in, a door closing and a set-up from thirty minutes prior being mirrored all being pulled off with such grace that they have major emotional ramifications for the texture of the scenes they can be found within. It is the sign of a director completely in control of his craft and methods that instances of relative simplicity can leave you awestruck. What a year’s he had.

15. Old

A grant improvement on its source material as M Night finds ways to shoot this that no-one else would ever think of. Some sole scenes contain more formal innovation than most other movies, see: freeze tag. So glad that he and Mike Gioulakis found each other. Just absolutely goes for it, right down to his obligatory cameo which should not be forgotten when you’re all putting together Best Supporting Actor ballots. Went longer on this here.

14. The Green Knight

Just gorgeous to look at, which was enough to keep me entranced through to the grandeur and bravado of that final sequence, which served to clarify just how much I actually liked this. Finally, Dev Patel has starred in a good film.

13. No Sudden Move

Steven Soderbergh doing what he can do in his sleep, yet he ensures that it never comes across as sleepwalking. The fisheye lensing distorts period Detroit (and rules, actually) as if the actual walls are closing in on those caught in this capitalist affair. It’s a wholly game cast that allows for a wide range of types of performance, from Julia Fox to David Harbour to Don Cheadle. Ed Solomon’s script achieves a liveliness through its various tonal shifts and maintains a perverse levity throughout that not many could pull off. As nice as it is that Soderbergh’s found a place where he can knock out a movie every nine-months or so — The Kimi trailer just dropped the other day — it’s a shame that this wasn’t a theatrical release because it would play like gangbusters as an eventual cable movie.

12. The French Dispatch

Walked out of seeing this at London Film Fest wondering if this was lacking a certain emotional power beyond the connection between Benicio del Toro and Léa Seydoux prisoner/jailor romance, only for it to immediately start growing on me and for a ensuing rewatch to get me on board with the Jeffrey Wright story being the best of the three. The majority of the anthology’s segments are some of Wes Anderson’s most downright prosaic sequences and for any other filmmaker this would be apparent. Instead, they’re coupled with some of his most dense visual stylings and that sheer sensory overload means it makes sense that no everyone can find a way into it. But if you let him take you within the nesting doll structure that makes up the macro structure of the anthology format starting in the final moments of the magazine’s existence and the micro of how the stories are relayed to us, you’ll find a host of characters caught up in the act of another’s creation, trying to find a way to express themselves without smothering this or themselves in the process. They’re a makeshift community that managed to find a home, only for it now to be on the verge of closing up shop. Ennui is not just a state of mind, but a place too. I wonder if they’ll end up leaving either.

11. The Souvenir: Part II

Hogg’s precision in processing her grief = Thesis.

Julie’s struggle in finding the words to express her’s, seeing the images that might be able to but still unsure about how to convey these to others = Antithesis.

This film = Synthesis.

The outpouring of emotion that comes with seeing this realised is followed shortly after by the morose knowledge that once you start trying to process these feelings you’ll likely never stop. The first had an impeccable craft to it yet never quite landed the wallop it wanted to on me, while this knocked me flat. Of a piece with that first part, while still managing to be its own thing. Namely, it’s more of an ensemble — performers like Charlie Heaton, Joe Alwyn and the powerhouse Richard Ayoade all come in for a spell, knock it out of the park and disappear just as quickly as they said hello — without sacrificing the primary goal of charting Honor Swinton Byrne’s coming into her own as a director. Hogg’s homage to the Archers breaks from her otherwise established sense of naturalism at just the right time to open this up even more.

10. Cry Macho

One of the most emotional films of the year, simply for the fact that this could be the last time we ever see Clint Eastwood on screen. It’s a pleasure to watch him as he shows no concern about hiding his age on screen, even when it seems counterintuitive to the narrative, which is where a lot of people seem to be getting hung up. Of course, it’s the man himself, not the source material, which is the text of the work; the last cowboy, the only actor nowadays we wholly believe in that situation. When they reach the cantina, it basically turns into a Late Hawks picture, which is fine by me. Just means more time to hang out in his presence. Maybe he’s still got another one or two in the tank, but if this was the last outing in front and behind the camera, there are worse ways to go than that final fade to black.

9. Petite Maman

When you’re eight, thirty-one seems so far away. Never would’ve expected Céline Sciamma to have a sci-fi in her, but here it is and it’s her best to boot.

8. Days

This was my first Tsai Ming-liang back when I saw it at London Film Fest 2020, however in that time, it has lost absolutely none of its acuity and tenderness. He captures moments of modern living that manage to be so personal despite their relative mundanity prior to Lee Kang-sheng and Anong Houngheuangsy’s paths converging that the sheer act of watching them feels like intruding, even more so when they actually do. Even the rain that opens the film, as it clatters against the roof above; like you’re actually there.

7. Spencer

Complete understand how people look at this Steven Knight script only to see a constant thrum of symbols, ideas and metaphors yet that’s reflective of what Diana became in the public and private eyes. The one that’s lingered most is the idea of currency, of a woman trying not to be old money, all the while the royal family tries to keep themselves and their traditions in circulation. Pablo Larrain’s previous women’s pictures Jackie and Ema have ranked highly in their respective years for me, what gives this the edge over them both is that remarkable KStew performance. Amidst all the ideas encased within the chilly Gothic of Sandringham, she’s nevertheless given a great freedom compared to the Natalie Portman and Mariana Di Girolamo of those aforementioned works because she’s allowed to be messier than the widow trying to keep it together and a mother waiting until the last moment to reveal her hand; she spirals like the twisting thoughts in her head and the movie’s. She’s a ghost who doesn’t know she’s dead and appropriately haunting.

6. West Side Story

The ambitious movie brat who was there when New Hollywood got replaced and the elder statesman in his late — and perhaps pop cinema’s most fallow — period collaborate on a dazzling display of how his formal prowess has only improved amidst the wreckage. Obviously echoes to the original, likewise to the teens of Nicholas Ray, but also to The Quiet Man; not visually like ET‘s on tv crosscutting, more in terms of Tony’s awareness of doing harm and the subsequent attempt to move beyond that. Though the colours aren’t as bright as they once were, they’ve long since stained the streets like blood. Reminds you what it’s like when someone puts effort into movies; musicals; remakes, and makes it look easy all the same.

5. The Power of the Dog

Trades Monument Valley for the uncanny valley in two key respects. The first being Benedict Cumberbatch’s central performance, Jane Campion gets one out of him which is far more rugged than anything the typically fussy actor has produced before, and very distinctly a work of performance. Phil Burbank as he plays him always has a layer of artifice attached, you have the sense that he’s putting on his displays of masculinity. Think it would be wrong to claim this as deliberate miscasting, instead the tension that comes from this enhances the melodrama. Second, this looks like no other Western that I can think of as a result of shooting in New Zealand. The terrain dwarfs these characters and as stable as it first appears, it is continually shaken up by the shifting power dynamics. And as with Spencer, a great Jonny Greenwood score heightens the anxiety and tension of the experience.

4. The Matrix Resurrections

The only perfect franchise continues to be just that. “Love is the genesis of everything.” In an age where actors like Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe are being digitally made to look younger, how beautiful this is to place so much on Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss’s faces in order to see how they’ve changed.

3. Bergman Island

The generosity that Mia Hansen-Løve affords to her characters shines through in the pairing of Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie in the film within a film. It could easily feel like an obligation, but they might even feel more real a couple than Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth. Thrilling in a way that she’s never made me feel before, the moment you realise that she’s doing a Goodbye, First Love quasi-sequel in addition to the metatextual conceits in the film itself takes it up another level on top of all that. Løved it.

2. Annette

Leos Carax and the Sparks Brothers constructed a dense simulacrum of artifice that calls back to early filmmaking techniques just as much as the current cinema of green screened-Atlanta-warehouses standing in for everything, even Atlanta warehouses, just to see how much they make you feel when you can get past that right upfront. Went longer on this at the time as a result of a very special viewing experience, this piece might as well be called On Cinema and The Cinema.

1. Undine

Christian Petzold operating at his most brazenly romantic as he reconfigures a myth meant to dissuade straying to a modern day narrative about it being okay to break apart, go your separate ways and hopefully move on. If Transit is about being displaced in time, this is that for space as so many scenes take place around train journeys and stations, cafes and a museum. It’s not just a love of Vertigo leading to these doublings, they’re also interstitial spaces. Points of transition. No-one’s hanging around them forever. Hope he works with Frank Rogowski and Paula Beer forever because they’re doing dynamite stuff together, that scene where she just lectures to him in the apartment captures what it is when you care so much for someone that you hang on their every word.