InRO's Best Films of 2022

IN REVIEW ONLINE
BEST FILMS
OF 2022

TOP 25 FILMS OF 2022
We can call 2022 a significant year in film not because a consensus favorite emerged, but rather for the consensus
of divisiveness that was encouraged, embraced, even. Split opinions stimulate more than lukewarm ones, and the
threat of meeting most new releases with a shrug looms larger than a slate populated with misfires and curios.
Cannes, and the festival industry at large, made an expectedly splashy return, heavy on the empty calories, while
we continued our pursuit of a more cross-platform intake of cinema, throwing streaming releases, prestige bloat,
and old masters all onto the same, wonderfully disagreeable list (unfortunately, we had Sight & Sound to compete
with this year). One could draw a line from James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water’s development of 3D and
high-framerate technologies to Dominik Graf’s perennially undisciplined formal play in his emotive, Weimer-era
epic, Fabian: Going to the Dogs. Elsewhere, a Jackass return is as heartening as Hong Sang-soo’s prolificness. And
then there’s the new (Alice Diop) mingling with the once-maligned old (Michael Bay), while the donkey in EO suffers
as much as the father and daughter in Aftersun. 2022 proves that we’re still learning how to watch — hopefully, we’ll
never be finished. . — PATRICK PREZIOSI
1

#25 — THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Martin McDonagh
Set against a backdrop of gunfire and cannons on the nearby
mainland during the dying days of the Irish Civil War, the drama
of The Banshees of Inisherin is dwarfed by historical events while
also reflecting the confusing and, some would argue, arbitrary
nature of them. There’s never any question that the conflict on
the fictional island community is intended as an implicit
commentary on the war: from how it pits friend against friend or
came about “suddenly” after years of simmering resentment to
the way observers are left wondering how they all got to this
place or even who’s on which side. And then there’s the
self-defeating nature of it all, with Brendan Gleeson’s gruff Colm
proclaiming out of the blue that he wants to be left alone by
affable dullard Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and the terrible toll to be
paid for ignoring his wishes: a finger removed from his own hand
every time his former friend bothers him. A fiddlist maiming
himself so he has more time to compose music has a certain
amount of senselessness to it, a bit like going to war to reunite a
country.
It’s a baldly theatrical conceit from playwright-turned-filmmaker
Martin McDonagh in a film where there’s no shortage of them.
Populated by colorful busybodies, cute animals, fools and
perhaps even the mythical harbinger that gives the film its florid
title (the double “sh” sound really does have a lovely ring to it),
the film has a musicality to its dialogue which also betrays the
stage origins of its filmmaker. Lines are repeated back to their
original speaker almost as if in call and response, with
characters regularly talking past one another, all peppered with a
healthy amount of “fecks” and “shites.” As if to head off any
accusations of staginess, McDonagh sets much of the film
against rolling emerald hills (punctuated by a sprawling network
of stone walls) and towering cliffs, often filmed in soaring drone
shots and framed in ultra-wide compositions. Like the quarrel at
its center, the film feels simultaneously intimate and expansive,
pulling in innocent victims carried along by the squabbles of
thick-headed men. But no mere historical allegory, the film
speaks to an all too prescient sense of despair and wanton
cruelty — the way people project their own shortcomings onto
others, perpetuate a chilling sense of isolation, and find their
hearts irrevocably hardened by childish disagreements (all
exacerbated by the internet). Though set a century ago, is there a
more 2022 sensation than feeling alone on an island yet still
being surrounded by boring fecking men and their piddling
grievances? — ANDREW DIGNAN
2

#24 — THE CATHEDRAL
Ricky D’Ambrose
When a film is as formally driven as The Cathedral (one need only
to know that director Ricky D’Ambrose has been compared to
Straub-Huillet with some frequency), the critical instinct is to
prioritize image. In 2007, David Bordwell expressed
disappointment in “most professional [critics’ disinterest] in the
film shot as a shot.” Bordwell having co-written several of the
most used film textbooks for introductory classes, even his blog
posts are often encountered early in film school. And though his
exhortation to discuss form is well taken, and discussing image
may seem the most obvious way to do that, film is exciting
because it is inherently interdisciplinary as a medium. The form
is image, but it is also sound, and, though Bordwell’s counterpoint
to the shot is “plot and acting,” it is also text.
D’Ambrose does nothing to dissuade the viewer from attending to
the image from the beginning. The film begins with a photograph
of an outdoor gathering, before the rustling of blankets reveals a
long, static shot, as nearly every shot in the film will turn out to
be, of a disembodied hand wearing a hospital bracelet. This is
not the way you expect a film to start, even on MUBI, the
adventurous streaming service distributing the film. But the film
also begins, and also turns out to continue, with third-person
narration — similarly unusual. Let’s look at the start of that text:
“Jesse Damrosch was born in 1987, two years after the
death of his father’s brother, Joseph. Jesse’s
grandfather, Dominic, a retired printer, had been
reluctant to allow his younger son to return to the family
home [...] It would seem that Jesse’s late uncle was
subject to two deaths: The official death, as confirmed
by medical tests, was AIDS. The unofficial death, as
Joseph’s father would have it, was a sudden bout of liver
disease, which he is said to have contracted from
unclean silverware. Some years later, Jesse’s own
father, Richard, would urge caution on his son when
dining at restaurants, stressing to him the importance
of wiping down his forks and knives.”
3

The Cathedral is a film of familial schisms. Such a schism forms
quickly between Jesse’s parents, his maternal grandfather acting
as a wedge. He is born into a world in which one already exists
between his maternal grandmother and her sister Billie, one that
Jesse and thus the film can never fully grasp. The film starts,
however, not with a schism, but with an absence. After
introducing Jesse, the film’s protagonist and his own alter ego,
D’Ambrose introduces not any of the characters Jesse will meet,
but his queer uncle. Growing up during the Clinton and Bush
administrations — both presidents appear among the film’s
archival intrusions — Jesse isn’t exposed to much queerness, and
the film has not generally been referred to as a “queer film,”
whatever that would mean. But, not to discount the image, its
first is that of his uncle’s hand; and it’s Jesse’s grandfather and
father’s active erasure of his uncle’s queerness that sets the
stage for the separation he will experience among his family.
Much later in the film, after Jesse has discovered video, the
narrator notes that his early films “reflected less an interest in
memory than in measure.” Given Jesse’s position as a director
insert it’s natural to see this as a mission statement for the film
and, in an interview with Lawrence Garcia, D’Ambrose said it was
meant to be taken literally — to convey “the fact that there is a
gap, a frame, a perspective on [Jesse’s] situation that filming
permits.” D’Ambrose applies this thought to objects, but in The
Cathedral there is also a distance between people, one often
made infinite by the film’s precisely isolating framing. It’s this
distance that Jesse’s parents and grandparents open up that
leads Jesse to fear his father and grandfather occupying the
same physical space, and that, in the film’s emotional climax, his
great aunt Billie hopes to close between her and her sister, but
that, in the end, no one manages to traverse. — JESSE
CATHERINE WEBBER
#23 — FIRE OF LOVE
Sara Dosa
A mainstream breakthrough for documentarian Sara Dosa, Fire of
Love frames devotion for Earth’s most dangerous wonders
through the romance between its subjects. A chronological
recantation of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft’s meeting,
curiosity, advocacy, and, yes, death, the film reconstructs the
footage the couple produced, often the first moving images of
remote geologic anomalies, interspersed with collage animation
to recreate the pair’s awe. Their images are scientifically
4

important, yes, but also richly textured, with playful asides to the
looming danger they walk straight toward (we see Maurice burn
himself in a rock pool and laugh it off as a near miss, Katia
repeatedly dressing in heat shields as if to go into space, and
Maurice again rowing in a pool of concentrated acid, shrugging
at the sizzling risk). The singularity of the point in research they
attain finds itself running parallel to the dedication between the
couple, one where they know it is only the other who would allow
them to venture so close to the fire. The pair do not share a
concentration within the field; Katia is fascinated by the
minutiae left behind after the clouds clear, studying rock
formations and the way life reacts to this newly hostile
environment. Maurice is instead struck by motion; he ventures
closer to the live fire, and dreams of
riding a titanium canoe down a lava
stream, holding the camera for much of
the footage used in order to study how
the magma, and later smoke, dances.
of our control. After all, as Maurice repeats, understanding that
which we are taught to fear brings us closer to the world around
us, and to the core of our own existence. — SARAH WILLIAMS
#22 — AFTERSUN
Charlotte Wells
Through the fog of memory and under the glaring Turkish sun,
British social realism gets a new look in writer-director Charlotte
Wells’ debut feature, Aftersun. The film follows Sophie (Frankie
Corio/Celia Rowlson-Hall) as both a pre-teen and an adult as she
pieces together memories of her young father Callum (Paul
Mescal) and the holiday they took together for her eleventh
birthday, weaving memory with home video with imagination into
The Kraffts were to volcanology as
Jacques Cousteau was to
contemporary diving — except their
painstaking video documentation of the
natural world is closer in artistry to that
of surrealist Jean Painlevé. Rarely do
the recent wave of found footage
documentaries further the material
(even Questlove’s recent Summer of Soul hardly served to
contextualize its striking content); in this case, Dosa’s romantic
tragedy narrativization structured from the couple’s research is a
reminder of how easy primordial destruction can come for even
the most prepared. When the couple dies in an eruption (of one
of the more volatile grey volcanoes they monitor), it isn’t shock
value, because from the start they know the inevitability of
disaster. This event serves to deepen their earlier warnings, as
they had traveled to rural communities to warn of the dangers of
living so close to a ticking time bomb. Fire of Love utilizes the
couple’s dynamic footage as a reminder that there is so much out
there grander than humanity, and how many forces are out
a quiet and deeply moving portrait of parenthood. Wells chooses
for her locale the sort of holiday resort that will be familiar to UK
audiences, an almost liminal world of family-friendly faux luxury
where time feels suspended between bouts of sunbathing,
playing pool, and the occasional outside excursion. Wells remains
subtle when observing Brits abroad, supplanting the usual
overcast grays and blues of kitchen sink realism in favor of
bright, if paled, sunlight. This choice casts Wells’ subject matter
within a hazy glow, taking Sophie and Callum’s precarious
situation as a young, fractured, and financially unstable family
and refusing to submit them to the grim aesthetic that usually
accompanies such characters and stories.
5

As young father Callum, Mescal is revelatory, performing a
restraint that animates the puzzle at the center of Aftersun.
Whether it can be attributed to masculine stoicism or Sophie’s
incomplete memory, Callum is just as much a mystery to the
audience as he is his own daughter, but Mescal’s turn,
melancholic and full of an anguish that lies just beneath the
surface of his persona, brings a profound humanity to his
enigma. Callum may be fundamentally unreachable across the
gulf of memory and whatever clearly lies between the pair in the
present, but Mescal never feels distant in his portrayal,
embodying both Callum’s personal pain and the noble strength he
adopts for Sophie’s sake. It’s a balancing act of a performance,
and a testament to Mescal’s talent that he never loses control of
that balance for even a second.
Where Aftersun truly transcends its own premise is in its design,
sitting at the intersection of memory, imagination, and digital
record. While between its two wonderfully cast leads the film
succeeds at examining
parenthood and the complications inherent in that relationship,
Wells forces her audience to consider the very ground she lays
her story upon, with Sophie’s morphing is constantly drawn to
moments of heterosexuality but grows to queer womanhood,
seems to theorize, as though puzzling out what she thought of
those early encounters, why she started noticing them in the
first place, and eventually even extending
her re-examination to her father, recalling conversations about
women he found attractive and imagining his platonic
encounters with other men. As narrator, Sophie adopts subtext
and abandons it, searching for significance in events that may
not have any, leading the film to a magnificent climactic
sequence that poetically encapsulates the entire film:
surrounded by noise and confusion and fragments of images,
we understand how the search for meaning in our own lives can
define us and, crucially, the only way we may have of reaching
the ones we love. — MOLLY ADAMS
#21 — THE METAMORPHOSIS OF BIRDS
Catarina Vasconcelos
In The Singularity of Literature, David Attridge writes that artistic
singularity inheres in the encounter between reader and text —
the reader, in encountering the text for the first time, creates art
anew through the act of interpretation. There’s no way to
anticipate how a text from the past will be received in the future,
and it’s precisely this element of surprise which sustains art’s
alterity. The radical potential of art to endlessly create new
possibilities is brilliantly illuminated in Catarina Vasconcelos’ The
Metamorphosis of Birds, a hybrid documentary which paints a
rich and expansive portrait of Vasconcelos’ family through
re-imagining their histories, memories, and letters. As
Vasconcelos’ grandfather Henrique wishes to burn his
correspondences with his wife, Beatriz, The Metamorphosis of
Birds also doubles as a physical
archive, a desperate attempt to
reconcile an entire life. It’s through
artistic reinvention that Vasconcelos
learns how to meet her grandmother,
who died before she knew her, for the
first and last time.
What’s most striking about Vasconcelos’
re-imagination of Beatriz, however, is
the way that the latter’s interior life is
portrayed with tender sensitivity:
generic and domestic
6

images of cut grapefruits, raw meat, or even an electrical socket
imbue her life with a deep loneliness, even as the laughter of
children reverberates across the house. After all, Henrique was
often away at sea, leaving Beatriz on her own to raise five
children. Unlike the empirical trappings of most documentaries,
The Metamorphosis of Birds universalizes the particular;
Vasconcelos uses Beatriz’s experience to speak for generations
of mothers whose stories were not worthy of the camera. It’s also
why the film refuses to clarify the litany of actors who stand in
as Beatriz. As deeply personal as Vasconcelos’ film is, it’s also a
love letter to women like her grandmother — their letters may not
have been burned, but it’s entirely possible that they, too, have
been tragically lost to time in one way or another.
During the film’s narration of Beatriz’s death, we see a woman
swimming in a lake; with every passing second, she swims
further out away from the audience and, presumably,
Vasconcelos herself. Up to this point, the first half of The
Metamorphosis of Birds largely comprises shots that are confined
within tight 4:3 frames where images and people look like
portraits and still lifes, an effect which reflects Vasoncelos’
aching desire to capture Beatriz’s story before the
correspondences are lost. But as tight compositions give way to
this poignant image of a woman swimming away from us in a
vast lake, The Metamorphosis of Birds astutely revises the
traditional archive — it no longer seeks to document Beatriz’s life
in relation to her children or her husband. Instead, Vasconcelos
lets Beatriz go, and this generous act of artistic freedom is how
she finally meets her grandmother for the first time. The
Metamorphosis of Birds wants us to meet our grandmothers and
mothers before we knew them; this is a gentle kindness that we
can only wish that our stories will be told with. — SHAR TAN
#20 — NOPE
Jordan Peele
In many ways, we’re still living in the shadow of Jordan Peele’s
Get Out — rare is the American horror film these days that doesn’t
come with a prefabricated, paint-by-numbers allegory for the
social ills of our time. Few of them have matched the originality
and potency of Get Out, and Peele’s follow-up, Us, suffered from a
labored foregrounding of metaphor over the genre’s more
essential pleasures. What makes Nope, Peele’s third and most
ambitious feature, so exciting, then, is how daringly it rides the
knife’s edge between its director’s instincts as a sociologist and a
showman. As uneasy as the marriage can be at times, the result
is undeniably one of the richest and densest blockbusters to
grace American screens in years.
“To reduce Nope to its
thematic content would be a
mistake, the same one…
Peele’s elevated horror
contemporaries make.
The heady mixture Peele is after comes baked into his film’s
premise, which concerns brother-sister duo Emerald (Keke
Palmer) and OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) as they take over the
ranch owned by their father, a Hollywood horse trainer, after his
mysterious death. Many of the film’s myriad thematic currents
sprout from here, from the film industry’s history of exploitation
(whether of Black workers like the Haywoods behind the camera
or of animals in front) to the very nature of iconography and how
meaning is read into images, which Peele identifies in Eadweard
Muybridge’s studies of movement as readily as he does TMZ and
Twitter.
But to reduce Nope to its thematic content would be a mistake,
the same one that many of Peele’s elevated horror
contemporaries make themselves. The imaginative flair and
formal bravado Peele brings to the set pieces here establish him
as a first-rate large-scale director, and his handling of the
movie’s “monster” — a massive UFO known only as “Jean Jacket”
— is worthy of the Spielberg-sized hole the filmmaker seems
intent on stepping into. Even more impressively, Peele never
loses sight of the movie’s intellectual framework within these
sequences; rather, its function as thrilling entertainment is
central to its critique of our own desensitization to visual
spectacle.
7

Nope’s welding of blockbuster and art film forms was bound to
show a few seams, and for many those are most prominent in the
Steven Yeun sections of the film, where Peele paradoxically
pushes the envelope the furthest and is most clearly weighed
down by the allegorical needs of his movie. But when the movie
takes flight, Peele shows us as exciting a vision of commercial
genre cinema to come as I can remember: not one of dull
aesthetics and duller messaging, but of new forms of filmmaking
that carry with them new ideas, a cinema both indebted to and in
challenging conversation with everything that came before it. —
BRAD HANFORD
#19 — IL BUCO
Michelangelo Frammartino
Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco stands out in a 2022 field of
films not just for the exhilarating beauty of its images — though
it is the year’s most gorgeous film — but for the shifting
definition of beauty it evokes and the clear harmony of its
disparate images. Leaving the film’s historical and contextual
details for a quick pre-end-credits scrawl, the film drops viewers
directly into its titular setting: the camera shoots out through its
cragged and crescent-shaped opening, as night turns to day and
a few Podolico cows amble into the frame of the Bifurto Abyss’s
gaping maw. A quick array of vista shots, the region’s
mountainous backdrop and green grazing land blanketed in white
cloud and mist (an initial contrast to Il Buco’s immense
darkness), then cuts to a shepherd perched upon a steeply
sloped hillside overlooking the plateau’s bucolic character.
“Il Buco stands out… not just
for the exhilarating beauty of
its images… but for the
shifting definition of beauty it
evokes.
The trajectory of these early few minutes works to communicate
both the pictorial nature of the film to follow and to establish the
first halves of a few essential dichotomies that Il Buco is built
upon. No mere exercise in empty, postcard-approved slow
cinema aestheticizing, Frammartino’s film takes as study a series
of considered inversions: the lush, easy beauty of the bright
Calabrian verdance and the more beguiling allure of the dark
unknown of Il Buco; the rhythm of ambered shepherd tradition,
cyclical in its time-stands-still intimation, and the clear linearity
of progress spearheaded by the deep-delving speleologists; the
curious, nebulous line between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking;
and, most distinctively, the unflagging mystery of both human
and terrestrial life, each always bearing witness to the other —
here, a flickering pulse on the back of a dying man’s hand and a
headlamp’s light dancing upon the rock formations in a
heretofore unseen crevasse both bear secrets of immense,
profound meaning.
Lest that sound overly academic, however, Frammartino takes
conscious care to remember the medium he’s working within. Far
from plodding along through these intellectual suggestions, Il
Buco instead effortlessly moves between understated but still
riveting scenes of exploration — without imbuing any faux
gravitas or saturating this with dramatic emphasis, these
otherwise unassuming scenes still sneakily shred the nerves —
and pastoral domesticity, allowing the dance between the two to
build both theme and aesthetic organically, the shifting
perspective of the images speaking to the grandiosity of both the
seen and unseen. All of this is punctuated by the director’s play
with light and dark, the expansive wide-angle shots in constant
conversation with the cramped, blotted-out images of what lies
beneath. And then there’s the meta-textual layering Il Buco
employs in bearing witness to this all: there’s us, the audience,
observing a shepherd, who is observing the Il Buco explorers,
who are themselves observing that which has never before been
seen. Dark and light, seeing and unseeing: these are both
objective truths and false constructs of our human creation, a
means of flattening the inexplicable into the digestible
imprecision of language. Frammartino seems fascinated by that
which is always ever only outside of our human understanding
and articulation — the mystery, you could say — and in Il Buco
brilliantly captures that specific shadow in moving visual terms.
— LUKE GORHAM
8

#18 — FABIAN: GOING TO THE DOGS
Dominik Graf
In the sloganeering spirit of its source material, the Erich Kästner
novel Fabian,: Going to the Dogs, Dominik Graf’s epic-length film
adaptation opens with a tracking shot that might as well
announce one of that text’s chapter headings: “The Past Comes
Round the Corner.” Graf’s film, pointedly unfashionable and
gleefully esoteric even as its fascism-on-the-rise trajectory
might seem to suggest something au courant, is never easy to
make sense of: its mix of formats, frame rates, split-screen
collisions, zooms, and assorted handheld disorientations suggest
a house in the process of flying apart. The tone somersaults
between senses: the cynical bonhomie of literary outsiders;
secluded, starving romanticism; and an essentially sweet
disposition toward family take shelter underneath an inevitably
tragic structure. We know, because the year is 1931, that
everyone’s either going to end up dead, exiled, an apolitical
facsimile of a person, or a member of the Party.
What Graf wrings out of this material, though imperfect and at
times overloaded with televisual signals and undigested plotting,
is an exhilarating sense of public intrusion. The energy of any
given scenario is transferred to asides, interruptions, street
noise, and detective flashes of intuition, then back again, to the
three lively children of Goethe that populate Fabian’s inner circle:
Stephan Labude (Albrecht Schuch), a pampered but tortured
idealist; Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Rosendahl), a law
student-turned-actress as self-determined as any Verhoeven
heroine, and Jakub Fabian himself (Tom Schilling), the would-be
literary hero who, as Joyce wrote in his Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, “defiles with patience whatever image had attracted
his eyes.”
Time here slides in and out of sync between our experience and
these characters’, a concept that shares some features with,
though far from exactly aligns, with Christian Petzold’s, Graf’s old
neighbor from Dreileben. And this may be because, unlike the
professorial guide in Undine or the autodidact political refugee in
Transit, Graf’s ultimate form of narration is the sentimental
education, albeit a haunted and accelerated one. He pays his
duties to historical implications, but Graf’s inventions exist to
power an in-the-moment sense of one decision leaping into
another, the fractal explosions of small differences. It remains to
be seen if Graf, who mostly continues to work in television, is
doomed to obscurity for his choices of industry, aesthetics, or
both; but for those in search of other paths to be taken in the
realm of literary-derived subjectivity, he remains an essential
director. — MICHAEL SCOULAR
9

#17 — THE TSUGUA DIARIES
Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes
Few films will be remembered as pandemic-era classics like
Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Tsugua Diaries. Its
title, which features the word August backwards, plays out in
reverse-chronological order, with day-by-day accounts of a film
and its filmmaking process capturing both the malaise and small
comforts of its circumstances. It begins with one of the most
memorable scenes of the year: after a title card reading “Day 22”
flashes on screen, we’re dropped into the midst of a modest
dance party set to Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons’ “The
Night.” As moody colors wash the interior in a seductive veneer,
the lyrics foreshadow foolhardy aspirations for ecstasy in a time
of standstill: “If that day could last forever / You would fall in love
completely / But the night begins to turn your head around.” Still,
The Tsugua Diaries moves swiftly, with a romantic kiss leading us
into the everyday realities of “Day 21,” which skitters off to “Day
20” shortly thereafter. Some days last longer than others, but
everything starts to blend together on this Portuguese farm in
the summertime heat.
For their own entertainment, Gomes and Fazendeiro spent
lockdown working through John Ford’s films from last to first,
and were inspired by seeing John Wayne grow younger
throughout their viewings. This isn’t to say that The Tsugua
Diaries is anything like Linklater’s Boyhood or Nolan’s Memento,
but that there’s a joy they’re trying to embody in observing
minute changes. They succeed on a purely visual level, with
different hues of light blanketing a single image, allowing for
deep appreciation of film at its basest levels. One of the movie’s
most striking scenes is little more than flashes of colored dots
flitting across a black screen, meant to resemble the stars that
characters view through a telescope.
Gomes and Fazendeiro also succeed because their structural
gambit is wondrous: with every little bit we learn about the film’s
creation, it seems like a miracle that anything comes out of such
an increasingly complicated situation. Most notably, Fazendeiro
is absent for much of the film’s runtime, her voice only appearing
via walkie-talkies due to her pregnancy (she’s encouraged by her
doctor to lie down). When Gomes appears on screen and has
conversations with his actors, it feels less like a momentous
breaking of the fourth wall than an invitation to understand how
challenging all this is for everyone. But The Tsugua Diaxries is
foremost light and cozy, eager to showcase the comforts and
humor and delight found in being around others and simply
creating. The Tsugua Diaries may not contain the overt magical
realism of Gomes’ other films, but it does understand that there’s
always something enchanting one can conjure up, even in a time
of unprecedented crises. — JOSHUA MINSOO KIM
10

#16 — AMBULANCE
Michael Bay
In a year where the American blockbuster achieved its
all-or-nothing final form for commercial performance, almost
any movie not named Top Gun: Maverick became emblematic of
movies’ depreciating mainstream appeal. So too for Ambulance;
directed by titan of excess Michael Bay — he of malcontent men
and robots in disguise — its meager returns on a $40 million
budget were interpreted as a harbinger of ill winds in Hollywood,
from which even the superhero industrial complex would emerge
diminished. Yet these mercenary concerns obscure the value of
watching a maximalist doing more with less, Bay substituting his
usual explosion quotient with explosive star power and visual
language (and smaller explosions) to match. Conceived with
Covid-19 filming conditions in mind, the title of Ambulance
doubles as its primary setting, commandeered by Jake Gylenhaal
and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from paramedic Eiza González’s
vehicle after a bank robbery goes wrong; a volatile road trip
through the streets of Los Angeles ensues.
The downsizing also repositions Bay as Michael Mann’s
improbable heir apparent, relocating Mann’s
machismo-stricken, system-antagonistic operators within Bay’s
signature moral universe. If more cinematically persuasive than
ideologically, Ambulance’s heist offers a fitting parallel for
its real-life context, with its characters failing to achieve their
score with unparalleled (and highly watchable) flair and style.
At any rate, the plot of Ambulance is largely immaterial — so
much so that Bay reportedly did not watch the original 2005
Danish film from which it was adapted — instead relying on
larger-than-life symbology to evoke brotherhood, Americana,
economic disparity, cynicism and hope. None of the above
thematic totems are unfamiliar within Bay’s oeuvre, though their
presentation here skews the hyper-modern filmmaker even
closer than ever to a kind of unreal realism. Frenetic imagery
contrasts shaky close-ups of Ambulance’s stars inside the title
vehicle with renderings of advanced technology deployed in their
pursuit, like infrared grids and
sweeping drones. This airborne
imagery comprises an
immediate highlight in an
already visually arresting and
disorienting filmography, Bay’s
drones shooting down the sides
of skyscrapers and underneath
soaring automobiles, yet the
exterior chaos is arguably
secondary to that within the
title vehicle. Inside the
ambulance, fights escalate into
brawls, exploratory surgery is
performed, and brothers belt along to Kris Kross, all while the
car itself barrels forward in pursuit of a dream already deferred.
Particular credit is due to Gyllenhaal, who exceeds earlier
maniacal performances with a pantheon showing of coked-out
glory, attempting to make the world around him conform to his
designs as both ground and sky collapse. The creation of
Ambulance achieves a similar feat. — MICHAEL DOUB
#15 — THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER
Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher
The Zürcher brothers, Ramon and Silvan, have returned to us
almost a decade after what is ostensibly one of the finest works
11
6

of the 2010s. Their labyrinthine social dynamics, uproarious and
deftly concentrated, solidify here as incisive authorial
machination. The Girl and the Spider reconvenes with these
sensibilities to observe a matrix of intensely and unabashedly
horny freaks: freaks and their secret gazes, gleaning sensual
pleasure from brief, clandestine acts of looking. All the character
drama is inundated with riddles and confidential histories,
instigating a deathless ephemera, a temporary mold through
which transitory souls enter and exit. Each scene reconstitutes
positionality, drawing anew and over again the fickle relations in
play, incited only by an individual's capacity to see and re-see the
other; often incidentally, often for purposes unknown to even
them, and most certainly unknown to us. People move in melody:
there is, here, a comedy of manners, of
mannerism. This is not a function of
logical dramaturgy, but an inquiry into
embodiment and its tenuousness. A
point of relation might be Bresson,
where he distinguished in models
(actors) their entrances and exits of
space, as well as their passage through
thresholds. The brothers, in The Girl and
the Spider, distinguish the matched
stare, the reciprocated proximity of
one and the other. The whole ordeal —
here a simple act of
moving residence — plays out in gesticulation, flamboyant
scrupulousness, delivering a fable that inverts the moral
reductionism of Bresson into unmitigated heterogeneity. This is
an abstract portrait of human character, itself reduced into a
poorly kept secret: a private glimpse that lingers on into an
incommensurable but discerned act, a cinema’s framing of
perpetually antagonized human relations.
The Zürchers’ blocking maps people in a similar fashion to how
many filmmakers approach the navigation and representation of
architecture. We understand the narrative space as mundane
and simple, as visualized through a floor plan that is the first
image of the film. It is then the incessant mobility of people, a
stringent choreography, which proffers the aforementioned
labyrinthian logic. No one remains still in this film, and therefore
our static, spectatorial gaze cannot possibly keep up. The
simplicity of the setting provides a capacity for total
estrangement as dictated by the very lack of open space, further
defined by a strict continuity of medium shots. This lacking,
however, becomes opportune for our characters as they attempt
their coup d’œil, to imprint desires whilst everyone else is, to
their imagination, too busy to notice. But of course, we know this
not to be true. We know someone, as it goes in the movies, is
always watching: voyeurism as locus of seduction and allure.
However, the directing duo abscond with this fundamental of
cinema and construct a baroque formalism around it.
What’s delineated in The Girl and the Spider, more so than any
insight or observation on intimate relations, plausible
sociopathic tendencies, or brooding sexual fervor, is a state of
surveillance. In the conceived solitary of aching leers, another
pair of eyes, whether strange or aqua-tinted, assuredly burns
holes in the back of each character’s neck. Everyone, therein,
becomes a cypher, unveiling to us only their sight lines,
punctuated always by the camera itself. A precise cartographic
exercise, perhaps? I don’t think it’s too far a stretch to discern
this work as an extrapolation of structural film; of, if we choose
to believe it, a fantasy that further elucidates the anonymity of
bodies entering and exiting the frame in Michael Snow’s
Wavelength. Here, they are instead caught between the confines
12

of that frame, caught in this unwieldy and stirring narrative
circumstance, their desire always explicit and expressed yet
organized only by the reveal of the cut. Never is any of our
troupe given the opportunity or allowance to waver away into the
periphery, to exist outside of our purview, and therefore the
whole ethos must shift to accommodate: apparatus now
supplanted by anatomy. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND
#14 — SAINT OMER
Alice Diop
On its surface, the way that Alice Diop structures her first
narrative film (she’s been making documentaries for over a
decade) is pretty straightforward: We’re introduced to our
protagonist, French-Senegalese academic Rama (Kayije Kagame),
with a handful of scenes that show her life with a white
boyfriend, Adrian (Thomas De Pourquery), as well as visits to see
her mentally handicapped mother and other family members. We
learn that Rama is a novelist, and that she’s attending the trial of
a Senegalese immigrant whom committed infanticide —
drowning her 15-month old daughter — as research for a new
book. Diop interrupts her focus on Rama (narratively, at least)
“[Saint Omer] feels impossibly
massive… unlike any other
drama released this year.
with two very long sequences inside the courtroom, as the judge,
both attorneys, the accused woman herself — philosophy student
Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga, the year’s best performance by
the way) — and various other witnesses go into detail about the
circumstances of the crime and attempt to piece together a
motive. The last and most crucial component of Saint Omer’s
structure involves muted flashbacks to Rama’s youth, most
involving memories of her mother (with whom, in the present
day, she’s no longer able to communicate verbally). These scenes
slip in subtly, when Rama returns alone to her hotel room during
breaks from the trial; they provide no skeleton key to Rama’s past
(nor to her mother’s), but instead expand the psychological
breadth of what can feel (especially in its early going) like a staid
courtroom drama, by gesturing to the shared connection
between mothers and daughters and the different ways their
trauma comes to be passed down through generations.
By the time that Saint Omer arrives at its emotional crescendo of
an ending, the film feels impossibly massive — and unlike any
other drama released this year. Diop is able to draw out dense
layers of meaning both by honing in on small moments (the
parallel between the racism that informs Coly’s white former
professor’s skepticism toward her interest in Wittgenstein, and
the surprise that Rama’s publisher voices after hearing Coly’s
sophisticated French accent) and through the great sensitivity of
her filmmaking, which intuitively shifts between the antiseptic
sense of remove with which she films the first courtroom
sequence toward something much more anchored to a
perspectival experience, as Rama’s own sense of identification
with Coly begins to intensify later. Above all, Diop recognizes and
identifies exactly where the tensions in her own film are located,
and how they criss-crosses between both intimate and more
broadly representational modes of engagement. Rama’s own
experience of the trial starts as an academic assignment, as
she’s performatively presented a series of narrative details; it
changes, though, as she begins to see a reflection of herself in
the narrative; and finally, it shifts again, once that reflection
prompts a self-examination that leaves her grappling with even
more questions about how to understand herself and her social
environment. The film, then, hits a meta-textual vein — the
courtroom as proxy for cinema (something enforced when Rama
gives a college lecture on Hiroshima, mon Amour), and Rama’s
own crisis of conscience (as she starts to visibly resent the idea
of commodifying Coly’s trauma) an extension of Diop’s, who
based Saint Omer on a trial that she herself sat through. All that
may sound overly intellectualized and inaccessible, but there’s so
much grace in Diop’s approach — never more so than when the
needle drops on a certain very early Nina Simone song about the
racism that she felt kept her out of a North Carolina
conservatory. There’s clarity in Saint Omer’s careful consideration
of the interconnected experience of young Black women in
predominantly white spaces. — SAM C. MAC
13

#13 — RRR
S. S. Rajamouli
2022 may end up proving to be the year Indian cinema breaks out
big in the U.S. Then again, it’s equally as likely it won’t be,
America’s interest in non-Western, non-English language media
remaining decidedly spotty and inconsistent, after all. But
however it shakes out, one can’t deny that Variance Films (in
partnership with original distributor Sarigama Cinemas) moved
the dial with their strategic rerelease of S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR,
bringing the Telugu historical epic to Alamo Drafthouses and
various college town cinemas across the country following a
moderately successful multiplex run. A savvy play that paid off
big time financially (just over $11,000,000 stateside) and lead
directly to a fruitful FYC campaign akin to the one Variance ran
for Drive My Car last year with Janus, RRR has thusly been
positioned as both blockbuster crowd pleaser and prestige
powerhouse here in the states.
A rare accomplishment for any film, it makes some sense that
Rajamouli would be the Indian filmmaker to pull off this cultural
crossover in this particular fashion, his previous Baahubali films
commanding massive, record-breaking budgets and box office,
as well as positive critical attention internationally and at home.
It also surely helps that these films are, to a certain extent,
indebted to a sense of Hollywood grandiosity and mythmaking
informed by Disney films and Mel Gibson’s directorial efforts (as
confirmed by a recent Sight & Sound ballot), their appeal
translating across language barriers and cultural divides rather
cleanly, the outrageous spectacle of Rajamouli’s work
immediately satisfying in a way that tracks with these points of
influence, while going way beyond them.
Like 2012’s Eega and the aforementioned Baahubalis, RRR
embraces an unabashed maximalism that makes Gibson look
stodgy by comparison, while also introducing gleeful anti-colonial
(i.e. British) violence Disney would never consider touching, all to
tell the stories of real-life Indian revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama
Raju and Komaram Bheem. The resulting
combination is something powerfully irresistible, a film that, at
times, creeps into the realm of propaganda (an element U.S. fans
mostly avoided contending with) to celebrate the fictionalized
friendship of these two modern folk legends and their fanciful,
totally brutal assault on the thoroughly evil agents of British
colonial rule. And while it remains difficult to say if any of its
successes will trickle down to more modestly budgeted, less
pronouncedly sensational Indian cinema, RRR has at least
established its director as a globally recognized auteur through
sheer imagination and verve. What’s certain is that Rajamouli ‘s
film leaves audiences with more hope than ever before that there
may be growing space for Telugu action films in American
cinemas going forward. — M.G. MAILLOUX
#12 — DECISION TO LEAVE
Park Chan-wook
While investigating the death of retired immigration worker Ki
Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok), the insomniac Det. Jang Hae-jun (Park
Hae-il) meets Ki's mysterious widow Song Seo-rae (a brilliant
Tang Wei), and even though he suspects that she might be
involved in her husband's death, the kind-eyed detective grows
obsessed with the beautiful Chinese immigrant, soon finding
himself in an ill-fated, quasi-romantic relationship with her. His
thoughts completely consumed by Seo-rae, Hae-jun's own
marriage to the odd but lovable Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun) begins
to disintegrate, as his mind continues to run on the murder
“Shares more of its formal
DNA with the knotty The
Handmaiden than it does the
relentlessly bleak Oldboy.
suspect even while he's making love to his wife. However, as the
central relationship deepens, so too do Hae-jun's suspicions, but
no matter how hard he tries, he can't pull himself away.
Park Chan-wook's labyrinthine romance thriller continues the
gradual move away from the bloody genre exploitation that
marked the South Korean auteur's early filmography, sharing
14

more of its formal DNA with the knotty The Handmaiden than it
does the relentlessly bleak Oldboy. Decision to Leave is an
audacious spin on Vertigo, and while Park's ostentatious style is
comparatively muted here, he still pulls off his twisty neo-noir
plot with characteristic flamboyance. But beyond the flashy
formalism, the film frequently amplifies quiet character
moments — Seo-rae watching from her car as Hae-jun arrests a
suspect might just be the year's most sensual scene — even as it
appears to revel in frustrating their desires at every turn.
Taking cues from Hitchcock, as well as Hitchcock disciple Brian
De Palma, Park's visuals dazzle with elaborate beauty, but it's the
story of the star-crossed lovers that ultimately proves to be most
resonant. The director's films have often contained romantic
themes, although rarely presented in a manner as
straightforward (and non-icky) as this. Instead, Park dedicates
himself to sweeping romanticism: love and desire prove to be the
motors powering the story, not violence or revenge. And much
like late-period De Palma, characters find themselves in the tech
tangle of video and audio recordings, text messages, and
constant surveillance. Even their personal interactions are
colored by technology, as Seo-rae and Hae-jun often
communicate with the help of a translation app.
Acquired through a steady diet of Korean period dramas,
Seo-rae's Korean, which she herself describes as "inadequate," is
littered with archaic words and phrases, much to the fascination
of Hae-jun. The lovers revel in the messy excitement and
authenticity that their verboten romance provides them with, and
yet they prove incapable of moving beyond their repressed
longing, only ever consummating their relationship with a single,
albeit passionate, kiss, their love defined as much by what
remains hidden as by what they learn about each other. There is
an allure to not knowing, to never being able to fully grasp what's
playing out in someone else's head. What finds its earliest
expression in small linguistic speed bumps eventually culminates
in her securing a place in his memory as the ultimate object of
desire, an object permanently out of reach — a case destined to
remain unsolved forever. — FRED BARRETT
15

#11 — WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S
FAIR
Jane Schoenbrun
Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature is one designed to be watched on
a laptop, which if we’re being honest is the way that most
cinephiles watch movies most of the time, especially since the
pandemic began. But more than most films that have used the
laptop screen as a zeitgeist-y extension of found footage, We’re
All Going to the World’s Fair understands its strange asynchronous
effect. There is an immediacy in looking right back into Casey’s
(Anna Cobb) eyes, as if only a tilt of the head would reveal them
literally behind the screen, but there’s also a distance. Casey is
seen as they show themselves, not through a webcam capturing
everything, but
through the videos
they choose to
create. Fading are
the fears of
post-Snowden
surveillance; an
excess of
oversight almost
seems desirable
next to being left
alone with nothing,
where all you can do is talk into a void. It becomes clear Casey
isn’t looking back at all when they perform the ritual for the
titular world’s fair challenge, repeating “I want to go to the
world’s fair” three times — as with Bloody Mary or the Candyman
— into a different, more modern kind of mirror: a camera.
This challenge is supposed to summon some spirit or force that
will bring a powerful change from the inside out. It speaks to the
mixture of fear and desire for transformation felt through most
people’s teenage years, and, more specifically, by someone
whose transness has not quite reached the surface. Maybe it’s
just a fantasy, an alternative reality game in which you can
imagine the process of transition taken over for you. Or maybe it
has to be seen through the lens of horror because that’s the only
language that’s been given to describe these feelings. But the
fact that the question of Casey’s transness is left answered
suggests that it can’t be understood in these terms, that the
medium speaks louder than the message.
Casey is encouraged by this atomized community — who mostly
communicate through video, if at all — to document their
transformation. But to express these feelings is to dramatize
them, especially within the confines of this micro-genre of online
video, using passed-down horror tropes. In one video Casey
dances boisterously until they are possessed by a screaming fit
that disappears as suddenly as it came. They go straight back to
dancing in a way
that doesn’t quite
fit their edgy style,
that it would seem
strange for them to
film in the first
place. Whether
they’re conscious of
this performance or
not, it does seem
contrived. But this
is how social media
works, creating a performance of self-expression that doesn’t
allow the feelings being expressed to take form. Otherwise there
can be no more content to feed the algorithm, and in this case, to
create a deeper rabbit hole for the next person to slip into.
Another reason Schoenbrun doesn’t reveal whether or not Casey
is trans is so that there is only intuition and personal experience
to draw upon. By being alienated from Casey, the audience is
unmoored in a similar way that they are, left only with their own
suspicions, unsure if they’re only protection. That’s also why the
film doesn’t stay solely on-screen, it would give too clear a form.
None of this alienates from the film itself; it makes it more
enticing, drawing deeper, and more personally, into that
16 4

downward spiral. Like the black screen in the film’s YouTube
analogue that stays for half a beat too long before the hypnotic
wheel loads the next video, it separates in a way that only blurs
everything further together.
In the drift between algorithmically chosen videos, Casey
discovers one from another player called JLB warning that they
are in danger. He’s an older man whose motivations are as
ambiguously predatory to Casey as they are to himself (the
internet’s obfuscation also allows malice to go unspoken, left to
express itself subconsciously without the fear of being labeled).
And so by cuts to his side of the screen, Schoenbrun makes it
strikingly clear that what’s shown of Casey is much like what JLB
has seen: only a fragment filtered.
When they suddenly disappear from us
and from JLB, it, therefore, feels
incomplete. For one, it doesn’t seem
like Casey has anywhere else to go,
their small town is like any other
abandoned by capitalism. In evoking
the world’s fair, these huge expositions
celebrating nations’ grandest
advancements, the film recalls the
once-promised future of a prosperity
that never came, that was never going
to come. The screen is a mirror not just
to look at ourselves, but away from
anything else; to obscure the crumbling world around us, without
even a false promise of it getting better. — ESMÉ HOLDEN
#10 — PETITE MAMAN
Céline Sciamma
On a visit to her mother’s childhood home, a young girl befriends
another, and their friendship, tinged with a hint of magic, guides
her through a difficult turning point. At first glance, Céline
Sciamma’s follow-up to the remarkable Portrait of a Lady on Fire
looks like a stark change of pace, but closer inspection reveals
this delicate fairy tale is not just in communion with the film and
the rest of her oeuvre, but, in fact, a blossoming evolution.
Sciamma has always proven adept at capturing the tender heart
of youth in her work; from the awkwardness of emerging
sexuality in Water Lilies to the rending gender dysphoria of
Tomboy, Girlhood’s tug of war between family and identity, and
even Portrait’s rapturous awakening; all of her films can be seen
as comings of age of a different kind. They are united by acute
depictions of intimate inner worlds shared by these girls and
young women, hidden away from parents or figures of
patriarchal authority.
At times, Sciamma constructs these as dreamy physical spaces
where characters are free to be themselves — the pool in Water
Lilies, the hotel in Girlhood, the island in Portrait — and within
these liminal zones, the world’s stark rules bend to their whims,
allowing for powerful, if brief, moments of transgression and
self-actualization. In this, Petite Maman is no different, but for
one crucial respect: here, Sciamma breaks past the limits of
reality and pushes into the fantastic to express the heartache
buried within a young girl's imagination. The magic trick of Petite
Maman’s forest, commanded here with such ease and grace, has
drawn quick reference from the lush animated wonders of Hayao
Miyazaki, but a film from another Studio Ghibli director echoes
louder: Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s achingly beautiful When Marnie
Was There, playing like a perfect companion piece. Even more
intriguing is the thematic overlap with another of this year’s
17

est: Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, which similarly navigates both loss
and the thorny distance between parent and child.
The mother/daughter relationship at the heart of Petite Maman,
much like the father/daughter relationship in Aftersun, finds an
alternate means of expression and understanding leading their
respective pairs to heartfelt common ground. In Sciamma’s film,
the young girl Nelly, having just lost her grandmother, struggles
to process the loss magnified by watching her grief-stricken
mother withdraw. The forest behind the house becomes a space
for Nelly to not just play, but allow herself room to process the
looming distance building between her and her mother, and the
sense that her mother too may one day slip away. There, in that
liminal space, Nelly’s imagination forges a pathway to connect
with her mother in a direct way that would seem otherwise
impossible. This simple narrative, relaxed in its telling and
captured by Sciamma with unassuming naturalism and playful
nonchalance, is an elegant heartbreak.
This is perhaps the smallest and quietest of this year’s greats,
but there’s a reason that despite its April release, it has endured
in our collective memories all the way through to the end of
December. Its gorgeous simplicity and effortless evocation of
childhood places it alongside modern classics like Where Is the
Friends House?, belonging to a rare type of children’s film that is
profoundly insightful and deeply moving for both parent and
child. At its core, Petite Maman is about letting go and learning to
say goodbye, an act that doesn’t get any easier as we get older,
let alone when it comes to letting go of a parent. And so, as she
has done in film after film before this, Sciamma once again
carves a space for her characters to explore these fraught
emotions and pulls us in alongside them, because if by the end,
Nelly can see her mother clearly for who she is, there may be
some hope for us to open our eyes as well. — IGOR FISHMAN
#9 — JACKASS FOREVER
Jeff Tremaine
Jackass Forever shouldn’t work. It’s been a decade since our
golden boys have declared themselves too old for the franchise,
yet here they are for presumably one last hurrah. In that time, the
feral “I’ll take any drug handed to me” Steve-O hopped on the
wagon, ringleader Johnny Knoxville turned fifty, and the spirit of
Jackass (reduced in a MadTV sketch to a small child hitting his
genitals with a hammer while watching MTV) has diffused into
YouTube pranksters and two-bit imitators who are invariably
much meaner and much less funny. Bam Margera, the perfect
Jackass-er whose bizarre Satanic Little Lord Fauntleroy
costumes heavily influenced a young yours-truly, is missing,
18

thanks to a series of relapses and threats to the production team
continuing years after the death of his best friend and Jackass
regular Ryan Dunn. This is not the winning formula that made
Jackass the most successful non-narrative film in history.
But, though it arose out of skate magazine Big Brother, Jackass
never sold tickets based on skating or athletic prowess. Jackass
placed ever-so-loosely over Ehren’s most delicate region, is hit
with a cartoonish amount of force by professional athletes
(including MMA fighter Francis Ngannou whose punch is
compared to getting slammed by a car to a shaking Ehren). Part
of the pleasure of Jackass is the pure glee of seeing pure glee,
and every athlete seems very, very proud of themselves as Ehren
enters his crocodile death roll.
“Part of the pleasure of
Jackass is the pure glee
of seeing pure glee.
has always been a demented variety show with a deep love of
classic entertainment. Vaudeville, slapstick comedy, cartoons,
game shows, geek and freak shows, musicals, monster movies,
Candid Camera, and the simple pleasure of filming your friends
worrying that they’ve been hit in the testicles so hard that one
could very well be found across the room: these have all kept the
blood of the franchise pumping, and age is no barrier to putting
on the greatest show on earth.
Plenty of screen time is also given to the newcomers, all of whom
grew up on Jackass’s antics and know that flinching results in
another, likely more painful, take. The best of these tenderfoots
is one who wasn’t even originally cast: Davon Wilson’s father,
Dark Shark. A Gary Cooper disposition and post-prison-life
composure make Dark Shark the perfect straight man to our
gaggle of clowns, but the gags that bring out his fear of spiders
and vultures (who wouldn’t be afraid of a vulture that’s right
there?) initiate him into the crew. This is not the first time that
family members have made their way to a Jackass production
(April and Phil Margera are given special thanks here), proving
that love and care are central to the project, something the
nihilistic live-streaming imitators should note well.
A gray-haired Knoxville, once the man who would take the most
dangerous stunts when nobody else would (N.B. his producer
credit), now plays our impish barker and host, accidentally giving
the nut-whacking punishment to a correct answer in the quiz
show segment and orchestrating an inflatable punch to a
correctly nervous Eric André. That’s not to say that Knoxville’s
passive; he’s also keen to use their biggest budget yet in order to
remake classic bits that never worked in their DIY days, such as
igniting a fart underwater. (Thanks to a very pleased engineer
and an elaborate fart-catching gizmo, Paramount can consider
their money well-spent.) To his credit, Knoxville does perform the
most dangerous stunt in the movie, as the team yet again travels
to the same bullring featured in every Jackass movie for one last
bout with the bull; it results in the worst injury in Jackass history,
as well as Knoxville’s retirement from what he calls “big stunts.”
And perhaps the most memorable gag is Ehren McGhehey’s
repetition of the classic “cup test” wherein an athletic cup,
Though it may be the silliest film featured on this list, what other
films from this year put those behind the camera on screen?
They torture the below-the-liners, yes, but also celebrate them by
doing so. Legendary Jackass cameraman Lance Bangs once
again fights vomiting from the stench of the gross-out gags, and
everyone from producer Spike Jonze to the youngest PAs report
a sort of anxiety that only comes from working on the
prank-happy set of Jackass. Like Hal Needham’s Hooper and
Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it’s also a celebration
of stuntmen, that dying breed who once cared about the movies
so much that they would die for them. Finally, it’s the only film
that unironically vaunts love and friendship, those most
important simple qualities that, if lost, make a person, artwork,
or critique rudderless and without direction. Alone, a
Jackassateer falls, writhing in pain. Together, and scored to
Knoxville’s signature exasperated cackle, they get back up. One
more take. — ZACH LEWIS
19

#8 —IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE & THE
NOVELIST’S FILM
Hong Sang-soo
As ever, the pace of Hong Sang-soo’s film production outpaces
the capabilities of the international art house film circuit. The
result is three of his films making their US theatrical debuts this
year (although two of them saw their initial festival releases in
2021), while his second 2022 festival film will have to wait for
next year’s awards season (where it will presumably be
competing with at least one more Hong, rumored to be ready for
the early year festivals). His first eligible film, Introduction, surely
saw some support in this poll, but it is In Front of Your Face (from
late 2021) and The Novelist’s Film (from early 2022) that place
among the very best films of the year. Both are among the finest
examples of what I’ve been calling Late Hong, the films made
since 2018 which see him move past the jumbled romances and
even more jumbled realities of his Early and Middle periods into a
more open embrace of old age, spirituality, true love, and death.
producer on several projects in the 1960s. Lee plays an actress
who comes home after a long time away. The first half of the
film sees her visit various spots and engage in the kind of
awkward conversations that are a Hong staple, small talk about
coffee and real estate and such that masks a deep melancholy.
The second half sees Lee meet with a film director (played by
Late Hong avatar Kwon Hae-hyo). Their conversation is full of
references to Hong’s own work (the Kangwon Province setting of
his second feature, a shot from The Day After in which Lee is
suggested to have played the part Kim Min-hee played in that
film, etc.), and the director wants very much to make a film with
Lee. But of course, what he really wants is sex. Lee, though, lives
by a kind of mantra, repeated at the beginning and end of the
movie: that everything is full of grace, an admonition to live in
the moment, neither the past nor the future, but with what is in
front of her face. In the end, this wisdom leads her to the only
appropriate response to the director’s illicit desires (he is, of
course, married) and the moral quandary he agonizes over: she
laughs.
In Front of Your Face introduces a new star to the Hong stock
company, actress Lee Hye-young. A longtime star of Korean film,
television, and theater, Lee is the daughter of director Lee
Man-hee, with whom Hong’s mother Jeon Ok-sook worked as a
The Novelist’s Film sees Lee return as the eponymous novelist.
Initially she visits an old friend, a bookstore owner, for the now
customary introductory awkwardness. Then another meeting
with Kwon, again playing a director, for some barely contained
20

hostility (apparently he was supposed to adapt one of her books,
but didn’t follow through, though it may as well be residual
antipathy from In Front of Your Face). But then, walking through
the park, Lee meets Kim Minhee, playing a mostly retired actress.
Kim and Lee hit it off immediately, and after meeting Kim’s
nephew, an aspiring filmmaker, Lee decides to make a movie of
her own, starring Kim and her husband. The plot will be a generic
romance, but the charge in the film will come from our seeing
two people who are very much in love in real life on screen
together. A jump ahead in time takes us to the film’s screening at
a local theater, where it will play for an audience of Kim alone
(much as she watched movies more or less solitary in The Woman
Who Ran and Right Now, Wrong Then).
The film that then plays might be the film that Lee made, but
then again it might not (as always, everything is contingent in a
Hong movie). It plays a little like the coda to Abbas Kiarostami’s
Taste of Cherry, with Kim on-screen gathering and arranging a
bouquet of flowers while she sings and chats with what appears
to be the cameraman (presumably Hong himself). She asks if he’s
shooting in black and white or color. He says black and white;
she suggests color. Actress and cameraman whisper “I love you”
to each other, and the film shifts to color. In In Front of Your Face,
as in many Hongs past, film is a stand-in for, or at least a means
to, sex. In The Novelist’s Film, for a few brief moments, film is love
itself, which is not necessarily the same thing at all. — SEAN
GILMAN
#7 — AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
James Cameron
The term “tech Romanticism” is a paradox, but James Cameron’s
Avatar films are best defined by this seemingly self-contradicting
concept. Indeed, both Avatar and its visionary sequel, The Way of
Water, are fascinating works of art precisely because they are so
bound up in tensions and dissonances. Sometimes these
tensions are less than easy to resolve; for example, in both
pictures the representational politics of appropriation bump up
against anti-imperialist, environmentalist, and anti-colonialist
ideologies, and these problems warrant serious critical
discussion. At almost all other times, though, the Avatar films’
interior conflicts offer excellent points of entry for critical
thought.
Consider both films’ aesthetic and philosophical engagements
with the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth century Romantic
movement, which presents a riposte not only to the Industrial
Revolution, but also to excesses of technological advancement
more broadly (look no further than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
[1818] for a text soaked in Romantic opposition to scientific
hubris). Cameron’s Avatar pictures align with the Romantic ethos
in many ways: they celebrate anti-Enlightenment spiritual belief,
denigrate the industrial destruction of ecosystems, and bask in
mystically William Blake-esque awe at the natural world. At the
same time, though, they are helmed by an auteur whose entire
body of work is defined by the growth and demonstration of
technology, which culminates astonishingly in The Way of Water.
The Avatar movies are almost entirely defined by the sheer
spectacle of immersive images, rendered by the development of
obsessively implemented, futuristic special effects. They are
paeans to the organic, but they are born almost completely from
the digital.
As such, attempting conventional critical analysis of The Way of
Water feels counterintuitive. It’s an anti-rational artwork in the
purest and most authentically Romantic sense, and this is
integral to its function. The plot serves as a navigational tool for
21

aesthetic majesty rather than vice versa. In other words, image
doesn’t serve story here — image is the substance. Experienced
in 3D and played on a massive screen at the proper high
framerate (technically a projected variable frame rate) with
powerful speakers, The Way of Water reveals nothing less than
unprecedented possibility for its medium. This is a showcase of
contemporary cinema at its furthest possible aesthetic limits,
bringing the notion of immersion into exhilaratingly new and
vivid places.
To experience The Way of Water is to wade into a sci-fi-smeared,
hyperreal Blake painting. It’s about the weight, movement, and
texture of imaginary creatures rendered just as real (if not
realer) than the live-action human actors with whom they
interact. It’s about the intricate fictional world of Pandora,
constructed by Cameron and his army of gifted animators as a
rippling, fantasy-boldened mirror of Earth, and as a canvas for
urgent calls to eco-activism, decolonization, and veganism. The
film stuns with its sprawling, elaborate, gloriously orchestrated
action sequences and its meticulously drawn vistas: vibrantly
forested landscapes, bioluminescent spectacles on land and
underwater, exhilarating flights around floating mountains, and a
newly introduced, beautifully alien oceanic dreamscape.The Way
of Water, then, is fixated on its own vision of the natural sublime,
which often recalls Edmund Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), a key text for the Romantics that describes our
amazement when confronting natural majesty, but also
emphasizing the element of terror imbedded in that amazement.
The film’s view of the spectacular nonhuman world feeds into its
intense empathy for nonhuman animals, and into its indictment
of anthropocentrism. Its richest and most interesting character
might be the gigantic cetacean creature (a “tulkun”) named
Payakan, truly an object of sublimity — both magnificent and
terrifying. The Way of Water does something radical by granting
an animal so fundamentally “unhuman” such depth and pathos.
Cameron uses Payakan’s tragic backstory, selfhood, and
emotionality to deliberate ends, drawing the audience into a
drama that recalls our real-world whaling industry and the
endemic horrors therein.
If The Way of Water is a crucial work of tech Romanticism, then
another of its richest central dissonances is that between past
and future: it imagines a world that stands a chance against
modernity’s most brutal and oppressive machinations, thus
22

situating itself in the past, but it also uses its genre modality to
speculate a future that exceeds postmodernity’s politically
flattening failures. As in George Lucas’ Star Wars films, The Way of
Water’s plot and characterizations are broad and familiar, driven
by mythic tropes and archetypes, deliberately maximizing on the
“ancestral” collective psyche to help envision possibilities in
futurity. There is value in aesthetics alone, and as an aesthetic
object, The Way of Water is transcendent. — MIKE THORN
#6 — EO
Jerzy Skolimowski
Plenty has already been written about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's
very strange, often exhilarating new film. And while the director
himself has confirmed what most viewers detected immediately
— that EO is a loose adaptation of Bresson's Au hasard, Balthasar
— there are actually similarities to another Bresson film. In
L'Argent, Bresson follows the movement of a counterfeit
500-franc note as it's passed from person to person. This is, of
course, the essential structure of Balthasar as well, but EO helps
to highlight this similarity. Foregrounding the movement of
objects is a fundamental premise of many of Bresson's films, but
EO focuses on one of the key philosophical postulates inherent in
this approach. The donkey is private property.
We first see EO cast out of his own limited view of paradise — a
circus where he performs with Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska),
who treats him with love and respect. The reason EO has to leave
is because the circus management has defaulted on its bank
loans, and EO, along with the other circus animals, is seized as
collateral. This is not just a narrative problem, although it
certainly generates a sad irony. Animal rights activists are seen
protesting the abuse of animals in circuses, and they are not
wrong, but EO was living his best life under the big top. His
particular circumstances cannot be accounted for when
protesters are trying to improve the lot of "animals" in general.
The real crime, then, is not that EO is here rather than there. It's
that, like the banknote or the wallets in Pickpocket, he is a unit of
exchange, the trajectory of his life determined by human
economic factors he can never understand. He exists in a
23
8

twilight between subject and object. He is property, but he is
alive. (Incidentally, in his essay "Art as Technique," Viktor
Shklovsky cites a story by Tolstoy in which the narration, from a
horse's point of view, muses on the mystifying question of
ownership.) And so, like Balthasar, EO is forced to be a passive
observer to his own fate.
We see animals in movies and TV all the time, and we usually
think nothing of it. That's largely because cinematic grammar
regards them as plot devices, as instrumentally defined as if they
were working on the farm. Simply by using reaction shots and
point of view, Skolimowski sutures us into EO's perspective,
demanding that we empathize with him. As we recall from Cast
Away, Robert Zemeckis was able to humanize a volleyball. There's
nothing so strange about this. But when we are inserted into EO's
point of view, we cannot avoid
occupying it from our uniquely
human perspective. So, when EO
is being transported to his next
owner, we see him gaze out the
window at a herd of horses
running free beside the road. We
cannot know how EO feels about
this, or if he even notices. But we feel for him, regarding the
scene as an unavoidable representation of freedom vs. slavery.
Like Bresson, Skolimowski recognizes that animals can function
as mirrors of our own subjectivity. We don't identify with EO so
much as identify at him, allowing his mute, stoic plight to reflect
our own values back at us. (Eisenstein once wrote that the
abattoir scene in Strike, meant to parallel the Czar's butchering
of the peasants, didn't play well in the countryside, where animal
slaughter is an unsurprising fact of life. It’s fair to wonder how EO
might play down on the farm.) Unlike a human protagonist, EO
elicits both our sympathy and our recognition that it's never
really possible to know "the other" at all.
This being a 2022 production, Skolimowski understands that he
cannot simply remake Balthasar. EO is not just a donkey story
but a story about seeing and feeling, interrogating the ways that
cinema has historically encouraged or discouraged our empathy.
There are numerous cinematic allusions in EO, some of which are
very much about cinematic identification. One scene mimics the
final shot of The Searchers, where the subject is forced to remain
outside of society. Another sequence, in which EO travels by
night along a river shimmering in an eerie, consecrated
moonlight, recalls a similar scene in The Night of the Hunter. Both
of these speak to cinema's capacity for isolating the perceived
outsider.
But other sequences are more cinematically primal. Several
shots of EO and a white horse he encounters, cantering in a
circle in a training ground, resemble the motion studies of
Muybridge, something Skolimowski amplifies with a pulsating
“The real crime, then, isn’t that
EO is here rather than there. It’s
that, like [L’Argent’s] banknote or
the wallets in Pickpocket, he is a
unit of exchange.
flicker. Another late scene,
with EO wandering down the
central aisle of a stable, uses
undulating lighting to replicate
Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity.
These moments disrupt
empathy, replacing it with an
examination of cinema's raw
data, the illusion of movement that is the precondition for
identification, and also refutes it in favor of a stark, materialist
look at the world.
These scenes, like several others, are demarcated by a crimson
filter, something which forcibly removes us from EO's diegetic
space. At first, these red segments seem to be EO's memories, or
his impassive gaze out at the world around him. But at other
times, the red scenes do not correspond to any available point of
view, except the camera's and perhaps God's. In this way,
Skolimowski asserts the camera's helplessness with regard to EO.
Neither we nor the film can intercede on his behalf, and so
Skolimowski asks us to exist alongside the donkey in a
consideration of our own smallness. It strands us all at the
intersection of the mundane and the sublime. — MICHAEL
SICINSKI
24

#5 — STARS AT NOON
Claire Denis
Stars At Noon begins as encompassing, in
media res as a Claire Denis film can be: a supple, slightly
menacing Tindersticks score, shards of locational imagery, transactional sex,
the internal rhythms of a protagonist only half-registered beneath a layer of caprice. Even if
we’re familiar with the methods of this director three decades and change into her remarkable
career, Denis unglues the most basic of filmmaking tenets from one another so that the ground is
always shifting, fumbling cuts, camerawork that is seasick one moment, stately the next, the
nigh-astonishing John C. Reilly cameo, and stilted line reads pulling us in closer as much as they push us
away. Taken from one of Denis Johnson’s more flawed texts (The Stars At Noon, to be exact), Stars At Noon
forgoes scene-setting for a more abstract languorousness, the relationship between deposed “journalist” Trish
Johnson (Margaret Qualley) and British oil-(con?)man Daniel Dehaven (Joe Alwyn) lubricated by rum and carnality, a
runaway train of a union that only slows down for earthly pleasures, even when surrounded by a contemporaneous
transposition of the Nicaraguan revolution.
25

The feat here, beyond all the beloved Denisisms, is the sympathy derived by way of total stupidity: Qualley and Dehaven are the
flummoxed, underhandedly careerist white foreigners, and their fate is practically sealed from their first encounter in a mostly
emptied-out hotel bar. Their chance of endurance, much less survival, is in perpetual flux, until the screen goes dark at the end. With
no tangible stability, these two retreat into one another, while simultaneously trekking across a landscape of hotels and jungle to
reach the Costa Rican border; the more they acquaint themselves with one another’s bodies, the more inscrutable the motivations get.
If Stars At Noon is an argument for anything, it’s unequivocal love without trust, a diaphanous entity, which can dissolve with the
slightest push from a third-act Benny Safdie. The critical shorthand for describing Denis has always fallen short: at a certain point,
words like “tactile” and “intimate” lose both their purchase and purpose when flanked by heady inscrutability. The last thing the
transient Trish and Daniel should feel in the company of one another is safety, and yet, Denis seems at least partially convinced by the
two — touchingly so — telegraphed by a certain mutual perseverance. If one gives up, the whole thing will topple; of course it’s
inevitable, but you still hope that somehow they’ll make it. — PATRICK PREZIOSI
26

#4 — TÁR
Todd Field
Following his fictional and peculiar protagonist Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the ambitious and eminent U-Haul lesbian conductor of the
prestigious Berliner Philharmoniker, Todd Field’s third directorial effort is a rare depiction of inside and behind the classical music
scene: a highbrow artistic world, usually male-dominated, triumphed by some of the most respected maestros (Bernstein, Karajan,
Abbado, etc). But it’d be insufficient if we consider TÁR as merely a film about music. In fact, the greatness of TÁR is that it consciously
interweaves an attentive soundscape as an integrated part of both its narrative and aesthetical rhetoric, a highly-refined audiovisual
experience that is most essentially conceived as a piece of music itself and reveals its entire spectrum of emotions and meanings
through its gradual and patient becoming. But as much as the minuscule acoustics play a crucial role in constituting TÁR’s exceptional
ambiance — an exemplary combination of subtle sounds and noises with the most profound silences in accordance with Lydia’s
surroundings and subjectivity (most notably during her obsessive and paranoid illusions) — Field’s visual virtuosity in composing,
harmonizing, and arranging his elegant and eloquent elitist aesthetic (specifically in vivid correlation to the architectural spaces
present in every scene) and his unique orchestration of glances (of passion, jealousy, and heartbreak) proves a delicacy. TÁR’s
crystalline imagery, in a direct response to the film’s overall atmosphere, embraces a clearly conceived color palette: the cold hues,
especially, and the blacks and whites (also recognizable in Lydia’s clothing) recalling a piano’s clavier, all exhibit a certain minimalist
stylishness as they reveal Lydia’s somber, almost clinical interiority in contrast to the warmer colors used during the relaxed,
passionate evenings between Lydia and her life-partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss) or her ignored and
mistreated assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant). Perhaps, as Lydia
states in her Juilliard masterclass — “Good
music can be as
27

ornate as a cathedral or bare aspotting shed” — it’s fair to understand Field’s work here simultaneously as a fine balance between both
maximalist and minimalist strategies (compare the two restaurant scenes in Berlin and NYC, for instance), one that through tranquil
observation moves alongside his (anti)heroine’s state of being from tonality to atonality.
It’s thus possible to describe TÁR in quite a similar way as Friedrich Nietzsche once explained the art of the ancient Greek tragedians to
be the perfect fusion of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses: the former as cerebral, harmonious, transparent, and the latter as
passionate, ecstatic, chaotic. On the other hand, as the looking glasses in Field’s mise-en-scene indicate, it’s a film of continuous
counterpoints, dilemmatic dualities — specifically, classical music within the postmodernist age of Wikipedia, social media, cancel
culture, etc. — and occasional mirrorings, one of the most striking of which can be found in two different car scenes: first, with Lydia
and Francesca, and then, with the desperate maestro and young Russian cellist Olga (Sophie Kauer), who among all of Lydia’s affairs
holds extra significance since she both reflects the ill-fated romance which supposedly inspired Mahler’s 5th Symphony and recalls
Aschenbach’s fatal attraction for the ethereal, juvenile Tadzio in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. It’s as if there’s a rupture between
Lydia’s true self and her persona — her frequent jogging and driving in her luxurious Porsche suggests that she’s constantly running
from herself and a haunting sense of guilt that lingers after her ex-mentee’s suicide — and behind her ostensibly stable and clearly
manipulative facade we get glimpses of a defenseless, awkwardly childlike adult. It’s no wonder, then, that in the final act she finds
herself revisiting her childhood home, before heading to the green landscapes and South Asia (markedly different from a gray and
autumnal Berlin), ultimately conducting music for teenage cosplay audiences. The grandeur of TÁR as meticulous psychological
character study and philosophical scrutinization of our modern-day society comes from its gradual expansion from everyday
questioning of one’s identity to more essential existential concerns, while it's inexplicable beauty lies in Field’s tuning of
emotion through which his megalithic structure finds its culmination. — AYEEN FOROOTAN
28

#3 — THE FABELMANS
Steven Spielberg
For an oeuvre so relentlessly dedicated to (and associated
with) a commercial cinema, full of thrills and cheers, Steven Spielberg’s
fantastical and earthly worlds alike have always carried an undercurrent of pain. His latest
film, The Fabelmans, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man, foregrounds this searing
emotion across the few forces that have defined his mammoth shadow on the American film industry: his awe at the
power of the moving image, his parents’ divorce, and his Jewish heritage.
It’s certainly no mistake that The Fabelmans possesses only Spielberg’s fourth writing credit (shared with Tony Kushner), as his first
three entries all rank among his most evidently personal and feed into their successor’s DNA: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about
a man who forsakes his family for a spectacular adventure; Poltergeist, concerning the spectral histories menacing a suburban home;
and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which brazenly mixes science-fiction fabulism with Oedipal reveries.
A similar level of daring animates The Fabelmans, necessarily transforming what could be a nostalgic evocation of movie magic into
something far knottier. Even something as simple as the trick that his stand-in Sammy Fabelman (an uncannily vivid Gabriel LaBelle)
uses to simulate a grenade explosion is thrown into doubt by the discerning viewer, a question of whether the veteran director added
a little something extra despite the air of amateurism. The opening scene, a recreation of Spielberg’s first experience in a movie
theater — equal parts wonder and terror, more real than real — is followed by a scene of Sammy in bed, trying to calm himself with the
dull thrum and green glow of an oscilloscope; much later, that sound and image will accompany the last moments of his grandmother,
in sync with the pulse he can see in her veins immediately before she dies.
29

Such privileged images and dramatically ironic touches help structure The Fabelmans, which could come across as neat were its gaze
not so sprawling, were Spielberg not willing to dive down rabbit holes into his past (real or imagined). Case in point: two exhortations
by near-mythic figures — in a film already dominated by Michelle Williams’s deliberately stylized performance as Sammy’s mercurial,
otherworldly mother Mitzi — speak both in unison and at cross-purposes. Sammy’s lion-tamer great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) stresses
that the artist will be torn in two by art and family; John Ford (brilliantly embodied by David Lynch, in one of the greatest bits of stunt
casting of the century) begins his abbreviated conversation with the budding director by exclaiming that the movie business will tear
him in two. Two old hands, one justly described “the greatest film director who ever lived” (an appellation that movingly rings true for
both the signifier and the signified) and the other a possibly real, possibly fictional perennial outsider; together they reach toward the
balance of art and commerce that has provided Spielberg with some of his greatest successes and most vehement criticism. Boris’
warning becomes a test that gets applied to practically every scene to follow; Ford’s bitter reflection is left unaddressed but hangs in
the air, even managing to render the jubilant ending and its sublime meta-joke with a slight foreboding, maybe even regret.
Second-guessing and the unknown lie everywhere in The Fabelmans, so many little threads and insinuations that are ultimately
unanswered. Burt Fabelman, as embodied by Paul Dano with ultimate poise, generosity, and sad fatalism as a counterbalance to
Williams’ pronounced vivaciousness, is perhaps the most poignant figure of all. Sammy bases his greatest triumph, Escape to
Nowhere, on his father’s war stories, something which the elder doesn’t comment on, instead choosing to throw himself headlong into
his electronics and computers. In a relative paucity of screentime, Spielberg sketches out a storyline that comes within striking
distance of The Magnificent Ambersons, capturing a genius ushering in the future which will have consequences both positive and
negative. Sammy (and Spielberg), of course, is no George Amberson Minafer, and there’s very little comeuppance that he deserves. But,
despite the fact that Burt, not Mitzi, gets to bestow the final blessing on the genius-in-the-making, it’s hard not to recall that his
invention will one day help birth the systemic degradation of the industry his son has worked so hard to maintain.
It is to The Fabelmans’ credit that such considerations are both text and subtext, that its ideas about creativity and the march of time
are so hammered home amid an exhilarating and touching experience, that the most sobering and tragic ramifications appear only in
hindsight, when looked upon from a distant vantage point. If that isn’t movie magic, what is? — RYAN SWEN
30

#2 — BENEDICTION
Terence Davies
The biography, an imagined communion with the living in
recognition of the dead, is often a consecration of meaning, a
way of laying to rest the ambiguities and uncertainties of futures
now past. One imagines events, having taken concrete shape,
now woven and engraved into the narrative stone of posterity;
and biographers, for the most part, work within the margins of
an already predestined space, rendering the historical lucid and
the personal tragic — not in the purely cataclysmic sense of
tragedy, but with a pathos cognizant of life’s perpetual and
unyielding finitude. Biopics embellish this distinction even
further: their pictorial medium serves as an outsider’s
voyeuristic gaze into time already past, while the pointillistic
gathering of sounds, images, and words all suggest time as lived,
projected from the resolute determinism of fact and onto the
living dynamism of the future. What attracts the gaze of the
present viewer, more so than words alone, is the cinematic
interplay of words and experiences that constitutes a biopic’s
convocation of living and dead: the dead recite their pages, and
the living relive them.
In Terence Davies’ Benediction, the dead hold similar sway as
conduit for the aims and afflictions of a previous age.
Dramatizing the life and times of the English war poet Siegfried
Sassoon (Jack Lowden) from his military service in World War I to
his conversion to Catholicism in old age, Benediction imbibes the
poet’s lifelong search for higher meaning amidst a prevailing
senselessness. Noted for his valor as an officer — for which he
was awarded the Military Cross — but more famous for voicing
his antipathy towards what he deemed “a war of aggression and
conquest,” Sassoon escaped the firing squad but was consigned
instead to psychiatric observation at a hospital, where he formed
a brief if defining relationship with his contemporary and poet,
Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson). The subsequent post-war
years saw Sassoon enter and be entrenched within the roaring
beau monde, engaging in trysts and heartbreak with its prickly,
31

lavish characters, Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) among others. But the time
passes mercilessly, and all the sensuality of life — in loving and in poetry — will soon leave Sassoon behind,
stranded along the road to middle-aged perdition and cloaked in the twilight embrace of a love “that dare not
speak its name.”
Benediction, then, is a work steeped in muted regret, a regret over a life not quite lived and over possible lives not
quite known; unlike Owen, who died one week prior to the war’s end, and unlike the many members of high society
who chased and conquered Romanticism, Sassoon’s legacy as a master of both words and hearts dwindled in the
decades that followed, a stasis that seems, to our modern eyes, almost antithetical toward the progressive tides
of history. “Since 1918, your poetry has gone from the sublime to the meticulous,” a spiteful Ivor brandishes.
Fuelled with a richness for being but scorned by the acerbic cynicism of beauty, Sassoon retreats into embittered
solitude, betraying his heart for the enviable peace of society by marrying a woman, Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips), and
settling down. A half-century past the film’s opening — depicting Igor Stravinsky’s entreatment to Modernism in a
performance of The Rite of Spring — we find the couple (now played by Peter Capaldi and Gemma Jones, respectively) in
their wintry years, strained by the silences they once basked in during the time of mortar and trench fighting.
Yet the film proves more than a straightforward biography of Sassoon; in many ways, it mirrors Davies’ own. The aesthetic
inner worlds of poet and painter — for Davies, more than filmmaking, paints his images with stark, indelible memory — share
the joy and burden of loneliness, pleasurable when constructing the persona of genius but painful when critiquing it. More
tellingly, the denial of gay desire (a recurrent theme in Davies’ overwhelmingly beautiful oeuvre of his childhood) worms its way
into Benediction’s center, a miasma of gazes and cloudy afternoons through which the aging biographers examine their lives and
only partially fulfill Søren Kierkegaard’s dictum, that life “can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Through a blend of dissolves — archival footage of the war interspersed with flashbacks and fast-forwards — and digital
manipulation, Davies strips away space and time to reposition memory’s ever-present place in the imagination: memory nostalgic,
and memory ominous, of the retroactive representation of the inevitable once unknown.
More than his autobiographical trilogy, for which Davies is arguably most well known, Benediction displaces sentimental reverie for a
wounded one, tempered with dyspeptic conversations and frosty exchanges which, upon Sassoon’s release from duty, comprise the
bulk of the film. The whittling of the years down to the razor wit of Modernism and bourgeois indolence, trifles by idealism’s heroic
young side, lends the film an air of mournful weariness: to what end did pacifism, or the pugnacious battles of young hedonism in its
thirties, lead after all? Benediction’s stylistic realization of psychological interiority, through quotations of Sassoon’s own poetry, is an
immense undertaking staid in ambition and sorrowful in actualization, unpacking with deep feeling the eternal quiet passion of the
poet’s earthly journey. When he converses with God at the altar, enjoining Him to speak, it is a moment of clarity in a sea of noisy
silence, but clarity is all the blessing Sassoon, and by extension Davies, may hope to achieve. Thus Benediction, in committing to its
subject’s life, understands that the enduring place of the ephemeral, despite all of life’s perceived glories, is here to stay. Sassoon,
tellingly, in a conversation with his son who states: “Most people live for the moment. You live for eternity.” “Don’t say that. [...]
Because I’m afraid I might believe it.” — MORRIS YANG
32

#1 — CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
David Cronenberg
The great mad scientist of body horror has returned after a long absence, just in time to bear witness to a world irrevocably altered in
profoundly disturbing ways. It’s been eight long years since David Cronenberg’s last feature film, the unfairly maligned Maps to the
Stars; difficulties finding funding, a scuttled streaming project, and the death of his spouse all suggested the very real possibility of a
surprising retirement. Thankfully, this proved to be only a hiatus, and Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future finds the master overflowing
with ideas and concepts, drawing influence from his own extensive body of work while forging ahead and trying vigorously to make
sense of this ever-elusive “now.” The film is a collection of fascinating contradictions — an ostensibly futuristic setting that appears
to have been filmed in old, abandoned factories and bunkers (actually Greece), an espionage tale that makes no sense, an emphasis
on tactile, physical touch coupled with a distant, almost hollow mise en scène. Typical for Cronenberg, there’s curiosity tinged with
disgust at our squishy insides, so fragile and malleable. There was much chatter about so-called “late style” making the rounds on
social media this year, and if that slippery term is ultimately too vague to be useful as a broad critical rubric, there are nonetheless
unmistakable similarities between this and Ferrara's Zeroes and Ones, Argento's Dark Glasses, and Hill's Dead For a Dollar — all fairly
small-scaled but ambitious projects from aged auteurs made cheaply under various Covid restrictions. It’s a terrifying new zeitgeist,
full of mysterious potentialities.
33

In Cronenberg’s conception of a hypothetical near-future, ecological disaster has progressed unabated while mankind has begun
experiencing “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome,” an increasingly common disorder resulting in the spontaneous manifestation of new
organs inside the body. Humanity as a whole has also begun losing the capacity to feel pain, creating a new culture of body
modification and other extreme endeavors. Crimes begins with a prologue of sorts, as we meet a young boy who eats plastic and is
promptly smothered to death by his mother. We then turn to Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, playing a hunched over, asthmatic Rene
Falconeti), a performance artist who is renowned for his ability to produce the aforementioned organs. He works with Caprice (Lea
Seydoux), a former surgeon who cuts these foreign objects out of him in highly ritualized exhibits in front of a rapt audience. The duo
wind up meeting two employees of the National Organ Registry, an organization run by Wippet (Don McKellar) and his assistant Timlin
(Kristen Stewart, in a bizarre, frequently hilarious performance). Eventually, we are introduced to Lang (Scott Speedman), the father of
the dead boy, and Detective Cope (Welket Bungue), who is investigating the shady underground group that Lang runs.
342

This is all fairly vague and opaque, a series of
encounters that border on the abstract. Indeed,
Cronenberg seems interested in narrative only
inasmuch as it allows him to convey some key
philosophical ideas and display all manner of
delightfully grotesque production design. The
performers all engage to varying degrees in
halting, even monotone speaking patterns,
awkwardly enunciating words while indulging
strange mannerisms and gestures. It’s equal
parts off-putting and comedic, and further
distances the proceedings from any sense of
“realism.” In true Cronenberg fashion, Saul sleeps
in a bed that looks like a womb, complete with
tentacled umbilical cords that attach to his skin.
There’s a feeding chair that looks like the skeletal
remains of one of the Mugwumps from Naked
Lunch, and a sarcophagus that’s actually an
automated autopsy machine. A few themes
emerge in all this: namely the nature of art and
what it means to create, as well as what human
evolution means in the face of ongoing
environmental catastrophe. In other words, in a
poisoned world, wouldn’t a human capable of
ingesting plastic be more “fit,” in the Darwinian
sense?
It’s all so claustrophobic and disorienting, just
skirting along the line of what a “normal” film
should look like without actually conforming to
that ideal. This is style stripped to the barest
minimum, Cronenberg honing in on the essence
of each scene to convey an idea and tossing out
the rest. There’s still plenty of viscera here for
those looking for wounds and flayed flesh, even if
Cronenberg contextualizes it in more intimate,
less horrific emotions. Echoes abound of Crash
(pleasure & pain commingling), Videodrome
(vaginal abdomens & old CRT TVs), Dead Ringers
35

(the tools here resemble the gynecological “instruments for
operating on mutant women”), and especially eXistenZ (a labyrinthine
conspiracy plot that ultimately adds up to nothing; fleshy, squishy bio-mechanical
controllers). But somehow, none of this ever feels threatening. Indeed, most of the characters
frequently discuss the nature of consent, so much so that when two lovers embrace under an automated slicing machine, it feels not
horrific but tender (hilariously, distributor Neon tried to market the film using the image of a man covered head to toe in ears, surely
trying to entice horror fans. In the film, the “ear man” is actually mocked as a try-hard poseur).
It's fitting that Crimes of the Future is InRO’s number one film of 2022, a year which finds society still struggling with an ongoing
pandemic, an increasingly dire ecological outlook, and new, hitherto unknown physical maladies — Cronenberg couldn't have known
before embarking on this feature that its release would roughly coincide with the discovery of microplastics not only in the human
body, but even in the blood of unborn babies. In an interview with critic Amy Taubin in the Summer 2022 issue of Art Forum,
Cronenberg refers to Mortensen's character as “a body that is trying to adjust to new inputs and intakes... your body is constantly
responding to the environment.” For her part, Taubin suggests that the film's setting, Athens, Greece, is notable because “what you see
is the crumbling relics of the cradle of Western civilization.” Both sentiments feel particularly pertinent to our present times, with so
many old edifices giving way to a “new normal.” The film ends on an autopsy, the results of which might reveal the next stage of
human evolution while releasing Saul from the pain of his existence. Cronenberg leaves it ambiguous, choosing to linger over a cryptic
smile and a fade to black. It's arguably his most cautiously hopeful ending, a vision of ecstatic transcendence in the face of imminent
catastrophic change that might nonetheless herald a bold new step forward for humanity. “My interest in the body is because, for me,
it's an inexhaustible subject — and of the essence of understanding the human condition,” Cronenberg told critic Adam Nayman in a
wide-ranging New Yorker interview earlier this year. Long live the new flesh, indeed. — DANIEL GORMAN
36

HONORABLE MENTIONS
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE
BLOODSHED
Laura Poitras
“Poitras, then, aims to use the quite large
scope of her documentary to thread this
needle: To show how Goldin’s life has been
defined by an interconnected series of
public and private crises, and how at
seemingly every turn our institutions have
failed and Goldin’s trauma (expressed
through her art) has accumulated…
[Poitras] has a knack for turning complex
legal and political minutiae into taut,
procedural-oriented cinema.” — SAM C.
MAC
A NEW OLD PLAY
Qiu Jiongjiong
“In a sharp break from the documentaries
that have made up Qiu’s work to date, A
New Old Play instead opts for an approach
that emphasizes artificiality and
stylization of these spaces of the past and
the supernatural. Seemingly every scene
takes place on a set, each crafted to
maximize what feels like a handcrafted
quality to the film, where the distressed
and flat personality permeates the
backdrops of man-made structures and
landscapes alike. ” — RYAN SWEN
ONE FINE MORNING
Mia Hansen-Løve
“Hansen-Løve’s latest production, One Fine
Morning, has the director reestablishing
the rhythms and pacing essential to her
best work… [the film] concerns itself with
a significant swath of its protagonist’s life,
but moves through it with a sort of
deliberate casualness that condenses and
approximates our real world relationship
with memory and time’s passage.” — M.G.
MAILLOUX
AFTER YANG
Kogonada
“After Yang, in this light, arrives with great
pathos and acuity, its inert yet subtly
shifting frames echoing the almost
metaphysical Zen of Columbus. Whereas
the latter’s careful compositions and
employment of negative space offered
sociological and personal ruminations on
change and continuity, Kogonada now
explores in greater detail the technological
subject: its subjectivity, consciousness,
and fundamental place within greater
civilization..” — MORRIS YANG
ELVIS
Baz Luhrmann
“Elvis is, on its surface, empty spectacle
thematically concerned with a rather
specific breed of American excess located
and perpetuated within this country’s
cultural iconography… It’s often thrilling,
but also exhausting, usually at the exact
same time, and so boredom can never
really set in. In short, it’s a Luhrmann
picture, bearing all of the baggage and
pleasures that come with that headline.” —
PAUL ATTARD
MR. BACHMANN AND HIS
CLASS
Maria Speth
“It’s an experience we all know, the
exhaustion of classroom time, as edifying
and educational and revelatory as it can
often be. And so, there will likely be a
point in Speth’s film that viewers will have
to trust in Mr. Bachmann’s lively,
charismatic presence to re-engage,
another hour or two to go, an opportunity
to feel and explore more if one can settle
back into the film’s casual lessons and
mostly rewarding rhythm.” — AYEEN
FOROOTAN
EL GRAN MOVIMIENTO
Kiro Russo
“Gradually, as the film proceeds down its
trajectory of bodily decay, the ruptures in
the carefully drawn aesthetic become
ever more frequent and unexpected,
culminating in a furiously and
rhythmically edited sequence that
appears to mix footage from both films,
along with a flurry of faces and streets.”
— RYAN SWEN
OUTSIDE NOISE
Ted Fendt
“Fendt’s latest feature, Outside Noise,
goes even further in removing itself from
notions of “motivated plotting,” foregoing
legible conflict in order to craft a hazy
16mm malaise film that pursues those
moments in life that we generally think to
37

e uncinematic… Outside Noise takes on
the classic subject of ennui, but with an
interest in observing it as opposed to
reveling in it.” — M.G. MAILLOUX
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Joseph Kosinski
“Slotting squarely into the recent formula
of every new Tom Cruise movie going even
deeper than the last as a subtextual
referendum on his superhuman screen
persona, Top Gun: Maverick is a blistering
piece of pop art, an all-timer Dad movie
stealth masterpiece, and maybe the
ultimate legacy sequel.” — MATT LYNCH
BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE
Claire Denis
“While the term late style may be bandied
around too much these days — is cinema
itself, facing the death of movie theaters,
in a period of late style? has it always
been? — there is something apt in affixing
it to the 76-year-old director’s film… Unlike
the jittery jumps through time and space
or the poetic montages of bodies and
landscapes graphically arranged to
externalize dense psychic geographies,
Both Sides of the Blade exhibits an
understated languor unique amongst her
films.” — JOSHUA BOGATIN
MAD GOD
Phil Tippett
“Packed with a maelstrom of grandiosity
and chaos for the entirety of its 83-minute
runtime, Tippett’s labor of love comprises
stews of steampunk, body horror, and
religious mythology, offering nothing less
than a ravishing sensory experience of
lurid phantasmagoria… This ahistorical
film proffers, in fact, a historical thesis of
pessimism concerning humanity’s cyclical
violence, as its hellscapes span both
antiquity and modernity, beginning with
the wrath of God in Leviticus and tracing
the anachronisms of plagues, trench
warfare, slavery, sexual depravity, medical
institutions, and so on. ” — MORRIS YANG
DETECTIVES VS. SLEUTHS
Wai Ka-fai
“It’s thrilling to watch Wai put all these
puzzle pieces together, juggling various
narrative threads and weaving together an
intricate web of deceit and obfuscation…
Even the film’s final shot, ostensibly a
moment of triumph, suggests an ongoing
madness that cannot end. Wai is a
magician and has here crafted one of the
year’s best, most kinetic action movies,
one that leaves you absolutely miserable
once it’s over.” — DANIEL GORMAN
THIS MUCH I KNOW TO BE
TRUE
Andrew Dominik
“Cave has always presented something of
an eccentric front, and in tandem with a
post-Vegas persona that slides easily
between swagger-rich and deeply earnest,
it’s not surprising that this sustained
portraiture of the past decade continues
to hold appeal and strip away layers…
there’s less happening here than in
previous Cave documentaries, its reason
for existence less pronounced but
perhaps more explicable after three
previous ones: there’s pleasure to
watching Cave perform and to bearing
witness to his musical creations.” — LUKE
GORHAM
THE MUNSTERS
Rob Zombie
“Indeed, something of a mishmash of
influences reflecting its author’s broad,
endearingly unhip taste, and with a comic
sensibility several decades removed from
accepted contemporary standards, The
Munsters is a gonzo standout in a
landscape otherwise populated by
dispassionate, lifeless IP retreads.” — M.G.
MAILLOUX
ARMAGEDDON TIME
James Gray
“There may be eye-roll notes of liberal
apologia in Gray’s treatment of how the
discovery of his own privilege also
became the beginning of disillusionment,
but he’s also too smart a filmmaker to
wallow in pity or simple political
messaging. Gray resists settling on any
proper moral position… choosing instead
to make a general skepticism toward
American society the ultimate landing
point of his film.” — JOSHUA BOGATIN
38

Photo Credits:
Cover - Paramount Pictures; Page 1 - DVV Entertainment; Page 2 - Jonathan Hession/Searchlight
Pictures; Page 3 - Mubi; Page Page 4 - National Geographic; Page 5 - A24; Page 6 - Primeira Idade;
Page 9 - Lupo Film; Page 10 - KimStim; Page 11 - Universal Pictures; Page 12 - Zürcher Film; Page
15 - Mubi; Page 16 - Alamy; Page 17 - Lilies Films; Page 18 - Paramount Pictures & MTV
Entertainment Studios; Page 20 - Jeonwonsa Productions; Page 21 - Cinema Guild; Page 22 - 20th
Century Studios; Page 23 - Sideshow & Janus Films; Page 25 - A24; Page 26 - Curiosa Films; Page
27/28 - Focus Features & Everett Collection; Page 29/30 - Merie Weiswiller Wallace, Universal
Pictures, & Amblin Entertainment; Page 31 - Roadside Attractions; Page 33-36 - Nikos Nikolopoulos;
Back Cover - Icarus Films