It was a great year for movies. Full stop. Every year, there is a corner of the critical community complaining that this year’s offerings pale in comparison to days gone by. That same corner is back and louder than ever this time around, trying to convince us that one of the best film years of the 21st century was somehow weak or lacking. Do not listen.
The secret truth is that every year is a great year for movies if you know where to look. If you thought 2022 was weak, see more movies. If you think any given year is particularly lacking, see more movies. If you think the artform has long since passed its heyday and remains locked in steady decline, see more movies. The answer is always to see more movies.
It is never (okay, rarely) the movies’ fault. Greatness is out there, but in a world of shuttering theaters and endless streaming options, the onus is on us to seek out the best of what the medium has to offer. So it takes a little extra effort. The rewards are self-evident, but for further proof, I submit the 10 films listed below.
My top 10 films of 2022 represent a diverse array of nations and genres and filmmakers, but what they share in common is that each film made me think about the world in a different way and made me see the art of cinema itself in a different way. No other medium on earth holds the power and possibility of film, and these 10 films wield that power in ways I have never seen and explore possibilities I had never considered. More than anything, they inspire me to keep searching for greatness in the next scene, the next performance, and the next film. The answer is always to see more movies.
Before we get to the top 10, five more films (listed alphabetically) that made 2022 such an outstanding year at the cinema: Athena, Romain Gavras’ virtuosic polemic against the horrors of state-sponsored violence; Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink ode to and takedown of the Hollywood machine; Fire of Love, Sara Dosa’s poignant, beautiful non-fiction tale of two scientists who find love and meaning on the edge of the abyss; Pearl, Part II of Ti West’s X trilogy and a cursed fairy tale for an age with no happily ever afters; and Till, Chinonye Chukwu’s devastating exploration of the aftermath of the murder of Emmett Till. Now, the top 10:
10. Holy Spider, directed by Ali Abbasi
It hit me as I was in the theater watching Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi’s Iran-set true-crime thriller, what is wrong with most American takes on the genre. Even great films like David Fincher’s Se7en or Zodiac ascribe a certain mystical power to their unknown, unseen killers. They become larger than life. The more they hide in the shadows, the more an audience can project a sense of grandeur onto the criminal and his (usually his) crimes.
Abbasi, instead, introduces us to the killer right away, and he is pathetic. He has a family and a day job and an obsession with killing prostitutes, which he claims comes from a religious desire to rid Iran of moral depravity. Maybe that is his reason, but Abbasi shows him checking the newspapers for his nom de crime, the titular Holy Spider, and hanging out by the crime scene to see what people are saying about him. He is a vain, glory-seeker in a world just depraved enough to grant him that glory.
The first two acts of the film belong with the best of the crime genre, but its true power lies in its disturbing final act, when the killer is captured and put on trial. He receives not condemnation but praise. He is hailed as a hero for battling the vices of his nation. The women he killed are shamed and denigrated as their killer finds love and support in the community. It would be shocking if it were not so familiar, but we see it all the time in the US, a country that puts murderers on TV and still asks questions like “What was she wearing?” There is no moral authority, and Holy Spider is less a cautionary tale of what could happen than an insight into what is happening, here and everywhere else.
9. Petite Maman, directed by Céline Sciamma
Sandwiched between Taxi Driver and 8½ on the latest edition of the Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time is Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire at No. 30. Along with Parasite, down at No. 90, it is the most recent film on the list. It is a beautiful, epic romance that deserves all the praise lavished upon it. It is also, it would seem, an impossible film to follow up. Impossible, perhaps, for anyone except Sciamma, who dials back the scope but not the emotional resonance in this wonderfully intimate gem of a film.
In a breezy 72 minutes, Petite Maman finds the time and power to devastate and uplift in equal measure. It tells the story of a young girl visiting her mother’s childhood home only to encounter her own mother as a child in the surrounding woods. They laugh, they play, and they bond in ways they never could as mother and daughter. It is a story of intergenerational trauma and healing, but it is also a fairy tale told from a child’s point of view.
Though the camerawork and art direction are gorgeous, the story is unadorned by any unnecessary flourishes. We accept everything we see fully and without reservation because Sciamma has faith in the strength of her script to carry us along. That faith is well placed, and we are so drawn into this world that we start to forget anything fantastical is happening. At the end, what we are left with are a mother and a daughter who have learned to love and understand each other in deeper ways than they ever could have imagined.
8. All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Edward Berger
It takes a certain amount of courage to adapt one of the most famous and popular novels of the 20th century. Even more courage to choose one that has already been adapted into one of the most acclaimed and best loved movies of all time. And still even more to cut out large chunks of the plot and insert your scenes and ideas into a story many know by heart. This is the courage it took for German director Edward Berger to bring All Quiet on the Western Front to the big screen.
This is not a word-perfect adaptation of the novel, nor is it, I understand, a particularly accurate depiction of World War I, at least in the specifics. It is, however, completely faithful to the heart and spirit of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war masterpiece. Paul Bäumer (an excellent Felix Kammerer) and his friends descend into hell, and Berger pulls no punches in depicting the human suffering and abject misery of war.
The technical achievements of this film are remarkable: from the sound design that emphasizes war as a machine that grinds up soldiers to a score that exists at the precipice of madness and a color palette drained of life. Berger and his crafts team have created something truly astonishing. But as with the novel, what truly sticks with you is the horror of these soldiers’ lived experiences. War is an act of destruction, and as these men’s souls are chipped away, piece by piece, they know and we know there is no putting them back together again.
7. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
The “Three Amigos” have been all over town the past month or so, talking about their decades of friendship, their many collaborations, and their insights into Hollywood filmmaking. For those unaware, the Three Amigos comprise Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. They had been around for years before gaining massive exposure at the 2006 Academy Awards, where they blew the doors open for Mexican filmmakers in the United States with Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Babel, respectively.
From 2013-2018, these three men won five of the six Best Director statues at the Oscars, an award that had never previously been won by a Mexican filmmaker. Iñárritu won back to back statues in 2014 and 2015, the third director ever to accomplish this feat and the first in more than 60 years. I say all this to establish the world into which Iñárritu delivers Bardo. Alongside his friends, he has reached the mountaintop, and as he approaches the age of 60, Iñárritu finds himself looking back and wondering what the mountain even means.
Bardo should not be read as a one-for-one with Iñárritu’s life. It is more phantasmagorical than that. Instead, the film depicts what I imagine it must have felt like for Iñárritu to be a Mexican filmmaker who achieves success in America and questions whether he has exploited his nation and his culture to get there. Then, as I watched Iñárritu speak with Cuarón and del Toro on the awards trail, I realized the film must also speak to their experiences, as well. And to anyone who leaves his or her community behind to achieve something greater. How lonely. How isolating. And yet, how universal.
6. Triangle of Sadness, directed by Ruben Östlund
This is the biggest swing Ruben Östlund has ever taken. His international breakout film, Force Majeure, was a big step up in scale from his early films and put the fragility of modern masculinity squarely under the microscope. His Palme d’Or-winning followup, The Square, went even bigger, taking on the hypocrisy and cowardice of the art world and the moneyed elite. For Triangle of Sadness, Östlund confronts his grandest subject yet and, in so doing, employs his largest canvas.
The superyacht at the center of the film is a symbol of everything that is wrong with society – wealth inequality, the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else, and the damaging consequences of believing in a hierarchy that is just waiting to be toppled. Some of the film is perhaps a little on the nose – as when the communist ship captain and Russian oligarch passenger argue about Marxism over the intercom – but a film this bold will require bold strokes, and these moments end up feeling more like a feature than a bug.
Östlund’s greatest coup is to flip the tables, however briefly, in the last third. He gives the models and influencers and oligarchs – all of whom have been propped up by capitalist structures – a true lesson in supply and demand. In this final stretch, we get a hero in Abigail (Dolly de Leon, in a star-making turn), the cleaning woman who serves as the ultimate heart of a story that risks living too much in the head. This is why the film’s closing moments and Östlund’s last shot of Abigail land like a punch to the gut. It’s all fun and games for the rich. For Abigail, it’s life and death.
5. EO, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
Roger Ebert was fond of citing the W. G. Sebald quotation that “Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Because of Ebert, I come back to this quote often, usually with regard to that time-tested story conflict: Man vs. Nature. It comes up a lot in film, but rarely is the story told from the point of view of nature. The accomplishment of Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO suggests we could certainly stand to have more stories like it.
EO, the donkey of the title (say it out loud), travels the countryside in search of his first owner, a circus performer who loved him but could not care for him. On his journey, he meets many people, some sympathetic, others cruel, but all lacking any understanding of what EO wants or needs. Similarly, EO cannot figure out who these people are or why they do the confounding things they do. Such is the gulf of mutual incomprehension.
The conclusion Skolimowski seems to draw in his film is that the misunderstanding arises not from the donkey’s unknowability but from our own inherent beastliness. We try to project meaning and intention onto the donkey, but why, when so much of human toil lacks either meaning or intent? EO is an innocent, and innocence is a state of being humans are particularly ill-equipped to understand. Where is his brutality? Where is his selfish self-interest? Where is his need to conquer? He has none of these, and we are indicted by the fact that we even asked the question.
4. TÁR, directed by Todd Field
Power pools. It coalesces. It calcifies until it can be wielded as a cudgel. Lydia Tár’s power resides in a literal baton, which she uses to control time itself, she says. She is the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She is an award-winning composer, a celebrated scholar, and one of the brightest stars in the universe of classical music. She is also a bully, a predator, and in some respects, a fraud. She is also completely fictional and sprang fully formed from the mind of writer-director Todd Field and the incomparable performance of Cate Blanchett.
I mention the fictional aspect because a funny, if baffling, pseudo-controversy sprung up around the movie as viewers and critics believed it to be a based-on-a-true-story biopic then were left disappointed and dumbfounded that no person such as Lydia Tár exists – at least not in a literal sense. A quick Google search could have saved people a lot of trouble, but that is not the point. The point is that Field and Blanchett came together to create a portrait so real and vivid that viewers believed it must be true.
There is such verisimilitude in the details of Field’s writing and filmmaking and of Blanchett’s acting choices that it truly boggles the mind at how any of it was accomplished. However, to consider the film only in terms of its considerable filmmaking achievements is to hold it at a distance, to ignore its true intent. Field is here to investigate abuses of power, the tendency toward corruption, and the emptiness of the genius myth, all through a lens we have never before seen. The film is everything its central character pretends to be – it is brash, it is bold, and it is brilliant.
3. The Banshees of Inisherin, directed by Martin McDonagh
It is hard to believe it has been 14 years since Martin McDonagh made his feature film debut with In Bruges. I have lived essentially my entire adult life since that film came out, and though it remains among my favorite films of all time, I feel older, hopefully a little wiser, and certainly more world weary since that movie hit theaters. All of which is to say I was primed for The Banshees of Inisherin, which could only have been made by a director who had grown older, wiser, and more world weary.
On its surface, the film is about the dissolution of a friendship. McDonagh would seem to stretch this simple premise to its breaking point, leaning heavily on the indelible performances of his main cast (Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan), but by the end, you find yourself in a place of such profound pain and sadness that you can barely remember how you arrived there. The same is true of McDonagh’s characters, who with the exception of Condon’s Siobhán, seemed pulled along their journeys by an invisible hand. McDonagh’s, yes, but perhaps also that of fate itself.
The script, of course, is loaded with the filmmaker’s particular brand of bleak Irish humor, but it is more measured here, tempered by a contemplativeness that is deeper and weightier than McDonagh has ever employed. He has said the two main characters represent the two halves of his own personality – the artist who wishes to leave a legacy through his work and the nice guy whose prime concern is to leave the world a kinder place than he found it. There is value in both men, but they cannot see the value in each other. Therein lies the tragedy.
2. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras
The best documentaries weave together the personal and the political into a tapestry that shows us something about the world in which we live. OJ: Made in America uses the trial of one disgraced football star to tell the modern history of race in Southern California. Grizzly Man transforms a singular tragedy into a fable about humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Laura Poitras’ own Citizenfour turned the story of Edward Snowden into a story about the government’s intrusion into every part of our private lives.
Now, Poitras is back with this riveting study of famed artist Nan Goldin and her quest to bring down the pharmaceutical empire most responsible for the opioid epidemic in this country. Goldin is an inherently fascinating subject, and Poitras jumps back and forth in time to link the photographer to a number of pivotal social movements in the latter half of the 20th century. The effect is to demonstrate that Goldin comes by her activism honestly and that this fight is nothing new for her – the Sackler family may be a modern enemy, but they are just the latest in a long line of powerful people looking to exploit the powerless for profit.
The filmmaker makes deft use of Goldin’s art to illuminate and elucidate the film’s many themes, chief among them that the machinery of capitalism would gladly grind us all to dust but for the efforts of warriors such as Goldin and her kind. Despite a life touched in one way or another by mental illness, domestic violence, addiction, and HIV/AIDS, Goldin’s resolve never seems to have diminished. She is a perfect fighter for our times in that she inspires the rest of us to take our place beside her on the front lines.
1. Women Talking, directed by Sarah Polley
Sometimes a movie is everything you thought it would be, yet it still exceeds expectations by being more intelligent, empathetic, and beautifully mounted than you ever could have conceived. Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is just such a feature. It is the kind of picture that reminds you of the heights to which great films can ascend. It is simultaneously of the moment and timeless. It is a mirror that reflects who we are, but it is also a vision of who we could be.
Based on the Miriam Toews novel and adapted for the screen by Polley, the story follows a group of women in a cloistered religious community who must confront the fact that they have all been victims of repeated druggings and sexual assaults at the hands of the men in their lives. They grapple with questions of faith, vengeance, personhood, and the place of justice in an obviously unjust world. Ultimately, they must decide whether they will leave the only world they have ever known or stay to fight a likely losing battle of revenge.
I do not necessarily blame anyone put off by that description of the plot. It is heavy stuff, and the stakes are nothing less than the soul of modern society. However, Polley and her stunning cast – led by Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, and Claire Foy – convey the text with a matter-of-factness that prevents the material from becoming either melodramatic or underbaked. The truth is clear. What is left is a moral reckoning. Is there anything here worth saving, or should they burn it to the ground and start anew?
Polley’s film believes in the power of conversation, and her script is filled with heartbreaking speeches and deeply considered arguments. Rare is the film that finds time to listen to its characters and their concerns. These are women society has left behind, but what is past is always present, and their world is not so far removed from our own. The power of Polley’s film is in giving these women a voice to speak their grievances aloud. She leaves it to us to hear what they have to say.
Check back next time for Part III of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review series as we look back on the best performances of 2022.
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