2022 on the Big Screen Part 1: New Releases

2022 was one of the loneliest of my forty-five and one-half years on planet Earth, so it makes sense that most of the movies I watched in a movie theater and cared about this year made almost no ripple in the popular consciousness (except for the one about guys hitting each other in the crotch). Because of corporations' near-total stranglehold on nearly every human experience and interaction, most people don't see movies in the theater anymore except for the ones with millionaires in spandex running around saving some world (not ours) created by mouse clicks with a lighting scheme resembling a suburban Best Buy. As Brian Wilson once said in one of my favorite Beach Boys songs, I just wasn't made for these times.

Does film culture exist any more? Do I exist? I had two curious experiences this year with two people I know from the Austin music scene. Their bands and my old band played several shows together throughout the 2010s. I had many friendly conversations with them then and we'd say hello if we bumped into each other, but, in 2022, I've been deleted from their memory cards. They introduced themselves as strangers when we were talking to a mutual friend. No memory of me whatsoever. The handshake and a "Hey, man, I'm ___. What's your name?" These weren't brush-offs from clout-chasing scenesters who decided I wasn't important enough to remember. This was genuine friendliness and politeness from two people who should have recognized me instantly. I took these two encounters as important and deeply disturbing warning signs. I'm disappearing from my own life.  

In a few months, it will have been three years since my wife was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer. I wrote about it extensively in my last two end-of-year posts. Her treatment is going amazingly well, but cancer is a bumpy-ass ride, and there have been a few complications that will require more information-gathering and decision-making down the road. I still don't have much of a support system, and I don't know what to do about that. (As my wife so eloquently put it: "Heart emoji. Transaction complete.") It's near-impossible to relate to anyone not going through what we're going through, and I'm still dealing with a lot of jealousy and anger toward other people for committing the unforgivable sins of having healthy partners and leading normal lives. I'm also being pulled in too many directions at once at my job, and I was forced into a promotion I didn't want because of a wave of retirements. I haven't had a good day there in months. I carry around so much heaviness (every morning I wake up to the punch in the gut of re-remembering my wife's diagnosis), and even normal interactions at work like talking about our Thanksgivings fill me with anxiety and sadness because my wife and I spent our Thanksgiving nervously waiting for/dreading test results we thought were going to be bad (fortunately, they weren't). I'm in such a different headspace than almost anyone I know, and it's so alienating (and I was alienated before all this). Honestly, it's making my job completely unbearable even though I'm still working from home, and I feel like there is a wall of unbreakable glass between me and every other human being. I know I need to find a therapist, but my work schedule is going to make that impossible for the next several months. I really wish I wasn't stuck there, but I am most definitely stuck there for the time being. If any filthy rich eccentrics are reading this and feel like funding my lifestyle so I can shitcan the jay oh bee, hit me up. 

Things have been rough (we also got COVID in the summer despite mostly being careful), but we're not the first people bad shit has happened to, and on my better days, I'm thankful for every second I get with my wife. I'm also pretty fond of our cat. They're both delightful weirdos, and I love them. (I love my wife more. Please don't tell the cat.) I hope I can work through this alienation and reconnect with other people someday. I also hope to get the willpower and motivation to play music again when my work schedule simmers down in the summer, but I feel like most people I know have forgotten me and moved on (it's not like I do much reaching out either). If I can't relate to people right now, at least I can relate to the art they make. Music, books, movies. This is what keeps me alive. Here are the movies I watched on the big screen in 2022 that kept me connected to that lifeforce. (I will be cannibalizing some of my letterboxd reviews in this post. Follow me there at https://letterboxd.com/joshkrauter/ if you're feeling it.) As I always say in these posts, I care about image, movement, sound, character, performance, light, shadow, sense of place, mood, tone, and atmosphere more than I care about plot and story, though I'm still not entirely sure how to write about that in any successful way. I think of every artistic medium as the transformation of lived experience, instinct, and dream into organized space.

My favorite movies of 2022 (as seen in the theater)

I'm not into the preferential ranking thing (how the hell does anyone know their seventh favorite film of the year and how do they stand behind that decision years from now?), so I'm going alphabetical.

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (Laura Poitras)

The polar opposite of the modern wave of surface-skim documentaries that play like visual Wikipedia pages, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed presents the childhood, life, day jobs, art, friendships, and activism of Nan Goldin, one of my favorite photographers and one of the most human of artists, and doesn't compartmentalize any of it. This is all her life. Every piece of it connected to every other piece. I was a bit worried we'd get a 20- or 30-minute speed run through the biographical details and photography in order to focus on her recent activism against the Sackler family (titanic pieces of shit) and their overwhelming culpability in the opioid epidemic, which is what the trailer leads you to expect. I was also worried we'd get the activism awkwardly shoehorned into a story of her art or even a solid but simple run-of-the-mill look at both. Poitras' intricately constructed film is so much fuller and deeper than that and a work of art in its own right. It's also mournful, celebratory, matter of fact, and inspiring in its depiction of Goldin's rejection of the shame, secrets, repression, and conformity embedded in mainstream American values, traditions, institutions, gender roles, and societal norms and her fight against corporate inhumanity. And it's a thrill seeing Goldin's incredible photographs on a big screen. 

An aside about movies that have footage from the '70s, '80s, '90s, and the present. This is probably 40% fogeyism, but I think I'm making at least 60% of a good point. The change from analog to digital technology has made an enormously negative visual impact on the actual three-dimensional world we live in. The pre-2000s had so much more visual texture and flavor. Everything is so fuckin' flat and samey now. The look of our screens has colonized the look of our physical environment, and it is aesthetically dull and unpleasant to me.      

APOLLO 10 1/2: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD (Richard Linklater)

I was underwhelmed by Linklater's last two movies (Where'd You Go, Bernadette and Last Flag Flying), but he's so prolific and so up for anything that I knew it wouldn't be long before he made another really good one. His third animated film (after Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) and his third collaboration with Jack Black (after School of Rock and Bernie), Apollo 10 1/2 is a more than semi-autobiographical time capsule of suburban Houston in 1969 as experienced by a 10-year-old boy and his family. I think nostalgia is generally horrible and destructive, but, if handled correctly and without too much sentimentality, it can be a beautiful thing in art. Linklater provides so much detail and specificity (along with a dose of childhood fantasy) that I couldn't help but be transformed as a viewer into feeling like I somehow grew up in '60s suburban Houston. Animation is a better visual vehicle for turning these particular memories into images than live-action period recreations. Sweetly wistful, funny, loosely plotted, big on small moments other movies ignore. 

ARMAGEDDON TIME (James Gray)

Oddly enough, here's another autobiographical film about a boy and his family (Spielberg also made one of these this year; what is happening?), though James Gray's look back at his 12-year-old self in 1980 Queens, New York, is the polar opposite of Linklater's wistful nostalgia. This is a movie, in part, about how much being a kid sucks and how the suckage only increases once you start learning how the adult world (and its attendant systemic moral rot) works. It's also about learning to live with the cognitive dissonance of being a victim and a beneficiary of an oppressive, unjust system. Heavy shit, but Gray has a light touch even when he's laying it on thick, and he doesn't go over the top with his period detail. Armageddon Time sometimes fumbles its big moments, the daydream fantasy sequences feel like tonal mistakes, and the character of Johnny doesn't get the depth and complexity he deserves (though Jaylin Webb does a lot with what he's given), but, despite all that, this is my favorite James Gray movie since Two Lovers. When this thing works, it works beautifully, and Banks Repeta gives one of the most nuanced child actor performances I've seen in a long time (though child actors continue to freak me out). I've seen some snarkily disingenuous comparisons to Green Book. This is not Green Book. 

BENEDICTION (Terence Davies)

Davies' second feature in a row to transform the biographical details of a poet's life into the particular animal that is a Terence Davies film, Benediction follows A Quiet Passion, about Emily Dickinson. His subject here is Siegfried Sassoon, a relatively obscure poet in the U.S. in 2022 but a famous one in Great Britain. Sassoon was a decorated WWI hero turned staunch and vocal opponent (in both his poetry and activism) of Britain's continuation of the war. He was placed in a military psychiatric hospital for his dissent. After the war, Sassoon, a literary sensation and as openly gay as you could be in the UK of the '20s and '30s, had romantic relationships with several famous men (including Ivor Novello), though he also married poet Hester Gatty and had a son, George. Sassoon converted to Catholicism later in life, a move Davies portrays as a bitter and cynical renunciation of self, though the final scenes complicate and transform that bitterness in ways I won't spoil. Davies' work is a strange, paradoxical marriage between classically old-fashioned structure and avant-garde experimentation, ironic detachment and deeply felt emotion, a lowercase-c conservative dislike of the modern world and a lowercase-p progressive artistic impulse, and a bit of catty snobbery tempered by a warm-hearted empathy. I like every one I've seen, though I wish his recent films weren't so neglected. Benediction is emotionally and stylistically complex and covers so much territory: war trauma, mortality, sexuality, aging, grief, religious faith, family dynamics, duty to country vs. duty to conscience, and literature's intersection with all of it. If this sounds unbearably heavy, keep in mind you also get many hilariously bitchy one-liners.

BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE (Claire Denis)

In 2018, we were lucky enough to get two Claire Denis movies. The first (Let the Sunshine In) was a French-language film about (to be stupidly reductive) the romantic travails of a character played by Juliette Binoche, with a screenplay by Denis and Christine Angot. The second (High Life) was a strange and dreamy science fiction film full of menace, eroticism, and dread and was Denis' first English-language movie. A sad three years of no new Denis films happily came to an end in 2022, when we were lucky enough to get two more Claire Denis movies. The first (Both Sides of the Blade) is a French-language film about (to be stupidly reductive) the romantic travails of a character played by Juliette Binoche, with a screenplay by Denis and Christine Angot. The second (Stars at Noon, more on that one later) is a strange and dreamy political adventure-thriller (sort of) full of menace, eroticism, and dread and is Denis' second English-language movie. I'm a Claire Denis fanatic (I think she's one of the greatest living filmmakers), so I'm pretty happy with this bizarrely coincidental second round of doubles. I'm not entirely sure why her movies speak to me so strongly, but I have managed to figure out two partial reasons. She's a filmmaker who lets her visual curiosity shape the form and structure of her work as she's making it. She also starts her movies slam-bang in the middle of her character's lives without clearly delineating their relationships, occupations, conflicts, and dramas, so we're knocked off guard as an audience and forced to pay hyper-attention to details and images if we want to know who these people are and what is happening. We eventually find out, but, by then, our normal watching-a-movie brain has been rewired, refocused, and, if you're like me, lit up with the pleasure of the present moment. Both Sides of the Blade is worth it just for the way Denis captures sunlight on water in the opening scene and her expressive use of extreme closeups throughout, but her characters and the great actors playing them are worthy of that intrusive approach. Each one is fascinatingly knowable and unknowable. In contrast to Let the Sunshine In's inviting warmth and breezy optimism, the color palette  in Both Sides of the Blade is purposely Denis' coldest, with barely any trace of a bright, vibrant color (beautiful images like the sunlight on water really pop out amid the chilliness), and dread suffuses even the pleasantest moments. It's a risky move that pays off, and Denis continues to run laps around most of her peers visually. 

A COUPLE (Frederick Wiseman)

93-year-old lawyer-turned-filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has been making documentaries since the 1960s, and he's only departed from that form twice to make scripted, narrative features with actors, once in 2003 and again in 2022 (though he's also filmed plays he was otherwise not involved in staging). Both of these features consist of a woman delivering a monologue of hand-written letters to the camera. That woman is the sole cast member of each film. Doesn't sound too visually thrilling, am I right? (I'm wrong, at least in this case). I haven't seen 2003's The Last Letter, in which Catherine Samie portrays a doctor in a Ukrainian ghetto whose residents are about to be killed by Nazis reading a letter she wrote to her son. The letter is delivered as a monologue on a soundstage with images projected behind Samie. A Couple is similar on paper but takes a different visual approach. Loosely drawn from Sophia and Leo Tolstoy's letters to each other, A Couple sees Sophia (Nathalie Boutefeu) walking through an enormous, lush garden and performing monologues based on these letters. (A few scenes also take place indoors, at a lamp-lit writing desk.) Opening the film and in punctuating scenes between letters, Wiseman quietly and uninterruptedly observes the garden's colorful landscape, the coast and water nearby, and the animals and vegetation within it, absent of people. It feels like a radical departure and an exciting new way of working (or, considering his age, a surprise ending) but, in a strange way, it's also a continuance. It makes for an odd but fitting companion piece to his last documentary, City Hall, in its alternating scenes of wordless external landscapes and word-filled human activity inside those landscapes, the words revealing the internal workings of city government in the documentary and a marriage in this one. Wiseman's wife of 65 years, Zipporah Batshaw, died last year, and this film feels like a response to her loss (and possibly an apology and self-critique in its depiction of an artist so consumed by his work that he neglects his wife and children) though it was planned before her death.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (David Cronenberg)

In the eight years following Cronenberg's previous film (2014's Maps to the Stars), he published a novel, his wife Carolyn died, his sister Denise died (she was the costume designer on every one of his features from The Fly to Maps to the Stars; before The Fly, she worked in the wardrobe department on Videodrome and The Dead Zone), he was forced to abandon a miniseries he was writing and directing for Netflix after they backed out of the project, he did a little acting, and he moved closer to his eightieth year, occasionally resignedly telling interviewers that his film career and film culture in general were probably over. Something has clearly changed in Cronenberg-land. I was happily shocked when I heard he was releasing a new film, quickly followed by the news he'd already started working on another one (The Tombs, which is in preproduction now), with plans for another one after that. 

Crimes of the Future feels like a restatement of purpose and a new beginning made up of referential nods to his past (Viggo Mortensen's look here is even patterned directly after Cronenberg's). Cronenberg revised a late 1990s screenplay called Painkillers (which he nearly made into a movie in 2003), retitling it after his second feature, released in 1970. Despite stealing its title, this new Crimes of the Future is not a remake of the old one, but it is a return to the body horror that Cronenberg has not explored much since 1999's eXistenZ (though if you're like me and you consider the mind a part of the physical body, you may be able to argue that he never stopped making body horror). The movie takes place in a future an undefined number of years after an undefined Big Bad Thing happened. The population is sparse, the landscape is in partial ruins (though there has been some rebuilding), there's not much light, air quality is awful, and performance art is the only art left standing. On the plus side, analog technology has regained supremacy, and there's not an Instagram influencer or digital creator in sight. Classically Cronenbergian fleshy, synthetic-y machines control some bodily functions, and humans have evolved/devolved to no longer feel physical pain. Saul Tenser (Mortensen) is one of the minority of people with a mutation causing new, vestigial organs to grow. He and his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) remove these organs in performance art surgeries to a small but devoted cult following. Meanwhile, a newer mutation is allowing a portion of the population to eat and digest plastics, and a secret police organization is snooping around for mysterious reasons. Perfect for the soul of 2022.  It's a disturbing, pretentious, beautifully composed movie that also skewers pretense, and it's funny as hell. I don't trust anyone who doesn't think it's funny as hell. I'm so glad Cronenberg's back.

DECISION TO LEAVE (Park Chan-wook)

Oh my god, what a filmmaker. Park Chan-wook makes insanely complex, intricate, virtuosic yet unostentatious movies that somehow crackle with energy and feeling despite their ridiculously detailed construction, and he never forgets to deliver the pleasures of whatever genre he chooses to work with or blend. This one is a symbiotic integration of the police procedural and the romance, by which I mean the movie is not a romance with a murder investigation backstory or vice versa. Chan-wook builds his narrative so the two genres are completely dependent on each other and totally enmeshed. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)

Robert Bresson's 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, whose central protagonist is a donkey the narrative follows from owner to owner, is one of my favorite works of art in any medium and a constant presence on lists of the greatest films of all time. There has never been anything like it, though someone finally tried. 84-year-old Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski is brave and foolish enough to take on a modern update, though he's such a stylistically different filmmaker from Bresson that the inspiration never feels like a burden. Balthazar is one of the most overwhelmingly human movies I've ever seen and the closest I've come to a transcendental spiritual experience without the aid of music or psychedelic drugs. Paradoxically, Bresson achieves this with a distanced formal style and a deliberately flat affect from his actors and without anthropomorphizing Balthazar, the donkey. Skolimowski borrows Balthazar's structure to very different ends. We follow a donkey, EO (played by six different donkeys), as he moves through owners and periods of ownerless wandering. Skolimowski anthropomorphizes his donkey slightly by giving him hints of dream, fantasy, and motivation (an attempt to get back to the circus worker who loved him and performed with him), and his visual style steers the audience into seeing events through highly specific points of view, a major aesthetic change from Bresson, who leaves that decision to the viewer. Unlike Bresson's beautifully composed but grounded-in-the-dirt compositions, Skolimowksi's images and landscapes are shot with a mystical awe or hint of surrealism, and the tone sometimes approaches a fable or religious parable. He also has a polemical aim that wouldn't work in a Bresson movie. With EO, Skolimowski has made a powerful piece of pro-animal rights propaganda without any preaching or pamphleteering by giving animals rich internal lives and juxtaposing that against their casual, indifferent exploitation and slaughter by humans. Nothing can touch Au Hasard Balthazar, but this is a beautiful movie in its own right, and it provides further evidence that making a donkey the central protagonist of a film should probably keep happening.

THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER (Ramon & Silvan Zürcher)

An odd, not quite unsettling movie that simultaneously attracts and repels, The Girl and the Spider begins as a plausible slice-of-life ensemble drama, but dissonant weirdness soon begins sticking to it like fur on a lint roller. Nearly every character is horny and kooky and quietly menacing, and everyone looks at each other for two beats too long. I have a feeling that years from now this movie will be an incomplete but accurate representation of the mental effects of living in the 21st century.

INTRODUCTION (Hong Sang-soo)

Over the course of the pandemic, I've become a big fan of extremely prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, but I still have no idea how to write about his movies other than to say he uses the digital zoom better than anyone currently living (I'm pretending here that I've seen every moving image by every living person). On paper, most of them sound indistinguishable from each other, he often uses the same actors, and initial impressions of his work can be underwhelming if you're not used to his style and structure and the ways all of his films seem to talk to each other. I think his movies, in part, are about different perceptions of shared experiences (including different perceptions within a single individual). This is one of his shortest (at 66 minutes) and feels like one of his slightest until the final scene does the mysterious things his films do that make them so good. In my opinion, it's not a particularly great introduction (see what I did there?) to his body of work, but I'm not you, so what do I know about that? Like all of Hong's films, this one is similar to the others and nothing like them.

JACKASS FOREVER (Jeff Tremaine)

Me, watching a guy ride a pogo stick on top of another guy's nut sac: "Hell yeah. This is nontoxic masculinity." I have a lot of high-falutin' movies on my list this year, and I also have one where the boys slather honey on Steve-O's genitals and unleash some bees. It's called containing multitudes, son. This needs no smartypants defense. It's funny as hell and a great visual experience, and I was unexpectedly moved by seeing these now-middle-aged guys take the bumps and the hits. I love them for it. And it knocked that superhero shit off the top of the box office for a few weeks. U.S. pop culture was set right again (briefly). Has any other box office champion shown more full-frontal male nudity? I've never seen Shrek 2, but I think this probably beats it.

MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Probably my favorite new release of the year, and, if the filmmaker has anything to do with it, Memoria will never be available on streaming or home video. The distribution and exhibition plan for the film is that it play in theaters and arts spaces, one city at a time, permanently. (Confusingly, it occasionally plays in multiple cities at the same time.) This is obviously a problem for any Weerasethakul fans living in rural areas or small cities without a university, major museum, or arthouse theater. I'm someone who values the big screen theatrical experience, but I also grew up in a culturally isolated small town, so I'm both a fan of this unusual distribution move and sympathetic to the people who are unhappy about it. Luckily, it played in Austin four separate times in 2022 at four different venues, and I caught it during its Austin Film Society run. The schedule of future screenings can be found here. That schedule is a little sparse at the moment, but it will always be playing somewhere in the world until movies and humans are gone. Memoria was marketed in the U.S. as Thai filmmaker Weerasethakul's first English-language movie even though half of it is in Spanish (making it also his first Spanish-language movie) and even though sounds are as important (maybe more) than words in the context of the film. It's a slippery, unsatisfying business trying to reduce Weerasethakul's work to a digestible blog post paragraph, but, like all of his films and maybe even more than his others, this one is an incredible sensory experience. It's unsettling and meditative at the same time and gave me the curious but not unpleasant sensation of being hyper-relaxed and hyper-alert. My breathing slowed and my muscles relaxed, even as I experienced feelings of dread, wonder, and awe. How to even describe it? Tilda Swinton plays a Scottish expatriate orchid farmer/flower market owner in Medellín, Colombia who travels to Bogotá to visit her hospitalized sister. She begins hearing loud bangs late at night that seem to be auditory hallucinations, though she believes the sounds are emanating from somewhere real. While trying to understand these sounds, their source, and why she can hear them, she moves through Bogotá and the surrounding countryside, having increasingly strange, dissociative encounters with a world that doesn't seem to be following the normal rules of memory, temporality, linearity, or current scientific possibility. This is an extremely inadequate description of a beautifully unique work of art. I know I also said this about Claire Denis, but Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the greatest living filmmakers.

NOPE (Jordan Peele)

I don't think everything works in Nope, particularly in the second half, but I don't really care because the movie is so beautifully composed, has so many ideas, and is such a welcome mainstream multiplex alternative to the interchangeable blockbuster franchise movies that are almost the only game in town in almost every non-arthouse theater in the country. Peele is a good writer with a great eye, and he's equally skilled at delivering quiet dread and elaborate action. His movies are about Big Important Subjects, but he avoids the mistakes so many contemporary filmmakers and screenwriters make when they tackle the Big Stuff. (The dialogue in soooo many current movies and TV shows sounds like the characters are reciting their tweets to each other.) Peele writes three-dimensional characters with specific internal and external lives who just so happen to be experiencing the Big Stuff. I love the dynamic in Nope between the siblings, introvert OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and extrovert Emerald (Keke Palmer), and their differing relationships to the family business (a ranch a few hours from Los Angeles that trains horses for movies, TV shows, and commercials). I also love Peele's use of the physical space of the ranch and surrounding countryside, and the way he shoots it in the daylight and in the darkness of night. Nope covers a lot of different ground (family relationships and legacy, the burying of Black contributions to the history of filmmaking by historical gatekeepers, the toxicity of fandom, the exploitation of show biz animals, the exploitation of show biz humans, the awkward transition from child stardom to adult life, "bad miracles," human underestimation of the natural world) in at least four different blended genres (science fiction, horror, the western, the underbelly-of-showbiz drama). He also does for Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" what he did for Luniz' "I Got 5 on It" in Us. I think Peele's greatest work is still ahead of him, which is pretty damn exciting.

STARS AT NOON (Claire Denis)

Denis' second film of the year, and her second in the English language, was buried by its North American distributor and got a mixed to negative response, but I love it. A loose adaptation of a Denis Johnson novel (Denis does Denis), Stars at Noon is set in a politically unstable Nicaragua. American freelance journalist Trish (Margaret Qualley) is stuck in the country and trying to get out. She meets British businessman Daniel (Joe Alwyn) in a hotel bar (weirdly, most of the dialogue in their meeting comes from Sonic Youth lyrics for reasons I don't understand; Denis can be a madwoman). They get into a steamy, dramatic, sometimes contentious, very intense relationship that is primarily physical. Daniel is stuck in the country, too, and may or may not be a political operative interfering with South American elections and lying about his day job. Detractors quite reasonably point out that these actors are too young to be playing world-weary characters and should probably have been at least a decade older. Alwyn also doesn't seem to do very much or give his character any real personality. These would be major problems in a conventional Hollywood narrative, but this is a Claire Denis movie, so light, movement, sound, bodies, Margaret Qualley's great hair, and the visual texture of location are much more important here than all that normal, typical movie junk. Too many filmmakers call themselves storytellers. It's a fucking visual medium!! Go find a campfire if your primary concern is telling a story. Get some curiosity for what your camera is pointing at instead of what's on the page. I'll stop yelling at imaginary people now. I feel compelled to point out that this is the second movie in two years to feature John C. Reilly in a funny cameo in the first third and Benny Safdie playing a glad-handing political type in the final third (Licorice Pizza was last year's model). I won't be sad if this annual trend continues.

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (George Miller)

The general moviegoing public has lost its damn mind in making this strange, beautiful, exciting thing a box office flop. My dreams of the MDU (Miller Djinnematic Universe) have been crushed. I bitch about digital effects all the time like an old man yelling at the neighbor kids to stop all that hootin' and hollerin', but this is one of the most gorgeous and aesthetically appealing uses of that nefarious CG business I've ever seen. It feels like a choice instead of a corporate obligation and is integrated into the design instead of shoved on top later, is what I'm saying to you. I love George Miller's oddball career, and I'm glad he used his Fury Road clout to take this swerve. Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba were made for these roles. If this thing doesn't develop a sizable cult following in the years ahead, I'm going to be so mad. You think I'm grumpy now? Get out of my yard, you damn teenage adults, until you make this a cult film. 

THE TSUGUA DIARIES (Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro)

Filmmakers and romantic partners Gomes (Tabu, the Arabian Nights trilogy) and Fazendeiro had to postpone separate directorial projects when COVID-19 hit, so they decided to write and direct a movie about the pandemic together. It's much more satisfying than the other COVID-themed movies I've seen this year. Turning limitation into possibility, they and their cast and crew use the early pandemic and its technical and aesthetic challenges to make a movie about a movie searching for and finding its own visual language and structure while the movie about the movie finds its own visual language and structure (you dig what I'm saying?). Form becomes content, content becomes form. Excellent uses of colored lights, dogs, plants, water, sunlight, time, and Frankie Valli's "The Night." Shot on 16mm. I'm a sucker for films shot on 16mm. They have a particular visual texture I go crazy for.

Honorable Mentions

HER VIOLET KISS (Bill Morrison)

MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON (Ana Lily Amirpour)

POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ (Celeste Bell & Paul Sng)

THERE THERE (Andrew Bujalski)

THE VILLAGE DETECTIVE: A SONG CYCLE (Bill Morrison)

That's Entertainment

HALLOWEEN ENDS (David Gordon Green)

THE NORTHMAN (Robert Eggers)

PEARL (Ti West)

X (Ti West)

Swing and a Miss (from directors I otherwise admire)

BLONDE (Andrew Dominik)

I don't think Dominik deserved to be the main villain on Film Twitter for making this movie (despite his exasperating comments in interviews), but I also think this is his weakest film. The period detail is exquisite, it's wildly ambitious, and certain sequences have a crazy visual invention (though other moments are ill-conceived, tasteless, or pompous, and my patience was seriously tried by the talking CGI fetuses and all the "daddy" stuff), but Dominik and Joyce Carole Oates (Twitter shitposter and author of the novel the movie is adapted from) don't seem to respect Marilyn Monroe as an artist or even like her movies very much, which is a big problem for me, and the singular motivation for the semi-fictionalized Monroe's life trajectory (looking for the daddy she never knew) is ridiculously condescending. I'm glad I saw it, though. 

BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (Nina Menkes)

I love Menkes' features, but this essay film is a glorified TED Talk, poorly delivered, with copious film clips that are often stripped of context or misrepresented to avoid complicating her argument, though Menkes doesn't think context matters and has said as much. (If she truly thinks context doesn't matter, then her film would also be contributing to the problem of objectification, right?)  A disappointingly simplistic, narrow, occasionally puritanical, and, in a few instances, dishonest approach to an important subject. At its best when dealing with specifics, which is unfortunately not often. Watch everything else she's made. They're so much better than this. 

2022 releases I enjoyed but missed in theaters

GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO (Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson)

A beautiful stop-motion animation version of the classic story that doesn't talk down to kids and is a pretty affecting meditation on life, death, and loss. 

THIS MUCH I KNOW TO BE TRUE (Andrew Dominik)

Dominik's better film of 2022 is his second Nick Cave documentary. Everyone who sees this mentions Warren Ellis's desktop, but, like Courteney Cox's terrifying bangs in Scream 3, it cannot go unremarked.

I missed the brief theatrical run of Noah Baumbach's White Noise adaptation. I'll catch it on Netflix the weekend it shows up there and possibly add it here. 

The lowly medium of television

THE KINGDOM: EXODUS (Lars Von Trier)

Von Trier finally finished the third part of his Kingdom miniseries trilogy, which began in 1994 with The Kingdom and ended on a cliffhanger with The Kingdom II in 1997. He abandoned the planned conclusion in '98 when the first of several important cast members died (most of that original cast were elderly or middle-aged and have passed away in the quarter-century gap between the second and third parts of the story), but he gets around that enormous hurdle in practical, silly, and moving ways. Taken as a whole, the three parts add up to the funniest thing he's ever done (and maybe the most explicitly Danish). This may also be the last major project he directs since he was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's and is weighing retirement. FYI, all three miniseries (or one long miniseries, depending on how you want to look at it) are currently streaming on MUBI (the final episode won't be available until Dec. 25 if you're reading this before that date).

Part 2, about the older movies I watched on the big screen in 2022, coming soon-ish.