Hello friends, family, strangers, enemies, frenemies, lovers, AI, and ghosts. Welcome to the second half of my year-end movie post. This half of the year-end-palooza is primarily a love letter to the Austin Film Society. Founded by Richard Linklater in the '80s, the nonprofit AFS finally got its own two-screen theater a handful of years ago after renting or borrowing space in existing venues for most of its existence, and, luckily for me, that theater is a short drive from my home. In a world that is increasingly unfriendly to any theatrical experience not built around a corporate franchise or middlebrow awards bait, AFS is a rare jewel. They show good to great stuff from the entirety of film history, including new releases, every single day. I'm there at least once a week (except in the every-other-year stretch when my work schedule is insane), and I would be at 99% of their screenings if I didn't also have other non-movie obsessions and life obligations. (I hate that I had to miss Rachel Amodeo's criminally unknown
, one of the best movies of the '90s. I hope they bring it back so I can see it on the big screen, where it belongs.) AFS also gives grants and provides resources to new Texas filmmakers and does a variety of other nonprofit-related stuff that keeps Texas film culture breathing. Here are the non-2022 movies I got to see on the big screen in 2022 thanks to the Austin Film Society. I think it gives a broader and more accurate picture of my taste than the new-release post. (For example, I love pulpy stuff and drive-in B-movies and classic Hollywood and 20th century horror and action and westerns and comedies and crime thrillers and musicals just as much as I love art films, but no one really makes those kinds of movies anymore and/or makes them right.) Since that post was such a word salad, I'm going to try to be a little pithier here.
Until the narration in the final minutes broke the spell, Teshigahara's camera made me feel like I was part of Gaudí's architecture. I can't remember where I read this, but someone described this movie as the closest approximation to wandering around in a city you don't live in, and I like that description.
I love how the superimposed water images, colors, and the early electronic music score by Bebe and Louis Barron play off each other. I was so entranced by the images and sound that I barely paid attention to Anaïs Nin's narration.
The actress and activist Delphine Seyrig shot videotape interviews with actresses in the United States and France in the 1970s about being a woman and an actor in the film industry and edited it into a feature in the early '80s. It's both a tough and an exciting watch, tough because nearly everything negative these women say about an industry behind an art form I love is undeniably true, thrilling because we're watching people given the space, respect, and occasional push to say what they think and feel without self-censorship. As a Rivette-head, I was happy to see Jacques Rivette be one of the only male directors talked about in a complimentary way. Another thing that fascinated me was when Seyrig asked these women if they would have pursued acting had they been male. All of them say no; a handful say they would have found jobs as sailors.
Any movie with an 80% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes that's also been called a perfect film by John Waters is probably going to be right up my alley, but throw in Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Joseph Losey, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Barry, and a Sardinian island, and that's an alley I don't want to leave (and I got to see it on 35mm). The AFS programmer who introduced Boom! sprayed a vintage Elizabeth Taylor-endorsed perfume into the air as the screening started, which really set the mood for one of the most insane pieces of camp Hollywood has ever turned out.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is so good at capturing the dread caused by the ghosts of the past colliding with the dim-hope future in the digital present. Bright Future makes expressive use of the grayish color-drained visual palette otherwise too prevalent in the '00s. It really works here, as does the varying image quality caused by the use of different digital cameras. Bright Future is also more evidence that movies with a jellyfish in them are more often than not worth watching.
Finds a sweet spot between anything-is-possible and no-hope, with a formal approach that touches on both British kitchen-sink realism and the French New Wave without getting trapped by either one.
Finally got to see one of my personal top 10 favorites on the big screen. Rivette is my favorite conspiracy theorist. Is this the best movie about friendships between women? Does this have the best ending? I'm highly biased toward my own opinions, so the answer is yes.
Every single person in this movie, no matter how small the role, is in contention for being the most interesting person in the movie. Including the guy we never get to meet.
Pretty wild story about the restoration of this film. It was released shortly before the Islamic Revolution in Iran and banned once the Ayatollah took power. The negatives were presumed destroyed until the director's children found them in a junk shop in Tehran in 2014. I'm a sucker for gorgeous, candle-lit, Gothic melodramas about decaying families betraying each other, and this is one of the most visually striking.
Rip Torn gets most of the accolades for this disturbing, funny, uncomfortable, formally and narratively daring, proto-found-footage exploration of character and performance near the abyss, and he's great, but Sally Kirkland is the movie's VIP. Contains one of the great party-where-nobody-is-having-a-good-time scenes. (I was both surprised and not surprised when the clown appeared.) The film has the odd superpower of detaching from and demythologizing its own 1969 present and looking at the moment without pity or mercy.
I've seen this movie dozens of times, but I finally got to see it on a big screen, and damn, that opening credits scene is incredible projected large. Still my favorite Coppola, but now I feel like I've really seen it.
I'm not wild about the overly screen-written turn the ending takes, but the rest of Cooley High is right up my alley in its emphasis on character, place, and experience and deemphasis on plot. The following year's Car Wash is Michael Schultz's masterpiece, but this is almost as good. For a few years there, Schultz was a bit of a '70s American Jean Renoir. I wish he'd get talked about more as a filmmaker, but I'm guessing there are a few mostly unfair reasons why he doesn't (he's only directed television for the last couple decades, he made the notorious Frampton/Bee Gees Sgt. Pepper's flop, he's a Black filmmaker in the U.S.A.).
Robert Wise is such an underrated director. How had I never seen this sci-fi classic before? It's a message movie with a prominent role for a child actor but somehow it's not cloying and the message is laced with ambiguity. The visual effects still have a lot of power, and the film's paranoia and exasperation will never go out of style as long as humans remain violent, shortsighted, and dumb but also kinda self-aware of our own violence, shortsightedness, and dumbness.
I was one of the people who saw this in a theater when it first came out (I was a freshman in college). Where were the rest of you jokers? It was one of the most undeserving box office flops ever, but it's picked up a cult following since, and it was a joy to see it on the big screen for the second time. Everyone is so good in it, even the actors who only have one or two lines, and Tak Fujimoto's cinematography is some of the best of the '90s. Carl Franklin is way too underrated as a filmmaker (third movie in a row on this list where I've said that). He has to take a lot of director-for-hire gigs, but when he gets a chance to really do something, he makes it count (see also One False Move and his episodes of Mindhunter).
Formally thrilling and quietly devastating. Ceylan excises the overblown faux-seriousness of most mainstream dramas by choosing to observe instead of tell. I love where he puts his camera. His images have so much texture and life, and they excite me not just as a lover of film's possibilities but as a messed-up human trying to live in this world. He respects the medium, and he respects the viewer.
What if a Mentos commercial was 90 minutes long and Satanic? This movie plays like every single person in the cast and crew spent their entire lives in sensory deprivation tanks, were plucked from the tanks and forced to channel-surf '80s TV for four weeks, and then were taught how to use film equipment and instructed to create a teen horror movie from what they'd pieced together. (The teenage lead spends half the movie in dinosaur pajamas, for example.) This is not a criticism. It's a recommendation. Such a blast to see with an audience.
Highly entertaining gender-bending spin on the Jekyll/Hyde story from Hammer with a great Martine Beswick performance and lots of delightfully over-the-top Britishness (the pronunciation of "elixir" as "eelixEER," etc.). To paraphrase Homer Simpson describing Grand Funk Railroad drummer Don Brewer, I've always found the competent direction of Roy Ward Baker to be neither a major plus nor a major minus, but this is one of his most vibrant and energetic pieces of work.
A platonic love story about two men yelling at each other. A cohesive blend of about a half-dozen genres. The bridge connecting rough 'n' (un)ready Kurosawa to seasoned master Kurosawa.
Some of his comedies are fantastic, but I wish Blake Edwards had worked in this creepy, neo-noir mode more often. Maybe four fewer Pink Panther movies and four more of these?
The fact that Andy Milligan is generally regarded as a campy, so-bad-he's-good filmmaker (if he's regarded at all) is an indictment of the way mainstream society rots people's imaginations and narrows possibilities and real choice. No other filmmaker arranges people in a frame the way Milligan does. Milligan's camera placement and arrangement of actors make every shot feel like you as an audience member are an eavesdropping peeping tom on pills. I love this. Neil Flanagan steals the show here. I wish we had a whole series of Cherry Lane movies.
An enormously ambitious, enormously successful document of the 1981 French Open as seen by photographer/filmmaker William Klein, who died in 2022 at the age of 96. The annual tennis tournament comes across as its own temporary country. A favorite moment among many: an Open official telling a swarming group of autograph seekers and schmoozers to "beat it, jerks!"
Fascinating and mostly successful attempt to turn sex as a bodily experience into film form. Schneemann has a good sense of humor, too, and knows how funny balls are. The shots of the cat were a nice touch.
Classic Ozu in its focus on intergenerational conflict, living and working spaces, landscapes, and the difficulties of communicating big, honest emotions while also adhering to societal norms, but this time Ozu moves the comedy that flavors most of his dramas to the foreground, with the dramatic elements acting as a quiet foundation for the humor. Like every other Ozu film I've seen, it's a major achievement. Unlike every other Ozu film I've seen, this one has multiple fart jokes and some hula hooping.
I thought this was my favorite Kurosawa movie after watching it on DVD many years ago, but seeing it on widescreen 35mm confirmed, rubberstamped, and notarized that opinion. The way he uses the space of the living room and its window in the first third. Damn! The marriage of technique and style to the moral and ethical dilemmas of the characters. Damn! As the 30-year-old kids on The Wreck of the Elonmusk Fitzgerald (fka Twitter) say, this is king shit.
A Hong Kong crime thriller trilogy shot in dazzling, operatic, ultra-exciting, occasionally silly high-'00s style. Martin Scorsese remade the first one as The Departed, but the second and third parts (a prequel and a hilariously complicated prequel/sequel hybrid) expand, deepen, and complicate the characters. The second one is especially strong.
A cockfight between the ridiculous and the sublime. I have a real fondness for messy movies that bite off more than they can chew. Natalie Wood is too old to play her teenage character (a Letterboxd review comparing Inside Daisy Clover to Clifford made me laugh), but that age gap gives the movie a weird, desperate tone that kinda sometimes works. Christopher Plummer is great as the Machiavellian studio head, Robert Redford's character talks more than any other Redford character I've ever seen, Ruth Gordon is hilarious but doesn't get enough to do after the first third, the sound booth scene is incredible. I wish we could have stayed in the world of the first third for more of the film before all the movie star biz takes over the story. I love the graffiti in the opening scene ("astrology is for the birds" and "grope for peace" are personal faves).
Another old favorite I finally got to see on the big screen in 2022. To be honest, I think I'd like this movie just as much, if not more, if the whole thing were an extension of the opening scenes, in which Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe tries to find the one brand of cat food his picky cat will eat. I love the way Gould, screenwriter Leigh Brackett, and director Altman turn Raymond Chandler's hardboiled byzantine murder mystery into a stoned '70s hangout movie about the eternal battle between cynicism and real feeling. I also love how much it hates cops.
I'm glad AFS showed a 35mm print of this even though the colors had faded a bit because it's an exasperatingly difficult movie to see on anything other than rare expensive copies of early '80s VHS. It's not available for streaming and has never been on Blu-ray or DVD. It deserves so much better.
It took me a few scenes to find my bearings and connect with the characters (not necessarily a bad thing and sometimes an indication that a movie will eventually become one of my favorites), but Moreau's stylistic choices had me hooked from the jump. She somehow manages to reveal so much about each person in its large ensemble of characters without really showing us much of anything except for a handful of carefully observed details. I found myself becoming completely absorbed after my initial resistance, even as it confirmed my suspicions that showbiz people are exhausting.
A gorgeous visual mosaic of big city night people (bartenders, baristas, sex workers, drag performers, drug dealers and addicts, cab drivers, movie theater projectionists, musicians, a West Indian pastor, a Hungarian boxer) and their interconnected subcultures carried along by a rhythmic, constantly moving narrative. Director/star Juliet Berto (one of my artistic heroes) and codirector Jean-Henri Roger contrast the neglected and marginalized community (where drugs and hard living are ever-present but where people look out for each other and are genuinely connected) with the trigger-happy police (who are in the community but not of it and who exist only to harass, divide, worsen existing problems, and create new ones).
Bogdanovich planned this film in black and white, but the studio forced him to release it in color. After the financial disaster of Bogdanovich's previous movie (the massively underrated At Long Last Love), he didn't have the clout to push back. Unfortunately, this one tanked at the box office, too. I've never seen the color version, but I suspect the movie may have done a little better in b&w. It's probably completely exhausting and tonally jarring in color. In b&w, this is a beautiful, overstuffed, pratfall-filled, melancholy screwball comedy about the silent film era and loving movies, and I mean really loving movies. I'm still chewing on the film's ambiguous depiction of racism in the movie industry, especially in the choices made about what to include and what to leave out in the Birth of a Nation scene. Is Bogdanovich making a pointed critique of white obliviousness or he is being oblivious himself? I'm not sure. Whatever the case, Nickelodeon is yet more proof that Bogdanovich in the '70s was a man both behind and ahead of his time, bending the old forms into new shapes and attempting to keep the blood of Old Hollywood flowing in New Hollywood's veins.
Yet another of my longtime favorites I finally got to see on a big screen. Linda Manz in Out of the Blue gives a performance that goes so far beyond what the celebrities who win major acting awards are remotely capable of on their best day, and she does it without any showing off. (Take that, celebs.) I also think this is Dennis Hopper's best work as both a director and an actor. I can watch it over and over even though the final third is a descent into emotional hell because of the amazing Linda Manz and because Hopper created a zero-bullshit movie with one strong image after another.
A warped funhouse mirror reflecting both the classic American crime thriller and its remix/remodel by the European and Japanese New Waves, and a dream-search for meaning in the void. Great parts for Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson.
I'm hot and cold on Philippe Garrel, but when he grabs me, he really grabs me. This mostly silent collection of dream images about a young family on the run does a lot of fascinating things with ultrabright lighting, natural darkness, landscape, and striking shot compositions in both the intentional and happy-accident categories.
This movie is such a good time. I've never seen Kurosawa experiment with style and form so much in a single project, but there's real feeling behind it all, too. Every frame has something visually exciting in it. The hotel telephone sequence? The sweaty nightclub dancers unsuccessfully beating the heat backstage? The baseball crowd? This is cinema, baby.
Very odd that this didn't connect with audiences or critics in the late '60s. You get Natalie Wood in a role that lets her do everything she does best, Robert Redford coming into his own as a movie star (he looks way more comfortable onscreen than he did in Inside Daisy Clover), a compelling and unusual story, beautiful James Wong Howe cinematography, a complex and not annoying child actor performance from Mary Badham as Wood's younger sister. Why didn't the people of 1966 dig it? I dug it. You might dig it. Dig it? Dig it!
I have no idea how I feel about this movie (particularly its final thirty minutes), but it really makes an impact on a big screen. Twentynine Palms is a deliberate act of provocation (or maybe just trolling) from Dumont, who had grown tired of critics repeatedly comparing him to Bresson and who made something kinda-sorta adjacent to what was then called the New French Extremity (a group of late '90s and 2000s transgressive French horror films and dark dramas, often filled with extreme graphic violence, sex, emotional brutality, and aggressively of-the-moment visual styles) in response. Critics and audiences HATED it ("doctors HATE him") and fans of the director felt betrayed, but it set him free from the curse of expectation, something he's used to his advantage for the remainder of his wonderfully oddball career. (Until watching his most recent movie, France, last week, I had a hard time recognizing the Bruno Dumont I know from 2009 to the present in the Bruno Dumont who made Twentynine Palms, but France finally connected the dots for me.) Contrary to its reputation, Palms is, until the brutal final scenes, more about dread and unease than violence, and there is an incredibly effective menace emanating from every automobile in the film. (This was such an unnerving movie to drive home alone from at night, but dread and discomfort are my constant companions, so I also kinda loved that drive home.) I'm still having a hard time figuring out my feelings about this one, but I did enjoy the Antonioni-indebted landscapes, the Eggleston-esque motel room interiors, the scene where the two main characters walk to a store to buy car wax and then get ice cream at a roadside stand, and the aforementioned automobile horror. Seriously, these are the scariest cars in film, and people should be scared of cars.
Valerie's goals and dreams align with what conservatives want women to be (a middle-class housewife cooking and cleaning for a man she loves), but she's stuck in sex work, harassed by cops, and spit in and out of the prison system simply because she lives openly, unapologetically, and proudly as herself, a Black trans woman in 1970s Akron. Joseph Horning's short documentary about Valerie is unpretentious, empathetic, unsentimental, and human, with a simple but striking visual style.
This is the earliest Hong Sang-soo movie I've seen, and it's fascinating to watch the seeds of his present style being planted, along with some elements that were discarded or transformed later (including some beautiful, painterly shot compositions that aren't the kind of thing you see much in his recent work). I love the structure of the film, in which scenes from the first half are repeated in the second half with different emphases, additions, omissions, perspectives, and vantage points and slight changes in dialogue or action, giving the viewer a lot to chew on about the unreliability of memory, our limited individual perspectives, and the manipulative control filmmakers have over audiences.
Superficial comparisons can be made to other filmmakers, which I'm about to do (Cassavetes, Pialat, Truffaut, Rivette, Schatzberg, and her ex Godard (RIP), for starters), but Anna Karina is mostly doing her own thing here, and this movie should not be so hard to find. The story of a turbulent couple from love at first sight to messy dissolution (played by Karina and Michel Lancelot), Vivre Ensemble does not look like a directorial debut. Karina shows remarkable skill at handling seemingly contradictory moods and tones and weaving them into an integrated whole with a fantastic use of closeups (she knows how great her face works onscreen, but she also gives that same understanding to her costars), she films big cities in ways I haven't really seen before, and she gives it all an infectious rhythmic structure. Even when events in the movie are at their darkest and most despairing, Karina's electric visual style kept me from feeling like I was drowning in murkiness. There are some really funny scenes, too.
George Cukor is an incredible visual stylist, but that style is easy to overlook because every bravura camera movement, shot composition, and construction of a scene is in service to his characters, their personalities, and their place in the narrative. The Women is a fine example of that symbiosis of style and character, from its very funny opening credits sequence to the final shot that manages to be both an affirmation of traditional values and Hollywood conventions and a hilarious subversion of both.
That's almost all, folks. In 2003, I started writing down every movie I see in a theater and the date I see it in a little notebook. When the pandemic hit, I started doing that for every movie I watch at home, too. For the third year in a row, here is the full list of every movie I watched or rewatched this year, at home and in the theater.
12 Hour Shift (Brea Grant, 2020)
13 Slays Till X-mas (various directors, 2020)
100 Monsters (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1968)
The Acquaintances of a Lonely John (Benny Safdie, 2008)
Aenigma (Lucio Fulci, 1987)
The Alchemist Cookbook (Joel Potrykus, 2016)
Alive in France (Abel Ferrara, 2017)
All Hands on Deck! (Guillaume Brac, 2020)
Alligator II: The Mutation (Jon Hess, 1991)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)
Along with Ghosts (Kimiyoshi Yasuda & Yoshiyuki Kuroda,
1969)
Anthropophagous (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
Antlers (Scott Cooper, 2021)
Antonio Gaudi (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1984)
Ape (Joel Potrykus, 2012)
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater, 2022)
Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022)
At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich, 1975)
The August Virgin (Jonas Trueba, 2019)
The Baby (Ted Post, 1973)
The Badlanders (Delmer Daves, 1958)
The Baltimore Bullet (Robert Ellis Miller, 1980)
Bells of Atlantis (Ian Hugo, 1952)
Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)
Benediction (Terence Davies, 2021)
Be Pretty and Shut Up! (Delphine Seyrig, 1981)
Between the Lines (Joan Micklin Silver, 1977)
The Black Balloon (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2012)
Black Belt Jones (Robert Clouse, 1974)
Black Box (Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, Jr., 2020)
Black Roses (John Fasano, 1988)
Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)
Blacula (William Crain, 1972)
Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2022)
Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968)
Both Sides of the Blade (Claire Denis, 2022)
The Brain (Ed Hunt, 1988)
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Nina Menkes, 2022)
Bright Future (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2002)
Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platts-Mills, 1969)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (William Asher, 1981)
Buzzard (Joel Potrykus, 2014)
Cannibal Man (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1972)
Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962)
Capone (Steve Carver, 1975)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)
Car Wash (Michael Schultz, 1976)
Caveat (Damian McCarthy, 2020)
Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
Cemetery of Terror (Ruben Galindo, Jr., 1985)
Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982)
Chess of the Wind (Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976)
Chilly Scenes of Winter (Joan Micklin Silver, 1979)
A Christmas Horror Story (Brett Sullivan, Steven Hoban,
& Grant Harvey, 2015)
Christine (John Carpenter, 1983)
C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud (David Irving, 1989)
The Church (Michele Soavi, 1989)
City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020)
City of Blood (Darrell Roodt, 1983/1987)
Clownhouse (Victor Salva, 1989)
Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973)
CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont, 2018)
Combat Shock (Buddy Giovinazzo, 1984)
The Comeback (Pete Walker, 1978)
Coming Apart (Milton Moses Ginsberg, 1969)
The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)
Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Cooley High (Michael Schultz, 1975)
The Corpse Grinders (Ted V. Mikels, 1971)
Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1971)
A Couple (Frederick Wiseman, 2022)
The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973)
Creepozoids (David DeCoteau, 1987)
Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982)
Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987)
Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)
Crime Wave (Andre De Toth, 1953)
Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947)
Dark Night of the Scarecrow (Frank De Felitta, 1981)
The Dark Offerings (Marcus Slabine, 2022)
Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019)
Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kumel, 1971)
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (Michel Gondry, 2005)
The Day After (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)
Day of the Animals (William Girdler, 1977)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974)
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022)
Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 1999)
Deep Blue Sea 2 (Darin Scott, 2018)
Deep Blue Sea 3 (John Pogue, 2020)
Def by Temptation (James Bond III, 1990)
Detention (John Hsu, 2019)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston (Jeff Feuerzeig, 2005)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995)
The Devil Is Driving (Benjamin Stoloff, 1932)
Dig! (Ondi Timoner, 2004)
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Don’t Open Till Christmas (Edmund Purdom, 1984)
Don’t Panic (Ruben Galindo Jr., 1988)
Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (Roy Ward Baker, 1971)
Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936)
Dream No Evil (John Hayes, 1970)
Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)
The Eiger Sanction (Clint Eastwood, 1975)
Elvira’s Haunted Hills (Sam Irvin, 2001)
Enormous (Sophie Letourneur, 2019)
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)
Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 1979)
Evil Eye (Rajeev & Elan Dassani, 2020)
Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962)
Eyes of Fire (Avery Crounse, 1983)
The Fan (Ed Bianchi, 1981)
Fangs (Art Names, 1974)
Fatal Exam (Jack Snyder, 1990)
Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog &
Clive Oppenheimer, 2020)
Fleshpot on 42nd Street (Andy Milligan, 1973)
Footprints on the Moon (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975)
Four Days in July (Mike Leigh, 1984)
Four Women (Julie Dash, 1975)
France (Bruno Dumont, 2021)
Frankenhooker (Frank Henenlotter, 1990)
The Freakmaker (Jack Cardiff, 1974)
Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996)
The French (William Klein, 1982)
French Connection II (John Frankenheimer, 1975)
The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)
Frownland (Ronald Bronstein, 2007)
The Front Page (Billy Wilder, 1974)
Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1967)
Get In (Olivier Abbou, 2019)
The Girl and the Spider (Ramon & Silvan Zurcher, 2021)
Going in Style (Martin Brest, 1979)
Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)
Good Time (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2017)
Grave Robbers (Ruben Galindo Jr., 1989)
The Great Impersonation (Alan Crosland, 1935)
Grizzly (William Girdler, 1976)
Habit (Larry Fessenden, 1995)
Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green, 2022)
Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green, 2021)
Hard Rock Nightmare (Dominick Brascia, 1988)
Hard Rock Zombies (Krishna Shah, 1985)
Harvest Time (Neil Young, 2022)
Head of the Family (Charles Band, 1996)
Heima (Dean DeBlois, 2007)
Hellbender (Toby Poser, John Adams, & Zelda Adams, 2021)
Her Violet Kiss (Bill Morrison, 2021)
High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
High Tension (Alexandre Aja, 2003)
Honeydew (Devereux Milburn, 2020)
Host (Rob Savage, 2020)
Hotel by the River (Hong Sang-soo, 2018)
Hot Saturday (William A. Seiter, 1932)
House (Steve Miner, 1985)
House II: The Second Story (Ethan Wiley, 1987)
Housebound (Gerard Johnstone, 2014)
House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)
House of Mortal Sin (Pete Walker, 1976)
Identikit (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1974)
I Like Bats (Grzegorz Warchol, 1986)
Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2002)
Infernal Affairs II (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2003)
Infernal Affairs III (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2003)
Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965)
International House (A. Edward Sutherland, 1933)
Introduction (Hong Sang-soo, 2021)
Isolation (various directors, 2021)
Is That Black Enough for You?!? (Elvis Mitchell, 2022)
Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine, 2022)
J.D.’s Revenge (Arthur Marks, 1976)
Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, 2017)
Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, 2019)
John’s Gone (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2010)
Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais, 2019)
The Killer Elite (Sam Peckinpah, 1975)
The Knack … and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)
Knife of Ice (Umberto Lenzi, 1972)
Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2019)
Landscape Suicide (James Benning, 1986)
Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)
Led Zeppelin (Dick Carruthers, 2003)
The Legend of Boggy Creek (Charles B. Pierce, 1972)
Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2018)
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)
The Lie (Veena Sud, 2018)
Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944)
Lili Marleen (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner,
1976)
Little Shop of Horrors (Frank Oz, 1986)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)
The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)
Lumiere (Jeanne Moreau, 1976)
The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)
Magic (Richard Attenborough, 1978)
Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020)
The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955)
Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (William Lustig (as Alan
Smithee), 1992)
Man in the Saddle (Andre De Toth, 1951)
The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021)
Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935)
Masked and Anonymous (Larry Charles, 2003)
Megan Is Missing (Michael Goi, 2011) (one of the worst
things I’ve ever seen)
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger & Bruce
Sinofsky, 2004)
The Midnight Hour (Jack Bender, 1985)
Midnight Madness (Michael Nankin & David Wechter, 1980)
Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue (Murray Lerner,
2004)
Mill of the Stone Women (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960)
Les Miserables (Ladj Ly, 2019)
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2021)
The Monster Club (Roy Ward Baker, 1981)
Mortuary (Howard Avedis, 1983)
The Mortuary Collection (Ryan Spindell, 2019)
Mosquito State (Filip Jan Rymsza, 2020)
Mr. Jealousy (Noah Baumbach, 1997)
The Mule (Clint Eastwood, 2018)
Neige (Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger, 1981)
New Order (Michel Franco, 2020)
Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976)
Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953)
Nickelodeon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1976) (B&W version)
Nightbreed (Clive Barker, 1990)
Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
The Night Stalker (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1972)
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (Bartosz M. Kowalski,
2020)
Nocturne (Zu Quirke, 2020)
Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022)
The Northman (Robert Eggers, 2022)
Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)
Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959)
On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)
Operation Varsity Blues (Chris Smith, 2021)
Original Gangstas (Larry Cohen, 1996)
The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah, 1983)
Ouanga (George Terwilliger, 1935)
Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)
Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar, 2019)
Palermo or Wolfsburg (Werner Schroeter, 1980)
Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958)
The Passing Show: The Life and Music of Ronnie Lane (Rupert
Williams, 2006)
Pearl (Ti West, 2022)
Peppermint Soda (Diane Kurys, 1977)
Phenomena (Dario Argento, 1985)
Piazza Vittorio (Abel Ferrara, 2017)
El Pico (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1983)
El Pico 2 (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1984)
Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson, 2022)
Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché (Celeste Bell & Paul Sng,
2021)
Popcorn (Mark Herrier & Alan Ormsby, 1991)
The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017)
Prater (Ulrike Ottinger, 2007)
Private School (Noel Black, 1983)
The Projectionist (Abel Ferrara, 2019)
The Prowler (Joseph Zito, 1981)
A Quiet Place Part II (John Krasinski, 2020)
A Quiet Place to Kill (Umberto Lenzi, 1970)
The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)
Relaxer (Joel Potrykus, 2018)
The Rental (Dave Franco, 2020)
Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story (Morgan Neville
& Robert Gordon, 2007)
Le Revelateur (Philippe Garrel, 1968)
The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel, 2020)
Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)
Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, 2022)
Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997)
Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000)
Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011)
The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)
Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975)
Siberia (Abel Ferrara, 2020)
Slaughterhouse (Rick Roessler, 1987)
Snatchers (Stephen Cedars & Benji Kleiman, 2019)
Spiral (Kurtis David Harder, 2019)
Spiral: From the Book of Saw (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2021)
Sr. (Chris Smith, 2022)
Stars at Noon (Claire Denis, 2022)
Stax/Volt Revue Live in Norway 1967 (no director credited,
2007)
The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1987)
Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)
The Student of Prague (Arthur Robison, 1935)
Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground (various
directors, 1997)
Los Sures (Diego Echeverria, 1984)
The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968)
Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, 2019)
Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Guy Maddin, 1988)
Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)
Terrifier (Damien Leone, 2016)
Terror in a Texas Town (Joseph H. Lewis, 1958)
There There (Andrew Bujalski, 2022)
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969)
The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)
Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009)
This Much I Know to Be True (Andrew Dominik, 2022)
This Property Is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966)
Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975)
Three the Hard Way (Gordon Parks Jr., 1974)
Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022)
The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin & Irwin Allen,
1974)
Track of the Cat (William A. Wellman, 1954)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)
Trauma (Dario Argento, 1993)
Treasure Island (Guillaume Brac, 2018)
Trick Baby (Larry Yust, 1972)
Truck Turner (Jonathan Kaplan, 1974)
The Tsugua Diaries (Maureen Fazendeiro & Miguel Gomes,
2021)
Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003)
Uncle Sam (William Lustig, 1996)
Undisputed (Walter Hill, 2002)
Valerie (Joseph Horning, 1975)
Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983)
The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)
The Vigil (Keith Thomas, 2019)
The Village Detective: a song cycle (Bill Morrison, 2021)
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-soo, 2000)
Vivre Ensemble (Anna Karina, 1973)
War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Welcome to New York (Abel Ferrara, 2014)
We’re Going to the Zoo (Josh Safdie, 2006)
Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)
What About Me (Rachel Amodeo, 1993)
When I Get Home (Solange Knowles, 2019)
While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)
The White Bus (Lindsay Anderson, 1967)
White Heart (Daniel Barnett, 1975)
The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico, 2017)
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (Jim Cummings, 2020)
The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo, 2020)
The Women (George Cukor, 1939)
X (Ti West, 2022)
Yummy (Lars Damoiseaux, 2019)
Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara, 2021)
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2 comments:
Wow! For the time put into this yearly effort in creating these movie lists, and for the great concise descriptive writing! It's amazing!
Yes & yes to Céline et Julie vont en bateau! (Got to see it on the big screen at FilmStreams in Omaha.) Your writing is worthy of a national audience — so much more depth & variation than what I see in the NYTimes etc. Thanks for expanding the films I can now look forward to.
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