Disclaimer
I have not seen the following films yet:
One Fine Morning (Un beau matin) (Mia Hansen-Løve, France/Germany)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop, France)
Pacifiction (Albert Serra, France/Spain/Germany/Portugal)
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, USA)
No Bears (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi, Denmark)
Between Two Worlds (Emanuele Carrere, France)
Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, United Kingdom)
Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa, Japan)
RMN (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
Unrest (Cyril Schäublin, Switzerland)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, Germany/Argentina)
Rimini and Sparta (Ulrich Seidl, Austria)
Rule 34 (Júlia Murat, Brazil)
Sanctuary (Zachary Wigon, USA)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber, USA)
Cognitive dissonance
For unfathomable reasons, some of the most egregious films of 2022 - e.g., Nope, The Eternal Daughter, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Kimi, Parallel Mothers, Playground - received high scores from professional critics. I've never felt such a disconnect from the Sight & Sound and Film Comment criticariat since they began publishing the best movies of the year list.
For instance, Jordan Peele's Nope is, by far, his worst movie (1/5 stars):
Nope indeed. A third rate, directionless, bloated M. Night Shyamalan rip off. One of the most soporific sci-fi westerns in the history of cinema. Nope is what happens when you surround yourself with sycophants. I don't know how you can recover from such a disaster: it's Peele's Heavens Gate. PS The in your face e-bike product placement is such a faux pas. Besides, the movie ran out of batteries after barely thirty minutes.
Johanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter (1/5 stars) is borderline embarassing:
A film so obscenely pretentious it deserves zero stars. I remember when Hogg used to tell interesting stories (Archipelago, Unrelated, Exhibition)... The collaboration with Tilda Swinton, whom I love, has definitely run its course. Hoggs pulls a M. Night Shyamalan after subjecting the viewers to a litany of "darling" and "lovely". "Look, ma. I'm making a parody of a ghost story, so gothic, so smart..." The last straw is Louis mentioned in the end credits. This is as lethal as The Souvenir Part Two, perhaps the most unbearable British film of the decade. It's always sad to lose a great talent.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once (1/5 stars) is everything that is wrong with pseudo-indies, all at once:
Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is the title of Stuart Jeffries's monumental study on postmodernism. This film is a perfect example of the silly, puerile, juvenile, comic-book aesthetics, ambrosia for nerds, ubiquitous video game logic permeating cinema he describes. Hollywood got gamified, the stultifying process continues unabated, but wait this a parable about family issues - she's the one, she's the messiah, enjoy this feminist version of the matrix but it's still the matrix. An overdose of inanity. Beware the fanboys, they're mapping out all the possible story lines on their wiki.
And among the (many) disappointments of the year, Noah Baumbach's White Noise was possible the most shocking:
Turning White Noise into a farce is as blasphemous as desecrating a holy text. This adaptation should have been directed by David Cronenberg. Everything is off: the tone, the chroma, the acting, the cast, the pace. *Everything*. We will never forget & we will never forgive Noah Baumbach for this debacle. Words escape me... I'm in a state of shock. Look at me, I'm shaking as I type this. Not even four Dylars on an empty stomach could lessen the pain. I need a glass a water... please... somebody. And what the heck is the "Green Drop Award"? The Venice Film Festival equivalent of the Razzies?
Last but not least, here's what I wrote about Decision to Leave (3/5 stars):
Last September, MUBI's CEO told Variety that the company "paid an irrational amount" of cash to buy the rights to Decision to Leave. "Why? Because [the] data showed... that that film is worth significantly more than what distributors were willing to pay in the U.K." he said. Shortly after, MUBI proceeded to mutilate its community, removing years of comments, the FEED option etc. without a warning or an explanation, gutting the admin and the community staff. Was spending an "irrational amount of money" for content worth destroying the community? What do the numbers show, dear data-driven CEO?
Horror!
2022 was a great year for horror. I have updated the Greatest Horror Films 2020-2030 list: Speak No Evil replaced Possessor as the most interesting horror film of this (admittedly horrific) decade. Other entries include Soft & Quiet (a truly remarkable achievement), Men, Fresh and The Innocents.
Below are some of my takes:
1_Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
I confess I could not watch Vortex in one take. I had to stop, occasionally and listen to the radio, pretend to check my email or whatever. After all I'm still recovering from Haneke's Amour, which I watched in a movie theater, paralyzed in my seat, unable to leave or look at anything but the screen. I don't think that movies are dreams. They're more like previews of things to come. So they're more like nightmares.
2:_Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup)
The new benchmark in modern horror. Perverse and Machiavellian like Hostel, Tafdrup's unsettling tale tackles a special kind of dark tourism. Morally obscene, like any Lars Von Trier's film, Speak No Evil is as disturbing as Haneke's Funny Games. They share the main ingredient: family torture porn. But the recipe is different: here the family complies. Copenhagen syndrome? Although inevitable the finale is shocking.
The following comment was erased by MUBI in one of their purge frenzies:
Ok, now that I watched 's Tafdrup's previous films, Parents and A Horrible Woman, I think I have a better grasp of Speak No Evil. First, basically, his entire oeuvre is about the emasculation of the Danish male man. If in the previous two films such capitulation is mostly symbolic, mostly lighthearted, here is literal and tragic. Second, in all films, the Danish male man takes an active role in his own humiliation and ultimate annihilation. Third, you can see a progression in Tafdrup's narrative: although Speak No Evil is a horror film, abjection, torture, and psychological manipulation are the key ingredients of all his films. Another way of saying this is that Speak No Evil is quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from his previous efforts. The shocking outcome of Speak No Evil should not come as a surprise: there's a sense of progression, rather than revolution. In many ways, Speak No Evil could be considered the direct sequel rather than a mere follow-up to A Horrible Woman.
3_Athena (Romain Gavras)
This is what you get when you combine Anders Ølholm and Frederik Louis Hviid's Enforcement with Christian Schwochow's Je Suis Karl. Kudos to the sublime Gavras for casting Anthony Bajon (The Third War) as the doomed cop. "Europe 2024" (list): The clock is ticking. European filmmakers know what's about to happen to the Continent. Gavras's diagnosis is one of the most lucid and realistic I've seen so far.
4_Triangle of Sadness (Robert Östund)
A monumental, pre/post apocalyptic tale with plenty of sorrow & zero redemption, part Titanic, part Lord/Ladies of the Flies delivering a sad message: hierarchies, abuse, exploitation, and inequality will prevail no matter what. After all, killing a (pregnant) donkey is the only episode when group cohesion is achieved. Thus, the only thing that could save humanity from itself is a giant meteor. Hence, Melancholia. In the meantime, Eat the rich and then barf. Woody knows best: self medication (i.e., imbibe alcohol until you drop) is the only revolutionary strategy that seems to work, at least in your head. TINA TINA TINA.
5_Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)
Stelarc & Orlan in the post-apocalyptic universe of eXistenZ, aka Greece after decades of Troika austerity. The Man Who Sold His Internal Organs is the world's biggest performance artist. The opening scene is harrowing: we are so overwhelmed by plastic that in the future we will literally eat it, thanks to the crimes of Coca Cola, Pepsi and the fossil fuel mega-monsters. Cronenberg redefines the meaning of "natural". PS When it comes to pure horror, it's hard to compete with Big Oil, even for Croneneberg.
6_Tàr (Todd Field)
Two words: Monster Hunter.
7_Soft and Quiet (Beth de Araújo)
...aka "This is America". This poignant, urgent documentary, released just before the November 2022 Midterms, was inspired by the Karens episodes that shook the US in 2020 (here Stefanie Estes plays the woman who called the police on African American birder in Central Park). Technically stunning - a one take wonder - Soft & Quiet is a remarkable achievement for debutante de Araújo and another triumph for Blum.
8_Sundown (Michel Franco)
Think The Lost Daughter. But with craft and talent. Think Succession. But without Roy. If you can't stand "life affirming" and "empowering" woke-movies-with-a-message-made-for-Sundance, Sundown is for you. The Franco-Roth connection is a killer kombo. And make sure to check out their previous collaboration as well, Chronic (2015).
9_Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland)
Cronenberg, with humor. But also Ballard, with all the psycho-sexual stuff, the fetishes, the documentation practices, and the shopping obsession. Above all, it's pure Strickland, perhaps the most visionary and innovative British directors working today. A much more effective parody of the Artworld than The Man Who Sold His Skin, Flux Gourmet is a movie best served cold, on a streaming service. Trigger warning: colonoscopy porn.
10_You Won't Be Alone (Goran Stolevski)
Robert Eggers' VVitch : Goran Stolveski's You Won't Be Alone = McDonald's : Chez Panisse. This is the 2022 equivalent of Jonathan Glazer's Under My Skin: learning how to be human, acting like a human, feeling like a human. A different kind of shapeshifting: more like adaptation. A thoughtful meditation on gender roles, sex, superstition, community, motherhood, belonging, revenge, atonement. Masterful.
11_Earwig (Lucile Hadžihalilović)
A terrific adaptation of a cryptic book by Brian Caitling starring Mia, a girl with teeth made of ice, an enigmatic tutor named Albert Scellinc, and a demonic cat. Impenetrable, cruel, at times horrific, Earwig seems to be about trauma and control. As in most Hadžihalilović movies, Earwig's dreamlike logic resists rationalization, but lingers in the subconscious like toxic residue. A misanthropic delight.
12_Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude)
The stroll in the city (Part I) is glorious. The similarities between Milan and Bucharest are striking: morons parking their monster cars on sidewalks, unruly drivers, no cops in sight, pervasive junkspace, a general sense of chaos and disorder, hostility and rudeness (see the fight in the supermarket, for instance), noise, litter and smog. It's set in Bucharest, granted, but it looks and behaves exactly like Milan. Horror.
13_The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra)
Ibarra's The Sacred Spirit radiates the same level of ingenuity and deadpan humor that I encountered when I first stumbled upon Los Cronocrimines by Nacho Vigalondo in a San Francisco movie theater. It can be described as a tragicomic movie about the Heaven's Gate cult directed by Isaac Ezban under the influence of the Greek Weird Wave. A genre defying cinematic experience. How much fun did they have making this?
14_Poser (Noah Dixon, Ori Segev)
Dixon+Segev's fictional ethnography of a music subculture is built upon the premise that a millennial with an iPhone is, by definition, a stalker. A millennial with an iPhone is a spy. A millennial with an iPhone is a nightmare. A millennial with an iPhone is a psycho. In short, beware the millennial with an iPhone. If Ingrid goes West, Lennon goes East. Now you be careful because Lennon, like Big Tech, is a vampire.
15_Zero Fucks Given (Emmanuel Marre, Julie Lecoustre)
The labor force is split between the 99% and the 1%: slave for rude tourists for a cheap air travel company or be a maid for a fossil fuel oligarch ("guest") in Dubai for a private jet service firm. They both suck, but for different reasons. Surveillance, harassment, sexism & worst of all, Eurotrash dance & cheap beer. The dream of happiness lives on Insta: social media = Valium. Keep smiling for at least 30 seconds.
LINK
2022_My favorite cinematic experiences
2021_My favorite cinematic experiences
2020_My favorite cinematic experiences
2019_My favorite cinematic experiences
2018_My favorite cinematic experiences
2017_My favorite cinematic experiences
