Here we stand at the end of another year in movies, and I’m left with one of my most pessimistic outlooks on the artistic medium to which I’ve devoted much of my life and attention.
To put it succinctly: it was a good year for movies. It was a bad year for the movies at large.
Some of this is just delayed fatalism from the COVID era, as 2022 is when it finally felt like the limited supply of films — and their smaller range of imagination coupled with a very time-bound set of preoccupations — dominated the year’s storyline. Maybe it’s streaming, maybe it’s peak TV, maybe it’s production budgets hamstrung by expensive pandemic protocols, but this year there were undeniably fewer movies … and that had the downstream effect of diminishing their cultural prominence just about everywhere.
More than ever, this list seems to represent a very narrow swath of movies. Namely, they’re the kinds of artist-driven works that garner a lot of attention out of film festivals when they premiere. It feels like that used to mean something or have some kind of currency outside that bubble, but now it just feels like that momentum disintegrates instantly.
If all I’ve done is depress you thus far, I’ll stop the lamentation up top and turn to the individual movies that brightened a pretty dark year for the art form. No year could be entirely bad or worthless with ten films this strong, this curious, this alive. While it might feel like an ever-harder battle to swim upstream against the currents of culture, I hold out faith that elevating titles you might not have heard of — or given a chance — through a list like these can keep the flame of cinema alive just a little while longer.
#10 — Great Freedom (trailer)
I’ve long been fascinated by the charisma and contortionism of German actor Franz Rogowski, who can hold the screen with an animal magnetism I can only compare to Joaquin Phoenix. The actor gets his most impressive showcase to date in Great Freedom, where he plays prisoner Hans Hoffman across three decades following World War II. It’s a long, tortured journey from his release from concentration camps in 1945 to his full release back into German society in 1968 when the country finally repealed a statute known as Paragraph 175 that outlawed same-sex relations. His body keeps the score, physically and emotionally, as shown across three distinct periods of his captivity. Tenderness movingly breaks through the limits that authorities attempt to impose on it, but filmmaker Sebastian Miese is not exactly chanting “LOVE WINS!” off-screen as Hoffman walks free. Rogowski ensures we can feel that the prison has only moved into his mind and spirit. For there are only so many times you can tell someone their feelings are unnatural before they begin to internalize that.
Available on MUBI.
#9 — Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (trailer)
Any long-time admirer knew when Rian Johnson cut his lucrative deal with Netflix to continue making Knives Out movies that he was not just going to do cookie-cutter sequels. But Glass Onion exceeded my wildest expectations for how incisively the filmmaker could dissemble the murder mystery genre while still providing all its requisite thrills. This is a film that swaggers with more sureness of purpose than the original, delivering both confident humor and meaningful twists of fortune with admirable boldness. Johnson’s inspired send-up of Big Tech’s dumb money also finds the most natural vessel for the boiling rage at the billionaire class by adding design, not just despair, to the destructive impulses toward a system rewarding all the wrong things and people.
Available on Netflix.
#8 — EO (trailer)
The clearest X-ray of contemporary society came not through radiation waves but through the braying of a donkey. EO makes us an animal so often reduced to metaphor and imbues it with an existential ache that communicates across species. As the donkey surveys the world that has left it behind in virtually every realm, he provides an unblinkered view of humankind. But filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski isn’t interested in his protagonist solely as he relates to the society we’ve built. He plunges us into the subjectivity of the animal kingdom and translates his emotional plea to recognize their consciousness into visceral, vibrant filmmaking — which then makes it all the more moving as a plea to care rather than a polemic.
Available in select theaters.
#7 — Crimes of the Future (trailer)
In a year when some of my favorite filmmakers turn the lens back on their own craft, the one that lodged itself in my brain most firmly was David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. This lo-fi dystopian vision of a world where people no longer feel pain posed the most profound, if oblique, questions about where we draw the line between humanity and monstrosity. Cronenberg’s refraction of these questions about our physiology and psychology comes through his twisted vision of what artistry looks like in this — one where the body becomes an irresistible canvas for artistry both internally and externally. It’s sexy, scary, satirical, and scintillating … not to mention disarmingly sincere.
Available on Hulu.
#6 — Everything Everywhere All At Once (trailer)
No film felt more “of the moment” in a good way than Everything Everywhere All At Once. The directing duo Daniels explodes the omnipresent multiverse concept, finding a logical entry point through the plot and then exploring its full range of possibilities aesthetically and emotionally. In a year full of bloated runtimes (call it the mini-series effect), the filmmakers make a compelling case for the value of a maximalism that trusts audiences can follow wild twists of time and narrative. Their skeleton key is rooting the journey of an exhausted immigrant mother (Michelle Yeoh’s singular Evelyn) in a sincerity of spirit and a trust that, even when unexplainable, there’s a design to the maddening mess of the universe.
Available on Showtime Anytime and to buy digitally.
#5 — Causeway (trailer)
The directorial debut of the year came, surprisingly to me, from acclaimed theater director Lila Neugebauer with Causeway. This quietly simmering two-hander between two physically (and emotionally, natch) broken people who link paths in New Orleans captures all the quiet intimacy of the stage without restricting the audience’s view to the mere observation of a chamber piece. Neugebauer treats every moment with patience and grace, letting them unfold naturally and organically. The result is a simple, slender drama where no scene rings emotionally false. It’s also elevated by the always-great Brian Tyree Henry and a revelatory Jennifer Lawrence, who replaces her traditional loose-cannon acting style with a moving turn rooted in reticence and resolve.
Available on Apple TV+.
#4 — Saint Omer (trailer)
Alice Diop’s first foray into fictional filmmaking with Saint Omer is a work of sneaky yet staggering simplicity. Using the transcript from the trial of a woman who left her child to die, this work of verbatim cinema creates a space in which concern over mere innocence and guilt fades into the background. Through the perspective of a professor observing the proceedings, Diop methodically peels back the different layers of systemic neglect and disrespect of women — specifically Black women — that might help bring some humanity to the surprisingly durable myth of the monstrous Medea. She’s never pulling punches throughout the difficult court proceedings, and yet the film’s lucidly articulated finale still manages to land like an unanticipated shot to the gut.
Available in select theaters beginning January 13, 2023, following an awards-qualifying run in 2022.
#3 — All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (trailer)
After years of limp “protest art” that really represented little more than a helpless cry against the convergence of revanchist forces, what a tonic it is to behold All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Subject Nan Goldin, the great photographer whose focus on capturing the simple joys of her bohemian pals helped enable much of contemporary art (and maybe also Instagram?), understands the true nature of the link between art and activism. Be it during the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s or the present-day opioid crisis fueled by the greed of the Sackler family, Goldin knows how difficult it is to achieve real accountability through legal or political institutions. Art is merely a symbolic realm to lift up those who left too soon … and yet it is often all we have, so it matters. Documentarian Laura Poitras’ ingeniously layered bio-doc keenly notes the echoes across Goldin’s early life, artistic career, and harm reduction activism to show how everything has built to this moment. There’s likely no one else capable of rising to the occasion.
Available in select theaters.
#2 — Athena (trailer)
No work immersed me with propulsive filmmaking quite like Romain Gavras did with Athena. Moreso than any big-budget blockbuster in 2022, this is the movie that most convinced me there were still new frontiers to blaze with the camera. With his propulsive long takes that refuse to abide by the laws of gravity, Gavras uses the immediacy of his urban warfare thriller to fuel the story’s tragic implications. Ironically, all this scale and spectacle of cinema derives from the narrative role played by a very different kind of recording device: the one attached to a cell phone that captures the all-too-contemporary sight of an unarmed person of color shot to death. When imagery becomes this potent in its evocation of broader societal struggles, Gavras shows how ideology and identity simply fall away in the name of survival at all costs.
Available on Netflix.
#1 — The Banshees of Inisherin (trailer)
Most conversations I had with people I’d managed to convince, or at least nudge along the journey, to see The Banshees of Inisherin revolved around the depressing and downbeat nature of the film’s outlook. The case that I made back time and again was as follows: Martin McDonagh must show us the destructive ends of human pettiness and cruelty to remind us that people are, actually, worth fighting for. This parable set against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War takes a simple spark — what if your friend decided you weren’t worth speaking to anymore? — and fans the flames until it grows to engulf the entire titular town. It’s an aching cry out against the arbitrary divisions that keep us apart as people, delivered with tragicomic precision in everything from dialogue to performance as well as cinematography and score.
Available on HBO Max.
Wishing you all the best for a final great night of 2022 — a new year beckons for us all!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall