Top Movie of 2022: No. 1 - Everything Everywhere All at Once

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels

The least surprising surprise. I mean, come on! What choice did I have? This was inevitable. I left that theater last March thinking "case closed, that's the best movie of 2022". Everybody I've told about Everything Everywhere All at Once watched this movie and also said "yup, that's obviously the best movie of the year and if you write a Top 15 list it will be boring because the winner is so obvious, Eric". (I promise they did say this.) I'm almost left with little more to say. This movie has everything, as promised. Everything everywhere for two hours and twenty minutes.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an enormous amount of movie with a lot of tones. Avatar 2 is an hour longer and has far, far less movie in it than this one. Everything Everywhere is an action-packed extravaganza of SciFi reality-bending power, it could be this generation's The Matrix. But beyond that is wonderfully silly, imaginative, and really clever. What seem like one-off gags turn out to be incredibly important. No matter how ridiculous the premise, nothing is thrown away like a Family Guy cutaway gag. Everything Everywhere loves every bizarre part of itself and insists that 100% of its ideas reach a cathartic end in a sometimes exhausting obsession.

However, I believe you can reedit Everything Everywhere All at Once into a much more mundane movie. Because this is a mutliverse epic (sorry Doctor Strange, you got badly out-shown in 2022) it would not even be too difficult to splice out all the fantastic elements and the other realities to just about a forty minute interpersonal drama. At the very core of Everything Everywhere is a family tearing itself apart and then during one very hectic day, finding an ability to communicate again. You could read all the amazing elements as just a symptom of Evelyn (the great Michelle Yeoh)'s boredom or emotional dissatisfaction. Or maybe the multiverse distractions are a metaphor for undiagnosed ADHD, since she cannot focus on her life right now. That is, until her life explodes in a million ways even without scenes of martial arts sodomy.

Personally, waiting on the Everything Everywhere All at Once Topher Grace cut.

Really what Everything Everywhere All at Once is about is a couple of first-generation Chinese immigrants whose life has become completely swamped by debts, failed ambitions, annoying customers, and conservative hang-ups. Just a few minutes in Evelyn's life feels as hectic and anxiety-inducing as Uncut Gems. Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan in a glorious return) is a small, quiet man unable to speak up. Their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is trying to connect back to the family but her mother refuses to acknowledge her girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel). Then there's Gong Gong (the great James Hong), the elderly grandfather who needs to be wheeled around and just happens to be visiting at the most inconvenient time possible. 

Still, none of the other universes and martial arts nonsense are unnecessary, Waymond gets his greatest character moment away from what we can consider 'Our Universe'. The dozen or so alternate movies playing in this have their own importance and care given to them. But Everything Everywhere is never about anything other than this battle to accept each other. To let down whatever terrible voice in our head pushes our loved ones away and instead forces into a role we hate, such as a mother who can only nag her daughter about her weight.

I did consider doing a double Number One, with Everything Everywhere All at Once and Turning Red both sharing the top spot. It is incredible that we have two movies with so many similar themes, both in the Top 3, both about Chinese mothers and daughters, both about accepting queerness (either subtextually or textually) and weirdness and freedom, and both released in March 2022. This generational split in that community has clearly been a source of a lot of pain, even as it is such a muse. It meant a lot to half of the directing duo, who poured his own emotions into this project. It means a lot to me, because my near-boomer parents can be ignorant idiots sometimes, and I'm not Chinese and never will be. I love how this real trauma can be felt cinematically in fantastical metaphors. Maybe you're a mom turned into a kaiju red panda destroying Toronto, maybe you're a daughter whose trauma has transformed you into a super cool Final Fantasy villain and now will annihilate reality with a nihilism bagel.

I had a sense many years ago that the directing duo known as Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) were bound for greatness years ago when I saw their short film, Interesting Ball. That feels now like something of a dress rehearsal for what they would achieve in Everything Everywhere All at Once. There is this wonderful affect in that twelve-minute short, where we see many different surreal stories all happening... at once, and while none are alike, they all come together in this beautiful collage. The ball bounces around, creating impossible and disgusting yet wonderful things, and has an almost cosmic effect of shaking the universe down. Interesting Ball is revolution of all standards, embracing the way grossness can tie us all together in childlike delight. Where we are free to be anything, be that a young woman on a date with an older man, or sucked up an asshole to be one with our best friend soulmate.

Besides all that, Interesting Ball is a very impressive work of editing. Everything Everywhere All at Once is repeating that feat, since by the third act of this movie, its various plotlines have splintered into what should be an incoherent mass. Evelyn has in just one day, seen her life transform from merely being an overwhelmed laundromat owner to now the hero of all reality. And while fighting for the entire multiverse, she's begun to connect with her various other selves across time and space. This includes a famous movie star in a smoke-filled alley straight out of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, or a hibachi chef trying to reconnect her co-worker with Raccacoonie (played by Randy Newman!), a raccoon that lives on his head.

It takes real skill to sketch together a film that can connect low-stakes personal drama, Silver Age SciFi nonsense, one of the most acclaimed movies of the 20th century, a misremembered plot to a Disney movie, and Hot Dog Fingers without the production collapsing. Instead, all the stories progress at once to a beautiful pay-off. Maybe the most powerful scene in cinema in 2022 was in Everything Everywhere, with two rocks with googly eyes talking to each other with subtitles. It is such a joke of a premise, yet it is emotional cornerstone of this entire movie. Little dumbass rocks will made me cry.

So yeah, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most obvious Movie of the Year pick I've had in all the years I've done this. It achieves everything you could want out of cinema without compromise, without dumbing it down, fearlessly. I do not envy Daniels for ever having to follow up a work like this. Because if made Everything Everywhere, I would just retire. What  more do you need to say after this? Everything Everywhere is already in your one masterpiece movie.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 2 - The Worst Person in the World

2. The Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier

A movie that topped many 2021 Best Of lists, The Worst Person in the World did not release in the US until February. Sorry, Norway, I'm the last person in the world to talk about how great The Worst Person in the World is.

The Worst Person in the World is a coming-of-age drama, only does anybody ever come of age anymore? Adolescent angst in our modern times seems to stretch forever. Our heroine, Julie (Renate Reinsve) is quickly running out of her twenties and coming to an awful realization: that first digit of her age turning over is not going to suddenly shower her life with meaning and happiness. She never really settled on a degree in college, never found a husband, and never accomplished much of anything in the way of a career. Ultimately though, it is decisions themselves that she is terrified of. Julie goes through two relationships in her movie with two men that love her and she loves back. But when the moment comes to take the next step, to have her life defined by whatever this is, she runs away. "I feel like a spectator in my own life. Like I'm playing a supporting role...", she tells her older cartoonist boyfriend, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie).

That is a telling line, speaking of Julie's anxieties and fears, while ironically making a decision that will only exasperate them. But it is also a load of bullshit. The truth is, there's another man, Elivind (Herbert Nordrum), a younger, less serious person. With Elivind, she will be free of a life of older married friends and the expectation to fill her body with children. She can waste more time, do some mushrooms, have mindless fun and screw around. There's a freedom in being nobody with no goals, no tasks, just a bookshop job and a hot doofus at home. The Worst Person in the World is different from so many other romantic comedies where falling in love solves everything. Actually, in real life, falling in love might solve nothing at all. Julie comes dangerously close to an irreversible life choice with Elivind, and then at the last minute, she's given one final escape. Nothing achieved, yet, maybe not nothing learned.

The title is interesting. Julie is by no means a terrible person. Sure, she cheats on Aksel and probably is using Elivind. Sure she's a layabout in Oslo refusing to pursue her many talents. (She writes a feminist piece on oral sex that gets published online and is very successful, then never publishes anything again.) She crashes a wedding just for fun and gets into an argument with a loud lady just to troll her. This is never arch-villainy. "The Worst Person in the World" is this dramatic statement, which feels like a young person's view of themselves. It speaks to a time when your ego is so fragile you must either be one hyperbole or another. Julie never speaks these words out loud and is never called this, but she's definitely feeling it.

But The Worst Person in the World is also about not feeling that way. About how life is not time wasted or decisions not taken, but simply the moments we've had. There's brutal existential questions that are never quite answered. However, maybe they just do not matter anymore. Maybe growing up is not the responsibilities we take or reject, it is just learning to love ourselves. Aksel, despite having ten years on Julie, seems like he never really found these answers, and in a heartbreaking turn, it may be too late for him.

The standout thing about The Worst Person in the World is its soundtrack. This feels like the kind of cool selections of old Seventies pop hits that would have decorated an indie hit back in the 2000s. The needle drops are full of guys like Art Garfunkle and Harry Nilsson. I do not think this is the kind of soundtrack that Julie would pick her own life, this sort of ultra-hipster deep-cut cred feels more like stuff that would be in Aksel's record collection. But every song hits just right, and it rules, I fell badly in love with the ending song, which is absolutely perfect for this movie's message. The Worst Person in the World's soundtrack is something that a kid could find and decide to make their entire personality for three years. It is as dangerous as Garden State or Juno. (Or in my case, Drive.) All these sensitive men with feelings gives the movie an interesting texture. It's as iconic as the warm summery air of Oslo's modernist landscape which dominates so much of the frame.

I'm thirty-two now. The Worst Person in the World speaks a lot to me at the time of writing. (Forgive me, I usually only get introspective with I hit Movie of the Year.) I'm not married, have no kids. I never found the important job or the big platform that ever turned this into a brand or even paid a single bill. I should feel terrible, like I let an eighth of my life pass by since college without real success. The Worst Person in the World makes me feel better. Because fuck it, I did plenty of cool things in my Twenties, I'm gonna do more cool things in my Thirties. I like myself, I think I'm better at what I do now than I was last year, and life is not about some triumph you win ten minutes before the end credits.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 3 - Turning Red

3. Turning Red, dir. Domee Shi

In March 2022 two movies came out with very similar premises. They were both about conservative Chinese mothers forced to confront the non-traditional life choices of their daughters but finding acceptance with own inner weirdness. One of those was Turning Red, our subject for today, and the other was some... silly movie about bagels or googly eyes or something. I can't really remember the title of that one, probably won't be important. Certainly will not be circling back to that thing at all.

I also do need to comment on Disney's brilliant strategy of releasing their best movies only to streaming. Turning Red was a Disney+ exclusive, and Prey was dumped to Hulu because of a previous deal with HBO Max. I'm glad both of these movies found their audiences, but as somebody who likes theaters and still thinks that's best way to watch anything, it's frustrating. Turning Red was the third Pixar movie in a row to never see the inside of a cineplex, certainly a dramatic reversal of fortune for the storied award-winning studio. Their previous movie, Luca was a fun movie about kids being kids and finding themselves in the world and causing trouble. Turning Red is the same kind of movie, only with middle school girls in Toronto. This is one of most joyful movies of the year. It should have been bigger.

Speaking of kids causing trouble, Turning Red had a bit of a backlash this year. All that was one of those stark reminders that many grown adults in the world refuse to believe that children actually are people that make choices. We're in the midst of one of the largest political and media assaults on a group of people I have ever experienced in my life, an all-out war against trans youths. This bigotry is so barbaric that none of us will be able to explain it to future generations when they rightfully wonder what the Hell we were thinking. Turning Red need not be a metaphor for anything, just the text was too taboo for some. And all Mei (Rosalie Chiang) wants to do in Turning Red is sometimes be a big fluffy red panda sometimes while her mom, Ming (Sandra Oh) forbids it. How dare a movie say kids should be themselves and find identities outside her family unit?

How dare a movie acknowledge that menstruation... exists? I'm sorry I'm so being so negative so far. I really like this movie and everything it stands for. Honestly most of the adults who dislike it seem like they've yet to grow up themselves in many ways.

Now admittedly, Turning Red is severe catnip for me specifically. Red pandas rule. Director Domee Shi has spoken directly about how her inspirations for Turning Red were Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2. You can see the anime influence in the expressiveness of the faces, which do these huge cartoon reactions. Mei and her friends are all color-coordinated like the Sailor Scouts and often do dramatic sentai poses. Turning Red is set in 2002, right when millennials, such as yours truly, would have been discovering these exact anime show. That includes the director who was born in 1989 and like Mei, grew up in Toronto. It is pretty weird to be old enough now that my middle school can days goldmines for nostalgia. But I'm not complaining. The movie's climax references Mamoru Hosoda's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, right before becoming a kaiju movie. It is hitting all my weaknesses at once, how do I fight back?

Also, Turning Red proves that more movies need a Double Jump.

I also really loved Turning Red's cast. Mei's friend group all have their own unique silhouettes and energies. Abby (Hyein Park) is this loud angry short king, while Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) is more goth-y reserved, yet all while they show emotion differently, it all reads clearly. Who wouldn't love seeing their emotions of seeing their favorite boy band in concert? I love that Mei has a heroic gang of super aunts in her extended family that can save the day. I love that Turning Red feels authentic to a kind of cultural experience that is not just a generic Disney plot copy-pasted but now with soup dumplings. All this pressure to be perfect, that crushing fear even Ming feels when her own mother gets involved, that feels very specific to a real time and place and culture.

Most of all, I love that Turning Red is a movie that dares imagine that there can be growth and acceptance. An increasingly bold statement in 2022, when people kept choosing ignorance as a weapon instead.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 4 - RRR

4. RRR, dir. S. S. Rajamouli

I had a really bad January. The week of my birthday we found out about a sudden, shocking family tragedy and we had to rush across the country. That week sucked. There was a lot of pain, a lot of guilt, a lot of stress. Anyway, I only dwell on all that to say that only movie from 2022 really cheered me up. There were a lot of fun movies, a lot of great vibes, a lot of great friendships, but the most loving and positive experience I could think of to get me out of my funk was "Do you know Naatu?" That put a smile on my face two sizes too big for my head. My grinning cheeks were out past my ears.

I'm very happy that an Indian movie has finally caught on in the West. Years ago, I was trying to tell anybody who would listen about this heroic epic called Baahubali, a duology of fantasy movies also directed by S. S. Rajamouli. I was yelling "Baahubali" at total strangers around town, hoping anybody would listen. Please watch Baahubali, and then consider many other great Indian movies that RRR could lead you to. You can watch Lagaan, another movie about heroic colonial subjects defeating British twits, this time in a game of cricket. Or if you want another awesome bromance, there's always, Sholay, "The Greatest Story Ever Told!", featuring a scene of two bros having fun riding through the country. (I'm obsessed with that sequence, it's so precious.)

So why did RRR catch on but not Baahubali or War (2019) or Enthiran? I do not know. RRR is a remarkably big movie, the most expensive one ever made in India. Maybe those other movies were just too fantastic to be taken seriously, or not fantastic enough to stand-out. RRR hits that Goldilocks Point of being just amazing enough that it is unlike any blockbuster from around the world, yet is not laughably bizarre. The subject matter helps too. Despising British imperialism is practically a universal language thanks to their centuries of global pillaging. A historically inaccurate over-the-top fantasy of preposterous violence against stuck-up English villains? If you grew up watching Roland Emmerich's The Patriot, you're ready for RRR. Maybe also in an age where the MCU is the dominant form of cinema, RRR had an opening. Where the MCU is sarcastic and self-conscious, RRR is nothing but sincere. Gloriously, shamelessly sincere.

Also, it could be that RRR is just a great movie. This is a three hour monstrosity that needs all three hours. RRR has more movie in it than any other movie of 2022. I thought this was wrapping up and going to end on a downer, before it suddenly launched a whole second act. There's incredible action sequences. There's our two central bros, Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Raju (Ram Charan), effectively falling in love during the greatest hand catch scene in film history under a burning bridge to save a kid. We then shift to a tragic structure where these two superpowered heroes hide themselves in their various secret identities, unwittingly hunting each other. There's a scene of public torture so defiant and dramatic, it might as well be Christ on the Mount. Then one guy becomes an avatar of the god Vishnu. 

And then there's CG wild animals. 

And then there's a piggy back fight scene.

I could go on. There are many wonders yet to describe.

Now to be a downer, there is an undercurrent in RRR that left me frankly disturbed. I loved the achingly hot bromance made so innocently of any possible queer subtext. I loved the complete disinterest in historical accuracy (the British Empire ruled Brazil in this universe). However, RRR is not all simple fun as it seems. This is also a work of nationalist myth-making which gets especially unpleasant during the end credits music number. That scene was this martial dance sequence featuring several heroes of India, or more specifically, Hindu independence. Raju and Bheem liberate Inida, but you must wonder liberate for who? This is a very diverse and complex country that many powers would like to flatten down. The fact that Bheem is a little too proud when he reveals his Muslim garb is only a disguise worries me. Especially when right now the Modi government is at war with its own Muslim citizens.

And I do not really have a solution there. I'd love to enjoy more Indian cultural products, but the darker turn that country is taking is going to keep clouding its future, even in cinema. In the meantime, I cannot really be too much of a buzzkill for RRR. Because in the end, we still do have Naatu. It is not too late to turn that into a huge Tik Tok phenomena. I want to Naatu at the next wedding I attend.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 5 - Tár

5. Tár, dir. Todd Field

We are meant to love Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, in an all-timer great role). But Lydia Tár is a brand name, a performance designed to sell herself as the great conductor of her age. That is not even her real name. Still, we are introduced to Tár at the height of her power, at her most glamorous.

We meet her in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, seemingly at home on a stage surrounded by rows and rows of onlookers. There's Adam Gopnik interviewing her. This Tár we meet is more than up to the challenge of winning a crowd. She can not only answer the questions, but elaborate on them, while not diminishing her host. She can reference the Talmud, multiple musical theories, and even the personal history of her favorite composer. You know if you met Lydia Tár at a party, she would be intimidating because no matter the subject, she probably knows more about it, and could explain her point more eloquently. If ever there was a superhero of the sophisticated cocktail party set, it would be her.

But also, in the background, there is a ghost. We only set it from behind. Red hair in the crowd, watching Lydia seem so invincible and so perfect. This ghost will continue to haunt Tár in the background. There are moments where the movie jumps genre to horror. Lydia will hear a woman scream while jogging in Berlin but never finds the source. In one scene, you can see that same red-haired woman standing in Lydia's home, back to the camera, half hidden in the background. At night, Lydia keeps awaking, alone but not alone.

Lydia Tár has a recurring tick of dismissing all criticism with a single pejorative: "robot". (As a conductor, she is naturally terrified of becoming a metronome, an automation clicking, rather than a human controlling time creativity.) If you are like Lydia, you're a free thinker. If not, no matter your case or your perspective, you're regurgitating some inane thought unworthy of discussion. Early in Tár, just after her magnificent performance with Adam Gopnik, Lydia hosts a class with Julliard students. When one student mentions his disinterest with the same cast of dead white men that have dominated classical music for centuries, Tár gets aggressive and feverish in one long take. She bullies him and humiliates him. And of course, there's that same word "robot". For somebody so clearly brilliant, so knowledgeable of the failures of her predecessors, there is no flexibility here. 

Notably, for all her accusations that her opponents are merely pieces of mindless programming, Tár is herself trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior with no interest in self-reflection or second-guessing. You spend the entirety of Tár knowing every one of her actions are a mistake, the disaster is so obvious. You can beg her to do anything other than what she is doing, yet the sequence towards calamity is inevitable.

By the time we meet Tár, she has repeated a process of grooming, exploitation, and betrayal at least twice, and is already on her way to a third. This has happened to Krista, the ghost that Lydia will not acknowledge. She seems to have repeated the process with Francesca (Noémie Merlant) her current assistant. Then a young Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer) catches Lydia's eye, and is rewarded for their growing closeness with a prominent solo. Everybody around Lydia knows these patterns. You can see it in their exasperated looks, basically rolling their eyes to each other. As long as Tár is the superstar, the genius, all this must be tolerated, treated as a joke, or strategically ignored.

There have been movies about powerful predators before, even ones dealing with our current climate of "#MeToo" or "Cancel Culture" (a thoroughly tortured phrase now made useless by reactionaries). Kitty Green's The Assistant from two years ago kept us at the ground floor, never letting us see the abuse or the abuser, but still feeling the shocks of the crimes. Tár is different in that the abuser in question is our heroine. She's at times a great mother, she's clearly a brilliant conductor, a snazzy dresser, but she's also a clumsy consumer of people, carelessly leaving the wreckage of lives behind her - including her own after a certain point.

Tár is a tragedy, but a very limited one. We see our heroine/anti-heroine humiliated, have everything that matters taken from her. Except celebrity, except power. She can still find work, maybe in less glamorous circumstances. She'll still get waited on, have all expenses paid, and be given two aides to lead her around. She has a home to go back to, even if its in Hell land called Staten Island. Maybe in the last act, Lydia finds some recognition, maybe there is some justice in her vomiting on the street. Reduced from performing Mahler's Fifth Symphony to nearly choosing a prostitute in a fish bowl labeled #5. That is the only justice we the we can hope for now.

Is the ghost haunting Tár satisfied with that justice? We never do find out.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 6 - Decision to Leave

6. Decision to Leave, dir. Park Chan-wook

The sensual details of Decision to Leave are rarely explicit, however, they are all undeniably erotic. A man, detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and a woman, a murder suspect, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) share a sushi meal. Then they work together, with an unspoken understand, to clean up the table. On the surface, there's nothing here. The detective can explain to anybody that he's just doing a job, just tidying up. But their coordination is too perfect. It all looks rehearsed, too natural, the man's movements leading right to the woman's, as if they've known each other their entire lives.

Park Chan-wook's previous movie, The Handmaiden (the best movie of 2016, btw) showed sexual acts of all kinds. Yet, the hottest moment of that movie had to be the tooth filing scene set in a bathtub, where one character reaches inside another's mouth to perform some amateur dentistry. Chan-wook can perform wonders with simple acts of intimacy. In Decision to Leave, Seo-rae will reach into the detective's pockets and use his chapstick on her lips. Clearly too familiar. It is a line crossed of his biology coming into contact with her own. But still, it's just some lip balm, right? No, this is a red-hot love affair kept quiet, but screaming with intensity. Meanwhile, Hae-jun will go home to be with his wife, Jang-an (Lee Jung-hyun) and they're strangers to each other. It is not lovemaking, it's a routine, like flossing your teeth.

Decision to Leave's actual romance is complicated and perverted. There's a recurring figure in Chan-wook's films: the strange seemingly innocent woman that is much more than she seems. A kind of vamp that the hero ends up loving in spite of - or maybe because of - the manipulation. This is Tae-ju in Thirst, Hideko in The Handmaiden, and in Decision to Leave, Seo-rae. The men in their lives are humiliated and emotionally disintegrated by these women, yet keep coming back for more. 

In this case, Seo-rae's husband has died while rock climbing (if you're feeling any Vertigo, that is not by accident). This seems like a very neat open and closed case of misadventure, an easy one to take down from the big Murder Board. Seo-rae is a Chinese immigrant whose Korean is strategically bad, but her alibi is airtight, and she's even able to help solve one of Hae-jun's other cases for him. Hae-jun seems genre-aware enough to know this is all too neat, a story like this has to have twist, or three, which is what seems to drive him to her in the first place. 

There's a lot of very clever details in the plotting in Decision to Leave. I wish I had caught this detail, more eagle-eyed critics than me noticed this: Soe-rae's apartment has this blue and white wallpaper full of triangular figures. The first half of the movie is all about a murder on a mountain, so you see them as snowy peaks. But the second half of Decision to Leave is all about water: there's a new murder in a pool, and the ending is a heartbreaker on a beach. Now what is that wallpaper? Waves in the ocean. Decision to Leave's structure is one of the more clever narrative machines of the year. Just when you think you have the mystery fully solved, there's another complicating wrinkle, another problem that cannot be solved. Which is exactly what Hae-jun seems to be after.

Decision to Leave is also a gorgeous, damn movie, one of the best-shot films of the year. It is all full of reflections and mirrors and windows. We see Seo-rae's dead husband on the ground with ants crawling over his lifeless eyeballs. Then we cut to the corpse's POV with ants marching across the frame. The windows are often frames to see what is a constructed reality. Hae-jun stalks Seo-rae for the case and imagines himself in her room while watching from across the street. Park Hae-il is even added to the scene of her apartment, signifying his character imagining himself there despite the distance. But you always get the sense that somehow Seo-rae is somehow observing this man back. Even while her back is turned, she somehow can see her man better than he can see her.

While being one of the best thrillers of the year, Decision to Leave also is one of most brutal tragedies. You really wish that Hae-jun could simply renounce policing and join with Seo-rae in a long spree of complicated crimes. But instead he is rewarded with the most devastating unsolvable crime. Seo-rae becomes his perfect mystery, forever stealing his soul to her own.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 7 - Mad God

7. Mad God, dir. Phil Tippett

I saw Mad God at the new Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan, maybe the perfect place for this particular film. This theater is built deep underground below some anonymous tower in the shadow of the World Trace Center. The financial district is always a strange place after hours. Only hours earlier this was the beating heart of modern capitalism, and after dark, it is so empty it feels like a lost civilization. To get to the Drafthouse, you ride escalators downstairs, and keep riding those escalators, for at least two floors longer than seems possible. The whole ride down is straight out of "liminal spaces" memes on Twitter. There's glass walls to let you see into these huge empty retail spaces that have never been used and probably never will be used. One "store" was full of painted pianos. On the other side I could see dozens of people sitting at long folding tables, having entered from some other passage and for a mysterious purpose. It's all very creepy - but the theater is cool. The legendary collection of Kim's Video is down there, somehow buried dozens of meters below the streets after briefly living in Salemi, Sicily. Who knows what other relics of a New York past are hiding down here in the deep?

Mad God itself is a movie that is hard to believe actually exists. It has been a whisper of a legend of a movie for decades. It's a labor of love from Phil Tippett, a special effects legend of Jurassic Park and Star Wars fame, using his old style of stop-motion effects. This is not the smooth movement of Laika or Del Toro's Pinocchio, this is a jittery, gnarly motion, a fascinating form that feels lost to our modern world. The production began after Tippett worked on RoboCop 2 in 1990, and we've seen multiple revolutions take place in special effects since then. Works of art that take thirty years to make are usually Renaissance paintings or epic works of sculpture like Rodin's The Gates of Hell. And speaking of Hell, Mad God is a singularly upsetting and powerful work. This is an effects showcase and marvel that will make you sick, there is more Francisco Goya here than George Lucas.

Now, do I understand Mad God at all? It is largely inscrutable. No dialog, no names, no context. The exact mechanics of the lore and what actually occurs to the characters is opaque and circular. On the other hand, I am not entirely sure there is anything to understand. If you're repelled and horrified, you're getting it.

Mad God opens on a quote from Leviticus and a shot of the Tower of Babel. The movie then is an endless, sometimes non-linear descent downward into a world of chaos and decay and flesh and rot and agony. It is eighty-two minutes downward into new and terrible ways to depict Hell. Nightmares upon nightmares, all running out their vignettes of suffering without any knowledge of what is happening below or below. The animation feels like a patchwork collage of a thousand different ideas, clearly a hallmark of the decades of stop and start work. However, that does fit the utter chaos of this world.

Our central character is an unnamed burly figure wearing a gas mask, jacket, and helmet that is traveling downward with a suitcase and a map. The "plot" - as much as there is one - involves this figure continuing downward to accomplish something. Mostly he/they are as much an observer as we are, watching every episode in each layer of this katabasis. We conclude with them tearing off another part of their map.

The worlds the traveler visits are these broken, horrible systems of consumption and mechanization. Worlds of many beings with terrible faces smashed into gunk to be fed upon as fuel for the engine that drives more it all onward. There's recurring images of huge red eyes and unspeakable things with filthy teeth. Eventually even our central character is captured and operated upon by the few live action figures of Mad God. Which is then an agonizing work of body horror and unsanitary violation. We end on a long sequence of a wailing thing of sticky hair, screaming like a baby, carried to its final fate, as it too must be fuel for this world.

It is hard to say what the “Mad God” of title actually is. This world does not even seem to have a god. I would guess an apocalypse has occurred many times over, and what we are left with is automation whose creator was long gone, and whose purpose was forgotten. Now it is all governed by filthy creatures continuing the cycle with no ability to understand what they are doing. In Mad God the engine must keep spinning, and all is expendable to keep it going.

Luckily our current time is nothing like that. Relax. God is in heaven, all is right with the world.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 8 - Nope

8. Nope, dir. Jordan Peele

Nope's trailers were writing checked that seemed impossible to cash: A 19th century silent film of a black man on a horse. Armies of wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men in the desert. A bloody ape's hand reaching under a table to give a child a fist bump. A man in a mirror helmet riding a motorcycle. A girl with no face. A horse in a glass box next to Steven Yeun dressed as a cowboy fop. What could all those ideas and images have to do with aliens? What could all that have to do with anything? 

Incredibly that whole diverse set of weird iconic moments come together to make narrative sense in Nope. The trailers only cheat one time: there's a shot of a crab climbing around a doll house that is not in the movie. (Audience boos) But everything else that was promised was paid off, and we got even more incredible things in this movie itself. Even in very first frame is another incredible sight: A girl's shoe balanced impossibly to stand vertically upright, right next to a fallen body in a deserted sound stage. That too, pays off in Jordan Peele's script.

All that imagination, as dreamlike as it sounds, did not come together into some experimental art film. No Nope is pure genre. It is a big silly monster movie! Nope is Tremors but with the sand worm coming form the other direction. The climax is a loving homage to Jaws. Jordan Peele took the idea of a flying saucer and transformed it into one of the weirdest and most terrifying predators in film history. I immediately thought of Evangelion Angels (but when aren't I thinking of Evangelion?). What happens to people "abducted" by the craft is a wonderfully nasty surprise. We see only hints of the ordeal to come, but we hear of screams. We hear those screams for so long. Then, it only gets worse when the screams stop.

One telling detail we get in Nope is the POV shots from inside the creature. The heart of this thing, whatever it is, oloks out onto the world in a very particular shape: a rectangle. I think the dimensions are actually 1.85:1, the standard widescreen aspect ratio of modern cinema. Inside the core of Nope is film making. 

This is not even subtext, since the main motivation of the characters becomes about capturing the invader on camera. Our heroes are a family of Hollywood horse trainers, claiming descent from the unknown jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 The Horse in Motion series. During the course of Nope, the characters must turn back the clock on film technology. The craft's powers disables electricity, so modern digital cameras are out. An attempt with mechanical cameras fails. By the end, they're using the most basic method of capturing motion: still photography shooting frame by frame, the same way that first 19th century black man on a horse was immortalized.

I've heard a lot of criticism of Nope that people "did not get it" or that it somehow did not live up to the standards of Get Out and Us. Nope is less blatant a work of social criticism than those other films, I suppose. But also, Jordan Peele managed to tie together the very foundation of cinema and the largely ignored contribution of a black man in that seminal work, into the survival of a black family struggling in the business. If that commentary is not sufficiently rich for you, I cannot say that is the movie's fault.

More importantly, Nope is a fun damn movie. It has a great cast of heroes you want to root for. Daniel Kaluuya's OJ becomes a heroic cowboy (itself a notoriously whitewashed archetype in cinema history), Keke Palmer's Emerald gets to do a motherfuckin' Akira slide. Those two have a great sibling bond, they're one of the best duos of 2022. Steven Yeun, one of the best actors working today, is playing Ricky, a theme park operator whose inability to process his childhood trauma might have created the entire monster problem. Michael Wincott has a big role. There is what appears to be a one-off wacky tech salesman character in Angel (Brandon Perea), who in any other movie would be in only one scene. Instead the guy sticks around to the end. Nope has likable characters coming with intelligent solutions to their monster problems, that's what you want out of this genre. 

And anyway, why do I need to rank Jordan Peele's work in order to appreciate it? I don't care if Get Out was "better", there is no universal scale to all cinema - hypocrisy of a Top 15 list noted. Get Out was doing something different. It is the not a meaningful comparison. Nope is the best Nope I've ever seen, and that deserves celebrating.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 9 - Inu-Oh

9. Inu-Oh, dir. Masaaki Yuasa

Inu-Oh is the best movie of 2022 nobody talked about. I only managed to find it by sheer random luck of checking new releases one Wednesday afternnon and seeing Masaaki Yuasa's name next to some words. Other than my own tweets, I haven't seen any buzz on social media. I don't think I convinced anybody about Inu-Oh either, sadly. It it absent from all the Top 10 lists. I feel like I dreamed this movie. But I am reasonably certain that I drove to a real AMC theater, saw actual celluloid or whatever comes out of projectors now on a screen, and the photons carried information into my eyeballs, that my brain translated correctly into a sequence of images, and Inu-Oh was those images. I believe this happened.

I saw three different anime musicals that came out in 2022. One was Mamoru Hosoda's Belle, an extravagantly beautiful experience that unfortunately I think is total trainwreck in terms of narrative. Then there was One Piece Film: Red, in which the Straw Hat Pirates took on the most dangerous and hypnotic pop star since Sharon Apple. Those movies had awesome banger songs, check those hyperlinks out and prepare for your friggin' ears explode. Anyway, the best of the anime musicals was Inu-Oh. It's not J-pop, it's not big Disney ballads, it's classical Noh theater meets hair metal. Who knew you could play the biwa like an electric guitar? Who knew they had glam rock in the Muromachi Era?

In order for western audiences to appreciate Inu-Oh, they are going to need a lot of cultural context, which the movie is not terribly interested in giving out. This film is depicting the backstory of the works that would become The Tale of the Heike, a Japanese epic depicting the Genpei War, one of the most famous civil wars in Japanese history. The heroes of the film sing about heroes and legends are obscure even to me. Just assume the battles were as cool as the anachronistic prog rock light shows are implying. Really what you need to know is that in medieval Japan there were two factions claiming legitimacy of the Imperial Throne, and one faction the Heike (more commonly known today as the Taira clan) lost. Inu-Oh is set some centuries later, in the period of the Ashikaga Shogunate, when the facts of the war have already turned to folk tale, and history is most malleable.

Inu-Oh has a very cynical view of governmental power. I notice this a lot in Japanese media, actually, governments are capricious and terrible forces not to be trifled with. The pure uncompromising hero will inevitably get crushed by those making backroom deals. Right from the start of Inu-Oh, our protagonist, Tomona (Mirai Moriyama) as a little boy gets a brief brush with power and is maimed for life by it. He lives as a diver with his family nearby the site of the Battle of Dan-no-ura, where a legendary sword of Imperial Regalia was lost along with child Heike claimant to the throne. When royal agents hire his father to find some "treasure", the magical sword shoots out a gleam of light so powerful it slices Tomona's father in half, and blinds the boy. Later, Tomona's concerts will be a massive pop sensation and lead a movement right up to the Shogun's palace. However, the canny politician is able to buy the movement, simply co-opting the opposition.

There also a recurring issue of control of historical narratives. Names are a recurring issue. Tomona takes on a new name, "Tomoichi" when he becomes a blind monk (a very popular trope of medieval Japan), which means he loses access to his father's spirit, who still hungers for vengeance. Tomona/Tomoichi becomes a friend to the titular creature, Inu-Oh (Avu Barazono), a gourd-shaped thing that is the living embodiment of the spirits of the lost Heike warriors. Inu-Oh begins as merely a little monster guy bothering the citizens of the old Japanese capital, Kyoto. But when exposed to music he learns to dance. Out of hunger for musical talent, he sprouts limbs. As Inu-Oh grows more and more human, he can finally express the pain of the losers of the war. Which leads him and Tomona to confront the Shogun, whose power rests on a very different idea of the past. As I said before, this is a very cynical movie. Justice and truth do not win in Inu-Oh. Power alone is the true power.

And also, as Inu-Oh becomes less and less a magical being, the more he's able to fit into a traditional power structure. Until finally, he's a regular person, indistinguishable from any other courtier. Inu-Oh is a movie about how we need to stay little freaks. Because the moment you lose your freak, you can be codified and controlled.

Still, Inu-Oh is a very fun movie. It is one of the best bro-tastic friendship movies of 2022. Tomona and Inu-Oh have a wild adventure that only gets more incredible the more impressive their concerts become and the less interested the movie is in any kind of realism. Anachronism after anachronism only makes the show better. Plus, Masaaki Yuasa has a very unique style to his animation. Somehow the film's wild swings from high melodrama politics to ten-minute long rock shows and back all flow naturally in a world already so sketchy and almost water-y in form. Like at any moment the lines could dissolve and the animation could just wash away, yet it never does. This is a magical realism story on a magical canvas. Yuasa one of the most interesting directors working in anime today, and Inu-Oh might be the best work I've seen out of him.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 10 - Triangle of Sadness

10. Triangle of Sadness, dir. Ruben Östlund

There have been plenty of movies about a sea vacation gone bad. Titanic, Deep Rising, The Poseidon Adventure, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Titanic 2, etc. There's plenty of grisly watery fates to choose from.  Now personally I've always wanted to be the guy who slams into the propeller of the RMS Titanic and does an incredible spin into the deep. That's a way to a fucking die! If I had my choice of least favorite cinematic aquatic ends, I don't want to anything to do with Triangle of Sadness. At least if you're eaten by a tentacle in Deep Rising, it is over fast - and you're feeding an awesome sea monster. Triangle of Sadness' way of killing its cast mostly involves them drowning in as much vomit as seawater. No thanks.

Triangle of Sadness is a nasty slice of class warfare black comedy. Where is a better place to set such a brutal take-down of wealthy and comfortable than on a cruise ship? Cruises are after all the starkest example of social divisions remaining in the modern world. They're practically medieval in design. You have armies of servants, working feverishly, tirelessly for hours below decks, to create this air of effortless luxury and relaxation for their customers. And Triangle of Sadness is not set on some middle class escape. Its people would laugh at you if you said "Royal Caribbean". No, this is the best of the best, a ship for the ultra-wealthy. The workers must satisfy billionaires who have not had a single whim denied in decades.

One woman demands that the ship's sails be cleaned, and even though the ship is not wind-powered, the captain (Woody Harrelson) can only nod, and promise to get on that. One woman forces the entire crew to swim because she's trying to flirt with a pretty steward. When a storm dares defies capitalism and whips the ship in a thousand directions, meal service will not be interrupted. The finery and elegance must continue, on schedule, even if the tossing and turning makes you spit it right back up all over the glimmering plates and spotless tablecloths.

Triangle of Sadness's title is a bit misleading. Things are bleak but rarely sad, it's a comedy until the end. Also I hear "triangle" in the context of the sea, I imagine the Bermuda Triangle and cheesy conspiracy documentaries. It is not clear what ocean this movie is even set in. If anything in Triangle of Sadness is "triangular" it is the three-act structure, all depicting a different angle its world of service and power.

We open on a young couple of models, Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson), whose diverging career paths already is tearing their relationship apart. Yaya is a successful influencer and fashion model, while Carl's opportunities are closing. Over dinner, Carl has an enormous fit since Yaya does not offer to pay. We watch this extended argument play out over ten minutes as Carl shittily poses his emasculation as psuedo-feminist enlightenment. (Triangle of Sadness's cast will rarely become more honest as time goes by.) These two are the closest thing to the film's leads, but each act will push them either in or out of focus. In Acts 2 and 3, they're just supporting figures.

If you're after subtly, Triangle of Sadness is the wrong movie. If you want a gross-out, however, you came to the right place. The collapse of order on board the cruise halfway through the movie is a spectacular of nastiness. Poor rich women covered in vomit, toilets overflowing, total anarchy taking hold, while maids quietly and professionally turn a filth-covered dining room back to normal, as if nothing had gone. All this effort is completely wasted as much of the cast are in the hallways soaked in fluids, and the ship is doomed anyway. The captain and a Russian oligarch, Dmitri (Zlatko Burić) steal the ship's PA system to have a debate of Marx vs Smith. But do you really need philosophy when the class struggle is so apparent as to be ejaculating itself out of your throat all over the rug?

It all gets even more blunt in the final act, when Triangle of Sadness' greatly-reduced cast finds itself in the mercy of a lowly, previously unnamed maid, Abigail (Dolly De Leon), who is the only person with any survival skills. The same rhythms of power and abuse play out both in and outside of society. In our world, Yaya's body was the main couple's meal ticket. Outside the world, Carl's body gets the spoils. From the high-glamor world of fashion down to a miserable, nasty beach, director Ruben Östlund can only show us the same power structures. In the end, it is all the same form of barbarism, either made to look nice, or unapologetic in its bluntness.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 11 - Women Talking

11. Women Talking, dir. Sarah Polley

The crimes that launch the story of Women Talking are unspeakable. We never see any of the attacks, just the horrible mornings after. Frankly, such a subject matter would be unfilmable. This is an enormous responsibility for any film to give itself, to portray this much pain and this much horror respectfully. I could not imagine trying to take on such a task an artistic endeavor, this is fearless work.

All of Women Talking is set in and around one large barn in a rural Mennonite colony, with women from every age gathering to discuss what must be done next. The facts of the crimes are no longer in doubt, and the suffering is universal. Some of these women need dentures or assistance walking down the stairs. Some of them are still so young they cannot pay attention and play aimlessly with their braids. The horrible fact that you must remember in every scene of Women Talking is this: they're all victims. Even the smallest ones were abused in secret, at night, and lied to by their community.

If you really want to feel extra shitty today, I am sorry to report that this is all based loosely on real events that happened in a Mennonite colony in Columbia between 2005 and 2009. Also, Women Talking is not depicting some unique event that could never happen again. There are millions of people living in closed-off, deeply religious communities just like the one here. And this is not a particularly Christian or Protestant problem. There have been countless stories of abuse happening in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups, for example. It does not necessarily need to even be a religious problem. It is a problem of control, and who has it. Woman Talking even takes time to remember that everybody is dominated by their structures, the victims and the perpetrators. These kinds of power dynamics lead inevitably to abuse, and even those with the power can never be fully in control. I am in awe this movie could have the wisdom to recognize that everybody is a victim one way or another.

Women Talking is a stage play in structure, the entire film takes place during one day in and around one barn between about a dozen characters. Imagine 12 Angry Men replaced by 12(-ish) Revolutionary Women. As the title implies, they are all speaking together to find an answer for the women and children of their unnamed colony. At the start there are only three options: 1) stay and accept life as it is, 2) stay and fight, and 3) leave. The three women with the largest personalities take the three corners of the argument. Salome (Claire Foy) has funneled all her pain into fighting. Marchie (Jessie Buckley), despite living with a domestic abuses, wishes to stay. She can only guard herself in sarcasm and eye-rolls. Finally the Leave faction is led by Ona (Rooney Mara), a woman who knows far more than she is willing to reveal behind her smile.

Since none of the women are capable of reading or writing, they must rely on the unmarried school teacher, August (Ben Whishaw) to write their minutes and explain their actions. There are only two adult men with speaking roles in Women Talking. One is August, who has lived outside of the colony to train for his profession. The other is Melvin (August Winter), a trans man, but also a victim of the attacks. Every man who fits into the traditional masculine role of the colony are out this day. (I note that both of these male actors are queer.) The one man who does return, Marchie's violent husband, is never seen on camera. We only see his impact with the bruises on Marchie's face in the final act of the film, another spectacular act of horror that is thankfully not shown.

Women Talking does not shake away from the details, yet is not an unrelentingly grim movie. We learn that Melvin was probably abused by his brother and miscarried the fetus. But also, it is not pornographic in suffering. There's laughter, there's play, there's rivalries, there's hints of precocious crushes, there's long-suffering unrequited loves.Mejal (Michelle McLeod), gets a small act of teenage rebellion by lighting cigarettes while the adults is not looking. Unfortunately it turns back to the main matter when we discover she's been smoking ever since the incidents, and the smell of nicotine helps her out of her panic attacks. 

At no point does the cast ever feel like two-dimensional cut-outs symbols of people or marionettes the movie needs to operate to make a point. They're a group of people, three families, gathered together to make sense of the impossible, and to discover a revolutionary potential and strength amongst themselves.

In order for a movie like this to work at all, Women Talking needs an absolutely stellar cast. Every person from the big stars down to the relatively unknowns are collectively putting on outstanding performances. All the young women in the cast are great finds, capable of as much emotional range as the veterans. The one small disappointment may come from Francis McDormand's character of Janz, who is prominently featured in the marketing, but ultimately is merely a cameo.

And no, Women Talking is not an easy watch. It is not an easy movie to write about either. If Women Talking sounds like too much for you, that may indeed be the case. I recently decided the new biopic of Emmitt Till was beyond me. I could not even watch that trailer. Women Talking asks a lot from its audience. It also delivers quite a lot more in terms of strength and inspiration, to find a better future in the midst of a nightmarish present.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 12 - Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story

12. Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, dir. Ti West

No horror director had a better 2022 than Ti West. He did not make just one great movie this year, he made two. Both of his movies in his new franchise were in New Zealand during the pandemic, both starred Mia Goth, and both were set in the same primary location. We rarely see this kind of efficiency in a theatrical release, to just reuse the same sets and maybe even the same man-eating gator. It feels very old Hollywood or the classic B-movie Roger Corman method of economical production. That is all very appropriate considering how much West's duology traffics in nostalgia.

The first of these movies, X, is an Honorable Mention on this Best Movies of 2022. Set in 1979, X is loving tribute to two genres that were just blossoming that decade: those being Golden Age of Porn and the Golden Age of Slashers. Because after all, we think of the X rating as bawdy, it is the last letter of a very powerful three-letter word, but it was originally intended for all kinds of adult-material. The Evil Dead was infamously rated X and that is only pornographic in its use of goopy slime effects. X is imagining what if Debbie Does Dallas were interrupted by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

One of the gimmicks of X is its star, Mia Goth, playing two roles. One is the Final Girl, Maxine, performed by Goth as her current beautiful young age. The other is Pearl, the psycho-biddy psycho-killer, played by Goth in many pounds of thick old age make-up. (It is a better make-up effect than it sounds, to the movie's credit.) Because of this dual role, West and Goth were able to make a prequel about their killer's origins, which came out a few months after X. X was a lot of fun, a really solid slasher that proudly spits on the moral guardians of the Seventies, who still decades-later deserve to be spat on. However, Pearl, the movie seemingly made as a bonus feature, is far superior. It is a much darker and more interesting experience.

Where X was about the rise of our modern idea of B-cinema, Pearl is about the rise of motion pictures themselves. It is set in 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, a time where you feared going out to the cinema without a face mask (unimaginable in our times, of course). Pearl, a young woman trapped at home in her small Texas farm, dreams of her husband's return from World War I. She also dreams of being a shining star in 'the pictures'. We're right at the beginning of Hollywood becoming the dominant cultural force of the 20th century. This is when Hollywood could be imagined as purely wholesome, before even the first big actor scandals and first conservative backlashes. If you have nowhere else to be, the movies are the perfect escape.

On top of that, Pearl's projectionist friend (David Corsenswet), has a 1915 stag film hidden away in his bunk. Even back 100 years ago, some people old enough to be your grandparent's grandparents were humping away on the roadside on camera. Nothing is as new as we believe it to be. This is yet another path for Pearl. However, Pearl has no future on the big screen or secret underground projections. Her future is here, on the farm, to be nothing and nobody, while her terrified parents try to contain her, and she is very angry about it.

Mia Goth's performance as Pearl is an amalgamation of a many different film icons. Sometimes she's as sweet and innocent as Judy Garland. Pearl is technicolor pastiche on the Wizard of Oz, complete with a scarecrow hanging on the bright sunny all-American cornfields. But then, Pearl is pouring her repressed sexual energy onto the strawman, to remind us there there is no Emerald City at the end of this yellow brick road. Our heroine transforms from Cinderella to Norman Bates. She's Annie Wilkes who thinks she is Carrie White. As long as her dreams are only dreams, the whole world is going to suffer.

More than anything, Pearl is a triumphant display of acting. No actor accomplished more acting in a movie in 2022 than Mia Goth did in Pearl. There's a song and dance number inside her mind. There's a fearless soliloquy that she delivers to her poor, trapped sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) that goes on for many minutes without a cut. The end credits play over Mia Goth's face stuck in a Joker-esque grimace, that she sustains unblinking for nearly five minutes, until her face is covered in tears and snot. Pearl is constantly demanding that the world recognize her as a star. She'll never get there, but Mia Goth, she is a star.

A lot of movies in 2022 were these tragically earnest attempts to sell their audiences on the power of cinema. This all felt to me increasingly desperate as the medium continues to decline in total viewers. Damien Chazelle's Babylon might have been the worst of them, wasting all of its material on a Whiggish view of cinematic history as this grand arc from the silent era to Avatar. Sorry, none of that works on me. If you're going to be this painfully saccharine, at least throw some irony in there. Have some more depth. Give us a spectacular gross-out murder like Pearl does so often. If the medium is so nakedly desperate to be loved, don't just tell us a story about how great it is. No, use that desperation. Tell us a story about somebody truly desperate to be seen and recognized. And then if you refuse her, she'll set you on fire or feed you to her gator.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 13 - After Yang

13. After Yang, dir. Kogonada

SciFi fiction can simply dispense with the old question of "are robots human?" You can just move on, it's a settled debate, the answer has to be "yes". If you're drawing hard prejudiced lines around humanity you're being... well, really shitty. There's too many real people in this world on the margins of what their society to start creating fictional humanoids to dismiss. After Yang is not interested in the people-ness of its title character. That is a given. Everybody in the film sees him as a person, or are quickly swayed to the other side. The few characters on the other side of that debate are irrelevant to the story, very elegantly passed over and ignored. Like many forms of awfulness, it is best simply not to make time for it.

After Yang is set in a near-future that, compared to many visions of the future, seems rather pleasant, if even enlightened. The central family is mixed both racially and biomechanically, having purchased Yang (Justin H. Min) in order to guide their adopted Chinese daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) with her cultural heritage. Her parents, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) are extremely not Asian and do not want to imprint their backgrounds onto their daughter/. They hope she can be a more-rounded person. However, as lovely as that goal is, they still purchased a man. No matter how much he seems enjoy his life and his given task, this is slavery.

We do not get much context to the world of After Yang. You're free to theory-craft the greater implications of the world beyond Yang's family. Richard Brody interpreted this future as a secretly dystopian slice of "techno-fascism" when he wrote about the film for the New Yorker. I'm not sure there really is anything so blatantly sinister hiding behind the softness kindness of this world. Everybody lives in pristine ultra-modernist glass boxes, they get to ride around in self-driving cars that have gardens in place of their controls, and while money is a concern, Jake is still flexible enough to pursue an emotionally fulfilling job of selling exotic tea. The family takes part in a synchronized dance competition during the opening credits, which is a very fun bit of musical energy that the movie needed. But is this a cruel bit of Verhoeven irony? I see less of Starship Troopers or The Running Man as much as dancing is just fun. 

However, even if you imagine this future as having no façade, being really as peaceful as it seems, it still treats its technosapiens as commodities with warranties that you can buy second-hand from shady shops downtown. At no point does After Yang shy away from the dark implications of its premise. Yang questions whether he is allowed to fear his death. Even further, he wonders whether a synthetic being such as himself is truly "Chinese". At best he is a true brother and son to his family, at worst, he's a trite collection of trivia and feel-good lessons without context. He feels especially false when he tries a mundane metaphor of two trees grafted together for Mika as a symbol of her mixed family. When the given example does not quite line up properly, he repeats it again, clearly reading from some pre-programmed speech. Eventually we learn that Yang does have an inner life, he has friends outside the family, he has a past he's kept secret, and seemed happy with his place. But the family only really gains this context after Yang already is effectively dead, and only after going through his harddrive to find his memories. Jake and Kyra see him first as a broken babysitter/tech product, it takes time before they really grasp all that's gone.

These are all uncomfortable SciFi questions much more interesting than just humanity. The meaning of race, questions of free will. But also, without the genre trappings, After Yang would still have a lot to recommend about it. This is one of the best films about grief of 2022.

Grief is painful process, but also, it can be celebratory. You are losing somebody, but you're appreciating them in ways you never could when they were still here. Jake spends most of the movie unwilling to admit to his family how bad Yang's condition is. Upon losing a loved one, we must go through our vast memory banks of that person, to ponder who they were, what we're losing, what it all meant, if it meant anything. In spite of the grotesque nature of his existence, Yang was loved.

After Yang has this fascinating cinematic trick where all of Yang's memories echo. We get two different takes for the lines in the scenes, shown one after another. This is an interesting technique, I've never seen a movie do something like this before. The echo makes the memory feel bigger, like not just a scene but a connection. I believe we are seeing both Yang's memory of the scene, and also the memory of Jake or Kyra at the same time. It plays out the same, always with there's subtle differences, as no two people can see the world the same way. Every moment in time is shaded by our minds in our own unique way. In After Yang, one of those unique ways does go away forever, but it is never forgotten.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 14 - Crimes of the Future

14. Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg

I left Crimes of the Future with a loud, booming thought in my head: "THAT'S IT?" Thoughts like "wait, it's over?" or "what was the point of that?" are not the kinds of ringing endorsement that make a movie in my Top 15. Thinking for too long is a wasteful use of time these days. Who has the room in their lives for delayed satisfaction? We need to be accomplishing grand feats of consumption and creation every five minutes, after all. I demand my movies shower me with meaning and enlightenment no later than 9 PM sharp. But sometimes a movie just lingers. You never quite stop thinking about it. The lack of solid lines of closure is a quality in of itself.

Crimes of the Future is the first new David Cronenberg movie in nearly a decade. He is not going easy on his audiences in his old age. His latest work has all the makings of a traditional SciFi noir plot. It opens on a shocking act of murder. The film is full of shady men in coats whispering of conspiracies. There's an imaginative future set in a trash pile coastal city where humans have evolved some form of immunity to pain and infection. All of society is one endless piece of grotesque body horror performance art. It seems several forces are fighting for control of the direction of our species.

But then almost none of it matters in Crimes of the Future. All the conspiracy trappings do not really go anywhere. There's no final climax, no real villain, and there are not nearly as many crimes as the title promises. You have dozens of characters to keep track of, yet that is rarely worth the trouble because most of them do not really need to be here. After a horrifying opening of infanticide, the awful transgression everybody is so worried over is just an issue of diet. So again, I have to ask: that's it?

Yeah, maybe that is it. Maybe a movie can just be a weird hang with horny oddballs.

Kristen Stewart is doing something really interesting with her character Timlin, a government bureaucrat tasked with logging the many new organs that people are generating. She plays her character with this almost-cartoony nerd-girl affectation. It's a great performance, but Timlin is mostly irrelevant. I do not remember what role she actually played in the end. But nobody would dare cut her from the movie. Crimes of the Future is less a story and more the backstory for all the lore you'd need to run a tabletop RPG campaign with all these ideas. Why not have a sexually constipated secretary drool over our hero's mutations?

Cronenberg is well-known for his fetishes and imagery, which Crimes of the Future does supply: nobody else has made a movie featuring a writhing bone chair that somehow helps you digest breakfast, or a dancing man covered in ears. While his vibes are best-remembered for their use in horror films (The Fly, Videodrome, etc.), he also just has a lot on his mind beyond simply grossing the squares out. His most recent movies were Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars, two works of social satire that were in no way horror, just musings on the unnatural state of late-capitalism. Here in Crimes of the Future, we spend our time in a dark Riviera landscape reeking of humidity and garbage. It seems like an awful dead-end for our kind, yet it may also be a kind of paradise. Our heroes, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul (Viggo Mortensen) can be in love in a non-sexual way, performing their art their way. The freaks have won.

Crimes of the Future is also an effective metaphor for the act of artistic creation. Our "hero" (in scare quotes because I cannot remember what he does that's actually heroic in a traditional sense), Saul, is beset by these tumor-like organs growing all through his body. He uses these mutations as his performance art, as Caprice surgically removes them before various onlookers. Saul is a respected master of his craft, whose painful secretions are both a blessing and a curse. He must find a way to process the growths in his soul, and why not have them be art? And I know this feeling, I've written stories that certainly feel like getting painful lumps removed from my soul. Peter Strickland's equally strange film Flux Gourmet imagined art as flatulence, I believe tumors are the more accurate metaphor. Passing gas is easy, art is not just a by-product. No, it's cutting yourself to pieces and hoping your audience likes what they see.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 15 - Cyrano

15. Cyrano, dir. Joe Wright

I do worry: "am I only putting Cyrano on the Top 15 because nobody else liked or even saw this movie?" Then I start getting in my feelings about my integrity and biases, and whatever. Enough of that nonsense. The truth is: I feel bad for you all that you missed this. In Cyrano, there is a sequence of bakers in the morning kneading dough that's one of the most sensual visual metaphors of the year. Blunt and clumsy as all heck, sure, you cannot miss the point on the movie's mind, but it is effective. For proving that baking is sexy, Cyrano has to make the list.

And looking into my heart of hearts, Peter Dinklage's sad puppy dog face face trying to smile while holding back tears absolutely belongs in a celebration of 2022 in film. 

Cyrano is an adaptation of a 1897 play by Edmond Rostand, which has inspired countless films, operas, and even plenty of other musicals. I've never seen any of them, so maybe this is the best version of tale, maybe it is the very worst. The 2022 film musical makes an enormous change to the story by shrinking its title character. Traditionally Cyrano has an enormous nose which creates his anxieties, but in this version, he has dwarfism. Despite being a heroic figure in this 17th century French town who can win duels both by sword and by anachronistic rap battles, Peter Dinklage's Cyrano believes he can never be physically appropriate for the love of his childhood friend, Roxanne (Haley Bennett). This leads him to become a mentor of a dashingly handsome young soldier, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who also loves Roxanne. This is a great love triangle dynamic, where one part of the trio is unwittingly the conduit for the romance between the other two. Any physical conquest is offset by emotional cuckoldry.

Now, I will admit that a lot of the Joe Wright take on Cyrano is edging dangerously close to being very lame. It is a costume period piece melodrama and also a musical, and Cyrano will not apologize for being any of those things. From the color blind casting to the very scenes themselves, realism is not a concern here. Joe Wright could not resist having boys in full foppish costume dancing merrily in Sicilian ruins. The music is not even all that great, to be honest. The rock band, The National, did a fine job conjuring the emotions of the characters in song, but very few audience members were humming the tunes on the way home.

Still, the romance on display in Cyrano is hard to resist. It is not cool, but it is beautiful. The primary trio of Dinklage, Bennett, and Harrison Jr. are all great. Dinklage can be the most dashing man in town but also the Saddest of Sad Boys. Haley Bennett is bringing real heat to a movie that would otherwise be painfully dry. You even have Ben Mendelsohn playing the usual Ben Mendelsohn role, as unpleasantly aristocratic as ever.

There is one scene that won Cyrano a place on this list and that would be the nighttime balcony scene. This is a classic opera construction, where the older man feeds the inept suitor his lines to the beautiful maiden upstairs. You expect the scene to go one way, with Christian and Roxanne somehow closer despite the physical distance between them. But then, Cyrano, from behind a wall, suddenly steals the scene, pushing Christian aside to sing with his own voice. I love this because it reveals so much. Christian discovers this is not his story. Cyrano finds an honesty in the darkness he could not give in the light. Roxanne is enraptured by the formless man before her, both Cyrano and Christian at the same time.

Dinklage has a hell of a baritone too, that doesn't hurt.

Top 15 Movies of 2022 - Master Post

Preamble:

I have a Best Movie of 2022 in mind already. This list is still not 100% concrete in my mind, a lot of things might rise and fall in stock as I begin to write about them. But absolutely there is a No. 1 and I have not doubted that it would be No. 1 for the entire year since I've seen that flick. (You can probably guess what it is - it isn't hard - the movie in question is very obviously A Thing I Would Love.) However, whatever I pick is largely irrelevant, because I am just me, a ting bubble of sea of greater film discourse. There already are a couple true Movies of the Year which are beyond little ol' me and my little ol' opinions. Much larger forces have crowned the winners, and before I write my part, let me confront the other winners.

If I were to be democratic about this, the definitive winning Movie of 2022 would be either Avatar: The Way of Water or Top Gun: Maverick, which together made over three billion dollars worldwide. Those are simply unfathomable numbers for us mortals for whom $10,000 is a life-changing about of money. Interestingly, both were long-awaited sequels to legacy properties, sequels to movies coming from the recklessly jingoistic Reagan era or in response to the recklessly jingoistic War on Terror. (There's a lot of money to be made from irresponsible imperialism, on either side, turns out.) They're both passion projects born from the egos of supermen. Top Gun 2 was pushed by Tom Cruise, one of the last remaining true movie stars, a person whose name alone still has bankable marquee value. Avatar 2 was created by James Cameron, the greatest of the auteur blockbuster creators, and one of the few left that can bully film studios, rather than the other way around. 

What do Tom Cruise and James Cameron have in common? They're both dinosaurs, already instinct. There are no replacements waiting in the wings for either of them. Do you think Miles Teller will ever be the next Tom Cruise? Sounds unlikely to me. Do you think any director will be able to tell the MCU not to pollute their films with cameos for god knows what? No. If you're not Jim Cameron, you do what you're told.

Personally I saw both Avatar 2 and Top Gun 2 on their opening weekends, in the biggest theaters I could find, with all the various bells and whistles and extra dimensions and frame rates and whatever else. They are the rare kind of movie I can find a crowd to go with and make an "event". That just doesn't happen very often anymore. I contributed about $100 to that over three billion box office (and rising!) figure, do not question my patriotism when it comes to the blockbuster experience. So what did I think of either one of them?

Well... um... They're fine. They're okay. I guess... Spoilers: neither are making the Top 15.

For both of them, I have about a sentence to actually say: "It's the same movie as the first one, just older." I'm not uninteresting in the experience, I love loud, artistically non-complex things, I like roller coasters. But what am I supposed to do with either of them? They're total rehashes, nostalgic for things I was not terribly nostalgic for to begin with. I'm glad Tom Cruise can still market a movie by promising a bonkers stunt. "I'm Tommy Cruisville and this is big-ass cliff motorcycle jump!!" I'm happy James Cameron gets to swim around with his crab mechs and sexy mermaid aliens. I do not begrudge either of them. Also, this is not sustainable, either financially or emotionally.

Meanwhile, on the other extreme, a new Greatest Movie of All Time just dropped. BFI's Sight and Sound Top 100 list updated itself for this decade, and the new No. 1, replacing previous "best movies ever", Vertigo and Citizen Kane, is Chantal Akerman's 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Which obviously is not a 2022 movie, and thus will not make the list. But I find it is an interesting comparison point. Sight and Sound polled filmmakers, critics, writers, academics, and their idea of the greatest movie possible was an extremely slow, extremely quiet, almost plotless art film. Meanwhile, audiences in 2022 wanted the loudest, fastest, most spectacular, most violent experiences possible.

Now, admittedly, this methodology has flaws. Do audiences really think Big Movie No. 2 is the greatest time to be had at the movies or are they simply choosing from a limited menu? You just voted a few months ago, how many of you are really happy with your Congressmen you chose? Many audiences do not have access to anything like Jeanne Dielman and are emotionally incapable of processing what that movie is doing. They simply do not have the tools to access that movie's grammar, and I am not claiming any superiority here. I watched Jeanne Dielman this fall after the Sight and Sound list dropped. It was one of the most unpleasant film experiences I've ever had. It was three hours of a woman doing chores in disturbing solitude and quiet, depicting an unimaginably oppressive lifestyle. I got freaked out when this woman kept turning the lights off in every room, how can you live like that?? I don't even make my bed in the morning.

There is, however, something of a strategic choice being made here. In response to the increasing fantastical carnage in pop culture, critics and filmmakers have picked something mundane and real in direct opposition. There will never be a race of space aliens fighting extractive capitalism with sea dragons, but there probably were women in your life doing tons of labor quietly and as expected by society, selflessly, as in having no self. Jeanne Dielman is not a character in her movie which we, the audience, have access to, she's a body that performs tasks. It's a blunt, miserable truth, in stark juxtaposition to dreams of men flying out to space or San Diego to finally be appreciated for their manliness.

However, the critics and filmmakers represent an industry that has profited deeply from training audiences to want more explosions and more baroque nonsense. Sure, on an "objective" scale, a film showing a handsome man bombing Iran in a jet plane is a more "fun" or "interesting" experience than your daily routine of making coffee. But also, "fun" and "interesting" are themselves marketing terms which represent trained behavior and limited access to thought. Are you sure you're the one who decided what was "cool"?

Sadly, I find myself in early 2023 as the miserable centrist. I never want to see Jeanne Dielman again, it is a movie I can respect and ponder, it is a fascinating work of art, but I'd rather chores at home because I at least I can play some music or listen to the podcast. Concentrating that hard on a nice lady shining her boy's shows gave me a headache. But also, I'm not out here starving for Avatar 3 either. All that silliness just did not bring up many interesting questions - and the 3D frame rate business gave me a big headache.

However, maybe there's a place in between. Maybe there's a movie that be both one of the most incredible experiences on screen in terms of output of raw wonder and imagination, but can also speak truthfully of the neglected and exploited labor that makes society run? Can we be both incredibly loud and incredibly honest?

Maybe such a movie is going to be my Movie of the Year. Who knows? But that's spoiler talk. For now, the links to the Top 15 are below, will be updated daily.

Some Notes:

I'm going to be releasing these reviews day by day instead of in one huge lump. I'm pretty far behind on the schedules I leave for myself (had a family emergency which stole a week), so one short review a day is more practical than killing myself to write thousands of words in one sloppy, unwieldy mass. But more importantly, these End of the Year recaps keep growing in scale and ambition. I fear at some point I'll spend an entire year just recapping the previous year. So making it a more manageable operation is better, I feel.

So for the rest of January, it's Movie of the Year stuff. And running concurrently, there will be Game of the Year stuff, which will get its own Master Post and its own naval gazing intro.

In order to qualify for this list, the movie in question must have been released to wide audiences, either theatrically or streaming, in the United States sometime in the year 2022. So you might see a movie from many critics' 2021 lists, you might see films that will make other people's 2023 lists. Access is not universal. I did see about 70 movies in 2022, so I did not see everything, but I think I saw everything I needed to. Feel free to be furious that I skipped The Fabelmans.

One other programming note: I am returning to a Top 15 for this list. No more Top 20s, maybe ever. This also helps because 2022 had fewer movies I felt were truly great. I flirted with shortening this down to a Top 10 but that did not feel honest. I am not sure what that means about the overall state of the industry and what was released. I do not think 2022 was a considerably worse year than 2023, but also everything still feels weird in the film-world. Just weird in new ways every year.

Anyway, I am going quite long again, so let's get into it... starting tomorrow:

15. Cyrano, dir. Joe Wright

14. Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg

13. After Yang, dir. Kogonada

12. Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, dir. Ti West

11. Women Talking, dir. Sarah Polley

 

10. Triangle of Sadness, dir. Ruben Östlund

 

9. Inu-Oh, dir. Masaaki Yuasa

8. Nope, dir. Jordan Peele

7. Mad God, dir. Phil Tippett

6. Decision to Leave, dir. Park Chan-wook

5. Tár, dir. Todd Field

4. RRR. dir. S. S. Rajamouli

3. Turning Red, dir. Domee Shi

2. The Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels

Honorable Mentions and Extras