Knowing what to watch when you get a few hours to yourself now, has never been easier or harder. The abundance of choice available in the age of the multiplex and now streaming means you are never short of options and quality films are dropping in your lap all the time. But with great choice comes great paralysis as the pure scope of what is available means seeing everything you want to see is both achievable and impossible – times are confusing. Still, it is reassuring that in an age where cinema is under threat, the demand and desire for great films to be made is only increasing. TV itself too, continues to blur the lines between the small screen and the big, such is the quality of shows, but that is a subject for another blog as there is enough to cover with just film.
Here are my personal choices for best films of 2022. PS: The list does not include any of my favourite horror films as I already covered those on the following list and didn’t want to repeat my content. You can find those on the following list. https://darrenmoverley81.wordpress.com/2022/10/29/the-best-horror-films-of-2022/
10. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
If you look at early Disney, it is exceptionally dark for pioneering animation. Pinocchio, made in 1940 is essentially the story of innocence being corrupted and exploited, unnerving to youthful minds for the best part of a century. The original Italian novel is even darker though, and Del Toro seems here to be taking the story home, recontextualizing it in war torn Italy, with Mousilini’s fascist rule, setting up the boldly dark world the fable is set in.
Take the Gepetto arc for instance, here he is a father going through exceptional loss, who is losing his soul to the bottle. He carves his wooden boy out of a desperate attempt to ease the burden of losing his son.
At a time when lots of filmmakers want to revisit Pinocchio, Del Toro’s interpretation really stands out as inspired. He reinvigorates the sense of strangeness to the tale, employing his love of the nightmarish to make the fairy tale enchanting all over again. Those familiar with Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, may see that he has told another bewitching fantasy with war and fascism intertwined with fairy tale. He goes as far as to say, this is the third in the civil war trilogy; Pinocchio does have that same sense of atmosphere from nightmares that those two films had.
As for Pinocchio the character, he epitomises the refreshing sense of invention to this old tale. He’s naive in a new way to the Disney version, he is cocksure in his guilelessness, with a reckless energy, but the growth he shows as the story progresses – and not just in the nose – shows a soul deepening with meaningful life lessons. The villains want to pull him into strange and nefarious directions – but he shows a lot of anarchic spirit.
Telling a version of Pinocchio that plays out on a backdrop of war, death, tragedy and fascism, was a bold to the point of risky in a stop-motion animation, but this re-imagining completely makes you see these characters from a different perspective and it doesn’t detract from the original, but enhances its core message and power.
9.Licorice Pizza
Modern cinema’s answer to Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, grew up and still lives in the Hollywood adjacent San Fernando Valley – the setting for this quasi-romantic character driven seventies set exploration of his beloved Valley.
The film feels delightfully on the fringe of the movie industry as the developing, unorthodox relationship between two coming of age figures, meanders through the valley, organically crossing into the paths of period actors and well-known Hollywood types.
No two leads had the chemistry of Gary Valentine (a strong debut performance by Cooper Hoffman who was as assured and commanding as his late dad on screen), And Haim’s Alana Haim who is funny, authentic and mesmerizing. Essentially, there was an element of forbidden love between the two, with the twenty-something Haim the older of the pair reluctant to cross a line with a boy who is still around high school years. Anderson delights in teasing this relationship out with the two having such witty and fun repartee – resulting in considerable sexual tension.
Anderson’s fun, organic and charming film almost felt like his crossover between Altman’s The Player and his Short Cuts, as this couple take a journey through the Valley that intersects with characters, that seem to be involved with mini-stories that feel like they were inspired by word of mouth tales of certain antics of Hollywood figures.
Sean Penn, playing a character clearly inspired by William Holden, steals scenes and the arrival of Bradley Cooper as infamous hairdresser turned movie producer and long term boyfriend of Barbara Streisand Jon Ryan, is both hilarious and tension filled. If you know nothing about the character Cooper is portraying it is worth googling as his stories in Hollywood are legendary. And a quick google backs up the feeling that Anderson has written this film, inspired by things he has heard happening in the Valley.
Growing up is an adventure – but growing up in the seventies San Fernando Valley proves to be an idiosyncratic, charming and humorous adventure, which further cements Anderson’s reputation as the modern master of organic cinema.
8. Drive My Car
The premise for Drive My Car seems to reflect the simplistic self-explanatory nature of the title. It features an actor and director who learns his lines for his roles whilst being chauffeur driven by a hired driver.
The self-explanatory nature of the premise as then reflected by the title, is deceptive as this is one of the most emotionally rich, deeply introspective, internally gratifying dramas of the year.
The central character has suffered a sudden bereavement and uses his time and his process in the car to reflect deeply on his circumstances, his life and his lost wife. He learns his lines by playing a taped recording, which he listens to whilst being driven. It’s a unique process, and the repetition of the words, seems to deepen a sense of connection he has with the material, his wife and the driver of the car too.
The phrase ‘still waters run deep’ seems to apply to the central character. On the surface, he seems contained and together, but the quiet contemplation enriches the inner life of the drama.
It becomes a profound screenplay that says something deeply stirring about the confused and lost state we are left in when someone suddenly departs and the person is left to plot a way out of the sadness and emptiness that is left behind. It seemed to say something quite metaphorically deep about the sense of alienation and disconnection people feel currently in Japan.
It is both melancholy and meditative and beautifully meaningful film about the long process of coming to terms with a devastating personal loss.
7. Banshees of Inisherin.
Martin McDonagh has become a household name in the indie film community as a filmmaker who can make inventively spiky layered black comedies. Banshees saw him stick to the black comedy template his films can loosely be moulded around, but once again, he strayed off this path early, with a story that swiftly breaks out of the conventions of the comedy sub-genre it appears to start out in, to tell an increasingly bitter and totally unique tale of a friendship disintegrating.
Set on an island, off the coast of Ireland in the 1920’s, it starts when one lifelong friend Colm (Brendon Glesson), tells another, Padraic (Colin Farrell) that he no longer wants to be friends with him. This sort of thing happens in romantic relationships, or perhaps among children all the time, but you never have to say this to a friend you no longer have much in common with as an adult, and the fact that this is being said out loud between two men, seems absurd and therefore humourous. It almost feels like some sort of indie Father Ted, with two middle aged men acting rather curiously on some remote rural Irish setting.
But what Martin McDonagh really wants to do in Banshees is ruminate on how strong a force middle-aged existential angst can be and what motivation from fear of death can do to a person’s soul.
When you start to see just how serious Glesson’s character is in his conviction to not be bothered by his former friend, the humour is still there, but it is way more edgy and uncomfortable as you begin to see Banshees has more thought-provoking dramatic heft than it has had before. Glesson’s character is on another plane of consciousness that no one seems to understand, driven to leave a legacy to remind the world that he was here. Whether he is a man of substance or pretension, is an interesting debate to have with others after watching the film – but it all hints at just how much the film gets under the skin in surprising ways.
No filmmaker right now has been as good as McDonagh at taking his characters in unexpected turns, and making them have conflict in unconventional ways. As the relationship between the two men becomes ever more acrimonious, the black comedy is scorched around the edges and the film hits home with a sense of pathos that you might not have expected from its initial delivery. You realise then what depth of anguish the film has unlocked in so many of the characters souls; it is intense to experience, you feel it deep within as it really resonates. Humour has been substituted for conviction and profound statements about the dichotomy between love and hate and the tension between the human need to belong and the human need to be left alone. Banshees of Inisherin is acerbically hilarious, but it is also ultimately deeply powerful.
6.Boiling Point
Had a stress inducing day at work? Then spare a thought for Stephen Graham in Boiling Point. No matter how anxiety-inducing your working day was, take solace in the fact that it cannot be nearly as bad as his. He is a head chef at a high class London restaurant who has to endure a surprise health inspection on a day he is feeling more than a little hazy.
Immediately there is a sense that things are falling out of his control, which creates easily the year’s most tension-inducing film. In a way this was this year’s Uncut Gems, as you have a clearly flawed but very organic character who is struggling to hold things together and making increasingly worrying decisions, seeming troubled out of his depth.
The film gets its hooks into your psyche early doors, as you feel like his struggles are your struggles and there is something thrilling about being this emotionally immersed into someone else’s crisis scenario.
The film was technically as inspired as it was emotionally. It was all done in one frenzied, but expertly choreographed take. It was quite a canny creative call by director Philip Barantini to get his actors to shoot this in one continuous, editless sequence. There can be few working environments to work in as stressful as a kitchen in a top restaurant, and by mirroring the organized chaos of that in the challenge he posed for his ensemble, he gave them more of a taste of that pressure cooker scenario chefs face. If his actors mess up a line here, it is back to square one. But you can feel them using that stress energy to spark off one-another in a brilliantly realistic, pleasurably nervy-dicing style.
There is an interesting life intimidating art methodology in Boiling Point, which created a raw, wonderfully involving, effortlessly tension inducing pressure cooker of a viewing experience. Few directors try and do a film in one take for obvious reasons, so Boiling Point is a rare example of that approach and for that level of boldness alone it was a gourmet viewing experience.
5. Nightmare Alley
Even before the Netflix show Cabinet of Curiosities came in the spooky season, Guilimero Del Toro had established himself as the current king of darkly evocative horror inflected fairytales. Those familiar with his work now know there is a love of monsters lurking around at the heart of his films, but how he played off those expectations and then subverted them with Nightmare Alley was brilliantly done.
Del Toro threw audiences off the scent by seemingly not at first having an obvious creature or ghost at the center of his film and instead moving into the horror adjacent genre of film noir.
Very few filmmakers are currently working in the style of 30s noir, so this alone marked Nightmare Alley as a film unique in modern times.
Carnival freaks and fairground folk live on the fringes of society and therefore make an intriguing ensemble of characters in a noir film. To ordinary people at this time, these eerie showmen were as close to the idea of monsters that society got, and although staring at circus ‘freaks’ now is something of a taboo it passed for entertainment in the days before TV and political correctness.
But Del Toro cares about the creatures in the shadows, in a way few filmmakers do now, so his remake of a long lost forties film, expertly updated the themes, and almost wrong-foots the audience expectations, as what surprised about his remake of Nightmare Alley was just how ruthlessly dark, provocative and unsettling Del Toro had become.
The film has a career best central performance by Bradley Cooper who lured you in with his charm and likeability factor and took you on a journey with this character as he follows his talent and powers of persuasion into morally dubious murky areas.
There was a brilliant sense of a character losing control of itself, in a brilliantly plotted story that gained its considerable tension by putting out an ethical dilemma, and running away with it until there was a narrative gaining traction the messier it became as the gallery of noir rogues take the film to unexpectedly twisted depths for what made it on the shortlist of Hollywood prestige pictures. Del Toro had a prolific year with two films in the top 10 and a really strange hit tv show too.
4. The Fablemans
For those of us who have been watching Steven Spielberg’s films carefully over the last fifty years, we’ve suspected that there may be a lot of personal truth in his fantasy creations. What does his recurring fascination with aliens represent for instance? Could it be this Jewish boy randomly transported from New Jersey to the open plains of Arizona at a tender age related to the idea of meeting a world you do not know and trying to connect to the other? Are benevolent aliens literally a metaphor for the sense of alienation he felt in his youth?
With that in mind, The Fablemans is like the perennial wizard of fantasy, is stepping from behind the curtain with this remarkably candid film, and fully revealing that a lot of moments from his real life were in his films all the long. His fascination with either broken families with absent parents or a reconciliation of families or wholesome family values is fully, and tenderly revealed in The Fablemans. This is Speilberg fully shining the camera onto his own past, to reveal the reasons why his films seem to have the ability to touch the heart in real and personal ways.
Even for a filmmaker as prolific and as open to new challenges over five decades as Spielberg, this is a remarkably brave film to make. This is his story, or more accurately the story of a teenage Spielberg discovering how he can use the camera to figure out the people in his world.
You can feel Spielberg’s passion for the craft in every film he makes, but in remarkably raw autobiographical reflection on his formative years here, he finds a million ways to demonstrate the extraordinary power of the camera and the screen to reflect back the truth in life that we might otherwise not be looking closely at.
The Fablemans is an ode to the wonderful power of cinema to understand emotions, and it feels like stepping into the mind of an experienced filmmaker drawing from his memory the events, both good and bad, that set him on the pathway to an unparalleled career.
This is like an emotional instruction manual that decodes his entire back catalog.
The more personal you make art, the more vulnerable you become – regardless of your position and status. It is as true for Spielberg as someone just starting out in the business. But such a seasoned and refined filmmaker who fully understands the tools of his craft, can use imagery to recreate with pinpoint accuracy, the emotions and reflections he had at key moments of his life. You practically feel the epiphanies as the young stand-in for himself figures out certain truths about his mother, his father, the inner workings of their relationship and who people really are, perhaps even before they know this themselves. Everyone has a moment in life when they stop seeing their mother and father as all-powerful gods and begin to see their flaws and their struggles, but Spielberg knows how to articulate those moments on screen, and whatsomore, he is revealing here, the extraordinary role the camera has played in his life.
You don’t watch The Fablemans, it is even more than an experience, you live it – you live what he experienced in his youth, the struggles, the moments of wonder and you see with extraordinary candour how the craft of his art comes out of something so genuine. There are reasons why Spielberg is unrivaled in his love of the craft and the source of who he is shines brightly in this utmost of heartfelt and sincere films. All of us want to pull from our memory our past and capture every emotional beat to work out who we are and where we came from, Spielberg being the genius filmmaker that he is, has actually managed to do something that we might all have loved to do for our own understanding of ourselves.
3. The Worst Person in the World
Millennials have been brought up with the idea that we were the generation who could be anything we want to be and we were given the impression that we have more choice for opportunity than any before. For women, this empowerment was even more liberating for a new generation. But with an abundance of choice, the sense of restlessness that you’ve made the right ones becomes ever more nagging…
So opportunity is a double edged sword and the titular character, a young, ambitious, idealistic, but rather flaky female Julie (a totally luminous Renate Reinsve) is never quite certain, whether she is in the right job, or right relationship.
This is a Danish film, which speaks so directly to the heart of a generation where opportunity has reached a paralysis. The film walks a tight rope of ambivalence in its character study, never totally endorsing those who change things up in their life, but also never totally condemning Julie’s flightiness too, but, all the while offering subtle observations of what happens to the psyche of those who can’t commit to a certain pathway as the thirties beckon – both the good and the bad.
Director Joachim Trier flits between an organic tone, that absolutely captures the reality of life, but with the spark of invention, at every moment. His bravery is depicting the flaws in romance and relationships as well as the sense of joy and renewal new sparks of connection can do to the human soul.
In the vein of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise series, this film really naturally puts believable characters intertwined with the beauty and angst of relationships, whilst all the while creatively deconstructing the modern relationship, hitting numerous notes of recognition in its audience, who will recognise how emotionally truthful and honest it is about modern love.
The key seems to be the decision to make the central character, a highly flawed individual – hinted at in the title – whose spontaneity flits between endearing and destructive. How many times can you completely go in a different direction, before you run out of pathways? This seems to be the question the drama is prompting. But what hooks you in is, like Julie, you never quite know whether she is making a decision that will make her happier or lead her into regret. But you perhaps wish she could consider her options before making a leap of faith that things will work out for her, but that is how life works when you are young, and here you have a mirror shining a light on all the good and bad that comes with that.
It’s funny, it’s full of flair, it’s full of admirable observations and its naturalness is compelling. The Worst Person in the World is the best film we have for understanding the mindset of an idealists who suffer from commitment phobia. Do you avoid getting trapped, or do you leave yourself looking back at what might have been? It is beautifully human, and a unique existential drama for a whole generation who were told to make the right choices to be happy.
2. Elvis
Landing at a time when we are readdressing the mental struggle of celebrity, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis shone a torch on the secret struggle Elvis had between balancing fame with being respected or exploited as an artist.
It demonstrated the power of cinema to capture the personal struggle behind the fame, money and glamour. Elvis has been replicated so many times that he has practically become a cartoon character, and there was a fear that Baz Luhrmann, a director who will often never let truth get in the way of a good kaleidoscopic, fantasy set-piece, would make a further mockery of the King of Rock and Roll. What he actually did was the exact opposite of that. He captured everything, telling the story of how EP rose from the ghettos, and took influence from the powerful blues and soul music he was immersed in growing up in African American communities.
The frenzied, pulsating set-pieces he created to bring Elvis’ childhood back to life were the most rousing of the year – as Luhrmann’s energy as a director worked marvelously in the Elvis story. He used a carnival metaphor to illustrate the dark drama in Elvis’ story too, capturing with raw heart how the Colonel saw an opportunity to shackle him to contracts and make him mercilessly perform like a dancing bear. Austin Butler had it all, the look, the swagger, the bravado, but also the hidden frustration of a man losing his soul to commerce. At times, Butler tore his heart out in doing justice to the king, it was the bravest of challenges to step into Elvis’ blue suede shoes and he nailed it.
If Beale street could talk, it may whisper that this is closer to the truth of who Elvis was and where he came from than the stuff that usually bares his image. If people want to find out who the real Elvis was, they no longer have to go to Graceland, they can just watch Baz Luhrmann’s energized but poignant film.
For the Elvis feature review click here: https://darrenmoverley81.wordpress.com/2022/08/31/elvis-film-review/
Film of 2022: Mass
Mass shootings continued to happen at a disturbing rate in America in 2022, and key politicians could only offer distraction tactics rather than active solutions as to what can be done about America’s gun crisis. Director Fran Kran, showed the delicacy in which cinema can handle the contentious issues, with this deeply poignant and sobering expertly performed drama about four parents trying to process the aftermath of a high school massacre, after the media have left the scene.
To gather the two sets of parents – from both the perpetrators and the victims – seems on paper as a recipe for Jerry Springer levels of sensationalism. The fact that the drama was so real, emotionally and psychologically well-observed and was easily the most impressive ensemble of actors playing off each other on display in 2022, made Mass a work of real importance, so it is a shame that it was only seen by such small audiences.
When we first see the parents – who are portrayed by Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton on the side of the victims and Reed Birney and Ann Dowd as the parents of the murderer – it is the kind of scene that the phrase, ‘cut the tension with a knife’ was designed to illustrate. The air is full of awkward strained nerves, masked by the air of civility necessary to facilitate such a meeting.
The gathering takes place in a church, some time after the parents have been sitting with the grief and emotional turmoil of the events. Some time and considered thought has gone into preparing an environment in which the two sets of parents can begin their interactions to try to make sense of their grief and process the burden of their trauma. Will they play a blame game? Will they reach a sense of understanding? Is this going to be a productive or destructive process? – are questions left floating, which creates a mood of tension and gravitas.
The film seems to have an astute understanding and sensitivity to how one’s psychological condition and sense of peace is damaged in the long, drawn out process of grief. There is a lived in strain to all the performances that utterly convinces that each person is lost in a prison of soul-torturing pain.
Should the parents of the victim of a gun shooting be in a room with the parents of the culprit? Fran Kranz asks the viewer to consider this question, and you are not sure how you feel about the meeting until the final moments provide some clarity. Given how much pain and suffering there is right now, I can see why a film like Mass is perhaps not something people are naturally drawn to. But to watch it is to experience something of a powerful catharsis and to strike a pure sense of empathy as to what all the victims of losing children to senseless acts of violence feel. This is one of the most hard-hitting and emotionally thought-provoking films ever made about coming to terms with what it is like to lose a child. If some of the U.S politicians against automatic weapon reform or NRA members actually took the time to see Mass, then the U.S senate may be one step closer to at least drawing up the necessary bill to do the sensible, morally correct thing and tighten gun restrictions over automatic weaponry.
Click here for Mass feature review: https://darrenmoverley81.wordpress.com/2022/07/05/mass-film-review/
This list is the second part of a 22 film list that I consider to be the best films of the year. For part 1 click here:- https://darrenmoverley81.wordpress.com/2023/01/29/22-great-films-from-2022-part-1-22-11/?fbclid=IwAR04ay7zwjw7sgY_KNOFiMIvJCQiHHBtRn7LZh8bLKikUWEej5fXajRlQl0
Please feel free to leave a comment. What was your favourite film of 2022?
Blog Day Afternoon 