While the Academy mulls over its nominees and decides on winners, the awards season reaches its last phase. Campaigns are at their apex, precursors shake the race, and speeches are aplenty. So, here at The Film Experience, it's time to share personal favorites, getting closure on the cinematic year as we do so. Indeed, Nathaniel's Film Bitch Awards are on its way, with some categories already announced – go check them out. In the meantime, I'm here to share my own top ten, which runs the gamut from apocalyptic gore to the year's best performance, from Jesus-y donkeys to Catholic guilt with a side of gay longing...
First up, let's get some selection criteria settled.
Since this is an American website so attuned to the Oscar race, I'll be going by US release though I live in Portugal. That means some 2022 films yet to be released won't be part of this list despite my love for them. Specifically, I'm thinking of Carla Simón's Alcarràs, a family snapshot of one sorrowful summer that made me actively tear up at the sight of peaches. There's also the beguiling Joyland by Saim Sadiq, maybe the most visually beautiful film I saw in theaters last year, delineating painful webs of desire and repression. Look out for both titles in my 2023 top ten.
And now, some honorable mentions must be applauded.
How can one resist the murderous love of Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave? It's a Hitchcockian romance for the ages, as carefully crafted as the ghost story cum memory play of Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter. Some are tired of the director's recent autobiographical bend, but I can't get enough of these cinematic souvenirs. Ninja Thyberg's Pleasure belongs in any consideration for every list of most audacious directing jobs of the decade, while Return to Seoul is a staggering character study. This identity-crisis movie should put director Davy Chou and lead actress Park Ji-min's names on the map.
If you're in the mood for a thematic double feature, try Paz Encina's Eami and Alex Pritz's The Territory. Both deal with environmental narratives seen through the eyes of indigenous peoples living in the forests of South America. However, while one takes on a lyrical approach verging on abstraction, the other appeals to classical film models to dissect contemporary political conflicts.
Then, we have Jafar Panahi's No Bears, a culmination of the director's last decade working under the watchful eye of Iranian authorities, making clandestine cinema that's as much a manifesto as a dangerous need from deep within. Finally, watching Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Earwig is akin to experiencing a lucid dream projected directly from one's skull unto the screen. Both ravishing and frightful, it's a formalistic wonder that sends chills down my spine.
With that out of the way, here's the final countdown. My favorite films of 2022...
THE TOP TEN
10) MAD GOD, Phil Tippett
Ingmar Bergman's Faith Trilogy posited a universe where God is nonexistent, silent, or worse, a monstrous stony-faced spider intent on making us suffer. Visual effects legend Phil Tippet goes one step further in his magnum opus, a decades-spanning project that envisions a reality governed by divine madness. The result is the nightmare of a lost world yearning for the mercy of an end, cosmic rot as far as the eye can see, and all animated with equal parts imagination and mastery. What a fantastic sense of scale and materiality, what hopeless hope.
Mad God is streaming on AMC+ and Shudder. You can also rent it on most services.
09) EO, Jerzy Skolimowski
From my review:
"An enchanting experience, the sort of thing where you feel the weight of a movie pressing down on you, pushing air out of your lungs by force of imagery and startling sound. Awe-inspiring doesn't begin to describe this perfectly imperfect film whose every unfortunate choice is counterbalanced by some of the most surreal shit you ever saw. It's not even proper surrealism in regards to what it depicts, but how it does so, always reaching for the cinematic sublime in shades of red."
EO starts streaming on the Criterion Channel next Tuesday, February 21st.
08) THE FABELMANS, Steven Spielberg
From my review:
"Spielberg's past filmography echoes through it all like a scream in a cavern, revealing just how much the auteur's overall work is an expression of self, be it the trauma of the parents' divorce or a continuation of juvenile loves. It's also a desperate attempt at giving order to what has none, trying to take control over the chaos of life through the camera's gaze. (…) So few films, even meta-cinematic pieces, ever problematize what a camera does or the value of framing, blocking, showing or not showing."
The Fabelmans can be found on most major platforms, whether to rent or buy.
07) ALL THAT BREATHES, Shaunak Sen
Right from its rat-infested opening, this documentary announces itself as a poet's work, using the camera instead of words to convey its profound observations, its heartfelt pleas. Floating through the Dehli skies, the picture is keen on rendering the horror of a polluted world in visceral detail while finding something dazzling amid the desolation. I challenge you not to fall in love with the conservationist brothers at the doc's center, two souls lost in the big city committed to valuing the small lives skittering about in danger and need.
All That Breathes is streaming on HBO Max and DirecTV.
06) ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, Laura Poitras
An essential view if such a thing exists combining memoirist impulses with the intimacy of a secret confession. It's the private made public, life as a political act onto itself. Collisions, repetitions, echoes gradually illuminate the necessity of a presentation that may seem fractured at first, replicating how a Nan Goldin slideshow works in the wild. Coalescing divergent storylines and a galaxy of distinct personalities, Poitras makes a persuasive argument for the doc's odd shape, culminating in the sense of a pulverizing punch. Distilled anger beacons something akin to enlightenment.
All The Beauty and the Bloodshed is available for pre-order on Apple iTunes. It's also going to be streaming soon on HBO Max.
05) GREAT FREEDOM, Sebastian Meise
From my International Film Oscar coverage:
"A match in the darkness connects out-of-order chronology, a flame of kindness transcending time. A friend offers a hug to help another man cope with grief while guards try to separate them, beating the one cradling his crying comrade. Dates in an open courtyard at night, bodies huddled in the cold and darkness, trying to forge a sense of intimacy in a place where that cannot exist. Sex is a cure for addiction, a love language, and a way to celebrate the self, the velvety shadows in a labyrinth of passion."
Great Freedom is streaming on MUBI. You can also rent it on Amazon Video and Apple TV.
04) THE GREAT MOVEMENT, Kiro Russo
From my review:
"The Great Movement regards hope as a luxury that only a privileged few can enjoy. For the majority, such mercies are out of reach. Instead, the picture is shaped like a cry for change, full of sound and fury, fires blazing within its celluloid heart. Nevertheless, to characterize Russo's film as pure despondence feels wrong. It's not misery porn, by any means, finding paradoxical euphoria in the pits of despair. Oddly revitalizing, the picture appeals to storytelling traditions and kind lies, camaraderie, and hustling fraternity. Though without mercy, Russo's cinema is full of life."
03) AFTERSUN, Charlotte Wells
A memory revisited through analog video, a polaroid picture slowly coming into existence, a gesture reaching towards what cannot be reached. This debut haunts the viewer with its cinematic evocation of a child's perspective of parental pain, unknowable in the moment but growing thorns in retrospect. We look back, hoping to see more, but there's still an invisible force refusing to give into transparency. Between the camera and the actors, the cutting and scripted reticence, Wells creates something hard to describe, though not wholly intangible. I can feel it in my bones.
You can find Aftersun, available to rent or purchase, on most platforms. Depending on your country, it may also be on MUBI.
02) BENEDICTION, Terence Davies
Before watching Benediction, I made my way through Terence Davies' complete filmography, getting acquainted with a director I had admired for years. It was an odyssey of gay desire crashing headfirst into religious anger, born out of a kind of shame that can only be expressed by the paradox of a whisper. After such journeys, this portrait of poet Siegfried Sassoon gains palimpsestic meaning. Like an open wound in the form of a film, it's drunken with sublimated pain and oh so eager to be penetrated by some curious gaze. It interrogates and provokes, shattering the preconceptions of period biography with unexpected experimentation.
Benediction is streaming on Hulu, Hoopla, and Kanopy. It's also available to rent on many services.
01) SAINT OMER, Alice Diop
After cementing her name as one of France's most exciting new filmmakers with her non-fiction works, Alice Diop reaches the greatest heights of her craft with this, the director's narrative debut. Minimalist to the point of severity, the courtroom drama reveals itself to be a deeply demanding exercise, forcing the audience to confront its ideas in long takes staged to promote a silent dialogue between spectator and film. Whatever stabs at moral reckoning exist are complicated by notions of colonialist projection, making even the simpler direct addresses into revealing tests. Each viewer is bound to bring something different to Saint Omer, taking different things from it in a game of conflicted gazes. Part of the point is to reflect upon the mystery of people, to others and themselves, while mulling over a terrifying reality. Every element works in perfect harmony, from Amrita David's editing patterns to Guslagia Malanda's miraculous performance – the best of this and most years – to build a challenging picture that's never less than profoundly engaging. A masterpiece!
Saint Omer is available for rent and purchase on most main platforms.
Follow me on Letterboxd if you want to keep up with what I'm watching, and check out my complete ranking of 2022 releases. But be warned, as I watch and re-watch movies, that ranking might change, and even my top ten might transform. It's a fluid thing. So with that out of the way, what do you think of my list of favorites? Please, share your own top ten in the comments.