Happy New Year everyone. This will be the last newsletter of 2022, and I am ending us on a high note. This was a really good year for the pictures, which is why this list is much longer than the worst of the year (also because I didn’t see Eo in time to put in on there. Fuck that movie and the 95% of critics who think it’s anything other than an utterly saccharine bore).
I haven’t yet seen everything 2022 has to offer but for now, I want to celebrate what I saw and loved. I’m sure we’ll get to see some gauzy montage at the Oscars about the lip-trembling power of storytelling, but what I see in these movies are rejections of traditional ideas of subject and spectatorship. These are movies concerned with modern voyeurism, what happens when we dare to look at who's been watching us, to flip the gaze.
For the purpose of this list, I’m counting things that got a wide American release in 2022. Here they are, in no particular order:
Nope (Jordan Peele, streaming on Peacock)
I was Emerald for Halloween (catch me on Instagram). There’s no way this wasn’t making the list. I wrote about how intelligently Nope comments on American individualism. Returning to Nope now, I’m lingering on one specific moment with Emerald—when she shouts to her brother, “Run, OJ, Run!” It’s a reclamation of voice, a reclamation of the name OJ, a reclamation of Black spectacle. It’s the exact opposite of the Scream Queen trope, the long history of white girls screaming. Kelli Weston’s piece on Peele and how anxieties of perception and sight figure into his work is a must-read. I know everyone roasted that guy on Twitter saying Peele has the best three-movie run of any horror director ever but … y’all… was he right?
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough, in theaters and streaming on HBO Max)
The cure to the kindness-core defined by Ted Lasso, Everything Everywhere All At Once (The Daniels, 2022), and Schitt’s Creek. Movies about hetero boy friends often have genre trappings that justify why two straight men would share so much intimacy (crime, war, etc.) but Banshees finds its revenge drama in two seemingly mild characters. Set against the backdrop of a civil war none of these characters seem to care about, if they even understand it, it’s a look at how a community can completely fail. I haven’t seen something that so elegantly delineates how delicate our social systems are since Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019). I am looking forward to rewatching this one, especially since I learned that young animal actor Jenny had a donkey friend on set to keep her chilled out.
Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg, streaming on Showtime)
I don’t remember seeing a ton of buzz about Pleasure when it came out, but Thyberg’s candy-colored feature is a mesmerizing, unsettling watch. Bella Cherry leaves her native Sweden for L.A. at age 19 to become an adult film actor. Bella wants to become a true Porn Star and has a reality tv-esque “I’m not here to make friends” mindset about her ambitions. Pleasure feels like a response to erotic dramas like Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995), but it’s a movie about exploitation without being an exploitation flick. Bella is the center of the narrative and we see her actively calculate her next moves—and when things go wrong, the movie does not relish in punishing her. Instead it grimly shows all of the adult industry’s easily consumed cruelty. A really interesting movie about consent and power, one to watch alongside Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021) and Titane (Julia Ducornou, 2021).
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this will probably never be streaming but the theater trip is more than worth it)
While watching Memoria, I thought about how often we describe movies as a way to develop empathy for others: as a non-sociopath, it has always made me raise an eyebrow to hear art described in such prescriptive terms. Memoria asks whether it’s possible, or even useful, to share any experience secondhand. How do I make you hear a sound that only I have heard? Why do I even want to?
After Yang (Kogonada, streaming on Showtime)
I didn’t consider that Colin Farrell would appear twice on here—thank god I left Batman off. I dug Kogonada’s previous feature, Columbus (2017), and here we get more of his sensitive, architectural storytelling. It is rare to see an American movie investigate death this fully, and After Yang is a completely uncynical look at a family story. I don’t know how the hell Justin H. Min, who plays Yang, has just been sitting in a Netflix original series helmed by Gerard Way. Though Min doesn’t have a ton of screen time, his blooming presence is central to the movie. And the opening of this movie has to be one of the best. And not just of the year—ever.
RRR (S.S. Rajamouli, the Hindi language version is streaming on Netflix. If you want to see it in Telugu, you might need to seek out a theater)
This two minute scene, where our heroes meet for the first time, captures everything I loved about RRR. The instant connection and language between these two, the obvious glee on their faces upon finding a kindred spirit, the symbolic uniting of their two goals as represented by the flag and the child. RRR is the most expensive Indian movie ever made (so far—I am anxiously awaiting the sequel) and it shows—not a moment in the very healthy runtime is wasted.
Tár (Todd Fields, in theaters and available to rent online)
The classroom scene, where a woke Gen Z-er declares his distaste for Bach, has gotten a lot of criticism but I keep thinking about it. Tár is a dick, obviously, but she’s also devastatingly right about the warped effect representation politics have had on us. Neoliberalism strips the political meaning out of our identities, which is how you get slavery torture porn in the “Celebrate Juneteenth” catalog on Netflix and cops demanding they wear their uniforms to march in Pride parades. The corny reviews of Tár decrying it “bad representation” for lesbians are just another example of how an identity label that was once used to coalition-build and organize is now just a marketing checklist.
What makes Tár sparkle is not that it is good or bad representation for lesbians, or for female conductors, or for Staten Islanders who change their names to sound fancier. Tár is a deeply funny, slow-burning marvel. I love how incredibly sinister the mundane world becomes as Tár fails to acknowledge her guilt. I love how Blanchett holds court, her ostentatious and imperfect German speaking, her immaculate tailored outfits that suddenly seem Chaplin Tramp-like as she crumples over a weary day. The chime of a cell phone made me gasp, the clicking of a metronome had me clutching my seat. Who else can do that?
Thanks for a good 2022. If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter so far, I would truly appreciate it if you would share it with your friends. I’m going to try out some new things with format next year; in the meantime, expect once-a-month updates from me.
Let me know your best of the year and what you think about mine. See you in January!
Great read. I totally agree on Tar. I think the thing that fascinates me about the Julliard scene is that they're both right in their own ways, and their primary point of wrongdoing in that scene is their failure to acknowledge the larger complexity of the issue they're talking about. It's a great little slice of modern discourse: Shave it down to something that's easy to digest and pretend like that's the whole story.
Thanks for this list, it's given me some new stuff to check out. I think your review of Tar is one of the few positive ones I've seen, and I've been wanting to check it out, so this will push me to do so. And I had totally forgotten about Pleasure, so thanks for the reminder on that too.
As for Peele, as a huge horror fan, there is some part of me that wonders what I'm missing. His movies just leave me so....empty. The only one I really enjoyed at all was US, just because I thought the home invasion stuff was really scary (home invasion is my second favorite horror sub-genre), but upon second watch even that lost a lot of its power for me. I am so glad he is making movies, and I can really appreciate and respect what he does, I just wish, I don't know, maybe he was better at it? His movies always feel to me like they desperately need an editor, and there also always feels like there is far too much exposition, too much to explain. I think he's a great Idea Man, and a very technically competent director, but I leave his movies just kinda feeling like they're half-baked. I definitely seem to be in the minority on all of these things, though, so I'm probably wrong. But if I'm being really cynical, sometimes the praise heaped on him all the time feels a little disingenuous to me, and a little patronizing. He feels a little beyond criticism to me sometimes. I'm not accusing you of doing that at all, I'm just saying in general. Ultimately, I just wished I liked his movies more than I do.