My Ten Favourite Films of 2022: A Lineup

For once, I feel like I’m comfortable enough writing about the year’s very best before the year is over as I’ve caught a good chunk of what I know I wanted to see most, whether they be at film festivals or far beyond. But there’s also a lot I feel one can write about with regards to people lamenting the fact that cinema might be at a dying point, despite being maybe one of the best years one could ever want for the art form. It’s just all a matter of being able to look high and low beyond what you’re always hearing about. Sometimes there’s more to movies than just what one thinks the experience that one would commonly want to go for.

10. Aftersun

A case could just as easily be made for Aftersun being the best directorial debut film of the year, by far. In Charlotte Wells’s film, we’re seeing a portrait of a loving relationship between a Scottish father and daughter but we know that even in this memory there are pieces missing. In another one of the year’s most heartbreaking films, we’re made to experience what it feels like to want to be able to hang onto what made us so happy as a child, before realizing as an adult that there were certain things about the people we loved we just weren’t able to know.

It leaves the viewer to think at times, about what else there could have been in our memories with those we loved as kids that we were shielded from. Was it an act of love, that they kept these secrets from us at the time, or was it something greater? Regardless of the answer, it only reassures the power present in Aftersun and why it’s so devastating. Available on VOD in Canada.

9. RRR

The new film by S. S. Rajamouli has taken the world by storm in a way that no other Tollywood (not a Bollywood production!) has done so — as the sheer spectacle of RRR must be seen to be believed. In telling a fictionalized story about two Indian revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) and Komaram Bheem (Jr. NTR), it’s easy to see why the story of RRR is one that resonated with many audiences: a story about the start of a revolution against colonialism and how it all starts, for we see them taking on the British empire.

In its three hour running time, you have some particularly astonishing visual effects work whether they range from Bheem capturing a tiger, or Bheem and Raju meeting together for the first time by saving a child, but also one of the catchiest musical numbers of the year in the “Naatu Naatu” sequence, which had also gone as far enough as making people actually dance in the theater. It’s the sort of film whose spectacle could only make one wonder when will American blockbusters hit this level of spectacle, or if they’ll ever become so bold. Available to stream on Netflix (dubbed in Hindi).

8. Crimes of the Future

Body is reality — surgery is the new sex. These are the words that linger most in David Cronenberg’s latest, a film all about the manner by which people can alter their own bodies despite the objections of the world around themselves. For this reason alone, I think it’s easy to see why Crimes of the Future hits the marks for many, especially as we’re in an age where transgender people are still being prosecuted by their own governments and routinely denied their identities or deemed “disgusting.” To Cronenberg, whose name has been made through making body horror movies, what you have here is a reflection of an artist pondering what his place in the art world amounts itself to.

Maybe it’s also in part me being the Cronenberg enthusiast that I am, but what I love most about Crimes of the Future is the fact it’s Cronenberg being open about what fascinates him most. To that end, it’s certainly among his more provocative efforts and maybe among the most distinct we’ll see in a long while, and I also believe it to be one among his best too. Available to stream on Crave in Canada.

7. Nope

Here is what might be a perfect case for the spirit of the American blockbuster in peak form. In his third directorial effort, Jordan Peele interrogates the audience and their fixation on spectacle, while similarly creating a picture that sweeps you away in that same sense. After Get Out and Us, it only feels fitting that Peele follows both films with maybe his most ambitious effort to date — made better by how it utilizes the IMAX technology to give you an idea how big everything can all feel.

It wasn’t less than ten years ago where Jordan Peele built a name for himself as one of the great contemporary sketch comedians alongside Keegan Michael-Key. But with Nope, where Jordan Peele takes the viewers now is somewhere extraordinary. It’s a plea for the industry to become better than where it is as it stands, and a perfect statement about the horrifying nature of exploitation in the name of spectacle to be put on display for hundreds of millions to witness. Available on VOD in Canada.

6. Tár

After a sixteen year absence, Todd Field returns behind the camera with his best feature — and maybe one of the very best Cate Blanchett performances in her long career. A film like Tár almost feels like something of an enigma, much like the titular Lydia Tár, who we’re seeing as being someone who’s at the top of their form but not without any level of vulnerability. She’s someone who knew how to make her way to the top, but not without the suffering underneath of those who were taken under her wing. Tár is a film I find to be an especially fascinating case, because it’s so clearly about the dangers of being at the top without controlling the ego.

But the way it’s all coming together is what really sells it for me. It’s the way that the crumbling is a slow, calculated one — the way all the cracks become so evident from a long take, and the way the smallest sounds make the loudest noise. It makes all those small moments feel so visceral, and soon it becomes all about what it feels to lose that control. Available on VOD in Canada.

5. Women Talking

One could already ask, how does a film all about rhetorical questions going back and forth end up so highly regarded by many? The answer is simple. In Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, based on the novel by Miriam Toews, we’re already posed the question about what is the appropriate manner to respond to repeated sexual assault as it affects a community of people before realizing there’s no one answer. There’s no right or wrong answer and Polley’s film reflects the nature of how the world continually silences those who suffer at the hands of the powerful.

For that alone, I think Women Talking is an especially bold movie. For myself, it was one of the most devastating films of the year, but not without the glimmer of hope for those who wish to escape the hell of their own world as the answers seem to fade away so quickly. As her first feature film in ten years following Stories We Tell, Polley returns to the screen on a high note — and it only leaves me looking out for what’s next in store for her as she continues working behind the camera. Currently in theaters in Canada, playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Expands wide on January 20, 2023.

4. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Nan Goldin’s photography is already distinct enough as is, but the way that All the Beauty and the Bloodshed provides the insight into what motivates her own artwork as well as her own life’s pursuits can only ever be so powerful. What Laura Poitras presents in her new documentary about Nan Goldin is a film all about what it takes to get people to finally see what your work can culminate in, as she follows Goldin’s own fight against the Sackler family for their role in the opioid crisis, but not without us also getting the insight into how this played a role into how she works.

The crisis as we see is never solely just Goldin’s struggle, but it’s also something that continues to motivate her going forward. To that end, I think it’s a very beautiful movie all around and it’s arguably going to go down as the year’s most incendiary feature — for the message is present in Goldin’s own art and what she wants to pursue going forth. It’s all about allowing your voice to be heard, especially in a world where money speaks the loudest, even to the point it can buy active criminals legal immunity.

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once

Author’s note: this film was added here on February 27, 2023

One of the first things that crossed my mind upon watching Everything Everywhere All at Once was: how is it that a movie that allows itself to be so taken in with its large concept could end up feeling so small too? As I keep coming back to the Daniels’s multiverse action-comedy-drama-science fiction spectacle, I think that the fact that this incredibly zany take on the multiverse concept just manages to hit every emotional beat without ever feeling false just means it’s a rousing success in my eyes. Sure, it was a film that I’ve underrated quite a bit on my first viewing, but perhaps that was also out of apprehension because Swiss Army Man didn’t work entirely for me.

And yet, all the most immature aspects of Everything Everywhere All at Once never feel like they’re taking away from the fact that this is a film about chaos. There’s no real sense of maturity in that chaos at that, especially as we see Evelyn Quan trying to get her own life together from doing her taxes or the laundry, or preparing for a Chinese New Year party at that. That feeling of being overwhelmed is something that we’ve gone through at some point or another. Of all the films that came out in the past few years that felt designed to be crowdpleasers, I think that Everything Everywhere All at Once may just as well be the cream of the crop. Available to stream on Amazon Prime in Canada.

2. Decision to Leave

Could see this one making a case for being the most overtly romantic film of the decade, but if there’s anything else that makes Park Chan-wook’s outright Hitchcockian mystery thriller as special as it is, most of Decision to Leave’s own thrills come from the fact you’re not always able to tell exactly when can Park pull the rug from under your feet. But the whole film is also presented as an enigma, much like that feeling of being swept into the charms of a femme fatale, as we’re to see in a performance for the ages by Tang Wei.

But as the mystery unravels, you’re soon left to realize there was something more to the story than what meets the eye. For Park Chan-wook, perhaps it might sound a tad more accessible when placed next to the likes of Oldboy or Lady Vengeance, but it’s certainly just as delightful to be wrapped into the grand scheme of things. Incorporating some of the most inventive uses of smartphones on screen as well as his own dark sense of humour, Decision to Leave is a spellbinding thriller from start to finish — and another hit for the Korean auteur. Available to stream on MUBI in Canada.

1. The Fabelmans

We’re all too familiar with movies about the magic of movies. We’re even more so familiar with filmmakers revisiting their childhoods as they create semi-autobiographical takes about their own memories growing up for us to see. Yet for someone who’s been in the industry as long as Steven Spielberg has, in The Fabelmans he delivers not only one of his best films, but my personal pick for the best film of the year. I think that The Fabelmans takes how we define “movie magic” and soon shows us that there’s a great power to the movies beyond the escapism, for they show us another way of seeing the world around us: sometimes even having devastating consequences left behind in its wake.

From the moment when I saw The Fabelmans at its world premiere at TIFF this year, I’d already known that it was bound to become something special. But why I settled on thinking about this as the best film of the year is simple, because it feels less like the hagiography of childhood memories as much as it does a means for someone who’s been in the industry for longer than he’d already created some of our fondest childhood memories in the forms of Jurassic Park or the Indiana Jones films to show what more they’ve been capable of. But most of all, it also feels like the perfect calling card for any young aspiring filmmaker to go out into the world, and tell the story that they’ve always wanted to tell. For Spielberg, that feels present all over the screen, and the resulting film is nothing short of a miracle. Available on VOD in Canada.

Honorable Mentions

• The Banshees of Inisherin (available to stream on Disney+ in Canada)
• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (available to stream on Netflix)
• Benediction (available on VOD in Canada)
• The Northman (available on VOD in Canada)
• Turning Red (available to stream on Disney+)