10 Favorite New-to-Me Films of 2022

A clear preference for cinematic modernism is greatly evident in my favorite first watches in the year of 2022. Though it has come to be an aesthetic and ideological wavelength I've been most drawn to extending longer than in the past year, its notions applied to formal structuralism have appeared more pleasing and diverse to me than previously ever. Explorations and experimentations in narrative shape spanning across multiple decades and lands. In my viewing, I tried to give equal priority to the marginal and lesser seen as much as I did to the acclaimed and well canonized. For the first time since I began the blog, no filmmakers on this list will then go on to appear again on my favorite new releases list. The extension between the past and present comes to a halt this time around. Perhaps fitting for a year in which its events and containments, both personal and political, have been unlike anything I can recall living through yet. I won't further elaborate on that, but I will on the movies. Onward.

10) AN OBSESSION (1997)

(Dir. Shinji AOYAMA)

Configured with a profusion of formalistic oddities that obfuscate and obstruct the few moments of objective truth as to render the information back into elusivity and thus functionally useless, Aoyama's esoteric fixation against the machinations of his genre results in a gradual temporal metamorphosis amidst a waning structure. The police procedural destabilizes into post-modernistic affect. The further truth is searched, the more it expands and complicates its fragile meaning. A collapsing of coherence giving birth to a world anew. One senses a sort of formal kinship Aoyama shares with Kiyoshi Kurosawa in how both probe fractures in the increasingly modern and technocratic Japanese society through a genre means.

9) GETTING TO KNOW THE BIG WIDE WORLD (1978)

(Dir. Kira MURATOVA)

Tracking the birth of a new community from humble nascence to ambivalent solidarity. Graces in poetics, with a loving gaze moored by the passions of youth. A more than pleasant introduction in getting to know the big wide world of Kira Muratova.

8) CONTACT (1997)

(Dir. Robert ZEMECKIS)

Zemeckis' trademark keenness towards starry-eyed melodramatic schmaltz, most often rendered by a gush of computerized effects is most well realized here as the film's supreme outward looking optimism matches the maximal form it colors. The God-like eye of the camera that traverses and observes each scene with a childlike curiosity connotates the ever-expanding possibility of human space and percept. What do we see/know vs. what "they" see/know of us. Envisions extraterrestrial contact as a maturing passage of truths, where intergalactic entities baton-pass the wisdoms of the universe in a loving trial of connection, but only when each receiving body endures and reaches a milestone of self-contained reasoning and question first. Look up to the sky and we'll see ourselves. Trust the voyage of the universe.

7) THE BRIDEGROOM, THE ACTRESS, & THE PIMP (1968)

(Dir. Jean-Marie STRAUB & Danielle HUILLET)

A survey of cinema's narrative and aesthetic history observed through three dramatic episodes. Essentialism to classicalism to modernism. An astonishing achievement in self-reflexivity.

6) HAPPY HERE AND NOW (2002)

(Dir. Michael ALMEREYDA)

Prophetic, but not of the doomer-ist sort. One can field the pulsations of Almereyda gently cascading through his own notions of corporeality and wrestling with the difficulties of human sensation and how technology further complicates the value of one's feelings. Almereyda appears rather resistant, if not totally uninterested, in sweeping through the potential pitfalls of modern tech, but instead swept by and lost in its unintelligible dream channel. If life is so much as meaningless, then what is the innate harm in pursuing one's own esoteric fantasies for comfort and rest? Melancholic from afar, but quite the opposite upon closer inspection. Solidarity for the emotionally wounded and weary.

5) SANTA CLAUS HAS BLUE EYES (1966)

(Dir. Jean EUSTACHE)

Eustache's form is highly comparative to Rohmer's short work in this same period, but noticeably marked with a far tougher sense of damnation for the degenerate brethren. Most impressively, this inkling of potential moralizing is greatly hidden aesthetically, letting mere kinks in JPL's performance, treated with frigid cinematographic removal, gesture what needs to be understood. Where as Rohmer projected from the inside out of his leads, Eustache opts for ontological display. Internal whims signal out as pathetic behavior, as most spectators would only view such actions and scenarios as is.

4) AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962)

(Dir. Yasujiro OZU)

Pondering in the sun-baked warmth of slow moving time, gently gazing and bracing for the beyond. Simultaneously reminiscing about the past while trying to settle an ambivalence for the coming future. Where as many celebrated auteurs came to finish their careers sometime within periods firmly succeeding their generation, Ozu completed his in the afternoon of his era, just before the coming of a new day. As masterful of a final stroke by an artist as I've ever seen.

3) HAIL MARY (1985)

(Dir. Jean-Luc GODARD)

No other film has managed to wash my emotions with the assiduous grace this has. And by Godard of all people, no less. Revising the Virgin Birth as a tale of female liberation, unfurling with utmost fervency and raw beauty in its passages. I cried upon finishing, and then some more when contemplating it again the next day. The various close-ups of Myriem Roussel have imprinted themselves into my mind forever.

*The trailer Cohen Media put together for their re-release of this is possibly the best I've ever seen in concisely capturing the entire essence of a film.

2) MARGARET (2011)

(Dir. Kenneth LONERGAN)

Something of an apotheosis of written fiction and numerous production economies converging and conflicting against one another. Akin to an infinitely expanding formation, Lonergan pushes extreme thriftlessness and winds up with an object of unremitting abstract function. To ascribe this simply as an accomplished narrative film would be to come short on its major behavioral components relating to various environmental ripples promulgating all through out, in a manner that actively resists communicative clarity in favor of cryptic temporality. The first time I can recall seeing a literal, active social network with all its persons, holistically rendered on a film screen. By Lonergan's literary and theatrical impulses intransigently concentrating on each character's essence, the common limitation of narrative cinema to contextualize motive and consistency is enigmatically faded, filtering to only the most substantial of characterization. Then the ending. Which ruptures the world open momentarily before stitching it back together, and in doing so, provides a rare shard of lucidity that had been elusive up until.

1) L'ARGENT (1983)

(Dir. Robert BRESSON)

The ideal Marxist dialogue for me, as it clashes the perfect bit with Bresson's own spiritual analysis as a Catholic with nihilistic streaks. Amasses its case points for repudiation against objectivism through a succession of transactions that ultimately manufacture behavioral extremism analogous to how an individual should aim to succeed in a capitalist system in the first place. The substantial presence of law enforcement and judicial practice as morality-abiding hands of justice are rendered an absurdity in Bresson's eyes. Moralizing justifications for punishment under a severely flawed economic order is a trivial and hypocritical act. For the film's damned are those who work to survive and those who attempt to hack the system through philanthropic deeds.