Smaller and more compact movies stood tallest for me in the strange year of 2022. I've seen many deem this year as "minor" or "weak" for the cinema, particularly in describing a noticeably off festival season, and although I do share the sentiment, I personally prefer the descriptor of "funky" instead. While I do generally agree that 2022 will most likely go down as being of the less fruitful years of cinema of the 2020s, that doesn't necessarily collude to a lack of abundance or eclecticism, either. The highs for me didn't reach like they typically do, but the lows also didn't fall too badly simultaneously. Despite a year's long continuation of the erosion of traditional theatrical economies and worsening aftermath of mega corporate mergers, the precious light and flicker, and the artists globally fighting for their visions within it, remain excitedly vigilant as ever. Perhaps we've reached the end of an era for traditional distribution models, but this certainly is no death rattle. Organization and reform is likely imminent, and telling from history, artists will learn to adapt to make their art possible. I'm glass half-full for the future of this medium. Now, onwards to the films (and a limited series and episode of an anthology show).
10) THE ADVENTURES OF GIGI THE LAW
(Dir. Alessandro COMODIN)
A seemingly non-fictional procedural so vacantly humdrum for its first hour, that one gradually begins to slip into rote hypnosis along its pleasantly repetitive beats. Then suddenly, the onset of an interior fracturing with its subject, slyly revealing a fiction all along, and then some.
*Currently awaiting distribution
9) OUR ETERNAL SUMMER
(Dir. Emilie AUSSEL)
Notably unusual in its structure, Aussel undercuts similar coming-of-age and grief narratives through the insertion of an elongated diversion so inexplicably conceived, that one is blindsided by its constitution making up most of the film's running time. For its events centering on a commune of hippie artist types managing to poignantly reflect back upon the familiar dilemmas of nascent adulthood renders like some grand subversive act. Calls out to the universe for divine answers that it knows cannot emit beyond the limitation of human abstracts.
*Streaming on MUBI
8) FOR 13 DAYS, I BELIEVED HIM
(Dir. Kiyoshi KUROSAWA)
Leave it to Kiyoshi-san to masterfully disrupt and debilitate the aggressive machine of episodic content through his mere mercenary involvement. Produced as part of a Japanese spin-off of Modern Love, an American anthology series I'd previously never heard of based off a New York Times column featuring various op-eds on romance, sex, and dating in contemporary times, Kurosawa's commissioned "episode" (like almost all anthology structures, each entry can be treated as its own singular film) is a brilliant act of defiance so unabashedly unrepentant to his filmic universe, one is bowled over to their knees, both by its stark transgressions to its larger project and by its sheer exactitude as a genre exercise. More precisely, in how Kurosawa transitions aesthetics from start to finish, going from the viscid, Hallmark-like intro of the show's opening, establishing the familiar dynamic of two individuals feeling each other out after the first date, before gradually twisting the cupcake and kisses world of the show into one of socioeconomic disorder and supernatural anomaly. Come for the disobedience and stay for what is ostensibly a refined distillation of Kurosawa's filmography into a neat 40 minutes.
*Streaming on Amazon Prime Video
7) ANAÏS IN LOVE
(Dir. Charline BOURGEOIS-TACQUET)
Like the cinematic equivalent of a fine cut of filet mignon topped with rich garlic butter and a cabernet or malbec to compliment. Classical French romantic romp that smoothly flows in and goes down soothingly with plenty of heart & flavor. No other performance by a woman this year tops the speeding fireball that is Anaïs Demoustier in this movie.
*Streaming on Hulu. Available to rent/purchase on VOD by Magnolia Pictures.
6) DARK GLASSES
(Dir. Dario ARGENTO)
A much welcomed foreign object in the current thematic & symbolically fetishist world of contemporary horror. Argento's directorial return bears the signature hallmarks most known to him (rendered gorgeously in the digital format this time around), but is also noticeably marked with a sensitivity unforeseen in his previous works. I don't know exactly what an "anti-giallo" would be, but the sentiment behind such a term feels specially apt here. The structure and familiar iconography is present, but bizarrely secondary from a place of dramatic relevancy. The expected serial killer plot appears to function as a background device to that of the plights of its main subject, Diana, whose mounting vulnerabilities bare her as a loner whose relationships remain almost exclusively steeped in transaction (parallelling with her main occupation as a high end sex worker). A consistent undercurrent of sympathy for her permeates all throughout, and makes one consider the raised sentiment present on Argento's behalf. A projection of varying consciousness, or the onset of newly formed sensibilities late into the maestro's career?
*Streaming on Shudder and AMC+
5) IRMA VEP
(Dir. Olivier ASSAYAS)
Besides serving as a grand meta-textual exorcism-for-catharsis for Assayas, this also appears to be the project where he's finally fully embraced and wholeheartedly leaned into the sexy, mischievous, and high couture inclinations previously elicited in more reserved forms in the past. Probably even more of a filmmaking sin to his critics, but those people simply aren't fun. Vincent Macaigne & Lars Eidinger give my absolute favorite performances of the year here.
*Streaming on HBO Max
4) OUTSIDE NOISE
(Dir. Ted FENDT)
My warmth for this comes from its localized interiority away from everything one could attribute to the contemporary cinema - including potentiality for an enabled discourse to be coated around it. Fendt synthesizes his aesthetic fixations of the bygone filmmaking culture he clearly adores (think Straub-Huillet or Rohmer) and props up a mini-fiction to freely exercise within that space.
*Streaming on MUBI. Available to purchase on DVD by Shellac.
3) INTREGALDE
(Dir. Radu MUNTEAN)
Its comment on urban/rural polarity is finely observed, but even more tactfully accomplished is Muntean's gentle oscillation of expressivity, committing dramaturgical metamorphosis without any rugged display of movieness. A film of constant shifts to new directions, teasing numerous recognizable cogents of genre, before landing on poetic exactitude. The stratagems wave out in the open, then dissipate before your very eyes.
*Streaming on MUBI. Available to rent/purchase on VOD & DVD by Grasshopper Film.
2) LAKE FOREST PARK
(Dir. Kersti Jan WERDAL)
If James Benning directed Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park.
*Currently awaiting distribution
1) LIMBO
(Dir. Cheang SOI)
A wholly overdue update to noir procedurals I've long dreamt about. Pushing the systematics and material baseis of chance and fate to the forefront by regularizing the urban and architectural conditions in the overall grammar of the film. Pollution, everywhere. Abundant signs of consumption that slowly give rot to the structures and people around, and eventually, within it. Then, a shock mutant turn in the film's antagonist, projecting inhuman extremes synthesized from the murkiest of the trash depths. A film disgusted with its own contents, and therefore modulates itself successfully as a result.
*Currently awaiting distribution
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