Good vs. bad movies in the year of cultural collapse
Throughout 2022, it felt as if Hollywood was daring us to go to the movies. Commercial films either offended one’s intelligence or failed to entertain. When the prestige movie glut began during awards season, it was obvious that most filmmakers were interested only in their own political bias, wrongly assuming that the public would buy it.
Examining the invasion of arrogance, incompetence, and obnoxiousness (and Sight & Sound’s feminist putsch) is both the work and pleasure of criticism — especially needed as the culture tilts toward collapse.
Making a status-quo Ten Best list would be delusional, but this year’s Better-Than List sets antidote against poison, hope against despair. It challenges media hype with good cinema alternatives.
Terence Davies’s opulent Siegfried Sassoon biopic is also a powerful personal reflection on the director’s spiritual, sexual struggle. That same concept becomes so histrionic in Todd Field’s snob-culture take-down, it ridicules itself. Bravo to Jack Lowdon’s silent monologue — the performance of the year.
Father Stu > Everything Everywhere All at Once
Rosalind Ross directs Mark Wahlberg as Father Stuart Long, whose funny and moving religious conversion found real-life, real-cinema faith (Mel Gibson and Jacki Weaver complete the road-to-Damascus jubilation). But the Daniels team in Everything preferred cut-rate Buddhism over Christianity, wasting Michelle Yeoh in a chaotic, faithless, exhaustingly unfunny superheroine jamboree.
Michael Bay rescues the American ideal with cinematic brio and working-class brotherhood while Tom Cruise repurposed ’80s junk as America First desperation. Bay’s dazzling vision is superlative. Anyone who doesn’t realize that Maverick is silly is just being silly.
Marco Bellocchio’s personal family-tragedy doc reveals the depths of his artistic impulses, yet Spielberg’s indulgence of his own oft-repeated Freudian-Marxist legend (via Tony Kushner) rings totally false.
Dead for a Dollar > The Woman King
Walter Hill’s esoteric Western dramatizes modern America’s conflicting race, sex, and history myths anchored by Rachel Brosnahan’s defiant agency, the opposite of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s misandrist Afro-eccentricity.
Petit Maman > Aftersun
Celine Sciamma’s storybook fantasy intuits a child’s uncanny adult empathy, besting Charlotte Well’s unfocussed, amateurish pretend home movie. A mother-and-child reunion vs. father–daughter estrangement.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes the first great satire of the Covid-era lockdown and Big Tech enslavement. Jordan Peele looks for and curses Hollywood racism while fumbling sci-fi genre tropes.
Nitram > The Banshees of Inisherin
Justin Kurzel probes the psychic roots of an unnerving 1996 New Zealand mass murder through amazing characterizations. Martin McDonagh exploits Irish misanthropy, concocting tribal fakelore.
Raymond & Ray > Babylon
Rodrigo García’s poignant sibling drama unites a broken family and heals a broken land with compassion (not “community”) — a Borzage film for the Millennium. Damien Chazelle’s phony, overwrought history of Hollywood celebrates a broken film industry but degrades its legacy.
Caroline Vignal’s road movie follows a single woman’s love hunt through the profundity of movie romanticism (from Robert Bresson to Howard Hawks). Jerzy Skolimowski’s updated remake of a Bresson classic is strictly for nihilists.
Crimes of the Future > Decision to Leave
David Cronenberg’s analogy to decadent cinema laments society’s lost morality while Park Chan-wook’s slick, grotesque policier is decadence itself.
Xavier Giannoli’s 19th-century Balzac adaptation exposes corrupt media then and now while Maria Schrader clumsily turns New York Times reporters into petulant feminist Wooodward-Bernsteins.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, Personality Crisis: One Night Only > All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Salutes to two pop music artists (X-Ray Spex and David Johansen) are preferable to Laura Poitras’s nauseating politicization of cultural pseud-activist Nan Goldin. Enjoy the rock ’n’ roll and beware the derangement syndrome.
My Son Hunter > Armageddon Time
Robert Davi’s compassionate critique of an unignorable political scandal shames James Gray’s made-up TDS scandal. Doofus Gray’s America-hating autobiography is Fabelmans for dullards.
Great Freedom > The Eternal Daughter
Sebastian Meise recalls the lifelong radicalism of one man (Franz Rogowski), but Joanna Hogg’s metaphysical slog is just sub–Sofia Coppola navel-gazing.
Peaceful > The Whale
Emmanuelle Bercot concentrates on the wide impact of the mortality of an artist/father/son (Benoit Magimel). Darren Aronofsky’s embarrassing romp through all social-victim categories pretends spiritual uplift.
Just when we’ve lost sight of art’s purpose, actor Denis Ménochet’s vivid emotionalism breaks through Brecht’s vaunted V-Effekt and director François Ozon transforms Fassbinder’s own alienation devices. Cate Blanchett and Todd Field get tangled in their own false sophistication, a sign of bad times.
Bones and All > The Menu
Luca Guadagnino’s teen-cannibals-in-love movie says more about Gen Z apathy than Adam McKay’s latest failed greedy-bourgeois satire.