In no particular disorder:
Robe of Gems (Natalia Lopez, 2022) – Excellent, messy drama about the impact of trafficking on a close-knit rural Mexican community. It has the faintly heightened naturalism of Carlos Reygadas (unsurprising, as Lopez is his long-term partner and collaborator), and features both the greatest opening and the greatest closing shot of any film I’ve seen this year. A superb feature debut.
Godland (Hlynur Palmason, 2022) – A visually arresting, off-kilter period epic with a small debt to Lisandro Alonso’s
Jauja (which was edited by Natalia Lopez, if we’re going to make a daisy chain out of this) in its use of round-edged Academy ratio. The square format is better suited to Iceland’s vertical landscapes than traditional widescreen. Palmason’s previous feature, the thriller
A White, White Day, was perfectly fine, but it didn’t give any hint of the ambition and visual sophistication of this work, which slots handily into the new tradition of historical poetic austerity jumpstarted by
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, though the quest narrative of this film is closer to
Piccolo Corpo (or indeed,
Jauja). A large part of the film’s power is that its historic, epic trappings ultimately boil down to a rather bathetic tale of small-mindedness. Bonus points for featuring a terrific dog in a key role.
Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli, 2021) – A ripped-from-the-headlines drama about “fake news”, the decline of journalistic standards, the perils of celebrity culture and the cult of the influencer . . . adapted from Balzac and set in 19th century Paris. Like
Godland, this is a period film that relishes in authentic recreation, and both films are so accomplished in this respect that they make the modish anachronism of something like
Corsage (which, I have to admit, does that particular trick better than most films I can think of) look like a lazy gimmick. Also like
Godland, this is a compelling, engaging movie that sees no need for a sympathetic protagonist.
Full Time (Eric Gravel, 2022) – An intense action thriller about a young working mother in Paris who – through no fault of her own – has to contend with being a young working mother in Paris. And then there’s a transport strike. Nerve-fraying social realism that could have made for a dreadful Ken Loach film but is instead liberated by an open-eyed understanding of other people’s priorities and how annoying Julie’s blameless neediness can be. Stylistically, this is in the modern impressionist tradition of Denis and Assayas, and Laurie Calamy gives a brilliant performance as a bundle of nervous energy.
Muru (Tearepa Kahi, 2022) – A good New Zealand feature is big news: when you find a great one you need to stop traffic and yell it in the streets. This imaginative recreation of the 2007 Tuhoe raids is a breathless action film, thorny thought piece, and bizarro biopic (with Tame Iti playing his younger self) all at once, and it navigates multiple changes of mood swiftly and confidently, with room for Tearepa’s generous and gentle comic sense amidst the chaos and rage. The film is – perfectly naturally – almost entirely in te reo Maori, and the performances are uniformly solid to great, with Cliff Curtis hitting yet another career highlight in the lead role.
Playground (Laura Wandel, 2021) – Another very accomplished first film, this time in the Dardennes mould, featuring extremely close observation of extremely young protagonists. As Laura gets over her traumatic first day at school, she slowly comes to the realization that her older brother is being bullied. We’re firmly within Laura’s point-of-view, where bullying is monstrous and inexplicable and the ‘rules’ surrounding it are unknown to her. The kids’ ongoing struggle is conveyed in intense and visceral strokes.
Wheel of Fortune & Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchil, 2021) – I actually preferred this to
Drive My Car (which is kind of like a Hamaguchi film with a big Botox injection of mainstream arthouse drama). Here, his trademark theme of performance is depicted as a regular life skill – a way of dealing with or manipulating other people – rather than a capital-M metaphor, and he proves that he’s just as adept and acute with concise, short-form two-handers as he is with his typical sprawl.
Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup, 2022) – A horror movie that announces its genre early on by playing apocalyptically foreboding music over random scenes (a sunlit Tuscan holiday villa, for instance), but then withholding and withholding the actual horror as it dabbles in culture-clash cringe comedy for another hour or so. The disjunction gets funnier and the tension tenser the longer it’s stretched out, and by the time the other shoe drops you have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen, but
it’s much nastier than you suspect – which is always a nice surprise
Like a lot of horror movies, the plot only really works because certain characters behave stupidly or inexplicably at key points, or stuff just happens for no good reason.
For instance, when the family escape, if Dad had just told Mum why they were escaping, they wouldn’t have been recaptured; and I still can’t understand why the door to the Shed of Doom was left open so Dad could discover The Horrible Truth.
s (Ruben Ostlund, 2022) – Did somebody say Scandinavian cringe comedy? This is yet another Ostlund film predicated on gender and class roles, but he’s operating in a more transparently farcical arena this time. No, he’s not making any fresh or penetrating analyses of the class struggle, but that’s not what this film is about. It’s a comedy, and its job is to be funny.* If you missed that point, then I guess you slept through the climactic Captain’s Dinner set piece where a pair of blind drunk characters trade Marxist and anti-Marxist aphorisms. And how the hell did you manage to sleep through the Captain’s Dinner?
* It is sickeningly funny.
Incredible But True (Quentin Dupieux, 2022) – Of the two new Dupieux films I’ve seen this year,
Smoking Causes Coughing probably has the more immediate hook, but this is the bonkers, mind-stretching keeper. The theme is the perennial search for the fountain of youth, wildly updated, and clearly indebted to Bunuel (at the end of the film Dupieux shows his hand and leads me to suspect that this entire film might be reverse-engineered from a particular shot in a particular film.) The premise of the film is a doozy, and because the trailer (and the film, for about ten minutes) is coy about it I’ll spoiler it:
a couple buy a house that has a portal in the basement. When you climb down into it, you emerge through a hole in the ceiling at the top of the house twelve hours later. But you’re three days younger.
If you don’t want to see what Dupieux does with that idea, I pity you. The film’s secondary plot is much more obvious and almost seems like it was added to push this (barely) up to feature length.
Other recommendations:
Alcarras (Carla Simon, 2022) – Simon broadens her palette after her brilliant debut
Summer 1993, but doesn’t miss a beat. This is another beautifully observed rural drama with a superb eye for honest child performances.
Close (Lukas Dhont, 2022) – A queer teen drama where it doesn’t even matter whether or not the teens are actually queer. More awesome performances from young actors.
Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland, 2022) – Remember when Peter Greenaway films were actually fun? This is a throwback to that almost forgotten time, But I get the sense that actors are having a much better time playing with Strickland.
The Velvet Queen (Marie Amiguet / Vincent Munier, 2021) – Gorgeous wildlife documentary with uncommon patience and which makes great play with scale.
A Story for 2 Trumpets (Amandine Meyer, 2022) – Gorgeous metamorphic animated short that plays like the lovechild of Suzan Pitt and Windsor McCay.
Later additions:
I might as well just start mentioning other noteworthy new films I see this year and rejig or not the final list in December:
The Tsugua Diaries (Miguel Gomes / Maureen Fazendeiro, 2021) - Destined to become a key curio in the micro-genre of Covid lockdown films, this delightful whatsit is like a playful mash-up of
Du cote d'Orouet and
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, but backwards. If I explained what it was about, it would sound a lot like Jasmin Lopez's Ruizian masterpiece
If I Were the Winter Itself, but in four other creative hands this is completely different in tone and affect.
Letter to My Mother for My Son (Carla Simon, 2022) - A very personal film that combines home movie footage with magic realist dream drama to create a moving coda to her debut feature
Summer 1993 (assuming you're aware of that film's autobiographical basis.) It's quite a stylistic leap for Simon and bodes well for her future explorations.