For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the neorealist Italian poverty drama The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).
0:00 Welcome
03:58 Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022) 08:22 Queen of Versailles Reigns Again 15:52 Blue Lagoon: The Awakening (2012) 19:10 Rosaline (2022) 22:40 Blue Hawaii (1961) 26:40 M3GAN (2023) 33:50 The Woman in Black (2012) 37:59 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
I never engaged much with the Harry Potter movies as they rolled out throughout the aughts, but from what I remember glimpsing in Dear Reader, Wizard People, Daniel Radcliffe was not an especially talented child actor. I couldn’t hear Radcliffe’s pipsqueak line-readings over the drunken growls of Brad Neely’s alternate narration track, but I distinctly remember him having a dazed, deer-in-headlights look in Wizard People that suggested even he didn’t know why he was helming the blockbuster franchise. It’s incredible, then, that Radcliffe was able to turn that early windfall into what’s now a decades-running acting career instead of just a passive, eternal source of royalty checks. What’s even more incredible is just how weird he’s committed to making that career. Radcliffe continually chooses projects where he gets to play absolute freaks: Dr. Frankenstein’s groveling hunchback lab assistant (and possible boyfriend), a computer nerd with guns surgically bolted to his hands, a farting corpse with a magical boner, any role he can land to distance himself from his association with Harry Potter – efforts I am cruelly undermining here. Much like the kids who headlined the Twilight series, Radcliffe has put his blockbuster blood money to great use in the years since he broke free. Only, while RPat & KStew are chasing high-brow critical prestige, Radcliffe is out there determined to be seen as the biggest weirdo to grace the screen since Nic Cage screeched about the bees. It’s been a truly magical transformation.
Radcliffe’s determination to let his freak flag fly recently reached its highest fever pitch in the Funny or Die sketch turned Roku Channel Original Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Weird is a mock biopic that sensationalizes the notoriously squeaky-clean polka musician Weird Al’s life to match the more traditional rock ‘n roll hedonism of his MTV-era colleagues, complete with Dr. Demento scouting talent at the local biker bar and Al’s father forbidding him to play “the devil’s squeezebox.” It’s a single-joke premise that might feel a little redundant for anyone who’s already seen similar music industry parodies like Walk Hard & Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, but its single joke is still—importantly—very funny. Weird is the kind of comedy nerd’s comedy where every character introduction has you muttering “Oh, that’s good casting” under your breath. It’s Radcliffe’s casting that really makes the film special, though. As much as the purpose of Weird is to contextualize Al Yankovic as an essential American pop culture icon—alongside fellow greats like Madonna, Elvira, Pee-wee, and Divine—it also completes the mission of contextualizing Daniel Radcliffe as a true weirdo himself (although a Brit). Radcliffe commits to the bit with full fervor, playing the raw, scuzzy, self-destructive sexuality of Weird Al as if he were starring in an Iggy Pop biopic instead, strengthening the over-the-top absurdism of the film’s only joke by playing it with a straight face unseen in the genre since Leslie Nielsen passed. Radcliffe has played much weirder characters than Al in the past—the titular Swiss Army Man chief among them—but I’m not sure he’s ever done so more convincingly.
Things weren’t always this way. A decade before The Al Yankovic Story, Radcliffe’s career appeared to be taking a much more pedestrian leading-man path, starting with the 2012 adaptation of The Woman in Black. A comeback production for the legendary Gothic horror studio Hammer, The Woman in Black is super scary, both as a traditional ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Radcliffe’s potential career as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire. Both Hammer and Radcliffe had a lot to prove in the otherwise low-stakes, low-profile production, and only Hammer scored high in that gamble. In its story of a vengeful ghost who targets rural village children, Hammer was able to prove they were ready to produce well-balanced, traditionalist ghost stories again – offering a mix of shameless jump scares and long stretches of atmospheric quiet where all of the spookery lingers in backgrounds, mirrors, and mist. It’s not an especially shocking nor inventive horror film, but it is an efficient & effective one, where every adaptive choice helps amplify its eerie scares . . . except for Radcliffe’s casting as the lead. Much like in the early Harry Potter films, Radcliffe is just kinda there. He’d be easily replaceable as the film’s lead if it weren’t for his box-office draw as a recognizable name on the poster, which would only lead to diminishing returns if his career continued down that path (especially as the Harry Potter franchise sunk further into the toxic muck of TERFdom). The Woman in Black was marketed as Radcliffe’s debut as a serious adult actor, a legitimate talent with real staying power beyond the franchise that made him famous as a tyke. Instead, he comes across as just some guy, totally replaceable by any number of BBC repertory players.
The curious thing here is that The Woman in Black is a much better movie than Weird; it’s just not a better Daniel Radcliffe Movie. I would much rather live in a world where Radcliffe is a walking, talking Nic Cagian meme than one where he’s a competent but unnoticeable leading man. Looking back at the ten years between The Woman in Black and Weird, it appears that Radcliffe also wants to live in that world. He’s a genuine weirdo, and I think that’s beautiful.
Hello, all; it’s that time of year again! As always, I must begin with my apologia and my explanations. First, as I’ve said before, I personally feel like any movie released during the last two weeks of December should technically be counted for the year following. I’m not a person who can be counted on to go and see something with a December 29th release date in time to compose my end of the year list (which I’m doing right now on only the second day of 2023); it’s an arbitrary rule, but it is mine. Some of you out there might think that I’m already laying the groundwork to includeHot Twink Spider-Man: Too Many Spider-Twinks on this list because of its December 27th, 2021 release date, but that leads me to my second introductory note for the year. Although this may surprise many long-term readers, there are no comic book movies on this list. To tell you the truth, the MCU ended for me a couple of years ago withEndgame. That movie served to conclude all of the things that I had come to care about within that franchise and put a nice little cap on it. I’ll still stick around for Spider-Men and occasionally check out one of the shows if it piques my interest (in this house we watch anything with Tatiana Maslany in it), but I can hardly work myself up to care about the big flicks anymore. I didn’t even see the new Thor, and the only MCU movie I did see was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was 95% because of Sam Raimi directing and 5% Patrick Stewart cameo, which leaves 0% in the tank for the ongoing Marvel long term plan. I did also see The Batman, which would have been a great crime thriller were it not for the fact that it’s a Batman movie, and also Morbius because I hate myself. Finally, although a year is a long time, it’s still not enough to see everything. Brandon’s list just went up and there were nearly a dozen movies on it that I had never even heard of, but the assignment is due and it’s time to turn in what I’ve got even if I didn’t finish all of the homework. For what it’s worth, based on synopsis and marketing material alone, I think the films most likely to appear on this list if only there were world enough and time were After Yang and Triangle of Sadness.
Honorable Mentions
The House– The first two of the three segments that comprise this anthology are phenomenal, and either one of them could have ended up in the top three of this list if they were features. The third short, however, simply disrupted my viewing experience in a way that I’ve still not managed to get over. You see, the third short is too happy, or at the very least, too optimistic. The most important thing that a film can do is create an emotional rapport with you, and The House does this with the opening segment about a man whose obsession with a fine house draws him into a Faustian bargain that becomes a nightmare for his child, and that spirit of dread and discomfort plays out through the second segment, which is about a contractor who is unable to flip the house into which he has invested everything, and his inability to drive out parasites and pests. The third segment simply changes the feel of the movie in a way that moves it out of the top tier of consideration for me, as much as I like two initial vignettes.
Licorice Pizza– I loved this one, and it’s funny to me that I can’t technically put it on this list, since I saw it in theaters as late as March (a full two months after seeing 5cream at the drive-in). But it technically had its wide release in November of 2021, so I can’t even grandfather it in with my arbitrary two-week rule noted above. Everything about this movie felt like magic to me, like a story of a 1970s Pippi Longstocking who seems to be able to do just about anything he wants through the power of sheer gumption and never questioning himself, and the way that maturity looks differently on different people.
Hatching – Leaving this one here because although I really did love it, I fought with myself about whether number 12 below should count as a movie or only be considered for Honorable Mention status, and the truth is that the experience that made it onto the list below just deserves it more. But if it weren’t for that, Hatching would have made it to the number 15 spot.
Without further ado:
15. Bros – I can’t say much more about it than I already did; read my review here.
14. Do Revenge – Hitchcock by way of Heathers, a twisty bubblegum potboiler that’s more fun than it has any right to be. Read my review here.
13. Don’t Worry Darling – I’ve already done my apologia for why this one was better than anyone gave it credit for and was more than the sum of its inspirations, and I stand by them. Check it out here.
12. Everything is Terrible: Kidz Klub – Everything is Terrible is one of the few social media outlets that is run by people you can truly respect. They create new films out of hundreds of old VHS tapes, and you can hear more about one of their earlier ventures on the Lagniappe episode found here, in which we discussed their film The Great Satan. Kidz Klub likewise cribs largely from propaganda distributed in churches as well as secular material, with this film being about a child asking “Goddad” about life, the universe, and everything. I know EIT content is normally more digestible for the public in web-hosted chunks, but this one is well worth tracking down if you don’t get headaches from their material.
11. Neptune Frost – An Afrofuturist fable about colonialism, strip-mining, and the concept of a unified people in the form of a musical, this movie is gorgeous, even if it will probably take more than one viewing to begin parsing together a thorough understanding of what its plot is. The message is clearer than the narrative, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Listen to us discuss it on the Lagniappe episode here.
10. 5creamaka Scream aka Scream 5 – The latest feature in my personal favorite horror series, this one suffers from too little Sidney Prescott, but it’s still worth watching. Read my review here.
9. Barbarian – Identified by Alli as the Castle Freak of AirBnBs, Barbarian is about men and their barbarity, and all of the ways both subtle and obvious they walk through the world. A harrowing movie about the anxieties of existing as a person who is historically disenfranchised within a world controlled by others which also contains a scene in which Justin Long struggles hilariously with a tape measure. Read my review here.
8. Prey – The colonial era Predator prequel that everyone’s dad probably thought was really cool until they went to their favorite YouTube channel that’s focused around The Discourse and learned that they were supposed to hate it because the main character is a Mary Sue and this new film is woke SJW bullshit. You know, unlike the first film in this series, which they somehow believe was an apolitical move about Vietnam. Listen to us discuss this one on the Lagniappe episode here.
7. Glass Onion – A worthy sequel to Knives Out. It’s absurd to call a film so tightly constructed “sloppy,” but there is something that’s a little less sharp and fine-tuned about this one than its predecessor, but some of the new zaniness therein helps balance this one out. Read my review here.
6. Fire Island – It is a truth universally acknowledged that most romcoms derive the core basics of their plots from Jane Austen novels, even though they rarely wear their inspiration on their sleeve so openly and honestly as Fire Island does. Joel Kim Booster is our Elizabeth Bennett, who initially has friction with the seemingly humorous but ultimately passionate Will, who stands in for Mr. Darcy. It could just be recency bias that’s making me rank this one so high, but I watched the whole thing with rapt attention and a big smile on my face, and sometimes, that’s really all you need. Read my review here.
5. Men – Possibly a spicy take here, but I loved Men when I saw it and even though I know that there was discourse, it passed me by completely and I still love this as much as I did when I first saw it. You can read Brandon’s review here.
4. Three Thousand Years of Longing – An absolute delight of a movie. A stodgy academic meets a handsome djinn and, determined to use her wish wisely, listens to the stories of the djinn’s life and the loves he has has lost along the way. A love story that crosses time and distance in a truly magnificent and magical way. You can read Brandon’s review here.
3. Nope – Another absolute home run for modern horror maestro Jordan Peele. After examining the horror of suburbia and neoliberalism in Get Out and the horror of the self and manifest destiny in Us, Nope is about a brother and sister whose experiences with extra terrestrial life require them to stop trying to outsmart the entity which has taken up residence near their ranch, but to realize that it’s impossible to reason with an intelligence so alien. Read my review here.
2. Everything Everywhere All At Once – This has easily been the most talked-about movie of the year, so what more do you need to hear from me about it? I love Michelle Yeoh, and although she’s no stranger to the complex role, it was nice to get to see her play a character who considered themselves to be a good person but whose actions are often selfish at best. So often, a film that is about intergenerational trauma and poor parental relationships comes across as schmaltzy and reductive, but this one is complex in ways that you can’t predict or imagine. You’ll find yourself empathizing with a rock more than you ever have before. You can read Brandon’s review here.
1. Marcel the Shellwith Shoes On– I fell in love with Marcel the moment I saw a trailer for this movie. I love anything that gets down to the eye level of a little being and sees the world from their perspective. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the Borrowers books, the half-remembered TV show The Littles, and even Ant-Man: it’s an immediate win for me. Marcel has more than that alone going for it, though, with an earnest depiction of a relationship between a child and his grandmother that found me where I live and pressed on my emotion button. I laughed and then I cried and then I laughed some more. Long live Marcel the Shell with Shoes on.
For the past couple months, my inboxes (both physical and virtual) have been overflowing with FYC Awards Screeners. Within the two-hour span of pressing play on a movie and checking my phone during its end credits, two or three more titles would appear, fighting their way into my eyeballs. It was an unrelenting flood of #prestigecontent presented in low-res, watermarked glory, and I crammed in as many titles I could before voting on the SEFCA’s Best of the Year list and publishing my own personal favs. Now that the ritual is over and my backlog of screeners is cleared, I’m feeling a lot less pressure to properly review everything I watched during my FYC marathon. For the past month, I’ve been regularly #prestigeposting about the movies I watched during that busy stretch, but I’m ready to move on to the much more exciting moviewatching ritual of January Dumping Season. I’ve got to get these 2022 FYC leftovers out of the way before I review the most important cinematic release of 2023: the killer-doll gimmick horror M3GAN.
So, here are a few quick mini-reviews of the 2022 awards contenders I watched for Best of the Year consideration, but never found the time to write about before those lists were carved in stone.
Corsage (2022)
The playfully anachronistic costume drama Corsage was the biggest no-brainer selection from my screener pile, since I’m generally a huge fan of subversive works that shake up the genre with modern flippancy & vulgarity: Marie Antoinette, Emma., The Favourite,The Great, etc. Only, I’m not sure that director Marie Kreutzer shares my love for those defiantly lewd period pieces. Corsage modernizes Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s final years by framing her as a feminist icon, wagging her tongue & middle finger in mockery of The Patriarchy while orchestral arrangements of pop songs like “A Tears Go By” lilt on the soundtrack. However, Kreutzer pursues a much more restrained, melancholy approach to the pop-music costume drama than you’ll find in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, aiming more for deep exhaustion with the world than transgressive, bratty sass. Corsage evokes the awkward, sad, oppressive atmosphere of films like Spencer or Jackie instead, with even the modern pop soundtrack from French chanteuse Camile striking a haunted, spooky tone instead of an out-of-time party atmosphere.
That muted, somber tone limits how surprising & transgressive Corsage feels from scene to scene, so it’s most commendable as a Vicky Krieps acting showcase, the scale of which hasn’t been seen since Phantom Thread. Elisabeth died in her forties, obsessed with maintaining her youthful beauty as a source of political power but frustrated to be living a royal life where “your only duty is having your hair braided.” The movie skips over the more dramatic Wikipedia bullet points of her biography—including her assassination—and instead makes a meal out of watching Krieps squeeze into increasingly tight corsets, smoke countless cigarettes, and seethe on windowsills. Its boldest risks are taken in her costuming, outfitting her with striking black veils, sea captain tattoos, costume shop mustaches, and other novelty adornments that would’ve been a shock to 19th Century onlookers. In a lot of ways, it feels stuck between flippancy & solemnity, never finding a satisfying balance between those two impulses, but it’s still worth a look for Krieps’s costumes & performance.
The Whale (2022)
I can at least get behind Best Acting nominations for Krieps in Corsage more than I can support them for Brendan Fraser in The Whale. His casting is just about the only thing that works in Darren Aronofsky’s latest allegorical feel-badder, in which Fraser plays a 600-pound gay man on a culinary suicide mission. Fraser has kind, sympathetic eyes, which beam blinding, unearned pathos from under his cumbersome prosthetic fat suit. The only problem is that every choice outside that casting is cruel, miserable, disposable nonsense. Everything about this stilted stage play adaptation rings hollow & artificial, directly in opposition to the real-world authenticity of the last time Aronofsky told its father-seeking-redemption-before-suicide story in The Wrestler. Worse, it gawks at Fraser’s synthetic fat body as an alien grotesquerie, cranking up the sounds of his eating, gasping, and wheezing on the soundtrack so you never forget to be disgusted by what he’s done to himself. You’re supposed to feel immense sympathy when bullies enter the dying man’s apartment to hurl insults at the poor, obese creature, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the movie itself shares their villainous disgust.
I love a volatile auteur who consistently swings for the fences, but sometimes that means they follow up one of their career-best films with their absolutely worst. mother! felt like an exciting direction for Aronofsky’s absurdly literal allegories, lashing out in broad, expressionist strokes instead of tethering himself to the grim restrictions of reality. In that context, The Whale is a regressive act, confining all of its allegorical value in conversational references to Moby Dick & The Book of Jonah while Fraser’s pathetic junk-food suicide plays out onscreen in grounded, morbidly realistic terms (until its idiotic concluding seconds, at least). For some reason, Sarah Polley’s emotionally devastating Women Talking is getting a lot of pushback this awards season for being stagebound & visually ugly, while this phony misery piece is shot in even duller greys, browns, and yellows in a cheap-o digi 4:3 Zoom window frame. It’s incredible that it was adapted from a stage play and not written in a rush to produce something COVID-filmable, since most of its faux-philosophical dialogue reads as [insert something profound here] placeholders.
We’re all happy to see Fraser back onscreen, and he really does have effectively pathetic puppy dog eyes, but his presence is totally wasted here, not to mention physically obscured.
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
In contrast, I despised Martin McDonagh’s last film—Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri—but adored his latest darkly comic awards seeker. The Banshees of Inisherin is similar to The Whale in its stage-play approach to dialogue, its pronounced adherence to allegory, and its morbid fascination with destruction of the human body. It’s just more successful by every metric. I was even heartened that the SEFCA poll for the Best Movies of 2022—the reason I received these screeners in the first place—honored Colin Farrell’s performance in Banshees over Fraser’s in The Whale, demoting that Oscar front-runner to Farrell’s runner-up. Fraser may have sympathetic eyes, but Farrell has the world’s most flexible, expressive eyebrows, and they’re put to incredible use in his latest collaboration with McDonagh.
The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t an especially impressive looking movie; its relatively low-stakes story about an adult friendship on the rocks is rarely emotionally devastating; its metaphorical echoes of the Irish Civil War are spelled out as plainly & flatly as anything in The Whale. Truth be told, it’s my favorite movie on this list simply because it is very, very funny. Colin Farrell’s performance as a nice, milquetoast man who is devastated to discover that his lifelong bestie (Brendan Gleeson) finds him to be a bore and wants nothing more to do with him is consistently hilarious & endearing. As Gleason holds himself hostage, mutilating his fiddle-playing hand every time Farrell crosses the treaty line to bore him with more small talk, Farrell’s sweetheart himbo confusion with why they’re spatting in the first place reaches some sublimely funny character work. I’m going to assume it’s a distinctly Irish sense of humor, too, since McDonagh’s dialogue hits the exact same joke-telling cadence as the recently concluded sitcom Derry Girls, just now with more allegorey.
Banshees did not register among my favorite movies of the year, but it consistently made me laugh, while Corsage occasionally had me checking my watch and The Whale made me roll my eyes so hard they’re still stuck at the top of my skull.
1. Neptune Frost – A post-gender Afrofuturist musical that triangulates unlikely holy ground betweenBlack Orpheus,Bacurau, and Hackers. At its best, cinema is honest artifice. At its best, cinema is openly provocative & political; it’s a shared dream; it’s poetry. This is cinema at its best.
2. Inu-Oh – An anime fable about the glories & follies of rock n’ roll fame, illustrating how it can only elevate the marginalized so high before fascists at the top take notice and shut them down. Personally, it’s the best genderfucked feudal Japan glam rock opera I’ve ever seen, but I can’t speak for everyone.
3. Mad God – Both a for-its-own-sake immersion in scatological mayhem & an oddly touching reflection on the creative process, the indifference of time, and the cruelty of everything. It’s meticulously designed to either delight or irritate, so count me among the awed freaks who never wanted this stop-motion nightmare to end.
4. Everything Everywhere All at Once – We have apparently slipped into an alternate timeline where Michel Gondry directed The Matrix. It’s nice here (as long as you don’t engage with the fanatics).
5. RRR – An anti-colonialist action epic about the power of friendship (and the power of bullets, and the power of wolves, and the power of grenades, and the power of tigers, and the power of dynamite, and the power of bears, oh my). A real skull-cracker of a good time.
6. Jackass Forever – Rewatching the first Jackass movie recently had me thinking about the series as a Reality TV update to Pink Flamingos, but I don’t know that Pink Flamingos ever reached this wide or otherwise unadventurous of an audience. I also don’t know that I’ve ever found a John Waters film to be this heartfelt & sentimental. For all of the Jackass series’ boneheaded commitment to gross-out gags, it’s also now a beautiful decades-long story about friendship (a friendship that just happens to be illustrated with feces & genital mutilation).
7. Deadstream– A found footage horror comedy about an obnoxious social media influencer getting his cosmic comeuppance while livestreaming his overnight tour of a haunted house. It’s a constantly surprising delight, getting huge laughs out of supernaturally torturing a YouTuber smartass with a sub-Ryan Reynolds sense of humor. It effectively does for The Blair Witch Project what Host did for Unfriended, borrowing its basic outline to stage a chaotic assemblage of over-the-top, technically impressive scare gags.
8. Please Baby Please – Ponders the question “What is a man, anyway?” through lofty academic discussions of how masculinity is socially engineered and through kinky 1950s kitsch. Andrea Riseborough gives THE performance of the year, approximating what it would be like if an especially rabid Jerri Blank had a Marlon Brando drag-king impersonation act. Queer menace, artifice, and excellence on a community theatre budget.
9. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)– A sci-fi acid Western that languidly fills the frame with the most mesmerizing, glitter-slathered nightmare imagery I saw all year. Its lesbian orgy planet that cowers in fear of a demonic, almighty Kate Bush reads like someone fed “James Bidgood’s Dune movie” into one of those AI art generators, and the results are intoxicating.
10. Strawberry Mansion – Look, I grew up in a time when Michel Gondry was a golden god to artsy teens everywhere and not a aughts-era fad everyone seems embarrassed to admit they were super into. So, of course I’m happy to see his arts & crafts aesthetic is back in vogue and prominently represented in this twee fantasy epic about dream-hopping lovers dodging pop-up ads in a near-future dystopia. Maybe I should be rolling my eyes at its analog whimsy but I’m happy to swoon instead.
11. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On – Expected to enjoy this no matter what, since I’m in the exact Millennial target demographic that would be nostalgic for the titular stop-motion cutie’s original YouTube clips. Even so, I was super impressed by it, both as a rapidfire joke delivery system (where every punchline is “so small!”) and as an emotional defibrillator, shocking me back into the great wide world of communal joy after a few years of intense isolation.
12. Funny Pages – Proudly wears its 2000s indie nostalgia as a grimy badge of dishonor, questioning why Ghost World and The Safdies can’t share the same marquee. You might want to question where its alt-comics slackerdom fits in the modern world, but you also can’t deny that it’s nice to see Real People on the screen again. I say that with full sincerity and full awareness that it makes me sound like the exact kind of dipshit suburbanite poser the movie is brutally satirizing.
13. Flux Gourmet – Cronenberg wasn’t the only fetishist director who reconfigured his early works into a new fantasy world overrun by grotesque performance art last year. Crimes of the Future found an unlikely sister film in Peter Strickland’s latest, which brings the vague outline of Berberian Sound Studio up to speed with the more free-flowing absurdism the pervert auteur has achieved in the years since. The result is not quite as silly as In Fabric nor as sensual as The Duke of Burgundy, but it hits a nice sweet spot in-between.
14. Lux Æterna – In which Gaspar Noé deploys the same disorienting split screen technique he plays with in the much more subdued Vortex to actively attempt to melt his audience’s minds. The most authentically “psychotronic” movie I’ve seen in a while, one that balances out its seething hatred of backstage film set squabbling with a love for witchcraft, strobe lights, leather jackets, and wearing sunglasses indoors. A truly stunning experience; consult your doctor before subjecting your brain.
15. Belle– Pretends to be a sci-fi anime update of Beauty and the Beast, but it’s more a virtual reality teen fantasy drama about the merits & limitations of seeking community online. Weird coincidence that both this & Inu-oh happen to feature whale-themed light shows in their stadium concert fantasy sequences, as if they’re both anime illustrations of The Decemberists performing “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”.
16. We Met in Virtual Reality – Billed as “the first feature-length documentary filmed entirely in VR,” this is basically Belle except for “real” and without all those pesky trips back to the physical world. Most remarkable as a bizarre descent into the niche nerd-culture subdungeons that the internet was built for but rarely makes room for anymore. Happy to see that documented before the Metaverse turns it all into a digital Target.
17. EO– Jerzy Skolimowski’s noble donkey tale only occasionally plays like a colorized TV edit of Au Hasard Balthasar. More often, it takes wild detours into an energetic, dreamlike approximation of what it might look like if Gaspar Noé directed Homeward Bound. It’s incredible that a film this vibrant & playful was made by a long-respected octogenarian, not a fresh-outta-film-school prankster with something to prove.
18. You Won’t Be Alone – A post-VVitch coming-of-age folktale about shapeshifting, bodyhopping witchcraft. If it’s to be dealt with as a horror film, it’s Imposter Syndrome Horror (or maybe just a nightmare scenario where Freddy Krueger is your adoptive mother). Mostly, though, it’s a supernatural drama about all the various ways life can be miserable unless you luck into a well-nurtured youth.
19. Hatching – A great entry in the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, along with titles like Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, Teeth, and Carrie. Stands out in that crowd by adding an extra layer about mothers living vicariously through their daughters in unhealthy ways. Also achieves a lot on what appears to be a limited budget, leaning into its cheapness to create the kind of plastic world you’d expect to find in a music box.
20. Men– There’s been a lot of pushback against the idea that A24 has a house style, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve guessed the studio that produced this before I would’ve guessed the director. Alex Garland is usually reliable for chilly sci-fi, not atmospheric folk horror with a blatant 1:1 metaphor driving all of its grotesque imagery. Kind of a useless distinction, though, since I’m a fan of both. If it weren’t for the tabloidification of Don’t Worry Darling, this would easily be the most over-complained about movie of 2022.
One of the most common themes among established big-name directors this awards season is the memoir film, with directors like James Gray (Armageddon Time), Sam Mendes (Empire of Light), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Bardo) aiming to make career-defining magnum opuses out of dramatic reenactments & distortions of personal memories. Only Steven Spielberg appears to have emerged from that 2022 memoir scrum victorious. The Fabelmans makes a fable out of Spielberg’s youth, tracking his fascination with The Power of Cinema from his first trip to the theater (to see the circus-themed studio epic The Greatest Show on Earth) to his teenage use of filmmaking as a therapy tool throughout his parents’ divorce. It’s being heralded as one of the best movies of the year, if not the best of Spielberg’s career . . . and I don’t understand that praise in the slightest. If anything, I’m terrified to contract whatever subvariant of Film Twitter Brain Rot makes critics believe The Fabelmans is “late-style” Movie Magic but Cinema Paradiso is cornball schmaltz. To his credit, Spielberg ensures that his memoir movie isn’t entirely comprised of shots of projectors flickering behind awed audiences modeling period costumes (although there is plenty of that ready-made imagery to go around); the movie is densely packed with detailed personal memories and messy interpersonal conflicts that are supposed to distinguish it from the more unembarrassed schmaltz of Paradiso. And yet, the whole thing rings generic & phony, barely a step above the “aww shucks” Boomer nostalgia of A Christmas Story – if you’re not as reverent of Spielberg’s prominence in the cinema canon as the director is himself. And it turns out plenty of people are, as evidenced by the film’s success over its fellow movie memoirs.
The most frustrating thing about The Fabelmans is there is a genuinely compelling, emotionally thorny drama at its core. Through his geeky onscreen avatar Sammy Fabelman, Spielberg time travels back to a pivotal moment in his relationship with his mother (played by Michelle Williams in Judy Garland meltdown mode, sporting a lime cat haircut). Beyond the broad caricatures of his mother as a right-brained free spirit—explaining the magic & poetry of movies to him after that fateful Greatest Show on Earth screening—and his father as a practical left-brained engineer—explaining the mechanics of movies as a technological illusion—the movie pinpoints their separation as a painful, epiphanic moment when Spielberg first saw his parents as real, flawed people, not just faceless pillars of authority & love. It’s too bad that brain-breaking, cinema-rattling epiphany is buried under so much self-mythology about Spielberg’s early stirrings as an amateur filmmaker. Instead of digging into the discomfort & detail of his changing relationship with his parents, the movie runs itself ragged trying to collect as many origin stories for the greatest hits of Spielberg Tropes as it can in 151 minutes. We see the kids-on-bikes nostalgia of his early career-defining genre films foretold by his afternoon rides with his childhood boy scout troupe; we see a D.I.Y. trial run for his prestigious war epic Saving Private Ryan met with rapturous applause as the greatest backyard movie of all time; and, in the godawful concluding scene, we see him take direct inspiration from his boyhood hero John Ford, for no reason in particular. The emotional core that supposedly separates The Fabelmans from sentimental schmaltz like Cinema Paradiso (a film I far prefer, at least for its clarity in intent) is buried under so much phony self-mythology that it has no room to resonate with any heft.
I was much more impressed with the smaller, more intimate memoir distortions of The Eternal Daughter that joined this year’s “autofiction” pile-up, if not only for being more direct & streamlined in its mother-child drama of discomforts. Joanna Hogg’s latest is much less ostentatious than Spielberg’s by default, filmed on an independent budget under COVID-19 lockdowns instead of working with the kind of extravagant studio funds that are afforded to the world’s most famous director. Hogg finds plenty of room for layered artifice in her small-cast drama, though, even while never losing sight of the mother-daughter tension at its core. The Eternal Daughter is a slippery little supernatural mystery film that defies the tidiest boxes you want to file it away in. It’s a ghost story about memory, not ghosts. It’s directly connected to Hogg’s autobiographical Souvenir saga, but it works perfectly fine on its own, like a long-running series’ standalone, spooky Christmas special. Tilda Swinton plays a mother-daughter duo in a dual role, but neither of performance is overly affected, and the back-and-forth bickering between them is more subtly devastating than cute. In The Souvenir Parts I & II, Swinton’s real-life daughter (and Hogg’s real-life goddaughter) Honor Swinton Byrne played Hogg’s Sammy Fabelman avatar, while Swinton played her fictional mother onscreen. In The Eternal Daughter, Swinton plays both roles, aged decades into the future, as they share an especially dour vacation in an empty hotel on the ghostly moors of Wales. None of that Russian nesting-doll artifice really matters, though. Neither does the ghost story framing of its drama. All that matters is the way Hogg wrestles with the passive aggressive tensions of her mostly healthy relationship with her mother, and how a child seeing their parent’s personality & behavior reflected in themselves can be both wonderful & horrific, often simultaneously.
In the emotional climax of The Eternal Daughter, both versions of Swinton bicker about what time they should eat a celebratory birthday dinner. That sounds like a minor frustration, but it’s far more hilarious and heartbreaking than any of the life-altering divorce drama from Spielberg’s actual relived childhood in The Fabelmans. Listening to a mother-daughter duo volley “What do you think?” & “I’m not going to eat if you don’t” back and forth in an endless shot, reverse-shot nightmare feels painfully, relatably true to how passive aggressive, self-conflicted parental relationships play out in real life – even though you’re watching two Tilda Swintons bicker in a haunted hotel. Somehow, Spielberg is staging dramatic reenactments of complex parental & marital betrayals that actually did happen in real life, and it all feels thuddingly false, inauthentic. As a pair, both The Fabelmans and The Eternal Daughter find their filmmakers looking back on personal, familial memories and struggling with how the good feelings of the past are jumbled with the bad. From there, your appreciation of either is almost a question of genre. Are you more interested in the Raised By The Movies nostalgia trips of mainstream directors mythologizing their own childhoods as historical turning points in the artform, or are you more interested in the atmospheric tensions of a haunted-hotel ghost story that plays out under the eerie mood lighting of green & blue gels? I found Hogg’s film more thematically direct & concise than Spielberg’s, which feels like a simultaneous one-for-them-one-for-me compromise that dilutes what he’s trying to work out onscreen. My assumption is that his is the best of the recent crop of movie memoirs from Hollywood filmmaking giants, since the people who are more interested in that kind of thing have been singling it out as something special, a cut above. I’ll likely never find out for myself, since there’s no promise of ghosts nor Tilda Swinton casting stunts to lure me in.
In the back of my mind, I’ve been saving a couple slots on my personal Best of 2022 list for two titles that never screened theatrically in New Orleans: Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please and Bertrand Mandico’s After Blue (Dirty Paradise). Having now rented both films for an especially lurid double feature, it turns out those reserved parking spots were totally justified. Both films hammered the exact personal pleasure centers I’m always looking to hit when seeking out new releases, exactly as expected. What I didn’t expect was that they would be so sympatico in their dreamlike deconstructions of gender, nor that they would be thematic mirror opposites of their respective directors’ previous works. I was introduced to Kramer through her apocalyptic meditation on the vicious, combative impulses of femininity in Ladyworld; I was introduced to Mandico through his wet nightmare vision of the vicious, combative impulses of masculinity in The Wild Boys. With their latest features, they’ve swapped topics (i.e., swapped genders), which makes After Blue & Please Baby Please a rewarding, fascinating double feature beyond their momentary value as last-minute best-of-the-year contenders.
In Ladyworld, Amanda Kramer immerses her audience in a never-ending Buñuelian house party where a group of young women eternally, ritualistically tear each other apart in the darkest corners of feminine bloodlust. In Please Baby Please, she reflects on the performative brutality of masculinity instead, abstracting & eroticizing the violence of traditional machismo. After a seemingly cis-hetero 1950s couple falls in lust with a gang of leather-clad ruffians (the wife out of gender envy, the husband out of closeted homosexuality), they separately explore their own relationships with masculinity as a social power & as a fetish aesthetic. As the couple unravels & retangles, Kramer ponders the question “What is a man, anyway?” through lofty academic discussions of how masculinity is socially engineered and through kinky fetishization of 1950s kitsch. Andrea Riseborough gives the performance of the year as the beatnik housewife turned Tom of Finland brute, approximating what it would be like if an especially rabid Jerri Blank had a Marlon Brando drag-king impersonation act. Harry Meulling’s crisis of masculinity is much more internal & philosophical, interrupting every friend group conversation with off-topic questions about why he must perform a gender at all, much less one arbitrarily assigned at birth. The film is overflowing with queer menace, artifice, and excellence, all achieved on a community theatre budget.
Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released in my lifetime, a complete gender meltdown that erodes all of the traditional characteristics & boundaries of masculinity in its titular group of nihilist ruffians but does not reform their vicious misbehavior when they emerge as women on the other end. Mandico’s second feature is just as gorgeous, grotesque, and wonderfully genderfucked as that debut, but goddamn that’s a tough act to follow. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)starts with feminine violence as its thematic anchor, dreaming of a far-out lesbian orgy planet that cowers in fear of a demonic, almighty serial killer named Kate Bush. As a disgraced hairdresser and her horndog daughter hunt down the elusive Kate Bush in the alien wilderness and fall in lust with other bizarre women they meet along the way, After Blue proves to be just as visually & thematically daring as The Wild Boys, just on the opposite end of the gender spectrum. The hallmarks of its sci-fi acid Western subgenre weighs heavily on its momentum & pacing, but it also constantly fills the frame with the most exciting, glitter-slathered nightmare imagery you’re likely to see this year. It plays like someone fed “James Bidgood’s Dune movie” into one of those AI art generators, and the results are intoxicating, even if a little exhausting.
Anyone who has already tasted “the rotten fruit of [Mandico’s] imagination” knows what to expect from After Blue, but that’s more of a sign of his out-the-gate fervor as a fully formed auteur than a sign that he’s repeating himself. By contrast, Kramer’s ideas & imagery appear to vary more from film to film, aiming for a fluorescent-trash version of John Waters’s aesthetic in Please Baby Please that I don’t believe was present in her previous work. As a pair, they’re among the most exciting artists currently working in the medium of queer filmmaking, not least of all because of their respective indulgences in over-the-top visual style and their shared philosophical hostility towards rigid gender boundaries. I have no idea where their careers are going (especially Kramer’s), but I’m confident in saying they’re already making some of the best movies out there on the new release calendar, and it’s a shame these two titles aren’t being published on more critics’ Best of the Year lists.
I recently took a long bus ride uptown to see my very first Antonioni film, projected on the big screen at the Prytania Theatre. I enjoyed Blow-Up well enough but did not love it. However, I do love some more genre-minded pictures that were directly inspired by it—namely Blow Out, Perversion Story, and The Eyes of Laura Mars—all titles I previously understood purely as giallo-era Hitchcock derivatives. In contrast to those later, flashier works, Antonioni’s own perversion of a Hitchcockian murder mystery is a stubbornly arthouse-minded affair. On paper, its story of a horndog fashion photographer in Swinging 60s London who uncovers evidence of a murder (and a larger political conspiracy to cover it up) in his photos reads like a stylish crime thriller. In practice, Blow-Up deliberately withholds all the traditional payoffs of a murder mystery story & a political conspiracy thriller, instead dwelling in frustration & ambiguity. If it’s a straight-up horror film, it’s about the existential horror of asking all your friends & acquaintances “Hey, you guys wanna see a dead body?” and no one taking you up on the offer, leaving you to sit with your own morbid fascination and no outlet for the tension. As a result, it’s the kind of movie that earns measured “That was interesting!” compliments instead of more genuine, swooning enthusiasm.
To be honest, the most rewarding part of the screening was not Blow-Up itself, but its presentation. The film was preceded by a lengthy slideshow lecture about The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul & Revolver, which had nothing to do with the movie except that it happened to be set in London in the 1960s. It was clear most of the audience was not aware of this deeply nerdy opening act, which pushed the start time a full precious hour later into the weeknight. Every new slide about how well 45″ singles like “Paperback Writer” or “Yellow Submarine” were reviewed in the papers had people audibly groaning in frustration, with a small crowd of younger moviegoers cowering in the lobby, desperate for the rant to end. It was an incredible bonding experience, like surviving a group hostage situation. I don’t know that the lecture sold many Beatles-themed history books as potential Christmas gifts in the lobby, as intended, but it did a lot to restore my personal faith in humanity on both ends; it was good to know that the kids out there are still indignant brats and that the nerds are still oblivious to their audiences’ attention span for rapid-fire niche interest stats. I often go to the theater alone, talk to no one except the box office worker, and leave without even making so much as eye contact with my fellow moviegoers, much less conversation. By contrast, that Blow-Up screening felt like a substantial Community Event.
Somewhere in the lengthy preamble to the feature presentation, I found myself chatting with an employee at the theatre and expressed gratitude that they were adding more repertory classics to their weekly schedule. It turns out the single-screener only had room for this extra rep screening because the Oscar Bait Movie of the Week, She Said, was doing poorly. And while the audience for Blow-Up might have been groaning at the nonstop onslaught of mid-60s #BeatlesFacts before the show, I was encouraged to see them show up & stick it out. There were a few dozen people in attendance, when I’ve gotten used to sharing the room with much smaller crowds on my artsy-fartsy weeknight excursions. After reading so many doomsaying national headlines about the box office disappointments of Awards Season hopefuls like She Said, The Fabelmans, Triangle of Sadness, and Tár, I was starting to worry that my local independent movie theatres might not be able to survive between superhero epics & Top Gun sequels if audiences are just going to wait for everything else on the marquee to hit streaming services. Seeing that crowd show up for Blow-Up (and struggle to stay up for The Beatles) gave me hope that the business might not be dying, just changing. If art-friendly spaces like The Prytania, The Broad, and Zeitgeist have to survive on community events & repertory screenings instead of Avatar-scale CG monstrosities the world may be all the better for it.
Even that night, I had to choose between seeing Blow-Up for the first time uptown at The Prytania or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest for the first time down the street at The Broad. And The Prytania’s new downtown location has been running more regular repertory screenings than either of those locations combined, something I don’t know that I’ve ever seen with any regularity in this city. I may not have fallen totally in love with Blow-Up on this first viewing, but it did feel like I was placing an essential puzzle piece in my larger understanding of genre film history, the same way that I felt seeing big-screen presentations of Ghost in the Shell & The Fog for the first time in recent months. I do want to see the trend of every non-superhero movie struggling to make money continue in this post-COVID, rushed-to-streaming world, because I fear that theatres will not be able to sell enough booze & popcorn to stay afloat. That momentum may be unstoppable at this point, though, and that surprisingly well-attended Blow-Up screening gave me hope that there might be another way to combat audiences’ exponential disinterest in trying new, uncanonized art. I can’t speak for the rest of that crowd, but I’ll sit through a hundred more Beatles lectures if it means I get to keep watching weird, divisive movies projected big & loud. If nothing else, I’m too old & too tired to find a new hobby at this point in my life.
There are a lot of handwringing articles making the rounds right now about why Awards Season movies like She Said,Triangle of Sadness, and Tár aren’t luring audiences to theaters. Of course, this annual ritual is always followed by complaints from “The Fans” that the Oscars and other highfalutin institutions don’t nominate movies that peoplehave actually seen. Personally, I’m glad they don’t. Given that most casual audiences only show up for a few scattered Disney acquisitions, talking CG-animal comedies, and disposable opening-weekend horrors throughout the year, Awards Season would be an absolute bore if it were driven by box office sales. This is the one time of year where smaller, stranger, quieter films get a little room to breathe in the public discourse outside the otherwise constant cacophony of jump scares, superhero battles, and Lyle, Lyle Crocodile’s bathtub croonings. Taking that away to boost an awards ceremony’s TV ratings would be anti-Art, if not outright evil. Case in point: the top-grossing film of the year to date—and the only Actual Movie of the year in wider audience’s minds—is the decades-late nostalgia stoker Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that it is, to put it as generously as possible, an absurdly expensive pile of ice-cold dogshit.
A lot of people will tell you that the only way to truly soak in the majesty of Top Gun: Maverick was to experience it in its large-screen format at your local multiplex’s imitation IMAX. Personally, I feel like I watched it the way it was meant to be seen: scaled down to the back of a plane-seat headrest on a late-night flight. While Maverick‘s biggest fans ooh’d & ahh’d at the Navy’s high-speed fighter jets roaring in perfectly calibrated digital clarity, I got the full 4D experience, with a real-life airplane engine providing aural background texture and the dull fear of a tragic mid-flight crash pumping up my adrenaline levels. Even in my personal one-man rumble seat theatre in the sky, I despised the film, increasingly growing angry at audiences’ lack of appetite for the much tastier delicacies that were left to rot in empty theaters this year. Top Gun: Maverick is a rusty carnival ride through a cobwebbed Hall of Memories – an algorithmic simulation of cinema. Making Maverick after it was already pre-parodied in MacGruber is exactly as embarrassing as making a by-the-numbers musician biopic after Walk Hard. It might even be a worse offense, considering how much more money was wasted on its $170mil production than smaller projects like Bohemian Rhapsody or Stardust (and for a much more insidious political purpose). Either way, it was already perfectly, ruthlessly mocked years before release. It’s nothing; it’s a joke; it’s the most popular movie of 2022 (at least until the next bloated-budget blockbuster sequel down the line, Avatar: The Way of Water, is given time to catch up).
Martin Scorsese has become a Gen-Z punching bag for an off-hand comment he made comparing modern superhero blockbusters to amusement park rides, and I think he’s only been proven right in the years since. In this dual Navy recruitment tool and elaborate vanity project, Tom Cruise’s renegade fighter pilot is a real-world superhero, with every other character marveling that “He’s the fastest man alive” in slack-jawed awe as he Supermans his way through the sky. He looks ghoulish in close-up as the force of his supernatural speed yanks his skin to the back of his skull, but we’re meant to fawn over his eternal good looks & boyish charm. Since he has no grey hair and total control over the flattering angles he’s filmed from, we see no signs of his decades of aging since the original Top Gun, other than that he texts with full punctuation. It’s like revisiting a Disney park attraction every few decades; the animatronic hosts behind the red ropes look mostly the same as they did your last visit, except a little haggard from years of repeating the same few robotic maneuvers. And the wonders he’s there to guide you through only appear smaller & sadder as you grow older: a simulated ride in an airfighter’s cockpit; a technical showcase of your local multiplex’s outdated sound system; a soullessly reenacted clip from a movie you used to like, scored with just as many notes of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” to stoke the memory before moving on to the next empty, sad display. Maverick is the abandoned wing of the amusement park that the owners didn’t bother to update, just a few months away from being replaced by something new & worse.
I could understand skepticism that watching Maverick on an uncomfortable airplane flight—eyes occasionally drawn to the private screening of That Thing You Do! on the headrest next to mine—is sufficient enough of an attempt at genuine appreciation. As a counterargument, I’d like to report that I watched the original 1986 Top Gun on my connection flight that same night, and I loved it. I remember being bored by Top Gun‘s rah-rah militarism on my first watch decades ago, so maybe it only clicked with me this go-round in comparison to its algorithmic snoozer of a sequel. Either way, it’s undeniable that it looks better than its 2022 counterpart. Tony Scott’s high-style approach to the material makes for gorgeous, horned-up pop art that only could have been produced in the MTV era. In Maverick, Tom Cruise frequently repeats the mantra “Don’t think, just do” as an overt suggestion to the audience that we shut off our brains and enjoy the ride. In contrast, Tony Scott shuts our brains off for us, packing the screen with so many wordless, sweaty music video montages that the film somehow plays more like a wet dream than a military recruitment ad. Both films have visible hard-ons for the tools of US imperialist warfare, but only the original conveys the sexiness of the machinery and the meatheads who operate it in a genuinely swoonworthy way. All of the color, flavor, and texture of that MTV reverie are drained from the sequel to the point where all that’s left is the machinery itself – none more important than the T-800 hyperalloy endoskeleton just under the surface of Cruise’s synthetic skin.
It’s okay that Top Gun: Maverick exists. Something has to sell enough popcorn & sodas to keep movie theaters afloat. What’s chafing me is the argument that it needs to be formally recognized as one of the best movies of the year in order to keep the Oscars’ TV ratings viable. This movie belongs on the showroom floor of a Best Buy, advertising overpriced 4K TVs, not parading across an awards stage or printed on a critical publication’s Best of the Year list. It’s not even a movie, really. It’s an echo of a movie, an expensive version of Fathom Events re-running choppy digital streams of E.T. & The Goonies to make up for the industrial slow-down of pandemic-era #content. The next time you hear someone complain that “They don’t make good movies anymore,” keep in mind that the only movies they’ve watched this year were a couple Spider-Man crossover sequels and this piece of shit. Otherwise, they just halfway listened to a few Netflix Originals in the background while thumbing around on their phones. There’s no need for critical institutions to cater to that audience; they’ve already spent all the money they’re going to spend at the carnival.
