Introduction
Hi folks, Shaun’s college roommate here.
I’ll take a little credit for Sin & Cinephilia’s existence, since Shaun and I spent our senior year at Yale consuming and bickering about hundreds of movies. Upon graduating in 2021, we made our inaugural pilgrimage to Cannes (to be continued this May).
Today, we continue to consume and bicker about movies, albeit from different coasts. And Shaun now has a Substack!
Shaun has invited me to share my own top 10 films of 2022 for diversity of perspective. Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of overlap. I won’t rehash all the things we agreed on last year. But I will share some hot—dare I say, sinful—cinema takes that may cause certain dear readers to take up their keyboards in protest.
Year in Review
It was ok.
As I scrolled through my Letterboxd diary for the year, I noticed a lot of misses: Fox Searchlight transformed into a rainbow laundry machine for busted Quibi IP (plus whatever Fresh was). Marvel dutifully churned out its formless superhero gruel for the masses, this year grinding up Taika Waititi’s sensibility in the process. Sony somehow allowed The Son to get made. Even A24 missed the mark with Men and Bodies Bodies Bodies—two movies whose brilliant final 30 minutes can’t save their first 1 hour+ of wasted screentime.
But who says Hollywood is dead? Speaking of A24, the indie-production-house-cum-lifestyle-brand raised equity at a $2.5 billion valuation in March. MGM cashed in with Amazon for $8.5 billion! And now that Bob 1 is back atop the mouse’s ears, we should expect some splashy Disney dealmaking in the near future.
Let’s not forget the $140 million Tencent spent on Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, which somehow threads the needle between blockbuster jingoism and a declining American empire. The movie is terrible, but its ability to capture both domestic and Chinese markets is a hat trick. While most studios are happy to accommodate their international profit center, Top Gun: Maverick made a refreshing exception.
To be clear, most of these developments aren’t great. Disney tends to neuter every piece of original content it touches. A24 is losing both its cinematic and commercial edge to scrappier upstarts. And don’t get me started on the broader move to streaming. When denominated in dollars, moviemaking is doing just fine. When denominated in cultural output… I have my worries.
Only one studio surprised to the upside last year, and you’d never guess it based on the abject failure over at Peacock. Universal spent 2022 moving from strength to strength; big-budget art-house fare (The Northman, Nope, TÁR) was programmed alongside absurd franchise renewals and comedy-horror (Minions, Halloween Ends, M3GAN, and the forthcoming Cocaine Bear). Nobody is putting butts in seats—from the festival screening room to the downtown multiplex—like Universal.
Let’s call the mood going into 2023 selective optimism. And let’s hope we get a flurry of reasons to head back to the theater.
Honorable Mentions
More subjective than objective here. I’ll make it quick.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Made me cry because I also think Leslie Stahl is a hero.
Resurrection
Rebecca Hall is working on a different level. Here she leads a psychological thriller that actually understands trauma.
Babylon
Deranged, but I can’t stop thinking about it.
Flux Gourmet
Food as a fetish object, and not in that boring The Menu way.
Kimi
Kimi on paper is a disappointing thriller with one or two half-baked ideas about big tech. Kimi on screen is full of ideas—post-pandemic isolation, destabilizing public reemergence, anonymous and surveilling gazes. Soderbergh always does the most with the least.
The Official Top 10
10. Triangle of Sadness
Classic Östlund shenanigans with a fabulously flatulent second act. Not a huge fan of the overall critique (too basic), but this film shines in its icily delivered repartee.
9. Don’t Worry Darling
Hear me out. Don’t Worry Darling is not simply bad. It’s brilliant because it’s bad.
Take stock of the actual plot. The first 75% of this film is meant to be a projection of Jordan Peterson acolytes desperate for a mid-1900s tradwife. These guys have no idea what an honest or detailed construction of 20th-century life should look like. The fuzzy world-building and vapid dialogue and barre classes and colorful dresses are just that: poorly-imagined fictions. Harry Styles’ abominable accent feels good in a place like this.
I’m not saying Olivia Wilde did all of this on purpose. Nevertheless, unwittingly or not, she expertly deflates the aspirations of today’s contemptible political figures. Catholic integralists, male supremacists, the new right—ask them to color between the lines of their sketchbook utopia and you’ll see nothing more than an Applebee’s kids’ menu drawn by a four-year-old. That metaphor also applies to the aesthetics of Don’t Worry Darling, but the strong final act puts the joke on us.
8. No Bears
My favorite films are simple in story yet grand in substance. So it is with No Bears, which mimics director Jafar Panahi’s working conditions under Iranian house arrest and a ban from filmmaking.
No Bears resonates with a basic sound effect (a parking brake) that flags Panahi’s desire to stay in Iran despite his political treatment. For him, continuing to make movies is an act of honor, almost a responsibility. His characters come to reckon with their own honor through understated decisions with life-altering consequences.
7. Decision to Leave
Nothing to add beyond Shaun’s review, except that you should watch this video deconstructing the shot above.
6. Introduction
Shaun didn’t include this one because he considers the release date to be 2021, but I’m putting it here because my eyes filled with tears last January as the details of this gentle romance came into focus.
5. White Noise
Frameworks for understanding human behavior. Turns out, we don’t have any good ones aside from “we’re all afraid of dying.”
4. EO
Imagine being a producer and having to source several donkeys and a Boston Dynamics robot for the same shoot.
3. Crimes of the Future
What is Kristen Stewart looking at here? The body as politics. More precisely, the body as a landscape for political action, and the violence incurred as a product of this action. After a year of shocking regression on issues of basic bodily autonomy, Cronenberg’s vision of a future where “surgery is the new sex” has grown from intriguing to prescient.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Plenty has been said about this baffling masterpiece. What I love most about EEAAO is the big middle finger it gives to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you take the idea of alternate worlds even remotely seriously, you’ll end up a lot closer to the hot-dog fingers and googly-eyed rocks flowing forth from Daniels’ imagination than some orderly chaos in the latest Dr. Strange flick. Our universe—among others—is an uncontrollable shit show, no matter how hard Kevin Feige tries to wrap it up in a tidy bow.
1. TÁR
The morning after TÁR’s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, I ended up next to Cate Blanchette in line for security at JFK Terminal 8. The encounter was brief: I congratulated her on a masterful performance, she thanked me, then she proceeded to cut the 50-person line in front of us both. I muttered under my breath, “That was the best fucking movie of the year.”