Favourite of 2022

Ok, took me til today to watch the 99 films released this year that qualify for my favourite 10 films released this year in Australia. So in alphabetical order ... 

DRIVE MY CAR - A beautiful study of grief, art, love, and creation as a semi-blind director and his driver bond as he directs a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. It's a very gradual film, and on the long side, but this pays off when the emotional floodgates open up and we see what's lying inside our lead characters. It's a great journey with great lead performances from Nisijiama and Watari

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE -Uses everything Michelle Yeoh is capable of and is a free-wheeling creative delight, every bit of apparent absurdity is there for a purpose and it's a film that loves its characters as much as its creative conceits.

GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE - A great acting showcase for the two leads, largely the only characters on screen. McCormack keeps pace with Thompson well, and Brand's script deals with the topic of opening up sexual taboos and finding your own level of honesty with wit and generosity. It's not necessarily particularly surprising, though it's expertly played. It's very much the Emma-Thompson-Hires-A-Sex-worker film you can take your grandma to, carefully not-too-confrontational, and very much a delight to watch.

LANGUAGE LESSONS - A really likable zoom movie, Natalie Morales gives herself a good vehicle to play a reasonable range of emotions. A sweet explosion of happiness at the ending

MOONAGE DAYDREAM - A triumphant distillation of Bowie, ignoring the normal talking heads approach in favour of using Bowies own interviews to underscore a collage of his work and philosophies. Having spent five decades being deliberately hard to pin down you wouldn't think he would come through as clearly as he does, but the selection of imagery, thoughts, and music is triumphant

THE NORTHMAN - A true Norse epic, brutal and intense, finds some moments of transcendence in among the gloom, while making very little secret of its obvious inspiration and no regrets in breaking out from it when it wants to

RED ROCKET - Only loses half a star because they never show where the kolaches are in the donut shop and as someone who is about two years away from his last visit to a Texas donut shop I needed the visual hit. But otherwise, this is an excellent study of a sociopath, after Sean Baker's last two films spent time with impoverished sex workers in LA and Orlando we get a fast-talking, similarly impoverished sex worker in Texas City Texas, constantly about three seconds away from dooming everyone around him to disaster. Fortunately, this is largely a comedy so the radius of the disaster largely just hits himself, with only one other victim.

RRR - This is simultaneously ridiculous and delightful, swapping genres from high drama to musical frivolity to romantic comedy to engaging action regularly, with two heroes who you get deeply engaged with even as they appear at odds. Even under suboptimal circumstances (on streaming, dubbed into Hindi rather than the original Telegu) this is fun, engaging, and wildly pleasurable.

TURNING RED - A cute coming-of-age romp looking at adolescence through a personal lens that is fun, modern, and very slightly ridiculous. The panda is super adorable, the teen angst is super relatable and the emotions are real and heartfelt.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY - A trio of short stories about complicated connections, with a clever set of twists and turns in each.  The short story format with no links beyond thematic should frustrate but instead, it's delightful as all have great stuff for actors to play through a long key conversation in the centre of each

The complete list in a ranked order is on leterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/.../ranking-of-2022-releases-in.../

And my ongoing profile including writeups of all 207 films I saw this year is at https://letterboxd.com/simbot/

Nightmare Alley

A solidly twisty turny noir that does feel a little bit self indulgent both in runtime and in pushing the gore a little. There's some great carnival design and the ending is appropriately nasty but it doesn't quite transfer from interesting to watch to engrossing to watch

Parallel mothers

 An enjoyable Almodovar melodrama with romantic complications, historical implications and a few surprises along with the gorgeous décor and design

Licorice Pizza

 A kinda sorta 70s romance between a 15 year old hustler and a 25 year old woman not quite sure where she's going, this meanders a lot (none of the big three guest stars, Penn, Waits or Cooper are essential to the plot, they're all diversions), and wins a lot of points on the ugliness of Gary's shirts and the capturing of a sense of how relationships between men and women were perceived in its period compared to now. I do wish it had just a little more narrative drive and focus but then it wouldn't be the enjoyable wallow that it is

One Second

 Part Road Runner, part Cinema Paradiso, part Melodrama, this is a surprisingly effective story of two characters drawn together over a reel of film where each have separate stakes in it, and how their relationship plays out is the prime pleasure in the film, along with some gorgeous desert photography and emotional engagement

Belle

 A beautiful emotionally rich anime exploring a virtual world where a shy schoolgirl can become a globally famous singer and become involved with a rageful beast and those who would hunt him. If it's not quite at the level of Summer Wars, the directors previous exploration of virtual universes, it still plays strong as an individual story of heroism and strength

King Richard

 Very much Oscar bait stuff for Will Smith including downplaying tricky elements of the story like the Jehovah's witness faith or the extra children that this film doesn't want to focus on, but it does effectively choose an appropriate place to start and finish, some interesting insight into the overlap between sport and race and an insight into raising children in a hothouse climate

Scream

 A solid follow up in the series that combines teen drama, film criticism and mass murder. If the teen drama feels a little flatter it might be that I'm further from being a teen than i was during the first four films and that the back-to-basics plot line ultimately doesn't really give the newbies much more to be than potential locations for knives to go or suspects, but it's still reasonably solid with a slightly higher taste for gore than the mid range sequels

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

 This doesn't exactly add a lot to the original, it's very much a case of playing the hits, although McKenna Grace gives it every bit of charm it has outside "remember the first movie". The climax does do the criminal job of wasting JK Simmons on a barely-there cameo, as well as going excessively sentimental in the last five minutes in ways that are kinda unnecessary. For all that whining I did kinda enjoy the wallow in nostalgia (not just the original, there's also an overlay of mid 80s Spielberg Amblin House Style in there too).

Red Rocket

Only loses half a star because they never show where the kolaches are in the donut shop and as someone who is about two years away from his last visit to a Texas donut shop I needed the visual hit. But otherwise this is an excellent study of a sociopath, after Sean Baker's last two films spent time with impoverished sex workers in LA and Orlando we get a fast talking, similarly impoverished sex worker in Texas City Texas, constantly about three seconds away from dooming everyone around him to disaster. Fortunately this is largely a comedy so the radius of the disaster largely just hits himself, with only one other victim.  The Trump analogy is never too laboured and remains an undercurrent rather than an overwhelming text, and the tension is maintained well.