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/
