Coming in at the very end of the year, my first response to The Banshees of Inisherin was more admiration than love: gorgeously shot and hauntingly acted, it was a great little tragic-comic horror story, but probably not more than that. But conversations with my daughters afterwards helped me see some marvelous coherences in the film's story; the fact is, in light of morning-after thinking, this movie is a gem, a scary and sad portrait of human limits and human choices, with multiple brilliant revelations packed into short exchanges and scenes. (Hint: the movie maybe focused on Pádraic and Colm; but it's really about Pádraic and Dominic, and Colm and Siobhán.)
I watched Bathtubs Over Broadway early in the year, and it was such a delight. It introduced me to a slice of American art that I'd never known anything about, and indeed can't remember having ever even heard anything about before; it was a genuine revelation. And a pretty delightful one, done with great spirit and nostalgia and joy. Honestly, everyone should learn about "industrial musicals," the grand shows that corporations put together for the annual meetings of their stockholders or whatever, year after year, throughout the middle of the 20th century. Such a fun film.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is absolutely a lot of movie; maybe too much. But it reduced me to tears when we saw it in the theater, and I know why: I couldn't contain the admiration I felt for, my sympathy for the pain felt by, and my hopes for the future of Waymond, and every other decent person who just honestly wants to people to talk to each other and listen with compassion to what they have to say, even when--especially when--what is being said makes no sense. "This is how I fight," he says: with kindness, not comprehension. I'm an intellectual who loves trying to understand things, and I won't ever change--but I'm a better person for being reminded, as I am not nearly often enough, of the limits of that approach.
Flee is a remarkable movie, one whose stylistic choices in how it unfolds its story didn't always seem to me to make perfect sense on their own terms--sometimes the movie would depart entirely from the conceit that we were watching an animation of an originally recorded interview, but then there would be a scene which leaned hard into maintaining that pretention--but all of which added up to a film that was more than the sum of its parts. The story of Amin, an Afghan whose family fled to the Soviet Union to escape the Mujahideen, then spent years attempting to escape the USSR as it slowly collapsed through the 1980s and into the 1990s, is a powerful one, and I appreciated the creativity and honesty--despite the frequent artifice of the movie--with which it was told.
For Mormons like myself--heterodox, liberal, critical, but still settled in our identity--the past couple of years have delivered a lot of media content almost perfectly designed to get us arguing about and dianosing ourselves and our history. I never got into Under the Banner of Heaven; my wife and I watched some of, but couldn't maintain interest in, Mormon No More; I thought Murder Among the Mormons was terrific. But by far the best documentary about my tribe, or those associated with it, I watched this year was Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey. A deeply creepy story, told with remarkable clarity and restraint considering the ugliness of the child and sexual abuse and the religious fanaticism at its center, it provides all the interviews and all the context and history you need to understand this small, horrifying branch of the fundamentalist movement within Mormon culture; if you can handle this sort of thing, I can't recommend it strongly enough.
I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp before a friend of mine did a complete rundown of all of the movies by the mid-20th-century British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and praised it to the high heavens, but now I mention it whenever the topic of British movies comes up. This is simple a spectacular yarn, telling in miniature the whole cultural story of the British empire from WWI to WWII, through the character of Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy, whose great virtues and perhaps even greater "Blimpish" flaws are laid out with affection, insight, and great wit. I was constantly being surprised and impressed by how the movie is put together; for what it wants to do, it's practically flawless.
Once again, a Spike Lee joint makes my top ten list, but this is an early movie of his, the first one he made after his career-defining film Do the Right Thing, and his first movie with Denzel Washington. And I have to say, I'm not sure Washington, whose work I love, didn't set himself a high bar that he has only ever equalled, never exceeded, in Mo' Better Blues. People can complain, legitimately, about how Lee makes use of crude--but funny!--stereotypes in filling out his films, and about the way he inserts himself--literally or metaphorically--into his movies, but here his camera is centered on Washington's amazingly calm, yet nonetheless deeply expressive, face, as the leader of a jazz band who thinks of nothing but music but is also intelligent enough to recognize all the trouble his lack of thought for anything else is getting him into. The soundtrack is tremendous, and the final 10 minutes, though completely predictable, are made transcendent by being accompanied by John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Absolutely worth seeing.
Salt of the Earth is a nearly 70-year-old melodrama, and it shows--the dialogue, acting, and staging all reflect a very different story-telling sensibility, one lacking the sort of abiding aesthetic which allow musicals similarly decades-old to still work for us. So no, it's not the style of this movie that made it so good for 2022-me; it's just how damn contemporary its honest, unflinching, thoughtful engagement with complicated issues of poverty, labor, exploitation, gender politics, cultural difference, faith, inequality, racism, and more all felt to me. The story it tells is an almost entirely fictionalized tale of an actual strike at a New Mexico zinc mine, with some of the actual participants appearing in major roles in the film. Written, directed, and produced by men who had been blacklisted in Hollywood, and dimissed as communist propaganda by many when it was first released, this is a great, powerful, however melodramatic, document of women and men fighting hard--against the power of capital, and against their own weaknesses--to achieve something better.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was just a totally unexpected blast. Terrific, nutty, often downright hilarious yet on-the-nose characterizations (Sherlock Holmes as a paranoid, traumatized drug addict? Sigmund Freud as a manly swashbuckling hero?), complete with a bonkers, definitely politically incorrect yet entirely entrancing plot? An adventure story-slash-costume drama, with hokey (but well-intentioned!) psycho-analytics, corrupt (but absolutely proper!) European aristocrats, confused and falsely accused (yet still guilty!) English academics, and a run-away train? All that, and tennis? Sign me up!
Sorry folks, but this is just cinema. Complain all you want about Tom Cruise; with this film, he did everything that Tom Cruise, Inc., does best: give us fabulous stunts, a perfectly efficient plot, lots of sharp and edited-to-perfection scenes, a few moments of almost-entirely-honestly-earn sentiment (Iceman! The hero we--and he--always knew he could be!), and, yes, plenty of non-distracting but solidly landing jokes. Just in terms of movie-going, popcorn-munching delight, Top Gun: Maverick was absolutely the summer flick of the year.
