BEST MOVIES OF 2022 . . . so far

[Chris Knipp]

RAYAN SARLAK IN HIT THE ROAD

Best movies of 2022. . . so far
Here's a halfway-through list (in alphabetical order) from IndieWire of movies the site's two main critics, Kate Erbland and David Ehrlich, like from the first half of this year, which they say can all be seen online now. It's a starting point for a Filmleaf thread on favorite movies of 2022. It's also a potential to-watch list. Read IndieWire's thumbnail reviews and see if some might sound worth checking out. I personally very strongly recommend HIT THE ROAD, HAPPENING, and NORTHMAN; incidentally was lucky enough to see NORTHMAN on a very big, wide screen. Several on this list (or at least one, AFTER YANG) I hated, or can't even face watching (EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE). But this is a place to start. It reminds me I want to see CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH, COW, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, and, I guess, TOP GUN. I don't know why they fail to mention MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Joachim Trier), COMPARTMENT NO. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen), A HERO (Asghar Farhadi), or PARIS 13TH DISTRICT (Jacques Audiard), because those are my favorites so far, besides the three mentioned above.

L I S T
(from IndieWire))
AFTER YANG (Kagonaga)
BENEDICTION (Terrence Davies
CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH (Cooper Raiff)
COW (Andrea Arnold)
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (David Cronenberg)
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (Daniels)
FIRE ISLAND (Andrew Ahn)
FLIX GOURMET (Peter Strickland)
FRESH (Mimi Cave)
GREAT FREEDOM (Sebastian Meise)
HAPPENING (Audrey Diwan)
HIT THE ROAD (Pahah Panahi)
JACKASS FOREVER ( Jeff Tremaine)
LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (Dean Fleischer Camp)
THE NORTHMAN (Robert Eggers)
ON THE COUNT OF THREE (Jerrod Carmichael)
R.R.R. (S.S. Rajamouli)
TOP GUN: MAVERICK (Joseph Kosinski)
TURNING RED(Domee Shi) Pixar

[oscar jubis]

BEST FILM:Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Batman
Cha Cha Real Smooth
Elvis
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
The Northman
RRR
Top Gun: Maverick
Turning Red
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, Oscar, glad to get the quick response. Some overlaps and a couple different titles here. It's nice to include a link wherever possible. Or, you could have mentioned that this is a Wikipedia entry.

5th Hollywood Critics Association Midseason Film Awards

It's not particularly edifying, alas. Pretty disappointing that they list as their top choice a movie I can't even bear the idea of watching. (As has happened occasionally before, I could wind up having to hold my nose and watch the thing.) Doubtful about ELVIS, - fun as far as it goes and Austin Butler is great (Tom Hanks not quite), but not sure you can quite call it one of the year's best.

But, the advantage of midpoint lists is that they're provisional.

Added in the "Hollywood Critics" list (who are they, exactly?*) are
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (Tom Gormican)
and
THE BATMAN (Matt Reeves)

*The Hollywood Critics Association - you can see all their names and even color photos of each. You can Google them and find out what they do. Some write reviews. Others are simply related to pop culture in some way or to the movie industry. Many seem to have entered the field, by our standards, relatively recently.

[oscar jubis]

Even "the idea" of watching Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once is too much to bear for you?
Before I had read any reviews, a student in my scriptwriting course gifted me a digital copy of the film. He is very passionate in his appreciation of it; other students shared this response. I was intrigued, so I watched it and found it to be remarkable in many ways (However,I'm not ready to call it a masterpiece or even a top 10 film for me this year.)

EEAO for short, may be defined as a post-modern film. It is a pastiche that evokes tropes from multiple genres in an extremely fluid and transformative manner. It plays with the (Transcendentalist, Emersonian perhaps) concept that personhood or personal identity is never fixed but always in a state of "becoming". In a way, the film may be considered a bildungsroman where the person coming-of-age is already about 60 years of age (Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang). Another feature of EEAO that squares with postmodernism is unprecedented fragmentation of time and space through the use of old science fiction idea of multiple planes of existence or universes. The film exploits this concept in a manner comparable to how David Lynch channelled the idea of doppelgangers or "doubles" in Twin Peaks (especially the amazing 2017 television series). It is a measure of how radical EEAO is that it may be ultimately regarded primarily as a family melodrama involving "ordinary" familial issues such as marital conflict and a generation gap (the chasm between Evelyn's father and daughter over her sexual identity). Finally, the film's postmodernism is also at play in the manner in which alludes constantly to the history of cinema in general and the particular career of its principal actors. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a fascinating film.

[Chris Knipp]

That was what I said.
Multiverses are not for me.
I may try to watch it if it's so highly admired. Or not.
It doesn't sound anything like TWIN PEAKS to me. More like a semi-comic Marvel sci-fi movie.

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