Liminal moments, speculative connections, part 1
The obligatory round-up of my favourite film and TV of 2022
Part of the reason why I’ve re-started The Flash as a newsletter that shows up in your inbox whenever I feel like it, rather than to a schedule, is that I want to reduce the stress in my life.
So I wasn’t going to do a ‘best-of-2022’ list, although I did write about my favourite Australian films of 2022 for The Age. (There are only five.)
But ugh! I couldn’t help myself! No arbitrary numbers; no ranking; they’re in alphabetical order. If I reviewed them, I’ll link to the review. (I wish my fortnightly ABC Hobart Mornings review spots were archived online.)
As you’ll see, I didn’t often get a chance to review the stuff I actually loved. I often had to review stuff that ended up on my ‘Good, But Not Great’ and ‘Fine, I Guess’ lists.
Also, because teaching took up so much of my time, I often couldn’t get to preview screenings, and so I’ve missed many of the films that are showing up on other people’s best-of lists.
Right, let’s get my favourites and non-favourites out of the way, and then I can talk about some sci-fi trash I’ve actually been enjoying.
Best Films of 2022 – Overall
Avatar: The Way of Water – James Cameron understands and unironically taps into cinema’s possibilities of wonder and connection. Also, the action setpieces are fantastic. I have much more to say about this film
The Banshees of Inisherin – So bleak, but very funny; I laughed a lot, then left the cinema feeling crushingly depressed by the possibility of being hated and rejected by my friends
Bones and All – I had no idea what this was about going in, but found it swooningly romantic, have thought about it so much, and have since read the source novel by Camille DeAngelis. I have Tumbld about this; it’s that kind of movie
The Eight Mountains – Tender Italian bromantic drama is novelistic in that it captures the heft of reading a novel: the satisfying accretion of character details; the little moments that pay off richly later on; the sense of loss when it’s over
Emily the Criminal – Makes crime feel righteous compared to a purgatory of convict-stained gig labour or unpaid internships with Gina Gershon (Showgirls as intertext?). An alert, tense film; Aubrey Plaza plays Emily like Chekhov's gun, and I rejoiced to see her go off
Everything Everywhere All At Once – Everyone loved this one, except for mean losers. Visually anarchic, with wonderful costumes and cinematography, and often made me laugh raucously in the cinema, yet it has a melancholic soul: I have thought so much afterwards about Raccacoonie
Fire Island – shrewd and hilarious: tackles all Jane Austen’s themes of family, class mobility and romantic expectations through a contemporary lens of Asian-American identity and gay male party culture. Joel Kim Booster gets Austen’s novel, and that’s what makes Fire Island so much fun
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – Sexy, sophisticated two-hander explores intersections of gender, age, race and class as the power balance shifts between the two leads
Nope – I’ve thought a lot this year about the history of cinema, and the ‘cinema of attractions’. Here, Jordan Peele literalises the idea that entertainment’s gaze consumes and spits out its objects. It’s an animal we can’t train, but trick ourselves into believing we can. He teases yet evades our desire for a Spielberg-meets-Sergio Leone monster-western spectacle. In the moment that counts, will you refuse?
The Northman – just before seeing this I’d recently read The Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price, who consulted on this film. I loved the way Robert Eggers captures the pre-modern strangeness of the Viking Age. Alexander Skarsgård is too old for the role, but the black-and-white textures are wonderful
The Tragedy of Macbeth – Technically this hit Apple TV+ in January 2022. I was like, how can Joel Coen bring something new to this? But the stylised, almost animated quality of it was brilliant, and I loved Kathryn Hunter as the three witches. She was also fabulous as Syril Karn’s pushy mum in Andor
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – Hugely entertaining riff on the film-nerd figure of Crazy Nic Cage, and more generally on film nerds’ entitlement to their favourite stars, and Hollywood’s broader solipsism. Pedro Pascal is so funny in this. Vibe: Get Shorty
You Won’t Be Alone – I went into this expecting a folk-horror fable like The Witch (sorry, I refuse to do the VVitch thing). Instead, I got a poetic, sensual, genderqueer meditation on the solidarity of human experience. Even the embittered witch Old Maid Maria isn’t a simplistic fairytale monster.
Best Australian Films of 2022
Blonde
Elvis
The Stranger
Three Thousand Years of Longing
You Won’t Be Alone
Worst Films of 2022 – Overall
Amsterdam
Bigbug
Cyrano
Don’t Worry Darling
Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
Jurassic World: Dominion
Lightyear
Moonfall
Morbius
Where the Crawdads Sing
Worst Australian Films of 2022
The Greenhouse
How to Please A Woman
Poker Face
Seriously Red
Thor: Love and Thunder
Best TV of 2022 – Overall
Andor s01 (Disney+) – gripping, multifaceted political drama about how social change happens gradually, from below. The fact it’s a Star Wars story feels almost incidental
Archive 81 s01 (Netflix) – sophisticated podcast-to-screen adaptation that also cleverly adapts the textures of podcasting affordances to a visual medium
The Bear s01 (Disney+) – The pace and physicality of screwball comedy meets the fraught, raw quality of documentary. I thought so much about these characters
The Last Movie Stars (Binge) – Ethan Hawke’s formally self-referential documentary captures a liminal moment in Hollywood as the studio era gave way to New Hollywood, through the almost unbearably sexy marriage of two complex stars
The Lazarus Project s01 (Stan) – Gripping UK time-slip thriller series stars Paapa Essediu (the most interesting man in Men) as a guy who breaks bad out of love. Fantastic ensemble cast wrangle with similar ethical issues: would you put your own happiness above humanity’s very survival?
Light and Magic (Disney+) – Another wonderful Hollywood history documentary about the history of ILM. Left me with profound respect for the ingenuity of visual effects. When I saw The Fabelmans, I thought about this series
The Patient (Disney+) – Steve Carell’s ASMR voice as a therapist kidnapped by his serial-killer patient (Domnhall Gleeson) camouflages a moving, elegiac drama of a man forced to contemplate his mistakes. Recommended if you liked the talky therapy sessions in Hannibal
The Peripheral (Amazon) – Exactly the kind of sci-fi I love: time-slips, ‘haptic drift’, cool robots. Much more on this one soon!
The Resort (Stan) – Weirdly slept-on, woozily genre-crossing sci-fi mystery; highly recommended if you liked The White Lotus
Severance s01 (Apple) – My favourite show of 2022. Absolutely elegant in its worldbuilding, it captures the feeling of capitalist alienation so cleverly. I was meant to write an essay on this for Tim Dunlop but to my shame, I was too overwhelmed by work. 2022 was a stressful, awful working year, hey
Shining Girls (Apple) – Elisabeth Moss is the queen of ‘being gaslit on screen’; this time-loop thriller, adapted from the Lauren Beukes novel, powerfully conveys the feeling of trauma: how it shifts your whole world around you.
Best Australian TV of 2022
Heartbreak High (Netflix)
More Than This (Paramount+)
Muster Dogs (ABC) – I got so emotionally involved in this docuseries. My friends and I still like to say tenderly to each other, “Lovely dog!” like Frank Finger, the gorgeous old farmer who is so intuitively kind to his working dogs.
Worst TV of 2022
Byron Baes (Netflix) – I was prodded into ‘reviewing’ this at ScreenHub. I ‘wrote’ most of this by ranting into my phone’s speech-to-text function while standing in my kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil for tea.
Okay, happy new year, everyone!
Phew, now that’s out of the way, I can get on with my New Year’s Eve, and we can get back to the good stuff: sci-fi trash!
What were your faves, and the least fave things you watched, in 2022?
