Earlier this year Sight and Sound revealed the 100 greatest films of all time, now with a similar degree of esteem I present to you this: the 10 greatest movies of 2022. Please stop whatever insignificant task it is that you’re doing, put your feet up and join me, it is what you’ve been waiting for all year after all.
10. RRR
We start this list with my nod to blockbuster. Everything you could ever want in a big summer action extravaganza is here about seven times. You’ve got your sweeping romance, you’ve got your meticulously crafted martial arts sequences, you’ve got your lorry full of wild animals as battle strategy. But crucially at the heart you have a really strong believable central friendship that anchors the film through all the outrageous stunts and high jinks.
9. Crimes of the Future
Old man Cronenberg has returned with his first feature in seven years and has done so with a quintessential late period directorial standout. As such there is an element of playing the hits here, Crony deals out the body horror in a way he hasn’t really since the 90’s. But for me what stands Crimes of the Future out as such a late great work is the sublime worldbuilding. You get such a sense that you are seeing a brief snippet into this rich and vast future world, and I for one would like to see more.
8. Memoria
In many ways Memoria is the piece of ambient cinema that I’ve been craving for a while now; slow, beautiful and mesmeric. I won’t pretend to be smarter than I am by lying and claiming I understood everything within the film, but I also feel this isn’t really the point. It’s one for lying back and letting envelop you, drifting in and out. Let Tilda guide you through this dream space as she searches for the noises that haunt her.
7. Flee
What a tender expressive way to tell such a tough story. It takes a second to settle into the animation style but its effectiveness carries you along after not too long. Flee expertly performs a balancing act between not shying away from the horrors of the story but also delivering on slices of life-affirming humanity where it can. One choice scene towards the end involving being driven somewhere by his brother particularly encapsulates this balance.
6. The Afterlight
Now if I may wear my slightly more pretentious than normal hat for a second allow me to introduce to you a film that I can’t even really recommend you watch as it only exists on a single reel of film, you can stop scoffing at me I know how it sounds. The truth is The Afterlight made me fall back in love with the art of editing and filmmaking very few other things have done. There are interesting ideas around the finite nature of film itself and by extension the people that appear within it, but for me The Afterlight centrally worked as the most startling example of the power of editing. You can really string any images together to create the illusion of relation, they don’t even have to look particularly similar. Somewhere Eisenstein is beaming.
5. Benedetta
In our latest edition of veteran directors reeling back the years we have Paul Verhoeven. Recently Verhoeven has become known as a cinematic provocateur, and on the face of it Benedetta adds nicely to this trajectory. However in amongst Paul having a good old time being slightly outrageous is a really strong anti-establishment, pro-love pro-belief story with overwhelming emotional sweeps of religious grandeur. Come for the blasphemy, stay for the Love.
4. The Worst Person in the World
Perhaps the apex statement in emotionally lost 30-somethings cinema. It’s a bit of a cheat code to shoot your film in summertime Oslo but this scenery combined with watching someone desperately trying to find their purpose is a potent cocktail for thinking you ought to up sticks and move to Norway while walking home from the Cinema at 11pm. Trier here is flexing as much of his directorial muscle without allowing the picture to fall into gimmick territory, Worst Person in the world is a treat for the eyes, the mind and the soul.
3. Aftersun
The discussion of “enjoyability” and how that pertains to the films you love is an interesting one. Did I enjoy Aftersun? It’s hard to really say. I can tell you it’s quite a steamrolling emotional experience. Hard to think of much else directly afterwards other than a sense of “now what”. Am I supposed to just carry on now that I have been flattened down into a thin melancholic paste spread across the floor? I do recommend it as a cathartic and strangely beautiful watch. But I would prepare for a subtle yet eventually all-encompassing sense of being wrung out to your very last morsel.
2. The Wonder
Depth is a term thrown around all too lightly in terms of film criticism, but you can take it from me as a high authority on filmic matters that The Wonder truly has an ideological and thematic depth, and one to which I have been mining each day since first watching it. Due to it’s odious popular streaming sight backing and fairly unassuming name/poster combination I wasn’t expecting a huge amount, but here I am stunned and shook to my core. The ace up The Wonder’s sleeve is of course that spellbinding soundtrack. It melted me in the cinema and continues to melt me to this day.
- Fire of Love
As you may have noticed if you are reading this list in the correct order – if you haven’t been I’ll be very cross – you’ll have noticed the titles closer to the top share a sense of making me very emotional and crying a lot. It will not surprise you then to hear that Fire of Love is no different. I will say in my defence each of these sweeping emotions has a different overall genre, and here with Fire of Love I am simply overcome with the power of both love and the earth. A timeless story of two star-crossed weirdos and their fascination with Mother Nature’s most spectacular creation – the Volcano, lovingly packaged in an accessible modern indie cinema body. I say to you dear reader, watch this as big and as loud as you possibly can and let it blow you away.
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