by Alex Rudolph, Contributor

Hello! Thank you, as always, for reading my year in review. I wrote a ton this year, primarily on weekly reviews for shows like The Dropout, Better Call Saul and Barry, but I didn’t get out to theaters that much. My wife was pregnant until June and then after that we had a baby, diminishing what was already a diminished schedule. You always write these things having seen less than you’d like to have, but 2022 was an especially theater-free year for me. I’m sure next month I’ll wish I had been able to see something like Memoria pre-list, but there are ten great movies here as it is.

I’d like to give a few special shout-outs. My favorite TV series of the year were The Rehearsal, Reservation Dogs, The Deep End, Barry, Pam and Tommy, White Lotus and especially Better Call Saul. I didn't think the movie was great, but there's a scene in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent where Pedro Pascal and Nicolas Cage are on drugs and Pascal fake laughs, and it's the funniest thing in the world. Everything Everywhere All At Once was terrific, with Daniels fulfilling and surpassing the promise that Neveldine/Taylor made so many years ago. The first 20 minutes and the last 10 minutes of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story are perfect.

I also wanted to mention Ted K, a Ted Kaczynski biopic starring Sharlto Copley, with a brilliant Blanck Mass soundtrack. Really, really good stuff, though I saw basically no mention of it this year (I think the Blanck Mass involvement was my only tip that it existed). There's a scene where Ted is walking through the serene Montana wilderness and a jet blasts by overhead, like a Terrence Malick film being invaded by a Michael Bay one. "Serial killer biopic" is a bloated genre that carries so much baggage, but Ted K shrugs all of that off.

I didn’t love Men, but I respect the hell out of the decision to end a movie like that. I think we’re seeing more big swings in that vein, and I want nothing more in the world.

Don’t like my writing? Call 1-800-KISS MY ASS (like if I was a truck driver and you were behind me and saw that on my bumper (just kidding, you can dislike my writing, just please don’t tell me).

10. Nope (dir. Jordan Peele)

It’s Jordan Peele’s worst movie, but that’s still more interesting than almost everything out there. Nobody else is using their clout to make stuff like this, that’s both idiosyncratic yet crowd-pleasing enough that you know he’s going to get the money to make something just as specific next time around.

This one didn’t completely work for me— “world building” is often a pretty empty term in science fiction and horror because it ends up meaning “there were a lot of props!” or “the characters referred to people and events that we didn’t even see!” But Nope was a little too lop-sided there for me. The monkey television half was perfect. That’s some good-ass world building. The Jean Jacket parts, despite the Jesus Lizard shirts and the Fry’s Electronics visits (RIP to the perfect chain where I bought my first stereo and a stupid amount of cheap DVDs), weren’t as great. I think about the destructive power of chimps every time I see one. Project Nim and Brian Posehn’s old stand-up bit about the real zookeeper who brought a chimp a birthday cake will make you very aware of how bizarre it is that some people just clown around with chimps like “this is my lil’ buddy!” That’s the perfect concept to anchor your story about spectacle and people’s disrespect for nature. Maybe Nope would be closer to the top if it had built directly off that. The pivot feels too far. But I still liked the movie a lot.

9. Kimi (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

Speaking of Men a little earlier, you know who else can take big swings? Steven Soderbergh. Kimi isn’t one of those. It’s probably his most straightforward movie in a decade, a great reminder that the guy who made Schizopolis and goes off filming entire features on his phone is also one of the best pure action-thriller directors. His “pay the bills” mode is as exciting as his “third experiment of the year” mode.

I wish more movies were structured like this, where the tension and action increase exponentially. I love a slow burn, but this thing is always going, the rare fast burn that isn’t already ash by act two. The last big scene in Kimi is twice as wild as the thing that came before it, which is twice as wild as the thing that came before that. I know how movies are made— I don’t think they shot this in an afternoon— but by the time it was done I still felt like I’d watched Zoe Kravitz run consecutive marathons.

8. Apollo 10 1/2 (dir. Richard Linklater)

Nobody does nostalgia better than The Link. He’s also probably the only person to ever rotoscope somebody else’s old animation. This feels like a mash-up of Spalding Gray and Joe Frank monologues, which is the highest compliment you can give a thing.

I didn’t understand the decision to animate at first, especially compared to Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, but the color palette is gorgeous. Even without the little picture-in-picture flourishes and big crowd scenes that clearly didn’t include 30 live actors, the colors make the animation a beautiful choice.

7. Dual (dir. Riley Stearns)

It’s amazing, the way this felt like it would be unbearably tense— not in a cliched, meaningless way, but actually unbearable, actually “if this keeps going, I’m going to have to turn this off”— and then I wanted it to last another hour. And I don’t actually want that. I just wanted more presence of mind in that moment. I wanted to luxuriate in every detail. Because everything here is a choice. The fonts in the web and text interfaces, the name of the porn Karen Gillan’s character is watching, the ad underneath that porn, the moments otherwise stiff characters are allowed to be sarcastic or outwardly pissed. It’s a contrived movie, to the point that the sparseness of the scenes, surely at least somewhat a result of COVID safety regulations, feels like a choice. I wish everybody gave this much of a shit about their art. The end is a gut punch that becomes easier to take with a few perfect jokes, which is so smart because it quickly gets you back into a headspace where you can deal with what the movie’s trying to say. You end up lingering on the real themes and not the violence that gets you to them. Karen Gillan remains an underrated talent.

6. Emily the Criminal (dir. John Patton Ford)

You feel like a college freshman after his first comp lit class saying this, but it’s true— all crime stories are stories about capitalism. Still, this one goes out of its way to channel the still-living spirit of Ken Loach.

It’s not that I already related to Emily, though as a person who worked a dead-end job for five years and went through the application and interview process a couple times this year, I absolutely did. It’s that the movie did such a good job tying me into her experiences and desperation. You could be a Libertarian with an empathy gauge operating at 5% and I have to imagine you’d still understand why she does everything she does and why there aren’t many other options.

But if anybody’s out here praising Emily the Criminal for being the rare heist film about money, they’re goofin’. They’re goofin’ hard. They’re Person the Goof about Emily the Criminal, the sixth best film I saw this year.

5. Fire of Love (dir. Sara Dosa)

Like all great documentaries about scientists dying in a volcano, this is streaming on Disney+.

Fire of Love is such an emotional watch that I don’t want to talk much about it, but learning about two people who loved each other explore their love of the natural world after losing faith in politics, etc. was deeply touching. Sara Dosa nails every decision she makes here, and she isn’t afraid to make some unorthodox ones. You know, for example, that the couple is going to die, but when that part of the story comes, she almost rushes through it. The tragedy isn’t the point and this isn’t Dateline.

4. We Need To Talk About Cosby (dir. W. Kamau Bell)

W. Kamau Bell's 4-hour-long analysis of Bill Cosby and everything else in the world might have ranked higher if I felt more secure about calling it a movie. It aired in four parts on Showtime and you can watch it as a TV show on their app, but it also premiered in one big chunk at Sundance. I'm taking Robert Redford's (employees') decision as permission to include it here. Showtime's chapter descriptions made it sound like the first 75% of We Need To Talk About Cosby would be about all of the successes, with an hour at the end about the downfall. Brilliantly, Bell mixes it all together. Because, as he and his interviewees make clear, you can't separate it.

When I say this is about Cosby and everything else in the world, I mean it. The people in this documentary are discussing the way white people report on Black men, about Black women being believed, about an entire entertainment industry built to protect men who make money. They're talking about a guy who fooled you so that he could then abuse all of these women. The stand-up and The Cosby Show made him feel like America's dad, the most trustworthy guy you could imagine, and the laughter those albums brought to me in the family car on road trips was as much a tool he employed as any drugs were. I wish We Need To Talk About Cosby-level thought was put into every piece of media that goes after topics this big.

3. Barbarian (dir. Zach Cregger)

This has more of the kind of pacing I praised in Kimi. As an experience, it was almost unrivaled for me, and I wasn’t even able to see Barbarian in theaters.

You know what I love? A horror movie that gets popular without a big hook and especially a horror movie where everybody’s telling each other not to spoil anything when there isn’t even a twist. Twists are easy. Getting by on the strength of your pacing and ideas is hard. Keeping me in the palm of your hand while your movie characters explore a big, mostly-empty basement is hard. This is Zach Cregger’s first big movie since Miss March. I haven’t seen The Whale yet, but this sounds like a much bigger comeback to me. I already knew I liked Brendan Fraser. Zach Cregger was a guy who had made some sketch comedy I liked my freshman year of college. And I didn’t even like it enough to keep the series DVDs when I moved back home. And now I’ll line up for whatever he’s got coming next.

2. Palm Trees and Power Lines (dir. Jamie Dack)

I watched this online through Sundance last January and it’s stuck in my mind as well as things I watched last week. I haven’t been describing plots in these little blurbs because you can see any of them for yourself, but Palm Trees and Power Lines doesn’t hit regular theaters for a few months, so here’s condensed explanation: A teenager, played by Lily McInerny, slowly ends up in a relationship with a guy twice her age, played by Jonathan Tucker. It’s very much a passive voice “ends up in a relationship” case, too. He helps her deal with a creep and then he meticulously grooms her until they’re secretly dating. Gretchen Mol plays the girl’s mother, who cares about her daughter, but maybe not enough. Maybe nobody can save a lonely, alienated kid from making mistakes.

I related to McInerny’s teen ennui and loneliness, but the movie does a good job reminding you how young she is and that you can’t truly relate to her, that you’re almost certainly closer in age and lifestyle to the abuser than to the teen who’s making pinky promises and doing high school homework. There’s a distance between the characters and the film never plays with POV or subjectivity enough to make you believe he could be a good guy. This, despite incredible performances where you can see in the older man what the younger woman wants/needs to see. You know it’s bullshit, but the actors let you see it.  You can hear the waterfall coming at the end of the river, but you understand why McInerny’s character wouldn’t be self-possessed or aware enough to paddle in a different direction.

1. Amsterdam (dir. David Ugh. Russell)

Just kidding. Can you even imagine wanting to see Amsterdam? Can you imagine going to the theater to see Amsterdam and walking in and there are other people seated and ready to watch Amsterdam? Who gave David O. Russell the money to make Amsterdam? I say this as a person who liked Silver Linings Playbook and thought it handled mental illness surprisingly well: Nobody needs this guy making movies anymore.

1.  TÁR (dir. Todd Field)

I felt the wait. I read about the projects Todd Field couldn’t get off the ground, the HBO pilots that didn’t get series orders, got whatever I could glean from people who were attached to those projects. It felt like Field would be a Lynn Ramsey or a Lodge Kerrigan but then Lynn Ramsey managed to make two more movies and Kerrigan co-ran a TV show, and Field was alone. When I finally had the chance to see a new Todd Field movie, I wanted to go in totally clean, which meant not watching any trailers. It was maybe a dumb move (one of the Little Children trailers stands by itself as a great piece of art). But when you treasure something, when the world finally gets ready for the return of a god-level filmmaker, you do what feels right.

Seeing TÁR in theaters was important, and ended up being the first thing I saw in a “real” theater in six months (apologies to the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society, whose home, PhilaMOCA, isn’t a traditional movie theater, but does make every traditional theater look like stinky trash). The baby could keep me from a lot of things but I snuck two-and-a-half hours away to sit with this one. 

I’m glad I did that for two big reasons:

1. The sound was very good.

2. My screening was 3/4 full and the crowd’s reactions worked pretty well for me. I hate when people laugh at awkwardness that isn’t supposed to be funny. Not Nathan For You awkwardness, but the kind there’s no escape from and that you either deal with head-on or with a giggle. And early in this movie, a lot of people were laughing with Lydia Tár. When a student in the film said they’re “BIPOC pangender,” people laughed. And that wasn’t a joke. People were laughing at this character because they thought they were supposed to and that this was a movie about older people righteously pushing against the younger world. If anything, I thought it went pretty hard in the other direction. I might have thought the movie was preaching to the choir had I not been sitting in the choir and heard a few subtle “amens” at weird times. It’s possible I misread the movie’s intentions, but by the halfway point or so, it seemed clear Lydia Tár was a crappy human being and that she was complaining about the damage of whispers and allegations despite having done demonstrably bad things. There was truth behind the allegations and we weren’t all watching a person get torn down unfairly.

For a few weeks before the screening, I had been noticing (in the news, not in my personal life) the way people get angriest when you call them on a lie. When a person lies to you and you don’t let them, they get pissed that you aren’t following the part of the social contract that says we don’t push each other on our bullshit, even if it’s clearly bullshit. Lydia Tár is the best example of that in art. But the film is also about so much more. It was a perfect movie to read about, both for other perspectives and to have other folks point out the little details you didn’t pick up on. There are things in the literal shadows here that I wouldn’t have noticed without help.

Nobody knows what this thing is about, and for once that means it’s good art and not simply muddled and vague. It means you’ve got Cate Blanchett doing such a good job with such a good crew that you as an audience member can’t immediately see her winking and mumbling “This is how you’re supposed to feel about what just happened.”

It’s a fun movie to think about. There’s so much going on, so many moments you can juggle around in your head. And I love a movie title with hidden significance. The title is like a product’s packaging. It’s there to help sell you on the thing, to get you into the theater, but if you can use it to elucidate something after you’ve already got me, I’m going to think you’re some kind of wizard. The last time I really got knocked out by one of those was Kajillionaire. In TÁR, and this is a spoiler, the disgraced Lydia Tár returns to her parents’ house in America. Her brother shows up and they have a detached conversation. He’s clearly put up with a lot of her shit. He reveals to the audience that her name isn’t even Lydia, but Linda. She’s been distancing herself from her normal, boring upbringing by adopting a slightly more exotic name. And then you walk home and look at your ticket, and you wonder if there even needed to be an accent above the “a” in her last name. It’s pronounced like the noun “tar,” nothing special. You wonder if the character changed that part of her name, too, if she’s been deceiving you from the time you learned Todd Field was making a new movie and you saw its title on some website a year ago. And you realize you’ve been under this movie’s spell for a long time.