Movies about movies have existed for as long as the movies themselves have existed, but 2022 was the year when the specific concept of spectacle shouldered its way to the front of the cultural conversation. Spectacle is striking, grandiose, and exceptional. It turns heads and magnetizes attention. As its etymology suggests, it is fundamentally about looking: the irresistible urge to gawk and the vexing hunger to be seen.
The past year gave us films than unabashedly embraced their role as delivery systems for spectacle, in both its glossiest varieties and its more provocative, discomfiting forms. Cinema grappled with the tremendous power of spectacle as a phenomenon and with its questionable hold on both artist and audience. It presented us with characters who imperiously demanded attention, those who desperately longed to be seen, and those who recoiled from the relentless gaze of the world. In narrative features, protagonists were challenged to look through the eyes of other people (and creatures), while in documentaries, viewers were invited to do the same. Also, Hong Sang-soo released a lot of films this year.
On that note, The Take-Up is proud to present the inaugural feature for a new era: our selections for the best films of 2022. You won’t find any rankings here, just a curated list of 30 films that we loved, as well as recommendations on where you can watch them.
Honorable Mentions: The Banshees of Inisherin, Benediction, Both Sides of the Blade, Catherine Called Birdy, Charli XCX: Alone Together, Corsage, Crimes of the Future, Descendant, The Innocents, Hold Me Tight, Hustle, Kimi, Resurrection, Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, Turning Red, The Woman King, X
After Yang
It’s a shame that After Yang — essayist-turned-director Kogonada’s gentle and heart-wrenching follow-up to Columbus (2017) — ended up being dumped on a streaming service in the spring of 2022. Buried under a heap of random offerings on Showtime and clouded by the positive response to two of Colin Farrell’s other 2022 performances in The Batman and The Banshees of Inisherin, the incomparable Irish actor turns in what is secretly his best role since at least The Beguiled (2017). However, he’s not the only draw: After Yang is an intricate, fragile film that perfectly captures the complex nature of mourning in the digital age. Perhaps its quiet reception is fitting for a movie so gracefully poignant. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Showtime and to rent on major online platforms.]
Aftersun
In her stunning debut future, writer-director Charlotte Wells confronts – to heart-rending effect – the convoluted relationship between the videographic record and our vivid yet imperfect recollections. Aftersun is a miracle movie of sorts: a precisely observed and bracingly personal memory space that is also an aching rumination on the tragedy and mystery of hindsight. Through Wells’ bone-deep understanding of her medium’s poetic potential, an ordinary resort holiday for a young father and his tween daughter becomes a shattered-glass puzzle of documentation and reminiscence. Aftersun asks, pointedly and devastatingly: Can we ever really know our parents as people? Perhaps so, but only in our dreams, and only after it’s too late to say goodbye. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Taking Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed as a straight-forward David vs. Goliath triumph is certainly one way to interpret her Nan Goldin doc. However, the great artist’s fights are far too complex to be neatly contained, and Goldin would probably be the first to point out there’s some futility in going up against the powers that be. The Sackler family, whose blood-stained Purdue Pharma money plastered their name on the hallowed halls that house the world’s most treasured art, are the same powers who allowed hundreds of Goldin’s friends to rapidly deteriorate into nothing during the AIDS crisis. They’re the same powers who obstructed the Goldin family’s pursuit of happiness to tragic ends. And yet they persist… One can also meet All the Beauty and the Bloodshed with pessimism, but to do so would simplify this wide-reaching statement. As this towering achievement in non-fiction filmmaking demonstrates, grace can still be achieved under seemingly insurmountable pressure. (Joshua Ray) [Screening Jan. 27 – 31 and Feb. 3 – 5 at the Webster University Film Series.]
Anaïs in Love
Those ready to proclaim the rom-com dead simply need to check elsewhere for a pulse. Like, France, for example: the birthplace of Anaïs in Love, a romantic comedy-drama better at tapping into this trifecta of emotions than anything comparable from the U.S. in 2022. Writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet is operating on another plane here with her feature debut, putting out the kind of work that others can’t reach even after many years at the helm. Star Anaïs Demoustier is superb in the title role, refusing to squander the part Bourgeois-Tacquet wrote specifically for her. The film’s portrait of a messy woman and her similarly chaotic love(s) is radically fresh in a way that every twee-tinged, quip-riddled, snark-heavy romcom screenplay wishes it could attain. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Hulu and to rent on major online platforms.]
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
Unfolding over the summer of 1969, Apollo 10 ½ is not the nostalgia bait some have falsely accused it of being. Using a style similar to the director’s first two experiments in rotoscoping — Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) — Richard Linklater recounts specific childhood memories (and makes just as many up) to convey a fantastical coming-of-age story like no other. Combining truth with fiction, the director crafts an ingenious semi-autobiography that is more nostalgic for the imagination of childhood than the hard facts of the time. By looking beyond what kids were literally doing over that historic summer, Linklater effectively taps into something far richer: what kids like him were thinking, dreaming, feeling, hoping, and fantasizing about as the world changed around them and nothing seemed impossible anymore. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Netflix.]
Armageddon Time
Of all the filmmakers to use 2022 as an opportunity to look back on their childhoods, James Gray’s Armageddon Time is no doubt the most devastating. Saddled with grief, shame, regret, and so much loss — loss of innocence, of life, of freedom, of respect — it’s the sort of movie one walks out of feeling solemn and melancholic. This is a good thing, to be clear: Gray has tapped into something weighty and painful in this illustration of Jewish life in Queens, 1980. Supported by the most underrated ensemble of the year — Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in the parental roles, Anthony Hopkins as the grandfather, and Jaylin Webb as our main character’s only friend — Armageddon Time adeptly wrestles with race, class, and privilege as it deconstructs the myth of an all-inclusive American Dream. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Beba
Many filmmakers came to 2022 with pseudo-autobiographies in hand. Steven Spielberg and James Gray took time machines back to their childhoods. Charlotte Welles and Ricky D’Ambrose built small-scale memory palaces of theirs. Joanna Hogg visited ghosts of mothers passed. There’s no “pseudo” in the telling of Beba, however. Rebeca “Beba” Huntt’s shamefully underseen debut feature is a cinematic scrapbook of her history, both direct and indirect. Hers is also the history of the U.S. Black and Latinx immigrant experience, a psychic wound shared by the fractured Huntt family and millions of others. The dazzling vastness of her collage isn’t the source of its great strength, though. It’s the love and understanding with which each piece is placed, even when doing so can be deeply painful. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on Hulu and to rent on major online platforms.]
Bones and All
After precariously entering the “big leagues” with the respectable yet ravishing Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino threw buckets of blood on the silver screen and giddily turned away from good taste with his Suspiria remake. Bones and All continues the trend. Those who were pissed that Oliver didn’t eat The Peach in the director’s 2017 Oscar-winner should bear witness to Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet eating people, well, bones and all. His cannibal Bonnie and Clyde is yet another termite/white elephant chimera, and like all of his output, what drives it across a melancholy Midwest is desire. The young queer love is quite literally all-consuming, and while the metaphor is as pronounced as Mark Rylance’s southern drawl here, it’s nevertheless swoon-worthy. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to purchase on major online platforms.]
Decision to Leave
a.k.a Investigate Me Like One of Your French Girls. No one understands obsession quite like Park Chan-wook, and the filmmaker’s deliriously watchable romantic neo-noir proffers a notion as tantalizing as it is perverse: obsession as another kind of love. Heartfelt gifts and physical intimacy might satisfy most couples, but Decision to Leave’s doomed lovers – a haunted Park Hae-il and a deliciously enigmatic Tang Wei – hunger for deeper expressions of devotion. Interrogation, surveillance, and suspicion become love languages in their fucked-up tango of death and desire. What’s more, the film is as formally dazzling as it is entertaining: Park’s direction has never felt so dauntless, or so shamelessly hot-and-bothered over the potential of cinema. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on MUBI and to rent on major online platforms.]
Elvis
Upon first watch, this critic had some minor qualms with Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. While most of them fell on the shoulders of Tom Hanks and his baffling turn as Colonel Parker, the script’s pacing, its handling of Elvis Presley’s thornier aspects, and even parts of Austin Butler’s devoted performance also stuck out as reasonable critiques. Something interesting happened in the six months since then, however. Elvis didn’t go away. Elvis embedded itself in the mind. As title after buzzy awards season title came and went with little impact, Elvis got better and better with hindsight. Looking back — and supplemented by rewatches — even qualms can be strengths in a movie this unabashedly batty. It’s Baz Luhrmann’s magnum opus, and it remains one of the unimpeachable greats of 2022. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on HBO Max and to rent on major online platforms.]
EO
A title card before the closing credits of EO assures the audience that none of the many living creatures in the film had been harmed, and it was “made out of love for animals.” The message is appreciated but also redundant, as Jerzy Skolomoski’s Au hasard Balthazar update is among the finest odes to the natural world and its inhabitants. The title card has another implication in the necessity for it, as EO ventures through human folly and the capacity for cruelty that comes from it. Yet somehow, in his sixth decade of filmmaking, the Polish iconoclast has also shared his most beguiling vision – one that proves people also have the ability to do something beautiful. (Joshua Ray) [Available soon to rent or purchase.]
The Eternal Daughter
If, as Mitzi Fabelman puts it in The Fabelmans, “movies are dreams that you’ll never forget,” then The Eternal Daughter is Joanna Hogg’s lucid nightmare. A ghostly forest fog guides Julie and her mother (both Tilda Swinton) to an ivy-covered hotel in the Welsh countryside. Their destination is a haunted memory palace, and Hogg’s third Souvenir entry – possibly, unofficially, or ostensibly, depending on one’s interpretation – is Val Lewton doing The Turn of the Screw on 16mm color film. Like the B-grade horror producer’s output and Henry James’ novella, The Eternal Daughter isn’t about the scares but the gnawing pain associated with something more tangible than fantastic ghosts. This haunting has metastasized to the director and her fictional stand-in’s grief and memories, and they attempt to remove it through the film’s arresting poioumenon telling. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Daniels bestowed an apt title on their exhilarating, eye-popping, go-for-broke science-fiction fable. What other name would suffice for a confetti-gun blast of dimension-hopping, martial-arts action that tackles regret, depression, nihilism, love, marriage, parenting, immigration, and the paralyzing over-stimulation of contemporary existence? What other moniker could apply to a feature in which a jaw-dropping kung fu butt-plug rumble squeezes comfortably alongside an embodiment of despair and self-loathing so powerful that it threatens to devour all of existence? Fantastically dense but somehow not overstuffed, gleefully juvenile but also shamelessly earnest, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the kind of heedlessly ambitious movie-movie that resembles a diamond in the multiplex rough. It’s a true feat of cinematic acrobatics from intrepid, inventive filmmakers working without a net. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Showtime and to rent on major online platforms.]
The Fabelmans
It’s that time once again. Another year-end list, another chance to pay some respect to Steven Spielberg. If last year’s West Side Story wasn’t enough to convince moviegoers of the vitality still pumping through America’s greatest septuagenarian artist, they need only spend five minutes with his film à clef, The Fabelmans. Ignore all that corny “love letter to cinema” stuff from the ad campaign that audiences by and large tend to avoid anyway. The Fabelmans isn’t some sentimental missive to the medium; far from it. Spielberg’s latest – his finest in maybe 20 years – is a nuanced and vulnerable trip across genres and state lines, a wrestling match between real life and the one imagined, an introspective act of cinematic open-heart surgery. Plus, its final scene and closing shot make for 2022’s most joyous moments at the movies. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to purchase on major online platforms.]
Great Freedom
An ineffable mingling of bliss and angst is secreted like contraband between the lines of Sebastian Meise’s understated, quietly shattering prison story. Nominally a historical drama about Germany’s post-WWII criminalization of homosexuality, Great Freedom centers on the turbulent relationship that emerges between a recidivist convict and his violent, hard-bitten cellmate. Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich deliver two of the year’s most magnificent performances, flawlessly conveying the fevered confusion of two people fumbling their way into a bond that is frightening precisely because it is so unexpectedly nourishing. The desolating beauty of Great Freedom is summed up in its final shot: a man just sitting, calm and content in the knowledge that he will soon be reunited with the only person who matters. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on MUBI and to rent on major online platforms.]
Happening
Sharply adapting the autobiographical novel by newly minted Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, director Audrey Diwan delivers a harrowing abortion story where the proverbial woman-in-trouble finds herself bereft of support and short on viable options. In 1963, both the criminal code and French society at large are arrayed against Annie (fantastically portrayed by Anamaria Vartolomei), a pregnant university student whose rising panic becomes positively claustrophobic as the weeks tick past. Diwan’s approach is at once brutally unsentimental and uncommonly incisive, deftly depicting the crisscrossing lines of gender and class that box Annie into a seemingly inescapable corner. Brilliantly shot, strikingly reserved, and unfailingly riveting, Happening resonates with the unfortunately timeless vitality of all great stories about women compelled to take matters into their own hands. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on AMC+ and to rent on major online platforms.]
In Front of Your Face
Following The Woman Who Ran (2020) and Introduction (2021), In Front of Your Face confirms what Hong Sang-soo fans had long been suspecting: the inimitable and improvisational South Korean filmmaker is on a hot streak. Utilizing his trusty two-part narrative structure — which recurs numerous times in his prolific filmography — Hong tells the story of a retired actress named Sangok (Lee Hye-yeong) who, while visiting with her sister, is presented with an offer to make one last film. Picking up on the same fears and anxieties touched on in Introduction, In Front of Your Face is one of the most quietly life-affirming works of the year, one capped with a perfect final punchline. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Introduction
If one counts Walk Up (2022) — which premiered at the New York Film Festival in October before being filed away for a 2023 U.S. release — Hong Sang-soo had four films hit the States in 2022. Introduction was the first, and also marks the director’s first time serving as his own cinematographer. (It’s a trend he continued in all subsequent films, and one he’ll hopefully maintain for the foreseeable future.) On the surface, Introduction is a film made up of three important conversations centering around a man named Young-ho (Seok-ho Shin). Underneath, it’s an incredibly personal work from Hong, who, in South Korea, has been the subject of many a tabloid headline as of late — not only for his relationship with frequent collaborator Kim Min-hee but also for his rumored struggles with his eyesight. Introduction is the most overlooked of the three Hong features on this list, but it’s nevertheless deserving of adoration. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Mad God
A gleefully filthy post-apocalyptic vision 30 years in the making, animation legend Phil Tippett’s Mad God is a singular work of experimental horror. It’s less a proper narrative than a descent, a hallucinatory journey into the bowels of a steampunk nightmare caked in eons of rust, mud, slime, blood, and shit. (Imagine Dante’s Inferno mashed up with Pink Floyd: The Wall and re-enacted by an R-rated Pee-wee’s Playhouse and you’re halfway there.) To the skeptical, Tippett’s delectably repellent, exquisite-corpse magnum opus might seem like little more than a succession of gooey, aimless spectacles. However, Mad God groans with the wrathful energy of an artist’s unchained creativity, vomiting forth all the grotesque terrors wrought by modern warfare, industry, and ideologies. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on AMC+ and Shudder and to rent on major online platforms.]
Murina
All that time working on Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) prepped actor Cliff Curtis for a much smaller, but just as aquatic film: Murina, writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s tense psychological drama about a young teen (Gracija Filipovic), her troubled relationship with her father (Leon Lucev), and her shot at escaping his stranglehold in the form of wealthy friend Javier (Curtis). Kusijanovic’s film is rife with equal parts beauty and violence, a delicate balance she handles with grace. It takes real prowess to take the film’s Adriatic Sea setting — which could be a set piece in a Mamma Mia! sequel in different hands — and transform it into a craggy hell on earth. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that Murina is her first feature-length film. Here’s to her next one (and every new one after that). (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Showtime and to rent on major online platforms.]
Nope
Nope isn’t just great because it seems to contain myriad preoccupations of other key films from 2022: the Black experience; the Black experience through cinema; defining and navigating great loss; humans and animals; humans as animals; the role of the artist; the art and purpose of storytelling. Jordan Peele’s third directorial effort isn’t just great because he’s achieved a fierce perfection to his brand of culturally astute tinker boxes. His self-aware telling doesn’t simply signal, it illuminates. Nope is great not just for its countless memorable passages, including small grace notes like the Haywood sibling giddily slapping palms in the face of potential doom. Nope is great because it manages to carry all this weight while cautiously (and brashly and triumphantly) balancing a tightrope flanked by “bad miracles” and ecstatic visions of possibility. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on Peacock and to rent on major online platforms.]
The Northman
When it comes to historical epics, meticulous period production design and gorgeous cinematography are not necessarily indicators of overall cinematic artistry. What, then, separates Robert Eggers’ brutal and electrifying Dark Ages revenge saga from the (wolf) pack? Ultimately, it is the cruel seamlessness of The Northman’s immersive vision that distinguishes it from so many mangy also-rans, coaxing it to vibrate with unparalleled mythic power. In crafting his bloody, ashen take on the ur-tragedy that would one day become a play about a sulking Danish price, Eggers plunges us – completely and ruthlessly – into a pagan world eleven centuries removed from our own, a world ruled by gruesome violence, dark omens, and implacable destiny. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Amazon Prime and to rent on major online platforms.]
The Novelist's Film
When Hong Sang-soo took on the role of cinematographer with Introduction (2021), he entered into territory few filmmakers have: sextuple duty. Hong is now solely responsible for writing, directing, producing, shooting, editing, and scoring his own films. The result has been nothing short of exceptional, with Introduction, In Front of Your Face, and now The Novelist’s Film proving to be highlights of 2022 as well as career-bests for Hong. What’s more, The Novelist’s Film is the pinnacle of these three: experimental and confessional, hitting all those expected Hong beats through the thinnest shroud of fiction yet to create a truly transcendent, overwhelmingly beautiful work. It marks a new level of honesty and openness from a filmmaker who has never shied away from reality in all its messiness. (Kayla McCulloch) [Available soon to rent or purchase.]
Rock Bottom Riser
I am a rock I am an island/And a rock feels no pain/And an island never cries. Filmmaker Fern Silva cocks his head at these Simon and Garfunkel lyrics and appropriates them to his own ends in his experimental documentary Rock Bottom Riser . The land is the people, the people are the land, and their sorrow is shared between them. A metaphysical lack of definitional boundaries gives this meditative yet punk-as-fuck portrait of Hawaii, its Indigenous people, and their colonization its shape. That isn’t easily traceable though, because Silva reaches deep down into the molten core of the earth before launching into the cosmos and back between visits to some truly talented vapers, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and other corners of his free-wheeling galaxy-brain. (Joshua Ray) [Available soon to rent or purchase.]
Saint Omer
So much of Saint Omer rests on Guslagie Malanda’s face, even if she isn’t tasked to do much with it. Director Alice Diop uses her like Robert Bresson used his actors – as “models.” Her Laurence is drained of expression, and from behind the courtroom stand she coldly details how she came to commit infanticide. In the spectator seats sits Kayije Kagam as Rama, the pregnant journalist who finds herself identifying with the immigrant and murderer. They never properly meet, but among the purposeful stillness conjured up by Diop and D.P. Claire Mathon is a psychic vibration between the two Black women swimming in a sea of white faces. By removing any potential obstructions in bearing witness to this, Diop knows her audience will naturally assume the roles of judge and jury before proving that process a tool of the same oppression that brought them into this room in the first place. (Joshua Ray) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Stars at Noon
For her second film of 2022 (after the almost-great Both Sides of the Blade), Claire Denis turned to a 1986 novel by Denis Johnson, The Stars at Noon. The two seem like awkward bedfellows, but Stars at Noon proves them well-matched to “measure the exact dimensions of hell,” as Margaret Qualley drunkenly smirks here. In the French master’s version of the apocalyptic playground, the protagonist’s ellipses-filled thoughts become essential mysteries writ-large with Qualley’s doe-eyed desperation. Civil war-torn Nicaragua is now without a specific conflict or time, save for our present Covid-19 disaster. And note the article drop in the film’s title: Denis the novelist points, while Denis the filmmaker gestures. Hers is an ephemeral inferno of sensation and a void without definable dimension – no matter how much booze, black market currency, and desperate fucking you throw into it. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on Hulu and to rent on major online platforms.]
Tár
It’s a credit to Todd Field’s mesmerizing, challenging character study that even the most enthusiastic Tár-heads (sorry) can’t agree on what the hell the film is about. Is it a politically thorny cancel culture parable? A Miltonian plea for sympathy for the Devil? A guilt-wracked, gothic-tinged nightmare? The brilliance of Field’s intimidatingly dense screenplay and precise yet slippery direction lies in the way that they invite so many interpretations, much like the compositions of the masters that Lydia Tár reveres. This is not an inscrutable film, but a manifold one, destined for decades of study. At the center of it all is a never-better Cate Blanchett, exuding velvety magnetism even as she betrays the icy heart and trembling terror beneath it. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Who wants an easy love story at the movies? Conflict is the backbone of drama! Why not spin a tale where the conflict lies in questioning the very nature of love, the well-worn storybook structure, and the reasons why we even tell these stories to begin with? And goddamnit, it’s going to be between nine foot-tall djin and the myth scholar who wakes him from an eons-long slumber. People are going to be hot for Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba working up a mystical, metaphysical sweat in the bedroom, after all. And yet, perhaps appropriately so, Three Thousand Years of Longing faded quickly from collective consciousness, if it was really ever there to begin with. Fool’s errand or not, Miller’s exquisitely wonky symphony for-the-ages is all the more welcome when almost everyone else working on his scale is churning out forgettable filler. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Women Talking
Ingeniously adapting Miriam Toews’ defiantly un-cinematic novel, Sarah Polley crafts her finest film to date, a story of “female imagination” that vibrates with the nervous energy of a nascent, unexplored world. In an isolated, conservative religious community somewhere in America, women and girls assemble in a hayloft to decide what they will do about the men who have abused, violated, and dismissed them. Polley works a kind of magic trick, transforming the act of public, collective debate into a pulsing drama as thrilling as any action sequence. At the heart of this affecting, deceptively rich tale gutters a flame of subtle bravery, one that illuminates a future that is (maybe) more just, hopeful, and compassionate. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now playing in select theaters.]
You Won't Be Alone
At once gnarly, cruel, and ruminative, Goran Stolevski’s boldly eccentric folk-horror tale of body-snatching witches ultimately owes more to Terrence Malick than it does to The Hidden or The Thing. In 19th-century Macedonia, a freshly liberated young weirdling sows her demonic oats by hopping from skin-suit to skin-suit, sampling all the curious delights and sorrows that the human world has to offer. Stolevski doesn’t skimp on the viscera or the brutality, but the spellbinding You Won’t Be Alone is not so much a horror film as a narrative poem about the terrible, beautiful mystery of existence. Cerebral stuff, but Stolevski’s direction is so focused and assured that these potentially discordant elements harmonize into a gorgeous and poignant work of cinema. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
