DECEMBER 24 — Even though the second half of 2022 has pretty much seen the end of quarantine life in most parts of the world, it still seemed like Malaysian cinemas haven’t fully recovered yet from that whole quarantine daze as there are still lots of major Hollywood movies that never made it into cinemas here.
The 15th General Election (and its aftermath) also meant that my work schedule was just too tight for me to be able to slip over to Singapore to catch the annual Singapore International Film Festival, which I’ve often used as the easiest way to catch up with most of the year’s festival titles I want to see.
Still, thanks to streaming and VOD platforms, I managed to catch (and love) way too many movies to make compiling a top 10 favourite films list a pretty darn hard exercise.
Again, a reminder, this is not what I think the best 10 films of 2022 are, but instead is a list of 10 films that I loved watching this year, for the many different reasons that I’ll elaborate on below. Enjoy!
Hit The Road
It’s immediately striking how assured, ambitious and masterful this debut feature film from Panah Panahi (son of Jafar Panahi) is, the moment its opening scene, shot from inside a car, hits you.
In an economic and very eloquent manner (by way of carefully orchestrated blocking and elegant camera pans, all in one shot), Panahi introduces us to the film’s four main characters — a family mysteriously on the road and on the run (for reasons never clearly explained) and the heartbreaking dynamics that play out during this journey.
It’s both classic Iranian cinema (landscapes, people talking in moving vehicles) and more, with one gorgeous sequence seamlessly incorporating (and paying tribute) to that cosmic final journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey that you never thought you’d see in an Iranian film.
Francois Truffaut once wrote that you’d be lucky to encounter even one ingenious sequence in most films, but this glorious debut has at least three or four of them. Wow.
Aftersun
Another strikingly assured debut feature, this time from Scottish-born, New York-based Charlotte Wells, Aftersun is almost as if Somewhere (my favourite Sofia Coppola film) was filtered through Moonlight, but with the precision of Hunger-era Steve McQueen.
A memory piece about a holiday involving an 11-yeard-old Sophie and her dad Calum somewhere in the 90s that only gradually reveals itself to be the recollection of an adult Sophie, the movie brims with the warmth, uncertainty, unreliability and sweetness of an old memory, and Wells captures all of this with alarming ease.
Anchored by two astonishing performances from Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio, this one’s as moving as they come.
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
Adapted from what’s reportedly an “unfilmable” Indonesian novel of the same title, Edwin’s major prizewinner in Locarno (it won the Golden Leopard for Best Film) is as messy, epic and mesmerising an adaptation that you can expect from an adaptation of a 250-pages long novel.
At face value, it plays like an homage to 80s Indonesian action flicks, but its epic story about a gangster named Ajo Kawir (Marthino Lio) and his great love affair with Iteung (Ladya Cheryl), which spans years and many jail sentences, provides Edwin with a platform to go big with emotions, as well as the many political subtexts littered throughout the film (it’s set during Suharto’s New Order regime), resulting in a film that I couldn’t take my eyes off of, even when I had no idea where it’s going to take me, which, frankly, is almost throughout the film.
Armageddon Time
James Gray is undoubtedly one of my favourite currently active American filmmakers, his 2013 film The Immigrant being one of the finest films made in the last decade or so.
His star-studded latest film Armageddon Time (which counts big names like Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Chastain as part of its cast) may at first seem like an Oscar-bait attempt since it’s a coming-of-age film concentrating on a pair of kids in the sixth grade during the early 80s.
But despite the warm performances, there’s nothing “soft” about the film at all. The lessons learned by the end of the film, about racism and white privilege, are very harsh indeed, and it will leave you thinking about the film for days afterwards. Absolutely unforgettable.
Decision To Leave
Director Park Chan-Wook (of Old Boy and The Handmaiden fame) won Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with this, and it’s really easy to see why even 10 minutes into the film, as it pairs some of the year’s most gorgeous cinematography with some truly striking editing strategies.
A murder mystery that plays like a film noir, complete with a femme fatale character (Tang Wei absolutely killing it here), there’s more than a touch of Vertigo in the film’s romantic longings, but director Park delights in teasing the audience into looking for the wrong feelings/sensations throughout the film, resulting in achingly mesmerising viewing experience.
Funny Pages
If you like your American indie films feel-bad, grubby, and just plain confrontational, like those 90s early classics from directors like Todd Solondz, Gregg Araki and Neil LaBute, then you’ll find a lot to love in this directing debut from actor Owen Kline.
Focusing on a teenage cartoonist named Robert (a delightfully unpleasant Daniel Zolghadri), who drops out of high school and moves out of his rich parents’ home in Princeton, New Jersey and rents a room in a dingy basement with two middle-aged men, all in the name of paying his dues and to feel closer to artistic authenticity, he then meets Wallace (an astoundingly, entertainingly paranoid Matthew Maher) whom he believes is a ticket for him to enter into the world of professional comics, and the stage is set for one of the most hilariously confrontational comedies I’ve seen in quite a while.
A very worthy challenger to the throne now being occupied by Joel Potrykus.
Fast & Feel Love
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit is, despite now working within the Thai studio system (he’s now made three films for Thai giants GDH), very comfortably in my top three favourite Thai filmmakers alongside Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Anocha Suwichakornpong.
His latest film Fast & Feel Love, while not reaching the heights of Heart Attack, his finest work so far, is still a pretty sensational and individual piece of entertainment, expertly balancing his individual filmmaking quirks with the more traditional needs of commercial filmmaking.
Focusing on the apparently very real phenomenon of “sport stacking” (competitive speed stacking of cups, I kid you not!), this mash-up of rom-com and coming of age dramedy will leave you contemplating things that you’d never thought you’d think about after watching a rom-com.
Il Buco
Very possibly an acquired taste, director Michelangelo Frammartino’s latest film, arriving 11 years after the similarly unclassifiable Le Quattro Volte, is also a dialogue-free combination of documentary and fiction.
It can’t really be a documentary since it’s a recreation of a spelunking expedition in Calabria in 1961, but you can’t really call it a movie as well because there isn’t a “narrative” in the traditional sense here.
What plays on screen is a playful rhyming/mirroring between two distinct sets of narratives/characters — one involving the spelunking mission and the other involving a shepherd, his donkeys/goats and friends.
How you watch the film (I suggest you approach it as if you’re watching a Jacques Tati comedy, by scanning the screen yourself and picking up what interests you) will also contribute to how rewarding you’ll find the film. I loved it.
Pearl
A surprise prequel shot back-to-back on the same location with X, director Ti West’s triumphant return to feature filmmaking after six long years, Pearl is such a gorgeously realised mash-up of old school Technicolour melodramas and serial killer origin story that it begs the question, why hasn’t this been done a lot more before this?
If Douglas Sirk decided to make Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer or one of the many Ted Bundy/Jeffrey Dahmer movies out there, we might get something like this.
As lovely as the filmmaking is (and that score sure is peachy!), the magic might not be the same without Mia Goth’s stellar performance here.
Both brutal and exquisite, this is a must-watch, no matter what your favourite film genre is.
The Fabelmans
The last time I really, really loved a Steven Spielberg movie was probably in 2005 with his absolutely barnstorming War Of The Worlds, still on repeat every few years on my Blu-ray player.
Seventeen years on, I can finally say the same about The Fabelmans, a reportedly autobiographical coming of age movie that hits all the sweet spots one might expect from a classic heartwarming Spielberg movie.
The movie centres on the Fabelman family, but the focus is on the cinema-crazy exploits of Sammy (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-Deford as an eight-year-old, and later by Gabriel LaBelle as a teenager), and the life lessons he experiences along the way.
Packing more meaning (and visual inventiveness) than its slight premise may promise to those who are less alert to these gifts, this is Spielberg at his most ingenious, playful and resourceful best.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
