Films. I definitely watched them in 2022, but their position on my list of priorities isn't what it once was, there was other stuff going on and this meant that I didn't get to film festivals, make as many trips into the cities or generally venture much further than the local Cineworld. Unlike the past two years I can't blame COVID on my lack of film viewing as the world sluggishly, and quite bewilderingly given the huge opportunity for change for the better, insisted on reverting back to normal as quickly as it could. COVID obviously had an impact on the schedules at the cinema though, both in that there was less films rattling in the system for distributors to get out there, and also cinema chains reeling from COVID's huge financial losses (particularly Cineworld) were reluctant to show anything other than a surefire big screen success, something that nowadays usually requires a superhero or some wizarding. But there was still enough out there to create the usual lists and so create the usual lists I have;
The 10 Best New Films I Saw At The Cinema
1. Everything Everywhere All At Once
The undeniable stand out of the year. An incredible explosion of imagination, creativity and invention that managed to have a go at twanging every emotion I have in the space of its too short running time, whilst simultaneously expressing the purest of love for every type of cinema imaginable. The closest I've seen to a modern masterpiece in quite a while.
2. Men
Any other year this would have screamed to number one on it's last 20 minutes alone. Being at number two is no slight though, instead it simply shows you just how good EEAAO really was. So good I'm now talking about it in the space meant for another film, apologies to Alex Garland for bringing his amazing movie out in the wrong year.
3. The Banshees Of Inisherin
Such a slow creeper of a film. The story is so slight, but the performances - particularly Barry Keoghan - are incredible, the dialogue an understated joy and the layers of allegory mean it gets to live rent free in your head for a lot longer than you'd maybe expect it to do so.
4. Avatar: The Way Of The Water
I've already typed about how this film is a glorious litany of contradiction, but for me what makes it a top five movie of the year is the largest contradiction that I failed to mention. It's quite clearly a cartoon, but nobody considers it that way. Even those who tear into its abundant cliche, contrivance and clumsy stereotyping talk about it as if it's all real, but none of it is. What an achievement.
5. X
I've always had a soft spot for Ti West's deliberately creaking pace that he brings to every one of his films with varying degrees of success. This was a huge success.
6. The Menu
When Cinema realised that filling every screen with Thor grinning his shit eating grin at flat uninspired CGI nonsenese wasn't going to save anything, choice slowly began to creep back in to the multiplex and leading the way was this lovely little character piece that dared to show intelligence, comment on society and be allegorical at a time when audiences were expected to endure things like characters saying 'MY AXE!' at an axe, that they are holding.
7. Something In The Dirt
In many years time film historians will look back and see a little seam of movies that can be classed as COVID movies, made under the recent restrictions that necessitated small crews, even smaller casts, and single locations with enough space that everybody can maintain their 2 metre distance from each other. Most would see this as a limitation, but Moorhead & Benson instead took it as a starting point from which their imaginations flourished. A shit ton of maths in it too, nice.
8. Crimes Of The Future
Purest distilled Cronenberg. It's not going to be for everyone, but then wasn't that always par for the course with Cronenberg?
9. Parallel Mothers
A plot that if made by other directors would get played as kooky, but which Almodovar imbues with all the gravitas required whilst still admirably retaining a frothiness to prevent things getting overbearing, something I doubt he'd manage if he didn't have Penelope Cruz's superb performance guiding him through it all.
10. Barbarian
One of those 'the less you know the more you will enjoy' movies, whch means I'm not going to even exhort you to watch it. I'm just going to let you observe how it's in tenth place preventing excellent films such as Licorice Pizza and Nitram from having their moment to shine, and let you figure it out.
Outside of the cinema on the small screen I did my best to keep up with what I could, but my small screen changed locations this year which slowed viewing down considerably. Not just this but also an unhealthy investment in the myriad of Marvel TV shows (and also a mention for TV of the year Better Call Saul and runner up Ozark) meant I didn't watch a great deal of new movies, although there were five I did see that deserve a recommend.
The 5 Best New Films I Saw On My TV
1. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Of course the biggest mystery is how we've ended up in a place that a film this good somehow isn't being shown on every screen across the country on Boxing Day and single handedly saving cinema but instead is simply being deployed as another desperate attempt to slow down Netflix's inexorable decline as it slowly dilutes into a now very overcrowded streaming market. Great film though.
2. The Feast
I've always had a soft spot for films that portray the dark pagan side of nature and this one builds to it in a wonderfully subtle way before unleashing some hideous wrath. Would make an excellent double bill with Garland's Men.
3. Orphan: First Kill
I know, it doesn't make sense. The actress who played the little girl in the original is now an adult but still trying to pretend to be a child but this is a prequel so she should be younger again. It's also a prequel to a shit movie that's been written as a ham fisted attempt to tidy up plot holes that absolutely zero people gave a shit about. It's very existence is ludicrous. And yet, the halfway twist... I'm still coming to terms with the rug that was pulled from under me.
4. Nope
I should have seen this on the big screen, but Telford Cineworld chose to project it in a tiny rectangle not much bigger than my TV in the centre of a much larger screen and then when I suggested to staff that maybe it should fill the screen they insisted, fucking doubled down insisted, that this was how it was meant to be shown. So I left, watched a dodgy copy at home and congratulated Cineworld on another idiotic move that crumbled their business out from under them. Sorry Jordan Peele you didn't get any money from me for this and it was really good, I'll buy you a pint if it bothers you.
5. Deadstream
Found Footage as a film making technique has been dead in the water for a while and I find the current use of it to ape social media technology in movies quite exasperating. So this one genuinely surprised me because despite being exactly that, it ended up more like a modern take on Evil Dead and massively enjoyable. And so Found Footage lives on to fight another day.
Of course the biggest obstacle to watching any new movies this year was the sheer volume of trash that I insist on putting myself through, though the allure of it all is stronger than ever. Joefest is a necessary week of hardcore film lunacy and October's temptation to sit through 31 ropey horror films drew me in once more. Moving the physical collection to a new location made me aware of how many films I've accrued that still need to be watched, so I've done my best to wade through them when I could and when I couldn't because they were in a different location I did my best to trudge through the mass of random shite downloaded onto a plethora of USBs instead. In amongst all the madness I saw plenty of conventionally good films, but they're not what you're hunting for when you're sloshing this much shit through your eyeballs, what you're after is the King films and these were the year's most King;
The 5 Most King Shit
1. Steel And Lace
The film that most transcended it's shitness this year was this utterly absurd confluence of robotics, seduction and outrageously over-plotted revenge. It's simply mind boggling that anybody would read the script to this and go 'OH YES! We absolutely should make this!' But somebody did and the result is simply brilliant.
2. High Desert Kill
A very low budget and a basic hunting trip gone wrong plot could quite easily become a dull movie, but this one pushes itself much further with larger Science Fiction ideas way beyond its remit into something very neat.
3. Smile Before Death
I watched eight Giallo movies this year, all with a pleasing mix of sleaze, mystery and murder. This one was the sleaziest, the most mysterious and the murderiest.
4. The Thing With Two Heads
This and Taxi Hunter were stand outs at this years Joefest, but it's this one that pips it into the most King due to the sheer audacity of the 'special FX' that mostly just involved an old white man trying to hide behind a much bigger black man. And the car crashes, there seemed to be one for every star in the observable universe. Glorious.
5. The Big Racket
As the amount of Giallo I have left to watch begins to wind down and they become harder to come by I've found myself taking solace in the large amount of Poliziotteschi films now being released, the finest of which this year was this non stop parade of car chases, gun fights and police violence. It also gave me a new director to keep an eye out for too in Enzo Castellari, because boy does he know how to shoot his action scenes.
Bad films. I watch a lot of bad films. All of those King movies, well technically they're all bad films too. There's so many cogs to spin and line up in the making of any movie that to get everything to mesh and create a good movie is a really difficult thing to do, few films end up as good. But even when they're average or bad, there's effort that can be recognised, attempts that can be seen within and context that can go some way to ameliorate feelings towards a bad film, because hey - nobody sets out to make a piece of shit do they?
No, of course not. But at the end of the day I pay money to watch all this crap, and these wasted it the most;
The 5 Shittest Films
1. Ambulance
He stopped making Transformers movies and we all cheered. Finally after five bloated monstrosities it was done. Then the original content began once more and fuck me is it bad. I think we're now at the point that staging an intervention the next time Michael Bay tries to make a film is the right direction to go.
2. Morbius
Any other year this would slap so hard into the number one slot, so really everybody involved here needs to send Michael Bay a thank you card. Warner Brothers are often quite correctly mocked for their mishandling of DC properties when compared to Marvel, but really its an unfair comparison. DC and Marvel have a very different vibe and once Warners figure that out they'll be fine, no really we should be laughing heartily at Sony who have enough important Marvel characters to build a universe to rival Marvel themselves but they fucked it up THIS badly. Lol.
3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Hellraiser
Don't get me wrong Texas is vastly inferior to Hellraiser and is the one that belongs on this list, but I've lumped both in here because they're a fine example of films that champion themselves as fresh, new revistations of original source materials, disregarding the inordinate number of shitty low grade sequels that followed and instead going back to the themes that made them so great in the first place. Yet neither new movie shows any understanding of what made the originals great and both are just more carbon copies of the inordinate number of shitty low grade sequels to add to the pile. Wank.
4. Jurassic World
For fans of Chris Pratt stoically trying to do a moody look off camera but coming across more like he's trying to decide how best to cover up the fact that he's just pissed himself. Personally I'm not a fan of this kind of thing, but presumably somebody out there is otherwise why would some prick think it was a good idea to leave out the dinosaurs from a Jurassic Noun movie and fill it with demon locusts and that scowling berk instead.
5. Christmas Bloody Christmas
The most toe curling dialogue I heard all year with characters talking about wanking, fucking, wanking, which rock abums are good, wanking, whch rock albums are bad, wanking, why Metallica stopped being good when they cut their hair (something that happened before most of the cast were born), wanking etc. And I imagine throughout it all the director was watching each take chortling and wheezing like a school child because of how clever he's been at getting all the wanking references in there. Fucking abysmal.
And now once more we begin again. Let's go.
