The 10 Best Movies of 2022

Too many to pick from but oh whale

10. Fire of Love

Directed by: Sara Dosa

At its core, Fire of Love functions as a mystery story. But it’s not the mystery story one might immediately presume. Strangely enough, the film is fairly perfunctory when detailing the logistics of Katia and Maurice’s deaths. Their sudden demise on a remote Japanese island in ’91 is recounted with uncommon neutrality and aplomb — a natural conclusion for two lives that literally spent every waking second playing with fire. Accordingly, their tragic end is somewhat anticlimactically retold in a matter-of-fact manner (even alluded to in the opening sequence without suspense or hesitation).

The film is more concerned with examining the enigmatic multitudes within life itself. Taking an affirmative perspective, Fire of Love’s priority is to investigate how its central volcanologist duo lived — celebrating their whimsical sensibilities and unorthodox life calling. Death thus becomes nothing more than a regrettable yet arguably inevitable finale — the punctuation mark of an infernal existence. Life — and the vigorous spirit that fuels life — is where the true syntactical surprises reside.

If life is the space that warrants real detective work, the past itself becomes an endless question. Very early on, Miranda July’s narration wistfully reflects on the past’s alluring open-endedness.

Due to the inscrutable margins of Katia and Maurice’s unknown/unrecorded identities, their volcano-obsessed romance turns into a magnetizing tale of surmises and probabilities. Like scientists studying a volcanic eruption, the doc explores the sediment of their volatile, fiery, and now bygone lives — sifting through autobiographical ash for underlying truths. We get glimpses into their oversized passions and personalities, but the grander picture remains, as it should be, lost to time — gaseous, mutable, adrift.

Volcanoes become the loci, the hub, and the center of their story. Containing hot magma and furious potentiality, volcanoes are naturally an object of immense mystique. Here, they become much more than tectonic coordinates, seismic polygraphs, or explosive craters. They serve as the metaphorical spark that lights our subjects’ lives aglow — captivating their lust, wonder, passion, and madness. They spur our oddball French duo to the ends of the earth. They also represent the thumping pulse of the planet — the fiery, molten, romantic heartbeat of geologic flux. Like love, volcanic activity is spectacularly alive, viscerally felt, and awe-inspiring. Yet, like a person, a volcano’s exquisite mechanics, its inner stirrings, remain wildly elusive — lethally unpredictable.

Fittingly, Fire of Love starts from a space of similar uncertainty — admitting Kaita and Maurice’s pre-documented selves and inner stirrings are proportionately elusive. Sadly, much of their initial courtship and budding amour — the very origins of their eccentric love story — is nebulously forgotten over time, susceptible to varied interpretations. The film doesn’t shy away from this equivocality. Adopting a scientific lens, it contemplates a series of ludic hypotheses — spinning a docu-fictional story about their early years via calculated conjectures.

This disdain for art’s artificiality and standoffish relationship to the burdensome archival footage makes our read on Maurice and Kaita even more dubious than before. It becomes impossible to parse when they are being natural vs. when they are putting up a pretense — “playing” their scientist/volcanologist roles as performative actors. To sustain their passionate hobby, they both seemingly pandered to the French middle-class/academic milieu — peddling their off-the-grid expeditions and infectious infatuation with volcanic activity to make ends meet. They traveled around selling a lifestyle, a product. What truly boiled inside is thus incapable of being confidently induced.

What is indubitable is their mutual devotion to the phenomena itself — their love of the immediate dance of an active volcano precedes all. Their true selves, however, remain somewhat obfuscated — made ambiguous by the suspenseful interplay between performance and authenticity. We can’t truly know the degree to which their media cameos, collegiate appearances, and recorded selves were genuine. Their higher, elevated selves — their “alternative stories”, as the narration might put it — are lost to time, subsumed in each evaporated experience of volcanic ardor that kindled their entire, waking existence. And only fiction — framing and reframing splices of time’s residue anew — can track the sediment, catalog the ash, and speculate on the liquified fire that once simmered inside.

Fire of Love understands this all too well. It realizes that there is no difference between science, art, or love — all are essentially phenomena. This doesn’t mean they are the same either. Bound to time and energy, all three forces are integrated, commingled, and congealed together. Knowledge and creation, as two parallel forms of passion, are always desiring and emergent, sensually present, and plaintively backward-looking. As we continue to reconsolidate and churn toward new explosive horizons, we simultaneously reimagine the alluvial deposits of the past — whether these deposits be recorded in metamorphic granularity, filmic archives, tender gestures, light banter, or written tidbits.

By mobilizing images, moods, memories, and imagination, Fire of Life asks many questions and offers few answers. This is science as it should be — ever curious, ever in doubt, and ever challenging the pedantic inertia of rock-solid presuppositions. Science, like art, gropes in the dark — resurrecting stories/‘truths’ from the dormant fossils and scattered evidence of extinct life forces. Both methodologies are inherently fanciful and creative. Both are loyal to life itself — in all its guises. Their fidelity to the underlying (e)motion of phenomena — both living and perished — exhumes much more the mathematical fragments or statistical modeling. It digs up entire movements, phases, sensations, and essences. It reignites the eternally amorphous bedrock of life and art — recreating the cosmic spark of spontaneous combustion.

9. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Directed by: Laura Poitras

On the subject of documentary films, I often refer back to the imaginary viewer who dismisses the entire form as little more than a time-filling educational tool for lazy substitute schoolteachers. Those viewers exist in abundance, but when they imagine that default product intended to educate with nothing in the way of intrigue, they aren’t thinking of the films of Steve James or Morgan Neville… they’re envisioning the films of Gianfranco Rosi and Laura Poitras. These are the filmmakers with a penchant for taking fascinating subject matter and filtering it into audiovisual NyQuil, so it’s odd to note that these are also the only two documentarians to have ever been awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. (I don’t know, maybe the jury members those years were appreciative of a good 2-hour nap after a long day of festival-going.) With all this talk of imagining, imagine my shock when the film put Poitras into that exclusive club, this year’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, actually assembled a case for its acclaim rather than being a direct shot of melatonin.

To think that the director who made Edward Snowden’s race against the U.S. government feels like a glorified high school Current Events project has found the material to complement her staid style is almost baffling until Nan Goldin’s work comes into focus. That Goldin is not only a photographer by profession but also a damn good one, makes for the perfect injection of energy and humanism into Poitras’s framing. In many ways, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is more captivating when pressing upon still images than when Poitras films her subject’s activism in the current day; it’s not difficult to comprehend why Goldin’s fearless, evocative photography made her such an influential figure that her publicized battle against the Slacker family held as much weight as it did.

Reconciling a tumultuous but, ultimately, lovingly recollected upbringing with a battle against the purveyors of the ongoing opioid epidemic, Poitras is admirable in her refusal to make an outright connection in saying that one-half of Goldin’s narrative led to the addiction whose aftermath spawned its other half. That much is left for us to ascertain ourselves because the focus of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed rests squarely upon the empathy and sense of communal fortitude that drove and shaped Goldin throughout every phase of her life, all of which culminates in this defiant move against a titan of the impenetrable pharmaceutical industry.

It’s clear enough at this point in her career that Laura Poitras has placed herself amongst the resistant faction of documentary filmmakers bravely siding with those figureheads who represent the first stone cast against the system. Nan Goldin, so far, seems to be the figurehead with whom Poitras’s sense of identification most tangibly resonates on a film scale, as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed makes every victory and loss feel, simultaneously, like an inevitable progression and an opportunity to shift the unfolding narrative for the better.

Documentaries remain the most vital form of cinema, as the most direct and raw medium for movies. Metaphors and stories can be cut through and the point is shown without pretense. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an intricate and complex documentary. On the one hand, it deals with the opioid crisis and the disgusting greed of the Sackler family, yet also the film functions as the story of photographer Nan Goldin and her entire life. The film seems abstract and unstructured. It does have title cards and chapters, but it seems to bounce around the past and present.

Both sides of the film are fascinating. As activism, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed highlights the evil of Sacklers and how they will never face justice. And as a film of personal history, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed becomes a document not just of Goldin but the working-class queer communities she represented in her work. She exposes herself entirely, partially due to an ethos that all art is personal, and in doing so the film can tap into very raw and deep emotions.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed feels like powerful testimony, like a work of self-reflection that goes beyond what most people ever share about themselves. On the political front, I’m not so sure any real victory is achieved, even though the film presents that narrative, but the overall journey feels very impactful. There were tears all around at my screening and I think All the Beauty and the Bloodshed earns them. It’s a merge of political filmmaking and personal examination, all executed at the highest level.

8. GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

Directed by: Rian Johnson

I attempted to write a multitude of varying pieces about this movie and the Netflix release model and how streaming is a dying breed and is not sutstainable. The only way for these companies to make any money is to release their big tent-pole movies like Glass Onion in a theater, however the fellas over at Forbes beat me to it, so here is a link to that article — ->https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2022/12/22/glass-onion-release-peels-back-potential-flaws-in-netflix-release-strategy/?sh=33b4b4056bda

Basically, this was arguably the 2nd best theater expereince of the past year and my overall thoughts of the movie coincide with that expereince. If I had watched this on my laptop alone in my room when it premiered, this would have made my “HONORABLE MENTION” list instead of the Top 10. Rian Johnson supremacy.

7. JACKASS FOREVER

Directed by: Jeff Tremaine

A thing that has stuck with me forever is Conan O’Brien describing Jerry Lewis telling him his theory of comedy, which is as follows: “tell the audience what you’re about to do, then do it, and then tell the audience it has been done”. It’s very old showbizzy (as Will Sloan noted, the Three Stooges did the same thing), but it also works, because it basically lets the audience in on the joke from start to finish. And if there’s anything in modern comedy that knows that that formula works, it’s the Jackass movies. Why else do we get the big long setups before the pranks and then slow-motion shots of what just happened and lengthy reactions to Wee Man getting super duper wedgied or Dave England suffering a terrible indignity or Ehren having his dick mangled in horrible ways? Because the folks that make these movies know that the old ways have always worked, and always will.

Watching this movie, as with the other 3, I found myself thinking of the Fast and Furious movies, which truck in the same sort of joyous unironic “we love this shit, yes we do” joie de vivre as these flicks do. The folks that make the F&F movies truly believe in family, believe in love, and believe that driving cars fast and outrageous stunts and visceral fistfights are fucking awesome, and want you to believe in these things, too. And the folks that do stuff like get their penises flattened for a sight gag or let themselves be used as a human ramp believe in this being funny as hell and that nothing rules more than doing goofs with your pals, and they want you to believe that, too. It’s why Johnny Knoxville, a very rich man, unflinchingly does the craziest ass shit in any of these things, or why any of these guys or the game new (welcomingly diverse) cast members will let themselves be mauled or attacked by scorpions or lick a taser or whatever else. At the end of the day, they want you to have a good time watching what they had a good time making. They told you what they were going to do, they did it, and then they told you it was done. And now it’s time for you to laugh.

…

While one might initially assume that a show about bunch of straight cis white dudes electrocuting each other and hitting each other in the balls would be aimed at fellow straight cis white dudes, Jackass seems to have achieved the unachievable: universal appeal. It turns out there is no gatekeeping when it comes to being launched into the air in a porta potty filled with dog shit. Its accessibility has attracted hoards of queer and trans fans, who see themselves in the ridiculousness of the guys and appreciate the lack of rigid gendering of the content. Hurting yourself in silly ways is possible and hilarious no matter your gender or sexual identity, and in Jackass, laughter is never aimed at someone because of who they are, rather how they react to whatever ridiculous prank is being pulled.

Jackass showcases a certain kind of positive masculinity despite being reared in the early aughts, when comedy was dominated by “no homo bro” sentiments (you couldn’t get through an episode of Friends without a landslide of gay jokes). The Jackass guys are comfortable with each other’s bodies, even guiding their co-star’s dicks into various positions to be bitten by snakes and other horrors. One might venture to say it’s homoerotic in a way that doesn’t mock being gay, which was surprisingly ahead of its time (Saturday Night Live was still casually using the word “dyke” in skits around the same time). The segments show dudes just genuinely caring about each other, which was even less common: they always help each other up off the ground, regardless of who knocked them over in the first place.

Here’s to the Jackass crew and their bruised, battered bodies. Long may they create a world where anyone can enjoy the peak of comedy: dudes getting hit in the balls.

6. TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Directed by: Joseph Kosinski

The recent failings of big-budget would-be blockbusters such as Morbius, Moonfall and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore are the most recent signs of the creatively bankrupt, shamelessly manipulative and opportunistic depths that Hollywood culture has dragged the art of cinema down to over the last few decades.

Being born in 1997, I grew up during a crossroads in cinema. The creative, practical effects-driven blockbusters such as Jaws, Star Wars, Alien and Terminator were still all the rage. At the same time, new films like Jurassic Park and The Matrix were proving what CGI could do for modern cinema with spectacular success. I loved going to the movies as a kid.

Now, nearly twenty-six years later, I can count the number of times I went to the movies in the past three years on one hand. There are a few reasons why I have avoided the big screen, the first and foremost reason is CGI.

CGI began as a wonderful tool to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Films like Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings trilogy used plenty of CGI but only where it was necessary. CGI was merely one of many tools which made these films great. Creative practical effects, real sets, engaging performances, solid writing and world-building were combined with the spectacle of CGI to create exceptional films.

Nowadays, the spectacle of CGI monsters, explosions and digitally crafted environments have replaced every other aspect of moviemaking and stripped it of its magic. Films used to inspire wonder, people used to exclaim “How’d they do that?” when faced with a creatively executed scene. Now, we always know how they did it, they do it the same way in every film. The sense of magic and wonder is gone.

Without that sense of wonder, Hollywood is forced to increase the spectacle with each passing year. Like a drug addiction, the American moviegoer has been trained to need a constant ramping up of stimuli to compensate for the hollow and repetitive nature of the experience. Over-reliance on CGI effects to draw crowds has replaced the need for good writing and strong characters. What was once the modern Broadway Stage has been reduced to the modern gladiator arena.

The over-exploitation of Intellectual Property (IPs) is also a huge turnoff for me. The Fantastic Beasts series and The Hobbit trilogy are some of the worst examples, but Disney’s recent Star Wars exploits (ever since The Rise of Skywalker) is also worth a mention (aside from Andor).

These films are the definition of corporate Hollywood beating a dead horse. These corporate committees who get their hands on a popular IP like Harry Potter or Star Wars don’t really give a damn about crafting a story, they only care about profiting off of someone else’s hard work and success.

This apathetic and greedy approach shows in the final result. One glance at IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes shows that these movies get middling responses at best, but by virtue of being attached to past success, they still make enough money to encourage these hacks to continue scraping the bottom of the bucket.

The actors who play in these movies are also a pretty good example of this trend in name profiteering. I began to notice this in high school when rewatching the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I began to notice how after the success of these films, the once-great Johnny Depp began playing the same Jack Sparrow-esque character in every one of his films.

Ever since that time, I have developed the opinion that modern films don’t really hire actors, they hire personalities. Just how different is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the Jumanji series from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the Fast and the Furious series? How different is Chris Pratt in Jurassic World from Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy?

I know there are probably a lot of Marvel fans out there who will resent me saying this, but I think the MCU is the main reason Hollywood is in the poor state it is in today.

Guardians of the Galaxy - a delightfully rare break from the MCU model — was a really fun, character-driven sci-fi adventure. Infinity War was undeniably ambitious and thoroughly entertaining. Captain America: The Winter Soldier felt like a great James Bond film with a superhero twist.

Yet overall, I think the impact of the MCU has been largely negative. It has proven that sticking to the same playbook and never taking risks pays off. All the movies are consistently the same degree of competence, but they feel more like a product coming off of an assembly line rather than someone’s artistic vision.

Like a factory-made product, MCU films are cold and devoid of humanity. Any time there is even a hint of emotion, intrigue or suspense, Tony Stark has to bust out some quippy one-liner to remind us that he’s Robert Downey Jr., the sexy bad boy. The jokes are rarely even funny, and even though the MCU is a universe with hundreds of characters, they all make the exact same kind of joke.

I would personally enjoy these films a lot more if they would allow me to experience a real moment of emotional engagement without it being interrupted by some played-out, childish smart-alec comment every five minutes. Especially considering that often these jokes are made when the world is literally being torn apart by some sky beam or a cube of some kind. Nobody would be cracking dumb jokes in those circumstances.

I know many of these opinions may be subjective to my own taste. Yet I think many people agree that the current course of modern cinema has felt played out and tired. The only reason these movies get made is that people keep buying into the scam.

I like goofy, action schlock as much as the next person. The Mummy is one of my favorite movies because of all the delightful schlock. Even if you are making a dumb, action movie, there are intelligent and creative ways to execute it. Some films are definitely intended to be simple entertainment. Yet, regardless, entertainment is an art form and we should stop supporting corporate committees at Disney or Sony who seem to ignore that fact.

Suffice to say, thank you Tom Cruise for pushing the boundaries of what actual blockbuster filmmaking should be.

5. BABYLON

Directed by: Damien Chazelle

If you’re going to make a movie, you better make a fucking movie.

Damien Chazelle’s epic of debauchery amidst the start of the Hollywood system is his most ambitious film to date. This bombastic and in your face depiction of the 1920’s is the biggest gut punch to your preconceived notions as to how this era of society went about life. It really was this crazy and wild where drugs ran rampant and the parties were unhinged at an unsettling level. Babylon feels like a demented cousin of La La Land in a sense that it is about the Hollywood Dream Factory but instead of showing an ideal version of it we get the underbelly of such a vile society who were actually looked upon as trash of the earth. The film industry was new and the world looked down on it as unworthy art. Both of Chazelle’s Hollywood pictures contain both versions of the city where dreamers either make it until they fade into obscurity or never make it at all.

Chazelle is adamant about showing us this huge canvas of characters chase after this dream and how the Hollywood system chews them up and spits them out into the black depths of obscurity. In all of his doom and gloom I couldn’t believe how funny this film was. It’s the hardest I’ve laughed at the movies all year and the comedy works so well with the cocaine paced editing of the film. Babylon literally starts with one of the greatest (and obscene) parties scenes in all of film and ends with one of the most ambitious endings I’ve seen to date. This doesn’t feel like Chazelle’s most nuanced and controlled piece of art he’s ever made, but it definitely feels like his most ambitious and admirable.

Epics that follow a vast array of characters are very tricky to do and we don’t see many of them anymore. Chazelle does it with as many surprises as possible and doesn’t let the viewer off the hook. The period detail is immaculate and I couldn’t stop smiling at all of the silent movie era elements being displayed to me. I’m incredibly interested in silent filmmaking (Chazelle obviously is also) and to see a whole movie dedicated to it and how it birthed this massive art movement for humanity through its wild and chaotic birth is something I will forever cherish. It is obvious Chazelle did a decades worth of research for this movie (he did!) and it all paid off in a fantastic way.

Margot Robbie gives one of her best performances as Nellie LaRoy, a Clara Bow stand in whose career is on the rise and fall trajectory. Brad Pitt brings his movie star charisma to such an endearing and heartbreaking character. Diego Calva is a newcomer and he portrays Manny with the dreamer spirit that allows the audience to follow him into this world of F’d up excess and glamour. The ensemble cast is excellent with Tobey Maguire, Li Jun Li, Jean Smart, P.J. Byrne, and Carson Higgins. Chazelle painted a massive mural of Hollywood personalities among a disgusting and harsh world where hard work, blood, sweat, and tears will torturously only get you so far before the system decides it is done with you. It’s done so in such a broad, energetic, brassy, sensual, and hilarious odyssey into the journey of the life of what we call the movies. These people paved the way and all of their sacrifices were not in vain. Manny wanted to be a part of something bigger than himself, something that will change the world.

The movies were built by people like Manny, Nellie, and Jack who gave everything to this art form that decided when they weren’t good enough for it. Manny found what he was looking for, but it was years later when he realized just how big of a thing he was a part of. Chazelle drives this home with the most breathtaking and ambitious ending I’ve seen this year with the most massive fourth wall break you could ever imagine. Manny, Nellie, and Jack paved the way for a huge art form that continues to push boundaries 100 years after they were birthing it. Manny achieved his dream of being a part of something bigger, probably something much bigger than he ever could’ve imagined. Chazelle’s film is now a part of their story and one that I’m sure the real people are smiling down at from up above. Besides from all of the piss, elephant shit, cocaine overdoses, and suicides of course. Babylon is an epic of motion picture history that you will never forget. I cannot wait to see it a few more times at the theater and give some more nuanced thoughts on it all. Ain’t life grand?

4. THE BATMAN

Directed by: Matt Reeves

My 2023 Master Plan(s):

Plan A: Jenna Ortega

Plan B: Become The Batman

Plan C: kms

*Disclaimer: I want to write something a little be more comprehensive about this movie and don’t want to limit myself to just a few paragraphs. It would be a disservice to the movie.*

3. TÁR

Directed by: Todd Fields

In the coming days after this was released, I found myself heartily endorsing Tár — “Oh, I loved Tár. Really good.” A friend who hadn’t seen it piped up — “oh yeah, isn’t that the anti-Me Too movie?” The line hits well. I can understand the allure of the easy summary. A movie about a predatory lesbian written and directed by a white man, starring a magnificent performance by a straight A-list actress whose best performance of recent memory happened to be in a Woody Allen movie. Nuclear stuff when it comes to assembling the almighty take.

I stumbled over how to respond — “That’s a little simplistic. It’s more about the grey area.” Not a great defense, but “anti me too” is somehow worse than pigeonholing Tár as “movie about cancel culture.” The exploration of misogyny and power dynamics by no means clears Tár’s culpability. It’s her inability to confront her perpetuation of the spiritual deterioration of young bright women that drives her to ruin, to vomiting at the Thai massage parlor in disgust at her the place in the hierarchy. It follows her everywhere, permeates the invisible cracks between all her beautiful things, until those things become less beautiful.

Tár could be from any other perspective — a quiet, incisive movie like The Assistant (2019) comes to mind, which documents the broader fall out of systemic abuse perpetrated by high status individuals in creative positions. But I think its impact comes from its dedication to Tár’s perspective.

I recently had a friend on here uncovered to be a bit of a monster, a torrential artist who preyed without apology on those drawn to his flame. You mourn these friends who turn out to be something else entirely. You mourn the grandeur of someone who somehow had all these other wonderful qualities. But through it all, the thing that repulsed me most as time elapsed from the truth coming out was the depth of his denial — the pure avoidance of the fallout of the scope of his smallness, his willingness to use people, admirers, for his sexual gratification and the fanning of the flame of his inflated ego. The response of disengagement, making his world absurdly small, hiding and disabling out of any accountability.

Tár finds terrors in the minute, the errant humming of the fridge. The imminent fear of something big and fragile about to collapse, actively collapsing. And when it falls, it’s not all at once, but in waves. An assistant quits. A colleague says something concerning. Tár can feel herself slipping, but it’s never enough to upend the ego. If American Psycho is about the mental unraveling of someone who can’t get caught, Tár is about what happens when you can.

2. BONES AND ALL

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino

Children inherit their parents’ eyes, their hair color, their skin, their blood. But they also inherit their parents’ diseases, addictions, and violence.

Occasionally, they even inherit their parents… cannibalism.

Luca Guadagnino’s newest film, Bones and All, dwells in the realm of movie monster perhaps lorded over by “The Shining’s” Jack Torrence. There dwell not just monsters of the mind, but of our own blood; so hungry, they devour us from the inside. They are horrors of our own heart; pumping inherited fallibilities and downfalls through our veins.

The metaphor of insatiable cannibalism for inherited parental addition and abuse isn’t immediately clear through the first half of Bones and All. As the film follows its main character searching for reasons that she suffers irrepressible urges to devour human flesh, the comparison is discovered piece by piece. Its realizations are mismatched found organs, sewn together into a terrifying form embodying all a child fears they will become.

Bones and All for all its focus on the corporeal, lacks the delicate physicality trademark to Guadagnino’s best works. Whether a deliberate deprivation or not, the director seems to rob his viewers of intimacy beyond that of necessary consummation of the flesh. It gives “Bones” the impression of being a lesser work by the director, but one far more adventurous than what he has so far attempted.

Timothée Chalamet, as in Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, is in Bones and All the chief embodiment of the director’s distinctive soulful sensuality. As ever, the most interesting actor of his generation, he provokes simultaneous sensations of aggression, lust, and tragedy. He seems to always beg for the audience’s pity, while rejecting it with downcast eyes each time it is given.

As Jack Torrence stalked his son Danny through the hedge maze of The Overlook, so the need to devour the body of another is looming always in the cerebral cortex, and in the stomach of the characters in “Bones.” Love can lead children out of the labyrinth they inherit, but it cannot raze the hedges to the ground. They will wander in it, sometimes alone, sometimes not, sometimes accompanied only by their demons. They will be, though, forever hungry.

A central aspect of the horror genre, which underpins my love for it, lies in its ability to exist on the fringes of all human stories. That any story can be propelled to its breaking point, at which it crashes through its conventions and into the grisly, dirty and often brutal world of the horrific; and with Bones and All, Guadagnino has successfully pierced through the barriers between romance, coming of age, and into something for more dreadful.

Yet despite the gore, the darkness which holds these characters by the throats and drags them through an isolated America, the film remains persistently warm, not overly hopeful, yet intently focused on the heights that connection in otherness can inspire. It’s a film that hurts, that gradually sinks its teeth into your heart, gently enough that it’s near imperceptible in its entrance, yet deep enough that its withdrawal leaves the ghastliest of open wounds.

I found myself hoping, in a way that I don’t often, that the film wouldn’t end, that I wouldn’t have to leave these characters and their world, so carefully constructed it felt tangible; not quite desirable but vivid nonetheless. And for that, I must applaud the film’s expansive storytelling, gorgeous cinematography and compelling performances. I’ve never seen Timothée Chalamet better, and Taylor Russel was incredible as essentially our lead. Their stories felt real, their worlds lived in, and their subconscious lept forth from the screen.

I’ll never get tired of horror filmmaking like this, like Julia Ducournau’s Raw, one of my favorite horror films of all time. Like that masterpiece, Bones and All powerfully channels its effectively gruesome moments into a patient, yet quietly startling, coming-of-age journey, crafted with such care and precision that the horrific becomes accessible and monstrous understandable.

In its extremities and fringe positioning, Bones and All captures humanity in its most intimate, rawest form.

1. AFTERSUN

Directed by: Charlotte Wells

Aftersun is a film that slowly chips away at its serene veneer to then leave you in shambles by its conclusion. It tells an intimate story of a father desperately trying to shelter his young daughter from his struggles — all told with very little dialogue and an emphasis on the raw purity of the images. Think the stark realism of Andrea Arnold and the sensorial cinema of Claire Denis and that’s Aftersun for you. It’s a truly stunning debut brimming with life that reminds us just how impenetrable the minds of our loved ones can be.

When your parents are apart, by way of separation, death or any circumstance, I wonder if the way you split your love moves with it. I’m thinking if, before my mother or father’s death, my love for my parents was carved down the middle, 50/50, or if it would change depending on who I was around at the time.

In Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Sophie’s love for her father weighs so heavily towards him, so doting and special, it’s almost as if her love for her mother stayed at home while she came with him on holiday. For the duration of this trip, and the film itself, there is only these two.

And so we watch it pass by with familiar late-90s mundanity: shuttle coaches, sunloungers, lurid-colored cocktails, tribute acts, Steps played on Walkman. This string of events is paired with — or interrupted by — conversations between Sophie and her father, identifying the traits that bind them so closely, observations of a father and daughter relationship that distance has somehow made stronger.

I loved this. Sophie reminded me of my sister, how the character of Calum provided insight into the emotions of a father children seldom see. My dad is maybe the most mysterious person I know; often, I experience a deluge of emotion on the rare occasion he opens up. It’s like seeing a rare painting out of its frame, vulnerable and likely to be damaged.

It’s funny how our memories of people are so often burned into celluloid or on digital files we store away; how our understanding of adolescence and who we were in our formative years leaves our brains but is easily returned to. But what it summons can be both gorgeous and heartbreaking, two perfect descriptors of Aftersun, a masterful debut in my eyes. A hugely important new filmmaker who successfully pins down what it means to love someone wholeheartedly, and to know that it’s often not enough — and not possible — to always have them by your side.

Memories are a hard thing to reckon with. Unless you write down every thing you’ve gone through in a diary rarely will you be able to remember something exactly the way it happened or the way you want to. Aftersun simply gives us a few days in Sophie’s life as she reflects on her past with her father.

She has a few camera recordings of exactly what happened but it’s really in Paul Mescal and Frankie Coiro’s hands to effectively depict this fractured yet functional relationship between two people who were never able to really figure each other out. Each constantly surprising each other in different ways through acts of maturity or immaturity. It feels distant and vague at times but it has to be — no, it has no choice but to be. Works nonetheless with a few of the most memorable scenes I’ve seen all year.

In the end, all we’re left with are memories. Closure isn’t necessarily given to you or found: you can create it. Whether it fulfills you or gnaws on you until your last days is anyone’s guess. Just push forward regardless and find peace somehow.

A moving film about connection and the confines of one’s memory/perspective. In terms of plotting, it’s practically an anti-narrative hangout picture wherein nothing much happens. And as it progresses with each elongated moment, the film slowly becomes about the small and imperceptible signs, what’s left unsaid, and its emotional gut-punches are only revealed later. Like watching an old video to reminisce about something or that someone who is no longer with you on this earth. Understated, tactile cinema.

Honorable Mention: Memoria, Decision to Leave, Avatar: The Way of the Water, The Northman, The Banshees of Inisherin