It may not have been the best of times at the box office, but 2022 produced a bumper crop of great films. But before we get to my annual, non-ranked list of the best the year had to offer, we need to talk about the worst.
Johnny Knoxville gleefully provokes bees into stinging Steve-O’s nether bits.
Worst Picture:Jackass Forever
If I wanted to watch 96 minutes of recreational genital torture, I’d go to the internet like Al Gore intended.
Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis is electrifying.
Best Memphis Film: Elvis
Okay, so it wasn’t filmed in Memphis, and we’re still a little sore about that. But Baz Luhrmann’s epic musical biopic was a certified crowd-pleaser. And despite the … questionable choices made by Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, Austin Butler’s barn-burning turn as the King shed new light on the complicated psychology of the boy from Tupelo who became the most famous person the world has ever seen.
Jenny Slate voices Marcel.
Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Marcel, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Who would have thought that a film starring a YouTube sensation from 2010 would be one of the most emotionally complex experiences of the year? Jenny Slate’s profound voice performance and Mars Attacks! animator Eric Adkins bring Marcel to life so convincingly, you’ll be hanging on this little shell’s every word.
Top Gun: Maverick
Best Cinematography: Top Gun: Maverick
Aerial photography has been an obsession of the movies since Wings won the first Best Picture Oscar in 1927. In Top Gun: Maverick, Claudio Miranda did it better than anyone ever has — and his work was rewarded with the top-grossing film of the year.
Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al Yankovich
Best Performance: Daniel Radcliffe,Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
In a year rife with good performances, no one committed to the bit like Daniel Radcliffe. Playing a well-known public figure like Weird Al Yankovic is hard enough, but Radcliffe went above and beyond in capturing the fabled accordionist’s unflappable manner and egalitarian worldview. He single-handedly carries this deeply strange biopic.
Mia Goth as Pearl.
MVP: Mia Goth
In X, the neo-slasher about a group of filmmakers and their exploitative producer who rent a farmhouse in the Texas countryside to film a dirty movie, Mia Goth plays both the young, would-be porn star Maxine and the elderly serial killer Pearl. While they were on set, Goth came up with such a compelling backstory for Pearl that director Ti West started filming the prequel even before the first film hit theaters. Goth’s ferocious performance in Pearl includes a chilling soliloquy for the ages.
UFOs invade California in Jordan Peele’s Nope. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
Best Horror/Sci-fi/Western: Nope
Granted, it’s a pretty specific category, but even if Nope didn’t have it all to itself, it would still be one of the best films of the year. From killer chimps to a monster reveal that is downright beautiful, Jordan Peele’s latest is original, funny, and above all, creepy as hell. You’ll never look at a wind dancer the same way again.
Moonage Daydream
Best Documentary: Moonage Daydream
Over the course of his 50-year career, David Bowie had many collaborators who claimed he had a knack for bringing out the best in them. That’s what happened when director Brett Morgen got access to the Bowie estate archive and spent four years creating a phantasmagorical tribute to the artist. This powerful ode to the creative spirit is 2022’s most groundbreaking film.
Neptune Frost
Best Director(s): Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost
If it were only for the opening sequence, in which laborers sing a subversive work song in an actual Rwandan pit mine, Neptune Frost would still be one of the most stunning works of the decade. But it just gets better — and weirder — from there. This unique blend of Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, and Sondheim musical combines catchy tunes with revolutionary fervor. Most remarkably, it was made on a Kickstarter budget.
Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once
Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Every once in a while, a picture comes along that captures the zeitgeist so effortlessly it seems to have invented it from whole cloth. The elements of Everything Everywhere All At Once — multiverse stories, a renewed earnestness, a breezy visual style, and kung fu — were all floating in the ether, but it took Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to wrangle them into one fantastic package. Anchored by Michelle Yeoh at the peak of her powers, a comeback turn by Ke Huy Quan, and a game-for-anything Jamie Lee Curtis, this is the rare film that features both eye-popping visuals and a deeply humane philosophy.
African hackers build a techno-utopia in Neptune Frost.
Neptune Frost is the only movie I watched twice during virtual Sundance last January.
Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s afro-futurist musical is bursting with energy and life. Filmed in Rwanda, it features an amazing cast of artists, many of whom are war refugees, and some of the most striking costumes and production design you’ll see anywhere.
Even though they were working with a vanishingly small budget, Uzeyman and Williams stage spectacular musical numbers filmed on location deep in the forest and in a working mine. The resourcefulness of the production is equaled by the sophistication of the ideas embedded in the afro beat soundtrack.
“The concept came first and once Anisa and I had the concept, the first thing I wanted to use towards world-building was the music,” says Williams.
Neptune Frost is a fantasy of revolution arising from the coltan mines of Africa. The mineral is used extensively in computers and consumer electronics, but the people condemned to extract it see none of the material wealth and comfort their labor enables. Near the mine is a vast landfill of e-waste, where scavengers search through mountains of discarded keyboards and monitors for a few grams of valuable metals. In between, a group of rebels carve out Digita, a would-be utopia led by a supernatural hacker named Neptune (Cheryl Isheja).
Cheryl Isheja in Neptune Frost.
“This film was born when Anisia and I discovered the phenomenon of e-waste camps, which are situated around the continent, usually very close to the mines where the materials that go into our technology are taken,” says Williams. “And so, around the same time, we discover that there’s these village sites and camps with mounds of motherboards and keyboards and towers and all these things.
“We were also tuning into a lot of the recycled art that was coming out of these situations — not just art, but science. We were learning about people in Togo, for example, who were taking e-waste and making 3D printers out of it. We learned about people in Sierra Leone who were taking e-waste and making robotic prosthetic limbs out of.
“So, there was a lot of stuff on our timeline that was very inspiring, that that made us envision this idea of a village made of recycled computer parts. The production designer and costume designer that we worked with is a Rwandan artist by the name of Cedric Mizero. When he heard the story, he was very shy. He listened, and then the next morning he showed up at our place in Rwanda with sandals made of motherboards. We were very clear on the fact that we had found the right person.”
During the month-long production, Uzeyman and Williams filmed in extreme circumstances far from the nearest town, sometimes while coordinating crews of more than 100 people.
“It was really intense,” says Uzeyman. “We traveled the country, which is said to be the land of a thousand hills.”
Williams says they were lucky to connect with an established group of artists in the Rwandan capital.
“The political unrest in Burundi in 2015 sent a lot of students, artists, and activists, over the border, into Kigali,” Williams said. “And so, that scene there is really reflective of amazing talent from Burundi and Rwanda; that’s what the film really reflects. All of the members of our cast are established musicians, poets, actors, choreographers, dancers, and drummers and they were already in the mode of performance. What carried us was their excitement about participating in this story.”
“It’s like a portrait of a generation,” says Uzeyman.
Designer Cedric Mizero created spectacular costumes and sets from e-waste.
At every turn in Neptune Frost, there is a sense of an old world dying, and a new one struggling to be born.
“It really reflect the fluidity of the youth in Rwanda, where we shot the film,” says Uzeyman. “On the continent, people speak like five languages correctly, regularly. And it’s something that we found very new and very beautiful to show because it’s not especially portrayed a lot — that fluidity that the migrations and all those movements inside of the continent produce.”
Williams says the free intermixing of language became a kind of metaphor for the new world of unlimited information.
“As an American sitting at a table, listening to a conversation, and realizing that people are choosing which expression from which language works best, it became super important for us platform that in the film,” Williams says.
Amidst all the beats and costumes and dancing, Williams says “we’re connecting dots between how the brain works and functions and the coding patterns of language, and what it means to break those codes. Those guys do it fluidly.”
Indie Memphis, in association with Tone, the Black Creator’s Forum, and Dedza, is sponsoring a free screening of Neptune Frost at Crosstown Arts on Wednesday, June 15th. It is a truly unique cinema experience that has been blowing minds all around the world.
“We are very happy with all that people see in the work,” says Williams. “We are very proud to have connected so strongly with the LGBTQ community, with indigenous community, and with the tech community. And we see that the people who now have a chance to see it…that it’s resonating with them.
“We’re just excited about people being able to explore this world and this universe. We obviously built something with a lot of space for questions, with a lot of space for the imagination. We wanted to invite the viewer in to, to participate in our creative process.”
Sundance wanted to return to a fully in-person festival for its January 20th-30th run, but the coronavirus pandemic had other plans. Luckily, when it became obvious that the omicron variant was spreading uncontrollably, and a 40,000 person gathering in Park City would have been a non-stop superspreader event, there were already plans in place to repeat the virtual programming the venerable film festival instituted last year.
After two years of rolling pandemic shutdowns, the film community is used to online festivals. Even in non-pandemic times, the virtual option is great for cinephiles who can’t attend in person. But that doesn’t mean all the kinks have been worked out yet.
Sundance is embracing virtual reality, with a program of various VR works and a festival village inside a virtual space station. This glimpse of the metaverse future is less Ready Player One and more Second Life. The biggest lesson from the festival’s opening weekend is, don’t cross the streams of cinema and VR.
The opening feature, 32 Sounds, is an experimental documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green that does what it says on the tin. It’s an exploration of sound as a phenomenon that is designed to be watched while wearing headphones. Much of the sound was recorded using binaural technology, which uses multiple microphones and physical models of the human ear to create recordings that sound more authentically “wild” than even stereo. It’s a fascinating concept, once you get into the movie’s headspace, so to speak. The problem was the opening program was presented in a virtual recreation of the Egyptian theater in Park City, a real-life festival hub. Technical issues delayed the beginning of the program, which meant that when the virtual screening period ended, everyone was unceremoniously kicked out of the virtual theater before the film was over. We got 25 sounds, tops! There are a several more potentially interesting VR events on the schedule, but after that experience, I have not been back to the metaverse.
Luckily, the vast majority of Sundance’s offerings are presented in a more conventional streaming format, with both limited-time premiere slots, designed to increase audience participation by ensuring everyone is watching at the same time, and longer, second-run slots to catch up on films you missed because of conflicts. This flexibility was great for me, as I was juggling a huge work project at the same time. It has not, however, been great for my sleep schedule. But I guess staying up way too late is an authentic film festival experience.
Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore in When You Finish Saving The World.
My takeaways from the first weekend are that the documentaries have so far been better than the narrative films, and that the foreign narratives have been much better than their American counterparts. Take the case of Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directorial debut When You Finish Saving The World. It has a crackerjack cast including the great Julianne Moore as the burned-out head of a nonprofit who runs a shelter for domestic violence victims, and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard as her son, a streamer who has attracted a small but growing audience with his folk-rock songs. The actors struggle to create well-rounded characters, but Eisenberg, who also wrote the film, doesn’t know what to do with them. The struggle between mother and son to communicate through the teenage years ultimately goes nowhere, and the impression you’re left with is that both of these people are kind of jerks, anyway.
Elizabeth Banks in Call Jane (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Wilson Webb.)
Call Jane is by director Phillis Nagy, most familiar as the writer of Carol, which is one of those films whose list of accolades is so long it merits its own Wikipedia page. It gets off to a promising start, with Joy (Elizabeth Banks), a housewife in 1968 Chicago, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. She’s also pregnant, but carrying the baby to term will almost certainly be fatal for both of them. When the all-male hospital ethics board denies her physician’s request to authorize an abortion, Joy seeks out the services of Jane, an underground organization of feminists who arrange abortions for the desperate. After Jane, led by a flinty Sigourney Weaver, helps Joy, she gets sucked into helping other women in similar plights.
The tension of suburban good-girl Joy leading a double life as an illegal abortion doula propels the first two acts of the film, but when it’s time for a climax, Nagy whiffs. The real-life Jane collective operated in Chicago for years until it was finally busted, and its leaders were awaiting trial for murder and conspiracy when the Roe v. Wade verdict was handed down. That’s some high drama, especially considering in this film it would be Sigourney Weaver in peril. But Call Jane instead omits the police raid (it’s mentioned as having happened off screen during the epilogue) and opts instead for a useless adultery subplot between Joy’s lawyer husband (Chris Messina) and their widow neighbor, played by Kate Mara. What could have been the feminist version of Judas and the Black Messiah instead fizzles into banality.
Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World.
Much more successful is the Norwegian import, The Worst Person in the World, by director Joachim Trier. It’s a flight-footed romantic comedy, shot through with magical realism and a heavy Bergman influence that sometimes put me in mind of Ira Sachs. The film is grounded by a generous performance by Renate Reinsve as Julie, a young woman in Oslo who falls in love with a graphic novelist named Askel (Anders Danielsen Lie) 15 years her senior. The episodic film is told in 12 chapters, with a prologue and epilogue, which map out vital events in the course of their relationship as they meet cute, grow apart, break up, and reconcile in the most melancholy way. The film is funny and sad, and all the characters feel like real people.
Sinéad O’Connor in Nothing Compares by Kathryn Ferguson (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo: Independent News and Media.)
Speaking of real people, the documentary side of the equation has a pair of killer biographies. Nothing Compares is the story of Sinead O’Connor’s meteoric rise to fame, and the painful history behind her songs. O’Connor is best remembered today for getting canceled after a protest at the end of a performance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a picture of the Pope. But as the film reminds us, the specific thing she was protesting was the Catholic church’s ongoing cover-up of pedophile priests preying on congregants. Time has proven her absolutely right on that issue, just as it has about everything else she says in the film’s wealth of archival footage. O’Connor paid the price for being ahead of her time.
Katia and Maurice Kraft in Fire of Love
The first big sale out of Sundance’s film market was Fire Of Love, a documentary about volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft by director Sara Dosa. The Krafts devoted their lives to studying volcanos, but they seemed to be just as drawn to the insane risks they were taking as they filmed lava rivers and pyroclastic flows at point-blank range. Fire of Love is a great combination of idiosyncratic love story and spectacular footage of fire fountains, It’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser when it sees wide release.
The Strokes tear it up in Meet Me In The Bathroom.
Last year’s festival was a hotbed of great music docs, including the transcendent Summer of Soul and the inventive The Sparks Brothers. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s chronicle of the millennial Brooklyn music scene, Meet Me In The Bathroom, doesn’t approach those heights. There’s no shortage of great footage of The Strokes, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem in the film, and the directors effectively make the case for the scene’s enduring influence. Specifically great is the treatment of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, which pairs explosive performance footage with a confessional interview. But the film is plagued by bad choices, such as inexplicably throwing Frank Sinatra’s “When I Was Seventeen” and Ace Freley’s “Back In The New York Groove” into the middle of a film about indie rock.
The opening image of Saul Williams and Anisa Uzeman’s Neptune Frost.
The find of the festival for me so far has been Neptune Frost by poet Saul Williams and director Anisia Uzeyman. I’m not even sure I can put this one in a clean category, but I’ll go with “Afro-futurist cyberpunk musical.” Shot on location in the countryside of Rawanda, it concerns a group of refugees from the harsh realities of war and economic exploitation who retreat into an alternate dimension to wage guerrilla war on The Authority. At least that’s part of it. It’s complicated.
Neptune Frost’s budget was minuscule, but it does everything right. It’s visually stunning, thanks to some incredible costumes and set design, as well as cinematography that punches way above its weight. The opening image literally made me say “wow” out loud. The directors stage full-on musical numbers with live singing in places like the jungle and a strip mine where rare earth elements are extracted to produce the electronics you’re reading this on right now. The songs are great, combining disparate elements like synth-pop, hip hop, high life, soca, Sondheim, and juju, with lyrics in five languages. The whole project’s perspective is bracingly revolutionary, but one banger after another makes it go down smooth. You’ll be bopping along and suddenly realize they’ve got you chanting “Fuck Google!” In the mixed bag of Sundance 2022, Neptune Frost is the first bona fide masterpiece
