My Top 25 Favorite Watches of 2022

The love grows

[posted to IG from December 28, 2022, to January 3, 2023]

​Ayyyy, I fucking love movies. And I love even more that whether I’m watching arthouse flicks, commercial blockbusters, or anything in-between, I continue to be blown away, floored, obliterated, re-formed, deeply touched, profoundly moved, educated, challenged, taken on journeys of staggering proportions, and irrevocably changed by the art form I adore so much, even after 32 years of life and thousands of films seen under my belt. So without further ado, not including re-watches, here are the movies that affected and impressed me the most in 2022.

​An undervalued feast of the physically exhausting psycho-carnival nightmare hell Tobe Hooper conjured like a mad warlock ringmaster during his prime.

Absurd and sinister in equal measure, there's just as much to laugh at as there is to recoil away from in this melodramatic story of surreal suburban terrors that feels like it could take place in the Twin Peaks universe.

Mani Kaul’s exceptional feature debut is a dismal, minimalistic poem - that feels both otherworldly and organic - about the alienated ennui of women without a place in a world defined by austere patriarchal tradition, sucked dry of all life and passion, leaving empty husks of human beings to merely go through the motions of living.

​The first volume of lauded Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi’s humanist but increasingly brutal anti-war trilogy. With a masterful sense of staging and framing, No Greater Love leads to a profound climax punching home the resiliency of the human spirit, beautifully demonstrating how even the smallest human victories can be monumental.

Continuing with his previous themes, Kaul’s deeply metaphysical ghost story Duvidha continues to take aim at a society that treats women as living phantoms themselves - invisible, aimless, and devoid of purpose outside the home (or even within) - emphasized by the quietly devastating line, “Parents allow a heap of rubbish to take time to grow. But not a daughter."

​Animation icon Hayao Miyazaki’s stunning creativity and hyper-imaginative, meticulously detailed world-building are on full display in this unforgettable adventure full of whimsical characters and anti-capitalist moral themes championing the importance of generosity over greed.

​What a simple yet beautiful message about the magic of imagination and childhood wonder, and the specialness inside us all when we let those things out to guide us over rigid, unchanging order.

With masterful visual language and sharply written scripts, Park Chan-wook has perfected the art of taking a simple premise and distorting it into a gripping, serpentine character study. This Hitchcockian romance-mystery is another exceptional outing from one of my favorite filmmakers.

​I spent a lot of time watching silent films this year and I don’t think most people realize how jaw-dropping and unhinged those movies can get. When things go bad, they go devastatingly, despairingly, dementedly bad, and Hell’s Hinges lives up to its title as a morally corrupt town nearly wipes itself out in a fit of violent frenzied mayhem, leaving infernal flames to swallow everything in sight like a self-wrought hell on earth.

​I don't know what it is about Slow Cinema™️, but I get the strangest feelings of deja vu while watching movies like Hungarian arthouse legend Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. I’m quite certain that the events of this film never happened to me, but at the same time, I often feel a visceral connection to them, as if I’d dreamed them before, or as if I’m interacting with my own past life, watching it unfold onscreen before me. It makes me feel like tea leaves wrapped in a surrealistic dream-state, being repeatedly submerged into some type of collective unconscious where I leave trace amounts of myself behind to be replaced by trace amounts of the concoction that seeps its way into my very being - like some type of unspoken covenant. In short, it’s fucking spiritual.

​Pioneering female filmmaker Lois Weber’s visionary artistry advanced the medium greatly during the 1910s with a complex film grammar that dwarfed most of her peers. From the evocative dance scenes to the dynamic action scenes to the melodrama in between, Weber shot everything in this film with an enviable eye for detail and design and an audacious technical precision I’ve yet to see in other films of the era.

​Road to Eternity deftly builds on the towering achievements of its predecessor and uses its boot camp military setting and unsparing climax to amp up the anti-Nationalism, telling the audience that there are much more important things in life than the glory of one's country. If pride costs human lives, it's not worth it.

The passion that went into every facet of this movie is abundantly clear, and the moments of transcendent beauty in the second half wrecked me as I was laughing through the tears and tearing up through the laughter.

​The absurdity of Nic Cage's performance at the start of Vampire’s Kiss makes for an effortless transition into a surprisingly believable depiction of someone suffering a psychotic break, legitimately convinced that they're turning into a vampire. In Cage's appropriately manic hands, the character becomes equal parts comic, tragic, and terrifying - like an evil, sad clown. Though cartoonish, there’s a sincere gravity to his performance at times that cuts through the buffoonery like a knife.

​Kobayashi’s final installment of his anti-war trilogy is a desolate yet engrossing character study questioning how someone like the protagonist Kaji - a stoic man of principles constantly championing his socialist humanism - would hold up once all order went belly-up and the life he once knew was all but gone. The answer becomes spirit-crushingly clear by the end. As our protagonist himself states, "When it's kill or be killed, you change."

​A juggernaut of silent cinema, Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöström’s early works are masterful social dramas that helped lead the vanguard of a rapidly advancing art form in the early 20th century, and this soul-piercing tragedy about a couple unfairly forced to flee into the wilderness is among his finest.

​A gripping piece of investigative journalism into the beliefs and origin of one of the strangest, most concerning sects in modern politics - revealing the men behind the conspiracy-ruled QAnon curtain.

Beloved Armenian arthouse filmmaker Sergei Parajanov's sublime artistry is on full display in this masterpiece. Attempting to recreate the tortured soul of a poet, where life’s beauty and suffering collide in a supernova, The Color of Pomegranates is an overwhelming, transcendent sensory experience. Parajanov drowns the viewer in eye-popping avant-garde visuals and cacophonies of sound that seem to truly capture what it must feel like to be a poet, stripped to your emotional core, naked at the mercy of experience.

​Daisies is proof that experimental filmmaking doesn't need to be stuffy, self-important, or ungraspable - it can just be a big ol' fucking barrel of fun. Czech surrealist and feminist filmmaking legend Věra Chytilová takes a morsel of a plot centered around a hedonistic pair of scissor-wielding chaotic neutral manic pixie dream eaters and turns it into a mischievous visual feast - ambrosia dipped in LSD for us to gorge upon. Pure artistic anarchy throwing double-birds to any and all convention.

​Lois Weber’s exceptional domestic drama about the small things we take for granted that irrevocably shape people's lives. Weber doesn't hide her hand (pun intended) about the crux of these problems either. In one visually inspired scene, the filmmaker superimposes a giant phantom hand with the word POVERTY stamped across it tormenting our sleepless central character. Clawing at the young girl as she lies awake, it seems to be chasing away her dreams, both literally and metaphorically.

​Easily the best pure horror film I watched this year, Ferrara’s underseen knockout blends gut-punching themes of substance dependence, the lengths of human violence, existential nihilism, and religion into the bloody messy cocktail of a damn good vampire flick where the common through-line is profound suffering. Even the jet black inky blood in The Addiction looks corrupted with the diseases that crawl their way into the human soul, spreading like a plague.

​Even though it’s not a comic book movie, The Matrix Reloaded is one of the greatest comic book movies I’ve ever seen. It’s dominated by pulpy, dynamic, over-the-top high-octane action fun, interspersed with compelling philosophical quandaries and existential questions about the human condition, and just overall rad as hell.

​Jane Schoenbrun’s masterful display of low-budget storytelling poses as a horror film but is much more of a poignant drama about fringe internet culture, the lonely people it sucks in, and the effect it has on impressionable minds. This open-ended internet-based social commentary is the exact type of reflection on contemporary culture that I look for in current media, and it slides into our zeitgeist like a missing puzzle piece as Schoenbrun sharply plays with narrative, form, and found-footage genre conventions to immerse the audience in a headspace of nearly metaphysical loneliness and ache. It’s an atmosphere that lo-fi indie folk musician Alex G has perfected, and his score for the film complements the story with beautiful melancholia. None of it would be possible without the haunting performance of Anna Cobb (in her feature debut) as Casey, though. She is nothing short of revelatory, seeming to blanket herself under a weight of sadness, insecurity, and isolation - reflecting the underdeveloped social skills of someone who spends every waking moment of their life in their own head - that's often hard to look at. As understated as it is, every aspect of this “bedroom horror” film blew me away.

Informed by 20th-century Czech stop-motion animators - most notably Jan Švankmajer's Alice (1988) - Christiane Cegavske's 21st-century update on the style is a surreal and unforgettable fantasy-adventure marked by dark whimsy. The cast of characters includes simple-minded nature-loving elf-bird-things that love red string and accidentally consume hallucinogens on multiple occasions; angry aristocratic mice that get crunk on blood tea; their domesticated turtle steed; a frog mage; a bartering spider-lady; and at the center of it all, a coveted female doll carrying an egg that anchors the main conflict. At face-level, the film is innocent and oddly wholesome at times, but the allegory underneath of a voiceless, immobilized woman at the mercy of two possessive factions of men is quite dark, especially as it culminates with the doll getting ripped apart limb-by-limb in a violent confrontation. Already a high-water mark of creativity and imagination in contemporary animation, the layered storytelling of Blood Tea and Red String only adds to its brilliance. Whether you want to watch it at the surface level as an offbeat little fantasy adventure, or in the depths as a nightmare about the negation of female agency in patriarchal structures - it's incredible.

Would you believe that my favorite watch of 2022 was an internet show about a group of improv comedians sitting around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons? I’d been wanting to play myself the past couple years, and luckily enough over the summer a good college buddy of mine invited me to join a campaign he was starting. Among others, he recommended that I watch Fantasy High to get a feel for gameplay before our campaign kicked off, and he mentioned that it was very entertaining as well. I don’t exactly remember what I expected going in, but it definitely wasn’t that this series where grown adults play make-believe would change my goddam life. It has more laugh-out-loud comedy, heart, compassion, depth, tension, thrills, emotion, drama, creativity, introspection, originality, commitment, cleverness, immersion, world-building, nuance, compelling ideas, and catharsis than 99% of TV and movies out there, and it beautifully demonstrates the magic of collaborative storytelling and the astonishing power of imagination. If someone were to tell me that lost films from all my favorite filmmakers had been uncovered and were being released this year, and also that Season 3 of Fantasy High was being released, Fantasy High Season 3 would still be my most anticipated content of the year. I love it so much. Hoot growl, baby, hoot growl forever.