2022 Movie Reviews

[TrueFaith77]

34.Benediction (Terence Davies); grade: A+

Terence Davies, one of the few living giants of cinema, daringly connects man's capacity for cruelty represented by World War I to gay men's cruelty to each other in the Siegfried Sassoon bio-pic Benediction. That makes this the most sophisticated bio-pic since Visconti's Ludwig and the most unsparing and morally insightful gay portraiture since Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train--epochal achievements. Epitomizing Davies' formal genius (and frugality), he expresses Sassoon's horror at the devastations of World War I by integrating found footage of the War. Doing so, Davies movingly connects his own personal responses to the men in the footage with Sassoon's political and poetic protest of the war (the footage recall's Pauline Kael's line in Riefenstahl's pre-WWII Olympia: "these young men who were so soon to kill each other"). After the war, which took the life of Sassoon's unconsummated friend, the poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), Sassoon joins England's gay elite and enjoys its hedononism--headed by Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine). Broken-hearted, Sassoon breaks hearts. (More to say on the bitter irony of Novello's betrayal of the fame afforded by his common touch and good looks.) Years (decades?) pass, but Davies ingeniously keeps his actors young until applying morphing special effects to visualize youthful beauty's fading and the spiritual-physical ramifications of hard-heartedness (a reunion of lovers dredges up old betrayals and new vindictiveness). By humanizing the generational conflict between Sassoon and his son (an agonizing scene of Sassoon's hissyfit over loud rock-'n-roll music), Davies demonstrates the lingering effects of World War I to achieve a wide-ranging critique of British culture and the legacy of the 20th Century. Sassoon's ineffective objection to World War I and his seduction in the world of fine young cannibals engenders a need for redemption. Sassoon expresses this need in his art, his heterosexual marriage and parentage, and his conversion to Catholicism. Davies expresses this in overwhelming imagery--tableaus come to life--and musical juxtapositions. He answers Sassoon's longings with ravishing rhapsodies (poetic meditations on trees as signs of permanence and natural beauty like Godard's Nouvelle Vague and on rainfalls over empty space charged with remembered bonhomie and overlapping imagery of synchronized swimming with his one true love). Finally, Davies achieves a spiritual epiphany when Sassoon discovers in his desire to redeem his life the necessity for humility. Davies juxtaposes the youthful pairing-off denied Sassoon and the physical ravages of war spared Sassoon in a montage unified by the poetry of a superior artist. Here, the appealing poise of Jack Lowden's Sassoon and the stony inflexibility of Peter Capaldi's older Sassoon finally crumble--a life's pose deconstructed compassionately. It's the best movie of 2022.

[DownOnRodeo]

As an unsentimental neophyte who never saw the original (although I did read the screenplay as homework just in case), the new Top Gun was a cringefest of Tom Cruise glorification comprising a succession of cliched dialogue and plot development that is laughable despite taking itself seriously. Much of the film was rehashed from Cruise and Kosinki's earlier, and far superior, film "Oblivion".
Looking forward to the next M:I installments and anything from Kosinksi with a decent script.

[TrueFaith77]

Originally Posted by DownOnRodeo

As an unsentimental neophyte who never saw the original (although I did read the screenplay as homework just in case), the new Top Gun was a cringefest of Tom Cruise glorification comprising a succession of cliched dialogue and plot development that is laughable despite taking itself seriously. Much of the film was rehashed from Cruise and Kosinki's earlier, and far superior, film "Oblivion".
Looking forward to the next M:I installments and anything from Kosinksi with a decent script.

I agree with everything you say—especially about Oblivion!—except I think Cruise is extraordinary in the film.

[Jondalar]

9. The Black Phone, grade B = Atmospheric horror movie with a few scares. The movie has a simple plot, but it's very well-made and acted and very creepy. It's by the same director who made Sinister and the first Doctor Strange movie. Takes place in the 1970s and it has that Halloween feel. I'm going to add this to my horror collection. It is more creepy than scary though.

[TrueFaith77]

43.Marx Can Wait (Marco Bellocchio); grade: A+

Leave it to Marco Bellocchio to use the autobiographical documentary genre to advance the language of cinema. At first, Bellocchio utilizes various familiar documentary tropes to explore his own complicated relationship to the very personal subject: testimonials (witnesses and "experts" recount the unexpected suicide of Marco's twin Camillo in 1968), family ritual (a birthday meal with the families of the Bellocchio siblings), found footage and family archives, and clips from Bellocchio's own filmography. Aesthetic Spoilers: Bellocchio then astonishes with devastating formal gambits that achieve spiritual revelations. He expands the Rappaport-esque Kuleshov effect by splicing in baby photos of he and his siblings to create the impression that they are responding to a sequence from one of his films that dramatizes his own family's playtime (recalling a similar use of the technique to witness the rise of fascism in Italy and to reflect the moral investigation of his own daughter's gaze). In slow-motion, he completes the individual portraiture of his surviving siblings--whose insights into and conflicting memories about Camillo and his death constitutes the film's narrative--as a thorough examination of family dynamics--one sibling turns another's frown into a smile. After that, Bellocchio reminds of his powerful compositional sense and exquisite lighting with a deep-focus shot of Marco walking on a bridge with the fog and a city behind him as if left alone with the mystery of his brother, only for Bellocchio to tickle spectator imagination and express his own deepest longing with the image of a jogger running past with a logo on his sweat jacket that explodes in the mind with unexpected associations (Camillo was a gym trainer). The moment fulfills Bellocchio's exploration of a gym space earlier int he film as he ponders his brother's occupational disappointment. Finally, Bellocchio shows us something I can't remember ever seeing before that challenges preconceptions about personal ambition and artistic pursuit (I won't spoil it). It rivals the visionary expression of radical faith that concluded Bellocchio's career-revitalizing My Mother's Smile (2005)--which kicked off the most awesome run of films in the 21st Century. No wonder a Catholic priest read that particular film as a penitent's confession. Both films climax with the post-postmodern spectacle of divine absolution. Now, Marx Can Wait constitutes Bellocchio's act of contrition.

[TrueFaith77]

44.A Night in the Fields (Guillaume Grélardon); grade: B+
45.Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi); grade: B
46.My Donkey, My Lover, & I (Caroline Vignal); grade: A

Three recent art-house movies aim to reconnect audiences to a cultural heritage that vivified human relations in opposition to contemporary alienation (essential dependence vs. authoritarian isolation).

1) The platonic friendship at the center of A Night in the Fields provides the opportunity for Grélardon to catalogue various forms of intimacy and physical love during a fateful night of working-class recreation. His visuals connect the gay-youth films of fellow French filmmakers Andre Techine, Gael Morel, and Francois Ozon with the American youth-cult films of Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Hill. The resonances culminate in an iconic image of male affection—sharing a seat on a bike ride—familiar from those French auteurs in Wild Reeds, Full Speed, and Summer of 85 The image originated as mother-son love in Pasolini’s Mama Roma, a process Grélardon tracks narratively from family tenderness to friendly compassion.

2) The overrated Hamaguchi practices rare narrative efficiency in the three thematically-linked shorts in Wheel of Fortune. Although the rhetorical progression reminds of Eric Rohmer’s anthologies, Hamaguchi highlights each story’s existential moment of grace with zoom shots—countering the zoom prisons of Kubrickian misanthropy. (The second story’s perverse feminist triumph is worthy of Mary Gaitskill.)

3) Last, and best, Vignal awakens her self-involved heroine (and audience) to the Other In My Lover, My Donkey, and I. After receiving a benediction from the impossible protagonist in Rohmer’s masterpiece La Rayon Verte (Marie Rivière), Laure Calamy unfurls her self-destructive romantic history onto a saintly donkey named Patrick. Through this dynamic, Patrick chases out the snakes of sociopathology that threaten to doom Calamy. Cineaste Vignal leverages the spiritual-narrative trope of human-and-animal/alien bonding (from National Velvet to E.T.) to revivify Rohmerian existential Faith. Hence, the film’s range of feeling—from enervation to hilarity to endearment to catharsis—achieves the spiritual version of restoring dead flesh (as in a fling with a biker). The adulterous “lover” played by Benjamin Lavernhe (hilarious on stage as Scapin the Schemer) further anchors the film, beyond cinema tradition, to Moliere romantic ritual. I imagine Clarence Brown, Rohmer, Spielberg, and Moliere moved to tears by Patrick’s final bequeathing of hope.

[Jondalar]

10. Thor Love and Thunder, grade C - = Huge disappointment. Basically its a comedy. There are some cute moments but they turned Thor into a joke.He doesn't seem like a super hero. He seems like a comedian.. Marvel movies used to be dependable. You could count on them to be good, but more and more you never know what you are going to get. This movie is blah.

[Jondalar]

11. Bullet Train, grade F = Hated this movie. I couldn't follow the plot and eventually fell asleep in the movie theater. I still don't know exactly what is about. The British accents and humor were hard to follow and the timeline of events made things even more confusing. Definitely style over substance. I give it the finger.

[TrueFaith77]

36.Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli); grade A

At 2.5 hours, Lost Illusions adapts the 1840s serial novel by Balzac at breakneck speed. Director Giannoli's visual imagination illustrates dense narration to simultaneously detail a young writer's rise and comeuppance in post-Revolutionary Paris (a portrait of Napoleon appears in an antique store window). It juxtaposes the return of the aristocratic classes--to which the writer believes he belongs--and the era's corrupt upstart media--through which the writer plots his climb and revenge. The plot hurtles toward an unholy collusion between these forces to destroy the benighted young writer by exacting a cruel proxy vengeance. The modern parallels to today's media elite and the climbers of internet alternative media prove bracing and, ultimately, devastating. As Armond White points out, Balzac seemingly invented the term "fake news"--and deconstructed how it works through this story (as a promising rural poet, Lucien de Rubempré works in a printing press). What energizes this adaptation is the casting of actors whose modern gay portraitures have always rubbed me the wrong way--Benjamin Voisin (Ozon's Summer of 85), Vincente Lacoste (Honore's Sorry Angel), and Xavier Dolan (his own I Killed My Mother). In period garb, each of them physically embodies a Mythic type--naïveté, cynicism, and ambition, respectively--as immediately recognizable as the era's caricatures illustrating newspapers with names like Le Satan. The actors' gay-cinema resonance in heterosexual roles here creates a shorthand for shared sympathy and envy. In this way, the film awakens political consciousness in the audience by activating the political significance of its actors. So, their exploitable humanity matches that of the film's sacrificial lamb, an innocent who she dares to expose her vulnerability in the public sphere.

[TrueFaith77]

37.Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg); grade: C

Crimes of the Future combines elements of my two personal "favorite" Cronenberg films. Here the perverse techno sexuality of 1996’s Crash meets the bizarre labyrinthine conspiracy of the 1991 Naked Lunch. Yet, it jettisons the most interesting parts of those films. Instead of the common connection between people and cars in Crash, Crimes of the Future focuses on niche performance art and body-horror sadism. Instead of the literary-biography elements of Naked Lunch, the original screenplay of Crimes of the Future reflects the faux-existential pretensions of Cronenberg. Double agents engage in a pseudo-political war between those who support body adaptation (incorrectly labeled "evolution") and those serving the powerful which seeks to maintain the biological status quo. Yet, the status quo means making a spectacle out of mutilation, and the radical means accepting the reduction of humanity to biological impulses. It affirms the question: are we just eating and ****ing machines? That's why Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart give labored performances and why Cronenberg over-relies on cgi instead of practical effects. Even Lea Saydoux, the most believable and emotionally dynamic performer in the movie, plays a character who cynically fakes her own expressiveness when the film reaches its transgressive climax. The movie's consensual mutilations reaches their logical conclusion in the desecration of a child's corpse. Some complain that the movie's final shot acts as too much of a cliffhanger. Note: it fulfills the movie's art direction--bio-furniture designed to achieve maximum comfort. It features the rebellious act of the story's main mole who risks death for the chance to embrace dietary evolution. Still: It's more interesting and more intelligently crafted than Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Northman, and The Batman! They’re the crimes of Cronenberg’s ‘90s future.

[TrueFaith77]

Originally Posted by TrueFaith77

34.Benediction (Terence Davies); grade: A+

Terence Davies, one of the few living giants of cinema, daringly connects man's capacity for cruelty represented by World War I to gay men's cruelty to each other in the Siegfried Sassoon bio-pic Benediction. That makes this the most sophisticated bio-pic since Visconti's Ludwig and the most unsparing and morally insightful gay portraiture since Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train--epochal achievements. Epitomizing Davies' formal genius (and frugality), he expresses Sassoon's horror at the devastations of World War I by integrating found footage of the War. Doing so, Davies movingly connects his own personal responses to the men in the footage with Sassoon's political and poetic protest of the war (the footage recall's Pauline Kael's line in Riefenstahl's pre-WWII Olympia: "these young men who were so soon to kill each other"). After the war, which took the life of Sassoon's unconsummated friend, the poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), Sassoon joins England's gay elite and enjoys its hedononism--headed by Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine). Broken-hearted, Sassoon breaks hearts. (More to say on the bitter irony of Novello's betrayal of the fame afforded by his common touch and good looks.) Years (decades?) pass, but Davies ingeniously keeps his actors young until applying morphing special effects to visualize youthful beauty's fading and the spiritual-physical ramifications of hard-heartedness (a reunion of lovers dredges up old betrayals and new vindictiveness). By humanizing the generational conflict between Sassoon and his son (an agonizing scene of Sassoon's hissyfit over loud rock-'n-roll music), Davies demonstrates the lingering effects of World War I to achieve a wide-ranging critique of British culture and the legacy of the 20th Century. Sassoon's ineffective objection to World War I and his seduction in the world of fine young cannibals engenders a need for redemption. Sassoon expresses this need in his art, his heterosexual marriage and parentage, and his conversion to Catholicism. Davies expresses this in overwhelming imagery--tableaus come to life--and musical juxtapositions. He answers Sassoon's longings with ravishing rhapsodies (poetic meditations on trees as signs of permanence and natural beauty like Godard's Nouvelle Vague and on rainfalls over empty space charged with remembered bonhomie and overlapping imagery of synchronized swimming with his one true love). Finally, Davies achieves a spiritual epiphany when Sassoon discovers in his desire to redeem his life the necessity for humility. Davies juxtaposes the youthful pairing-off denied Sassoon and the physical ravages of war spared Sassoon in a montage unified by the poetry of a superior artist. Here, the appealing poise of Jack Lowden's Sassoon and the stony inflexibility of Peter Capaldi's older Sassoon finally crumble--a life's pose deconstructed compassionately. It's the best movie of 2022.

Ranking Terence Davies

Greatest Films of My Lifetime
1.The Long Day Closes (1993)
2.Distant Voices, Still Lives (1989)

Masterpieces
3.A Quiet Passion (2017)
4.Benediction (2022)

Great
5.The House of Mirth (2000)
6.The Neon Bible (1995)
7.Sunset Song (2016)
8.The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Near-Great
9.Of Time and the City (2009)