2022 Movie Reviews

[paleshadow]

Originally Posted by Jondalar

I totally disagree. None of them are really scary anymore but this one had interesting, surprising kills.

It's hard to compare thoughts without spoilers, but I am curious about what kills you thought were surprising? In terms of surprises, I thought there were people who were going to get killed that didn't. Also, one person that really pretty much was killed but at the end wasn't.

[TrueFaith77]

5.Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche (Celeste Bell, Paul Sng); grade: B - Poly’s daughter Bell honors her mother’s legacy—a punk legend and lead singer of X-Ray Spex (think Sex Pistols meets Roxy Music meets Bowie)—by emphasizing her humanity. While the film establishes Poly’s startling youthful intelligence and artist’s sensitivity by chronicling her mental instability, it reconciles Bell to Poly as daughter-and-mother—a blessing. I wish the film had focused more on Poly’s art (the music, the image) and on her impact (grade Z interviewees ignore Poly’s influence on the Au Pairs and X and relationship to contemporaries like John Lydon). But when the film explores one of her most daring ideological stripteases (from Lyndon’s flat to an anti-racism rally) it recognizes semiotic revelation that must have inspired Morrissey.

[TrueFaith77]

6. Through My Window (Marçal Forès); grade: C+ - Gay YA filmmaker Fores’s #throughmywindow #ATravesDeMiVentana teases a more radical view of sexual discovery (and heartbreak), but turns into the usual hetero post-Twilight soft-core wish-fulfillment fan-fic fantasy … the two leads (Julio Peña + Clara Galle) are gorgeous and naked.

[TrueFaith77]

7. The Battle at Lake Changjin II (Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, Dante Lam); grade: B-

The wacky—surprisingly moving!—propaganda film sequel The Battle at Lake Changjin II features ideologically abstracted CGI thru which camera, history, the collective (“brothers”) advance like a seamless robe and American might vaporizes like Dr. Manhattan in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. Even the three directors meld into one hegemonic force—but I’m certain Chen Kaige directed the awesomely visualized and touching climax in which sentimentality gives way to tactile feeling in looming framings and poetic imagery.

[TrueFaith77]

8.I Want You Back (Jason Orley); grade: B-

Jenny Slate might be the best current film comedienne. Her characters start as overgrown children who mature by discovering purpose and building relationships (Obvious Child and Landline remain her best work). She makes her characters specific (sexy, ethnic) but recognizes in this arc a universal crisis. And in this film she and director Orley find a new expressive facet when Slate’s character plays Audrey in a hilariously impassioned junior high production of Little Shop of Horrors. I lol’d in every scene, and, though the two main characters don’t quite get the comeuppance they deserve, the film secures a moral foundation (Scott Eastwood warning: “Stay away from my wife. I’m not kidding” is his best acting yet).

[TrueFaith77]

9.Bigbug (Jean-Pierre Jeunet); grade: A

Jeunet long-dreamt an Eisenstein-inspired peek into the sexual secrets behind closed doors. Now, finally fulfilled, but through the sci-fi lens of covidpocalypse isolation. Each actor is lit with a ring light—as if evincing an individuating spark. By the time Jeunet penetrates into the psycho-spiritual essence of his characters’ exploitable desires, the film is revealed as a continuation of Spielberg’s devastations in A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like Spielberg, Jeunet expands these insights into cultural awareness (quoting French literature and citing Sternberg-Dietrich’s iconic Blue Angel). Dizzy yet? When the characters debase themselves for the pleasure of their AI overlords, Jeunet fulfills the film’s De Palma-like existential immanence. This peak dystopian satire brings to our current totalitarian waking nightmare the clarity of dreaming. It’s the movie to beat: 2022.

[Jondalar]

2. Moonfall, grade D = Very bad sci-fi movie, stupid plot. There are some very good special affects and Halle Berry gives a pretty good performance, but don't waste your money. The movie isn't paced well and I couldn't wait to leave.

[TrueFaith77]

67.Unhuman (Marcus Dunstan); grade: F
68.See How They Run (Tom George); grade: F
69.Grande Jete (Isabelle Stever); grade: C
71.The Menu (Mark Mylod); grade: F

The year’s brutalizing movies exploit real-world brutality, while the rare film attempts to explore the human dimensions of abuse. Both Knives Out wannabes Mark Mylod’s The Menu and Tom George’s See How They Run (also ripping off Wes Anderson) reveal the motivations of their respective murderers as founded in the child abuse they suffered. Upon this moral horror, the films hang the year’s most incompetent big-movie screenplay and display of film technique, respectively. Such indulgence of spiritual darkness proves enough to make audiences feel smart—these films use child abuse for cred. (Such a fall after Mylod made the definitive satire of the Washington closet in What’s Your Number?) The Tik-Tok style of Scream wannabe Unhuman means to congratulate the sophistication of young audiences, but is itself a form of abuse. More depressing than its twist (ripped off from the great Detention by Joseph Kahn), is its incapacity to highlight the talent of the underutilized Uriah Shelton (iconic in Rodrigo Garcia’s Blue, audacious in Christopher Landon’s Freaky). In international cinema, Grand Jete takes a stultifyingly dispassionate view of incest. Set in German drudgery in and outside of Berlin, it concerns a woman ballet instructor, whose physical demands she makes of her young charges she, too, probably suffered including giving up her son to pursue dance. “You have no maternal feelings,” her own mother drones. Returning home, she commences a sexual affair with her son after he invites her to an underground physique competition in which he participates. Their shared interest in pushing physical limits meets a desire to push social boundaries. The style of the film, handheld camera with characters moving in and out of shallow focus, keeps all prurience at a distance—but also empathy. The dulling emphasis on the mundane and punishing duration culminates in the scene where the mother gives birth to the child she shares with her son. The endless physical strain engenders within her, finally, maternal feelings. Somebody better cast Uriah Shelton in the American remake before it’s too late, but it better not be hacks Mylod or George!