Month: December 2022

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The Best Films of 2022

Perhaps I went a little overboard. It’s usually a lack of discipline that causes me to spill over the usual “Top 10” at the end of the year and expand it. I won’t deny it, but IRead Full Review

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Broker

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s uber-humanist approach to storytelling has produced some of the best films of the last twenty-five years, but his penchant for melodrama and sentimentality can sometimes lead him astray. His best films (like After Life or StillRead Full Review

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Babylon

As Babylon winds down to its end – a conclusion that manages to be both sentimental and ostentatious – it seems to be making a case for the end of movies. Or, more specifically, that the “endRead Full Review

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No Bears

It’s said that limitations can fuel creativity. No living filmmaker has taken more credence in that theory than Iranian director Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker whose persistence and prolific output hasn’t ceased even after being legallyRead Full Review

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Living

The face of Bill Nighy is a character actor’s dream. Expressive, handsome, slightly devilish, Nighy has used that face (and his expansive, wiry frame) to great success in his decades-long career, which has seen himRead Full Review

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Corsage

We all know what to expect of a royal biopic. The vast, sweeping palaces. Complex, ornate clothing. Rigid interiority thinly veiling robust emotion. Whether by design or by necessity of a limited budget, Corsage sidesteps a lotRead Full Review

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Women Talking

The last time we had a new Sarah Polley was all the way back in 2013, when her documentary Stories We Tell laid bare the secrets that lie within her family. That film was tinged withRead Full Review

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Avatar: The Way of Water

When he’s in between films, it does always feel like we’ve lost James Cameron to his infatuations. His submarine expeditions to explore the wreckage of the Titanic is still one of his great obsessions all theseRead Full Review

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Empire of Light

Empire of Light is a movie that has a lot of reverence for the more granular details of cinema. Yes, it takes place in a movie house and you often see the marquee lit upRead Full Review

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The Whale

Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Whale is a work brimming with so much self-hatred that you can almost forgive the complete lack of care it takes with its delicate subject matter. Almost. The subjectivity of itsRead Full Review

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Devotion

2022 has been a historically lucrative year for naval aviation dramas. Well, for one movie anyway. Top Gun: Maverick has made over a billion dollars worldwide since its release on Memorial Day weekend, a triumph that feltRead Full Review

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The Eternal Daughter

David Foster Wallace once famously claimed that “every love story is a ghost story”. Like many of Wallace’s quotes, it’s a romantic gesture flush with alternate meanings. I don’t think of Joanna Hogg as a DavidRead Full Review

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The Inspection

The Inspection excels at subverting your expectation. We have our notions about a US Marine Basic Training drama, and that notion gets even more narrow when you learn that the protagonist is a queer characterRead Full Review