HMs: The Batman, The Tinder Swindler, Don't Worry, Darling and Lightyear.
10 to 1:
James Cameron, after 13 years, returned us to Pandora to catch up with Jake Sully and Neytiri, who are now married parents to a brood of Na'vi kids, and their rainforest world's atmosphere of peace is again targeted for invasion; this time from the sea. I found it less moving than its predecessor and a couple of scenes are almost jarringly similar to ones in the first, but Avatar: The Way of Water is nonetheless confidently directed, logically plotted, visually mouth-watering (of course) and populated with engaging characters, some old, some new. It was worth the long wait.
Documentarian extraordinaire Brett Morgen has done it again. After studying the lives and works of Kurt Cobain, Dame Jane Goodall and the Chicago Eight among others, his latest subject is the man who was alternately the Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Saine and (originally) David Jones: David Bowie. I'm not actually a Bowie fan overall (I only like a few of his songs), but Morgen's work has never disappointed me and so when I saw his name attached as director here, I was interested and, despite initially feeling disappointed as I'd gone into it with the wrong expectations, he again justified my faith in his work. With this being another rock star documentary I was initially expecting something very personal and intimate like Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) but instead, it was very extravagant and weird. But then I realised, that was appropriate for a portrait of Bowie because, unlike Cobain, Bowie was very enigmatic, flamboyant and unorthodox. Morgen seems to know both the right stylistic approach for all his subjects and why to employ a different one for each, and with Moonage Daydream (named after the Bowie song) the result is ultimately visually striking, thought-provoking and exquisite.
Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) is a retired schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm despite having had two children with her late husband, so she hires a young male prostitute named Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), for some private time in a hotel. He's a very laidback but professional guy who reveals his mother believes he works on an oil rig. As Nancy continues her extended stay in the hotel, she continues having sessions with Leo, over which they bond both physically and emotionally. With Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Aussie director Sophie Hyde and writer Katy Brand take the very private and often sensitive subject of sex and build around it a sex dramedy that struck me as like a mix of Harold and Maude minus the Cat Stevens soundtrack, meets Y Tu Mama Tambien minus the road trip. Thompson and McCormack are both delightful and share strong chemistry, and they also help to make what's ostensibly a movie about sex really one about human connection. Despite a slightly predictable conclusion, I found it captivating, resonant and very tactfully handled.
Those ears, that nose, that laugh. Ever since he steered his way across the high seas in 1928's short Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse has become probably the most enduring and recognisable cartoon character ever created. Jeff Malmberg's absolutely beautiful documentary Mickey: The Story of a Mouse is one I'd recommend even to non-Disney fans, as it's about far more than just Mickey and Walt's shared history. It's also about how animation works as a process works; it's about how social attitudes change and then force brands to change; it's about what happens when an artist sends their creation out into the world, just like when a parent sends their child out into it; and, most profoundly, it's about how even after we grow up and old, our favourite children's characters are still always there to comfort and nourish us in dark times like a faithful pet. Overall, it's educational, affectionate and very frank and poignant, and in not using a narration it lets the tale tell itself.
Continuing with Disney, Turning Red is the first Pixar release from a solo female director, debutante Domee Shi, and that's just where it's notability starts. It's 2002, and 13-year-old Meilin "Mei Lee lives in Toronto with her traditional Chinese parents. Her strict and overprotective mother Ming (Sandra Oh) makes her fearful, as opposed to her very easygoing father Jin (Orion Lee), and as such Mei is quite secretive with Ming about her social life, including how she and her friends are huge fans of the boy band 4*Town, who are soon playing a concert in Toronto. But something then awakens in Mei that she can't quite hide: due to a family curse, she now starts transforming into a giant red panda whenever she experiences strong emotions. This transformation inevitably causes difficulties for her at school and home, but gradually enables Mei to learn more about her background and nature. This movie has a couple of noticeable narrative echoes of Brave (2012), but even so it's just wonderful. Shi takes to the directorial chair here like a duck to water, drawing from her own upbringing in Toronto as the daughter of Chinese immigrants to tell an obviously personal story without compromising imagination and charm. Her pacing and her attention to visual detail and consistency are faultless, the voice cast all give vibrant turns, and the music is very fitting. Wise, philosophical, existential, funny, sincere and genuinely touching, Turning Red ultimately turns to gold.
When Agatha Christie wrote her classic theatrical murder mystery The Mousetrap, I don't think she would've expected it to inspire a cinematic crime caper but that's exactly what we've received with See How They Run, from director Tom George and writer Mark Chappell and starring a mixed UK/US cast. It's 1953 in London, and The Mousetrap has just completed its hundredth performance on the West End stage, where the murder has so far been confined to. But that's until the show's sleazy American director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) is mysteriously killed backstage. Cue the no-nonsense Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) and world-weary Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) being put on the case, they're thrown into a whodunit that's even more puzzling - and certainly much funnier - than the one being performed. I usually prefer my comedies when they're very in-your-face but this is how I think you make a subtle, and clean, one that still raises huge laughs. It's witty and intelligent throughout because everybody involved intentionally (albeit satirically) approaches it like it's a deadly serious drama, despite knowing it's meant to be a farce. Thanks largely to that approach, See How They Run becomes a brilliant, metafictional and utterly hilarious send-up of all those stuffy and conservative English whodunits.
Harvey Weinstein was the most powerful producer in Hollywood, until 2017 when numerous women began coming forward with allegations of sexual abuse and harassment against him. Before long, those women numbered in their hundreds and he was finally sentenced in 2020 to 23 years in prison. The New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage and 2019 nonfiction book provided the basis for She Said, from director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and starring Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Carey Mulligan as Twohey. It's maybe unsurprising that this one was a critical smash but a commercial flop, as it deals with both a very heavy subject matter and a very widely publicised scandal (and when I went to see it I was the only male in there), but its importance is unquestionable and beyond that, it's just flawlessly and grippingly made. Schrader and Lenkiewicz both approach this story very cautiously and methodically, striving consistently to get the facts right and to reveal them impartially and objectively, and also to accurately evoke a newspaper's atmosphere as a workplace. They also handle the abuse storyline discreetly and tactfully, and Kazan and Mulligan fill Kantor and Twohey's shoes effectively. As a dramatisation of a journalistic investigation into discrimination, abuse and corruption, I think it's up there with All the President's Men (1976) and Spotlight (2015). I couldn't look away from it, and I left the cinema feeling moved and angry.
Family. We all have it; in fact, it's what we all come from. And often, it inspires art at its most challenging and impactful, which is certainly the case with the Australian documentary Everybody's Oma. Director Jason van Genderen began making home movies with his elderly, Dutch-born mother Oma in 2020 during the pandemic, which radically altered her lifestyle, and after posting those videos online they became a worldwide viral hit with over 100 million views. But there was considerably more to Oma's story, and this doco covers her early life before shifting the focus, with admirable sensitivity, to her eventual battle with dementia and how that also affected the rest of her family. Along the way, we also see how van Genderen and his wife and children rallied together to support her near the end as the pandemic lockdowns hit, with endeavours like creating a makeshift supermarket in her house. The result is a wise, tactful, compassionate, deeply moving and occasionally even (intentionally) funny study of dementia, family and aging. Even more profoundly, it's a study of a subject from her artist, that's also a gift to a mother, from her son.
The old adage "It takes a village to raise a child" is only a cliche because it's true, and Steven Spielberg didn't become the most successful filmmaker in history without his forebears first laying a path for him to walk down. That path is one he has now returned to for what I consider his best film in over 20 years: The Fabelmans. After his parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) take him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 when he's six years old, in which a train crash sparks his amazement, Sammy (newcomer Gabriel LaBelle), grows up with a hunger to make movies of his own, first recruiting his friends in his Boy Scout troop to make amateur war movies in Phoenix, Arizona. Amidst these adolescent filmmaking experiments, his home life is disintegrating as his parents' marriage crumbles and Sammy makes a particularly upsetting discovery about his mother, the only real happy note at this time being the arrival of his great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a former Hollywood employee who Sammy naturally sees as a sage. Meanwhile, at school he's the constant target of bullying for being Jewish, mainly from rivals Logan (Sam Rechner) and Chad (Oakes Fegley). But The Fabelmans is only ostensibly about Spielberg's upbringing; I think it's ultimately really a story about family, inspiration, prejudice and forgiveness, and since co-writer Tony Kushner is also Jewish, I'm sure it was quite a personal project for him as well. Spielberg's direction is so thoroughly tender, insightful, delicate and visually refined, he elicits very natural performances from all his cast, with Williams and LaBelle both giving assertive lead turns, it's very calmly edited and photographed by Spielberg regulars Michael Kahn (with Sarah Broshar) and Janusz Kaminski, and John Williams provides a haunting and appropriately piano-driven score. The Fabelmans is the man who I consider the greatest director ever, paying tribute to the people who gave him everything.
But somehow, not even Spielberg with a movie about his own life could dethrone this one. In this absolutely breathtaking recreation of the Viking legend of Amleth (which Shakespeare later adapted with the "h" at the start), King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) is killed by his power-hungry brother Fjolnir (Claes Bang), who then assumes the throne and tries to kill Aurvandill's son Amleth (Oscar Novak). The boy narrowly escapes, however, and swears revenge while sailing away. Years later, he returns as an adult (Alexander Skarsgard) to avenge his father's murder and on his journey to do this he meets and falls in love with enslaved Slavic sorceress Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), gains counsel from the Seeress (Bjork, bringing her singular Icelandic flair to this very Scandinavian story), and finds a simultaneous ally and adversary in his very duplicitous mother, Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman). My God, this epic masterpiece just blew my fucking head off when I first saw it in April (yes, it's stayed atop the podium that long) and it's repeated that with every subsequent viewing at home. I think the main reason why it impressed me that much is because of how genuinely distinctive it is: it's very refreshingly divided into five specific chapters, and director Robert Eggers infuses them all with a very expressionistic tone but he employs that for storytelling purposes more than aesthetic ones to be pretentious. There's a lot of slow cinematography with dark colours seen here, and that motif is truly haunting. Also, the editing is suitably sharp and remorseless for a movie about such a notoriously violent civilisation. Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough's score gives the action an exceptionally powerful beat to which to march, the costume and production design is meticulously accurate, Eggers' and Sjon's screenplay adheres authentically to the language and legends of the era, and Eggers never forgets about character development, ensuring all his cast don't let the visuals and action overshadow them; Kidman and Claes are especially strong. Overall, The Northman is, for me, like a perfectly bowled bowling ball: it is absolutely striking. In the cinema, I did not check my phone or watch once, and I sat through the credits. It's that amazing. It's just so fucking forceful, imaginative, visually spectacular and even emotional, and a very thought-provoking and insightful peek into Viking life and culture. I was W-O-W-E-D. With all due respect to the other movies here, this is my only 10/10 of 2022.
