The Top Ten Films (I Watched) in 2022

 The Top Ten films (I Watched) in 2022:

The terrific Romanian 2007 film 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days from Cristian Mungiu - isa film everyone in an abortion-banning state should be forced to watch over the 2 hours or so, through a series of mostly long stills, and sometimes long tracking shots in which Mungiu conveys the struggle over a few days of two college roommates in Romania, with its ridiculously strict anti-abortion laws (couldn’t happen here, could it?). 

Wim Wenders’s music-documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a totally enjoyable start to finish look at Cuban music - a project that began when the great American guitarist Ry Cooder, who’s been for many years a proponent of world music, travels to Cuba to try to connect with the great stars of traditional Cuban dance music, much of which had been performed by members of the eponymous club. 

What a nice surprise to come across the under-the-radar Best Pic nominee Coda (2022), which shocked everyone with its Best Picture Oscar: a terrific film that’s heart-warming, never soporific or gratuitous, about a teenager who works on her family fishing boat out of Gloucester while a full-time h.s. student with dreams of becoming a pro singer, with the catch that her family members all have complete deafness. 

In the Soviet WWII film Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), one of best war, or anti-war, films I’ve ever seen, we follow a young man’s induction into and armed combat and takes us through astonishing sequences of cruelty and brutality that never feel gratuitous, just horrifying. 

The Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the best ever among American films noirs - from the look of LA ca. 1938 (the setting for the plot), the fantastic hard-boiled dialog (screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by JM Cain, so how could you go wrong?), great acting by the 3 leads, each cast against type (McMurry, Stanwyck, E.G. Robinson), and a fun plot that will have you thinking all the way through,

Dino Risi’s Italian road movie, Il Sorpasso (1962), is totally watchable and fun and sad and touching. “Road Movie” doesn’t to it justice; it’s a comedy with much pathos, with two guys, strangers essentially, taking a weekend drive away from Rome and along the Coast - with Vittorio Gassman as the extrovert, risk-taking, domineering personality and the recently gone Jean-Louis Trintagnant as the timid, cautious, nerdy guy.

Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) - the title will become evident a few bits into this 60-minute program, directed by Bo Burnham - is an absolutely unique (and excellent) piece of cinema, something like an hour-long comedy sketch, sure, but also like a 60-minute one-man play and like an hour-long discussion unrehearsed and like an hour-long therapy session.

Radu Jude’s 2016 film, Scarred Hearts (the title is awkward, at least in English) is a beautiful if painful medical odyssey, as we follow a young man (early 20s) in 1935 Romania as he enters a TB asylum; the care he receives may have been adequate in its day but from our vantage looks brutal and ineffective: essentially the well-meaning doctor punctures the patient’s stomach to siphon off infectious pus - extremely painful - the puts the patient in a body cast, essentially making him immobile for months - with obvious physical (and mental) deterioration. 

John Ford’s 1939 classic, Stagecoach, is still a pleasure to watch if you can get by the racism and stereotypes that mar some of the scenes and just recognize these - the Apache warriors, the comical Hispanic-American English pronunciations - as relics from a (nearly) bygone era. In essence, the film is a version of the Canterbury Tales meets Sartre’s No Exit, as a group of 10 or so travelers, each with his/her own mission, share a coach for transport across dangerous open lands to the next fortification.

Martin Bell’s documentary Streetwise (1984) is a stunning and extraordinary film on the (mostly) teenagers living on the streets of Seattle, then, ironically, known as the “most livable city in America.” This scene is the polar opposite of the Microsoft/Starbucks Seattle culture that we know (of). Bell’s camera follows these children, all of them from broken homes or other terrible and threatening and loveless lives.