Battleship Pretension’s Ten Best Films of 2022
Battleship Pretension’s Ten Best Films of 2022
Honorable mentions: Happening, Memoria, The Swimmers, Triangle of Sadness, The Wonder
10. After Yang
As the line between humanity and technology thins and blurs, it makes sense that filmmakers continue to explore what separates man from machine. A key question asked by After Yang is what a single memory from every day of an AI’s life can tell us about machines. After Yang is a beautiful film the meditates on the human condition and what family really means.
9. White Noise
Director Noah Baumbach has really upped his game with White Noise, a film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name. The film jumps from an ‘80s family sitcom to corporate satire to massive disaster movie energy with such ease, it makes me wonder why Baumbach has never made a big scale movie before. But as it stands, the movie is unique in his filmography.
8. Bones and All
More like “Call Me By Your Maim,” amiright? Director Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal love story offers a lot of teenage romance with couple Maren and Lee, played by Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet, respectively, and bloody genre fare that you don’t often find on the big screen. Guadagnino expertly balances both tones with a travelodge exploration across the Midwest.
Moreover, it’s interesting to think about whenever a foreign director comes to America to make a movie, it’s usually a landscapey travelogue movie—see Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, Walter Salles’ On The Road, and others. Why is that? Is there something exciting about exploring the great unknown of the United States that American directors take for granted?
7. The Fabelmans
This is not a film in need of interrogating Spielberg as a cinematic savant. Instead, there’s a deeply felt drama surrounding a young man’s realization that his parents have issues, and his best way of processing this is through the creative lens in his head, pushing him to see the best way he could frame the fallout of his family’s dysfunction. And it’s given more shape by the Beard’s top collaborators.
6. Stars at Noon
Like discovering rain in a barren land. Claire Denis’s latest film finds the 76-year-old filmmaker as tuned in as ever to the vast pleasures and agonies of our corporeal existence, the way sun feels on the skin and the right body on yours can save your soul. Salvation that might seem out of reach for Trish (Margaret Qualley, always great but decidedly at her best here), a down-and-out maybe-journalist and definitely-prostitute whose heel-clicks home have yielded only a showerless hotel, and seems especially unlikely to be found in an international businessman. But at least he has a shower. Denis and cinematographer Éric Gautier seem to discover the film as they make it, drifting along with Trish and Daniel as they float through cafes and funerals and downbeat dance clubs and onto the possibility of freedom, if such a thing exists. All understand they only have the present; and bodies.
5. Saint Omer
It would be dishonest for Rama, Diop or us as the audience to deny the voyeuristic, tabloid sensationalism that draws us to something like a real life infanticide trial, especially one that eventually invokes eye-grabbing topics like sorcery and curses. But beyond the what lies the why. Not just why Laurence did what she did but why we want to know so bad. Or is that even it? Is a conclusion and explanation the reason Rama keeps watching or is it the minute revelations folded into the expressions and turns of phrase of the defendants, witnesses and judges? We can decide for ourself the extent of Laurence’s culpability but Diop is more interested in Rama. After all, as a viewer whose interpretation of what she sees is as much about her as about the figures in the drama, she’s as much our surrogate as Diop’s.
4. The Banshees of Inisherin
The undeniable chemistry between Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell is on glorious display in The Banshees of Inisherin. (Also on display is Farrell’s chemistry with a miniature donkey). In this savage and cutting dark comedy, we see what happens when a friendship between two grown men suddenly ends. The results are darkly funny and disturbing.
3. RRR
RRR feels like the exact answer to the question of what else cinema can do to really impress upon audiences what kind of creativity is still out there, especially when moving beyond the boundaries of films produced by Hollywood without any sense of boldness.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
I took in Everything Everywhere All At Once within the same week as my number one film, and it’s the best example of this year when I felt I could say to myself, “Wow, movies!” This absurdist action-comedy-drama from the director duo the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) feels like a cinematic miracle.
1. Decision to Leave
The term “film noir” typically recalls a grit and dourness that initially doesn’t seem to apply to the visually inventive and often darkly comical Decision to Leave. But in addition to its aesthetics and tone, the film noir genre was known for its morally gray characters, doomed romantic relationships, and cynicism towards just about everything and everybody. Taking those tropes into account, Decision to Leave is a phenomenal contemporary film noir. Park Hae-il stars as Jang Hae-joon, a detective who starts falling for Tang Wie (Song Seo-rae), a widow who may or may not have had something to do with her mountain climber husband plummeting to his death. Jang’s and our trust in this possible femme fatale can never be fully established, as director Park Chan-wook filters conversations through glass, phones, mirrors, and a Korean-to-Japanese translation app to highlight a disconnect between our characters and the truth (even the soundtrack, inspired by Tang Wie’s love of rom-coms, prominently features a song titled “Mist”). Like the best detective stories, the mystery is inextricably tied to the emotional unraveling of a narrator who becomes increasingly unreliable. By the time the truth is revealed, our characters’ fates have become so irrevocably intertwined that it not only fails to set them free, but instead ensures their ultimate downfall.
Battleship Pretension’s Ten Best Films of 2022
Battleship Pretension is a movie discussion podcast started in 2007 by Tyler Smith and David Bax. Since then, we’ve done live comedy shows, written reviews, commentaries and more.
Battleship Pretension is a film discussion show and a film review website founded by Tyler Smith and David Bax. Beginning in March 2007, Battleship Pretension the show (known to fans simply as “BP”) embodies the type of laidback, free-flowing conversations had by lovers of film around the world. Battleship Pretension the website is dedicated to being a destination for those seeking worthwhile opinions on current releases, be they foreign, independent, studio pictures, theatrical, home video releases, etc. From its meager beginnings in Los Angeles, Battleship Pretension has amassed a worldwide audience and readership. From Germany to Korea to Australia, people have tuned in to share in Tyler and David’s love of film. As Battleship Pretension’s following continues to grow, the purpose remains the same: Reach out to the international cinephile community, invite them to join in the discussion and perhaps even start one of their own.
