I have waxed eloquently (or at least interminably) on movies/film/cinema too many times before, so I’ll spare you here.

At least until you get to my number 1, wherein the words will pour out of me with undeterred passion…because this is what cinema can provoke. Awe, yes, and entertainment; but also something more profound, a resonance of the human experience that can move us deeply and point to hidden truths.

So without further ado, my best movie experiences of the year, arranged into a numbered list purely because my all-time film critic sage Roger Ebert chose to do this with his lists.

But first…

Movie experiences I loved but couldn’t fit on this list because at some point I need to stop writing:

Glass Onion (Knives Out)- I only got to see it streaming, but my goodness can Rian Johnson construct something so vastly entertaining and scathing at the same time, perfectly timed for this moment of absurd celebrity in our culture (yeah I’m looking at you Elon Musk).

Kimi- Another one I only saw on streaming, but maybe the first time that has ever felt appropriate? Soderbergh remains a master of the medium, and it’s exciting to see him continue to experiment.

Turning Red- Beautiful, funny, and a story I am so thankful was able to be told. The moment where she finds peace with the support of her friends- and the moment where she truly sees her mother for the first time- brought instant tears to my eyes.

Women Talking- An important, riveting experience that fell just short of greatness for me.

Saint Omer- There was nothing else like it this year; something that confronts an impossible situation with remarkable clarity and directness.

Pinocchio- The best animated movie of the year, full of fantasy and horror.

Everything Everywhere All At Once- I laughed, I admired much of the design, I absolutely loved the rocks, and I was pretty exhausted by the frenetic filmmaking.

Avater- I saw it on a giant 3D Imax screen and was in exposition hell for the first hour…then they went underwater and I just started crying at the immense beauty of the images. Visual splendor and silly plot machinations, this seems to be the rest of James Cameron’s career. (I’ll still watching the next one or 5 or whatever he does)

10. Top Gun: Maverick

God bless movies.

In something of a beautiful microcosm of modern Hollywood, this is a gorgeously shot, mostly vacuous work that still managed to completely exhilarate me both times I saw it in theatres. When the jets take off on their climactic mission, at the end of a flawlessly executed audio/visual crescendo, I reflexively leaned back and cursed out loud. Every part of it is driven by the visceral yet mostly empty charisma of Tom Cruise, that singular paragon of stardom and cult.

In lieu of more words on the movie, I’ll relate one of my favorite stories from this production: one of the actors discovered that due to prolonged exposure to the fighter jets, he had accumulated jet fuel in his blood that caused a sickness. When he told Tom Cruise about this the next day, Cruise smirked and said “I was born with jet fuel in my blood, kid.”

Ah, America.

9. The Fabelmans

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it nonetheless: this is a Speilberg film, so the craftsmanship is so superb you almost fail to notice it. The pacing, the dance of camera with music, the tender support of each performance is all simply sublime. It is impossible for a man this innately talented to make a ‘bad’ film.

But what is different here, and so strikingly provocative, is how he has nakedly turned those innate talents inward without editorial constraint. The important episodes of his young life are presented seemingly without forced narrative, as if the film stock itself is implacably providing space for the audience to do its own psycho-analysis. There are no easy solutions, clear explanations for each turn; in a way, this may be his most human work of all.

We can feel him oscillate between the two poles created by his parents, the Engineer and Artist within him and the struggle to co-exist with both. He does not choose between them, because there is no one choice; every single film he has created has been an uneasy marriage between the two, a battle of wills that causes great destruction and creation. It is all on display here: a car drive that becomes action set piece, a sinful betrayal revealed only through celluloid, a monologue that transforms a life.

But through it all, one great thread ties together every episode and every choice- the irrepressible joy he finds when he can speak through cinema. My favorite moment comes near the end, when he screens a little student film he made documenting a class day at the beach in which he couldn’t help but capture an athletic bully with iconic visual splendor, shooting him as if he were a golden god. The bully confronts him and asks him why he did that, and he has no answer; he couldn’t explain it then, and he can’t explain it now. The final shot of the film re-affirms this- he is forever the young artist overcome by joy in his craft, unable to fully express himself in any other medium or avenue of life.

It is a gift to us all that he has managed to let that craft probe his own story with such vulnerability and naivete.

8. The Northman

Blood, ritual, gore and mud; violence and fantasy, heartbeat by beaten heart. This film is both a callback to historical cinema and a deep dive through modern eyes into ancient visions. It is, in all its imperfections, a shining beacon of what this medium alone can provide- a visceral experience of one's perspective entirely foreign to us. The people of this particular land at this particular moment in time must have seen their world in such a way- with gods and natural spirits tangibly at work around them, the barrier between natural and spirit realms but a thin veil easily broken. To accomplish such an immersive experience through our modern movie industry is something of a miracle and a credit to the singular director Robert Eggers.

There is a 15-20 minute sequence of scenes in the first third that is nothing short of masterful, some of the greatest filmmaking of the year (or any year). In what seems to be 5 long unbroken shots we meet our central character later in life and experience in minute detail the horror and wild fervor he has submitted himself to.

The first shot sees a boat row past before the camera glides with great effort out over the river, turns, and slowly tracks on to the boat and reveals the now-adult face of our hero, inner light now dimmed behind his eyes. The second shot plunges us into fire-lit ritual and unearthly soundscape as the viking men undergo a trance-like transformation into savage animal spirits. The third and fourth shots implacably guide us in and through a gruesome assault on a wooden fortress, with a flatly absurd Aaron Taylor-Johnson at the center catching javelins mid-air and scaling timber walls with only an axe (seriously how did they do this??). The fifth shot then unsparingly reveals battle-scarred aftermath, the dreadful terror of the conquered and the maniacal glee of depraved victors all juxtaposed against a pained yet vacant face on our hero. The staging and artistry is immense to behold, cinematic storytelling that doesn’t need a word of dialogue to convey what it wants to say.

7. Eo

In the last section I spoke of what this medium alone can provide- a visceral experience of one’s perspective completely foreign to our own- but this incredible work takes that idea to abstract heights, and in some ways reveals more about modern society than any other film on this list.

It does so by centering its perspective on a donkey.

Eo brays, and grazes, and watches the world revolve; he experiences love, and loss, and haphazard adventures across the countryside. Along the way he meets humans who are kind, humans who are gentle, humans who flippantly embrace him and humans who casually wound him. He witnesses absurd joy, incomprehensible cruelty and the daily tragedies of life.

Most crucially, the film does not turn him into a donkey-shaped human; it observes him with compassion, and takes abstract stabs at perspective drenched in ethereal soundscapes and red tint, but it carefully avoids direct anthropomorphism. This allows it to step back and slowly reveal just how disconnected we human beings have become from the natural world around us, how we have so deeply, artificially severed ourselves from the pain and organic beauty we once understood to be intrinsic and all-encompassing.

How we turned all other life into tools, instead of partners.
The ending of this film, fluid and doomed, will stay with me forever.

6. Babylon

God f******* bless movies.

I mean seriously. This 3 hour epic has it all- shitting elephants and rattlesnake fights, lurid dances and madcap adventures, soaring soliloquies and vomitous responses, a multitude of moments both sacred and profane. This is what I live for, why I worship at the feet of the silver screen. This is a work only shameless hubris can produce.

In one shaggy masterpiece, Damian Chazelle and his team have conjured a work that attempts to sum up all of Hollywood in one giant swing. I don’t know if he fully connects; I don’t care. He has always approached pace and performance as a musician in his movies, and this has clearly become his magnum opus to the depraved magic of cinema. Some of the sequences here are among the most sensational I have ever experienced, so propulsive they still reverberate through my body every time I think of them. Yet he also manages to undercut every moment of earnestness, to allow self-ridicule and grand vision a jagged co-existence. Every time you think he might get too serious, a joke or gag or meta detail reminds you that this is all also a lark.

I saw it five times in theatres. To my twisted soul, it has become what Titanic was to pre-teens a quarter century ago. I could go on and on detailing my love for this endeavor, expressing wonder for Margot Robbie’s tornadic performance or for Justin Hurwitz’s instantly iconic score. This film had me from the first “what the f***” to the last note of heartbreak…

…and then the end happened. An ending that is probably the only way to wrap up a movie that embraces romance, horror, disgust, comedy, anger, tragedy, pleasure, discomfort, evolution, nostalgia, and everything in between. An ending that dares to encompass the entire history of cinema, to cut to the heart of unspeakable magic and thereby look inward with cosmic vision. Each time I had tears in my eyes, a smile across my face, my insides twisted in euphoric glee as if I was possessed by a hallucinogenic drug. The first time I laughed out loud, the second time I danced wildly in the aisles, the third time I was paralyzed and submerged, the fourth time I lost all sense of self, the fifth time I remembered what it is to be alive.

F****** movies, man.

5. Decision to Leave

I don’t know that I could easily quantify it, but this clearly felt like the best-directed film of the year to me, an example of how an artist can elevate derided ‘genre’ into something unique and fresh with a power of its own. Though the beats of this noirish detective story may seem a little familiar, Park Chan-wook manages to weave technical ingenuity with hard-earned character study to hold us in a state of ambiguity and impending heartbreak. Among the many achievements here, what may be most remarkable is his treatment of exposition; each download of necessary information is playful, and surprising, full of elliptical edits and visual juxtapositions that turn rote methodology into exciting revelation.

For as old-fashioned as some elements of the story may be, the storytelling here is firmly contemporary- and in fact is one of the best explorations of modern technological sensibility I’ve seen. Images are layered with exquisite touch, a plethora of screens and stills, recordings and reflections that all tell a piece of the story. At the same time, this is a work that is also obsessed with very human, tactile senses: the taste and feel of food, the minute details of bodily death, the soft music of earnest voices. As our detective falls into a confusing matrix of emotions, we are intimately drawn in with him until we ourselves are lost, grappling with what we want to be true and what we fear to be true.

And of course, the end left me completely shattered, as all good film noirs must. But what a joy to be carried there with so much verve and care.

4. Tár

"You want to dance the mask, you must service the composer. You got to sublimate yourself, your ego, and, yes, your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself."

This quote will never leave my head. It comes at the end of one of the most virtuosic scenes in all of recent cinema, a 15-minute single shot Rorschach test where Cate Blanchett as the titular character lectures, belittles, probes, plays piano, reveals both vileness and transcendence in equal measure. It is an absolutely dazzling aria by Blanchett, and demonstrates the central question at the heart of the entire film: what lengths will we go to excuse artistic genius? At what point does our celebration of celebrity turn into bloodthirsty destruction? Or do those two poles exist simultaneously, feeding each other?

Her own artistic genius is inseparable from the performance, and from the questions this work of art dares to ask; for every moment of Lydia Tar’s life is a performance itself, an effort to build mystique or to mask her true intentions. In the same way she professes to control the orchestra under her baton, she seeks in every moment to control all in her orbit- and her own public image. She coaxes, she intimidates, she flirts, she lies, she modulates; it is all a manipulation, from acts as subtle as stealing a pen from a desk to darkly threatening a child.

Yet crucially, almost miraculously, the film does not ‘take sides’, it does not condemn or make plain its judgement of her. This is one of the most effective submersions into a single perspective I have ever experienced; the almost gothic horror of the film is not the pain she causes others, which we indirectly witness- it is her own loss of control. Which turns a singular character study into something more universal: do we not all try to control and manipulate our surroundings, to perform an image for others? And isn’t the loss of that control what frightens us most deeply? The effect of this submersion is deceptive and slippery, as seemingly small details only gradually reveal the darkness in her soul; they appear at first as insignificant, brushed aside by her ego, yet in hindsight they begin to construct a more complete picture of her actions in the world. The pacing of these revelations is a marvel to behold, accompanied by surreal sounds and haunting images.

I’ll be honest: the first time I saw it, I was in her corner to the end. This may say just as much about me and my own dark twisted soul, but the age-old dilemma of engagement with the arts is intrinsic to this experience as well: do we separate the artist from their art? Should we? Is societal celebrity built on appreciation or jealousy? This film exists perfectly in the space between those questions, open to many different levels of engagement. It has become vogue to debate ‘cancel culture’, but this is just a modern (cable news) framing of inherited tendencies and modes of critical engagement; especially in the music world, we tend to forget that many great artists of the past were disregarded in their lifetimes, and many lesser artists promoted beyond their contribution based on social mores and constructs of the time.

Even the end itself, which might be one of the great comedic punchlines in cinema history, embraces ambiguity: does engagement with art have to look a certain way to be taken seriously? In an era where many orchestras draw larger audiences for performing soundtracks to movie projections than they do performing what are considered the great classical works of the past, what should we consider to be ‘real’ engagement?

I think we could debate the concepts and questions of this film for years to come, and in that way this may be one of the great American masterpieces of our time.

3. Nope

Yeah.

Look, there’s no real reason to rank these films. I just called Tár a modern American masterpiece and listed it 4th…can I qualify the difference here? I don’t know. But there is something almost impossibly remarkable about this achievement by Jordan Peele: he has made a work of art that provokes just as much introspection and debate as a so-called ‘art film’, and he has done it in the guise of a terrifically entertaining blockbuster.

More impressively, he has created a work that intimates the dark obsession we have with spectacle while it embraces the very spectacle we crave. We literally can’t look away, and that is the horror. The accumulation of layers here is nothing short of astonishing, and yet there is not an extraneous moment to be found; the storytelling is so economic, so deeply considered, that it is only in hindsight that we begin to fully connect the thematic threads across different characters and sequences.

And it still ends in a rip-roaring western-styled showdown between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ forces!

It’s not surprising that the film has failed to receive the same industry-wide acclaim, despite exhibiting truly prodigious skills- the sounds, production design and cinematography in particular are beyond exemplary- for it is in many ways a scathing indictment of the industry itself. Not just obsession with producing spectacle, but more horrifically in the ways the industry demands and exploits trauma for commercial gain. This is approached abstractly through the attempts to control and manipulate wild animals in various ways, but more directly through one character’s story which is revealed in small pieces across the length of the film. The only way this character feels they can continue to chase success is to transmute personal trauma into fame; the greatest heartbreak is when we realize they are repeating the same cycles, making the same sacrifice and mistake that caused their initial trauma. Movies are not an escape here- they are thinly veiled repression in pursuit of attention.

And we, the audience, are implicated just the same, for it is our very attention that feeds this monster. The protagonists of the film don’t act out of concern for the well-being of the community- they seek to capture something that will propel themselves to fame and success, and no one else. They sacrifice something inside, as we all do when we propagate the trauma-spectacle machine.

But are we not entertained?

2. banshees of Inisherin

I believe every great filmmaker has a work, years into their career, where all their talent, development and skill coalesce into a single picture that distills their greatness in something like perfection. For PT Anderson, that was There Will Be Blood; for Robert Altman in the 70’s, that was Nashville; for the Coen Brothers, Fargo.

While I enjoyed Martin McDonagh’s previous works, something in their jaggedness kept me from full adoration; I went into this experience with ambiguous expectations, but emerged certain that I had just seen the culmination of his career thus far.

The beating heart of this film, beyond his knack for dialogue, is the performance drawn from each actor/actress. It is a gorgeously shot film, most tenderly composed and scored, but it sings most when two humans confront each other with words- words that often attempt, but fail to communicate what they truly want to say. They may be too harsh, or too weak; overcome by a romance they can’t express, or a depression they can’t release, or a heartache they can’t comprehend. When the words don’t satisfy their inner desire, they turn to increasingly desperate action that turns to tragic masochism.

The historic and thematic backdrop here then elevate those interpersonal shortcomings into a universal observation bleak as it is powerful: that the civil wars in our world, both individually and across societies, grow out of an inability to truly see each other, limited as we are in language and perspective. There is a unmistakable male tint to these depression-fed conflicts, with a woman perhaps the only one who can clearly see how absurd the exaggerations can become here.

But despite this momentary clarity, there is a great inevitability that hovers over the story, as if depression is something that can never be avoided. Yet this inevitable depression is not the tragedy- it is our inability to fully accept it that leads to tragic acts, whether self-inflicted or outwardly destructive. A number of scenes dramatize this in almost excruciating heartbreak- perhaps non more so than one between Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon (who would have my Oscar votes); but the most expressive canvas for this bleak journey is the face of Colin Farrell, lost in confusion before such impenetrable darkness. As his heart hardens, the light behind his eyes turns black and irretrievable. Just as this film is a sort of culmination for Martin McDonagh, so does this performance feel like a culmination of Farrell’s fascinating career thus far.

1. Aftersun

Here we go.

I obviously enjoyed every film on this list, and have much to say about each of them; but to be honest, I only started it so that I could unpack my feelings for this tender, impressionistic work that struck at the very core of my soul and left an imprint that will remain with me forever.

-- Just so you know, tears have already begun to flood my eyes. My skin has levitated, at the very act of putting myself back in this emotional space - -

Music has endless capacity to transport us, to lift us out of our existence into something transcendent; the written word has a unique capacity to provoke deep thought and imagination inside; theatre has a special primacy of the moment, of the live electrical charge between performers and audience that only happens once; visual art has the power to strike behind our eyes and beckon us into another interior world.

But cinema has something no other art form can produce, in part because it involves a piece of every other art form. It can construct a convincing simulacrum of existence, awash in sights, sounds, and emotions seamlessly woven together. It can be almost unbearably specific, and through this specificity touch on something universal between us all. It transports, overwhelms, and provokes, not through pure imagination but arising from organic experience we all understand at some deeper level.

Its greatest equivalent, however, is not the primacy of the moment, transcendent as that may be; the most powerful relation it has to us human beings is perhaps not experience, then, but of memory. When we recollect moments from our past, we don’t physically experience the same sensations or the totality of that moment; we experience a simulacrum, something that feels impossibly vivid despite our distance through time and space. Strange details take the center of focus- a stack of books adjacent to an important conversation, a song playing in the background of a seminal interaction, a glimpse of lovers in the corner of our vision. All we have is an afterglow of each situation, the importance of which shifts through our lives as we look back from increasingly longer distances of time and try to make sense of what we didn’t understand then.

The plot of this film could be summed up in one sentence- a daughter and father go on a weeklong holiday, at different transitional moments in their lives. Yet just as the importance of a memory transcends any words we use to describe it, so does this work of art transcend any description. First-time director(!!) Charlotte Wells demonstrates an uncanny observational power throughout, capturing sensory experience with perfect, deft touch. We feel the strange eroticism of two pre-teen bodies, knees almost touching as they play a video game; we feel the distinct horror of standing on a stage in front of a crowd, alone; we feel the timelessness of transit at odd hours in a new place; we feel the dreamlike wonder of looking into the sky to see humans in places they shouldn’t naturally be; we feel the intimacy of lotion or mud on skin, the weightlessness of water, the breathlessness of hearing slightly older kids gossip, and the inner pride when they let us into their group.

But underneath all of these beautiful evocations gasps a dark chasm that threatens at every turn to swallow us whole. Because the film is crucially not a pre-teens experience- it is a memory, an act of looking back nearly a lifetime later. A lifetime that has been filled with unexpected turns, with unfulfilled wishes, streaked by regret and ungraspable understanding. Paul Mescal’s performance masterfully suggests this inner vortex through a few looks and fewer words, composed by the camera in a couple images with almost unbearable power. On a boat, in conversation with another man, he almost reflexively says “I never thought I would make it to 30” while barely in the frame, the camera panning away just as he feels life slipping away; in a vitally important conversation with his daughter, the camera stays motionlessly focused on a desk in the corner of the room, his face only visible in two pieces of reflections; there is a brief, iconic shot from below as he stands on a railing lost in a sea of hazy blue sky; and at its most precarious moment, the camera follows behind him, framed in absolute blackness before a pan down to reveal a great dark ocean in his future.

At every turn, he is captured in elliptical fashion, as we are constantly reminded- when we look back and search our memories, we will only find glimpses that suggest unknowable truths. A journey into our memory is but a few flashes of light in a dark club, momentary illuminations that we will spend a lifetime trying to understand. A progression of frames, so to speak, that give the illusion of continuity until we realize the blackness in between is what holds them together.

In the end, perhaps that is all our experience of life truly is, no? A simulacrum, bound by that which we can never know.

The first time I experienced it, my mind would not rest; I thought it might be the best film I would see this year, but I wasn’t sure I had grasped it. The second time, I felt confident in this opinion, gradually losing myself in its brilliance and the emotions it provoked.

The third time, I began to cry immediately; I gasped at moments and shots I knew were coming, overcome by the artistry; and I ended the film in shuddering sobs, broken apart as I sat by myself in a Thailand movie theatre. Profoundly moved, in only the way cinema can move me.