By the time Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and Tully (Dominic Sessa) wander through an ancient art museum in Boston, its already achingly apparent that the yearning for connection felt by the pair is an eternal truth. The Roman Empire was made up of people, and people invariably seek out connection. “There is no new human experience” Hunham declares and perhaps he’s right. The Holdovers is set in the winter of 1970 but in reality the ideas it explores are timeless. 

Boys have been sent off to die at war for as long as war has existed and the people left in their wake have always been splintered by loneliness. An early scene sees the graves of a collection of young men killed in World War I and II before expanding out to all the boys of Barton boarding school gathering for the funeral of a young alumnus killed in Vietnam. A long line of carnage that the carefree students step over to get to their winter vacation. Not all of them are so lucky.

Through a handful of thrilling documentary features Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have proven themselves extremely capable filmmakers documenting the extremes of human endurance and determination. Their subjects have frequently been willing to risk their lives in pursuit of the impossible and push their bodies to the absolute limit. In some cases — The Rescue — that pursuit is in service of noble heroics, in others — Free Solo — its a vanity to be remembered by history and seen as the hero. Whatever the reason, Vasarhelyi and Chin have become a singular lens through which to see extreme athletes, making Diana Nyad the perfect subject for their first narrative feature. 

Nyad is best known as an accomplished marathon swimmer, setting a number of records in the 70s for both distance and speed in open ocean swims of as much as 100 miles. Her failed effort to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida loomed over her other accomplishments and at age 61 she began a series of attempts to finally accomplish the feat. An extreme athlete pushing the boundaries of age and physical achievement, if they were making movies back in 2013, Vasarhelyi and Chin might have followed Nyad’s swims with their documentary cameras. Instead she is the muse of their narrative debut.

It’s no secret that Sofia Coppola has made a career out of depicting young women and their “gilded cages.” Its a phrase the director uses herself to describe the often opulent locales in which she traps her protagonist. Be it a grand Tokyo hotel, the palace at Versailles or mansions of Beverley Hills, Coppola uses the trappings of beautiful places to accentuate the loneliness of the young women who inhabit them. While Elvis Presley’s massive estate at Graceland may skew more gaudy that gorgeous, it’s halls turns cavernous for the singer’s young paramour in Priscilla.

​At the AFI Fest screening introduction Hugh Welchman joked that The Peasants was the second, and would probably be the last film animated by hand painting each shot frame by frame. The first, of course, was also made by him and his parter DK, the acclaimed Loving Vincent. A documentary about Van Gogh seems the perfect pair for hand painted animation in the style of its subject. For a follow-up the Welchman’s decided on oil paintings and a nearly 800 page Polish novel, Chlopi or The Peasants.

​Much of recent film has been obsessed with technology and its potential to usurp the existing order. Just this year we have seen Mission:Impossible Dead Reckoning and The Creator grapple with the dystopian consequences of an eternal march toward tech utopia. Sam Esmail is no stranger to the networks and servers that connect our modern existence, the director is, after all, the creator of Mr. Robot. With his first feature in nine years, Leave the World Behind,  Esmail supposes that technology has long since hobbled society and that the bonds between people and nature have already been frayed.

As soon as a defendant steps foot in the court room, they are put on trial for more than just the crime of which they are accused. Facts are not revealed so much as they are interpreted. Who you are and what you may be capable of are of far more importance than means, motive and opportunity. When Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) discovers and reports the lifeless body of her husband three floors below an open attic window, she is thrown into a system intent on probing her marriage, her parenting and her writing as much as her responsibility for the death of her husband. In Anatomy of a Fall, director Justine Triet (Sibyl) uses the trappings of a murder trial to interrogate the stories we tell to calm the unease of uncertainty and the way those narratives interact with the truth. 

​    Fiction has long imagined humanity’s inevitable first contact with a species from beyond the Earth. Might these visitors be the colonial warlords H.G. Welles imagined as far back as 1897 in his novel The War of the Worlds? Perhaps they’ll be something more like the enigmatic protectors from Villeneuve’s Arrival. As if drawn up on the edge of Occam’s Razor, Landscape with Invisible Hand supposes that our new alien overlords might simply be the galaxy’s most ruthless capitalists.

*What follows is less a review of John Wick Chapter 4 and more a collection of thoughts about where the country and culture is on guns at the moment. 

​This past week the boogeyman rampaged through American cinemas for the fourth time, adding to his already gaudy body count. Indeed, nabbing the second best opening weekend of  John Wick Chapter 4 did this weekend to its box office foes what its titular assassin does to his targets: destroy them. Across nearly 3 hours Mr. Wick executes 140 assailants in a variety of creative manners but also in some regrettably familiar ones.

Another year is coming to a close, believe it or not, my fifth year writing one of these lists. More than any of the previous years — when films like Roma and I’m Thinking of Ending Things topped the lists — this has been a year of great change for me. In the first year post-Covid closures I’ve ventured back into theaters more and yet seen fewer movies than anytime in the last few years. As a result this is the first time in some time my list will feel somewhat incomplete. Despite monumental change for me personally, the types of film that spoke to me remained quite consistent. My favorites of 2022 feature a great deal of coming of age stories, a theme that still resonates with me as much at age 28 as it did at age 23 when Lady Bird topped my 2017 list. 

Still, there are quite a few films left to see this year and things can still change a lot. For now, here are my top 10 films of 2022.
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“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” exclaims the filthy rich Russian cruise patron Dimitry (Zlatko Buric) suddenly finding himself in a situation where his money is worthless. The shit-peddling — he sells manure, you see — oligarch quoting Marx conjures quite the shocking mental image, but his about face was anything but surprising. Only a few minutes prior the gregarious gazillionaire had been summoning the words of Reagan and Thatcher to defend his enormous wealth as a ship full of bourgeois relentlessly puked up thier overpriced dinners. Opulence and absurdity abound, but subtlety is of short supply in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winning Triangle of Sadness.
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