Primal Stream’s Best Films of 2022

So why does my year-end top 10 list have 16 films on it? Because 10 is a ranking, not a sum. Also, no one has yet adorned their film list with this particular set of laurels, so I feel totally fine pulling a Duran Duran and doing it my own way. All of these films are exceptional, and worthy of your time. An asterisk denotes a film that has never played theatrically in the Nashville area.

1. Aftersun (available on most video-on-demand services)

A haunting gift that articulates the human-shaped spaces left in the soul by absence and the passage of time.

2. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed; Holy Spider (not yet available for home viewing)

The ways that women prepare for battle. Unjust systems disrupted by empathy and decency.

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once (on Showtime, DirecTV and 4K/Blu-ray); The Girl and the Spider (not yet available for home viewing)

Infinite possibilities. Unexpected iterations. The opposite of exorcism is reconciliation. Also, despite loving these films, I am not cool with having two different spider films in my year-end list.

4. Hellhole* (on Netflix)

The gutsiest screenplay of 2022. Just watch it with your phone in the other room, and use the bathroom beforehand. It’s 90 minutes — go with it. And stick with the original Polish-language track.

5. RRR (streaming in its proper Telugu language on Zee5, in a Hindi dub on Netflix)

The best solution upon being confronted with a racist dinner party: 1. a dance-off, and 2. throwing a tiger at it.

6. Crimes of the Future (on Hulu and 4K/Blu-ray); Flux Gourmet (on Shudder, DirecTV and Blu-ray); Please Baby Please* (available on most video-on-demand services)

Visions of better worlds, meshes of past, present, and future. Crimes is defiantly optimistic and politically and sexually fraught. Flux Gourmet is a delirious joy for anyone who’s been on either end of the art game. And Please Baby Please is like a collaboration between Kate Bush and Kenneth Anger. Together they are a trio of reinventions for the chaotic precipice that is The Now, and I exult in their worlds.

7. Great Freedom (on Mubi); Something in the Dirt* (available on most video-on-demand services)

Here we are, folks — the dream we all dream of. Loneliness versus determination, in the World Series of Human Experience.

8. Medusa (available on most video-on-demand services); We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (on HBO Max and Blu-ray)

Perceptive and unsettling peeks into how the youth are having to metabolize our generations of bullshit.

9. Bros (on Peacock and Blu-ray)

Funny, sweet, snarky and in retrospect doomed at the box office because it makes a point of addressing queer rage and frustration in a way that can’t be sidestepped. (Also it wins for most essential deleted scenes on the Blu-ray for both “WWI Cardio” and “Pride Fight.”)

10. Tár (on Peacock and 4K/Blu-ray)

 Several months of discourse has made me realize that this film is like Black Swan, and what makes it great is that it works on several different levels all at the same time. Searing contemporary drama, arch campfest, surreal traumnovelle, master class in actressing, academic satire — it’s all of these things and more.

Honorable Mentions:

Adult Swim Yule Log; All That Breathes; Barbarian; Benediction; Bones and All; Confess, Fletch; Deadstream; Descendant; The Eternal Daughter; Fire Island; Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery; Inu-oh; Jaws 3D; Leonor Will Never Die; Moonage Daydream; No Bears; Orphan: First Kill; Out There Halloween Megatape; Pearl; Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams; Stop-Zemlia; Strawberry Mansion; X.

Performances of the Year:

Anna Cobb (We’re All Going to The World’s Fair); Stefan Crepon (Peter Von Kant), Mia Goth (Pearl), Paul Mescal (Aftersun), Terry Notary (Nope), Margaret Qualley (Stars at Noon), Revika Reustle (Pleasure), Franz Rogowski (Great Freedom), Rakshit Shetty (777 Charlie), Brittany Snow (X), Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Coming in 2023 and worth your attention:

Alienoid Part 2; America You Kill Me; Brahmāstra Part Two; Disfluency; Enys Men; Gateway; Landlocked; Master Gardener; The Outwaters; Pacifiction; Putrefixión; Return to Seoul; R.M.N.; Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?; Showing Up; Skinamarink; The Smoke Master; Swallowed; Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter; The Timekeepers of Eternity; Trenque Lauquen; Unrest; The Weird Kidz.

Outstanding restorations:

Dawn of the Dead 3D; Inland Empire; Jaws 3D; The Mother and the Whore; Out of the Blue; Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The Director’s Edition.