Happy New Year, Viscerals!

It's amusing to me that the theme of last year's blog seemed to be "exhaustion", because Pez and I are so damn tired at the end of this year that we've forcibly carved out a final week all to ourselves, to just unplug from the world and enjoy each other's company, to collect our thoughts and recharge our batteries before leaping into next year.

We started the year by doing something we'd never done before - seeking professional script consultancy on a couple of our feature film treatments, an act we saw as poking our heads out of our private hidey-hole and dipping our toe into the wider world of film development, as we seek to strengthen our work as we tentatively step into the dark but sadly necessary lottery of applying for film financing - then helped Pez's daughter and Apparitions' lead Cate O'Connor and her partner Dylan James make their debut short film, the Influencer horror-satire Under The Influence, before producing our own short film (our first with an actual crew in the pandemic era), the King Lear-inspired Three Sisters. But for me, it was a new and constantly evolving/expanding day job with Bounty Films that really kept me running on the hamster wheel this year; a gig that quickly went from metadata and upload assistance to handling theatrical releases nationwide. 

I haven't made firm New Years Resolutions for a while now, but this time of year does get you thinking about how you plan to attack the next, and right now I'm thinking a lot about combatting exhaustion, about turning the tide on feeling increasingly overwhelmed. After a few seconds of thinking about 2024 work intentions, I can already feel my stomach twisting, and I don't want to feel this way. I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that my year-on-year energy levels are diminishing just as my creative and professional lives are growing, and I won't be able to keep up.

So many of my New Year intentions seem to centre around time management: about setting task-oriented week-to-week work plans, setting aside set amounts of hours to work on specific tasks on regular days, to get onto tasks as soon as they occur to me rather than wait-and-seeing my way though them, to build in enough time so when new tasks and priorities are inevitably thrown at me (or when things equally inevitably go off the rails) I've got time to sort them out and not get freaked out. The way I manage my professional and creative lives needs to change, or I'm going to burn out by 50 (which is in less than 18 months, by the way, thank you kindly for reminding me, brain). Hustle Culture can well and truly go screw itself; self-care, time management and building in time for rest and reflection rules.

So Cinema Viscera's Year-in-Review felt very sporadic: lots of writing as Pez built not one but two feature film treatments and I hammered away at advanced drafts of a long-gestating Christmas anthology project, me editing a couple of projects and both of us working on producing and directing Three Sisters​, which I can say without equivocation is completely different from any other project we've ever done.

Three Sisters is a weird little Shakespeare-and-Succession-inspired movie that we hope becomes a sort of immersive tragicomic emotional journey, equal parts schadenfreude, sensuality and sorrow. We're in the last leg of post-production and hope to start getting it out to film festivals (because we're masochists - and what other option do we have? YouTube??) in January/February. The shoot was hectic and (yes) exhausting but ultimately very satisfying, and incredibly fun to be working with friends old and new, and trying out new ways of working (such as, this is our first film in 15 years I've not edited!). So far, it's all coming together remarkably well, we're incredibly proud of it, and we can't wait to show you all another side of Cinema Viscera in 2024. In the meantime, here are some stills from the shoot:

So once we complete and deliver Three Sisters, 2024 will be focused principally on writing and developing our current slate of projects and taking the next step to a more elevated level of filmmaking while sharpening our voice, to further trust and fully realise the nutty instincts that make us who we are, not losing them. 

Now, that's quite enough about us. Some of you came here for a film countdown, right?

#20. WHO KILLED SANTA CLAUS? (1941; Director: Christian-Jaque): A gorgeously shot, affectionate pastoral comedy about a small French Alpine village celebrating the holidays, that suddenly turns into a murder mystery. Really draws us into its world of eccentric residents - with its mongrel kids and lovesick residents, this has big Jean Vigo energy, and feels like the kind of thing we'd see from Truffaut 20 years later.

#19. NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE (1976; D: Paul Mazursky): Writer-director Mazursky's biographical look at being a Jewish kid moving to New York to live a bohemian life in the 1950s is no mere nostaglia trip; surprisingly tough and unvarnished, and chock full of incredibly funny dialogue and great casting (Shelley Winters! Young & handsome Christopher Walken! Ellen Greene! Lois Smith! Jeff Goldblum! Antonio Fargas playing a thinly veiled James Baldwin!).

#18. SARABAND (2003; D: Ingmar Bergman): In locked-down July 2020, we began the project of watching all 39 films on the Criterion Collection's incredible Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set, which finally ended (a month shy of three years later!) in incredibly satisfying fashion with Bergman's final work as a director: a thirty-years-later sequel to his 1973 classic Scenes from a Marriage, it brings back stars Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson for a beautiful extended conversation about ageing, loves and regrets, before dovetailing into their relationships with their grown children - which, given this is Bergman, aren't always ideal. A lovely, witty, meditative swan song to a truly extraordinary film career.

#17. THE SERPENT'S EGG (1977; D: Ingmar Bergman): Back-to-back Bergman! One of two films Bergman shot in Germany, this was a real grower for me, starring David Carradine as an Jewish-American circus performer who moves to Weimar Republic Germany in 1923, strikes up a relationship with Liv Ullman and quickly finds himself in a co-dependent downward spiral, as economic depression and newly emergent Nazism start the walls closing in. Great brief character roles for Glynn Turman and Heinz Bennent, too. Dark and depressing as hell but even more atmospheric and bewitching. 

#16. MARY JANE'S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE (1996; D: Sarah Jacobson): Writer-director Sarah Jacobson's sole feature (before Cancer claimed her at just 32) is the low-fi punk rom-com you never knew you needed; a great, adorable hangout movie about being young, working with people your own age for the first time (at a local cinema!) and falling in and out of love. Should be much more well known, and one can only dream of what further treats Jacobson would've made had she not been so cruelly snatched from us.

#15. DIABOLIQUE (1955; D: Henri-Georges Clouzot): Clouzot's iconic, endlessly ripped-off thriller of two very different women who murder the awful man in their lives - only to find their plans complicated by his disappearing corpse - was a big List of Shame film for me, and finally seeing it this year didn't disappoint. The filmmaking felt surprisingly modern even when I could predict its twists, and both of these qualities give you an indication of how much this film has been pillaged in the seven decades since its release. Creepy and fun, with terrific lead performances by Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot. 

#14. INSERTS (1975; D: John Byrum): Imagine Babylon as a 5-character chamber piece set in a decaying Hollywood mansion and you're getting close. Richard Dreyfuss is a fallen "golden boy" silent director reduced to shooting porn with an erratic ex-movie star (an on-fire Veronica Cartwright) and wallowing in drink, drugs and self-pity, who's challenged by the enigmatic actress (Jessica Harper) dating the gangster (Bob Hoskins) who bankrolls his stag films. A lively, very adult commentary on gender dynamics, artists who believe their own bullshit and desperate aspirants working all sorts of angles, full of declarative monologues, power plays and parry-and-thrusts galore — albeit with bursts of full-frontal nudity!

#13. TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JULIE NEWMAR (1995; D: Beeban Kidron): No mere Americans-do-Priscilla rip-off, Kidron's film is an unabashedly queer explosion of pure joy from start to finish, with Patrick Swayze (in what might be his best performance), Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo (all straight, cisgender male movie stars) giving 100% committed, fully rounded performances as drag queens who transform a repressed small town (it's basically HBO's We Are Here: The Movie), while making space for Stockard Channing, Melinda Dillon, Beth Grant and Frances Bay to shine in wonderful character roles. As Hollywood studio attempts to reckon with queer and drag culture go, this is one of the sweetest, smartest and most successful.

#12. PUMPKINHEAD (1988; D: Stan Winston): Why is this dismissed as a minor '80s horror film? SFX guru Winston's directorial debut is, for me, one of the very best horror films of the decade, setting up a beautiful father-son relationship, initially careless but increasingly sympathetic teens, Appalachian fairytale mythology and dazzling creature design that seems like a Xenomorph and a Predator had a baby. It has real stakes, stunning production and lighting design, brisk pacing, a complex moral to the story and a terrific lead performance from Lance Henriksen. This pumpkin is ripe for rediscovery. 

#11. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939; D: Frank Capra): Capra’s plea for decency in America’s legislative capital is a prime example of what he did so well; an unconventional but fundamentally decent man meets a forthright woman who brings out the best in him, joining forces to stand up to large corporate or political corruption - supercharged by casting Hollywood’s all-time avatar for decency, Jimmy Stewart, but he's matched by Jean Arthur, playing a strategist who knows all the angles and should be running things in this man's world, stealing the film out from under Stewart, who filibusters his way into our hearts under her tutelage. Manipulative, sure, but not wrong.

#10. THE FIFTH SEAL (1976; D: Zoltán Fábri): One of the more intriguing, downright horrifying philosophical dramas I’ve ever seen; in a just world, Fábri’s film would be much better known. Starts off kind of fun in a low-key, Polish New Wave kind of way with an extended late-night cafe conversation — except these men appear to be almost ghostly, and there’s those sort-of Nazis lurking outside — before descending into a quiet hell, that seems to be WWII in many ways but, well, isn’t, before landing in its harrowing final act, which puts the ethical questions these men were blithely throwing at each other to an unimaginable test. This needs the deluxe Blu-ray treatment.

#9. LADY ON A TRAIN (1945; D: Charles David): A fast-moving One Crazy Night mystery-comedy set on Christmas Eve that isn’t afraid to get unexpectedly sexy (or unexpectedly unsettling, with a certain character’s late reveal), starring Deanna Durbin relishing the chance to shed her teenage sweetheart persona; her mystery-novel-obsessed amateur sleuth here is as charming as she's ever been, but throws a lot more vibe. Also loved David Bruce as the mystery writer who’s a lot less handy than he thinks he is, and the supporting cast of well-known nice guys (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, etc) make a great roll call of suspects. Add this one to your end-of-year Christmas watchlists!

#8. AT LONG LAST LOVE (1975; D: Peter Bogdanovich): Bogdanovich rules. Sure, his wild big-budget musical swing might be shaggy, shaky and overlong, but there's no arguing with the giant smile that wouldn’t leave my face throughout. The production values are huge, its sets and costumes exuberant and expressive, Cole Porter's songs are wonderfully used, the entire ensemble are having a ball and understand the absurd assignment, with, predictably, queen Madeleine Kahn stealing the whole thing — closely followed by the great John Hillerman and Eileen Brennan. I’d be happy to watch the ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ number at The Racquet Club multiple times as its own exhibit. 

#7. CURE (1997; Kiyoshi Kurosawa): Talk about a grower. Like the bizarre contagion that is the film's true antagonist, Kurosawa's spare, slow-burning Japanese horror thriller creeps under your skin and won't get out of your head. Following a quietly seething police detective (the terrific Koji Yakusho) on the trail of a series of murders committed by people who linger by the crime scenes dazed, with no memory of what they did, leading him to a psychological cat and mouse game with an elusive, enigmatic young man. One of those films whose quiet narrative and true meaning really only land on you afterwards, this might be the very best film of the entire '90s/'00s J-Horror cycle. 

#6. DEAD OF NIGHT (1945; D: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer): One of the earliest horror anthologies and the only horror picture ever made by UK giant Ealing Studios, famed for their comedies; comprised of four macabre shorts with a comedic ghost story in the middle (just to remind us which studio made this), all tied together by one of the best wraparound stories I’ve ever seen. As everyone says, the ventriloquist story is the best — that final shot in the cell is as creepy now as it must have been in ‘45 — but the others have their spooky charms, too. As British as Beefeater palace guards and Marmite, this was a ball.

#5. JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973; D: Norman Jewison): Or, A Requiem for Judas. Breathtakingly shot by Douglas Slocombe, with blocking and choreography that makes stunning use of the found locations (in Jerusalem itself!), director Jewison, co-screenwriter Melvyn Bragg and Tim Rice’s book succeed in making the film simultaneously small-scale and huge while capturing the cultish nature of it all. The high-powered '70s rock opera soundtrack is glorious, the dance numbers insanely energetic and the decision to almost entirely forgo dialogue is a winner. A stunning ‘70s musical which couldn’t be more of the time and culture in which it was made - and is all the better for it. 

#4. MUTE WITNESS (1994; D: Anthony Waller): What a delight this was! This exuberant giallo-influenced thriller is exactly the kind of movie I would love to make; shot in Moscow by a debut Brit director in the early '90s — with a brilliant/bizarre surprise cameo shot 8 years earlier — it's as tight as a drum, full of nods to De Palma, Argento and (of course) Hitchcock with brilliantly constructed suspense set pieces, tons of style on a small budget, a twisty (if frequently, enjoyably implausible) plot with likeable and very human characters, good performances, constant escalation and clever writing. Seek it out.

#3. THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1970; D: Leonard Kastle): Imagine a John Waters movie directed by Jules Dassin (or vice versa) and you're in the ballpark of Kastle's startling one-and-done directorial effort. Outside of being a terrific character study of impressive complexity — and one so artfully shot (by future star cinematographer Oliver Wood) for such a seemingly tawdry micro-budget film — where it really crawls under your skin is in its depiction of the pitiable humanity of its monstrous lead couple (with terrific performances by Tony LoBianco and especially Shirley Stoler - you know Divine was taking notes) and the simple desperate banality of their murders. I did NOT expect this to hit so hard. 

#2. NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947; D: William Goulding): William Lindsay Gresham’s novel and super-scribe Jules Furthman’s script provide a killer noir plot that sees a con man (a terrific Tyrone Power, serving big George Clooney vibes) who thinks he’s the smartest in every room being comprehensively outplayed as he seeks to conquer two sides of the American Nightmare — the rural traveling carnival and the corrupt big city — only to have them eat him alive. Lee Garmes’ cinematography is chiaroscuro heaven, with prison-style bars and ravenous shadows dominating rooms and lurking around every corner. Only falters slightly at the very end, when it takes a more despairingly romantic conclusion — still no happy ending, just softer — than the chilling coda that fading to black on the previous scene would’ve been (the only aspect where Guillermo del Toro's 2021 remake improves upon this one).

#1. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1975; D: John Schlesinger): Holy shit. I don’t want to say too much, as you will not be prepared for the final 18 minutes of this, which could be an epic short film of its own. The team behind Midnight Cowboy — director Schlesinger, writer Waldo Salt and producer Jerome Hellman — bring their caustic view of capitalist ruin to 1920s Hollywood, finding their acidic equal in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel about a crumbling apartment block of Hollywood hustlers and hopers trying to make it in a town that drags out their worst qualities. Brilliant performances across the board in a frequently unsettling, hauntingly weird rumbling storm of a film that quite literally explodes at its climax. The kind of big, bold, feel-bad epic swing that only winning a Best Picture Oscar gets you the cachet to make.

It is with both sadness and relief to say this might be the last time you see me doing this year-end blog in this current form. From next year, it'll be the Cinema Viscera wrap followed by quick, potted Top 10 Older and Newer Films lists.

It almost feels fraudulent for me to make a Top 20 list nowadays, given we're a long, long way from the media-screening-heavy halcyon days of me seeing 110-120 new movies a year - these last two years have seen my totals fall into the 60s (just 68 this year, for the second year running), in a weird correlation with the decline in AFL leading goal-kicker stats - so my natural inclination was to keep this list to a tight 10 or 15... except, I saw a lot of really cool movies this year. In fact, I really liked over half the 65 movies I saw, and loved 16, with four more that I felt deserved particular mention.

For the purposes of this list, "New Releases" are feature films I saw this year that received their premiere paid public release — in cinemas, on streaming, DVD/BD, VoD or at festivals — in Australia during 2023.​

As usual, there are heaps of highly acclaimed films I didn't see, like Past Lives, The Boy and The Heron, Close, Maestro, John Wick: Chapter 4, Polite Society, Reality and You Hurt My Feelings, and didn't get to a whole bunch that had festival screenings this year but will receive general releases in 2024, like All of Us Strangers, Anatomy of a Fall, Dream Scenario, Fallen Leaves, Ferrari, May December, Perfect Days, Robot Dreams and The Zone of Interest, or haven't screened here at all yet, like American Fiction, The Holdovers, The Iron Claw and Origin. 

From the movies I did see, my honourable mentions, counting down from #30-21, were: Barbie, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Chapter One, The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour, Bottoms, Knock at the Cabin, Skinamarink, Air, Showing Up, Blue Jean, Passages. Now, for the 20 that left more of an impression on me than anything else I saw in 2023:

#20. PERPETRATOR (D: Jennifer Reader)
A twisted child of Carrie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ginger Snaps and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, with fun performances, playfully punk humour, exactly the right amount of "what the fuck is going on?" quirk that all resolves satisfactorily, the body horror of puberty and the greater horror of men ready to prey on teenage girls… all building up to a final escape plan that I felt was spectacularly well devised and executed. Alicia Silverstone's fun as a witchy aunt, but Christopher "Piz" Lowell and Audrey Francis as psycho high school officials steal the whole thing. 

#19. THE ORDINARIES (D: Sophie Linnenbaum)
This tonally wackadoo comedy-fantasy-sci-fi-social-drama from Germany is not only one of the most audacious debuts I've seen in years, but also meant a lot to me personally, as it was the first film I ever personally acquired and theatrically released in my new gig with Bounty Films. While its many tones don't always work well together, this story of a girl relegated to Supporting Character status in a dystopian world that works like the movies, her struggle to be a Main Character and what she discovers about the way her world works, is alternately sweet, amusingly meta and dark as hell, but is ultimately a plea for us all to embrace what makes us individuals and be our best selves. 

#18. TÁR (D: Todd Field)
While this didn’t quite get all the way under my skin, I admired the hell out of it. Very much in the key of Michael Haneke, this digs into an egomaniacal Great Artist’s very 2020s descent into hell with a FEROCIOUS performance from Cate Blanchett, with Todd Field’s script and style encouraging repeat viewings — not in an annoying all-semiotic-subtext/dumb-surface-text fashion (as some popular recent filmmakers tend to do), as its story and characters are as incredibly engaging as they are deliciously flawed. Great work all round here, reckon I might dig it more on rewatch.

#17: YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME (D: Indianna Bell, Josiah Allen)
For a micro-budget Australian horror film, I was super impressed by the filmmaking craft on display here — the incredible layered sound design, deep focus cinematography, blocking and shadowy lighting were quite excellent — in addition to the strong lead performances. The film's first half hour and final act were genuinely scary and unsettling,  and even when the script runs out of road a bit in the middle stretch — there's not quite enough there there to sustain it — once it starts its journey home, it nails the landing brilliantly. Can't wait to see what Bell & Allen do next!

#16. A HAUNTING IN VENICE (D: Kenneth Branagh)
My favourite of Branagh's Poirot trilogy; does away with Nile's awful CGI and needless bloat and the absurd (if fun) blockbuster elements of Orient Express in favour of a more grounded (well, by Branagh’s standards) take on Agatha Christie’s super-sleuth that I found thoroughly delightful, even with canted angles and spook-show theatrics intact. The cast are fun (especially Tina Fey), it integrates Poirot’s wartime trauma in a much more organic and poignant fashion than Nile did, takes place against gorgeous Venice locations and an insanely gothic mansion, and the pacing is deliberate but efficiently edited, with brisk transitions. Good old-fashioned, satisfying stuff.

#15. STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE (D: Davis Guggenheim)
My favourite documentary of the year (granted, I didn't watch many), but given the longtime affection I've had for Michael J. Fox as a performer and an activist, that shouldn't be a surprise. Fox’s brutally honest, unvarnished, clear-eyed outlook and Michael Harte’s astonishing archival editing (near-seamlessly blended with linking re-enactments) are the twin engines that power this beautiful portrait of the star’s meteoric rise, life-altering diagnosis and continued advocacy, treatment and personal evolution.

#14. OF AN AGE (D: Goran Stolevski)
Stolevski follows up his brilliant 19th century Macedonian dark fairytale You Won't Be Alone with a deeply felt, disarmingly personal and lived-in love story between two men (played beautifully by Elias Anton and Thom Green), most of which takes place in a car in 1999 — so, y'know, totally the same. The musical nod to Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together is no accident, as Stolevski's film is similarly sensual, grounded in small gestures and looks, and ends on an elegiac note. But this undersells it, it's also frequently laugh-out loud funny as it is swooningly romantic. Few films evoke the rush of falling in love for the first time - or late '90s/pre-millennial Australian suburbia - as well as this one, and as impossibly poignant as the final shot may be, it's the journey you remember. 

#13. THE KILLER (D: David Fincher)
My favourite Fincher since The Social Network. Love Fincher and his Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker's wry digs at connecting everyday capitalism (Amazon, Home Depot, WeWork, Doordash, etc.) to the tools of meticulous murder; it’s never been easier to be seen and be invisible, with the tools of death and destruction delivered direct to your doorstep. It's a simple story but a highly engaging and propulsive one, that sees Fincher working more in the idiom of his old pal Steven Soderbergh. Fassbender is terrific, it has the best fight scene I’ve seen in Hollywood cinema in years, and I’m a sucker for meticulous assassins with no name but brilliant aliases and weirdly specific musical tastes. 

#12: SHIT (D: Susie Dee, Trudy Hellier)
A fierce, fiery, 74-minute gut punch of a film from the achingly empathetic poison pen of Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius, featuring a trio of searing performances (from the actors who played these roles for years on stage), theatre director Susie Dee and actor Trudy Hellier's film adaptation of Cornelius' award-winning play feels like the most arresting and vital Australian micro-budget film in years, exactly the kind of clarion call you crave from indie cinema. A powerfully feminist work with anger, acid and attitude to spare, this never coddles the audience, contrasting three bruised, tough women in a holding cell with the mysterious night before, where we gradually see what put them inside, as they reckon with the fucked up lives that have led them here — but what's most surprising is the screw-you swagger this film walks with, reminiscent of something like 1992's Romper Stomper. Seek it out.

#11. TO LESLIE (D: Michael Morris)
I love hard-won redemption stories of fucked-up protagonists, especially one as disarmingly human, empathetic and even funny as this one, with a laser focus on behaviour that gives it life. Working from an open wound of a screenplay, Andrea Riseborough's performance is a sinewy, bruised force of nature, but the film wouldn’t work as well without the quiet grace of Marc Maron opposite her, as a lonely, gentle man who takes a chance on this white tornado of a woman before even really knowing why. It’s nice to have a film that sits with its characters without judgement and offers a plausible kind of hope that a small dream that can, with the right support network, come true. 

#10. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOLUME 3 (D: James Gunn)
​​In a year that finally saw Marvel Studios tumble from its exalted perch and the DC Extended Universe die a grim death, leave it to James Gunn — the surest hands in this corner of the business — to land the plane safely. Gunn has spent three films (and a holiday special!) carefully building this found family of galaxy-hopping mercenary misfit toys, and making this one revolve around damaged cyber-animal pilot Rocket Racoon is a masterstroke of getting to the heart of why this story matters to so many folks around the world, more than a million Avengers crossovers could ever do. Amongst all the shenanigans and wisecracks, a profound sense of loss and grief has always hung around these characters; they've not just lost an Uncle Ben but entire families, worlds, galaxies — and, in Rocket's case, sense of self, a life he was born into (as an animal) that he was never allowed to have. While this third film doesn't perhaps hang together as a story as much as the previous two (it doesn't quite know what to do with Gamora and Peter, a curse forced upon them by one of Avengers Endgame's dumbest plot twists), in a world where so many people are having their rights taken away from them, their homes destroyed and lands eradicated, there is something elementally powerful in Rocket's final liberation — "All of them."​ — that transcends "superhero" cinema. 

#9. THE FABELMANS (D: Steven Spielberg)
Spielberg’s testament film of sorts, his attempt at a Rorschach Test to show how he became the artist he did — a child of art and science, fascinated with tech and the emotions it can elicit, struggling with constantly moving and making friends, with the thrill of wrapping his engineer-entertainer’s head around filmmaking elegantly contrasting and dovetailing with witnessing his parents’ relationship curdling — is a delight, though it could’ve gone a bit harder into showing us the “lonely kid” Spielberg so often refers to his younger self as. Loved the cast, especially Dano and Williams. The ending is an absolute treat (love that casting choice, of course), with a great joke in the final shot. 

#8. POOR THINGS (D: Yorgos Lanthimos)
Just when you think "they don't make 'em like they used to," along comes Lanthimos, one of cinema's great provocative oddballs, who makes movies that feel like magic tricks. Witness this delightfully carnal steampunk-gothic feminist fantasia, an alt-universe version of Bride of Frankenstein where Emma Stone's sewn-together Bella Baxter embarks into the wider world to seek a life of sensation before settling down, only to find a world of craven dickheads who wish to possess and control her for their own purposes, like a dark funhouse mirror of something like Fanny Hill. Stone gives the comic performance of the year (followed very closely by an unhinged Mark Ruffalo), backed by a perfect cast and some truly demented production design and VFX, but it's Stone's work and Tony McNamara's consistently hilarious script that power this twisted beast, even when it gets a bit long in the tooth in the final stretch. 
​
#7: LIMBO (D: Ivan Sen)
Sen's latest outback noir is even more mediative than previous efforts, but no less quietly mesmerising, with an inescapable sense of dread, ruin and weariness invading every monochromatic frame, lurking within all those underground caverns, as hollowed-out as the characters who dwell within them; marked by generations of abuse, displacement and disregard, like the mining sites that make this proud, sacred land look more like an alien landscape, violated by decades of invasion. Sen continues to be Australia's most dedicated genre-adjacent chronicler of the open wounds that throb beneath this land, and the fact he does it with such intelligence, skill and respect for genre makes him a national treasure.

#6. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (D: Martin Scorsese)
​​How does America's best film director keep getting better? Scorsese has always been interested in micro-societies and the violence they inflict on each other, but genocide is an entirely new subject for him to deal with, and he tackles the tragic fallout of the Native American Osage people's sudden oil wealth - swiftly followed by the mysterious deaths of the newly prosperous natives at the hands of their seething, newly-submissive white officials - with a sensitivity, a patience and an inquiry (not to mention an unflinching horror) that has become a hallmark of his later work. While I wish this followed the novel's (at least, initial) lead of seeing the tragedy through Mollie's eyes, the astonishingly great Lily Gladstone has such elemental gravity as a presence, while so effortlessly personable, that she lets you right in, refusing to believe the horrors that she increasingly knows to be true. But Robert De Niro's manipulative politico is also a monster for the ages, a late-career hallmark for one of the greats. The ending at first strikes us as odd, with Scorsese himself narrating the tragedy we've just seen as bullet points in a jaunty mid-century radio play, but this turns the tables on us: no piece of art, no matter how sensitive or careful, can ever begin to hope to do justice to the greatest of all injustices: one society's wilful intention to eliminate another.

#5. SALTBURN (D: Emerald Fennell)
Bless a filmmaker who still knows how to have fun! Fennell returns to capital-C CINEMA in grand style with this supercharged, sexy, slick, splashy and sinister spin on a couple of well-known tales (but to say which feels like a spoiler). Everyone here is perfectly cast -- Keoghan is shaping up as one of cinema's all-time great weirdos, Elordi is the alluring Golden Boy made flesh, Madekwe a perfect foil and Pike and Grant the distracted toffs inhabiting their own self-contained universe, hilarious as they are strangely poignant -- and the setting is as intoxicating as it is rotted (the production design here is brilliant), but Fennell's tale goes places you wouldn't imagine, leading to some of the most devilishly cringey moments I've seen in a film for a good long while. A mischievous psychosexual thriller with style and provocation to burn, this was a total blast.

#4. THE OLD OAK (D: Ken Loach)
89-year-old Loach's final film, about a pub landlord trying to keep his changing community of broken ex-miners and Syrian refugees together before it explodes, feels all the world like a parting wish, a road map for a way forward: a world where we're all kinder, more open to each others' experiences, where we embrace community - a world where "when you eat together, you stick together". But don't think ol' Kenny's gone all soft and sentimental on us, oh, no; this is as tough and upsetting as any British social realist drama you've seen, from one of the best to ever do it. Beautiful, essential filmmaking that takes a global issue and makes it heartrendingly personal. 

#3. FEMME (D: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping)
Drag queen Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarratt) is beaten by homophobe Preston (George McKay) and his mates, but when Jules spots Preston at a gay bath house months later, he decides to infiltrate his life (Preston doesn't know what Jules looks like without makeup) and take him apart. Gripping from start to end, it's a beautifully structured thriller, rooted in character, that's as complex as it is claustrophobic, carrying poignant subtext about the ways queer people are forced to play hetero roles just to survive in a straight male world, while keeping us on the edge of our seats. It never shies away from eroticism and perfectly dovetails sex with danger, leading to an ending that, in an effort to avoid didacticism, doesn't quite seem to take a position... but I had trouble reminding myself to breathe throughout the climax, so it obviously wasn’t that much of an issue. Powerful stuff.

#2: LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (D: Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes)
For me, the great Australian horror film of 2023 was not the one with the ghostly resin hand, but this, the Cairnes Brothers' brilliantly constructed, breathlessly entertaining late night satanic spook show, anchored by a career-best performance from David Dastmalchian, a longtime favourite supporting player of mine given a lead role perfectly suited to his particular brand of offbeat personability, sensitivity and charisma.  To be fair, no film I saw this year was more For Me, with everything from its Michael Ironside-narrated opening voiceover to its cheesy Don Lane-style 1970s talk show setting, from its real-time construction to the gleeful way it blasts through Satanic horror tropes — what, you mean we can have a horror film NOT mired in trauma, that doesn't feel the need to apologise for having fun, in 2023?? — from its perfectly period-accurate production design to its double-ending, was absolute catnip to me. 

...and my #1 film of 2023 is...

#1. AFTERSUN (Director: Charlotte Wells)
​This is the kind of personally etched memory-scape film we see so much at festivals nowadays, but I’ve never seen it done as well as this, and I’m not sure folks understand just how difficult it is to pull off this seamlessly. Wells gives herself a head start with two brilliant actors in Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, who give achingly lived-in performances, but her hand is always guiding this beautifully observed, soft-stepping sledgehammer of a film. Being a child of divorce, seeing a parent struggle alone, trying to keep it from you by creating as nurturing or optimistic a front as possible… I can no longer access those years of my own childhood, but they’re up in the old synaptic storage vault somewhere, as this film gave that box a good old shake. 

​A film of fragments, for most of its runtime it washes over you, like a summer holiday from your memory… until the last five minutes, when things get a bit more abstract, my tear ducts exploded and I couldn't hold it all in any more. A stunning directorial debut as deeply felt as it is beautifully calibrated, I’m excited to see where Wells goes from here.

Thank you to everyone who made it this far, hope you enjoyed this countdown. From us at Cinema Viscera, we wish you and yours a hugely happy and healthy 2024 - here's hoping our lives and the world at large can sort their shit out.

Love and cinema,
​P&P xo

Happy New Year, Viscerals!

Was 2022 as odd for you as it was for us? We had a handful of highs (mostly at the start and end of the year) and a whole lot of non-stop sludge (the middle). In December of 2021 we did something we never quite dreamed we'd be able to do: we bought our first home (a flat) together! So the first two months of 2022 were spent packing up and clearing out our old rental of the last 12 years, waiting for the contract to settle and then moving into and setting up our new home, which, as anyone who's bought a home knows, was equally thrilling, scary and exhausting. But after what seemed mere moments after we'd just set up the basics, we were plunged into Mad March, brought to you by our second movie, Apparitions! 

We'd made a deal with the fine folks at Cinema Nova in Carlton to run two special event screenings of Apparitions at the end of March, and the promotional trail started at a rather unexpected place: the Melbourne leg of Australia's biggest pop cultural convention, Supanova. We were given our own Q&A session on the main stage, led to a VIP Green Room alongside the likes of Christopher Eccleston (who we never saw - he was arriving later in the day), Lincoln Lewis and, weirdly, an old pal from way back, Ben Prendergast, who is now a star voice actor in video games! It was both amazing and confronting for me, Pez and our co-star Stefan Dennis (Paul Robinson himself) to be sitting on this big stage, with clips of our film playing, fielding questions from comic Ben Sorensen... to a largely empty hall. Still, it was a fun Q&A, it was lovely of the few who did show up to do so (look, we were on at 9:30am, which may as well be 5am for this kind of thing) and we thank the beautiful team at Supanova for their kind support. 

The next month of promoting the screenings -- while still setting up our new home -- continued to set the tone for what this year's theme would be: Exhaustion. However, the screenings went brilliantly, selling strongly (our second screening, on the Tuesday night, was the highest-selling of the evening!), the response was overwhelmingly positive and it was just a thrill to show the film to another 80 or so people who hadn't seen it. Huge thanks to Kristian Connelly and his amazing team at Cinema Nova for their hospitality and continual support of local cinema! 

At the start of April, Apparitions also screened at the inaugural Horrific Hope Film Festival at the Alamo Drafthouse in Winchester, Virginia, USA, where we won the award for Best Feature!!! 

Mad March also contained a curious invitation... we received an email from the Septimius Awards (no, we hadn't heard of them, either) in the Netherlands, wanting to nominate Apparitions' leading lady, Cate O'Connor, for Best Oceanian Actress for her role, and if she would be able to travel to Amsterdam for the ceremony! We decided this was an intriguing opportunity we couldn't pass up, so we quickly accepted -- but Pez, me and Cate's bestie, Meg Adams would accompany Cate over (for all we knew, the "Septimius Awards" could've been a shipping container outside Amsterdam Airport). As we planned our trip, a second email arrived from Team Septimius: in addition to Cate's nomination, they now wanted to nominate Apparitions for Best Oceanian Film! (We learned that Septimius gave awards for Best Film, Actor and Actress by continent, or continental zone: Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania.) Pez and I were chuffed, now up for an award ourselves (and not just filling out Cate's entourage, haha). The Septimius Awards were held the first week of June, so we packed our bags and gowns (and my first tuxedo!) and flew over for nine whirlwind days in Amsterdam, of delicious food, amazing sights, museums, red light districts, and an awards ceremony that was beyond our wildest dreams: especially when Cate WON the Best Oceanian Actress award!!! 

July-November were, with few exceptions (Pez's eldest daughter, Immogen, got married!), a slog. After outrunning it for two-and-a-half years, COVID finally caught up with us and played havoc with our schedules, our hoped-for Australian/New Zealand release of Apparitions never materialised (never fear, we'll have some news on that early in the new year), the film's international sales dried up, projects large and small stalled or completely conked out, the miserable Melbourne winter seemed to stretch well into November... and all of this drudgery moved at a breakneck pace. We never seemed to stop working, to stop moving, to stop for more than an evening's breath. It was five months of non-stop effort for little-to-no gain -- unless one measures gain in units of frustration -- under miserable, cold skies. 

Then December arrived. I landed a new job (in what one hopes will launch a new secondary career) in distribution, specialising in acquisition and theatrical booking, with Bounty Films, and Pez and I connected with an amazing mentor, a producer based out of Western Australia, who has already given us some terrific advice and filled our bellies with much-needed fire to take into 2023, as we plan to spend the year developing two major movie projects, one big, one small. We're going to pitch to funding bodies and producer-distributors, to reach out to the wider industry, for the first time, and we're as excited as we are terrified. Also, Pez has booked not one, but two plays as an actor for 2023, which we're thrilled about -- the first, Coming Out, will be playing at Chapel Off Chapel from Feb 9-12, tickets available here. This seems as good a place as any to close the book on Cinema Viscera's 2022... shall we talk about some movies?

These are my 20 favourite feature films made prior to 2019 that I saw for the first time this year. First, some Honourable Mentions, all of which could've sneaked into the Top 20: Ken Russell's Tommy (1975), Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack (1979), Ronald Neame's Gambit (1966), Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965) and Norma Rae (1979), Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria (1982), Terry Jones' Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), Guy Hamilton's Funeral in Berlin (1966), Spike Lee's Girl 6 (1996) and Crooklyn (1994), Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale​ (2008) and, technically ineligible as it was a made-for-TV movie, but possibly the creepiest movie I saw all year, James MacTaggart's Robin Redbreast (1970).  Now, counting down my favourites from 20th to 1st...

A fair warning for this and the next countdown: I didn't get much time to write my Letterboxd reviews this year, so my write-ups will be a lot less in-depth (small mercies for you all)...

#20: THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE (1976, Nicholas Gessner)
Creepy Canadian chiller with Jodie Foster (same year as Taxi Driver) as an intelligent young girl mysteriously living alone in a huge house, as a Big Bad Wolf -- namely, a well-heeled pedo played with relish by a very against-type Martin Sheen -- lurks outside.  Switches gears halfway through, as a young aspiring magician befriends Foster and the two make a sort of home together, but it's always informed by this sense of two kids trying to grasp tightly (paradoxically so, by imitating adult behaviour) to the innocence they know they're soon to lose. The scenes with the kids are sweet, every scene with Sheen is a tightly wound theatre of terror, and Gessner never loses his grip. Shocked he didn't have a bigger career.

#19: THE LADY VANISHES (1979, Anthony Page)
An unexpected delight, playing like a neo-screwball comedy playing off the very different rhythms of Elliott Gould and Cybill Shepherd, who gel together wonderfully, while, like Hitchcock’s version, having a ball with its cast of English eccentrics and suspicious Germans. Page’s direction is unflashy, but keeps the plot, intrigue and banter fast and fun; that and the script (by George Axelrod, of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and The Manchurian Candidate fame) hue closely to previous adaptations but change enough to keep things surprising — the biggest being the WWII setting, lending a more relatable context for a modern (1979) audience. So much fun!

#18: NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979, Werner Herzog)
Herzog's droll, atmospheric and remixed adaptation might be my favourite version of Bram Stoker's Dracula ever made, even as it's a remake of a famously unauthorised adaptation. Kinski's Count is so horrfyingly ratlike and weird, I've never been more in fear for Jon Harker than watching Kinski bailing up Bruno Ganz into a corner, eyes wide, sniffing about, with no-one around for miles. Isabelle Adjani as "Lucy Harker" (told you it was remixed!) is terrific, channeling the silent film energy of the original with her wild-eyed terror, while Kinski feels like a method Count, and Ganz a neo-realist Harker -- yet these styles all cohere beautifully amongst the rustic, ruined trappings. Love what Herzog does with the ending, too. 

#17: THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN (1979, Sydney Pollack)
Gently stirring tale of freedom and individuality with Robert Redford as an ex-champion rodeo cowboy who quietly steals the once-champion racehorse he finds doped up on a Vegas stage they're meant to share. He's pursued by acerbic journo Jane Fonda, whom he eventually allows to follow him, to tell the horse's story. Feels like the platonic ideal of a pre-Sundance Institute Redford movie, with its themes of anti-exploitation, animal rights and finding truth in nature, railing against big-city corporates, the marketing machine. It's also witty, charming and hugely entertaining, with two of the decade's movie stars giving believably lived-in performances while still operating at full charismatic wattage. 

#16: CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940, Preston Sturges)
"If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" This frankly absurd catchphrase kicks off a truly mad but truly lovely screwball comedy that may seem to be a Christmas movie in title only - it certainly isn't one in time or place - but is, at crucial moments, very much one in spirit. His second film as writer-director, it's Preston Sturges distilled; a rapid-fire wit generator with satirical jabs to burn and tons of heart (personified by Dick Powell and, especially, Ellen Drew), wrapped up into 67 breathless minutes (and it feels shorter!). I love Hollywood comedies from 1940-41, just before the US entered World War II; somewhat paradoxically, they display both an innocence and a clear-eyed readiness to poke fun at big institutions or, as in this case, the "American Dream" itself. You can find this on YouTube, and it's an hour-and-change well spent.

#15: A QUESTION OF SILENCE (1982, Marleen Gorris)
Kind of devastating Dutch drama, just as pertinent now as 40 years ago, about a quartet of women who murder a male women’s clothing salesman in cold blood, and the female attorney who struggles to uncover the reason why they did it — to the increasing resistance of her husband and male colleagues — before realising she might have more insight into the Why than she thinks. A blisteringly angry feminist work that never feels like a tract, unfolding instead as a fascinating character study that never stops being informed by gender dynamics. Seek this one out.

#14: MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1979, Gillian Armstrong)
It's taken me far too long to get around to Armstrong's sensational debut, that's as witty and wildly entertaining as it is a landmark. "Jane Aust-rali-en" was the portmanteau description that leapt to mind the second this ended ("Australia May Alcott" would work just as well), as it firmly channels the sharp social satire of the 17th-19th century women writers that surely influenced Miles Franklin but filtered through the uniquely Aussie lens of Franklin and, as writer-director, Armstrong. Judy Davis' breakout role is a comic, charismatic, forthright firestorm that set the tone for her own brilliant career to follow, but she's surrounded by a terrific cast (including a young Sam Neill as a romantic lead) in this timeless feminist ode to making your own life for yourself, finding (and following) your own voice and being your own hero. 

#13: GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL DEAD (1988, John Hillcoat)
John Hillcoat's debut feature is as shattering, angry and desolate as advertised, a sad, sinewy and searing indictment of a prison system more interested in generating profit and fear than rehabilitating offenders. While I wish a little less of the story was type on a computer screen, this is primarily a masterclass in mood, as Hillcoat and his army of co-screenwriters (including Nick Cave, who has a striking acting role as well) create a gathering storm of a film, its soundtrack always rumbling its way into your psyche as its lost, disturbed characters slowly become unglued, with a final shot that could scarcely be more chilling.

#12: 8 WOMEN (2002, Francois Ozon)
Imagine Agatha Christie meeting Almodovar in the pages of French Vogue, and you've got this ravishingly costumed, beautifully designed, surprisingly queer Christmas-set comedy-mystery melodrama. An absolute joy from its opening to ironic ending, it's as much of an adoring tribute to its four generations of French superstars as it is anything else: where else can you see Isabelle Huppert going full screwball, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant rolling around the floor passionately snogging, Emmanuelle Beart as a smouldering bisexual maid, or sudden internal song-and-dance numbers by these generally non-singing icons? A Christmas chocolate box of a film.

#11: THEY ALL LAUGHED (1981, Peter Bogdanovich)
What a gorgeous discovery! A breezy, funny, loose and lovely modern (for 1981) screwball rom-com from Bogdanovich which seems to glow from the love he has for this cast, and they for each other -- so many of them were in love, or used to be, or were great friends -- as the plot follows these half-baked private eyes chasing their marks around NYC. A pure delight from start to end, an underrated gem possessed with a charm and sense of place so missing from these kind of films nowadays. Just loved spending time with these people, in this city. Swoon.

#10: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957, Jack Arnold)
The title alone is a phrase familiar the world over, forever associated with the sensationalistic sci-fi boom of the 1950s, but I was completely blindsided by its existential terror and, even more so, contemplation of the infinite... which shouldn't be a surprise, given the words, "Screenplay by Richard Matheson" -- the mind behind I Am Legend and countless classic Twilight Zones -- always promise something special. The (often deceptively simple) special effects and giant sets are hugely innovative, and genre specialist Arnold keeps it humming for a sleek 83 minutes, but it's the underrated lead performance by Grant Williams, and Matheson's elegant, tragic screenplay that give this film its power to resonate, endure - and grow.

#9: CAMERA BUFF (1979, Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Did this dude ever make even a halfway-bad movie? A guy in a provincial Polish town takes an interest in Super 8mm filmmaking, and embarks on a journey that leads him through documenting the mundane lives of others, finding an artistic voice, journeying to film festivals, an unexpected backlash and a forced reckoning with state censorship, expectations, the responsibility of art and the fact no cinematic eye can ever be truly impartial, or detached. This early Kieslowski effort already shows his eye for finding humour and character in the unlikeliest of places, like a great satirical novelist who happens to be working in a screen medium. 

#8: ...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL (1979, Norman Jewison)
My favourite actor of all time is '70s Al Pacino, and it's taken me far too long to see this, one of his best roles. A darkly funny, emotionally charged and surprisingly empathetic critique of the American legal system -- with a justifiably Oscar-nominated script by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson -- that not only seamlessly blends genres, takes an anarchic swipe at a broken system from myriad angles (not all of them expected) and the toll it takes on the sanity of all involved, but also at the casual damage patriarchal structures do to women and queer people. Pacino's closing argument is iconic for a reason; as well as being beautifully written, it's an acting masterclass. 

#7: THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973, Douglas Hickox)
After making the two Dr. Phibes films (which we also saw for the first time this year), Vincent Price finds the perfect balance of absurd comedy, chilling horror and batshit craziness in this glorious genre-hopping blast about a vainglorious Shakespearean actor (Price) snubbed by a circle of snooty critics (a perfectly cast who's who of late '60s/early '70s UK character actors) whom he picks off one-by-one in deliciously inventive murders based upon The Bard's plays. Diana Rigg slays in a key role and a couple of the murders (especially the one that opens the film) are shockingly creepy for this kind of film. I also love that Price has it both ways; he gets to sample the Shakespearean roles he longed to play, in a way that shows off his skill whilst keeping his character's level of aptitude ambiguous. Does everything it says on the box, and how! 

#6: WISE BLOOD (1979, John Huston)
Something tells me Paul Thomas Anderson is a big fan of this film. it's crazy John Huston, whose directorial debut was The Maltese Falcon in 1941, was still making pictures that were this wild a swing in his early 70s. Undoubtedly an acquired taste, this is a sort of Pilgrim's Progress story about a very odd and damaged man (Brad Dourif, in an astonishing performance, even for him) who returns from a war, moves to the city to preach his own Anti-Religious Religion, gets into a strange relationship and even stranger rivalries, curdling and self-destructing all the while. A bizarre slice of on-the-turn Americana and a true original from a writer-director whose piercing insight into the darkness and foibles of humanity never left him. 

#5: THE DEMON (1963, Brunello Rondi)
Speaking of astonishing performances, Dahlia Lavi is incredible as an unruly village beauty whose all-consuming obsession, with a soon-to-be-married man who seduced her, sees her branded as a witch by her narrow-minded village -- a misdiagnosis soon upgraded to Demonic Possession. An incredibly poignant story of a young woman going mad in a place that has no ability (or desire) to take care of her, as ancient regional superstitions and a dominant self-serving patriarchy combine to abuse and crush her at all costs. Plays like a neo-realist precursor to Lars von Trier -- with a performance to match at its centre, including a jaw-dropping exorcism William Friedkin had to be aware of -- this is a bracing film, as physically beautiful as it is brutal, that proves that a mob of small-minded people is more terrifying than any demon. 
​
#4: NOISE (2007, Matthew Saville)
A small landmark of 2000s Australian cinema, a slick, spare, low-key genre film that doubles as a crackerjack character piece about a well-meaning man in the absolute wrong job (at the wrong place at the wrong time), spearheaded by an excellent performance from Brendan Cowell. Loved every choice here, information is imparted in smart and subtle ways, character relationships evolve in surprising ways that are completely organic, it's as funny as it is suspenseful, it walks and talks with a strong sense of place (Melbourne's western suburbs), makes offbeat character choices that feel baked into this world and, with all that, is rendered with an inescapable melancholy. A superb, still-underrated crime drama.

#3: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950, John Huston)
The O.G. heist film as we know them to be nowadays, and yet another in the litany of John Huston classics. (Also, how many all-time-great films has Sterling Hayden been in?!) A brilliant, multi-layered and lived-in portrait of a bunch of distaff characters trying to take one last crack at getting what they think is theirs, the thing that struck me is how sad everybody is here; the joints are dingy, the apartments are too cramped, even the rich guy's house is weirdly lifeless. You wouldn't be wrapped up in a gig like this, with people like this, if you had more viable options. The big score is, like capitalism, the ultimate carrot-stick game; the score won't fulfill your dreams or undo mistakes, leading to one of crime cinema's saddest final shots. 

#2: SCUM (1979, Alan Clarke)
One of the most shattering films I saw all year, this matter-of-fact drama about England's brutal borstals (juvie prisons for boys) is a chilling indictment of a system too long overlooked by a ruling class who'd rather these kids were locked away out of sight (hence the title), which by the 1970s had become overrun with rampant tyrannical behaviour, and physical and sexual abuse. Ray Winstone gives a breakout performance as a tough kid determined not to be broken, while Mick Ford's performance as the thoughtful, provocative Archer should have similarly elevated his career. A rare theatrical feature (a necessity as his TV version, made two years earlier, was deemed unfit for broadcast) for Clarke, who spent decades as an unflinching voice for social change on British TV, this is in no way easy viewing, but is one of the great social prison dramas, which helped to spread awareness and change the system for good.

...and my #1 new discovery of 2022 is...

...and now, for the main event...

The regular annual readers of this blog among you may notice something a little different right away: I'm going with a pared-down Top 15 list this year, with 5 Honourable Mentions. This is partly due to the fact I only saw 68 new release films this year (my lowest tally since the 2000s) and don't feel right listing a third of them, but also due to the fact I only loved 15 of those 68 films; of the ones I really, really liked, I only feel like talking about a handful of them. 

Among the heap I didn't see, there were a heap that appear elsewhere that I wasn't as crazy about; as always, I've laid out what new films I saw this year below, at the bottom of the page. You can make up your own mind as to where I landed on those, or look at my Letterboxd account. I just wasn't super into new films this year, but, as you'll see, some were truly special to me. Let's get into it, hey?

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)
I didn't love this as much as most -- it really is too damn much of everything (especially at 140 minutes), the middle stretch either drags or is just exhausting (or both), and those gross sausage fingers can get in the fucking bin -- but Michelle Yeoh is a global treasure, in a career-summarising role that's a gift. However, my MVP of the film is Ke Huy Quan's Waymond; yes, the Wong Kar Wai homage is dope, but the way he lays out his personal philosophy was one of the most incredibly moving cinematic moments of my year.
 
GLORIOUS (Rebekah McKendry)
What happens when a man at the end of his rope (Ryan Kwanten, an expert in playing broken man-children) stumbles into a public toilet to find the voice on the other side of the gloryhole is an ancient Lovecraftian entity (wonderfully voiced by J.K. Simmons)? Searching conversation, gross-out gore, potential planetary destruction... There's not a lot here -- even at a tight 79 minutes, it's slightly long -- but McKendry's directorial hand has never been more assured, the horror moments are ace, and the script springs its share of fun twists, mining that daft concept for all it's worth.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT STORY (Rian Johnson)
While it lacks the Swiss clock construction and sociopolitical heft of Knives Out, this is just a super fun, bright, glossy, clever and very funny murder-mystery comedy -- Johnson's Death on the Nile, if you will -- that takes a well-timed swipe at "disruptor" culture and self-branding billionaires. Daniel Craig is much looser and funnier as the Poirot-esque Benoit Blanc this time around, surrounded by a crack cast (Edward Norton, Janelle Monae and Kate Hudson, especially). One of these every 2-4 years would be fine with me.

KIMI (Steven Soderbergh)
A fun, tight, post-pandemic work-from-home Rear Window written by Panic Room's David Koepp. It may lack those films' grand design and chilling complications, and has the most ineffectual thugs ever, but it does have the excellent Zoe Kravitz, wry commentary on the increasingly digital lives we're leading (for good and ill) and cheeky touches like Kravitz telling her Alexa-like 'Kimi' to play the Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage' as she's about to flee from the bad guys. 

AMSTERDAM (David O. Russell)
​Are Pez and I are the only people who liked this?? A demented comedy-mystery-drama from David O. Russell about an attempted fascist uprising in America before World War II (based only vaguely on true machinations), it's stacked with one of the most awe-inspiring modern casts to watch share scenes, anchored by hugely likeable work from Christian Bale, John David Washington and Margot Robbie in the leads. Their friendship is immediately believable and palpable, their early post-WWI bubble so invigorating, that it sets a beautiful tone that the rest of the film repeatedly, disquietingly shoves us out of. Sure, the plotting's a little janky at times and it drags in one or two sections, but I found this to be a delight -- it's stunningly shot and designed, it's very funny, everyone's in fun form (including my favourite Mike Myers role in about 20 years) and it's a screwball whirlwind of sociopolitical chaos weirdly relevant to now.

#15: THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (George Miller)
Dr. George makes a disarming left turn into this gently whimsical tale about storytelling and storytellers, as Tilda Swinton’s solitary but seemingly content “narratologist” frees Idris Elba’s Djinn from his bottle and is offered three wishes... but she’s heard a thing or two about these tricksters. It’s talky by design but always engaging, lovely and sincere, and the duo’s negotiations are consistently absorbing (Elba and Swinton are excellent), always underpinned by a deep loneliness. The final act is thoughtful even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing, but I'm hugely fond of this.

#14: MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON (Ana Lily Amirpour)
If you’ve ever wondered, “What if Sean Baker directed an ‘80s sci-fi-kidventure?” then boy does Ana Lily Amipour have the answer. An adorable boy takes a psychokinetic Korean-American asylum escapee home to his stripper mom (a gloriously trashy Kate Hudson), who uses her to relieve dudes of cash, as cop Craig Robinson doggedly tracks the escapee down (leading to the slowest foot chase in movie history). Cheerfully cribs from everywhere but odd and subversive enough to be all her, it's infused with ALA’s attitude while being sweet, humane, feminist and optimistic. 

#13: THE STRANGER (Thomas M. Wright)
A darkly unsettling, slow-burning procedural of the highest order, one which features no onscreen violence but is no less suspenseful or disturbing, especially as it's based on a real-life murder investigation. Wright takes an approach to the material that almost recalls a less-flashy Lynne Ramsay; so much of it is observed snatches of thoughts, motions, sounds, feelings, like you're experiencing the film from the inside out. The film develops in such a quietly seething, gradually surprising way that you can't help but lean in further as each block of the story is slid into place. Edgerton and Harris are brilliant, and you can't help but feel overwhelmed by the experience; I saw this on Netflix, seeing it in a cinema would've been amazing.  

#12: THE MENU (Mark Mylod)
My kind of blunt-force metaphor social comedy-horror, but surprisingly clever and sophisticated in the bargain. Many of the team behind one of the best shows on TV, Succession, are behind this wickedly funny takedown of the way we idolise and build mystique around great artists (and chefs), but also of the shitty cultures around art (fans, critics, wealthy patrons), the bad-faith way many appropriate it, and, just because, asshole tech bros. It's also a twisty horror-thriller that keeps springing surprising twists with wry humour, is shot and designed with a cool, artful precision that befits its high-dining milieu and features terrific performances from its ensemble cast, particularly Fiennes and Taylor-Joy. Love the wicked little touches throughout, like listing the dishes' on-screen ingredients, which grow increasingly absurd. 

#11: VORTEX (Gaspar Noe)
Gaspar Noé's crushingly empathetic, matter-of-fact window into a situation that we spend our lives refusing to contemplate: losing a partner to dementia. Françoise Lebrun, Dario Argento(!) and Alex Lutz give lived-in performances that never feel acted, playing complex characters with painfully, sometimes cruelly, human motives, all crammed into a stressfully cluttered labyrinth of a Paris flat overflowing with books and artefacts of times long past, buckling beneath their weight, in an enclave far too easy to get lost in. But it's no tearjerker, as Noé avoids any kind of easy emotion. Could it be 20 minutes shorter and still devastate? Sure, but as a uniquely cinematic work that confronts The Big Sleep head on, it's bracingly great.

#10: ENNIO (Giuseppe Tornatore)
A 160-minute documentary on the maestro Ennio Morricone that never feels bloated or hagiographic, this isn't just an open-hearted tribute to a great composer, as huge as his absurdly prolific career, but an inspiring, joyous portrait of sheer creativity, and the ways that creativity can reach out, touch lives, inspire generations and endure. It scarcely leaves a time in Morricone's jam-packed artistic life unturned, but everything is examined so  tenderly, and Morricone himself is such an unassuming presence that you can't help but be drawn into his story -- and there are few things I saw this year as exhilarating as watching a young crowd at a Metallica concert rocking out to his six-decade-old 'Ecstacy of Gold' theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Beautiful stuff. 

#9: GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE (Sophie Hyde)
Sophie Hyde is carving out a great space in telling stories about complex human beings negotiating difficult emotional evolution, and this, helped by Katy Brand's sharp and thoughtful script, is no exception. Emma Thompson perfectly embodies a shy (not meek) schoolteacher seeking the sexual experience she always longed for, and how the sex worker she hires (a great Daryl McCormack) not only challenges her ideas about sexual pleasure and sex work, but who she really is, who she wanted to be, and the distance between those things. It’s also Hyde’s most accessible film thus far, consistently funny and empathetic. A delight, with a nimble, playful approach to pertinent themes.

#8: ELVIS (Baz Luhrmann)
Luhrmann and Martin's best film since Moulin Rouge! is a breathlessly constructed maximalist tone poem of a biopic, presenting Presley as a gifted magpie of a performer, sampling music from the cultures and friends he loved and respected, building it into his own, whose provocative hip-shaking was his superpower. In an inspired touch, Luhrmann lets the man who introduced Elvis to the world, "Colonel" Tom Parker (in a bizarre but delightfully mischievous performance from Tom Hanks), tell his story, in an attempt to clear his name of wrongdoing but digging his hole ever deeper, as all megalomaniacs do. But the real juice that powers this is Austin Butler's stunning, immersive performance as Elvis, inhabiting the performer's skin in a way that would almost be scary, if he didn't channel Presley's aw-shucks charisma and raw sexuality as well as he does. It's also a masterclass in montage -- I can't imagine how the editors assembled this -- and Catherine Martin's production and costume design are customarily peerless. A joy.

#7: TOP GUN MAVERICK (Joseph Kosinski)
Never bet against Tom Cruise. A three-decades-too-late legacy sequel to a well-orchestrated but politically suspect '80s blockbuster had no right to work as well as it does, but, as seamlessly directed as it is by Kosinski, the secret sauce here is surely co-screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise's collaborator on 7 of the star's last 13 films, who turns this Top Gun 2 into a stealth Mission: Impossible 6.5. A rollicking adventure with a great way of building tension, an intelligent approach to the antagonist that removes the elements that make the first so tricky, perfect aerial sequences and surprising emotional heft -- I've only cried in a handful of films this year, and this was the only one that got me twice (especially the lovely, perfectly handled Val Kilmer appearance) -- all anchored by beautiful work from Cruise, who is both the capital-M Movie Star this film demands and gives a layered performance. This is how you blockbuster. 
​
#6: MOONAGE DAYDREAM (Brett Morgen)
Morgen tells the story of David Bowie, his seismic impact on modern culture and his shifting identities, both public and private, in a documentary biopic like none I've ever seen before, more akin to something like Koyaanisqatsi than any kind of conventional music doc; an overwhelming tsunami of sound and vision which honours its subject's considerable legacy (and still deeply-felt loss) as well as his chameleonic nature, a IMAX-sized valentine to sheer unbounded creativity. It made me inspired as a creative person, also leading me to ask myself questions about why I create, and how I can do so more freely. It's a stunning work on every sensory level, which made my heart beat at a different register as I left the cinema. 

#5: PARALLEL MOTHERS (Pedro Almodovar)
Only Almodovar could dovetail a classic melodrama premise with the lingering scars of unreconciled Franco-era genocide, while mining from its familiar twist the one sharp-edged angle I'd never seen before, with a pitch-perfect Penelope Cruz performance at its centre (which Milena Smit, as the other mother, almost matches). Like all of his films, it invites us into the everyday of its characters, taking a while to connect the dots... and, like almost all his films, the way it all connects is so elegant and intelligent, ending on a note that's as haunting as anything he has ever made. It's astonishing how the 72-year old auteur's form maintains, as empathetic, playful, elegant and humane as ever.

#4: RED ROCKET (Sean Baker)
Ex-porn star Mikey Saber (a revelatory Simon Rex), the latest masterful creation from Baker, is a vampiric, opportunistic dirtbag with energy, bullshit and shitkicker charm to burn. Ejected from L.A., he rolls up on his ex-wife Lexi (Bree Elrod, also terrific), a hollowed-out wreck of her former self trying to rebuild her life, to crash when he finds young donut shop girl Strawberry (Suzanna Son, a stealth missile). We're terrified for her, because we've seen where Lexi's at now... but when Strawberry gets an idea of what's Mikey’s up to, things get even more interesting. As incredibly funny as it is unnerving and sad, saying so much about the way capitalist structures have us eating each other alive, it has a refreshing sexual freedom, looks gorgeous on 16mm film and solidifies Baker's rep as one of the most gifted indie filmmakers out there.

#3: THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Martin McDonagh)
It's been five days since I've seen this, and I'm not sure I even have the right words to articulate the effect this film had on me. It's a fascinating film, with so many elements I'm still sorting through; it works as powerfully on a macro level, as allegory and metaphor -- for the Troubles, the futility of war, the self-centred stubbornness of men -- as it does on a micro level, as a small story about a sweet man who has everything he wants out of his simple life, and another who couches his existential terror in arrogance. This film is not at all at the tenor I expected from McDonagh; while the dialogue and humor is perfectly placed, I didn't always find it funny (okay, sometimes it is, but often darkly so), instead, I found it to be increasingly, inescapably bleak. Performances are stunning across the board, especially Farrell, but I really keyed in to Kerry Condon's Siobahn. Among all the other things it does brilliantly, it's a stunning portrait of the void of depression, of facing, well, the void, and how it can suck in all around it, twist it, even destroy it; it can even make a sweet man cruel. Stunning work in every respect (Carter Burwell's score!), and still growing on me. For me, McDonagh's best film to date. 
​
#2: YOU WON'T BE ALONE (Goran Stolevski)
Stolevski makes one of the most assured directorial debuts of recent years, a dreamily paced, elegantly constructed folk horror tale that's as much of a shape shifter as its lead character(s): at various times, I thought I had the thematic drive of this one pinned, but it morphed in the most exciting ways, ending up in a place that's heartbreakingly poignant. All the actors are great, especially Anamaria Marinca, but Noomi Rapace's (shockingly brief) work is fabulously odd, amusing and achingly great. Stunning makeup FX, too.

...and now... my #1 film of 2022 is...