Another Round for the Best of 2022

That’s not happening, at least for the time being. NBC has agreed to broadcast the eightieth-anniversary presentation, but the HFPA is still on probation. This is a one-off trial balloon. Comedian Jerrod Carmichael will host the ceremony on January 10, and this morning, Mayan Lopez and Selenis Leyva announced the nominations. Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as friends who have fallen out, leads the film categories with eight. In the meantime, this past weekend has seen another robust round of lists and awards.

It’s rare for a prestigious critics’ organization to announce a tie for Best Picture, but on Sunday, members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association split their votes between Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once and Todd Field’s Tár. Fans of the former have been virtually roughing up critics who leave the multiverse head-spinner off of their year-end lists, and on Thursday, Kwan took to Twitter to tell them to cut it out. “The act of ranking any piece of art is so absurd and should only be seen as an incredibly personal and subjective endeavor,” he wrote. “This was an incredible year for movies and there is so much to celebrate, why waste your time on anger?” Those fans should be happy to hear that the Atlanta Film Critics Circle voted Everything to the top of their list.

New York–based Slate film critic Dana Stevens includes Tár in her top ten, calling it “brilliant and brutal, frightening and funny, seductive and repulsive, an enigmatic recasting of an all-too-familiar story.” Field’s “study of a superstar orchestra conductor, played with unassailable authority and sly humor by Cate Blanchett, is a smart movie that trusts its audience to be even smarter.” The LAFCA awarded Field both Best Director and Screenplay and named Blanchett one of two Best Lead Performances, the other being Bill Nighy for his turn in Living, a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) directed by Oliver Hermanus and written by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Most American organizations that present awards, from the Oscars on down, have two set categories separated along the lines of what the Academy calls Best Picture and Best International Feature Film. The Boston Society of Film Critics takes an admirably different approach. They vote for Best Film, and if the winner happens to be in a language other than English—as it was last year, when Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car won—they then vote for a Best English Language Film (last year: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog).

It happened again this year. Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, in which twenty-five-year-old Freddie (Park Ji-min), adopted by French parents and raised in France, attempts to reconnect with the country of her birth, is the BFCS’s Best Film of 2022. What begins as an “adoption drama” transforms into a “character portrait and ultimately into a much more intriguing and intricate investigation of place and belonging,” wrote Jessica Kiang in Variety in May. The BFCS’s Best English Language Film is The Banshees of Inisherin, and McDonagh won Best Screenplay.

RRR tops the list of the year’s ten best at Polygon. “Every cinematic possibility explodes across the screen in S. S. Rajamouli’s three-hour historical action epic,” writes Matt Patches. “Too much hype? There is no overselling the spectacle of RRR.” From the AP come two more rounds of ten each from Lindsey Bahr (The Banshees of Inisherin) and Jake Coyle (Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun). Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt goes for Tár, and the Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey will surprise many by giving the top slot to Robert Eggers’s The Northman. Looking back on the year’s best performances are the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman, Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, and the staff at the Ringer.

It’s not unusual for the European Film Awards to go all in on a single film. In 2017, for example, members of the European Film Academy voted to give six top awards to Ruben Östlund’s The Square. On Saturday evening, Östlund returned to the EFAs with his second Palme d’Or winner, Triangle of Sadness, and picked up Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenwriter. Zlatko Burić won Best Actor.

Burić plays a Russian oligarch who debates the merits of capitalism with a drunken Marxist yacht captain piloting a luxury cruise. When the ship goes down, the social order flips. “Triangle makes no attempt at subtlety,” wrote Caitlin Quinlan in Cinema Scope this summer, “but when the mockery is this relentless and the dialogue as enjoyably caustic as it is in the film’s first hour, it’s hard to take issue with it.”

But A. O. Scott did, writing in the New York Times that the “elaborately constructed, meandering plots of Triangle of Sadness and The Square purport to expose the hypocrisies and contradictions of contemporary life, but they are edifices of complacency, clever advertisements for the status quo.” At e-flux, Pietro Bianchi even goes so far as to compare Östlund to Trump and Elon Musk, “figures who explicitly present themselves as transgressive outsiders. Östlund, who in his films has always targeted liberals and urban elites, not only shares with them the same discourse, but also in a deeper way belongs to the same register and to the same imaginary.”

Lithuanian filmmaker and anthropologist Mantas Kvedaravičius was killed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol while he was shooting Mariupolis 2. The Best Documentary winner was completed by Kvedaravičius’s fiancée and codirector Hanna Bilobrova and editor Dounia Sichov. “The film itself feels like wreckage, fragmented and strewn, and as hot to the touch as the chunk of scalding debris we see the survivors pass from hand to hand in amazed disbelief,” wrote the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin back in May.

The Good Boss, the Best Comedy winner starring Javier Bardem and directed by Fernando León De Aranoa, is “a satire on bribery, corruption and image manipulation in contemporary Spain,” writes Maria Delgado for Sight and Sound. And Vicky Krieps who won Best Actress for her turn as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage.

Just hours after the EFAs wrapped, the International Documentary Association presented four of its top IDA Awards to Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes—Best Feature, Director, Editing (Charlotte Munch Bengtsen), and the Pare Lorentz Award, which is given to work that best represents the “democratic sensibility, activist spirit, and lyrical vision” of the documentarian best known for the films he made during the Great Depression. All That Breathes, which centers on a pair of Muslim brothers in New Delhi who rescue birds overcome by the city’s infamous pollution, “is maybe the most beautifully realized documentary in recent memory,” writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, which won Best Cinematography and Writing, focuses on another working partnership, married volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. The Observer’s Wendy Ide finds that “the way this lyrical documentary, operating in the intersection between science and poetry, tells it, the danger of the eruptions was part of the attraction. The closer Katia and Maurice got to the boiling earth, the more their curiosity grew stronger than their fear.”