Thank you, @hiddenlookingglass!
Before I continue, I have to give the obvious caveat that I haven't watched a ton of films, relatively speaking. I think most of these films were watched last year alone. And, making this list, I have to give honorable mentions, because, fuck me, originally this list was seven entries and, short of cheating this ask to write out top seven or ten, it was never going to happen without title-dropping the runner-ups, so here goes:
You Were Never Really Here: Take the premise of John Wick, drain it of all the orchestra and slickness, ground it in broken people, scarred by violence in childhood to adulthood, and polish it off with some of the tightest film editing and sound design in the industry, and you get my unquestionably favorite anti-violence film.
The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascenscia: A lovely and tragic indie gem of an animated film about a cult, one that finally clicked the appeal of them without diminishing their harm, and one that breaks me in touching on my own questions of loneliness... and whether being in an unhealthy dynamic is better than being alone.
Paddington: The second one is undeniably an even better film, but this one's rain scenes and leisurely narrative feels cozier to me. Whenever I feel like complete dogshit, I rewatch this, because Paddington's charm and earnestness winning over the Browns before realizing he found his family and home with them is hrrgh.
The Green Knight: A visually sumptuous banquet of the senses, trippy and wondrous in how it depicts Gawain's knightly trials, with moral and literary themes that scratch my itches and a fantastic leading actor who carries the film, complete with an ending that brings it all home, landing with such an earned emotional punch.
The Witch: Eggers' mastery at inhabiting the psychological reality of his time periods is impeccable, and it all started with this horror tale of a family plagued by the supernatural outside their walls... and religious anguish and Puritan misogyny among its members. Paired with a hell of an ending and arresting last shot? Delicious.
And, now, onto the proper top five!
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Look, is the script overstuffed with exposition about how the multiverse works? Yes. Is it ultimately narratively unwieldly, even faking us out with a false climax, and increasingly uneven to the end? Yes. Are some of the jokes pretty juvenile in the "haha, dildos are funny" realm? Yes. Could it have been more queer? Yes. Is the conclusion a little too tidy and pat, especially for my Chinese childhood abused-ass? Yes, yes, yes. There are definitely fair criticisms that I can agree to, but...
Every time I revisit this film, it wrecks me a whole another way. I never escape this film emotionally unscathed, I philosophically and morally match to it like an alternate version of me jumped into my mind, slipped into my flesh. There are at least five scenes in it that crack me open like a chestnut and I'm left a blubbering mess and astonished at how it manages to tie together all the chaos at the end in such believable catharsis that I can still buy into.
It's still an amazingly-acted film that allows for a rough, unpleasant, and embittered middle-aged female protagonist to lead the events, quite a few ladies dictate and command the plot, and manages to juggle a ton of disparate tones, balancing genuine pathos with bathos, and emotional weight undergirding every bit of silliness and goofy concepts it throws at you. It's still a multiversal familial drama that, at the heart of it, is centered around the experience of what if our first-generation immigrant parents made different choices, that failure can be its own positive experience in a lifetime full of not living up to your parents-demanded potential, and that, in depressive ennui, loneliness, and intense nihilism, all we can do is love, embrace what little joys our speck of lives get, and be there for each other. That, despite the material hardships and pain of a life, our connections still matter enough to keep at it.
It throws the totality of everything beyond the universe at our minds and senses, even down to "talking" rocks and sausage-fingers people, calling to the sheer information overload that most everyone in 2022 felt keenly, acknowledging that it can be such a burden that threatens to hollow us out with existential indifference... and earnestly makes its own case against that. If nothing matters, if all we do and are is worthless in the grander scope of the universe, then these moments we're facing right now, the people in our lives, they matter.
We're not built to attend to everything everywhere all at once. We'll always feel the whisper of what-ifs, the weight of different paths not taken. We might even be useless alone. All we can really do, in the end, is be there for these moments and people around our present. I can't help, but cherish this film on those grounds, but it offered such an awe-inspiring, emotionally resonant experience that it jumps up to my favorite as a result.
How has this masterpiece of a debut, depicting grief, human connection, the heart and art being hollowed by loss and commercial concerns, and masculine vulnerability with such finesse, flown under the radar, nor been nominated for any major accolades? I'm genuinely asking, because, aside from maybe one particular scene that tries to fake us out into thinking it'll become a more conventional John Wickesque revenge thriller, I don't see any crucial flaws that wouldn't warrant it in the discussion as one of 2021's best films. If you haven't yet, treat yourself to one of the best films I've watched.
I watched one of its mid-section scenes, that speech, you know the one if you've watched it, on its own, and wept at the power of its acting, dialogue, and direction by itself. The fact that I still broke down, despite primed, when watching it in the context of the full film should tell you how good Sarnoski's hands are at his first try as director. He brings an intimacy and restraint to the camera in capturing the events in the film, often situating his central characters against the wider scope of his landscapes and environments through a wider lens, showing them as small people against the greater beasts of being scored by grief and loneliness.
Though, given I brought up John Wick, one facet these two share, despite the bait-and-switch of premise, is that almost every character, no matter how minor, has a personality and some texture of history with the protagonist, by direction or sheer acting. Sarnoski just trusts us to infer the weight of history between our characters and, if you want to know how well that approach turns out, Cage's performance should be the clear-cut sign. If you have any doubts of how good Nicholas Cage could be, and trust me, I had a few, this is easily his subtlest, most restrained performance. No signs of a Cage hamfest, this is him at his best and minutely controlled, portraying a stoic man whose hardened demeanor and lack of social graces belies a painful past and years spent in intentional human disconnect.
And how we disconnect from other people bleeds into this narrative, permeates like an unspoken wound that won't scar and heal without proper treatment. Our central characters are haunted by ghosts in the narrative, unable to process what they've lost or reach out to others, for fear of surrendering to the totality of pain from that absence. But there's also disconnect from retreating to what others want, never showing ourselves and only what's acceptable to our social peers, our patrons, or our families, and it costs us piece-by-piece until there's slowly nothing left of us.
And it ends up on an unexpected climax and such a gentle note about masculinity, about how men suffer in trying to bear their griefs stoically, instead of permitting a chink of vulnerability. I dare not spoil more, you have to see it for yourself in how it succeeds in defining its own terms for masculinity and how much emotion cracks through the narrative. It's a film that divulges into the nature of art and food, and how they can bring forth an invitation of connection to others, and it deserves so much consideration and attention, given how much of a powerhouse it is.
Oh, this sleeper hit of heartache. I knew, going in, that the ending scene would cut to the emotional bone, having checked it out in a clip before, but the knife this slid between my ribs was unexpected in its depth and sharpness, especially given when I watched it. This was after I watched both Pig and The Green Knight, both stellar, emotional films, and while I think Lowery's later work there is better put-together in both pacing and visuals (A Ghost Story absolutely has scenes that drag, and I genuinely think one in particular suffered from overstaying its moment and not fitting Lowery's strengths as a visual/atmospheric director), this touched me so much more in its statement of grief and time.
I've watched enough films to get a decent grasp on my tastes, and its meandering, contemplative, more mundane fares that let scenes breathe in their silence without a quippy aside. This one suffused me in its haunting, contemplative atmosphere from the halfway point, lingering onwards and well after it ended. Lowery's direction is grounded in its intimacy, choosing to focus long stretches on mundanities other directors would've skipped past, as if to say these small moments, daily and common as they are, are what's most important in the grand scope of life and what we focus on, despite the vastness on time upon us all.
And the time spent during grief is where the film guts me in its first half. Going from cozier domesticity, full of lived-in marital discussions and intimacies, to the tangle of strangers sorting through the post-death ceremonies and the silences in the griever's life, booming from the absence of their beloved. Those long, uninterrupted shots, from then on, serve to point out how life persists after our bereavements. There is such attention and empathy to the camera, in how the director wants to show how people cope with grief, how it dogs our every movement, weighs down our limbs, loosens out the tears inside, and make us focus our energies on such simple things like eating food in the dark, to fill the hole our losses leave behind.
But if some trace of us survive as ghosts, upon death, then loss cuts both ways, and it's here that this film truly unmakes me in how it handles grief and remembrance on the ethereal side. Using ghosts as a speculative vehicle, it invites us to see how differently they experience the passage of time, as these beings are temporally untethered, but stay geographically tethered to a particular land. There's such a bitter loneliness to their existences, how being unravaged by time means they are unable to grieve being left alone themselves, they cannot move on by the temporal march by itself.
It's a beautiful, tender film, where centuries can pass by in the blink of a transition, but tiny affections take up whole minutes. A quiet narrative where snapshots of marriage and the tolls of grief take up uninterrupted stretches, letting them sit inside us and linger. A poignant story that ponders, sincerely, if something, anything survives of us after we are gone from this earth, or if we are doomed to have our impact on this mortal plane swept aside and forgotten after we pass away and time moves on from us.
I have a confession: this is my first and, so far, only Ridley Scott joint for various reasons. I don't love R-rated films, I easily get squeamish over live-action gore, and his biggest film and the one most people remember him by was Alien, which wasn't The Thing graphic, but definitely still above my comfort level! So I never touched him for a decade and a half. Now, later, I watched some of the earlier grisly parts of Game of Thrones and found out he directed plenty of period dramas, which was more my speed, and I got the opportunity to check his The Last Duel out with a group viewing. Now, given that preamble, imagine how I felt at its opening scene: a slow-burn of an opening with a lady being dressed before a duel between two men, shot in the same way they are being armored, as if she bears her life as well on the line, and bears witness to two knights charging at each other, before they converge, both hoping to break bones and shed blood.
That, and the subsequent Battle of Limoges, would absolutely impressed onto me that holy shit, Scott directs action in two minutes unquestionably better than some directors do in entire films. He portrays the inherent viciousness, filth, and ferocity of battle in a way that immediately clicked to me as a fan of Joe Abercrombie and a lesser one of Miles Cameron. And armor matters! But that, by itself, wouldn't have made for a favorite of mine. No, it's how this is a proper medieval legal drama with three central, compelling characters at its heart, each explored through a Rashomon-style framing device, and a heartbreakingly timeless message of what a rape victim's choices are in the patriarchy. Does it have its flaws? A few admittedly key ones of editing and dialogue that give away its directorial intent, but nothing so critical to weigh it down from its vaulted highs.
What's amazing about this film, and one of the key things I respect about it as someone who wants to write in that age, is how much, for the majority of its narrative, it is grounded in its medieval realities without turning its characters into anachronic mouthpieces. It has a showcase of warriors scarred and visually worn down by the wars they waged, discusses how the Black Death affected medieval economics and taxes, deals with betrothals and the dowries involved, and how waning wartime fortunes in a lord can sour the pot there, and the turmoil of marriage life, especially how reproductive knowledge intersected with beliefs about rape and love at the time. It admirably enmeshes itself so utterly in the culture of that age, that it's depressing to consider just how much patriarchal culture hasn't changed since then.
And how it divulges into patriarchal culture with nuance, and how women become victimized by it, is so key to making the proceeding duel all the more impactful. Because, as the framing device shows, these men don't come from a vacuum of their medieval culture, their egos and entitlements and self-justifications were shaped by their sexual circumstances and chivalric tales, and there are countless others like them who've done just as bad, if not worse, to others. It's why, even before the duel's outcome is set in stone, the crushing truth of the matter is... no matter the result, at least one individual dies, but the patriarchal apparatus stands, grinding up women in the future as it did the one witnessing the duel.
It's unflinching in its depiction of medieval culture, it's brutal in its violence, both warfare and sexual, and it demands an expectation of ambiguity in the character psychologies and gives no easy answers on how to deal with the patriarchy, especially when, as a lady of the time, you were dependent on the men who uphold it, at the mercy of their actions for your justice. It's why the last third is so harrowing: before the duel, before the trial, even before the incident, countless women went through similar horrors without the spectacle of public scrutiny. The final emotional context leaches the initial excitement when we return to the opening, leaving behind only cold understanding and terrible tension, no matter how much thrilling combat clashes and clangs in the winter air. It's my favorite period drama so far, and I don't expect it to be beat anytime soon.
Another confession: I didn't watch this, front to back, until the 30th Anniversary screening at my local Cineplex theater last year. Not that I didn't love what I saw in clips and pictures, but when the full film was on Youtube when I was in my teens, I neglected to watch it all the way, then it got taken down for a long while. There were other animated films and I didn't relish checking it out in separated clips. So, I knew a bit of what to expect, but boy, this whole film on the big screen was a greater feast for the eyes than any recent Pixar film I checked out. Does it have its problems? Yes, it's definitely narratively uneven, even rushed at times. I do wish some characters got more fleshed out and more time was given to the runtime, as a result. And I can 100% get the criticism of that climax resolution being a deus ex machina, even if I don't agree with it.
But, also, it's fucking The Secret of Nimh. Every frame here feels like it was downloaded from my mind, every sketchy bit of animated linework like it was distilled from my meaty head pulp. Its gothic and dark sci-fi aesthetics are unimpeachable to me, no other animated film comes close to approaching how much I viscerally crave their visual trappings. Say what you will about Bluth, and I certainly have my opinions about his stinkers, but even in them, the man and his team can draw up gorgeous, magical backgrounds and artistry. They're fascinating, lovingly animated and/or goddamn horny messes, bless them. You get a consistent grainy sort of texture in the linework, in the animation models themselves, that I can't help, but always adore with my eyes, hitting a sweet spot with me in this particular feature animation of his.
Even through the more childish trappings like Jeremy and the simplicity of the quest structure, how it balances those with its more heady themes always intrigues me further as an adult, like how we'll uplift our lesser animals before disregarding them, leaving them with the alienation and consequences of those experiments, and how the arrogance and selfishness of humanity manifests in our creations as a result. There's also bits of understated worldbuilding one catches better as an adult, like the fact that the non-Nimh associated female animals have no first names and are surname-defined by species (Auntie Shrew) or by male partner (Mrs. Brisby), suggesting a patriarchal ecological system. And, even before all that, the poignancy of a mother's quest to suck in her fears to protect and save her child from death only enriches with age.
None of this would hit as well, if not for the characters, even the supporting cast being animated to give them such fluid energy and expressive body language in the best of Bluth fashion. Most are dimensional enough in script to make the overall cast a cut above the typical animated fare, even the one-offs or the minor ones that appear in one scene or two. But the crown that completes the jewel of this production is the lead herself, Mrs. Brisby. She's easily one of the best, if not straight-up so, animated protagonists ever. Female leads weren't unknown back then, but mother leads? Almost unheard of, back then. And a huge part of that best status, what cements her place as such is that she's vulnerable throughout the movie. She's just a small mouse in a world full of giants and monsters, and she never fails to be scared at the vastness of the obstacles in her path. Yet, she doesn't whine, nor cower when the chips are down. By all accounts, her storied husband should've been the hero here, carrying out this mission to help cure his child... but he's gone, and Mrs. Brisby has to rise up to the occasion, stir up her courage to go on this sprawling quest, face down horrors and ancients again and again, all for her child. No one expected this of her, and she's always fearful every step of the way, but her conduct always reminds me of the GRRM quote, that being afraid "is the only time a man can be brave," which Mrs. Brisby demonstrates so much, with such earnest vulnerability.
The Secret of Nimh is a lot of things. It's a story about the vastness of the world as a little person in it through the perspective of a mouse, with horrors and monsters beyond your comprehension and understanding. It's a cautionary tale about human hubris towards nature and how our creations risk being condemned by the same flaws we ourselves succumb to. It's a three-way struggle between nature, science, and the unknown beyond our knowing grasp. It's a beautiful series of nature and grotesque sci-fi backgrounds and animation work, through some of the most expressive body language, facial emotions, and voice acting with talking animals, worthy of being Disney's creative challenge at the time, and especially now. It's a dreamy fairy tale narrative, where the hero must undertake a quest for a reward at the end, except this protagonist dwells in the shadow of the hero that should've been. Deep down, at its very beating heart, it's a mother journeying to the ends of her earth to protect and save her child, with fierce fear and clear courage. It's my favorite animated film.
