Spencer TuckermanEach year I set out to watch dozens of new releases, not just because I love going to the movies but because it feels important. I like to make my silly year-end rankings and I like to know what’s happening in the world of movies, of course. But it does start to become a drag. I actually kind of dread the end and beginning of each year because it usually turns into a lot of obligated watching. “What new stuff do I need to see before the year is up?” and “What Oscar nominees do I need to catch up on before the ceremony?”
Movies are the best storytelling form humans have ever invented. Songs are short and books take even longer to get through than most TV shows. Yet movies will trade you two hours for a trip through someone else’s mind. And then it’s over. Watching new stuff is fun but chasing that high through movie history is better.
If left to my own devices my watching habits would probably look a lot more like what you see below: Random tangents through directors’ filmographies, sudden and all-consuming fascination with Hong Kong cinema, return visits to forgotten childhood favorites, or a week where I build a shrine to Denzel Washington.
Some of the stuff on this list is kind of stupid at surface level and some of it almost seemed to change my brain chemistry. And yet both feel equally valid and important, which I guess is the power of the medium. A boy in Idaho feeds his llama. A priest in upstate New York yells at God. There’s a cow on the roof of the cotton house. There’s body parts in the fridge. It’s all there waiting for you.
You can spend your whole year (or whole life) watching this stuff and still not reach the bottom. You can think you’ve seen all the ways it can be done and then stumble across something that feels completely original. Or you can watch something you’ve seen five times and catch it at a different angle, unlocking a brand new appreciation.
I watched nearly 300 movies this year. Here are 23 of the ones (released before 2022) that I loved the most.
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Close-Up (1990)
dir. Abbas Kiarostami Watched July 20
"I feel the urge to shout to the world the anguish of my soul, the torments I’ve experienced, all my sorrows—but no one wants to hear about them."
An absolute killshot. I've never seen anything like this and didn't even know something like this were possible. It's deeply affecting and almost surreally gorgeous, especially that final passage. But it's also almost hilarious watching it fall into place—real-life quotes and pans nearly too perfect to believe.
It’s something to treasure because it’s both wholly gripping and reads as a towering achievement. I want it on my couch and in a museum.
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The Conversation (1974)
dir. Francis Ford Coppola Watched May 16
In college I took a Sound For Picture class. The Conversation was—of course—required viewing. Despite this being a class I both enjoyed and chose to take it became my immediate mission to avoid watching the movie because it was homework. I think this says everything about who I was as a student.
This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. Rear Window meets The Shining meets Blow Out meets Punch-Drunk Love. Not only does it fit the narrow distinction of being both perfectly made and immediately enjoyable, it's also chock full of flourishes that suit my personal taste. This should absolutely be talked about in the same breath as the all-time American greats like Citizen Kane, Vertigo, or The Godfather. I wish I'd have watched it when I was told to.
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
dir. Coen Brothers Rewatched August 5
“It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”
No idea how many times I’ve seen this over the course of my life. Picking a singular favorite is an impossible task for anybody, but every time I watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? I think this might be it.
Even after all these years there are little throwaway bits of dialogue and line readings I'm discovering. Considering this has a cohesive narrative and isn't just a plotless joke fest, it's amazing how the vast majority of the script is just relentlessly funny. Almost every line is a laugh. One of the funniest movies of the 21st century. (And with a soundtrack that won Album of the Year at the Grammys. Insane.)
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
dir. John Sturges Watched May 22
A perfect little movie about the kind of cancer that can take hold in a community when injustice has been established as the status quo.
The further you go back into film history the harder it is to find films that have stood the test of time and fit comfortably into our current social rubric. (To be clear, this shouldn’t be a criteria in the first place, but that’s a separate conversation.) Yet here’s a movie that’s approaching 70 years old that remains as relevant and biting as ever.
“Work your way up, save your money, and forget film school,” Paul Thomas Anderson once said. “Go watch Bad Day at Black Rock and listen to John Sturges’ commentary and you’ll learn more about filmmaking than 4 years of going to school.”
The Truman Show (1998)
dir. Peter Weir Rewatched August 9
It had been years since I'd seen this. Anyone who watches The Truman Show enjoys it, but I didn’t remember loving it this much. Without a doubt one of my favorite movies of the '90s.
The consensus take on this has always been, "Incredible concept, good-not-great execution." I think this is a little off base, simply because how the hell would you rather execute this? In 2022 this would either be a streaming series (yawn) or simply way longer and more muddled (see: Downsizing, yuck).
But here Peter Weir (by the way, an incredible director we should trust with this) dares to fit a world into 100 minutes. It slams on the gas pedal out of the gate and along the way travels efficiently enough to move through spaces that are terrifying, hilarious, depressing, and hopeful. It's well-written, it's brilliantly acted, and it's filled with some stunning images. Truman climbing that staircase is immaculate. Still frames that so effectively stick in your mind are rare.
Films of this kind too often try to tell us where to dig or too thoroughly convince us they've mined the hills for us. (Again, see Downsizing and its laundry list of half-baked ideas.) But The Truman Show thrills by giving viewers the space to wander long after the grand slam finale. I watch this and think about what it has to say about privacy, or social media, or parenthood, or nature vs. nurture.
Completely stunning, even nearly 25 years later.
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Ex Machina (2014)
dir. Alex Garland Rewatched May 20
After being disappointed by Men, I had to return here, almost out of fear I’d overrated Alex Garland in the first place. To my relief, this is still great. Even better than I’d remembered.
There’s something deeply Kubrickian here, even beyond the obvious AI-inducted panic and freewheeling science fiction of 2001. There’s the isolation of the Overlook Hotel and the spiraling masculinity of Jack Torrance. There’s Eyes Wide Shut’s eroticism as terror. If you squint, there’s even Dr. Strangelove’s impending doom and Alex DeLarge’s raw perversion of humanity.
It gets right that tech billionaires are inherently immoral weirdos willing to chuck us all into the incinerators feeding their own god complexes.
One of the 21st century’s best sci-fi films. It boasts pitch-perfect cinematography, score, production design, and an all-time great Oscar Isaac performance. Alicia Vikander's work here is unique in that it, at times, tricks you into forgetting Ava is being portrayed by an actual human and not a wholly generated bit of CGI.
Man on Fire (2004)
dir. Tony Scott Rewatched December 13
"A bullet always tells the truth."
This is Tony Scott's masterpiece; I don't care. Some will want the pedigree of True Romance. Others will want the nostalgia hit of Top Gun. And many (myself included) could build a case for any of the other collaborations with Denzel. Yet this has to be his defining film simply because it's the most him.
A sweaty, bloody Greek tragedy about sacrifice, justice, and atonement. As I noted the first time I saw this, Creasy is a killer who's found something worth dying for, but––very crucially––his sacrifice only comes after he's forgiven himself, learned his life holds value, and passed the bullet's judgement. This is not the story of a man whose life is dirty enough as to be disposable, but a man who's fought to salvage it, and then traded it in for another's. Biblical parable stuff.
And past all the trenchant, life-and-death stakes is Scott (and screenwriter Brian Helgeland) absolutely pulling up from the logo. Denzel, after spending the whole first half of the movie having his defenses melted by a 10-year-old girl, starts chopping off fingers, blowing up nightclubs, and literally sticking C4 inside a guy. A lot of movies slot into this lane (Sicario is a fairly obvious one), but none of them are really able to match this one's dueling cosmic beauty and muscular acrobatics.
Not all of it has stylistically aged the best (the entire treatment of subtitles here is tacky), but it's also unabashedly its director's film. I get sad every time I watch one of Scott's movies and know we'll never get another.
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989)
dir. Masami Hata & William T. Hurtz Rewatched November 12
If there's anything that frustrates me about the state of animation in 2022, it's that films largely fall into one of two categories: Completely artless or breathlessly heavy. Certainly there are spaces for each of these. Mindless cartoons have value just like explorations into heavy emotions do.
But with those two ends of the spectrum dominating the genre, vanishingly little room is left for the kinds of films that don't really exist for any other reason than to tickle the imagination. Some of these are being made (I fell in love with Luca last year), but I think there's a vacuum of simply weird, adventurous, magical movies like Little Nemo.
Lord knows how many times I watched this as a kid. I wasn't raised on Ghibli, so this was my only gateway into Japanese animation. It's held residence in my brain for more than 25 years.
I remember it so fondly despite the fact that it used to give me nightmares. There's something unsettling about the way it operates: Its surreal dream logic, the pastel colors, the complete willingness to get dark. A lot of this is intentional, obviously. It's a movie about dreams. But having read a little about the development hell this lingered in, and the number of hands that touched it, it's funny to consider that a lot of the off-kilter vibes are a side-effect of the film getting tossed around and becoming a Frankenstein of competing visions, accidentally serving the movie's theme.
There's a thin line between imagination and terror. Little Nemo is permeating that barrier, and I've always loved it for that.
Possession (1981)
dir. Andrzej Żuławski Watched October 25
One of the most visually arresting movies I've ever seen. It starts off feeling a bit like a modern horror before completely leaping the tracks. There's an uncanniness here that reminds me of Lynch, but there's also Cronenberg's sweaty perversion of the human form and, before long, Friedkin's killing in the streets. I'm not even totally sure what I've just seen (and I remained skeptical for a lot of the runtime) but at a certain point my lizard brain took over and I found myself completely hypnotized by Possession's rhythms.
There’s a scene near the end that takes place in a stairwell that I think is permanently seared into my brain. Annual October viewing going forward.
Breakdown (1997)
dir. Jonathan Mostow Watched September 6
Having a tough time thinking of too many ways they could've told this story any better. It's such a tried-and-true Hitchcockian kind of thriller that I actually had to look and see if it was adapted from an old movie or short story. (It doesn't seem so.) Kurt Russell is perfect here.
As an added bonus, this was shot in 1997 in the American west so it's drop-dead gorgeous and looks better than basically anything released in 2022.
Paper Moon (1973)
dir. Peter Bogdanovich Watched August 23
Immensely sweet, and nearly a full opposite of Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. That film, while similarly wearing its heart on its sleeve, believes earnestly in America as a bill of false goods. Paper Moon is set during The Depression, and while it might not all be sunshine and rainbows (it correctly paints America as a land of con men and rubes) it remains steadfast in its optimism.
I feel like I often hear people say "Wow, the child performances were great" and I always think "No, they were not." Kids are never good actors, and Tatum O'Neal is the exception that proves the rule. So funny. So charming. So endearing. If she's even mediocre this movie comes apart like wet tissue paper.
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Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
dir. Jared Hess
Rewatched July 16
"How was school?" "The worst day of my life, what do you think?"
I can more or less chart every movie that has, at one time, been called my favorite. Somehow I forgot this slots in there when I was 13 years old. This might be something unique to people who are exactly my age, but this is among the biggest cinematic moments of my youth, alongside much more obvious touchstones like Superbad and The Dark Knight. This hit my middle school like wildfire. If it weren't weird enough that "the movie you have to see" among a bunch of 7th graders was a micro-budget Fox Searchlight film, this was also the school year following its release, so it wasn't even truly new at the time. Did we all go out and buy DVDs? What was going on?
I don't think I've seen this in a decade, and maybe closer to 15 years, but it's startling how well it's held up. Sure a lot of that is nostalgia, but I don't think you can discount that despite my long absence from it I still could've quoted nearly the entire thing or explained the personalities and motivations of each character.
It's a movie about small-town America. It's a movie about the horrors of high school. It's a movie about clinging to the past. It's a movie about friendship and young love. It's also just a triumphantly silly movie packed wall-to-wall with quotes. There are lines in here I'd forgotten I've just adopted into my vocabulary without realizing it. And it's not something I registered at 13 years old, but it's also tremendously sweet. That final scene is great.
First Reformed (2017)
dir. Paul Schrader Rewatched July 14
"Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously: Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself."
One of those movies I feel like I'd need a few hours of isolation and reflection to truly get at in words. I'm glad not all movies are like this, but I sure love the ones that are. (Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Scorsese’s Silence come to mind.)
How do you look at the world, much less the future, and reconcile that with God's presence? We do it in the abstract, but actually confronting this in a tangible way is different story. First Reformed is maybe not theological (and in fact Schrader's intent is likely to prod us with the opposite), but I do think there's something inherently true about earnest, honest love as a salve for despair. Here Schrader drives to the cusp of doom before revealing a trap door (and it's something that I think is, crucially, both carnal and spiritual).
And on top of any titanic statements about existence, the apocalypse, and human frailty, it's also just got all these little flourishes and motifs I adore.
Surely one of the most accomplished movies of the last 10 years.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
dir. J.J. Abrams Rewatched June 1
This doesn't get enough credit. No, J.J. Abrams isn't the image maker Christopher McQuarrie is, and as a result this lacks the ballet of stunt work and filmmaking of the recent (stellar) entries. But there's a strong domesticity here that builds an emotional groundwork the recent Mission: Impossible films are probably lacking. There's something novel about the dinner party scene (Cruise having to bore guests with Department of Transportation anecdotes is incredible), and Ethan explaining to his wife that loading a clip into a handgun is like "replacing the batteries in the flashlight in the kitchen" is such a genius little detail that humanizes the character in a way nothing Cruise has appeared in recently bothers with.
So instead of IMAX glitz and glam (which, again, I adore) Abrams has crafted a kind of junk action movie that's still thrilling while also being much more successfully character-driven than McQuarrie's. Between Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performances, his truly creepy goons, and Hunt's general vulnerability, this is also a surprisingly frightening movie. This whole franchise is tense, but this truly feels like its most dangerous chapter, which is an achievement.
I saw this in theaters when I was 13. This is likely the first theater trip I ever made without an adult, and likely the first truly "adult" movie I ever saw in a theater. I remember my biggest takeaway was Hoffman's ability to portray menace. I've been a fan of his ever since. I miss him so much.
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Light Sleeper (1992)
dir. Paul Schrader Watched May 10
Brilliant melancholia. In between the neon lights and a high-class fortune tellers are dead bodies and ever-growing piles of garbage. This is all truly bleak. LeTour spends his nights filling up diaries he discards, pining for his ex-wife, regretting the past, and fearing the future, all while slinging coke to upper-class clientele—a depressing backdrop in its own right. Yet the way it's depicted (and certainly the way it eventually turns) almost succeeds in making this a place I wanted to spend more time in.
At one point during this I began to wonder what an updated version of this would be like, starring someone like Ryan Gosling. Certainly he's portrayed these kinds of soft-spoken, tormented men. But by the end it's impossible to consider anyone but Dafoe and Sarandon at the center. Simply sublime performances.
School of Rock (2003)
dir. Richard Linklater Watched March 30
One of my favorite movies when it came out. Jack Black was hilarious, all the kids fit into recognizable stereotypes, and they got transformed into a cool rock band! I was 11 then. I probably haven't seen this in more than a decade and it hits so much different when I'm 30 and can see my elementary school years with more clarity and now have much more in common with Jack Black's character than I do any of the kids who were my age when this was released.
I'm a big fan of movies cut from this cloth. I'll always go to bat for these cheap and charming early-to-mid-2000s comedies: Orange County, Accepted, Fever Pitch. Some of them are made by some of the same folks that made School of Rock. Some of them are my favorite movies to rewatch.
But none of them are directed by Richard Linklater. And none of them center around a performance as strong as Black's here. It lends this an uncommon level of quality. This movie is very good and has aged liked fine wine.
Childhood and adulthood can each be a pain in the ass for a lot of the same reasons. They're scary, alienating, and tend to stifle expression. Not only is School of Rock a hilarious love letter to rock 'n' roll, but it's a movie about finding a home, finding a voice, finding a passion, and pushing back when The Man tries to take it away. That's something that transcends age.
The Hand of God (2021)
dir. Paolo Sorrentino Watched February 8
Life has funny timing. It's striking how so many of the best and worst chapters of my life directly overlapped. This duality feels cruel but I also think it's the purest essence of existence. I can honestly say it's in these crazy wrestling matches between joy and pain that I've felt the most alive. It's hard to feel that way in the moment, but with even a tiny bit of hindsight it's obvious. This movie proves Sorrentino feels the same way.
And it's my kind of movie: A story of life cast in a way that feels bizarre enough that it could only be autobiographical. One that rings so true that you can't help but believe every drop of the surreal. The Hand of God is beautiful, and not just visually. It does what the best movies do by managing to capture something intangible and play it back.
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Chungking Express (1994)
dir. Wong Kar-wai Rewatched January 30
Buried in this hallucinatory story is a lot that's just dizzyingly complicated. Even on a second watch there are rhymes I'm noticing for the first time that just kind of float harmlessly past without drawing attention.
This movie came out when I was two years old, in a country I've never visited, in a language I do not speak. And yet something about it feels intensely nostalgic. In a weird way it's as if specificity itself is universal, even if what is being specified is foreign. It's a movie littered with intensely precise details: Expired pineapple, chef salad, toy planes, stolen apartment keys, and "California Dreamin'." I've never been here, but I feel like I have.
This romantic dreamlike state is, of course, intentional. This is a movie about impermanence, about missed connections, about the change lost in the sofa—little moments that we bury deep that seem insignificant, and maybe are insignificant, but that stay with us nonetheless.
Chungking Express is someone else's daydream and it's incredibly inviting.
Thelma & Louise (1991)
dir. Ridley Scott Watched January 28
"I always wanted to travel. I just never got the opportunity."
It gets dark quick, but the magic is how much it's able to circle back around, salvaging a wonderful kind of freewheeling road movie propped up by an incredible cast of male characters that help keep the tone light in the face of danger. The way this is built has a weird way of making it feel nostalgic despite this being my (long-overdue) first viewing. The colors! The music! The scenery! The shenanigans!
Ridley Scott is an absolute madman.
Blood Simple (1984)
dir. Coen Brothers Watched January 24
Might be my favorite debut feature ever? Simply astounding how much they crush right out of the gate. It's all there: The honed aesthetics, the blood-curdling suspense, even the dark comedic tone. Not many directors come bounding out with something this fully formed.
The vibe may be easy—we've seen lots of directors emerge with great taste—but past the grimy neon and buzzing bug zapper is something awe-inspiring. It's a movie littered with Chekhov's guns and trap doors, pay-offs and misdirections ramped to such and degree with such an expert grasp of perspective that occasionally I couldn't help but laugh at the mere spectacle of it.
It's also the most intense Coen Brothers affair I've seen. One might have watched this and figured they'd have a future in horror if not for that all-encompassing grasp that clearly yearned for something larger.
The Last Picture Show (1971)
dir. Peter Bogdanovich Watched January 7
"Nothing’s ever the way it’s supposed to be at all."
Man, this is brutal. A deconstruction of the myth of memory. It's easy to see why, deep into the Vietnam War, there would be such an appetite to tee up small-town white-American nostalgia and blow it to smithereens for two hours. We were never innocent and things were never idyllic, even in our golden age. What is America if not a bunch of disaffected people running roughshod over each other while the only pure thing we have gets run over by a cattle truck, over and over for centuries?
So many great movies manage to be about movies themselves. One reading of this could be about the death of cinema, which of course was going through another death by the time 1971 arrived. It's died a dozen deaths since. The real miracle of The Last Picture Show is that it's a movie commenting on its past that proves its thesis by also having the ability to comment on its future. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
(Also an interesting fact is that Cybill Shepherd was the most attractive human being on the planet in 1971.)
The Empty Man (2020)
dir. David Prior Watched October 2
Among the more audacious movies I've seen in years. It's stunning how much this film is committed to being. It spans from ghost story slasher, to stoner-brained anarchical conspiracy, to supernatural terror, and balances it all in surprising fashion with the help of its bountiful runtime. A lot of this is genuinely terrifying, and yet more of it (like its marvelous opening vignette) is almost distracting in its self-assuredness. This has been on my radar for about 18 months, so it's hardly a shock to my system, and yet I still found myself wondering, "How does this exist?"
For most of my life I told myself I wasn't a horror fan. As much as this was objectively true, I was finding exceptions to the rule consistently enough that at some point I had to question the thesis. I do like horror, I'm just picky about it and have thus far done a poor job seeking out the good stuff. This is it. I'm less nihilistic about the future of cinema than most, yet there's something refreshing about what's happening in the horror genre recently, with everything from blockbusters from mainstream auteurs (Nope) to surprise indie hits (Barbarian) gaining traction with original screenplays and confident scale and ambition.
Good movies are everywhere, if you look. But stuff like this makes me more excited than most.
A Perfect Getaway (2009)
dir. David Twohy Watched May 22
Occasionally a little dumb, but that's part of what you sign up for with B-movies, and this is a tremendous one. It's almost a bit of a shame I didn't catch it on TNT at 1 p.m. on a Saturday in July (though I'm ultimately glad I didn't, as commercial breaks would betray the tremendous pacing on display here).
It's not that there isn't anything smart going on between the lines, because there is. But it's the lack of both pretension and commercial aspirations that make this so endearing. In an era where it seems like every filmmaker of note is either gunning for billion-dollar Marvel paychecks or Palme d'Or glory, it's easy to forget that it's possible to make nifty-as-hell movies that never so much as dream of either.
A Perfect Getaway manages to reaffirm my appreciation for the simple craft of filmmaking by doing it without ever flexing muscles or drawing attention to its sturdy framework.