2024 Updates

For those who still read this blog, I thought I'd provide a few life updates after a series of year-end Top 10 lists (and, sadly, tributes to two instrumental figures in my life who have passed in recent years, Lucille Kyser and Lynn Pugh Remadna). 

The most important development in my life is my relationship with Claire Townley, an absolutely brilliant, kind, beautiful and deeply caring architect here in Austin. After nearly two years of dating, we are now engaged to be married, and I simply couldn't be more elated. Prior to meeting Claire, I had sort of counted myself out in terms of romantic relationships. But, without being too sentimental about it, everything changed when she came into my life.

On the filmmaking front, my recent creative energy has been focused on pre-production for what I hope to be my first feature film, Rusty Lightnin' - a micro-budget, Austin-based feature that, like most of my work, is deeply personal to me, though it's not as semi-autobiographical as my past work. In fact, it leans into the crime genre, something with which I have no personal experience (aside from my lifelong infatuation with crime films). 

In September, I was absolutely thrilled that Rusty Lightnin' was selected as a recipient of the Austin Film Society Grant for Feature Films. I cannot thank the Austin Film Society enough for this honor - their support is truly helping our team push forward to make this movie - and, if I can be frank, helps legitimize the film in the eyes of the Austin film community. I've been pushing to get this thing made for a while now, and it was a nice vote of confidence from the local film apparatus here in town.

You can read more about the recipients of the 2023 AFS Grant here, as well read the official press release from AFS here. And, to boot, the Austin Chronicle wrote a piece publicizing the recipients of the grant and information about each of the films and filmmakers selected.

In case you're curious, here's the quick synopsis for Rusty Lightnin':

Leonard, a struggling actor, becomes the unofficial spokesman of a local car dealership, which brings him newfound attention and fame – until local ATF agents inform him that the dealership is a front for firearms trafficking and Leonard is forced to become their informant.

With the funds received from the AFS Grant, my team and I were able to shoot a series of promos for Rusty Lightnin' in October, which serve as both material for a forthcoming crowdfunding campaign as well as a proof-of-concept showcasing the look and feel of the feature film. It was a fantastic chance to work with the department heads - including ace cinematographer Fidel Ruiz-Healy, master production designer Samantha Robinson and my longtime sound designer Bobb Barito - prior to actually shooting the full feature.

The general idea behind the promos is as follows: we begin with fake car dealership advertisements, in which the dealership's goofy cowboy mascot Rusty Lightnin' sells cars. But interspersed with these ads is more cinematic, "real world" material with the actor, Leonard, as he watches his schtick on television, grows weary of his Rusty Lightnin' persona, and ultimately decides to comply with the ATF and participate in a sting operation to take down the gun-running car dealership owner. 

Our day shoot encompassed several locations (all in Seguin, Texas), including a car dealership, a bar, a small apartment unit and a parking lot. While the dealership material is full of gags and over-the-top shenanigans, the material with Leonard is more somber - and more representative of the tone and look of the film (Fidel shot these scenes with anamorphic lenses, and I think the result looks pretty damn good). I am really excited to share these promos with the world as we launch our crowdfunding campaign and start pitching this project to the public.

I should mention that these promos come on the heels of a more lo-fi promo I shot in 2022 with the help of my friend Lucas Loredo (at the same Seguin car dealership). You can watch that video here. It's not as polished as the forthcoming promos, but it's a good introduction to the character of Rusty Lightnin'.

In December, I was honored to be the subject of a cover story in a local magazine, Neighbors of Tarrytown/ Northwest Hills. One of my late father's dear friends, Bobby Hawthorne, writes for this publication, and he penned a really moving piece that covers my journey back to Austin during the pandemic, the pre-production on Rusty Lightnin', the influence of my parents on my creative work, and my relationship with Claire. Bobby even includes some moving details about his friendship with my father (they were roommates in college), adding an extra dimension to this piece that makes it feel a little less like shameless self-promotion. Anyway, as a summation of where I've been the last few years and my journey from New York back to Austin, it does a much better job of telling my story than any blog post could.

As you can see, the front cover caption is "Jack's Back" - which is a little humorous as it implies that 1. Readers know who the hell I am and 2. I was ever "gone." But I am immensely grateful to Bobby for writing this piece, which you can see pictures of above and below (and can read in full on Bobby's blog). 

On a sadder note, I was heartbroken to hear of the passing of Nancy Buirski, a gifted filmmaker and friend, back in September. Nancy gave me my first job out of college, and I ended up working for her for over three years as an assistant editor, associate producer, researcher and bookkeeper. I learned so much from her strong work ethic, attention to detail and enormous drive to get important stories on the screen, which resulted in the many great documentaries of her career (among them The Loving Story, Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq, By Sidney Lumet and The Rape of Recy Taylor - all of which I was very proud to have had a hand in). 

Nancy was always so kind to take time to watch and give notes on my personal work, as well. I’ll never forget watching my thesis film with her, and she said something to the effect of, “Jack, you are a filmmaker.” That meant a great deal coming from someone as talented and brilliant as Nancy. My heart goes out to her family and friends.

Moving on - way back in 2015, I played the lead in my friend Alex Fofonoff's feature film Blood and Thunder. Perhaps I'm a little biased, but I thought Alex made a really terrific and wild revenge movie (one which provided endless material for my acting reel) - but, alas, it didn't make much of a dent in the film festival circuit, and thus has gone largely unseen in the time since. I was overjoyed, however, when last year Alex decided to reshape Blood and Thunder into a short film, whittling down the story to its essence. The short was renamed It Happened One Night at Melody Lanes, and last June it premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest. It really made me happy that a piece of work that Alex and I poured our souls into resurfaced in a new form. 

Last year, I had another exciting project that allowed me to exercise my directing muscles. I've written at length on this blog about my experience in Austin High School's theatre department, particularly the influence of my former theatre directors Billy and Annie Dragoo. Last spring, I was thrilled to return to AHS to guest-direct a production of 12 Angry Jurors (the gender-neutral version of 12 Angry Men) by Reginald Rose. Rehearsals took place in Billy's Advanced Theatre class, which allowed me to work with the students in the morning and still be home in time for my shift for The Daily Show.

Because it was a class of 26 students, I double-cast the show, dubbing one the TRUTH cast and the other the JUSTICE cast. The show opened on Thursday, May 11th and closed on Sunday, May 14th. Both casts got two performances, followed by a fifth performance for Austin High English classes consisting of performers from both casts. It was a blast to have the opportunity to work with such talented students - and be in the presence of Billy and Annie once again, who are continuing the excellent work they've been doing for over 30 years. As was the case fifteen years ago when I was a student, Billy built a magnificent set, and the students brought their A game to each performance. You can see a wonderful poster by student Alicia Hamm to the right.

A few good friends have gotten married in the last year. Emily Mente, a fellow Red Dragon Player from Austin High School, married a great guy named Eric Batiste last March. In June, Claire's sister Mary married Kurt Sierra in Omaha. And in September, my fellow NYU film school compatriot (and former roommate) Adam Boese got married to Nicole Giannini in New York (the wedding was held at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, which was quite spectacular).

That's all for now - but before I go, enjoy a few preview stills from the forthcoming Rusty Lightnin' promos. The crowdfunding campaign will be live in the next month!

My Favorite Films of 2023

The best year for movies since before the pandemic! In many ways, 2023 reminded me of 2019, in that my list was topped by two absolute masterpieces headed directly to my all-time Top 100 and almost-certain contenders for best of the decade.

If there was an interesting reoccurring theme in my favorite films this year, it was marriage. At least six of the below films deal directly with complicated marriages.

1. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)

I will never hide my unabashed love and respect for Martin Scorsese and his films, and Killers of the Flower Moon is yet another stunning achievement in the career of the world’s greatest filmmaker. Scorsese applies the meditative and reflective stylistic qualities of Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019) to the largest possible canvas, in what amounts to his first western. Appropriately for a western, Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie concerned with animals, either symbolically or literally - wolves, coyotes, buzzards, and, most hauntingly, owls. The two owl scenes in this movie send chills all the way up your spine.

As a portrait of the darkest depths of the human soul, this movie is unparalleled. Adapted from David Grann’s bestselling non-fiction book, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the oil-rich Osage people of Oklahoma in the 1920s, the wealthiest people per capita in the world… until cattle rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro) instigates a plan to murder the Osage, largely through intermarriage between white settlers and native women. With the husbands fatally poisoning their Osage wives, the “headrights” to the oil profits are passed on to the husbands, and slowly but surely, the wealth “flows in the right direction,” as Hale euphemistically puts it.

The relationship between Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage Nation, is the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon. By largely concentrating this epic film on the marital drama between Ernest and Mollie, Scorsese gives us a microcosm through which we can understand the larger betrayal of the Osage people by those they loved - and who, perversely, seemed to loved them. Particularly interesting to me are the ways in which Ernest is able to reconcile his horrible misdeeds. When Hale reveals to Ernest that Mollie had a first husband (despite Mollie having never directly admitted this to Ernest), he encourages his nephew to let her have her secrets - so Ernest can have his. After Mollie's first husband is murdered, Ernest asks Mollie how well she knew the man. When she doesn't mention anything about the marriage, you can see Ernest's inner moral compass rest easy - he can have his secrets, she can have hers (never mind that his secrets involve murdering her family). Scorsese is so talented at showing us the twisted logic by which morally compromised people are able to live with themselves (there's a great deal of this in The Wolf of Wall Street, too).

One of the things I love most about what Scorsese has given us here is that we’re not always certain who knows what when, and this ambiguity places us in the mindset of Ernest. He certainly knows what’s going on, but because it’s not always laid out plainly to him (or he’s not privy to the full extent of the plan), he’s able to convince himself that everything’s fine. If Scorsese had his characters show all of their cards from the beginning, the audience wouldn’t really understand how Ernest is able to dupe himself, and his self-deception is critical to understanding our own complicity (again, not unlike The Wolf of Wall Street).

De Niro is terrifying in a performance that embodies the banality of evil. His ability to manufacture grief in the aftermath of tragedies he’s orchestrated is chilling. More than once while watching his William Hale, I thought of De Niro’s Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas (1990). The way Hale manipulates Ernest into protecting him in the third act brought to mind the famous line: “Your murderers come with smiles. They come as your friends, the people who've cared for you all of your life.”

Let me continue heaping praise on De Niro's work here (he is my favorite actor, after all). When Mollie reveals she's having another baby, it elicits one of Hale’s scariest reactions in the entire film. First, he looks at Ernest, who immediately gets unsettled by his uncle's silence. Then, after a rather muted reaction (in which so much is communicated by De Niro's non-verbal acting), he smiles, and says, "Blessings," cupping his hands slightly. Never before has "Blessings" been loaded with so much.

The final scene between Ernest and Mollie is absolutely devastating. This is the moment the entire film has been building to - Mollie confronting her husband and asking the one question he can’t bear to answer. It reminds me of Peggy Sheeran's simple question to her father in The Irishman: "Why?" When Ernest utters his answer - which happens to be his last line in the film - is he lying to Mollie? Of course it’s a lie - but what I mean is, I think it’s a lie he comes to genuinely believe as the truth, because the alternative would be too horrifying to consider. Each time I view the film, it’s fascinating to observe the subtleties of DiCaprio’s performance. It’s tempting to think of his character as unintelligent, but I think it’s more nuanced than that.

Equally chilling is the final scene between Ernest and Hale. Never before have we seen Hale so vulnerable, so broken, while still being his conniving self. The way he tenderly tells Ernest he loves him, and then softly calls out "Don't throw it away, son" as Ernest turns his back on him is so beautifully acted. This scene could've so easily been Hale angrily lashing out at Ernest, but instead it's just pathetic.

There’s so much to cherish about this film - Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing (which gives the movie breathing room to let this story play out believably), Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, Jack Fisk’s production design (much like Gangs of New York, they appear to have built an entire town for this movie) and Jacqueline West’s costumes. I am in awe of what Scorsese and his team have achieved here. But I must pay special attention to the music, which is always a hallmark of Scorsese’s pictures. And in this case, the late, great Robbie Robertson's final score for Scorsese may be his best (which is saying something, considering his score for The Irishman is a knockout). The little guitar and harmonica riffs sprinkled in as Ernest, Hale and others scheme and plot against the Osage are absolutely terrifying (if you’re listening to the soundtrack, the track Heartbeat Theme/ Ni-U-Kon-Ska is truly something special).

In addition to Robertson’s outstanding score, Killers of the Flower Moon is populated with Scorsese’s characteristically excellent use of existing music. The song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson is the backing for the film’s most bone-chilling sequence, in which Hale deliberately burns his own ranch for insurance money, and the hellish glow envelops Ernest as he "takes care" of Mollie in their bedroom. It's a truly expressionistic scene, where the flames outside the window look almost unreal (and indeed, it's doubtful the fire could be seen from Ernest and Mollie's house in town). The way Scorsese superimposes incandescent images of Hale's men in the field contorting their bodies (Scorsese describes it as “demons dancing around the fire, like the Witches’ Sabbath”) over Ernest drunkenly injecting his wife with poison is just astounding filmmaking. Another song, Where We’ll Never Grow Old by Alfred Karnes, adds significantly to the sadness of the scene in which Ernest is escorted away by federal agents after he decides not to testify against his uncle. Mollie watches Ernest through the kitchen window, as he grins and nods at her while being put in handcuffs (Ernest has assured Mollie he has the situation under control, and he seems to actually believe it). Ernest’s false bravado, the way Mollie looks at her husband, and the deep mournfulness of the music add up to a truly gutting sequence. Lastly, near the beginning of the film, there’s a haunting effect in using Bull Doze Blues by Henry Thomas to accompany still photographs of the Osage, their unsuspecting faces frozen in time. There’s an innocence in them that’s already being exploited by the street photographers overcharging the Osage for a simple photograph. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is so many things: an incredible tribute to the Osage people, in which Scorsese, just as in Kundun (1997), immerses you in the world of another culture; a big-screen epic that is astonishing to behold (of the four times I saw the movie in cinemas, the most impactful experience was in IMAX); the tenth entry in the greatest actor-director collaboration in cinema history (exactly 50 years after the release of Scorsese and De Niro’s first, Mean Streets); a long overdue reckoning with America’s dark history of stolen land and stolen wealth. But, more than anything, it’s Martin Scorsese making the kind of film that other filmmakers can only dream of making. I am grateful to be alive to witness an artist of his caliber continuing to operate on a level unmatched by any director in film history.

One more note: there’s one small scene in particular that continues to haunt me. It’s an unnerving and surreal exchange between a hallucinating, bed-ridden Mollie and a possibly-imagined Hale, lording over her bed like the spectre of death:

Mollie (in Osage): "Are you real?"

Hale (smiles): "I could be real."

2. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)

Before seeing the film, I had heard folks compare Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer to Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), and it’s an apt comparison - both movies provide an onslaught of information, all of it fascinating, not all of it easily decipherable after a first viewing. Nolan has always been great at building momentum, and Oppenheimer is his most urgent and utterly propulsive movie yet - and also his best.

As an early birthday present, my mom and I made a pilgrimage to San Antonio to see Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm at the AMC Riverwalk, one of only two cinemas in Texas playing the film in Nolan’s preferred format. People had driven all the way from Mexico to see this presentation, and it was breathtaking. It was so heartening to see moviegoers embrace this dense, intellectually stimulating masterpiece, particularly those who made an effort to see it the way Nolan intended.

Among so many other things to praise about this film, I just have to say how happy I am that Robert Downey Jr. is back in meaty character roles. He’s outstanding in this film, and it’s my hope that one of the two Bobs (De Niro or Downey Jr.) walks home with this year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

I was really struck by how experiential and impressionistic this film gets, particularly in its “first person” scenes (to use Nolan’s description of the color sequences, which are largely from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s perspective). Oppenheimer’s speech to the Los Alamos team shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of the most visceral, uneasy and jarring moments in all of the director’s movies. Nolan’s most memorable set pieces are usually action sequences; here, the film’s standout scene plays more like psychological horror.

My favorite part of Oppenheimer is the mid-movie subsection about the Chevalier incident. Watching Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) sit down with Colonel Boris Pash (Casey Affleck) and attempt to report a potential security incident without implicating his friend is so incredibly tense (and Affleck is a legitimately unnerving presence, doing so much with limited screen time). Oppenheimer is trying to have it both ways - he wants to be a loyal American performing his patriotic duty by mentioning a treasonous approach by Chevalier while still managing to protect his friend’s identity. Murphy makes us feel the dueling instincts within Oppenheimer, and the tension in the scene comes from Oppenheimer’s rather slippery approach not going over well with hardened military men. It’s the film’s best articulation of Oppenheimer the free-thinking scientist versus Oppenheimer the loyal soldier. 

In addition to Downey Jr. and Affleck, the supporting cast of Oppenheimer is just phenomenal. Matt Damon may be the under-sung MVP of the film, Emily Blunt's third act takedown of the Atomic Energy Commission gets better with each viewing, and Gary Oldman, who probably has three minutes of screen time and only a handful of lines, makes a huge impression as Harry Truman. Every single part is so well-cast (welcome back, Josh Hartnett!), major and minor players alike. It's just a thrill to see such a talented ensemble bounce off each other for three riveting hours (which is a testament to Nolan's impeccable screenplay, which is now published in book form and truly a great read).

On a side note, in high school, I was in a production of The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer (a little-known, absolutely fascinating play by Carson Kreitzer), and it was a thrill to reacquaint myself with these familiar characters (Rabi! Groves! Tatlock!) who sparked my imagination at a young age (I played Edward Teller, who’s portrayed here by Benny Safdie).

3. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)

The Holdovers is such a warm, deeply empathetic, generous movie, full of all the elements that make Alexander Payne’s films so moving and heartfelt. Payne creates a space you want to live in, and I cherished being able to spend winter break with these misfits. It’s a testament to how much I love Paul Giamatti’s performance that I forgive him for loudly talking during a movie (he has the absolutely wrong reaction to being shushed, but no matter - it’s the classic case of me being fascinated by a character who I wouldn’t be caught dead sitting next to during a movie).

This might be the perfect Christmas movie for the misanthropic, the curmudgeonly, the disillusioned middle-aged burn-outs. Yes, people can be awful - but every once in a while, they will surprise you, and it’ll melt your heart.

On a side note, there seems to be a narrative this awards season that Alexander Payne is "back" after the commercial and critical indifference to his last film Downsizing (2017). This is disappointing because Downsizing is absolutely fantastic - an ambitious, thoughtful movie that swings for the fences and continues to resonate as the climate crisis becomes more and more dire. I hold out hope that folks will come around to Downsizing and eventually recognize it as the forward-thinking and deeply moving film that it is. 

4. Ferrari (Michael Mann)

Holy moly. I’m admittedly a die hard Michael Mann fan, but while I’ve admired his last few films (the Director’s Cut of Blackhat is really strong), Ferrari is his most focused and sharpest movie since Collateral (2004).

For one thing, he’s dialed back the intensely digital photography just a bit (I mean, it’s still digital, but the frame rate has gotten back somewhere closer to normal). The film also features the director’s most compelling lead character since Collateral, with Adam Driver lending a real emotional weight to the material. The interweaving of Ferrari’s personal life and professional life is beautifully done, and the racing scenes are dynamic as hell (Penélope Cruz is also amazing in this, and I’m surprised she hasn’t been factoring into the awards season conversation more).

What I love most is that Mann follows the Scorsese approach of “never explain.” We’re thrown into this world, we gradually come to understand the key relationships and conflicts, and what we don’t understand just makes us more engaged and fascinated by the material.

5. Maestro (Bradley Cooper)

Bradley Cooper proves A Star is Born (2018) was no fluke - this man is one hell of a filmmaker. Maestro is the biopic done correctly - focusing not on the broad strokes of a career, but on the smaller, more intimate moments in between the professional milestones one can easily find on Wikipedia.

If the first hour is a rather overwhelming rush of lavish dinner parties and inside baseball talk among mid-century American artists, the second half of Maestro slows down to a more somber portrait of a long, complicated marriage. Every scene between Cooper (as Leonard Bernstein) and Mulligan (as his wife, Felicia Montealegre) is so beautifully staged - there’s one that occurs in an Upper East Side apartment against an open window in which the Snoopy float from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade drifts into frame at exactly the right time.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but did I spy Lydia Tár in Bernstein’s classroom near the end?

6. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)

In Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, there’s a moment so utterly bizarre and indescribable between Tom Hanks and Jason Schwartzman that it immediately dispels any notion of Anderson making puppets out of his performers. Within the carefully designed artifice, there is room for discovery on the part of the actors, yielding moments as totally unexpected as this.

I love that Anderson’s movies are becoming a bit more obtuse. It requires the audience to do a little more work to pull out the thematic meaning, as opposed to instantly revealing its cards. I don’t think it’s necessary to walk away from a movie having understood the entirety of its thematic content. The real question is, did you feel it? Did it conjure up something real and unique? With Asteroid City, the answer to both, for me, is yes.

Upon a second viewing, I landed on my own interpretation of the material. The Actors Studio-esque drama class led by Willem Dafoe’s Saltzburg Keitel is representative of Anderson’s loyal company of actors who return and circulate for each of his films, and the film (or televised play, in the world of the movie) they’re attempting to make is a Wes Anderson film (Asteroid City). But they’re not certain how to make it, or what it means, until they land on a repeated phrase that embodies the spirit of any of Anderson’s movies: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” In other words, only through artifice (or the dream world) can one truly awaken and learn about themselves.

Now, is any of this what Anderson intended? Probably not. But that’s the beauty of a movie that truly engages you and asks you to come to it, not the other way around. 

While it’s true that Anderson’s filmmaking style has become a “brand,” of sorts (I heard a moviegoer ask the box office attendant for a ticket to “Wes Anderson” the same way one would ask for a ticket to “Indiana Jones”), it’s the best kind of brand in that it’s completely and utterly undesigned by a committee, but rather the unique creation of its maker’s interests and concerns. You can try to emulate Anderson’s aesthetic through AI all you want, but it won’t be able to predict the director’s obsessions with (in this case) mid-century American theatre and the anxieties of the Atomic Age.

7. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)

What’s the difference between self-delusion and consciously deciding what to believe? That’s the dilemma faced by the eleven year-old boy who watches in horror as his parents’ marriage is deconstructed and held under a microscope in a court of law. No matter how closely we examine this marriage, though, we still don’t feel very close to the truth - whatever that is. 

Justine Triet's brilliant Palme d'Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall exists in the murky grey areas that I find most compelling in cinema.  The film is less concerned about whether or not Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is responsible for her husband's death than it is about the stories we tell ourselves to live with the absence of certainty.

8. May December (Todd Haynes)

I saw Todd Haynes’s new film with a packed audience at the Austin Film Society Cinema, and the screening was followed by a Q&A with Richard Linklater and Haynes (the latter via Zoom). Boy am I glad I saw this with an audience - I wasn’t expecting May December to be so uproariously funny, but it played to huge laughs. The scene where Natalie Portman’s character visits a high school drama class is hysterical. 

There was an excellent New Yorker article two years ago titled The Case Against the Trauma Plot, and it essentially argued that a good deal of modern cinema (and literature) is too neatly explaining away the eccentricities and flaws of complex characters by revealing some past trauma that’s somehow responsible for all of the character’s bad behavior. In the third act of May December, Portman, playing an actress who is preparing to play a quite complicated real life woman, learns of a shocking traumatic event from the woman’s past that ultimately becomes her way into the character. The brilliance of Haynes’s film is that just when Portman thinks she has the character figured out, the real life woman reveals the traumatic event never happened. Ultimately, May December is a darkly funny film about an actress attempting to tidily sum up the messiness of a real life situation for a bland indie movie that couldn’t be less interested in the unexplainable contradictions of human behavior. Haynes’s film, of course, is a much better movie, because it refuses to fall into the same trap.

9. Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli)

The new age of Nicolas Cage reaches perhaps its finest moment yet with Dream Scenario, a film that harkens back to the great mid-budget Cage vehicles of the 2000s (Adaptation, Matchstick Men, The Weather Man). Yes, the movie can be read as a meta commentary on Cage’s internet fame and the price of becoming ubiquitous - but it also morphs into something much darker and inarticulable with each passing scene. What’s most interesting is watching Cage’s character attempt to have agency in a situation where it’s absolutely impossible for him to exert any control. By the end, maybe he’s found a small way to alter the narrative, but only in the land of dreams. His real life is irreparably destroyed simply because of what other people project onto him. But the man doesn’t go down without a fight.

10. The Killer (David Fincher)

David Fincher’s The Killer is a lean, darkly funny, no-nonsense thriller that makes for a thoroughly entertaining two hours at the cinema. Fincher imbues it with the unapologetic nihilism of Killing Them Softly (2012), a film that shares some of the same ideas about American capitalism. But whatever loftier ambitions The Killer might have - I’m sure one could expound at length as to what it’s really “about” - it’s first and foremost a really effective genre movie, complete with an insanely well-choreographed fight scene and some truly memorable sound perspective shifts.

Of course, there were more than ten great films released this year - here are several more that I loved and admired:

Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster)

Air (Ben Affleck)

Personality Crisis: One Night Only (Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi)

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie)

Napoleon (Ridley Scott)

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Poison, The Swan and The Rat Catcher (Wes Anderson)

Dreamin' Wild (Bill Pohlad)

The Secret Art of Human Flight (H.P. Mendoza)

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)

Past Lives (Celine Song)

My Favorite Films of 2022

If you could get past the onslaught of multiverse movies, it was actually a pretty damn good year for cinema. Several directors I admire took big risks and, in my mind, led us to some pretty interesting places. Here are my ten favorites from the year.

1. The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is a wonderful ode to the joy and pain of making movies, a thoughtful and moving recollection of youth by one of cinema’s greatest storytellers, and, above all, an immensely entertaining motion picture. The film recalls another auteur filmmaker’s tribute to the power of cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), and falls into a recent sub-genre of top-tier directors reflecting on their upbringings (James Gray’s excellent Armageddon Time also fits into this category). But The Fabelmans has a special quality all its own, and also offers us the genesis of the broken family theme that’s present in so many of Spielberg’s indelible films.

Sammy Fabelman (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a boy, then by Gabriel LaBelle as a teenager) attends his first movie with his parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano), at the age of six. The film is Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), and the images onscreen are seared into Sammy’s brain – along with a desire and need to recreate those images within his own home (particularly a rousing train crash sequence). When Sammy receives a train set for Hanukkah (along with an 8mm camera lent to him by his mother), he goes about shooting his first home movie.

The Fabelmans offers many ideas as to why a child might want to make films, but Sammy’s mother is able to identify perhaps the most enlightening reason – Sammy wants to exert some kind of control over the train crash. Mitzi understands this desire more than Burt, as she was a piano prodigy who gave up her dream, we presume, to raise her children (Sammy has three younger sisters).

I’ll stop here and segue into slightly more personal territory. Having control over some aspect of one’s life – particularly when there are painful outside factors beyond your control – resonates as a motivator behind creating one’s own world. In my personal creative work, I’ve tried to articulate the link between personal tragedy and my need to control the environment around me. If I’m unable to stop unpleasant or even traumatic things happening around me (the death of a parent, a struggle with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder), perhaps I can control other aspects of my life, particularly my creative endeavors – and, ideally, reconcile the troubled aspects of my life through these endeavors. Although Sammy’s need to “control the train crash” isn’t linked to tragedy initially, it’s not long before events in his family life spin completely out of his control, and the only place for him to turn is to his filmmaking.

After the death of Mitzi’s mother, Burt asks a teenage Sammy to edit together a home movie from their blissful family camping trip. Burt senses there’s something wrong in his marriage, and he hopes Sammy’s film might lift Mitzi’s spirits. Sammy, a bit dejected that he has to temporarily put aside his ambitions to shoot an action-packed war movie with his classmates, goes about editing the camping trip footage – and, in the process, discovers hints of possible marital infidelity in the background of certain frames.

Spielberg is careful to show such empathy for both Mitzi and Burt during the slow dissolution of their marriage. There are no bad people in this movie, only flawed individuals trying to navigate an uncertain world. And as Sammy is tasked with directly facing an uncomfortable family secret, Spielberg is able to beautifully articulate how making films about one’s personal story can be quite painful and revealing – while making movies of more fantastical genres not mined from personal experience (westerns, war pictures) can be exhilarating and much more fun.

There’s a deliberate parallel here to Spielberg’s own filmography, in which his brilliance at making escapist entertainment in the early part of his career (think Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.) eventually gave way to the filmmaker tackling weightier, sometimes quite personal subjects (namely, depictions of the Jewish experience in films like Schindler’s List and Munich). And it’s taken him 75 years to finally edit together his own home movie, and it was worth the wait.

In the film’s second half, Spielberg goes into delightfully unexpected territory, depicting Sammy’s high school experience in northern California, where his alpha male classmates taunt and harass him with anti-Semitic slurs and even violence. There’s an illuminating passage in which Sammy is asked to shoot and edit a film of Senior Skip Day, during which the senior class skips school and parties on the beach. When he screens the movie for his graduating class, we see that Sammy has made his cruel classmates look like golden gods – leading to a fascinating confrontation between chief bully Logan (Sam Rechner) and Sammy. Logan cannot understand why Sammy would choose to make those who bullied him out to be larger-than-life cinematic figures. This is a terrifically written scene, in which Spielberg (and co-writer Tony Kushner) get to play around with a variety of subjects, including a filmmaker’s intention, the ways in which one cannot control how others see their work, and the nature of art as a subconscious reflection of a filmmaker’s desires. Does Sammy want his tormentors to feel bad about their cruelty, or does he actually want to be one of them? What’s great about this scene is that Sammy truly doesn’t know the answer, and neither do we. That’s not the point. The Fabelmans is about an artist finding his voice and discovering what he wants to say and how he wants to say it – and we leave Sammy at a crucial juncture where he’s still figuring these things out.

I couldn’t help but identify with the film’s final scene, in which Sammy – now out of high school and about to start a job at CBS in Los Angeles – waits in the office of one of his heroes, the legendary director John Ford (played by director David Lynch in a terrific cameo). Sammy has now come full circle, and is face to face with the man whose films made such an impression on him as a young person. Without being too corny about it, I feel like I’ve sat in that office, too, staring wide-eyed at the poster collection of my hero (in my case, Martin Scorsese). Look, I’m no Spielberg and I never will be, but the feeling conjured up by this scene rings completely true. It’s about the giddy sense of a future where the possibilities are endless, where one’s lifelong artistic practice may one day pay off, where the horizon is always just ahead – and, ideally, framed correctly. That last one may only make sense once you’ve witnessed the final shot of The Fabelmans.

If The Fabelmans is still playing in a cinema near you, I cannot implore you enough to go see it. The adult audiences on which this kind of film depends for survival are simply not showing up at the cinema, despite the numerous exceptional entertainments released in the last year (including Spielberg’s own West Side Story, which should have been a powerhouse at the box office). The Fabelmans truly feels like a last stand for cinema. Yes, you can catch it on VOD, but for a movie that’s about the power of the moviegoing experience, it’s simply not the same thing. And, to put it bluntly, studios are going to stop making serious, thoughtful, intelligent movies like these if folks don’t show up to see them.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)

Martin McDonagh's latest film is a nerve-wracking, dread-inducing masterpiece. Compared to some of the director's prior work (as both a filmmaker and playwright), there's relatively little violence in The Banshees of Inisherin - and yet it feels as brutal and uncomfortable as anything he’s ever made. There's something quite haunting about the spareness and simplicity of this film's story, which really boils down to a falling out between once-best friends.

It's no accident that the Irish Civil War is happening in the background of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s feuding. The Banshees of Inisherin can be fairly easily interpreted as a parable about the folly of war - how what starts as a minor, rather stupid squabble turns into a game of bluffing, of following through with the most asinine and horrifying threats, until the situation escalates to such a point that there’s simply no going back for anyone involved.

But underneath the film’s allegorical nature is an astute examination of depression and loneliness, and I think that's what sticks with the viewer long after the film is over.

The feud between the two men could have been one-note and purely comical, but throughout, Gleeson clearly still has a degree of empathy for Farrell, no matter how much he'd like to shut him out of his life. And the basic reasoning behind his refusal to speak to his friend is somewhat understandable - Gleeson knows he only has so much time left, and he simply doesn't want to spend that time gabbing away with drunkards in a pub. But clearly something else is going on with Gleeson's character - and it may take me repeat viewings to fully catch the nuances of what he's going through.

Farrell, meanwhile, is wonderful as a character who's rather simple-minded and knows he's simple-minded (though he's smarter than he gives himself credit for). The film never feels like it's making fun of him, though - the power of Farrell's performance is in his utter sincerity and the way in which he communicates the pain of feeling intellectually inferior to those around him.

In a film full of beautifully concise, rich dialogue, there's perhaps no line more devastating than one uttered by Barry Keoghan's character: "There goes that dream, then." That sentiment may very well be the key to the entire film.

3. Babylon (Damien Chazelle)

To quote Brad Pitt’s character – an aging movie star named Jack Conrad – “FUCK YEAH!”

Look, I don’t have a whole lot to say about Damien Chazelle’s rather divisive film other than this: I was wildly entertained for 190 minutes straight, and that counts for a lot. The filmmaking on display here is electric, the performances from Pitt and Margot Robbie are superb, and the spectacle of the whole thing is truly something to behold. In an age where many movies posing as entertainment are dour and visually unexciting affairs, Babylon knows how to throw a good party – and, somehow simultaneously, deliver a stirring tribute to the early Hollywood trailblazers of yesteryear now relegated to the dustbin of history.

4. Armageddon Time (James Gray)

James Gray’s latest film, the semi-autobiographical Armageddon Time, is exquisite. It’s the kind of thoughtful, sobering American drama that used to be commonplace during awards season. But, as was the case with so many adult-skewing pandemic releases, the audience that would truly adore this movie largely slept on it.

As a portrait of where America is headed in the early Reagan years, the film doesn’t have a terribly happy ending, but it does offer something that feels true and even bleakly optimistic: those of us born with a "leg up" in the world (whether due to race, class, socio-economic status, etc.) may not be able to fully deny or forgo the advantages and opportunities that come our way, but we do have a choice to opt out of the fear-mongering, elitist power systems that create and abed monsters.

The hallmark of any James Gray film is a final shot that thematically ties the film together, beautifully articulating a singular idea behind the entire movie. Armageddon Time leaves us with Gray's stand-in Paul (Banks Repeta) walking away (figuratively and literally) from his private school in Queens, which hovers over him like a beacon of darkness. This is just one kid choosing a different path, to be sure, but it means something.

5. TÁR (Todd Field)

Despite loving director Todd Field's prior two films (Little Children and In the Bedroom), I wasn't certain what I'd think of TÁR (as I wrote in my review of B.J. Novak's Vengeance, I don't really like seeing online culture depicted onscreen - and the early word around TÁR was that it tackled 'cancel culture' head on).

Thankfully, this movie is beautifully and artfully made - and, more importantly, willing to wade into matters of moral ambiguity. We're never told how to feel about the title character, which is one of the hallmarks of a great character study.

I also quite admire how TÁR really thrusts you into Lydia Tár's world from the get-go - it's a film that expects the audience to keep up with it, and the specificities of an orchestra conductor's day-to-day existence and routine never feel anything less than authentic.

Cate Blanchett is, as always, riveting.

6. White Noise (Noah Baumbach)

In my mind, Noah Baumbach's White Noise is one of the major achievements of the year. I’ve read a lot of folks comparing it (unfavorably) to Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014), but that seems like a fairly broad and surface-level comparison between what are ultimately two pretty dissimilar adaptations of dense, “unfilmable” books. Plus, I loved Inherent Vice, so the comparison didn’t deter me in the least from eagerly anticipating White Noise.

If Baumbach is out to conjure up a feeling of existential dread, then he’s done so beautifully. Perhaps it’s the part of me that worries constantly about the long-term effects of COVID (are our organs really going to deteriorate faster if we’ve caught the disease?), but I genuinely relate to Adam Driver’s character’s fear of dying early from exposure to an airborne toxic event. Pretty much everyone in this movie is afraid of death and obsessed with how to avoid it, an all-too-real feeling coming out of the pandemic.

White Noise also has a stunning two-hander of a scene near the end of the film, with Driver and Greta Gerwig performing their hearts out in a bedroom confrontation. Excellent blocking and staging, memorable visuals, ultimately arriving at an emotional catharsis for both characters - what a sequence! This scene alone dispels any notion that the film is too academic or heady.

It kills me that most people will see this movie on a television, because White Noise is a spectacularly cinematic movie. It’s really exciting to see what Baumbach can do with access to such a large budget, and, like Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo, this film could’ve only been made on this scale by a streamer. It’s just a shame these streaming titles’ theatrical runs aren’t better marketed and there’s barely a week-long window in which to catch them in cinemas.

7. Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater’s latest film, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, is a joy to experience. This is Linklater’s third feature-length film shot using rotoscope animation (after Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly), and here, the stylized animation helps create an equal parts vivid and blurry account of the past – which is appropriate for a film modeled on Linklater’s own childhood memories growing up in Houston during the Space Age.

The year is 1969, and ten-year-old Stan (Milo Coy) is mesmerized by the Apollo missions being orchestrated just miles away at NASA. When the agency accidentally builds a lunar module too small for an adult, two officials (Glen Powell and Zachary Levi) recruit Stan to land this mini-ship on the moon. Although this top-secret mission is ostensibly the film’s A-story, it becomes fairly clear early on that we’re not supposed to take it at face value. This is, after all, a film about how the Space Race captured a child’s imagination.

Before we get to Stan’s mission, however, Linklater takes us on a welcome detour through a distinct time and place. Our narrator (a grown-up Stan, voiced by Jack Black) guides us through the cultural specificities of Texas in the late 1960s – from the long summer days of elementary school kids getting up to no good, to the television shows, movies and music that came to define the decade. The result is something resembling an animated hang-out movie (which is Linklater’s specialty) – and in an era where movies are becoming less and less fun, I’m happy to report that Apollo 10 ½ is an absolute blast.

Eventually, we do come back around to Stan’s Apollo mission – but instead of going all-in on the fantastical concept of a ten-year-old landing on the moon, Linklater does something more interesting. On the day of the actual Apollo 11 launch, we intercut between Stan’s imagined voyage into outer space and the real spaceflight commanded by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. While Apollo 11’s trip to the moon is in progress, Stan and his friends spend the day at AstroWorld. He returns home exhausted and ready to fall asleep… just as Armstrong and Aldrin are set to land on the lunar surface.

I can’t think of a more characteristically Linklater third act than one in which our protagonist is literally falling asleep on his mother’s shoulder as man successfully lands on the moon. As Stan weaves in and out of consciousness, Linklater adopts a cinematic style that’s part dreamscape, part faithful recreation of the moon landing – both happening simultaneously.

Ultimately, this third act set piece serves as a beautiful representation of memory – one that outright acknowledges the fancifulness and embellishment we bring to our own recollections of the past. In that sense, the split presentation of the moon landing is entirely truthful, in that it represents how it felt for a kid in that era – the excitement, the desire to be involved, the imaginings in one’s head of what it would be like to reach the outer limits of our world. Linklater bring this theme home in a beautiful closing exchange of dialogue. As his mother and father carry a fully-asleep Stan to his bedroom, his father says, “I just want him to be able to tell his grandkids he saw the first steps on the moon” – to which his mother replies, “Well, you know how memory works. Even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.”

8. Women Talking (Sarah Polley)

Sarah Polley's Women Talking is a phenomenal film, and despite receiving a Best Picture nomination at this year's Oscars, it somehow still seems to be underrated and under-seen.

Based on the seemingly period costumes and remote locale I had seen in the film's trailer, I assumed Women Talking took place during the early 20th century at the latest. So it's a wonderfully jarring moment when Daydream Believer by The Monkees comes blaring from a passing truck into the isolated Mennonite community in which our lead characters live. It suddenly re-contextualizes everything we've seen thus far - how the struggle to be heard within this community is completely divorced from (and yet, somehow, completely in tune with) the forms of cultural upheaval happening elsewhere.

Unlike last year's The Whale, a movie about a self-loathing victim that invites nothing but pity from the audience, Women Talking is a film of characters with agency, fiercely debating a plan of action and resistance. This is what happens when you create intellectual characters with conflicting viewpoints and put them in a room together - great drama! Women Talking would make Sidney Lumet proud.

Also, for a film that is largely about, yes, women talking, Polley never allows the proceedings to feel stagey. If anything, there's a real commonality with Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), particularly in the use of voiceover, which allows for a fragmented, almost stream-of-conscious style of filmmaking happening right alongside the more formal, scripted interplay between the gifted actors. Polley pulls off the balance beautifully.

9. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson)

Rian Johnson’s sequel to the blazingly original Knives Out (2019) might be the purely entertaining (and rewatchable) title on this list. A third outing with Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) can’t come soon enough. And it's worth mentioning that an onslaught of celebrity cameos in a film's sequel usually comes across as a cheap substitute for laughs - but here, they all work brilliantly (particularly Hugh Grant and Ethan Hawke, both hilarious).

10. Amsterdam (David O. Russell)

I knew I’d love Amsterdam, and I suspect a whole lot of folks who have been dissuaded from watching it (by practically every film critic and trade publication around) would enjoy it, too. After all, it’s a big cinematic gift with long, unhurried scenes full of movie stars doing marvelous character work, gorgeous cinematography by one of the best in the business (Emmanuel Lubezski), and perhaps David O. Russell’s most unfiltered expression of optimism in the face of cruelty and despair.

Is there too much explaining in the third act? Yes - but it’s by characters I’ve grown to love and actors who I love to watch. Does the film sometimes abandon its central narrative and indulge in O. Russell’s signature madcap group scenes? Absolutely - but, again, I love that. If it’s between a totally wild vision like this and some inoffensive, blasé film that more or less does everything “right,” I’ll take Amsterdam any day of the week.

Also, talk about a movie that uses its cast! Christian Bale is characteristically excellent, but what about Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola as the mismatched detectives, one a war veteran and the other a bumbling novice trying to prove his mettle? Or the surprise dynamic duo of Mike Myers and Michael Shannon, who are hysterical as a pair of government spies? And then there’s my favorite screen presence of all time, Mr. Robert De Niro, who clearly relishes the opportunity to make a critical third act speech against fascism (the role feels tailor-made for him, with O. Russell clearly asking De Niro to channel his well-known loathing of Trump into the performance).

There are no stock characters in O. Russell’s films, which is part of why his scenes are so chaotic and messy (in the best possible way) - everyone is trying to get along the best they can, but they keep running into the peculiarities and sharp edges of one another when attempting to have a conversation. Everyone seems to know each other, too, which is a rather charming trend in O. Russell’s prior work (The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, in particular).

It disheartened me to see film critics and trade columnists waiting with pitchforks to take this film down a peg, and actively root for and delight in its box office underperformance. Only Richard Brody of The New Yorker seemed to review the film on its own terms, as opposed to the others, who seemingly have it in for O. Russell, and whose complaints (namely, that the movie is overstuffed, has too many varying tones, exhausts the viewer with its relentless energy) are all positives, in my mind. And Amsterdam holds up wonderfully on a second viewing, to boot!