Mansel Stimpson Looks Back at the Year of 2022
2022 has been a good year for films but a decidedly troublesome one for cinemas. The struggle that so many of them are having to get back the audiences they had before the pandemic challenges the assumption that the public would be eager to resume the communal experience of seeing films on the big screen. It has not helped that the wide number of releases both for cinemas and for platforms has resulted in many films of quality failing to get the vital publicity that wide coverage by critics used to provide. Nor is it a good sign for the future that a serious film as distinguished as She Said has been a box-office flop in America. That's a failure which could well discourage Hollywood even further from pursuing in future anything other than popular escapist entertainment.
But, whether or not resulting in part from releases delayed due to the Covid crisis, the number of outstanding films to reach us in the past twelve months has been unusually high (that applied in 2021 too, but even more so in 2022). That being so, and also to ensure that documentaries do not dominate too much (I argued last year that they form a genre less challenging to a filmmaker and therefore easier to pull off), I once again list not just my top ten titles of the year but add here the ten runners up: 11. Mass. 12. Everything Went Fine. 13. Young Plato. 14. She Said. 15. In Front of Your Face. 16. Nitram. 17. Prayers for the Stolen. 18. Il buco. 19. Mr Bachmann and His Class. 20. The Innocents.
Furthermore, there are a whole range of new talents emerging both in acting and in directing. There are too many to mention here, but in the field of child players alone think of Maya Vanderbeque in Playground, Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundo in Tori and Lokita, Frankie Corio in Aftersun, Catherine Clinch in The Quiet Girl and Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb in Armageddon Time. That has to be a cause for hope.
Mansel Stimpson’s Favourites: