The Top 23 Films of 2023

Posted in Film by

This was a very weird year in my life! We spent almost half of it in North Carolina, seeing only Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie in theaters during that time. Then we moved back to Madison, a city I haven’t lived in since 2016. I immediately fell back in love with the city’s movie scene and reconnected with old friends. That’s meant that I haven’t watched a ton of movies at home, primarily seeing things at free screenings at the university. My fellow UW Cinematheque regulars will recognize many of these films from the Madison Premieres series.

Because I publish these at the Oscars on purpose, I’ll say that this year I liked every nominated film for Best Picture that I’ve seen, even though I’ve left three of those off this list. Maybe they just did a very good job, or maybe I’m getting older. Past Lives is a brilliantly acted debut that is shaggy in a few places. Maestro is a weird-as-hell movie I might grow to love over the years, but I wish the marriage drama worked a little better for me. And Poor Things may be more style than substance, but I had a hoot watching Stone and Ruffalo especially in such good goofmaster spirits.

Each of these write-ups includes a reference to any streaming service members can watch the film on for free. With one exception, all of these films are available either on streaming services or VOD rental.

HONORABLE MENTION: The Pope’s Exorcist

Dir. Julius Avery

Netflix

The Pope’s Exorcist is not my #24 film of the year. I’m not sure The Pope’s Exorcist is my #30 film of the year. But I want to watch Russell Crowe play Father Gabriel Amorth in like six more of these perfectly paced perfect little movies for morons. He rides up on that little Vespa, sits and drinks whiskey while speaking in Italian, and the whole thing is going delightfully if a little calmly. Then the last half hour hits and we get a perfect Madcap Special Effects Extravaganza. The Pope’s Exorcist hits the lizard brain in a way even Branagh’s Poirot couldn’t quite manage this year.

A big “see you later” to Ferrari, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Showing Up, American Fiction, The Holdovers, All Of Us Strangers, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Beau is Afraid, Broker, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Eileen, Furies, Godzilla Minus One, In Water, John Wick Chapter 4, M3gan, Master Gardener, Napoleon, No Bears, Pacifiction, Passages, Perfect Days, Saturn Bowling, Shin Kamen Rider, The Crime Is Mine, The First Slam Dunk, The History of the Minnessota Vikings, and The Killer.

23. The Sweet East

Dir. Sean Price Williams

VOD

I saw The Sweet East much earlier than it’s ended up available to everyone else, so I know some people would probably call it my “first movie of 2024.” This is the most Chapo Trap House-brained movie I’ve seen in a long time, a picaresque fantasia of fringe politics and embarrassing yuppies. The first ten minutes make a pretty awful first impression with Talia Ryder’s Lillian being caught in a PizzaGate riff, but once that’s past, it’s pretty damned funny for the rest of its runtime. Simon Rex, Ayo Edibiri, and Jacob Elordi are probably the highlights of the extended supporting cast. The film, directed by Safdie Brothers and Alex Ross Perry cinematographer Sean Price Williams, looks fantastic and nails a lot of great visual gags throughout.

22. Priscilla

Dir. Sofia Coppola

Max

Sofia Coppola returns to the caged bird structure of The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled, and, arguably, Lost in Translation. Cailee Spaeny as the titular Priscilla is asked to play a tough role, given she needs to be both our POV character and one who we understand has basically sacrificed all internal identity for years at a time. It’s not an especially kind film to Priscilla Presley given where it chooses to cut to black, but it’s an incredibly well-observed story about that sort of self-annihilation.

21. You Hurt My Feelings

Dir. Nicole Holofcener

Showtime

A writer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) telling her brother-in-law (Arian Moayed) that he hates her new novel. You Hurt My Feelings is marriage dramedy about imposter syndrome and “little white lies” and is my first Holofcener film. She’s the director of films like Enough Said and Walking and Talking, and it pretty well lived up to my understanding of her work. This film was a challenge to get through for me, the social discomfort being a sore anxiety spot for me. But I’m glad I pushed through! The back half is full of confrontations and reconciliations that shared something valuable about communication, cutting things off, and making value judgments. Dreyfus is very obviously suited to the material, which feels like a more dramatic approach to her classic TV work.

20. Rotting in the Sun

Dir. Sebastian Silva

MUBI

I said “I’m definitely going to see Big Gay Beach Movie” the moment I saw this trailer. The trailer maybe was not representative of how much of Rotting in the Sun was at the Big Gay Beach, but good lord, did it not hold back on the Big Gay while it was at that beach! Instead, this film spends most of its time as a very funny meta-thriller about class dynamics and social media toxicity, with both Sebastian Silva and co-star Jordan Firstman playing versions of themselves that are not very kind portraits. It’s very funny, the thriller portion of the film is quite tense, and Catalina Saavedra still haunts me as Silva’s assistant and maid Vero.

19. The Adults

Dir. Dustin Guy Defa

VOD

Cringe comedy’s tough in film! I think of the apocalyptic cringe of something like Rick Alverson/Gregg Turkington’s Entertainment, where all you want to do is stop looking at the screen. The Adults is packing cringe comedy into drama, which forces the cringe behavior of this theater-kid sibling dynamic into diegesis. It ends up with some really funny moments as its core trio of siblings break into embarrassing inside jokes in front of other people, and then carry that awkwardness into their independent lives as well. This serves as a really special performance showcase, especially for Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis, and even if the big heart didn’t quite land with me as hard as it did for some people I saw it with, I still really enjoyed it greatly.

18. The Settlers

Dir. Felipe Galvez Haberle

VOD

Haberle’s impressive debut western situates colonial violence against drunk black comedy. The Spanish and English worlds descend upon Patagonia in the form of a Queen’s soldier, a Texan cowboy, and the half-Chilean sharpshooter. Their job is to find safe passage from their Spaniard boss’s plantation to the Atlantic shore, and rack up a genocidal body count along the way. The first half of The Settlers manages an incredible mounting tension all building toward a pretty horrific sequence of violence, and then pulls back to a more intellectual cultural critique of these bloodthirsty profiteers. This is done in gorgeous landscape photography and with a rousing adventure film score by Harry Allouche, which sets the stage immediately for a film that starts rollicking and ends in despair.

17. Skinamarink

Dir. Kyle Edward Ball

Hulu, Shudder

Maybe oversold as “the scariest movie in years” for a lot of people, Skinamarink is now iconic as a verb or situation for “being trapped in a house you can’t leave with something you can’t see.” That’s crazy given just how abstract and experimental Skinamarink is as a film. Most of the dialogue is murmured by children who are often off-camera – some of it is subtitled but not all of it. There’s no real plot so much as an encroaching sense of dread and wrongness, an aesthetic darkness captured beautifully on such a low budget. Something cruel is happening and its evil only grows stronger as the film goes on. I certainly can’t recommend Skinamarink to everyone, but it’s such a singular, inventive film that it’ll likely be the go-to reference point for future Skinamarinks to come.

16. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

Netflix

Visual imagination trumps everything else in this sequel to the still-overwhelmingly-great Into the Spider-Verse. Across the Spider-Verse never quite reaches its heights narratively, but pound for pound this is still full of many of the craziest animated images I’ve ever seen on screen. Steinfeld’s Gwen Stacy and Luna Lauren Velez’s Rio Morales also pack emotional wallops into expanded roles from the previous movie. There’s some shorthand I don’t like here, I think the “canon event” narrative device that became the movie’s central meme is outright kind of bad, and until the sequel I can’t say whether or not the Miles storyline is headed anywhere good, but I have confidence I’ll love looking at it most of the way through.

15. Bottoms

Dir. Emma Seligman

Amazon Prime

Goshdarn riot. The premise of Bottoms maybe sells “Gay Girl Fight Club” as a little more radical a concept than Seligman and Sennott were going for with the script. They’re really just making a broad comedy, closer to Hot Rod or Superbad, and maybe some people were disappointed by that. I thought everyone in this movie was really funny, from Ruby Cruz to Marshawn Lynch, and Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edibiri are so good together. I like that Sennott’s PJ is just, like, an awful friend, a shitty teenager that never really gets redeemed. The Avril needledrop is one of the best jokes I saw all year.

14. Anatomy of a Fall

Dir. Justine Triet

VOD, Hulu March 22

Stretching the definition of courtroom drama by allowing so much mistrial to occur that it almost begs to be a film set outside Earth, Anatomy of a Fall marketing itself on the phrase “Did She Do It?” is an extension of its commentary on the violence of a justice system. We watch Antoine Reinartz as prosecutor lambast Sandra Voyter’s (Sandra Huller) character and enter everything from art to sexuality into public record as evidence Sandra killed her husband. She, along with her attorney Vincent (Swann Arlaud, the hottest exhausted guy in a movie in 2023) interrupt regularly to attack the absurdity of a legal argument that ends up offering very little in the way of evidence.

This ends up forcing the film to be less of an actual legal procedural than a moral and ethical wrestling match, a determination within the self to decide whether legal theater can ever meaningfully determine guilt in any edge case, an understanding of the damage inherently done under these circumstances. The gravity of that damage primarily falls on Milo Machado-Gradner’s Daniel, the blind son who cannot look away from the dissolution of his world, a brilliant performance from an actor I hope we continue to see.

13. Knock at the Cabin

Dir. M. Night Shyamalan

Amazon Prime

The Twilight Zone, alongside this film, are at their best when they beg the question, “What if the things you 100% knew to be true were wrong?” Some people have found Knock at the Cabin’s apocalyptic stakes to be deflating the film’s tension, determining “well, the film only works if the apocalypse is coming and these stakes are too crazy, so where’s the tension?” I think that understands the film’s POV a little incorrectly. Instead, I think the tension comes from “how can the horsemen possibly convince anyone they’re right?” Bautista’s performance anchors that tension brilliantly, realizing so early on just how high the odds are stacked against them.

The history of a lot of the horror genre stems from the perspective of punishment – those who sin are persecuted by Great Evil, in karmic retribution. Beyond religious morality plays, that history extends into classic pulp horror comics and the 70s and 80s slashers. I think Knock at the Cabin very smartly understands how to reverse engineer that history into interrogating why those who already are most marginalized or persecuted bear the weight of that Great Evil’s wrath.

12. The Zone of Interest

Dir. Jonathan Glazer

VOD

Details are the substance with The Zone of Interest, a near-plotless film about the evil inherent to domestic class fantasy and the genocidal background noise of self-annihilation. The film sets itself against the silhouette of Auschwitz, and I think the big picture is the banality and decay. Not just “the banality of evil,” but also the banality of their imagined Good Life. These fascists living high on the hog are boring – they do boring things, they keep a boring garden, they have boring conversations. Their kids are shitty and mean – in real life, they grew up to be even shittier. They’re poisoning their imagined Garden of Eden, from the air filled with the fumes of death to the river filled with ashes and bones, from the flowers bleeding to their own bodies rebelling against them. Maintaining the fantasy of domesticity while slaughter sits in the background destroys us.

The absolutely horrifying score, by Under the Skin and Jackie composer Mica Levi, is the film’s greatest achievement – the end credits theme is one of the most horrifying pieces of music I’ve heard in my entire life.

11. Barbie

Dir. Greta Gerwig

Max

I’ve been team Gerwig since Lady Bird in 2017, so I had pretty high faith that Barbie would deliver, but I never predicted what exactly she’d do with The Barbies and The Kens. A movie this heavily seen is inherently going to be both underrated and overrated, and I’m probably doing both at once. I think Robbie and Gosling are so funny and so strongly in character in this film – it would deservingly be listed alongside either’s best performances. The “What Was I Made For?” Montage made me cry. The “Push” cover made me laugh so hard. I think Kingsley Ben-Adir was so phenomenal as Gosling’s Benvolio Ken, an underrated supporting turn in a movie full of strong ones. This movie’s a treat, one I’d happily toss on right now.

10. May December

Dir. Todd Haynes

Netflix

It’s crazy a movie about such an uncomfortable subject manages to be so much fun as May December. A poison pill unsurprisingly too weird for the actors’ branch at the Oscars, May December is either a very dark comedy or a funny drama, depending on which part you emphasize, “loosely” based on the Mary Kay Letournau case. The story of Charles Melton’s Joe Yoo is a devastating arc about someone reckoning with his exploitation and infantilization by his wife (Julianne Moore,) along with the intense repression of his feelings of inadequacy and inability to maintain healthy relationship boundaries. The story of Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth Berry is a pitch black satire about how artists dredge up other people’s pain to make spurious dramas that probably shouldn’t exist. Samy Burch’s screenplay and Haynes’s direction of performance both balance the trauma and the absurdity of the proceedings, and the film left me both uncomfortable and fully satisfied. The ending scene puts a perfect pin on a film that’s already won me over.

9. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and Three More)

Dir. Wes Anderson

Netflix

At one point, I had all four of the Wes Anderson short films on this list because I really do think they all excel at different things. Poison, starring Dev Patel, is probably the funniest, with the performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Ben Kingsley really matching phenomenal narration from Patel. The Swan has my favorite performance of the batch in Rupert Friend’s narrator, quietly furious, maintaining an emotional outrage that is devastating to watch. But it’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which hands off between Cumberbatch, Patel, and Kingsley, that has to be my personal favorite – all three deliver unbelievable material, of course, but it’s the short’s visual imagination that makes it my favorite. This isn’t Anderson’s first film that fully breaks the fourth wall to depict special effects or character arcs – The French Dispatch handing off from Tony Revolori to Benicio del Toro is still probably my favorite – but this is the most he’s ever embraced that style, and I think it works beautifully.


8. Dad & Step-Dad

Dir. Tynan DeLong

VOD, NoBudge

Without any contest, Dad & Step-Dad is the funniest movie I saw all year. Colin Burgess (as Jim, the Dad) and Anthony Oberbeck (as Dave, the Step-Dad) deliver every line as such a fucking meal. The primary comedy comes from watching two dorks try to out-alpha one another, first passive-aggressively and later much more aggressively. But then there’s their thirteen year old son, Branson (Brian Fiddyment, decidedly not thirteen years old) who goes on his own hilarious journey. I’ve been saying lines from this movie every day since I saw it basically just to make myself laugh. If you enjoy the trailer, it delivers on that register for basically the entire running time. I’m gonna be shouting about this movie forever.

7. Afire

Dir. Christian Petzold

VOD

“What if a guy sucked?” That’s the central comedic question of Afire, which sets stuffy crumbum author Leon (Thomas Schubert, hysterical) to a Baltic beach resort where everyone else is having a good time. He’s sharing his holiday home with a photography student named Felix (Langston Uibel) and they’re meant to finish their major projects while enjoying the water. When they find out they’re double-booked with free spirit Nadja (Paula Beer,) Leon becomes inconsolable, rude, and simultaneously completely worthless as a writer. I grew to love these characters and the people they brought into the house for their strong senses of humor. When the stakes rise in the third act, it culminates in a really poignant character drama, but before that it’s perfectly set clashing personalities against one another to keep things awkward, funny, and always laughing at the right guy.

6. The Boy and the Heron

Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Theaters (this is the only film listed not on home video yet)

I so excitedly bought the 2021 Bruno Navasky translation of Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live?, a wonderful book about a young Japanese boy named Copper with a vivid imagination who learns with his uncle and his friends at school about his place in the world. It’s a wonderful story, filled with humor, funny facts, and philosophical lessons aimed at teaching children how to be kind, relate to a world from which they’re sheltered, and take perspective. I bought it because it was the book Miyazaki was basing his next film on – after seeing The Boy and the Heron, I hope he considers going back and adapting it some day after all!

Explaining the plot of the film is to spoil it – broadly, there’s a grieving boy who loses his mother, and he encounters a fantastical mystery that leads to a world of discovery. There is certainly some thematic overlap between this and How Do You Live?, but The Boy and the Heron is the open wound of a person who feels that the world we’ve created is a self-defeating one that may need to be torn down before something can be built in its place. Its bold formal decisions challenge the style and narrative coherence of Miyazaki’s previous work, and it’s almost impossible to say with simplicity “what it was about.” I know that I still found it profound, exciting, beautiful, funny. One of the best things a film can be is a puzzle – not a film you watch and fully understand the first time, but one you try to piece together over many years. I look forward to rewatching The Boy and the Heron, hearing the astonishing Joe Hisaishi score, and discovering this film again and again.

5. Killers of the Flower Moon

Dir. Martin Scorsese

Apple TV

Of all the films on this list, this is the one I’m worried I’m still underrating. Killers of the Flower Moon offers up its own weaknesses – the much-discussed ending (which I adore) is an admission of culpability by Martin Scorsese. He and Eric Roth have taken David Grann’s book and done what they can to center the Kyle and Burkhart families but in the end, this film is hoping to start conversation, not to be the definitive text. I’ll say that if anyone’s earned the benefit of the doubt on that idea, it’s Martin Scorsese, whose work as a producer and whose World Cinema Project at the Film Foundation have meaningfully brought to life and preserved films from marginalized voices.

Setting aside the “shoulds” of this film, Killers is so powerful because it honors Mollie and Ernest as characters. It never forgives Ernest Burkhart his vile crimes, easily the least likable man I’ve ever seen Leonardo DiCaprio play, but it also understands that he believed himself capable of compartmentalizing “love” and money until one devours the other. The attention for the film has largely come down to Lily Gladstone’s performance, which is one of the best anyone has given. I actually think it’s become a bit overstated how much of her performance is dedicated to reacting and being soulful – her Mollie is so funny, so wonderful at leading Ernest through their courtship or gossiping with her sisters, so great at speaking her mind but then not belaboring the fight. Like Barbie and Oppenheimer, it also has an incredibly wide cast of supporting players – I’ll shout out Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie’s mother, who I think invests a lot of joy what could be an afterthought character.

4. Monster

Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

VOD

Monster’s advertising has largely highlighted the importance of different perspectives in understanding how a story is really to be understood, but the story it actually tells is more of understanding how the limits of our own perspective keep us from understanding the behavior we observe. The film tells the story of about one month of time – a fire burns down a hostess club, Sakura Ando as Saori uncovers that her son is depressed and believes it’s due to persecution at school, and then a rain storm builds to a climactic conclusion. We see this month or so three times, from different characters’ points of view. Only by seeing all three stories can we understand what’s really happened.

The worldview this film paints is a sinister one – we see decent people try to live decently only for them to be surrounded by people who come across as cruel, uncaring, possessed by a system of beliefs that cannot allow humanity through. Annie described that from the title and the extent of darkness on display, she anticipated a malevolent horror to unveil itself. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say this film remains firmly a drama, not a horror film, and any Monsters we see are terrestrial in nature, even as some of the film’s best characters dream of something bigger.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is growing to be considered one of our modern masters, with now five or six films I’d consider to be instant classics of Japanese cinema. Shoplifters, Kore-eda’s 2018 film, remains a shining beacon I look back upon with awe. There are sequences in that film that manage such an ingenious marriage of tone, performance, aesthetic, and philosophy that I maintain it’s one of the greatest examples of what a director can achieve. Monster speaks to me much more deeply than Shoplifters, and while it’s not as astonishing a feat of filmmaking, the depth to which it grabbed me from beginning to end was immense and powerful. 

3. One Fine Morning

Dir. Mia Hansen-Love

Amazon Prime

At least since COVID quarantine began, I’ve been struggling a bit with focus and memory. My long-term recall, to childhood, has never been especially strong, but I have to make more of a conscious effort to write reminders to myself or I’ll forget what I’d planned to do these days. That feeling certainly lends itself to a sense of dread watching Lea Seydoux’s Sandra relate to her father, Pascal Gregory’s Georg, as he succumbs to the advanced stages of a neurodegenerative disorder called Benson’s Syndrome. The subject matter is something One Fine Morning approaches without the melodrama of imminent peril – Georg’s sorrow comes in the form of his loss of independence and clarity of thought, not because he’s harming or endangering himself.

This film also combats this sense of loss with new opportunities – the other primary story is Sandra kindling a romance with a married friend and trying to manage her daughter’s expectations about where that might be leading. The romance itself is not the most passionate, but that texture carries in Seydoux’s performance from scene to scene, and it ends up giving her one of her best characters I’ve seen. She’s funny, exhausted, literary, philosophical, bereft, sexy, angry – if I was going to recommend one film to understand why some consider her one of the best actors in the world, it would be this one. The sensitivity of Hansen-Love’s direction and screenplay combine to make a film that approaches aging and degeneration with the grace and levity to make its often sunny cinematography and romantic diversions feel less like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine and more like the natural course of life during transition.

2. Asteroid City

Dir. Wes Anderson

Amazon Prime

Asteroid City is a joyful parade of pleasures. Without spoiling it, Wes Anderson sets a grieving family into the small Southwest American road stop of Asteroid City to participate in a youth science competition – when Science Happens, they’re asked to quarantine with a hyperqualified Wes Anderson ensemble while the United States government puts its pants back on. There’s at least two or three layers of frame narrative put on top of this story, all of which I found delightful, but suffice it to say the world of Asteroid City is a play and we see its actors and creatives trying to figure out what it all means right alongside their characters.

This film is as gorgeous as anything Wes has ever produced, the red rock and sands creating a perfect backdrop for delightful costuming and set design. It’s so darn funny, from Jeffrey Wright’s General Gibson giving a hysterical autobiography on stage to Tilda Swinton’s Dr. Hickenlooper realizing the kid scientists outclass her, run laps around her and her team. There’s singing cowboys, deadpan Scarlett Johannsen, a scenery chewing Tom Hanks. It’s got the sort of emotional poignancy many of Wes’s films have, maybe closer to Moonrise Kingdom than the open wound of The Life Aquatic.

Right near the end, the film takes a turn into a back alley I hadn’t anticipated, and Margot Robbie makes a two minute appearance that is the best individual scene of acting anyone had all year. It’s a scene that’s funny but also one I can’t watch without crying. It recontextualizes everything the film has been about up til that point, all its metanarrative of “why do we tell stories and why do we tell them this way” and its satire and its comedy and reframes everything we’ve seen as the story of learning to remember why and how we live at all. I’m a sucker for Wes Anderson, and this is up there with any of his best.

1. Oppenheimer

Dir. Christopher Nolan

Peacock

Many of us who love Oppenheimer have spent a substantial amount of time discussing the film figuring out which of its many scientists and soldiers are at the top of your squad. From David Krumholtz’s citrus-slinging Isador Rabi to Tom Conti’s unflappable Albert Einstein, Jack Quaid’s bongo-bearing Richard Feynman to the Christmas gift of Kenneth Branagh’s Niels Bohr. Hartnett, Damon, Safdie, Clarke, DeHaan, Urbaniak, Thirlby, Modine, Peck, Ehrenreich, Blair – the Best Supporting Performance category at any given awards body could belong solely to performers from the film Oppenheimer, each bringing different energies to this massive ensemble project, different character philosophies. The fabric of the film is woven with guarded loving kindness, petty resentments, fatalist violence.

When it finally came down to a tournament of “Oppenheimer Guys” on Twitter, none could best Oppie himself. Murphy will likely take home his Oscar on Sunday – I’ve come to believe this is a generational performance since seeing it, the sort of incredible character work only comparable to Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. There is something to simply bearing the weight of this epic ensemble project, but it’s also a matter of maintaining both an emotional arc and psychological arc that tracks across the film’s diverging timelines. I relate to Oppenheimer’s frozen moments and autopilot martyrdom just as easily as I do his confusion at how other people experience his concept of fidelity.

I read this wonderful piece by Neil Bahadur as I was composing this and I was very struck by his argument for the film’s structural innovation. His words called to mind Cloud Atlas, which uses this sort of technique to draw parallels between different people across different plot lines and invoke a cosmic, psychic link between different storylines. Oppenheimer manages to use that emotional rhythm without ever summoning the question, “well, he didn’t know that yet, why did he do that?”

I haven’t rewatched the film – I don’t know that I’ll ever rewatch it at home, reserving it for the biggest screens imaginable. I remember my Barbenheimer day viewing. I remember the terror I felt in the theater. There is something I find deeply, elementally frightening about nuclear annihilation. I found it impossibly harrowing, but what I’ve taken home with me is the film’s many depictions of people, of love, of petty harm. It’s a painful film in many ways, but also one that makes the argument for why the pain is worth the fight.

Desert Golfing 1

Posted in Uncategorized by

Because this piece is no longer available in The Daily Cardinal without use of intense google-fu, I’m reposting it on my own website. This piece originated in The Daily Cardinal’s Arts section on September 29th, 2014.


Some might say that beginning my residency as The Daily Cardinal’s video games
columnist with an editorial on a mobile game is inauspicious. But amidst the
several titles entangling me, none pull as much focus as the stark “Desert Golfing.”
Described by iOS developer Adam Atomic (“Canabalt,” “Hundreds”) as “the ‘Dark
Souls’ of ‘Angry Birds’”—perhaps the most absurd form of description, akin to the
constant ringing question begging, “When will video games have their “Citizen Kane”
moment?,” whatever that means—it is a spare experience that closely evokes the
beloved RPG’s unforgiving indifference.

The game’s presentation is flat and hot; a light brown sky is delineated against a
rough and imposing dark orange landmass. Like a construction paper collage, the
angular hills defy the often-natural rolling dunes. Other times, the land towers above
the small white ball at impossible angles, revealing the constructed nature of each
hole. When the first prop appears beyond simple land and hole flags, it does so
without fanfare, yet it simultaneously serves as a secret to be uncovered and a
fascinating invigoration, an omen that, yes, there is more to discover in this vast
wasteland.

The game presents itself in the iTunes store with a short haiku: “To see a world in a
bunker of sand/And a heaven in a wild cactus,/Hold infinity in the pocket of your
shorts,/And eternity in Desert Golfing.” It appears to be near endless. At hole 2172, I
have yet to feel a need for the game to end. The furthest hole I can find a peer to have
reached is hole 2884.


Yet the game must have an end, for it is clearly authored and personally manipulated;
unlike “Minecraft” or “Flappy Bird,” each player encounters the same courses (as
made evident only by a handful of diligent players posting screencaps to Twitter) and
no one has yet reached an “impossible” course. The continuing journey towards the
game’s denied conclusion is not so much a race as a pilgrimage. And, yes, those
farthest along the two-dimensional path are reporting that there is something to see
upon the horizon.

Swinging at the golf ball is performed exactly as one might launch a red bird at a Bad
Piggy, albeit the game permits you to place your finger wherever on the screen you
might like. Its difficulty often lies in the treacherous nature of its sand; most golf
games use sand as an occasional trap, impossible to escape without using too many
strokes. “Desert Golfing” offers no such escape from the sand, but as a result offers
advantages one might not have previously perceived in the frustrating particles. Sand
will catch a ball as easily as it will allow it to move each simple grain; the ball is
capable of stopping on an incline if it arrives there at the proper angle, but will
tumble or, worse, bounce if granted a bit too much angular momentum.

A simple score counter hangs atop the screen; rather than offer your average-per-hole
or total strokes per 18-hole course, the game keeps a constant count, tallying your
every swing as you ascend into the hundreds or thousands of holes. In one sense, this
is freeing; there is no end in sight, allowing players to swing to their hearts’ content and improve their scores later, upon easier holes. Simultaneously, every swing takes on meaning towards the hole. There is no resetting the game and “starting over to improve one’s score;” your mistakes are only altered by improved performance over the continuing sands.

Time-wasting is often how mobile games are excused for their simplicity, but “Desert
Golfing” offers a meditative experience. With so little detail, the focus must simply be
on the mechanical; “aim, pull, release, observe, repeat” is its rhythmic drum. Games
often feature this same rhythm; September’s largest release, “Destiny,” offers the
same promise of the sublime upon the horizon and the same sort of “aim, pull,
observe” rhythm, albeit with grander skyboxes and sand and a far smaller geography.
“Desert Golfing” is available on iPhone and iPad for $1.99, and on Android devices for
$.99.

The Book of the New Sun

Posted in Literature, Uncategorized by
Yoshitaka Amano’s cover for The Shadow of the Torturer.

For the past several months, my fun pitch for The Book of the New Sun has been: it’s a science fiction novel where the narrator thinks he’s in a fantasy novel. Severian’s describing his matachin tower Citadel and you’re ho-humming along, and then suddenly he brings up how the bottom of it is a propulsion chamber and you realize it’s a goddamned rocket ship. In the first chapter, he sees a man shoot an evil green light and refers to it first as a “radiant wand” before realizing it’s a laser gun. Severian wields a big sword and rides around on mutant horses called destriers. Yet paying close enough attention reveals that the portrait of the gold-helmeted man he finds in the guild library is a photo of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Now that I’ve finished reading these books, I’d like to offer some more organized thoughts.

This spring, I started skimming science fiction literature. My own creative work has been headed in that direction for some time – still a little early to share the fruits of that labor – and I found comfort in reading the work of those who made historical marks in the community, landmarks that themselves created their own subgenres. I read Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Gibson’s Neuromancer, McCarthy’s The Road, and the first couple books of King’s Dark Tower in short succession, and took my first step into Pratchett’s Discworld with Monstrous Regiment. These were all books that loomed over the entire science fiction genre – their influence and popularity is regularly cited for inspiration and personal recommendation alike. I enjoyed each one of them, which I think are varying degrees of entertaining and profound. But also, sometimes it’s just enough to have lobster-monsters go “dod-a-chick?” and have them walk after your characters.

Our author, Gene Wolfe.

Until a podcast by a few critics I like picked up Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, I’d never heard of the saga or Wolfe himself. No one I’ve had a conversation with knows these books either, which surprises me only a little. You can find quotes from Le Guin, Ellison, Disch, and Gaiman all declaring Wolfe a master of fantasy fiction. You can find them calling him “a modern-day Melville,” “the greatest writer in the English language today,” Proust meets Beethoven, and Wolfe’s prose holds up to the highest scrutiny. It is gorgeous, thoughtful, musical work, and it works equally well for action and introspection. But these books are an odd, challenging read with a genuinely craven protagonist, and I think it’s telling that the highest acclaim I can find for these books is in deep genre spaces or on 4chan’s greatest books of all time.

The Book of the New Sun is quickly described as a science fiction/fantasy saga of four books written by an engineer and Catholic convert reckoning with the more grotesque mythology of scripture and its exegesis. On a dying Earth (“Urth”), a boy named Severian is raised by a guild of imperial torturers in service of a divine ruling Autarch – when Severian betrays this guild’s laws, he is exiled and set on an adventure that will put him directly at the center of Urth’s fate. While our narrator Severian claims that his betrayal was that he “showed mercy to a woman he loved,” this is one of the many half-truths Severian will offer us.

Before I get into the mess of Severian, I’ll introduce the mostly delightful cast of characters Severian meets, and the pulpy thrill of the adventures he gets into. There’s the traveling actors Dr. Talos and Baldanders, who at first seem to be a match for The Princess Bride’s Vizzini and Fezzik, that rope Severian into a 16th century morality play. For a time, Severian travels with a veteran sailor named Jonas, who has a nonstop bucket of bizarre aphorisms and a knowledge of spacefaring monsters like the hydra-bat notules. He travels from time-traveling greenhouses to underground cities of man-apes, fights a Monster Manual of fire-breathing salamanders whose heads bloom like a flower right before they unleash their scorching torrent, meets aliens in masks and witches in rituals. In the second book, I think he gets ambushed six times, mostly because he’s so lost in the sauce of his philosophizing that he simply fails to pay attention to his surroundings.

Don Maitz’s cover for Sword & Citadel, a compilation of the second two novels (these are the edition I read.)

Runs in the second and third book fly by where a full two hundred pages are made up of rip-roaring good times. Many of the coolest fantasy ideas I’ve ever read occur over a single chapter, and while Severian reflects on them, it’s on to the next leg of the adventure. The book takes us from garden parties to daring escapes to monsters and monarchs without any room to breathe – even within the picaresque novel formula, there’s significantly less quiet between moments of serious impact and importance. There’s a lot of incident in these books, and very little of it isn’t reflected on by our narrator. Severian repeatedly reminds us that he has a “perfect memory,” except for all the times he doesn’t and all the times he isn’t paying attention because he’s too busy thinking about how badly he’d like to sleep with just about any woman in front of him.

I enjoy a story about a freaky little creep. There are times where Severian pushes the boundaries of that, either because he’s so casual about it (maybe never moreso than sexual violence he commits in the second book) or because some of his longer digressions point toward conclusions I find distasteful. Especially in the third and fourth novels, Wolfe advances a form of Christian Science through Severian’s musing, working to reconcile his own (self-described) “rational” beliefs with the beliefs of his Catholic wife. It advances arguments against “science gone awry” with panicked allegories to plastic surgery, cloning and genetic modification, and argues that ungoverned science will lead to moral degradation.

Jim Devona’s art commissioned for the Book of the New Sun book club Alzabo Soup podcast (which I have not listened to.)

Severian’s value system is entirely warped by an institution which has made him monstrous, and he will go on to be a murderer, executioner, rapist, bigot, serial traitor, and self-mythologizing oblivious teenager. However, our narrator is loquacious, introspective, philosophical, and significantly more attentive to the emotions others experience than the character we see Severian to be in his actions with other people. As we keep reading, we come to understand how he has changed so dramatically in what he repeatedly reminds us is only a matter of months – the majority of the story’s action, barring the first eight or so chapters which loosely flit between the beginning of the story and Severian’s boyhood prior, occurs over the span of roughly a single year.

There are direct and indirect references to the life of Christ and The Confessions of St. Augustine throughout, as well as attempts to reconcile more literal exegetical readings of Catholic literature and sacrament. While Severian’s own life, as he tells it, resembles many incidents in the life of Christ, I would not go so far as to say he is meant as a Christ figure himself, but a study of how even the cruelest and most selfish of young men, raised in a world built to prevent him the path to righteousness, might become at least a more complicated man. I was not raised Catholic and likely miss a good amount of the philosophy and scripture Wolfe is working through, though I do know some of Augustine. Severian is not nearly so penitent for his evils. He tells them very plainly, without beseeching a higher power to cleanse him of sin, and often offers excuses and justifications for his actions. Alongside them, he tries to find meaning in it all.

It’s in this balance that The Book of the New Sun finds itself a gripping read. It has serious ideas written about seriously, but also wants to make sure it has room for a little green man from the future who’s scamming people with false prophecy. Not all of those serious ideas are agreeable, tastefully explored, or especially profound, but the combination with pulp adventure and the quality of Gene’s writing is hard to match. Both in terms of philosophical thinking and just pure cool fantasy storytelling, many of the people who love these books basically never stop reading them. If you read these books on my behalf, I’ll be so excited to talk about them with you – for now, I’m taking a break from genre fiction with Lawrence’s The Rainbow.

Takashi Obata’s cover for The Sword of the Lictor.

I’ll leave with a passage from The Shadow of the Torturer’s first chapter, for my money the most beautiful individual moment in these four novels. These words tipped me full tilt into the world of Wolfe, and I hope reading them intrigues one person enough to tip them into Urth’s orbit.

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life – they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”

Welcome To Barbenheimer House: A Three Part Review

Posted in Film by

A surprise retrospective, a lakeside screening of my favorite live-action film (behind only Masaaki Yuasa’s 2004 debut Mind Game), turned my Barbenheimer double feature into a triple. I do not know if the programmers intentionally sought out synthesis between Oppenheimer and Barbie when programming Obayashi’s 1977 cult horror classic House, but it remained an unmissable meeting point between the impossible girlhood of Barbie and the bloody indifference of Oppenheimer.

We began our journey at 10:30am with Oppenheimer in IMAX. This was earlier than I hoped – the AMC management clearly did not receive my psychic relays for an ideal post-lunch 1pm screening, and suffice it to say it left my vibes through lunch afterward in shambles and disarray. Nolan has made his match to Interstellar, two films about the end of the world with vastly different conclusions. Interstellar argues that human ingenuity will face the end of the world and through sheer force of will, warmth, and white-hot blinding love, it will conquer impossible odds and survive. Oppenheimer, instead, argues that human ingenuity and its failure to commit to any ideals will wreak the end of the world – if it has not done so already.

Without the magic tricks of wormholes, dream layers and larger than life comic book villains, Nolan pushes himself into a corner and turns out the best filmmaking of his career. Granted, he’s hired the best of the best in terms of collaborators. Hoyte van Hoytema and Ruth de Jong reunited for some of the desert photography we saw in last year’s best-looking film, NOPE, as Oppie and various companions ride horses through the New Mexico badlands and the Los Alamos Manhattan Project site. Ruth de Jong crafts wonderful, meticulous, memorable spaces alongside newcomer Emin Hüseynov, some based on historical record, others intentionally never recorded. Composer Ludwig Göransson was Tenet’s most valuable player, and he turns in breathtaking work here as well, ratcheting incredible tension and release as we build toward the Trinity detonation. Among the greatest editors alive, Jennifer Lame keeps these sequences legible and also disorienting.

It is insane a film this dour and this nihilistic is being sold as part of the greatest double feature in the history of summer blockbusters. Part of that is that when the pyrotechnics do go off, they maintain a wonderful balance of genuine spectacle and distinct horror. The Trinity test shredded my ego. It made me feel small within my seat. The aching pain of the remainder of the film, carried in Murphy’s once in a lifetime performance, withered me to a trembling husk. Most of my companions did not have such a hard reaction to the film. We made jokes about Joshes Peck and Hartnett, Branagh’s flexible accent work, and lamenting that the Pugh character is saddled with the film’s two worst scenes, the sex scenes no one quite knows what to make of beyond recognizing that it paints Oppenheimer and Tatlock as pseudointellectual assholes. We mostly loved the film.

The real Oppenheimer.

I really do think Murphy is walking an incredible tightrope in this film. To play a man so uncommitted to anything beyond forward momentum shatter upon completing his greatest achievement is difficult enough to make compelling, but on top of that, you have the fragmented timeline presenting ego death Oppie well before we’ve seen him at his most confident. He (and Nolan, and Lame) have managed to make a character arc that works both when considered chronologically and in the sequence the film presents, and they’ve done so without aggrandizing a character who is rightfully called a crybaby and criticized for his inability to commit to any values or moral scruples until he’s already done his worst. “You can’t commit the sin and make us all feel sorry for you,” Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer gets to state near the middle of the film – I don’t find myself ever feeling sorry for him, but once he can see what he’s done, it’s a scathing indictment of the world we’ve built since.

It’s not all the abyss. Nolan gets some hokey jokes in, fills the screen with fun characters, and builds a community that feel like they have genuine relationships, politics, ideas and ideologies. I agree with the sense that there was another hour of the film on the cutting room floor, only sacrificed to get that 70mm print out there, because there’s propulsion around these wonderful characters on the side who never quite get their chance to shine (specifically, Olivia Thirlby and Josh Zuckerman jump out as actors who might have had a bunch of material cut). Matt Damon, Robert Downer Jr, David Krumholtz and Josh Hartnett all get to bring some life back to the film – it’s a pleasure to see Alden Ehrenreich get to play off of a revitalized RDJ. The moment to moment thrills of reunions, breakthroughs, and “men sitting around a table making big decisions” are the stuff I knew Nolan had in him. It’s the ecstatic he reaches into here, and the nuance with which he engages in this film’s politics, that had me very much surprised.

A day that will be remembered.

We continued on to lunch, which took too long to come out, played with pets (including one very heavy cat,) and made our way to Barbie at 5pm. I connected Gerwig to Ang Lee in my review of Little Women, a film which shared a striking humanism and sensitivity for modest joy with the master Lee’s Sense & Sensibility. The most obvious analog to Barbie, then, would be Lee’s Hulk, a formally ambitious, visually impressive adaptation of a seemingly simplistic property that’s being interrogated with more thoughtfulness and purpose than previously. But Lee’s film’s interrogation is achieved by amping the melodrama of the film to a mixture of psychological character study and Greek archetypal mythic storytelling. It digs very deeply into the core relationships with a lot of grimacing and distress, and it offsets that discomfort with its incredibly striking visual sense.

Gerwig goes a different direction here, though I would argue it still matches that humanistic approach. For one, obviously, Gerwig’s film is a sex comedy about the absurdity of gender norms and a political farce about systems of power and oppression. While I think it still very much takes seriously the emotional states of Barbie, Ken, and the two “real world” leads Gloria (America Ferrera, who is really great!) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) it’s not nearly as built upon the Trauma of The Absent Father or The Oedipal Crisis. It trades Freud and Sophocles for intersectional feminism and fragile masculinity, and I’d argue a more pop-focused Twitter rendition of those subjects than Lerner or hooks. (Which isn’t to say Gerwig isn’t reading those books, too – just that what ends up on the screen is broader, more digestible, and familiar to those of us terminally online.)

Stereotypical Barbie and Beach Ken.

But for another major difference between Barbie and Hulk, Gerwig steers clear of declaring a true villain. There are antagonists – Ferrell’s condescending “ally” profiteer, Gosling’s turn as the meatheaded version of Ken – but they never become anywhere near as unsympathetic as Nolte’s Brian Banner, a disgusting snake of a man. And that is, of course, very intentional – Gerwig has spoken about how this film’s feminism is a “rising tides” feminism examining how failure to understand how gender roles work and the standards they enforce sink everyone into the ocean. Gosling really is born to play Beach Ken, a sympathetic but deeply flawed man whose impotence and ignorance are so readily willing to channel into vengeful malice. It’s an arc we’ve been told plays out regularly these days, the alt-right pipeline that we’re told starts from men not being validated for the sexual desire.

It’s in this morass that Barbie sets itself, and it elegantly dances around getting mired in any real-world ugliness for all too long. The longest extended sequence of exploring these themes, Ferrera’s monologue, is somewhere between a “clap-rather-than-laugh” gag suited to the modern comedy scene of Hannah Gadsby and Bo Burnham and a tour de force acting moment for Ferrera. It worked for me, and it’ll work even better for the huge audience of people seeing this that aren’t embedded in daily queer lefty feminist close readings of mass media. By otherwise keeping things relatively compartmentalized, it’s able to keep its levity at the forefront, a lovely confection.

Barbieland!

While picking standout cast members aside from the leads is difficult – I really enjoyed Alexandra Shipp as Book Barbie, Rhea Perlman as Ruth, and Kingsley Ben-Adir as Benvolio Ken – it’s not hard to shower production designer Sarah Greenwood in praise. The Barbieland world looks genuinely incredible – it’s such a wonderful work of production design, and the amount of delight clearly put into making every visual choice work is really astonishing. It’s a degree of visual imagination I certainly wasn’t anticipating out of a Gerwig movie based on her prior work (though Little Women is a great looking film) and it was thrilling to see it come together so wonderfully. There’s also a couple sequences toward the end of the film that invoke the work of Donen and The Archers that I think are special both as staged and as conceived, and it’s really wonderful that they were able to get those scenes in front of so many people.

If I really was going to make the comparison to another film’s success, Barbie isn’t Hulk, nor is it Josie and the Pussycats or Clueless as I’ve seen some people say. Barbie is Austin Powers course-corrected to ensure audiences actually get the joke this time. Austin Powers is an archetype of the sex machine hero of the patriarchy turned into a freaky little goblin, and by 2005 half the male audience just wanted to be Austin and actually would ask women out loud if they “make them horny, baby.” I think Gerwig tunes this film so that everyone understands that while we love to see the Kenergy, we do not want to be Ken. Ken doesn’t want to be Ken. Ken’s going to be Kenough instead.

Also, uh, good soundtrack on this one.

At this point, I was pretty tired. We’d partied a little too hard the night before Boppenheimer anyway, and eating only one meal and some cheese curds was not a recipe for success. But Obayashi’s House is a longstanding personal favorite, and like when I saw Zardoz a few weeks ago (I went long on that one too,) it felt like a personal welcome back to Madison gift for me to see it on a big screen surrounded by friends who’d never seen it before. It was relatively low stress to be reunited with it again, and it really did feel like the appropriate meeting point of the two films I’d seen already.

Obayashi’s history in advertising brings forward the comparisons to Barbie in a visual flair. We see absurdist comedy with stop-motion mechanics, animated backgrounds to live action sequences, flashes of sparkles and color that almost always get a laugh from the audience. But our characters, too, are stereotypes of girlhood popular in the booming shojo market of the period. There’s three named for their personalities, Gorgeous, Fantasy and Sweet, and four named for their hobbies, Melody, Prof, Kung Fu and Mac. Based on how fun Kung Fu is in this film, it’s too bad we never see Karate Barbie in the Gerwig film.

Left to Right: Kung Fu, Melody, Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Prof, and Mac.

These seven friends are planning their summer vacation, when Gorgeous is thrown for a loop. Her father is remarrying eight years after her mother’s death – unfortunately, he’s kept this a secret until the last minute, and introducing his new wife throws Gorgeous into a tailspin. She decides to cancel her family vacation and invite her friends (whose plans were thrown off by an unexpected pregnancy) to her Auntie’s house. This all plays out like a slice of life comedy, not unlike some of the TV dramas still being made today. There are cut-ins, zooms, even title cards clarifying all the names about twenty minutes in. It’s really, really charming stuff, and it lends a layer of safety and camp to the proceedings long before the horror begins.

But the tropes of these friends also end up playing them against one another, never in ways where they are openly fighting, but in ways where they occasionally diminish or dismiss one another’s concerns, limiting their expression. There’s a great scene where the other characters are trying to think logically and exactly mimic Prof’s gait and gesticulations – it’s cute, but also shows how much confidence they lack in themselves. Prof also gets hit with a “you’re so pretty without your glasses” remark that doesn’t register with her as meanspirited, but it is striking. Mac is probably the hardest to swallow – her thing is eating too much, and the other girls make comments about her weight (which she objects to frequently!) Fantasy really gets the worst of it, constantly having her witnessing the supernatural horror which will swallow them up as her daydreaming and imagining things. If these roles weren’t so defined, they wouldn’t be so easy to entrap – and Auntie’s magic snares don’t have to work very hard to pull them to their dooms.

The first piece of inspiration for this movie – Obayashi’s daughter being afraid of a “killer mirror.”

House’s connection to Oppenheimer may be a little more subtle, but it’s a matter of understanding the horror of the film. In an early sequence, Gorgeous shares the backstory of her Auntie in the form of a silent film all the girls watch together. She’s a young woman who became affianced to a young doctor in a small town. The young doctor is drafted into World War II – he promises to return to her, and she promises to wait for him. When he’s shot down, she decides to wait for him for the rest of her life in the titular house, and after her sister is married, she waits alone. And she’s really, truly alone – the last time Gorgeous has seen Auntie was ten years ago, when Gorgeous’s mother was still alive. When Auntie receives the note of her lover being missing in action, we see blood fall from her hands and a baby cry – we hear this baby’s cry again late in the film, during the climax, when a deep blow has been done to the ghost running the house.

This backstory frames the film’s central haunting as a tragedy. After the war, this widows who survived her dead was paid no real mind – if her pain prevented her from simply finding another willing man, she was isolated and abandoned. In a moment where Fantasy frames this devotion as romantic, the film cuts to the atomic bomb. Obayashi himself was a child of Hiroshima, losing all his friends in the bomb at age 7. A diary found toward the end of the film reads,  “There are no young women in the village now. I’m all alone.” This is ambiguous, as it may have been written before Auntie died and became the witch-spirit haunting the old house, or it may be after she’s eaten all the young women who were left. This violence against Auntie, the lack of care paid to unmake this single-minded devotion, creates a cycle of violence and misogyny which leads to her quite explicitly becoming a predator upon the virginal women who she entraps in the house. It is a chain reaction, the violence begetting violence beginning with the war and ending upon seemingly kind, innocent young women who know nothing more than the basics of history book lessons in school.

The train scene.

It is this sadness which underlies House’s scares, and yet Obayashi maintains incredible levity throughout the film. The visual invention on display and his incredible management of tone (including the expert use of whiplash) is the anchor through what is, admittedly, a story told in bizarre sequence and, underneath the effects, a pretty sad conceit. The aforementioned sequence in which Gorgeous tells her Auntie’s story is preceded by a child reading a picture book about the trains of Tokyo – it zooms in, and briefly, the film becomes animated in the style of the picture book, zooming along past Mount Fuji. When the background changes to a grassy glade, Sweet leans in to ask Gorgeous about her Auntie – they talk about this in front of the animated background, beginning the story, before cutting to Auntie’s story. There’s dancing skeletons, carnivorous pianos, bucket-butt slapstick, butt-biting and cats, cats, cats.

The fact remains no one else could possibly have made House. In order to replicate the feeling of it, they had to release two epics on a single day. Anyway, do Oppenheimer before Barbie. You’ll need the Kenergy before going to bed.

skwad

The 22 Best Films of 2022

Posted in Film by

It’s sort of hard to deny “the film of the year” is Everything Everywhere All At Once, regardless of your personal attachment to it. The widespread love for its incredible cast, its Rick & Morty-esque plotting and humor (it’s The Matrix with hot dog fingers), and its willingness to go where Marvel’s own Multiverse of Madness failed to explore has landed it in constant conversation since release. I adored Yeoh, Quan, and Hong in the film, and there were several sequences I’ll think about for a long time.

I also struggled with some of its depiction of homophobia, and the centering of Evelyn’s growth and redemption in that relationship rather than Joy’s trauma. Maybe a good review would help me think through that aspect of the film. I’m hopeful someday that, with some distance, some of the more heated responses to criticism I’ve seen wind down, and the total dismissal of the film that anger’s earned can heal. I think films grow when people talk about them, and right now it’s hard to have a conversation. It’s probably winning multiple awards on Oscar Sunday including Best Picture, and it’ll be a worthy winner.

This year, when many of the “best films” started to feel more terminally online than ever and discussion of so many films devolved into various inane (and sometimes insane) culture wars, I asked myself repeatedly whether or not I would bother writing my Top 22 of 2022. I imagined myself a dragon hoarding my gems, beckoning people into my lair to look but not touch. The main reason I decided to go forward with it is pretty simple: I enjoy doing it and it’s one of the few types of writing that comes pretty easily for me these days. If anyone else enjoys reading it, I’m happy to hear about it.

Honorable Mention: action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi

Dir. Tim Rogers
YouTube

Hyperthymesia is a rare neurological condition that results in excruciating, highly detailed recall of a lifetime of memories. The writer, director, and narrator of this documentary, Tim Rogers, experiences this condition, and he takes us on a tour of different parts of his life. Where Jon Bois and his team at Secret Base are innovating the presentation of narrative with their documentaries in Dorktown, Rogers fleshes out their emotional content.

What is on its surface a six hour review of a slice of life video game about a childhood summer (think Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley with a little more story and less to do) is instead mostly a deeply researched personal essay about how we relate to co-workers, memories of where we grew up, and an afflicting neurological condition. He travels back to childhood hometown – he films at all the places he made summer memories, finding that sometimes, they rebuke his investment. It’s my belief that Rogers has ability beyond his hyperthymesia – he is a phenomenal writer, one of my favorites in personal essay, before he translated that talent to criticism or filmmaking.

It’s a big ask to put a six hour video game review of a game never released in English on a “best films” list. The game review stuff is a blast! But it’s a lot of discussion of beetle battling for the average filmgoer. Letterboxd only briefly had the video available to log as a film before removing it a couple weeks later.But it would be disingenuous not to include it as an honorable mention, as it made me laugh hard, feel deeply, and has ingrained several phrases in my brain as gifts I won’t forget any time soon.

A hearty “see you later” to 3000 Years of Longing, Athena, Bones & All, Both Sides of the Blade, Catherine Called Birdy, Death on the Nile, Deep Water, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Eo, Il Buco, Men, Nanny, Neptune Frost, The Novelist’s Film, The People You’re Paying to Be In Shorts, Section 1, The Stars at Noon, There There, Un Couple, The United States of America, Vikram, and The Woman King, as well as a few that I’ve bumped to 2023 due to availability like One Fine Morning, Broker, Master Gardener, Pacifiction, Saturn Bowling, and Showing Up.

22. Turning Red

Dir. Domee Shi
Disney+

One thing that’s so impressive about Shi’s work, both of Turning Red and her short Bao, is that she manages to combine impeccable good vibes with genuine inner turmoil and interpersonal conflict. She brings her Chinese immigrant experience to her work, filling it with personal details where Pixar has historically used fantasy, and the fun goes totally off the wall when you’re just celebrating how teenagers get crushes and dance around. On a technical level, Shi understands her animation touchpoints better than any prior Pixar director, and she’s able to make more elastic,expressive, well-paced visual comedy than anyone at the studio ever has managed. There are direct references, too – the Sailor Moon and Rumiko Takahashi jokes are loving and knowing – but it’s in small animation choices that Shi’s expanding the vocabulary of CG animation with that familiarity of anime.

21. Sharp Stick

Dir. Lena Dunham
Hulu

I’m not a Girls watcher. I’ve seen the opening scene of the pilot in a class a decade ago (I liked that!) and the first twenty minutes of Tiny Furniture (I hated that!) Sharp Stick’s at least as divisive as anything she’s made, but I can’t totally tell why. Centered on a pretty lovely breakthrough film performance by Kristen Froseth, it’s a sex comedy about a neurodivergent young adult who decides to begin exploring her sexuality by hooking up with a married man (a never-better Jon Bernthal,) The film is at its best when it’s about their relationship (and Dunham as the cucked pregnant wife) but the whole thing is very funny and well performed. Unlike some similar films (Wetlands, Raw, Nymphomaniac) this never gets too gross or too punishing to stay light and, without spoiling anything, optimistic about sexuality.

20. Armageddon Time

Dir. James Gray
Peacock

Armageddon Time is a messy film, the autobiography of James Gray that takes on assimilation, class difference and racism in late 70s New York. Its vulnerability exposing some clumsy understanding of privilege and identity that doesn’t surprise me coming from a fifty-something filmmaker thirty years distant from the community he grew up in. I find valuable conversation in this film’s honesty in letting its characters make mistakes and honesty about the sometimes uncomfortable assumptions Gray continues to make looking back. The film looks back with beautiful autumnal images and music, and I’ll forgive the indulgence of getting great, funny performances from Anne Hathaway and Anthony Hopkins as your progenitors on the behalf of having Jeremy Strong play your father as Ray Romano. This film is less ambitious than Gray’s last two films, The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra, but unlike those films, I think the mess works in the film’s favor.

19. Kimi

Dir. Steven Soderbergh
HBOMax

The rogue of HBO Max returns with another quick and dirty genre thriller, following up last year’s No Sudden Move with a slapper of a paranoia conspiracy. Lots of people will argue on the behalf of its themes about technology surveillance, its COVID setting, its fear of Big Tech, but I don’t really think Kimi tells most viewers anything they don’t already know. The fun is in just how cleverly this film uses these elements to tell an unpredictable story in exciting and bold ways – one chase sequence midway through the film uses the camera in a way I can only describe as ecstatic. Kravitz is great, too, even better here than her turn as Selina Kyle, playing a fun fuck-up of a character that’s easy to root for even as she’s being openly rude.

18. Ambulance

Dir. Michael Bay
Amazon Prime

I am not one of those people who will constantly fight for Michael Bay’s place at the table in action filmmaking. I couldn’t even finish Bad Boys. I don’t really care about The Rock or Armageddon all that much beyond Affleck’s commentary snippet. And I don’t remember the two Transformers movies I bothered to watch beyond walking out of Revenge of the Fallen thinking “golly, that was really racist” and getting a text from the girl I had a crush on that Michael Jackson had died while I was in the theater.

Ambulance is delightful action filmmaking. I had such a hard time picking a clip, there are so many good ones that are so fun and inventive. There’s a weird beauty to the way it handles its characters, too, a nonjudgmental stance of belief that the difference between a good guy or a bad guy with a gun is something that changes minute to minute. That stance allows you to constantly be shifting in allegiances as the characters make decisions, which is good, because if you never got to relish being on Jake Gyllenhaal’s psychopathic allegiance, the movie would be denied one of its better pleasures. As action, it’s just rip-roaring speed, splashing through ideas with unmatched quickness. And the bullets hit hard and the crashes hit harder. In a lot of ways, Bay’s recaptured the vibe the Fast & Furious movies had when they were still actually funny and still actually about car chases.

17. Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb

Dir. Jon Bois
YouTube

More and more, film fans around the world are starting to notice – Jon Bois, the funnyman who made a reputation for himself as an artist of the absurd, is swiftly becoming a truly innovative expert filmmaker. His experimentation in presenting hours upon hours of sports stats in a way that’s digestible, easy to understand as a story, and remains visually interesting is the sort of thing that’s going to be taught in classrooms sooner rather than later.

I had never heard of Dave Stieb before watching this doc – I now have a strong understanding of his career, the peak in the early 80s that should have gotten him a Cy Young award, the latter day fall after injury and public embarrassment. Bois actually takes a new tactic with Captain Ahab – unlike The Bob Emergency, Captain Ahab “sticks to sports,” not relying on contextual history of city politics, institutional racism, fan culture. Even the book Stieb wrote about his own life only gets mentioned in passing here and there. This is a sports story first and foremost, about a guy who almost made the top rung over and over again, a thrilling series of victories and occasionally crushing defeats. It’s a story of small moments with large surprises. As a wise man once wrote, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

I admit, I fell behind on the Dorktown docs – The History of the Atlanta Falcons, The People You’re Paying To Be In Shorts, and Section 1 are all sitting in my queue, waiting to get chomped down. Maybe I’ll feel silly highlighting this one as my favorite when I look back. In the meantime, it was among the most fun I had with a movie all year.

16. The Eternal Daughter

Dir. Joanna Hogg
VOD

A stolen film, made guerilla at a Welsh hotel estate, Joanna Hogg managed to sneak out this little ghost story with one of our great “Having A Great Year” actors, Tilda Swinton. Tilda plays both a filmmaker and her mother, vacationing at a former family home while they process Dad’s passing. While there’s some eerie moments, ghostly images, and some striking thriller lighting, The Eternal Daughter is very much a drama about grief and the memories we sometimes pass down when it’s too late. Some people have complained the central reveal is “too obvious,” but I take that as a gift anyway – it’s obvious only because it’s so openly the thematic point the film is building toward, and it’s a beautifully expressed reveal all the same, one of the best scenes of the year. It’s a very cozy film, one I can imagine only growing as a rainy day classic when you need a good cry.

15. We’re All Going To The World’s Fair

Dir. Jane Schoenbrun
HBOMax

The internet is a cruel place to be a child. I don’t so much mean for reasons of stranger danger or exposure to adult material. Rather, it’s difficult to learn how to navigate safely when your ideas are formed by a lack of life experience, and to learn to perform confidence while surrounded by the grown folk who made the rules. We see this a lot with current discourse around Gen-Z, whether it’s a tiktok arguing that “all sex scenes are bad” or a half-formed political tweet that we later find out was made by a 14 year old. As someone who used to post a lot of Beatles lyrics and desperate pleas for my friends to message me so I wouldn’t feel so lonely, I’m glad that I never embarrassed myself in a way that felt really dangerous.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair escalates that into genuine fear. An online horror roleplay that starts to blur between “a game” and horrific reality. Everyone’s just playing along, right? Schoenbrun really captures that feeling of alienation, of trying to fit in. They’ve openly discussed how the film relates to their coming out as trans, and the feeling of trying to figure out the rules is universal. Anna Cobb gives a bravura debut, reminiscent of parts of Elsie Fisher’s nervous, nerve-wracking turn in Eighth Grade. It also nails the online horror creepypasta vibe, as someone who’s spent way too much time watching Slenderman YouTube series. I almost made one of those in college, too.

14. Avatar: The Way of Water

Dir. James Cameron
In Theaters

Never count out Big Jim. The man’s just got storytelling in his bones. Avatar: The Way of Water, which somehow manages to have a nonstop hour long battle sequence as its ending, is so full of joyful scenes of children playing, learning, dancing. He understands that to make the audience invest in the fight for Pandora, he needs to show its beauty and the way it takes care of its people. Eywa delivers – especially in the high frame rate 3D theatrical presentation, the pleasures of this alien world beat mighty. What shocked me most is how much I connected to the characters and performances on this round – Weaver as Kiri is an outrageous, special performance, taking advantage of the dissonance between Weaver’s speaking voice and Kiri’s insecure maturity, but I loved Jake and Neytiri, Lo’ak, Spider, Quaritch, and of course Payakan. That third act, nonstop action, features Cameron borrowing from every single one of his best films and firing it back for an encore, and it only gets more and more exciting as it goes.

13. Top Gun: Maverick

Dir. Joseph Kosinski
Paramount+

Okay, so don’t count out Touchdown Tom, either. He’s winning back almost everybody who can look past his personal history at this point, and it’s for two reasons: he’s still a great actor, and he genuinely cares about this shit. There’s a humanism inherent to Cruise’s work these days, one that believes in human ingenuity over drones and programs. That plays uncomfortably with Top Gun: Maverick‘s allegiance to institutions, even if Mav himself doesn’t play by the rules. But it also allows for a scene like Kilmer’s, which I think is an outrageously moving piece of acting. And it allows for the outrageous practical stunt emphasis, putting cameras on fighter jets. Every takeoff is just this unbelievable adrenaline boost. I wish it were less brown and grey (the main way it’s worse than the original is the lack of natural sunlight and color) and I wish the songs were better. I’d watch it again tomorrow if you asked.

12. Benediction

Dir. Terence Davies
Hulu

Catty poets haven’t been depicted this well since Campion’s Bright Star, but even that film’s depiction of male devotion isn’t the openly gay frisson of Benediction. Lefty artists fucking their way across 20s England, breaking hearts and trading barbs along the way, this film is glib, funny, and apocalyptic. There’s no happy ending imagined for these gay men other than settling down, marrying a beard and hopefully finding stability or God by the end. This film shows the cultural institution of being afraid to love someone else openly and the sweeping silence of that choice. Jack Lowden plays the impossible-yet-real Siegfried Sassoon, mostly known in real life for his poems rallying against World War I – the film only begins when he’s already been medically discharged to a psychiatric facility, and very quickly his best work is behind him. It’s sort of like The Last Days of Disco if the yuppies were all in the closet and much more genuinely intelligent. Its ending is a heartbreaker.

11. The Northman

Dir. Robert Eggers
Amazon Prime

Eggers is a man after my classic English literary heart. The Northman takes Hamlet back to its roots as a revenge play, a bordello of blood ending in a pile of bodies. It’s a thrilling action epic, one with at least ten incredible spectacles I won’t ever forget. There’s a cursed sword in an undead tomb – Bjork plays a witch soothsayer in a one-scene classic – there’s barbarian raids and barbarian football – Willem Dafoe gives our heroes ayahuasca and sends them to see Yggdrasil. It’s an absurd feast for the eyes and ears anchored by one of our culture’s great dramas, albeit without Shakespeare’s language or the court drama that most people consider the heart of that great drama’s greatness. I understand why that’s a hard sell, and like all of the Eggers films so far, it’s quite graphic, blood and guts and boobs and sweat. You do get one great scene of Shakespearean acting – Nicole Kidman turns it on for a climactic monologue to Skarsgard, her best performance in years.

10. Decision to Leave

Dir. Park Chan-Wook
MUBI

Park’s last film, The Handmaiden, may not have been topped since. That was a masterpiece of legendary status, with an incredible story, two of my favorite lead performances of all time, and the confidence of a master filmmaker making the most beautiful images of his career. It was funny, sexy, thrilling, thought-provoking, and a league above anything he’d ever done before.

With Decision to Leave, he’s thrown out the rulebook for where to put the camera. Rather than try to live up to that high watermark, he’s playing a different sport. There’s stuff in here that’s just astonishing, whether it’s presenting alternate takes at the same time in mirrors, a world class murder scene investigation, or the really crazy chase sequence of Park Hae-il chasing a violent criminal, that blew my mind. It’s a delightful romantic mystery, too, sort of a combo of Vertigo and Basic Instinct that expands into unexpected and funny places. At the heart of it all is Tang Wei’s performance as the not-quite femme fatale – she’s one of the greatest actresses alive, and she’s back to her career height with this no-holds-barred charm offensive. I don’t want to spoil anything in case you haven’t seen it – go in not knowing anymore and have a blast.

9. After Yang

Dir. Kogonada
Showtime

I’d be happy for Colin Farrell to win an Oscar this year, but it would be on the behalf of this performance rather than his larger than life persona in The Banshees of Inisherin. After Yang is a sci-fi parable about adoption and synthetic life, one that considers the way transnational adoption separates adoptees from their culture and how that would apply to AI. Colin Farrell’s son, played by a brilliant Justin H. Min, is an android breaking down – he gains access to explore his son’s recorded memories, and considers whether or not to “fix” him or donate the body to science.

The film predicts some of the conversations we’ve had this year about AI and consciousness, both by highlighting the indifference some people show and the perhaps overindulgence in belief others maintain. Its images are neutral, obviously inspired by Kogonada’s namesake Yasujiro Ozu films (Kogo Nada was Ozu’s screenwriter on his more beloved films) and perfectly framed for beauty and pouring light. The above scene, Farrell as a teamaster inspired by Werner Herzog’s quote from the documentary All In This Tea is one of the more insightful looks at appropriation and identity I’ve seen in a film. The film creates a complex emotion, not just a melancholy but a subdued anger, one that took me days to sort through.

8. Elvis

Dir. Baz Lurhmann
HBOMax

The cilantro filmmaker to end cilantro filmmakers – in my book, Baz is a master stylist who cannot be anything but interesting. Elvis is his best film, one that I think shrewdly makes a case for Elvis’s maximalism rather than his musical intuition. Butler plays him as a provocateur and zealot, a man who is sworn to his stage presence and swaying for his audience, his religion his own iconography. He’s a master entertainer, and Butler nails the song and dance to become one of the greatest rock stars of all time, on and off stage. The film is actively engaged with Elvis’s appropriation, both acknowledging that, yeah, there were black artists who supported it at the time, and also showing just how outlandishly you have to stretch that story to make it feel true. Whether it’s Doja Cat showing up in the film soundtrack proper or Eminem showing up in the credits, that conversation hasn’t changed a whole lot, whether it’s Lil Wayne’s shock at Gucci Mane ranking above Em or Doja in racial chatrooms showing feet. I can’t even begin to talk about how this film looks and sounds in the scope of this piece – if you’ve seen it, you know. Perfectly paced, I felt like I was gonna have a heart attack in the theater.

7. Tár

Dir. Todd Field
Peacock

It’s funny that Blanchett and Yeoh have wound up in the battle for Best Actress, as both films are crushingly online. Tár is the Twitter to EEAAO’s Facebook – it’s acidic, pompous, tragic, and inconquerably funny. Specifically, Lydia Tár is like a dril tweet, a main character of the day who cannot stop herself from making the worst decisions possible, a savant whose world we watch crumble like the tragedy of Richard III. I think I’ve told my wife ten different iconic scenes from Tár after she found out the film’s iconic ending, but this week my favorite “Lydia Tár Can’t Help Herself” scene is the scene where she tries desperately to bully her new prey into ordering a salad at her favorite restaurant and is forced to watch this woman (Sophie Kauer, who I would love to have seen nominated alongside Naomie Merlant and Nina Hoss!) devour more meat than she knew was still available in Germany.

The comparisons between Field’s farce and Kubrick are manifold, not surprising because Field was Kubrick’s protégé (as well as Nick Nightingale in Eyes Wide Shut!) but none of Kubrick’s films share more DNA with Tár than Barry Lyndon, the tragicomedy of a fraud you hate from the start. Blanchett is the only actor Field ever considered, planning to throw away the film if she’d refused, and she gives an all-time great character actor performance. But I hope we get to see Lydia again someday – I think she could become one of the great screen characters, reinterpreted by new generations, the most pompous imaginable representative of the old guard and ex-master manipulator.

6. Jackass Forever

Dir. Jeff Tremaine
Paramount+, Amazon Prime

When I first saw the trailer for Jackass Forever, I knew I had to be there opening weekend. It’s the spirit of Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan taken to extreme heights, and they somehow managed to hold back all the film’s best bits from the trailer (except that bear. That bear is just incredible.) I have not laughed that hard at a movie in my lifetime. Johnny Knoxville, who we all agreed is so outrageously hot now that he’s gone gray, is the perfect MC for this gathering of friends to pummel one another’s balls into oblivion. The love they have for one another is infectious, and the trust as they delicately prepare one another to be physically destroyed Yet Again is the heart of the dudes rock movement. The best scene of the year, in any movie, is The Silence of the Lambs, which makes me laugh out loud just to even think about for more than ten seconds. Fucking astonishing.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been flipping Jackass Forever and Tár for months, but ultimately I had to settle on the funnier film landing a little higher.

5. Crimes of the Future

Dir. David Cronenberg
Hulu

The final 2022 film I watched before I began working on this list, I’m still so disappointed that it so briefly played in theaters while I was traveling! I guess I probably should have considered it from the title, but after hearing about The Man Covered In Ears, I assumed Crimes of the Future’s crimes were more biological and less petty in nature. This is, by and large, a satirical neo-noir film, with our central “detective,” performance artist Saul Tenser (a never funnier Viggo Mortensen, I’d watch twenty more movies starring this guy) and his artistic-surgeon-and-maybe-more partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux, the only actress who could have played the role with this careful a balance of resentment, adoration and enthusiasm) walking into shadowy offices and dark alleyways to meet with bio-criminals and inefficient government officiants and unravel a criminal conspiracy.

It’s just joyfully good stuff, combining Cronenberg’s penchant for morphing bodies and machines made of bonebugs and using them to make “a pedal chair that’s supposed to make it easier to digest your breakfast.” Kristen Stewart’s been rightfully highlighted too, as the neurotic, creepy National Organ Registry clerk Timlin, who is so funny with every word she says. The film is the perfect capstone of Cronenberg’s work so far, combining his sense of humor, his talent for production design, his incredible filmmaking, and his more psychological dramas. For a director known famously for One Thing, he’s always had a balanced and varied career (A History of Violence, M. Butterfly, and Cosmopolis may share some of his themes, but they’re in no way horror films) and this film manages to interpolate all that variety into one ur-statement.

4. Inu-Oh

Dir. Masaaki Yuasa
VOD

Supposedly his last feature film, Yuasa’s final statement before retirement cements him as the greatest animator of music in film history. A rock opera about a shamisen player and his yokai frontman, Inu-Oh combines the sonics of Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson into a 99 minute musical odyssey. As with Lu Over The Wall, Yuasa is also telling a story about generational tolerance, the rebellion of the kids who want to push things forward.

Inu-Oh accomplishes that musically, but it also anchors that in gender identity and transgender presentation, finally nailing something Yuasa’s been fascinated by since his debut Mind Game. Avu-chan, the nonbinary actor and singer playing the titular Inu-Oh yokai, is fucking electric to listen to, a vocal performance that immediately makes clear why this band is so popular and why they’re so dangerous. This film nails the political aspect of Elvis’s career better than Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis, taking advantage of this film’s fantastical version of historical setting to tell a story that is surprising, thoughtful, and deftly written. But the great success of the film is the part of the film where five songs play in sequence, advancing the plot and changing scenes without ever having to take a breath for exposition, and the beautiful animation that accompanies them. Yuasa is a master. I selfishly hope it isn’t his last film, but if so, he went out only making legends.

3. Nope

SPOILER WARNING ON THIS CLIP

Dir. Jordan Peele
Peacock

It’s hard to know where to start with these final three films, interchangeable instant favorites that soared above impossible expectations. Peele’s prior two films, Get Out and Us, were my immediate favorites the year of their release, too – one of our funniest guys turned his observational talent toward symbolic, cerebral horror films. NOPE is every bit as thematically laden with purpose and depth, raising conversations about its depiction of media spectacle, race in America, posthumanism, family, and laying claim to influence from Spielberg to anime to the John Ford western.

It’s fucking thrilling to watch, the most tense, “no no no don’t go in there” horror movie I’ve seen in years. It’s aesthetically perfect, with some of the most gorgeous images of silhouettes in nighttime I’ve ever seen, and Abels’ score combining so many layers of influence into a thrill ride. This track, “The Run (Urban Legends)”, is the most pitch perfect fusion of classic Hollywood western scores, his more modern horror movie dissonance, and funk-influenced strings. Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya give the best performances in any movie this year as the Haywood siblings, their bond unbreakable, their chemistry unmatched, OJ’s intense well of emotions unspoken. Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Steven Yeun, these performances are so funny and so well considered. That it’s just as thoughtful and purposeful as Peele’s prior work is why it will stand the test of time.

2. Memoria

Dir. Apitchatpong Weerasethakhul
MUBI International/The High Seas

Tilda Swinton, our protagonist Jessica and the year’s greatest star, can’t stop hearing The Sound. It’s a loud, thudding sound, one she has to work very hard to describe accurately, and no one else can hear it. While living in Colombia to support her sister in the hospital, she explores the university campus, tries to identify the mystery of The Sound, and has some life-changing encounters. Mostly, this is a film of conversations, music, and wandering, a quasi-romance of a world where people care about things.

Without a doubt, Memoria is the most arthouse film on this list. It has long sequences of near-silence, of slowly walking through streets and alleyways. One of its two most climactic scenes is Jessica working with a sound engineer named Hernan to try to replicate The Sound, a thrilling, perfect scene containing the sort of intimate communication we sometimes have with strangers. The other is Jessica meeting another man named Hernan while on a nature walk, recognizing some intimate psychic connection, and watching him take a nap for several minutes. This one is not for the impatient, but it is funny, surprising, meditative, beautiful, and I could feel my mind rewriting its grooves as I experienced something truly profound.

Supposedly, Memoria will never be released for home viewing in the United States. It will “only ever screen in theaters,” concluding a nearly year and a half long roadshow with a one-week encore this January at New York’s IFC Center. I don’t think you need to wait for a revival screening, and the fact that the film is also available for streaming on Mubi internationally indicates to me that the filmmakers don’t really insist either. A VPN would allow you access to Mubi’s international catalog, and I’m hardly going to be shy about recommending piracy of a film that is otherwise impossible for you to see.

1. The Fabelmans

Dir. Steven Spielberg
VOD

I don’t know how this happened. I’m almost mad. I’ve been a longtime defender of late Spielberg, his film Bridge of Spies an immediate classic, but it’s been twenty years since his last true masterpiece, Catch Me If You Can. I knew I’d love The Fabelmans, his story of his own life and the end of his parents’ marriage. I didn’t know I’d think it was his best film ever, that Gabriel Labelle would be the best performance he’s captured in twenty years, that it would have the aesthetic invention of West Side Story combined with the most intimate story he’s ever told us. Spielberg’s told many of the stories it depicts before in interviews, whether it’s the story of him uncovering a brewing emotional affair, his mother’s Peter Pan-esque disinterest in parenting, a chance encounter with an iconic filmmaker that leads to a delightful brief anecdote.

But what becomes clear is that him telling us in words didn’t do it justice – he can only show us. Spielberg here is so outrageously vulnerable because he’s telling this story in the language he speaks better than anyone alive, cinema. He depicts himself as Sammy Fabelman, a savant, an unruly child with a thoughtless gift, an artist who doesn’t know his own strength. That savant tendency exists both on screen as we’re watching a beautiful, incredibly creative film, and also in the films young Sammy directs, Super 8 westerns and war movies where he gets amateurs to Really Act. Through that language, he finally can tell us thoughts he’s been guarding for sixty years, details he noticed in day-to-day interactions, thoughts that mortify him with their indifference and cruelty, thoughts that thrill him with joy and observations of beauty.

It’s by way of that vulnerability that Spielberg is able to treat his characters with his trademark empathy. He doesn’t pull punches, letting everyone have their faults, but he doesn’t abandon them, either, not even the antisemitic high school bullies other movies would use as a cheap trick. He’s told small parts of this story before, and there’s still elements he’s cleaning up to make the film more cinematic. An exchange in the film has his sister ask his father “[Uncle Boris] is lying, right?” and his father responds “He’s telling a story.”

Spielberg opens this film by showing us that young Sammy Fabelman experiences being overwhelmed by a trainwreck scene in The Greatest Show on Earth, and his response as a child is to try to recreate the crash in order to control it, make it “safe.” I don’t know for sure that he’s made Sammy’s life safe, but he put a vision of it on screen, and I’m thankful.

The 21 Best Films of 2021

Posted in Film, Uncategorized by

Half the film lists from this past year have made bold statements about the state of movies. I don’t really have those same thoughts. The movies I love continue to be made, are in production now, are being greenlit. The movies I don’t love continue to make most of the money, but maybe that’s just called turning thirty. The fact is that in 2021, many of my favorite filmmakers made new films, almost all of those films were great, and I had the opportunity to see many of them in a theater if I had wanted to do so.

It feels good to be back at the movie theater. I did not see most of the movies on this list in a movie theater. I’m not sure I typically see most of my best-of list in a movie theater. This isn’t some comment on the state of streaming vs. theaters, or on my own taste. I like my couch. My dog’s here, and if I need to get up and go pee, I won’t miss the climactic death of the film’s leads (as happened at my screening of one of this year’s best films.) My couch is where I’ve watched masterpieces by Tarkovsky, Keaton, Varda, Dunye, Antonioni, etc. And yet it feels good to be back at the movie theater. Heartbreak really does feel good in a place like the movie theater.

While I do keep a spreadsheet with my best actor, best director, best documentary, etc. etc., my picks are hardly so out there that they require special notice. I will identify those when I name the movies that gave me them. Of all the movies that can’t make this list, I’m saddest that Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Malignant slipped away – as far as movies I’d recommend for pure fun, those are the two that I’ve smiled about over and over again.

As for the films I’m saddest I haven’t seen, and hopefully will catch up with someday: I hope to love F9, Memoria, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Saint Maud, Earwig and the Witch, Malmkrog, The Woman Who Ran, French Exit, The Voyeurs, About Endlessness, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, A Hero, Cry Macho, All Light Everywhere, The World to Come, Procession, Belle, The Truffle Hunters, The Night House, Bad Trip, and Azor. No, I did not see Spider-Man: No Way Home. I let Endgame be my offramp from the MCU – 22 of those were enough for me. 

21. Dune

Dir. Denis Villenueve
HBOMax

After repeatedly sharing my distaste for Villenueve’s previous science fiction, I have to be nice to Denis – my fear that he’d sell out Dune’s integrity for emphasis on the Bene Gesserit witches or Game of Thrones-esque scheming were unfounded. Villenueve’s approach to adapting Dune may be humorless, but, for example, allowing Rebecca Ferguson to take such a risk in humanizing the role of Lady Jessica really speaks to him understanding the core tension of the material. I still prefer Lynch’s take, but Villenueve’s Arrakis has such incredible mystic power. I hope he can bring it home in part two.

20. Beckett

Dir. Ferdinando Cito Filomarino
Netflix

The fact that Beckett, one of the most fun films of the year, has been completely buried is a tragedy. A political thriller about a guy (John David Washington) having the worst “vacation” of his life in Greece, this is just fuckup cinema at its finest. What anchors this film is its incredible team – shot, edited, and scored by some of the business, Beckett had me more and more excited as it went along, to the point where its ultimate political message fell aside to just rooting for this sad, broken, constantly frazzled man unwilling to die. If they announced a Beckett 2, I’d be there day one.

It’s crazy that this is the point in the list where the ranking becomes sort of irrelevant – from here on just up to the top 5, every film does exceptional things, and in five years, I could see myself mixing and matching this entire remaining order.

19. West Side Story

Dir. Steven Spielberg

HBOMax

Modernizing West Side Story feels like a foolish errand, and smarter, more appropriate people than me have written about how this film, while better incorporating Spanish, is still failing Puerto Ricans. Beyond that, there are choices I would not have kept – holding I Feel Pretty directly after the rumble without an intermission feels too sharp, moving Gee, Officer Krupke before the rumble makes the second half pretty dour, no matter the metatext Somewhere’s beauty is as a duet!! – but they belie my love for this damn show, and the old Robert Wise film, too. Spielberg’s direction here is often breathtaking. It’s hard to beat the dance at the gym, which is maybe the best scene Spielberg’s captured since the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But…he manages to come close, from the reflective puddle shot in Maria to the street dancing of America. 

18. Undine

Dir. Christian Petzold

Hulu

The third Petzold film in a row to make my year-end list, if Beckett resembles Hitchcock doing North by Northwest, Undine resembles Vertigo. Fate and fantasy intermingle in the love life of Paula Beer’s Undine, but it’s in the staggering unreality of regular life that Undine hits hardest. Watching her speak about Berlin’s urban development only to lose herself in the scale model midway, or attending the bottom of a nearby lake with Franz Rogowski’s Christoph to visit the legendary giant catfish Big Gunther, there is a powerful feeling that the world is too big and majestic to comprehend. The back half retains some of the myth’s tragedy without adapting it beat for beat – like every Petzold I’ve seen, its ending hits a powerful melancholy.

17. The Souvenir Part II

Dir. Joanna Hogg

VOD

Hogg’s prior film, 2019’s The Souvenir, depicts a semi-autobiographical romance with a manipulative addict that ends in grief. I didn’t connect to it – while it was honestly made, I found it uncharismatic. But it was always conceived with this second film in mind, a sequel film in which the fictional version of Joanna Hogg makes a fictional version of The Souvenir, and the process of sorting through her love and pain. This film has more room for light slipping back into Julie’s life, including an electric reprise from Richard Ayoade (a high point of the first, too, but even sharper and more fully drawn here,) funny scenes with Joe Alwyn and Charlie Heaton, some rich and warm visual experimentation that (to me) recalled The Archers and Derek Jarman. That added warmth gives the tragedy of the first film room to hurt deeply. I’m excited to revisit the first eventually and give it more credit, as this film would not work as well if it weren’t earned by the first.

16. Parallel Mothers

Dir. Pedro Almodovar

VOD

Without wanting to spoil this film, because a lot of the fun is in discovering winding corridors, few directors on earth are as good at framing the way love and betrayal can make having the conversations you need to have incredibly complex without taking the film into hysterics. There’s a subdued quality to this almost soap-opera story that makes the film feel quite  He uses this emotional, personal story between two women as an anchor for his more targeted political commentary, a conversation about denial individual and national. Cruz would rightfully win on Sunday for her funny, well-rounded, never withdrawn performance.

Read Alex Bilme’s interview with Almodovar. (warning: some spoilers re: the film’s political content)

15. Benedetta

Dir. Paul Verhoeven

Hulu

I was predisposed to like the “nun sexploitation thriller” by the director of RoboCop and Showgirls, but I’m not sure that description is entirely appropriate. Verhoeven didn’t make an exploitation film, really, but a film about the punishment of believing Too Deeply meeting its match in mania and self-aggrandizement. Protesting the film’s sexual content seems absurd when the film is based on a true account of the persecution of sexuality in the Catholic Church. But also it is actually sexy, and it’s also almost as funny as RoboCop, and it’s also gross and outrageous and righteous in its violence and sexuality. It’s among the most fun movies I watched all year.

Read Veronica Baker on this film as well.

14. The Card Counter

Dir. Paul Schrader

VOD

Contending with the lore of Paul Schrader, the cardshark misogynist who posts incessantly on Facebook while writing forty years of incredible screenplays, is not something I’m equipped to do here. The Card Counter barely even uses his knowledge of poker as it explores the subculture of gambling as the small talk between the scenes of the film’s real target – the torture committed in the name of the United States at Abu Ghraib. The Card Counter explores how perpetrators surviving a system of abuse become classical Bickle-esque time bombs. Oscar Isaac gives his best performance in eight years (since his incredible work in A Most Violent Year) as the dead man walking William Tell.

13. The Last Duel

Dir. Ridley Scott

HBO Max/Hulu

Unfortunately, every clip of The Last Duel I can find sells this movie as miserable and grim – which erases just how funny parts of it can be. Marketed all wrong as a kind of combination #MeToo reckoning and period piece, I know all too well the reasoning behind this film earning deep vitriol. The Last Duel doesn’t quite fail Jodie Comer, but I can’t vouch for the film’s success on her behalf, its politics about sexual violence too pat and its characterization of her lead too neat. More interesting as a study of fraternal attitudes than feminist activism, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck started their careers under Harvey Weinstein’s wing, and this film successfully portrays the way their boys club culture sweeps evil under the rug. Interrogated, too, is Damon’s weird lack of charm: when Ben Affleck groans, “he’s no fucking fun!,” it feels true to the man’s distasteful descent into disconnected bigotry and crypto endorsement. Both men, really, are doing career best work here – Ridley acquits himself well, too, and surpasses that in the titular Last Duel, which is one of the most grueling and visceral action sequences I’ve seen in a long time.

12. No Sudden Move

Dir. Steven Soderbergh
HBO Max

A crime comedy about a fiasco robbery from the director of Ocean’s Eleven should be a slam dunk crowdpleaser, so of course it swiftly vanished from esteem. The fisheye lenses, the Tommy Newman score, the deep bench of supporting performances – it’s almost easy to take Soderbergh for granted, as he’s made one of the best films of the year nearly five years running now (I except 2018’s Unsane but include this year’s Kimi already) and all of them have come out on HBOMax or Netflix instead of in theaters. But, really, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, David Harbour, Brendan Fraser, these stars all make meals of their roles in this just as smaller names Amy Seimetz and Bill Duke do. The ultimate reveal that this is also part of a broad Brockovich-esque corporate conspiracy is the sort of icing on the cake that shows why Soderbergh is one of the best working. He recognizes the way power appreciates power from the streets to the suites – a surprise supporting role that appears toward the end of the film puts a great exclamation mark on this thesis.

11. The Worst Person In The World

Dir. Joachim Trier

VOD

I recently heard this film described as subdued, like “a collection of moments that wouldn’t normally be considered movie-worthy.” This, I think, is insanity. The Worst Person in the World has at least five scenes that are so incredible each would be reason enough to revisit the film twenty years from now on its own. The party where two people “don’t cheat” is one of the sexiest scenes I’ve seen in a movie in years. The film’s first breakup, incredibly real and well acted. A TV interview gone wrong, electric and real. The lead performances from Renata Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum – three of the absolute best of the year.

10. The Green Knight

Dir. David Lowery

Hulu/Showtime

Fog, haze, and hard light define the aesthetic of The Green Knight, setting itself firmly in the selective memory of Boorman’s Excalibur. I know some people feel this didn’t cohere to a greater whole for them, but I really treasured the way this characterized Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain. Lowery expands with fantastical interludes that highlight the psychedelic danger of the Arthurian world and anchor his interest in Gawain’s sexual encounters with Alicia Vikander’s Essel. The ending is a proper “best of both worlds” moment, a study of fatalism against bravery.

9. Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon A Time

Dir. Hideaki Anno

Amazon Prime

For starters, no, you cannot dive straight into this last chapter of the Neon Genesis Evangelion story. The anime saga about children piloting giant robots (that turn out not to be robots) has come to a head with Thrice Upon A Time, the fourth film in the “rebuild” saga. These films represent a different kind of remake. These films start quite literally shot-for-shot adapting the TV anime, but, slowly, small changes butterfly effect until massive alterations to the timeline send the second half of this story into entirely new directions. This finale takes Evangelion somewhere it never had space for – it creates hope for kindness and life surrounded by the monstrous apocalypse at the heart of this series. The Evangelion saga has remained among the most visually impressive, well-acted, emotionally intense animated works for over twenty five years – somehow, this final film still manages to surprise.

8. Annette

Dir. Leos Carax
Amazon Prime

Dumb guy pitch for Annette – for like two hours, the most outrageous shit imaginable happens and is also a rock opera. In this world, babies sing and fly, sex is an act of reverent sacrifice, comedians twirl around in a boxer’s robe and unleash verbal abuse on their audiences. There’s murder, sex, music, dance, comedy, a halftime performance at the Hyperbowl. Simon Helberg of The Big Bang Theory gives maybe one of the five best performances of the year as an accompanist and conductor. And underneath all of that, Carax swirls dreams, self-doubt, grief, power plays, and parenthood’s obligations. Of every film this year, this is the most audacious.

7. Old

Dir. M. Night Shyamalan

VOD

“The beach that makes you old” is an incredible concept for a movie. But it isn’t an obvious fit for a summer horror movie – rather, it better fits an existential drama, one about how bodies affect our relationships to one another and ourselves. Shyamalan finds a balance between his stilted, mannered dialogue and intense emotion while still including a handful of really greasy-handed grossout horror gags. There’s an incredible anger in this film at the feeling that we lost the best years of our lives for reasons totally out of our control that I found very relatable. The film is directed with an incredibly athletic pacing and top shelf cinematography by Mike Gioulakis, without which the story could not have such heart. I recognize that this film is too ridiculous for some people, that the dialogue doesn’t work, in the same way Twin Peaks The Return and Showgirls chase people away. But, boy, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it.

6. Licorice Pizza

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

VOD

Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are my paired favorite performance of the year – they both excel when they’re apart, but they also could not exist without one another’s presence. Cooper Hoffman is a magician. The son of maybe my favorite actor of all time obviously had this role tailor-made for him, but he still manages to summon up incredible life for Gary Valentine, from limitless charm to bewildered fear of a sudden end. Alana Haim, meanwhile, plays such forward arrested development, richly funny while also playing insecurity and occasional petty meanness. Their relationship, obviously one we’d condemn in real life, still feels wholly real, mutual, frustrating, and yet clearly we see why they come back to one another. Full of brief supporting turns that had me howling with laughter (one discourse-dominating omission aside), Licorice Pizza could do the same as every other PTA and eventually steal this whole list.

5. The Power of the Dog

Dir. Jane Campion
Netflix

Listening through the Blank Check miniseries on Jane Campion’s films this winter, The Power of the Dog is maybe Campion’s most straightforward film since The Piano. For how ambiguous its story can be, it’s a film that takes great pains to make sure you understand how to feel about each character as you’re watching. It’s also probably the culmination of her work and her best film? Compared to other Campion films, this one operates more on an architectural ecologic level, where the takeaways for the film aren’t necessarily as direct on the story so much as the ways characters respond to one another’s circumstances. The little moments of characters alone doing soft stims – Cumberbatch blowing bubbles, Smit-McPhee rubbing his comb, the tragic fate of Dunst’s Rose – belie a film about seeking input in a lonely, quiet world. I relate to the way this film portrays how difficult it can be to sit with your thoughts.

4. On-Gaku: Our Sound

Dir. Keiji Iwaisawa
VOD
Easily the most obscure film on my entire list, On-Gaku Our Sound is a crowdfunded anime film almost entirely made by its director. That independence allows him to make an extremely funny anime about a high school delinquent trio that decides to start a…masculine “rock” band that blows almost its entire animation budget on rotoscoping incredible musical sequences. It’s not a deep film, though it does address concerns of burnout, stage fright, and the trap of rejection. Its heights are largely in how hard it made me laugh and the fact that the final musical performance in this film is just the best work of animation I’ve seen in a film since Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. I could watch this thing a hundred times.

3. The French Dispatch

Dir. Wes Anderson
HBO Max

My friend Jack Read pointed out the moment in The French Dispatch where after a life of violence, the two actors portraying the mentally disturbed violent convict Moses Rosenthaler trade places. Tony Revolori, seated in his cell, looks straight at the camera – Benicio Del Toro enters from behind, taps his shoulder, and takes his place in the chair, is given Moses’s signature necklace, and Revolori walks off camera. It’s a sweet moment only Wes Anderson seems to trust he can include in a film – it’s a technique you might see in staged theater, but by creating a film that exists in aesthetic reality rather than any one logic, he can depict it without derailing anything he has happening.

Artist convicts, student revolutions, food critics getting wrapped up in kidnappings – at first blush, the soul, comedy, and artistry of The French Dispatch overwhelmed my ability to study the way Wes Anderson’s new anthology looks at the role of police brutality, oppression, and the role of a free press, but at this point, I’ve gotta say it’s just the whole package. Jeffrey Wright’s food critic is my MVP, great as he’s ever been, evoking both Orson Welles and James Baldwin without ever betraying that both could be egotists. I would have been happy to see this in a theater anyway just for the shot of the cats of Ennui and the illustrated covers of The French Dispatch in the credits – Anderson remains maybe the most influential and iconic visual artist of the 21st century, and there’s no reason style can’t be substance. That it’s Wes Anderson’s best live action movie since The Life Aquatic was a pleasant shock.

2. The Matrix Resurrections

Dir. Lana Wachowski
HBOMax

The moment I saw the trailer, I said “this is gonna be the greatest film of all time.” It…wasn’t quite that great, but it was a hell of a lot closer than I feared. The first act of this film is as on-the-nose a media satire as anything in Speed Racer, but Keanu plays the emotional reality of a day-in, day-out loop with outsized honesty and a great sense of humor. The “White Rabbit” montage is maybe the definitive pandemic scene in a movie. As this extends into its more science fiction second and third acts, it extends to come to the universal thesis of Wachowski films – love conquers all, and when there is The One, there are always those who carry him.

And, of course, as Lana Wachowski has said, this is a film about contemplating stepping off the platform. An incredible moment of this film is about how survival inspires survivors. I deeply connected to the way this film addressed the despair of cognitive distortions that make a world seem totally empty and the suicidal impulse of meaninglessness. I saw it a little later than a couple people who wrote incredibly on the subject. I’ll link them here.

Declan
Sam Bodrojan

1. Drive My Car

Dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

HBOMax

Sometimes, it really is just obvious. Hamaguchi’s three hour low key drama about a staging of Uncle Vanya and the secret things we keep inside is just the best film of the year. The core narrative of the film expands on Haruki Murakami’s short story in which a driver and passenger discussing the passenger’s relationship with his deceased unfaithful wife and the man he caught her having sex with – Murakami’s story is blunt, frustrating, uncut Murakami tabloid gossip. Hamaguchi gives all four of these leads far more humanity, depth, their own secrets and histories. The performances in this film are full with everything I want to see in a performance.

And yet it’s the portion of the film that is entirely Hamaguchi’s invention that really blew my heart open – the multilingual performance of Uncle Vanya, attempting to break open the barriers of theatrical convention, characters conversing without conversing. I can’t intellectualize why this depiction of people working so hard together to make something new spoke to me so deeply – multilingual theater as a real concept dates back decades, as you can find searching for thesis statements on the subject. But this film dramatizes that production, addresses the difficulty that can come with condescension between different languages (especially towards mute languages – a powerful conversation midway through the film is between our Japanese protagonist and a speaker of Korean Sign Language) and never takes for granted that this vision would be “easy.” It moved me very deeply – the final performance is the most moving scene this year in film. I finished these three hours and thought to myself, “I could watch this again in its entirety right now.” 

Key Text Introduction: Yakuza Kiwami

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Yakuza Kiwami - Kiryu standing at the entrance to Tenkaichi Street.

Crime stories often invoke familiar themes. Fraternity and loyalty, duty vs. intimidation, the corruption of power, the decay of an institution. The Yakuza saga, now eight core games and numerous spinoffs and adaptations, begins with the story of Kiryu Kazuma, an up-and-coming enforcer for the broader Tojo Clan’s Dojima Family, surrendering ten years of his life to take the fall for a murder he didn’t commit. Yakuza Kiwami, released in 2017 alongside prequel Yakuza 0, commits to retelling the story of the original 2005 Yakuza as part of an effort to revitalize the franchise.

Yakuza’s story, that of Kiryu Kazuma breaking away from his foster brother Nishikiyama Akira, is the story of a man realizing he’s not young anymore. It’s the story of a man realizing that in order to protect the people he loves, including a young girl looking for the woman he left behind when he went to prison, he can’t protect everybody. It’s also the story of how getting something always comes with a cost, and Kiryu ends up spending a lot of time solving other people’s problems. Kiwami is a messy story, one full of tangents and setpieces before arriving at a more dramatic conclusion.

An introduction to Yakuza’s combat, emphasizing the four different battle stances (Rush, Brawler, Beast, and Dragon.

Where Kiwami succeeds is as an action game and an open world. The core brawling combat of Yakuza Kiwami, with four separate movesets divided into “stances,” is a delight to play and rewards thoughtful preparation and adaptation to different opponents. Every enemy you fight is named, helping to build the sense of place Kamurocho is building. And Kamurocho, the red-light district that is home to several Yakuza games, is bustling with life, sidequests, and teeming with fun minigames and details. Wandering around from the taller buildings in the Hotel District to the tight alleyways of the Champion District, you’ll find everything from slot car racing to batting cages. It’s a gorgeous rendition of city streets, and the loving attention to detail in each step of Yakuza’s world helps to ground its beloved characters.

Since the revival of the Yakuza franchise, I think most people are familiar with the games’ heightened sense of comic absurdism and representations of positive masculinity. It’s true – Kiryu is the definition of a criminal with a heart of gold, a man whose head isn’t always on straight but whose most powerful traits are his sense of empathy and his unbeatable fists. The Dragon of Dojima has helped more victims of abuse and exploitation, offered more empathy to queer people on the end of their ropes, and nonjudgmentally entertained strange hobbies or kinks more than any other character in gaming history. The colorful world of Yakuza leads you to many strange corners, but it generally comes away with a smile or accepting laugh rather than reflecting a close minded worldview.

A side-by-side comparison of a cutscene featuring Majima Goro – lacking English subtitles, this shouldn’t be considered a spoiler.

Yakuza Kiwami…isn’t as kind as its sequels. While the new content in the remake reflects that generosity in spirit (and a couple dated sidequests have been rewritten to match the modern series’ tone and inclusivity,) the core story of Yakuza is being told as it was in 2005. A comparison of cutscenes between the 2005 and 2017 games reveal that most of the main storyline is in fact replicated shot-for-shot in the modern engine. That means that the story hasn’t improved on any weaknesses present in the story from the beginning, and that includes the absence and eventual violence against women throughout the story. The Yakuza franchise, in general, is a franchise where characters die dramatically, and characters you’d hoped to see for the next five games have their storylines ended in moments. But Kiwami occasionally fails to treat those deaths with the gravity of subsequent entries, and it can be jarring and off-putting compared to the reputation of this series.

The real question regarding the sudden popularity of the Yakuza franchise in the West is “why now?” After Yakuza 0 and Kiwami, the franchise has become one of Sega’s most beloved franchises outside Japan, leading to an effort to remake and remaster entries 2-5 before moving to an international release model going forward. The answer is, I think, quite simple – the games successfully iterated into their more modern incarnation with Yakuza 3, but the sprawling, epic story of the franchise was hard to enter for newcomers with the games’ latter entries. Rebooting the story with accessible entry points allowed people to get in on the ground floor, meeting the characters for the first time.

An example of one of the many Majima Everywhere scenarios.

One other motivating factor – Kiryu’s counterpart, Majima Goro. Majima is the second protagonist of Yakuza 0, a game where Kiryu and Majima’s parallel stories only briefly intersect to tell the broader narrative of the prequel’s superior story. He was included in the original Yakuza, voiced in the English dub of the PS2 game by Mark Hamill, and was essentially a miniboss you fought a couple of times. Now, in 0 and Kiwami, he’s presented as Kiryu’s blood rival, the Mad Dog of Shimano, and much of the new content in Kiwami is centered around providing new opportunities to duke it out in increasingly absurd situations. Hiding underneath giant traffic cones, luring Kiryu into soaplands for private parties, and simply howling the word “Kiryu-chan,” the Majima Everywhere gameplay system adds a gameplay villain comparable to the Resident Evil remakes’ Mister X and Nemesis, always a threat wandering the open world and ready to shake you down. Majima’s zeal for life brings out the best in the Yakuza franchise, and this is the best possible introduction to the character.

Which brings out the question – okay, this isn’t the best representative of what’s great about Yakuza, so is it where I should start? I’d probably still argue yes – while its story is more simplistic, the strengths it has in introducing characters and thematic underlining is a pitch-perfect way to meet Kamurocho’s Tojo Clan. And the anchoring relationship between the found family of Kiryu and a little girl named Haruka-chan makes this must-play stuff for understanding where Kiryu will go forward. But if you start it and the story starts to lose you, go ahead and drift off to Yakuza 0 or Like a Dragon and see if those set off the fireworks before you come back. I say – if you’ve never tasted Yakuza’s particular blend of soap-opera melodrama, peak absurdist comedy, and genuinely badass action before, you probably won’t be able to get enough.

Yakuza Kiwami is available on PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X consoles, and PC, for around $20. The game is also available on Xbox Game Pass, along with the other Yakuza games in the Kiryu Kazuma saga.

Yakuza Kiwami - Kiryu and Haruka walking down Tenkaichi Street in Kamurocho, holding hands.

Haunted Houses

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An image from 1204 S 18th street, full to bursting of color, glass, and sculpture.

One of my group chat’s pastimes is sharing every time a listing for a “surprise house” is discovered on Twitter. Surprise houses are homes that look perfectly reasonable from the outside and host either some truly strange interior decoration choices or some poor architectural planning. In the case of 7355 River Trace Dr, our favorite room was described as “a court of hell and you’re on trial.” A great surprise house will have a moment like with 1204 S 18th Street, where all you can say is, “Glad the roof is normal at least.”

I think our fascination started with the infamously bad DIY architecture of the SomethingAwful forums, best remembered by GroverHaus, Doom Bathroom, and the Zipline of Death, but there’s a delightful jack in the box quality to a house that suddenly has way too many mannequins or looks like someone had a little too much fun with the prepackaged textures making a house for a 90s adventure game. Often, it only takes one or two rooms to make a house worthy of “surprise house” designation – after all, didn’t it really only take Room 237 and the bar room to transform The Overlook Hotel in The Shining?

Last year, the world discovered 8800 Blue Lick Rd and its virtual tour – and the game command, “find the bathtub.” If you haven’t toured 8800 Blue Lick Rd, please pause reading this and try to find the bathtub – it will likely not take you more than a half hour to experience, and I’m going to reference specific details of the space in the blog. I’m hardly the first person to write about 8800 Blue Lick Rd as a game – I like this summary of its history best. I started writing this piece as I was writing my Games of 2020 posts, and my friend Steve said “Alex, you left off 8800 Blue Lick Road.” I am still cursing myself for leaving it off the list.

An external shot of 8800 Blue Lick Road.

The tour, of course, is what escalates 8800 Blue Lick Rd beyond its humble place as a listing – the mechanical process of figuring out where you can walk to next, and the maze of figuring out which rooms lead toward something new, is more mechanically involved than your average “walking simulator.” People have created their own scavenger hunts, meaning this is the first home tour I’m aware of that offers 100% completion.

As with all surprise houses, 8800 Blue Lick Rd tells its own story. The infamous bathtub belies the story of its history as a Christian school and church – the endless amount of refuse intimate the status as an independent reseller operation. The more personal details are told by the scarecrow display and the Hillside Swim Team towel. People lived here – a family lived here. They lived here recently enough that there’s laundry left undone, even setting aside the cat. Even looking at the living spaces, they are overstuffed to the point of disbelief. The trash clearly never goes out.

This house tells a story of collection. It tells a story of the excuse that “we can always sell it if we don’t want to keep it” leading to a hoarding breakdown. It tells a story of the excess of this reselling business crowding into the living spaces otherwise preserved – the “Star Wars fans” room that has old clothes and half-spent bottles of cologne is becoming an receptacle for inventory. The “living room” is also home to hundreds (if not thousands) of discs in binders and on spindles. The kitchen is a landing for the same sort of cardboard receptacle storage as the DVD rooms downstairs.

That personal story is a ghost story, and it is fiction. Nothing I suppose about the homeowner is necessarily backed up by Baio’s history and interview – when interviewed, he seems like a well-adjusted guy with a great seller score. It is not a story told by the living. It is a story told by their absence.

An image from Gone Home, in Sam's room.

When video games attempt to tell the sort of story a surprise house tells, they tend to force the fiction out from ambiguity. In Gone Home, you will not just find a few of your grandfather’s possessions, you’ll find clues to open a safe and read his will, along with letters confessing his misdeeds. In a game like BioShock or The Last of Us, if those histories tie into a central character, they will be externally manifested as a direct confrontation or even boss fight. In a game like L.A. Noire or Skyrim, that investigation will become a weapon in your rhetorical arsenal to confront or manipulate the keeper of a secret. The joke of the “skeleton on the toilet” is really the home of most environmental storytelling – because games require the creation of unique assets, it’s very difficult to justify telling stories and then not drawing attention to them.

Action games employ this sort of explicit purpose for each object in order to fulfill their objectives as power fantasies, which makes sense. Even disempowerment fantasies like The Last of Us are about being able to fight back as things are taken from you, and the process of poring over homes and “taking what’s useful” is itself part of that fantasy. But I don’t think this is the only reward of power you can achieve with this sort of design. Fascination with the minutiae of life curated rewards an inherent voyeuristic fantasy – being able to wander through a dead home and touch what you want is still a power fantasy in Whatever Happened to Edith Finch, and that would be true even if you didn’t progress into fantasy sequences representing the untimely deaths of the unlucky Finch family.

That same mentality extends to the design of escape rooms, shows like Sleep No More, and their descendants. The true fusion seems to be beginning with the Las Vegas attraction Omega Mart, which escalates that live investigation through objects into a fully emergent narrative, with rebelling sisters and books of accounting to pore over. There is an anthropological code to crack, and a designed “story” to be learned. When I first heard about Omega Mart, I heard there were people with notebooks taking down every detail they could from record books in the shop’s manager’s office. It’s like if you combined Disneyland and Myst, and I wonder how many times you can charge someone admission before they’ve “solved it” to satisfaction.

Last year, an online haunted house game went into early access named Phasmophobia. Its predatory ghosts are procedurally generated in a way that does not necessarily connect to the property you explore. Playing as a paranormal investigation team (your Ghost Hunters vibes) you’re tasked with uncovering in what form the ghost has manifested and collecting documentation of paranormal activity before it strikes down your team with the efficiency of a slasher movie villain. The houses are very plain, largely owing to the game being developed by a single programmer. He’s hoping to have the game ready for a full release in 2021.

What’s wonderful about Phasmophobia is how little it takes to start getting the players psyched out. If lights go out, or water starts running, people immediately gravitate toward the assumption that the ghost objected to their actions. The game allows the player to use their mic to speak directly to the apparitions, meaning they might actually “not have liked something you said.” The different types of ghosts owe to different kinds of deaths, but at no point is the solution to an investigation “uncover who killed the ghost and how.” Obviously, there are programmers or hackers digging into the game’s code able to tell exactly how responsive the ghosts are to player action – but, so long as you keep that mystery for yourself, the game tells its own story.

I would like to see some handshaking between the ambiguity of Phasmophobia’s design and the haunted house exploration of a game like Gone Home, or Tacoma, or What Happened to Edith Finch. I’d like the feeling of a “surprise house” in a game, one that doesn’t feel the need to include a drama waiting to be discovered with the tone of a Hallmark drama or Netflix original miniseries. Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, which does show its spirits incredibly directly, is a lot scarier before the final two episodes make thunderingly obvious every fright’s emotional and logistic purpose.

Aside from a brief property overview on a home like 203 E Morrison St, which can explain the architectural story at hand, there is no living record of the tenants. I think I appreciate that these homes are so mysterious – where Gone Home does offer the joys of a VHS collection to tell a story, 8800 Blue Lick Rd. offers no diary entries to explain why the owner has so many copies of The Devil’s Rejects. Anything we can guess about the personalities of the owners of 228 Townsend Ave is based in the obvious division in interests shown by the decor, though…they presumably have to have some overlap, right? I’d like more instances where I cannot have the full answer – I’d like more games that replicate the feeling of being somewhere you shouldn’t and being alone with your own projections onto the environment.

These haunted houses have no ghosts except the ones you bring in with you, and they need no more narrative than the excess which shaped them.

Living room featured at 7355 River Trace Dr

Key Text Introduction: Style Savvy Trendsetters

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May be an image of one or more people, footwear and text that says 'Approx. Budget $1,500.00 I really want to get into edgy fashion. No. 00230 StageDive Biker Jacket Left 1 $588.00 Total $918.00 Outfit'

Fashion is rarely the subject of a game. Now, fashion, wardrobe choices, character editors, those are a massive part of many RPGs, sims, and minigames within larger genre titles, but fashion itself is rarely the focus a game drives itself on. Style Savvy Trendsetters, the second in the Style Savvy series, keeps that focus centered – the next entry, Style Savvy Styling Star, branches out into the pop idol industry in an attempt to give the game a clearer sense of direction. Trendsetters instead uses this more freeform milieu to create a setting for the game’s real focus – spiritual fulfillment and relationship building. When I look at people comparing the franchise’s entries, there’s a strong contingent who never were satisfied with the next two titles. Unfortunately, I never played them myself, probably for the same reasons this game was ignored by so many in the first place.

The core gameplay of Style Savvy: Trendsetters, the outfit designer, is fairly simple. You collect clothing for your shop, and then work with customers to find outfits that work with their needs in terms of budget and style. Each clothing item or accessory is separated by where on the body it is worn (there are three layers for shirts, for example, separated into whether they function as a base layer or as outerwear.) As you select items on the touch screen, they populate onto a mannequin on the top, building the outfit as it tallies the sale total against the customer’s budget. When you’ve assembled your suggestion, the customer will decide whether or not to make the purchase. Rinse, repeat, make cute outfits, meet new people.

Your stylist, a self-created avatar, is hired on as the assistant at a local women’s clothing boutique. A few days into your job, the shop’s owner decides to pass control of the store to you – having gone through the tutorial of assembling outfits, you’ll now be responsible for selecting the store’s stock and style, keeping up with current fashion trends, hiring new assistants, and directly assisting customers with selecting new clothes that meet their needs. The day-to-day operation ends up serving as a fairly satisfying shop management simulation, where sales feel personalized and more detailed than just setting a price on an item and letting the day pass. Clothing recommendations require keeping in mind elements of style and seasonal weather, which give you reasons to sell more than “the most profitable” items in your shop – and every customer will keep what you sell them, so you want to try your best to only sell things you actually think look good!

May be an image of standing and text

This structure ends up providing a drip feed for new story content, most of it focused on your relationships with your customers or fellow workers throughout the city at local cafes, makeup shops, and so on. But inklings drip in about your shop’s former owner trying to become a superstar fashion Some number of weeks into building relationships, creating aesthetics, and exploring the city for social opportunities, you’ll gain the ability to select and outfit men’s clothing at your boutique as well, and eventually enter your boutique into fashion competitions in an effort to expand your store’s brand.

How many weeks? Well, I honestly don’t remember. There…isn’t a lot of writing about Style Savvy Trendsetters on the internet. A handful of reviews exist from the time of release – one of the five on MetaCritic is print only, and another links out to a site that no longer has reviews whatsoever. There’s only one in-depth customer list on GameFAQS – and zero walkthroughs, clothing lists, or competition guides. I remembered that Leigh Alexander used to tweet about the game – I’m fairly confident that’s how I originally found out about it! – but I can’t find anything in my searches now. This lack of guidance ends up leaving the discoveries of the game feeling even more special, more intimate. Style Savvy: Trendsetters might be one of gaming’s best kept secrets. If so, I’m glad I get the chance to share it with you.

May be a cartoon of 1 person, standing and text

Let’s walk through a short play session, maybe twenty minutes or so. I’ll boot up my file on the third copy of this game I’ve bought over the years, which I’m probably about three hours into playing.

In my shop right now, I have Shea, my assistant. Per the game’s tooltip, “She’s a bit of a scatterbrain but works hard to make up for it.” I like her updo and denim vest, but the black-and-creme striped top she wears under it doesn’t quite line with the buttons – I have an option to change her outfit, so I suggest a different striped top, this one pale cyan and white, with a small blue bow at the collar. She thanks me for the suggestion, and I move back on to my customers.

First, there’s Guinevere, a serious-looking woman in a black blazer and knee-length straight skirt. Checking the tooltip, “she has asthma but is training every day for a half marathon.” This isn’t her first visit – she has a budget today of $300. Checking in on my other customers, I have a first timer in a cute soft outfit and glasses (“She slathers on the sunblock because her skin is so sensitive”) and India (“She’s a waitress at the cafe and has a serious thing for dinosaurs.”) I take too long deciding and find out for the first time that each game day is processing on a timer – it’s not about how many customers you choose to help, but how long you take. Now the pressure is on. It’s now nighttime, and my customers have changed over!I’ll help this next first-timer. There’s now a customer with long dark blue hair and blue polka-dot dress. She has a budget of $800, so we’re picking her quickly. Her name is Wren: “Listen up! I have some great news for this city! There’s going to be a new makeup studio opening near here! Everyone around here is going to be so gorgeous! Once it’s open, you’ll be able to buy makeup there!” Makeup is highlighted in yellow – a new feature is being added to the game. Wren asks me for a feminine skirt as her first purchase – let’s help her out.

The game opens directly to the skirts menu – it doesn’t highlight which skirts are “feminine,” though. To discover that, you either need to know your wholesaler and styles, or you can use the menu to highlight all the feminine items in stock at your store. Feminine in this game means “adult, but not formal.” It’s a style I’d affiliate with business casual. Noticing her leather brown vest, I pick out a brown fluted-hem skirt from Marzipan Sky. It’s well within her budget, so I’ll ask her to try it on rather than take a look first – it’s a double-down mechanic, going all in rather than offering choices.

That feeling of putting on a new piece of clothing you love – you see it in your customers every time. They receive these suggestions as an opportunity for a Sailor Moon style transformation sequence – they are empowered to be their best selves in the clothing you’ve selected. “I decided on a whim to try it on, and I was blown away! It’s perfect for me! This look is just what I was going for! So sophisticated!” She isn’t buying anything else today, but sometimes these sales will lead to customers asking for an entire new outfit. You’ll see them in clothes they’ve bought from you going forward, mixed and matched with what they already own.

May be an anime-style image of text

Eventually, as a player, you come to know these keywords, these wholesalers, and, yes, these customers. They’ve written hundreds of customers, and compared with Animal Crossing, there’s a lot less shared dialogue between them than you might expect. Combine that with the number of events available in the game at an ever-expanding list of locales, and you end up with hundreds of hours you can spend long after your shop is 100% solvent.

What makes that gameplay so appealing is how much of the writing is geared toward people who actually behave, well, like people. Some of them have mundane problems, like a lack of self confidence, or job dissatisfaction, or a history of dismissing their ex-girlfriends’ love for dressing well. Those relationships reflect something very real, which is the way putting effort into your own appearance can make you realize your own self-worth, or how valuable putting effort into something you care about might be. Other characters are bubbly and fun from the jump, and their conversations tend toward being like easier, occasionally more superficial friendships.

In addition, I have to say, it’s a blast to play a game where the clothes actually look good. I always love to notice details like the button-work on a cardigan, the stitching on a pair of pants, the little accent stripes on a scarf. All of it suits the game’s character models well, who look very much like classical fashion school hand-drawn models, the sort you might see in traditional design drawing. I like the music too – catchy, easy-going music, mostly jazzy, a little bit elevator-y at times. But I spend a lot of time with the game with the music off, mostly because it is such an easy pick-up-and-play title.

May be an anime-style image of 1 person and text

There are obvious limitations to this game’s appeal. While I think the game does a decent job presenting racially diverse customers to the player, there is absolutely no body diversity – everyone is shaped like Taylor Swift or Andrew Garfield, reinforcing a monopoly of the thin and slender in fashion that many of its players won’t see themselves in. For a game with a fairly thoughtful approach to how strange and wonderful people can be in the city, there’s also not any explicit queer representation within the game, which is something I’d like to see them approach in a sequel. And, for all that great clothing can do for a person, the game frames that clothing in a sort of utopian capitalism, with no real concern given to where clothing comes from beyond “a warehouse wholesaler” and “a smartly selected boutique”, leaving it fairly unconcerned with any serious consumerist critique.

Still, I love this fantasy. I love living in a world where I think about expression. I love playing in a world where problems are easily solved. I love looking at clothes, and looking at those clothes on people who are nice and who I want to dress. Maybe someday there will be the Style Savvy clone that Stardew Valleys the original and builds even more into a queer utopia. When it does, I will remember this game.

You can expect me to write about this one again someday, now that you’ve been introduced.

Style Savvy Trendsetters is only available on the Nintendo 3DS, and currently sells at $39.99 digitally in the US. You can also find the game for significantly cheaper as a physical copy on online storefronts. The game is localized as New Style Boutique in the PAL region, and Wagamama Fashion: Girls Mode Yokubari Sengen! in Japan.

Games of 2020 – What’s New is New Again

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It is hard for me not to fight hardest for the new. Especially here, in games, the new expands the vocabulary of what we can do so greatly that it changes what we even dream can exist. This year’s entry might be “the best Assassin’s Creed so far,” but there’s a strong chance it won’t be anymore five years from now. Games like Outer Wilds, Baba Is You, Into The Breach, Death Stranding, and Return of the Obra Dinn – these games change what I think about when I think about games entirely. They form incredible emotional connections to me, even the ones that have no narrative whatsoever, because they are such special visions of what we should strive to make.

This year, these six games felt the freshest of everything I played. None are flawless. All are deeply special. And, yeah, shout out to Umurangi Generation and 13 Sentinels, which would go here if I’d only written two blogs and not separated three games I can’t shut up about into their own article. And, well, when they’re no longer works in progress, I’ll be writing about World of Horror and Phasmophobia in a similar blog, too.

Hades

Hades. Zagreus looks down on the lava of Asphodel, stating, "I won't back down. Not now or ever."

A Sampler Playlist

Zagreus, son of Hades, Underworld princeling, uncovers the scandal of the underworld. Unfortunately, that scandal is the identity of his mother – so he’s going to do his damnedest to escape the underworld, sword or spear or railgun in hand to thwart his father’s “security.” No matter how thrilling the escape attempt, if he can’t best his father and all his minions, he’s going to wind up face down in the bath of blood that ends the hall leading up to dad’s desk. But every attempt, the player gets a little smarter, and the other denizens of the underworld might have just a little more to say.

Hades is, mechanically, the least “new” of the games presented here. Its combat mechanics are similar to those in Supergiant’s first game, Bastion – the whole team has come along, building on their style, making better and better games with each at-bat, with more focused art, more variety in the music, more thoughtful storytelling. It is an action game and a rogue-lite with the sort of “base-building” mechanics at the heart of Rogue Legacy. That base building mostly happens either by trading collected resources for upgrades or by giving gifts to your fellow lost souls.

Hades. An unknown chaotic god, adorned with batwings, a halo, and a coat decorated with faces says, "...The Olympians have all grown soft... would you not agree?"

But what makes it fresh is the incredible synthesis between all the game’s best elements. Traveling from Tartarus up to Elysium, you receive boons from the Olympic gods you know best, all of whom have signature gameplay benefits that match their personality. Aphrodite’s boons have the ability to charm your foes and make them fight on your behalf for a brief time – Poseidon sends waves crashing against them to push them away from you, giving you the space to choose your prey without suffering under their claws and staves. All these gods are funny, well characterized, petty but friendly, and most of them are very attractive. Everyone’s attractiveness in this game, thankfully, feeds into the gift-giving – there’s a lot of flirtation, and, yes, a few characters you can actually date, but that gift giving also reveals new dialogue, new storylines, and new jokes. And the only way to see those scenes is to keep fighting your way out.

Synced up with all of that is the wonderful music of Darren Korb, further expanding on the folk vibes of Pyre and adding some really fantastic metal to the mix. Those who’ve spent time with Korb’s work know he’s consistently able to capture character themes and help define the setting of his games through that music. That’s true of the game’s lyrical folksongs, sung by Orpheus and Eurydice, long lost lovers who you’ll have the opportunity to meet. But it’s the choice to build out epic instrumentals, most of which extend to be eight or nine full minutes before looping, that makes for such a clean experience while playing – most playthroughs will be interrupted long before you hit the end of a music track, either by reaching a new area and theme or by meeting your demise in the trials of combat.

Fighting as Zagreus feels so good. Zagreus is fast, responsive, and he’s just as fun to control as you deliberately watch your opponents and wait for clean openings as he is to mash out as much damage as you can, as fast as you can. All six weapons, and all their customizations, and all the boons and talismans you can use to build your run, feel great to use (if not to you, to another player – I’ve heard every one of them defended by now.) I’ve now gotten good enough at the game that I can think to myself “oh, no, this run is doomed” and can figure out the kind of boons I need to fix what’s wrong and get a surprise win.

I don’t yet know how many games of the year there are – I’ve played at least nine. Hades is the game of the year because its complete package design, aesthetic, and writing make a game that feels beautifully fresh, all while reimagining how strong writing and story can fit into a game you have to start over every half hour. Truthfully, Hades feels like such a consensus masterpiece that detailed reasons for it to not be the Game of the Year would require their own article – I don’t feel like doing that here. Hades central thesis may best be summarized by my favorite line from Chaplin’s City Lights – “Be brave! Face life!” I think the game’s angry carpe diem ethos felt great to sit in through 2020.

Hades. Zagreus battles Theseus and The Minotaur.

Signs of the Sojourner

A Sampler Playlist

Echodog’s Signs of the Sojourner places you as the inheritor of a small-town shop in a loosely fantastical world, setting off to the nearby townships to find valuables to keep your home afloat. The gameplay of Signs of the Sojourner is simple – you and an NPC you’re talking with take turns playing cards, trying to match symbols from card to card in order to communicate with one another. Each “round” is cooperative, where you and the NPC are trying to meet common ground. If you complete a conversation successfully, you may make a trade for something new to sell back home, keeping your town thriving one day longer. You may also make a friend who will take your story in new directions.

What makes the mechanic so smart is that each town you visit has its own culture, and each card symbol has its own cultural meaning. Triangles represent factual logic, squares forceful directness, circles emotional reasoning. Due to your limited deck size, you’re quickly going to find that you can’t get along with everybody. So you end up finding your own cultural niche and either sticking to where you grew up or venturing out into the world past home.

The game ends up using this mechanic really effectively to communicate something about cultural difference and assimilation without ever being too direct about this fact, and it uses this smart, small mechanic to reinforce something that writing traditionally can only do through outsized stereotype. As a result, the characters tend to be much subtler and have more variety than the usual concept of “towns with culture” can offer. A place where people are creative thinkers ends up not having to mean everybody is an artist – sometimes, it’s an old crank who’s constantly coming up with conspiracy theories.

Signs of the Sojourner. The game introduces XN-220, citizen of Rimina, who speaks in circle and diamond shapes. It states XN-220 is "An older model of android, rarely seen." About the city of Rimina, it states, "Rimina lies among the hills, overlooking terraced vineyards and the coast far below. Packs of children run across the crumbling limestone walls around the outer limits, pretending their sticks are ancient swords." The game offers the player the ability to move on without meeting XN-220. It is day 22, and day 26 is the day the player is due back home.

Spiritfarer

Spiritfarer. Stella sits aboard her ship, fishing at sunset.

A Sampler Playlist

Farming simulator meets action platformer, Spiritfarer’s Stella has taken up the oar from a retiring Charon, dedicating her afterlife to sending troubled souls into the grasp of Hades. Quickly, it becomes apparent that the first souls Stella will ferry through the Everdoor will be those closest to her – Uncle Atul and childhood friend Gwen are the first aboard her vessel, which could use some work. Building a home on the titular Spiritfarer is the perfect opportunity to go on one last adventure with the loved ones and friends you’ll be sending on their way.

For most players, I suspect the characters, the story, and the artistry are what will be the main draw of Spiritfarer. The hand-drawn characters are rendered with bold colors and designs that stick in the brain, and their animation is expressive far beyond the borderline animatronics of most games. Their personalities are bold, and while I didn’t enjoy spending time with every one of them, I did want them to find their peace. The game trades in a deep sincerity that at times put me on edge. But I felt those moments of secondhand embarrassment and I found myself questioning whether that was a fault in the game’s tone or my own comfort with such child-friendly bluntness.

That isn’t to say the game is humorless – the game is as equally interested in making light of the petty flaws that drive wedges between us. Your best fence to sell your goods to is a rancid hoarder who has become an onion man. Guests on your boat include an obnoxious scold, an insufferable live-action roleplayer, and a serial philanderer. Traveling to cities and work sites, you’ll meet with smugglers, a rap group called the Dice Boys, a film director who barely has the time of day for you, and a labor riot, all of which are written with a modern sense of humor that works far more often than not. The game’s ability to handle these moments of comedy and urbanity make the moments of sincere grief feel their gravity.

As a farming game, Spiritfarer is solid! Every resource has its own minigame, whether it’s mining the ore rock itself, fishing from your boat, or working the sawmill, the loom, and the The time management involved in being productive is satisfying, though I ended the game with a lot of materials I had no outlet to sell or use. But that farming makes for a great excuse to enter a meditative state, one that is supported by the fact that Stella’s a fun platforming character to move through space – unlike some games, she feels complete before you get access to some later traversal abilities, and those just make you feel even more powerful.

I don’t yet know how many games of the year there are – so far, I’ve played nine. Truthfully, Spiritfarer isn’t so much the tenth – it’s the eleventh. But Spiritfarer remains a game that challenged me to think about how full a game you can make without combat. Spiritfarer is a terrifically entertaining platformer without death – and a platformer constantly mired in it. Its earnest heart will make it a shining game to point toward when I am sick of playing action games dedicated to murder.

Spiritfarer. Stella has assembled Uncle Atul and three more guests for a feast at a lamplit patio. Atul says, excitedly, "I knew you would pull through."

Blaseball

A Sampler Playlist

Fundamentally, Blaseball is a free browser game best described as baseball mixed with Dungeons & Dragons. The game takes place entirely in a small probability generator and a huge legion of fanart, fan fiction, fan twitters, fan bands, fan Discords and subreddits…you get the idea. It’s hard to write about because it’s the most absurd and dense game of 2020, and it’s such a freeform object that it’s hard to pin down. The game is returning from a four-month siesta on March 1st, following a major wave of new development, so a fair warning that when the game comes back it may be fairly different from what I describe. I think Quintin Smith’s video above does a great job explaining what Blaseball was in 2020, so if you want more details, I highly recommend it.

The core of Blaseball is the sport simulator, using athlete stats to determine nine-inning games every hour mostly recognizable as baseball. Each of these games is between a roster of twenty teams, and upon joining the game you’ll choose a favorite based on their name (I went with the Hades Tigers first, before finally settling in with the Seattle Garages) before being able to see their record or their players’ stats. Probability for each game is calculated before the game starts based on those stats, and the primary play mechanic is betting on these games to try to earn cash. Using that cash, you can cast raffle ticket votes into the election held at the end of each week, which will pass a new decree and grant several smaller boons to different teams in the league. This sort of betting mechanic is familiar to those who’ve spent time with the SaltyBet streaming game on Twitch, and the election mechanics work sort of similarly to TwitchPlaysPokemon.

Blaseball fan art of a blaseball card for Seattle Garages athlete Allison Abbott, who is chewing gum and carries a nailed bat.
Art by M. Lee Lunsford

And, like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014, an idle fandom will create its own jokes, its own lore, and its own space to discuss strategies. If the Helix Fossil was enough for a twitch chat to start a meme cult dedicated to its praise, Blaseball has managed to take that and run with it for just about every player in the simulation. The Blaseball Discord is home to the chat where people watch games live, private discussion boards for each team to discuss strategy for the upcoming election, and dedicated channels to posting fanart, fan-wiki lore, and real nerdy statistical analysis. Unlike a lot of fandoms, it’s not just artists or meme creators, though there are plenty of those too. Blaseball fans organized a community driven nonforprofit named Blaseball Cares, dedicated to utilizing the fandom to donate to causes like the Milwaukee Freedom Fund and the California Community Foundation. An organization calling themselves the Society for Internet Blaseball Research publishes properly formatted research papers.

Then there’s The Garages and Fourth Strike Records, musicians who have banded together internationally to produce music reflecting the DIY sensibility of fandom, entirely with lyrics about a fictional sport and fictional athletes. All the songs in the sampler playlist were written by fans, on their own dime, and they’ve maintained a respectable following even while the game has been gone since November. Your mileage is going to vary on this one – if you take pleasure in bands like They Might Be Giants, The Mountain Goats, and The Decemberists writing lyrics that couldn’t possibly exist without being entirely predicated on some real specific nerdy shit, there are some well-written bangers in the…14 albums and musical that have already been written by now. I definitely haven’t listened to all of it, and I don’t think I could recommend doing so in earnest, but my favorite is the chorus of In the Feedback (in the sampler above.)

The Blaseball fandom rapidly ascended from niche community into cult object, and the experience of listening to a pretty catchy garage rock song about a really bad fictional pitcher probably calls to mind Homestuck and bronies. It’s a mixed bag! There are times where the fandom gets very possessive of the game and their favorite characters, and it creates an unwelcome tension. And the never-ending onslaught of games on the hour through the workweek, the rate at which the rules of the game can change within just two or three weeks, and the number of community events that can happen may leave it totally inaccessible to those who haven’t been invested since the beginning.

What’s kept me following the game week to week is really the work of Blaseball developer The Game Band, who have done an excellent job giving us new experiences each week. When the elections happen at the end of each week, it’s an opportunity for them to unveil some new eldritch god who plans to interfere with the experience or some absurdist new rule change that has a new way to threaten our players. The climax in those original twelve seasons was a war with The Shelled One, a literal peanut god that threatened fantastical violence against the players’ favorite athletes. It’s a wonderful vehicle for light fantasy storytelling – players are invested in the teams and athletes of Blaseball already, so the developers can very economically raise the stakes by trusting that just about any change they make will set off a new wave of theories, strategies, and fan works. It’s the dream of every MMO to have players scheming on how they can effect the game itself rather than just build their own character to maximum strength, and Blaseball manages to do that while the only real “direct” interaction players have with the game is gambling and raffles.

I don’t yet know how many games of the year there are – I’ve played at least nine. The first run of Blaseball is the game of the year because games like Blaseball simply don’t happen any other way. The independent spirit of the game itself, its generosity to fandom work, and the freewheeling strangeness of Blaseball require incredible dedication and confidence the likes of which simply don’t tend to happen in the profit-driven mainstream games industry. I’m not sure Blaseball could have happened the way it did if COVID didn’t have us all cooped up in our homes. Hell, I’m not sure it could have happened the way it did if actual baseball had been able to finish its full season in 2020. I’m very curious to see how the game feels when it returns on March 1st, and I’m hoping they use it as an opportunity to welcome anyone new and curious and to invite those who fell off back into the fold.

Blaseball fan comic. Wyatt Quitter explains the history of the last season to a fellow player on the Tokyo Lift, stating, "So then The Garages were all like, 'What if we exploited a loophole in this popularity contest to resurrect the dead.'" The new player responds, "That sounds like it was a bad idea." Wyatt responds "Look pal, I haven't even gotten to The Snackrifice."
Art by Jonathan Ying.

If Found…

If Found. An eraser on screen peels away sunset into nightfall on an old, decrepit house covered in vines and moss.

A Sampler Playlist

When Paste Magazine posted its 40 Best Games of 2020 List and ranked If Found… as the second best game of the year, I knew I had two choices – to play it immediately after finding out it existed, or to allow it to fall to the background like We Know The Devil, Ladykiller In A Bind, Butterfly Soup, and Cibele. “Acclaimed visual novel about LGBTQ+ experience” is the new frontier of prestige games nobody talks about after year-end list season now that strategy games are becoming cool again.

This game, from Irish developer DREAMFEEL, is maybe two hours long. It also, according to my wife, may barely be a game.

Unlike the popular forms of visual novels in the west based on dating sims and choose-your-own-adventure novels, you do not make choices in the vast majority of If Found. Your primary mechanic is erasure. If Found… tells two running narratives, the primary narrative in the form of a diary. Your primary interaction is to read a section of the diary, erase any marks scratching things out, and then to erase the text and drawings in the diary themselves. The act feels violent. It feels intrusive. I love this mechanical choice. But, no, it’s not very gamelike.

If Found. A journal page, with significant sections scratched out or marked over. You can clearly read the dates Sunday 12th, Dec 13th, and 14th, the name Colum O'Malley, and the word Sorry.

The first narrative, a frame narrative, is that of the lone astronaut Doctor Cassiopeia, stranded in deep space, trying to find her way home. The second, the diary narrative, is that of 23 year old astronomy student Kasio, who can no longer live in the closet in 1993 Ireland and is now presenting as her gender. Kasio leaves her mother’s home to stay with her friends in a condemned old house, a rock band made up of a gay couple and their lead guitarist/vocalist Shans. She keeps a diary of her life at this time, full of fun asides, character sketches, and scratched out unwanted thoughts.

I don’t yet know how many games of the year there are – I’ve played at least nine. If Found… is the game of the year because it best understands the monumental stakes of feeling. If Found… allows its characters to say hurtful things. The fact that you are not directly playing as Kasio, but as the eraser, allows you the distance to judge character moments for yourself. And it presents this story in a way that is familiar, but never unwelcome.

If Found. An eraser on screen transitions between the fields of Ireland at night and Kasio walking with Shans.

Paradise Killer

Paradise Killer. An interview between Lady Love Dies and Crimson Acid at Crimson Acid's apartment. The transcript reads: LADY LOVE DIES: |Get on with it." CRIMSON ACID: "The Holy Seals are the holy grails of secret hunters. They're so locked down and under wraps. I was losing sleep each night thinking abou tthem. I knew K. HX designed the second Seal so I started talking to him. I also knew he was obsessed with me." LADY LOVE DIES: "Obsessed?" CRIMSON ACID: "More than I expected. I thought he was just horny for me."

A Sampler Playlist

The moment I heard about the vaporwave murder mystery where you can initiate the final court case five minutes into the game, I knew it was a game I was going to *have* to play before I began considering Game of the Year. The expectations were high for the story of Lady Love Dies, the exiled Investigation Freak who is called back to Paradise Island when the entirety of The Council is murdered just before the Perfect 25th Sequence. Your old friends, the members of The Syndicate of immortals who are trying to resurrect old alien gods, seem eager to sweep things up before you do your job. Lot of secrets in the time you’ve been exiled. Lots of old friends to catch up with.

You’re probably thinking – Alex, that’s a lot of proper nouns.

And you’re right. One of the great joys of Paradise Killer is figuring out how all these proper nouns fit together in a story that ends up taking seriously the pain and exploitation built into a society structured to sacrifice everything for some old ideals of success.

Playing the game is, well, a classic first-person exploration game. As Lady Love Dies, you scour the environments of Paradise Island, through roman plinths and absurd statues and yachts, meeting your nasty demon friend Shinji along the way, finding evidence and interviewing your old friends in The Syndicate. All of them have secrets – you tend to find those out by finding something on the island that someone wanted to cover up or by talking to someone. Maybe the Grand Architect Carmelina Silence’s alibi contradicts something Doctor Doom Jazz told you about the autopsy. Maybe you found an extra knife somewhere hidden, one that surely had nothing to do with the murders, right?

That process of combing through the island is deeply melancholy. For reasons you’ll discover later, everyone but the remaining suspects in The Syndicate have already left the island, one way or another. You find yourself exploring the remnants of an island that’s already dead. There are ghosts of citizens looking for one last peace before annihilation. Alongside evidence related to the case, you find pamphlets talking about worker conditions, squirrelled away contraband punk music and pornography, whiskey that’s been bottled from another island long ago. The game uses that vaporwave aesthetic to really highlight that sense of loneliness like all those great abandoned mall videos do.

Paradise Killer. A beach coastline with apartment complexes and a tall spire in the background. Statues of purple marble depict goat heads and other pagan iconography.

There are solid facts that can be uncovered – with enough time spent on Paradise Island, listening to its city pop, buttering up the information broker/sex icon Crimson Acid or the religious fanatic Witness to the End, all players will reach the same conclusion as to *exactly* who killed the Council in that closed room and how they did it. As long as you play enough to see their bodies, you’ll probably get a good sense of the picture. But it’s the fact that you’re allowed to start the trial immediately that means you may never be 100% sure how much more game there is to play, how many more betrayals there are to uncover, how many more blood gems or collectible mementos there are to find. And, as Trevor Richardson wrote excellently in his piece about the game, you will always be asked to present “your truth” – justice and truth don’t share a name in Paradise.

At this time, that Paradise Killer is my game of the year. Paradise Killer is the game of the year because it is the bravest new vision executed with the most complete package. Its warm, funny characters, its vaporwave, Dreamcast-era aesthetic, its methodical and contemplative gameplay, its themes of economic exploitation, lust, accelerationism vs. privilege, and its twisty, page-turner plot make it the greatest revelation of any game I played this year. The applecart for Danganronpa and Zero Escape has officially been overturned. I want to play one of these every year until I die, even if I never play one this great again.

Paradise Killer. The game offers the A button to talk to Henry Division, a man possessed by a caged demon, bound in the Desolation Cell.