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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Rian Johnson once again proves himself to be a master of misdirection in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, targeting his biting satire at a private island of wealthy celebrities partying in the middle of the pandemic, and constructing around them a winding, hugely entertaining murder mystery as densely layered as the titular vegetable.
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If…. (1968)
The implication of the title If…. is not a question, but an unfinished dream, as Lindsay Anderson conjectures a surreal world parallel to our own that assembles the strict hierarchy of a British boy’s boarding school into a pointed political allegory of tyrants, revolutionaries, and homoerotic power plays.
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Avatar (2009)
Avatar may not be James Cameron’s most consistently flawless work, but it is certainly at least his most purely ambitious, using innovative digital technology to serve his incredible visual artistry and immersive worldbuilding, both of which place this rich, ecological allegory among the most monumental achievements of genre filmmaking.
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Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
Guillermo del Toro’s foray into gorgeous stop-motion animation is perfectly suited the Italian fable of Pinocchio, though true to his darkly monstrous obsessions, this interpretation is haunted by a tragic existentialism, using the historical setting of fascist Italy to frame questions around fatherhood, blind obedience, and the value of fleeting mortality.
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Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)
Alejandro Iñárritu’s sprawling abstraction of one Mexican filmmaker’s existential musings may be absurdly funny at points, but in Bardo’s surreal, stream-of-consciousness dive into his lucid dreams, it is also a deeply spiritual work, building a mountain of rich visual metaphors to deliver one of the most formally complex and cinematically ambitious films of the past…
