Our Favorite 2022 Pieces

Before putting the cap on 2022, here are ten 'Reveal' pieces we feel are worth revisiting.

Happy New Year!

Hello, Revealers. It’s the end of the year and we’re going to use to the time to take a little breather as we get ready for a big 2023. Not that we’re entirely done with 2022 just yet: we’re going to kick off January with our best-of 2022 lists before diving into 2023. We’re also extremely excited to get started on our conversation series working our way through Sight and Sound’s recently released 100 best films of all time. We’ll begin that journey the week of January 9th with a discussion of one of the most recent films to make the list, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. We hope you’ll watch along with us. We want the conversation about these films to extend into the comments section (and beyond).

In the meantime, we’d like to revisit a few of the 2022 pieces we liked the best. (And, if the spirit moves you, feel free to share this post with friends who might enjoy what we do.) And, as always, thanks again for your support in 2022.

'Fly Away Home': How to talk to children about death (and life), by Scott Tobias

The care Ballard and Deschanel put into the visual splendor helps to emphasize the way Mother Nature can assert herself during difficult times, forcing a perspective that we might have trouble arriving at on our own: A car accident may itself be an unnatural way to die, but death itself is natural, even when a loved one is gone much sooner than expected. In that sense, Fly Away Home feels like a successor to Bambi, which features one of most infamous unnatural deaths in film history, but folds it into a story about the circle of life. 

An Insider’s Guide to the Oslo of 'The Worst Person in the World.' by Keith Phipps

The Reveal: Before I let you go, as someone who doesn't know Norway or Oslo, what else might we have missed over here?

Meinich: Well, there's this frequent use of parks in Trier’s movies. Oslo is a city where you can walk everywhere, and he often uses the parks in Oslo as sort of transformative locations where characters are talking about or moving through something very important in their lives. Even if you're in a hurry, you can bicycle or walk and mostly get around quite easily. It's very much part of Oslo's identity that we believe our city to be like a small town within a big city. If you are moving through Oslo, you can always move through a park to get to where you're going. His films are always geographically correct. You won't find him cutting from one place to a whole other place.

The Silo Effect, by Scott Tobias

That’s the grim reality we occupy now, when films are made or acquired, then placed in these silos that some can access and many don’t. The good news for independent filmmakers is that it’s the new gold rush, the biggest boon for Sundance since the explosion of pseudo-indie “boutique” labels like Fox Searchlight and (my favorite) Warner Independent Pictures in the mid-‘90s. Then as now, we can sense that these are unsustainable business models—a boom that will eventually go bust—but at least in the past, there would be a motive to give the films themselves some kind of robust theatrical life. You would at least know that they existed, even if they fell short of the exorbitant cash spent during a bidding war.

‘Dirty Dancing’ Is a Movie About Abortion, by Keith Phipps

In retrospect, Dirty Dancing was released in the heart of a moment when abortion, though far from a settled issue in the minds of many, felt protected by court decisions and a general desire not to turn back the clock to when a woman in need of an abortion might have no recourse but to seek the services of, in Baby’s dad’s words, “some butcher” to end a pregnancy–and then face legal consequences when the butcher did a butcher’s work. In 1987 it felt like a depiction of how far we’d come since 1963. In 2022, it now looks like a warning about how progress can be ripped away, and how little creating a movie world in which abortion rarely seemed to exist at all has helped.

An Interview with Pat Healy: Part 1 — 'Better Call Saul' and the ups-and-downs of life as a character actor, by Scott Tobias

Do you ever feel burnt out on the work itself? Is it just the sustainability problem, or is the work itself still simulating for you?

There was a time. I was about to say “never” because I always love it, but there was a time. I also spent a good deal of money because I knew that Cheap Thrills was such a great showcase for me. I got a publicist for the first time, and I went all everywhere in the country they wanted me to go, and it was on my own dime. Then I just started to have to take a bunch of jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do. They weren’t even big things. They were just work because I needed money.

I remember laying on the floor of a Mexican supermarket in Echo Park or Highland Park, a cold tile floor in a puddle of fake blood at seven in the morning on a Saturday, knowing that I had to be on another set of another thing I didn’t want to do at noon. And I just thought, “I don’t want to. I can’t. I don't want to do this.” And my agent had said to me, “You should just stay at home for a little while and just wait for the right thing to come in.” And I decided to do it at that point.

The ‘80s in 40: 'Ordinary People,’ by Keith Phipps

Decades can be porous, culturally speaking, and Ordinary People often plays like one of the last products of the 1970s, a decade in which the “sensitive male,” if never quite idealized, had more of a foothold in the culture than it would a few years later, in the face of a backlash evidenced by books like Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche and articles about “wimpophobia.”. But Redford’s film reminds us that even the ’70s were filled with those protecting the border of what real men did and did not do.

Tomb of the Unknown Video Store, by Scott Tobias

It’s possible that many Video Library customers did not know about the store’s primary source of revenue, given the discretion involved in keeping this legally iffy enterprise under wraps. What they did know, however, were the obscurities that porn bankrolled: A wall of Something Weird titles, vast shipments of dubiously sourced Hong Kong action movies, a Cult Movies section heavy with science fiction and horror oddities, and Foreign Films, which became my own little garden to tend. Link used to leave me with the latest distributor catalogs so I could circle the titles I thought we needed, and there was no expectation that we’d get back even the modest money we’d invested in them. But I’d call it a victory if a customer walked away with Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates and New Wave Hookers 4. That seemed like as balanced a cinematic diet as any. 

Worst To Best: Tom Cruise Movie Singles and Theme Songs, by Keith Phipps

16. “Endless Love,” Lionel Richie and Diana Ross (from Endless Love)

Cruise has only a small part in Franco Zefferelli’s ill-fated 1981 adaptation of a pretty good Scott Spencer novel, which yielded this sappy theme song from two remarkable talents. It might rank higher if it didn’t immediately summon up the memory of dentists’ waiting rooms.

Against Empathy: On the righteous anti-humanity of Lars Von Trier's 'Dogville,' by Scott Tobias

Again, none of these developments seem that out of line with the immigrant experience, at least insofar as the undocumented have no equal access to labor and justice, and the pathway to citizenship can be long, murky, and fiendishly conditional. But Von Trier’s darkest assertion in Dogville is how Grace’s hosts become her oppressors: Tom is hopeful that the townspeople will use this opportunity, the “gift” of her arrival, to reveal their good natures during a difficult time, but the situation proves more like a moral stress test that they’re doomed to fail. Rather than inspire the town’s support, Grace’s increasingly compromised circumstances become a reason to exploit her further. That’s an essential marker of Von Trier’s pessimism about society: He believes we’re more Darwinian than our consciences and ideals would seem to allow. If that’s “anti-human,” so be it. The proof is in the nativist pudding. 

The Importance of Outliers (Or: Why We Need Someone Championing 'The Dead Girl' and Other Half-Forgotten Movies), by Keith Phipps

Where do good movies go when they die? What becomes of the worthwhile films that, for one reason or another, never get the attention they deserve, those that receive low-key releases and fail to build up the sort of critical consensus that leads to awards talk but deserve better fates than to be forgotten? It’s a problem that’s been with movies from the beginning. The industry has always attracted more talent and released more films than could ever find a cultural foothold. In the stark terms of economics textbooks, it’s a business designed for overproduction. Movies get thrown against the wall. Some stick. Others don’t. In the process, some very good films end up not lost but pushed far to the margins where only the most intrepid explorers can find them. It’s always been that way, but that doesn’t make it fair.