By Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott
Section: Movies
Source: New York Times
Published Date: December 6, 2022 at 02:00AM
Amid endless agonizing over the State of Cinema, the actual releases proved a bounty for film lovers, whether fans of the art house or the multiplex.
In 1985, The New York Times’s longtime film critic Vincent Canby wrote an inspired, admirably cranky essay about the future of cinema. The spark for his ruminations was “Room 666,” a documentary from Wim Wenders that had just opened in New York. Shot during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, the movie consists of different directors alone in a hotel room where they respond to a question that Wenders had written on a piece of paper: “Is cinema a language that is about to get lost, an art that is about to die?”
The first director — and the other inspiration for Canby’s disquiet — was Jean-Luc Godard, who described Wenders’s project as an inquest on the future of films. For the next 10 minutes or so, Godard, smoking his familiar cigar, meditates on this vexing, evergreen question with his characteristic intelligence, opacity and epigrammatic wit. The news isn’t good. “The dream of Hollywood is to make one film,” Godard says, “and it’s television that makes it, but which is distributed everywhere” — which is as good a description of our NetflixDisneyMarvel world as I’ve read.
For Canby, Godard’s prediction of a one-movie world had already come to pass. Acclaimed films from the likes of Jonathan Demme were struggling at a box office dominated by wide releases like “Beverly Hills Cop.” Canby believed that there was plenty of blame to go around, pointing to risk-averse money types and a “sheeplike” public. He wrote that “our society is being increasingly homogenized, possibly through the pervasive power of television to plant the same ideas, the same fears and the same fads in more people, more quickly, than has ever before been possible in the history of the world.” Yikes!
I don’t think Canby and Godard were entirely right (feel free to discuss among yourselves), but after nearly four decades and innumerable interchangeable franchise sequels, it’s clear they weren’t entirely wrong. Yet, all these years later — and even as the industry struggles through yet another of its interminable crises — I am again heartened by all of the good and great movies that continue to be released. People often ask me if I’ve seen any good movies lately. I have, many of them, this and every year, but if I can’t tempt you with one of my favorites of 2022, I suggest you watch a film or two by Godard.
His soul left the world on Sept. 13; his movies will live forever.
1. ‘EO’ (Jerzy Skolimowski)
Soon after this indelible heartbreaker opens, a little circus donkey called EO — named for the sounds he makes — sets off on a strange, at times phantasmagoric, adventure. Along the way, he encounters other animals but, more consequently, kind and cruel people whose treatment of him reflects the denatured world that we have made. Now 84, Skolimowski has made one of the rare movies that speak to life’s most essential questions, and he’s done so with the ecstatic vision and fearlessness of a cinematic genius who seems as if he’s just getting started. (In theaters.)
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/movies/best-movies-2022.html
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