2022 has been a great year — well, at the cinema at least. Beloved auteurs, like Park Chan-wook, Jordan Peele, Martin McDonagh and Pedro Almodóvar, returned with new work, while low-budget indie underdogs found huge success (shoutout to Everything Everywhere All At Once, Aftersun and Happening). And while an influx of new favourite films is something to celebrate, this year has also seen equally deserving movies fly criminally under the radar. So, before you make your Letterboxd end-of-year list, here’s a reminder of this year’s underrated gems.
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1. After Yang
The video essayist-turned-director Kogonada takes on sci-fi in his sophomore feature, After Yang. But this imagined future is less action-packed Blade Runner, more high-concept malaise. A couple (Jodi Turner-Smith and Colin Farrell) bring the refurbished robot Yang (Justin H Ming), into their home, so that their adopted daughter can stay connected to her Chinese heritage. But when Yang stops working and is dismantled, special software is discovered. Into a memory bank, Yang has been archiving his life, which the family discovers extends far beyond just them. Subdued and soulful in its vision, After Yang tugs at ideas of memory, technology and race, unspooling them into an enigmatic future.
2. The African Desperate
Artist and filmmaker Martine Syms skewers art school discourse in her debut feature film. Set over a day and night, MFA student Palace defends her work in an uncomfortable viva — complete with every racist micro- and macro-aggression under the sun — before descending into a night of messy partying and even messier relationships. Liberal college stereotypes, the snotty art world and millennial narcissism are all coolly dissected in The African Desperate, an innovative satire that is as playful as it is biting.
3. Hit the Road
Son of the legendary, and recently detained, Iranian director Jafar Panahi, Panah Panahi continues his family’s tradition of triumphant, radical filmmaking. An old-fashioned road trip movie, Hit the Road moves between slapstick absurdity, gallows humour and heartbreaking tenderness as a family winds through grand Iranian landscapes in a borrowed car. We don’t know where the family are going – and seemingly neither do they – but it’s the journey that counts.
4. All Light Everywhere (dir. Theo Anthony)
In our intense, global surveillance culture, we are all simultaneously acting as spectator and spectacle. This ambitious documentary explores ideas of objectivity, and the fiction that the camera is a neutral eye onto the world. Spanning 19th century colonial photography, smart phones, police dash cams and the director’s own optical nerve, All Light Everywhere deftly explores the weaponisation of imagery and turns the proverb of “seeing is believing” on its head.
5. Great Freedom (dir. Sebastian Meise)
This powerful film shines a light on the ugly underbelly of recent European history. After the Allies won World War II and freed prisoners from Nazi concentration camps, many of the surviving gay men were imprisoned once more under Germany’s penal code that made homosexuality a crime. Great Freedom is a fictional telling of this cruel history, centering on an imprisoned man and Holocaust survivor, Hans (Franz Rogowski). Brutal and bruising, the film tackles a recent, shameful past through intimate relationships between wounded men.
6. Kimi (dir. Steven Soderbergh)
A rare example of a film made and set during the Coronavirus lockdown that stands up to post-pandemic viewing, Kimi is a paranoid thriller about connection. Zoë Kravitz plays Angela, a blue-haired agoraphobe who spends her days working from home to improve her tech company’s home AI product, Kimi. While listening to a Kimi recording, Angela stumbles upon evidence of a violent, domestic crime and decides to finally leave her house to investigate what really happened. Taking equal inspiration from Hitchcock and Siri, Kimi is a slick, sharp mystery.
7. Free Chol Soo Lee (dir. Julie Ha and Eugene Yi)
In 1973, San Francisco, a Korean immigrant was racially profiled by the police and wrongly convicted of murder. The injustice of Chol Soo Lee’s imprisonment fuelled a movement of Asian American social activism in the US, who took their protest of the man’s wrongful life sentence to the streets. This documentary uses archive footage and interviews to elegantly portray how Chol Soo Lee’s life was devastated by the police’s racism and the history of 20th century Asian American activism. It’s an engrossing, moving and long-overdue documentary, told with confidence and conviction by its filmmakers.
8. The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers)
Whether it’s wrestling in volcanos, raiding villages or dancing around a fire with a deranged Willem Dafoe, there’s nothing a shredded viking won’t do shirtless in Robert Eggers’ vision of vengeance. Alexander Skarsgård is Amlet, a burly warrior prince in exile, seeking retribution for his lost crown, parents and kingdom. Amlet’s journey across Scandinavian vistas is demanding, gruesome and deliriously silly – and features Björk! – in this nightmarish spectacle of Nordic myth.
9. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (dir. Sophie Hyde)
In a hotel room, a recently retired widow (Emma Thompson) and a handsome, younger sex worker (Daryl McCormack) meet for the first time. Over the course of the film’s runtime, the unlikely pair begin a knotty, transactional relationship and, between the sex, their conversations cover ageing, pleasure and marriage. It’s rare that an older woman’s sex life is so frankly depicted on screen, and Thompson and McCormack’s delightful chemistry keeps the tone oscillating between humour and tenderness.
10. Fire of Love (dir. Sara Dosa)
French volcanologist power couple Katia and Maurice Krafft were the subject of two archival documentaries this year, one by Werner Herzog and the other by Sara Dosa. The latter is the more romantic of the two, portraying a love triangle between the Kraffts and the erupting volcanoes that cemented their marriage. Miranda July’s lyrical narration adds to the poetry of the otherworldly footage, which the couple shot themselves during their geological excursions. The Krafft’s relentless pursuit of fiery landscapes would eventually swallow the couple whole, but this telling of their dramatic, destructive quest is dazzling.