Features
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...
David Nice
“Visionary,” I’m told, is a clichéd word these days. But so long as you don’t fling it about too freely, it’s apt: for me, there are only two visionary directors working in opera right now. One is our own Richard Jones – though even he can get it wrong occasionally – and non-Czechs probably won’t know much about the other as yet.Jiří Heřman, for seven years the Artistic Director of the National Theatre Brno’s Janáček Opera, whose new production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead in an unprecedented yoking with the Glagolitic Mass I was there in to see, along with a revival of his 2020 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)3= Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen); and3= Happening (Audrey Diwan)5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel)6. Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)7= The Duke (Roger Michell); and7= Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)9. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) Each critic’s first choice was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
1. Nightmare AlleyIt’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power), it’s the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose journey starts with his miserably paid job at a travelling carnival.It could have used a trim here and there. But once you get sucked into the narrative, it’s a wild ride – like a ghost Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).Which makes me feel slightly less guilty for going back this year again and again to the softest cinematic comfort blanket I know, Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1969). In new films I didn't review, I was entranced by the compelling performance of Renate Reinsve as the woman whose Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin and Nope are marvellously mad in their own ways.The Quiet Girl, Playground and Petite Maman, all films of great beauty, are focused on the difficulties of growing up, as, in a more extreme way, is Nitram, the story of a mass-shooter whose parents are powerless in the face of their deeply disturbed son. And The Wonder, a strange, beautifully lit story Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’m struck by how many of my 2022 picks deal with relationships in extremis: a love story disguised as a Hitchcockian murder mystery, a long friendship gone suddenly surreally awry, an unlikely romance that unfolds on a sub-zero train journey, a married couple whose shared obsession with mortality is piqued by a toxic dust cloud, a father-daughter bond that’s finally understood through the prism of bitter-sweet memory.It’s as if all the conflict and uncertainty in the world is being reflected in these personal stories; there even seems a correspondence between a costume drama about a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In what feels like a less than stellar year for cinema, some films stand out. In some instances it was because I stepped a little outside my normal fare of blockbusters or star-driven vehicles and saw some films I might have thought a little too arthouse for my tastes. I'm very glad I did because otherwise I might not have seen a couple on this list.I chose as number one a film version of a stage musical that I loved; I'm often not a fan of transformations (in either direction) as I think they can be lazy or reductive. But not Matthew Warchus's Matilda the Musical, a joyous reincarnation of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Diwan’s French abortion drama Happening was the year’s hardest but most luminescent watch, as a fiercely intelligent young woman fights for her future survival as an artist in 1963, when illegal abortion requires wartime subterfuge and bloody violence to female bodies.Similarly humane social concern motivated the poetic realism of Li Ruijun’s Chinese peasant saga Return to Dust, and migrant children’s struggles in the Dardennes’ gripping Tori and Lokita. Nina Hoss’s portrait of a disintegrating piano teacher in The Audition also brought icy thriller techniques to the arthouse, while a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Empires rise and fall; every dog has its day. The increased awareness of and need for diverse voices – together with the series-driven streaming revolution – has made Hollywood less relevant now than it has been at any time since the industry colonised Southern California's orange groves. Even stars have become an endangered species.I enjoyed Licorice Pizza, The Fabelmans, and Bullet Train (until its awful last scene), but the films listed below speak with an urgency avoided by American mainstream movies with their escapist imperative – She Said being a grave, classy Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I struggled to find enough features this year for a top 10, probably because Covid’s long shadow made it harder for filmmakers to get interesting work on screen. But there are several documentaries with fascinating characters, untold stories, excellent cinematography (All that Breathes) and ingenious editing (Three Minutes: A Lengthening) that have been as moving and absorbing as any fiction film. The dramas that I’ve loved have also been drawn from life, using non-professional actors (Tori and Lokita, Utama) to highlight the vile exploitation of immigrants and the effects of climate Read more ...
mark.hudson
Looking back on the most exciting, atmospheric and musically challenging gigs I’ve seen to date, there are several contenders in each category. But for the distinction of THE MOST DISTURBING GIG I’VE EVER BEEN TO there is only one possible option: the night in autumn 1973 when I saw a band called Dr Feelgood supporting Ducks Deluxe, a bluesy soully pub rock band in – of all places – Surbiton Assembly Rooms.The NME, then the Bible of pop, were talking up Pub Rock, a back-to-basics, real music in small venues movement, as the thing of the moment, and a bunch of us from school, maybe six, went Read more ...