We’re ranking every TV show of 2022. If you missed the first episode (har har), you can find it here.
95. Los Espookys (HBO, Season 2; 2019 rank: 72 of 101). I feel bad about not enjoying this show. It’s commendably offbeat, and its premise—four friends run a guerrilla business where they use their amateur talents to manufacture supernatural happenings as suits the bizarre needs of their eclectic clientele—is a triumph of bizarre imagination. But the execution is spotty, and some of the oddities are so random that they verge on perverse. (Also, I know he’s a co-creator, but Fred Armisen is absolutely dreadful.) I admire the concept of Los Espookys, because in an artistic landscape glutted with the same old stuff—true-crime dramas, ensemble sitcoms, world-building fantasies—we need more unclassifiable programs. I just need them to be better. Read More
We all know there’s too much TV. But what if TV is under existential threat? One of the programs you won’t find in the upcoming series of posts—which, per annual tradition, will count down every TV show I watched in the prior calendar year, concluding with the top 10 on Friday—is the second season of Raised by Wolves. It’s not that I didn’t want to watch the series; it’s that I couldn’t. To be more precise, I saw the first six episodes of HBO’s weird off-world thriller last February before losing interest, promising myself I’d finish it when I had more time. But last week, when I resolved to power through the rest of the show at long last, I discovered that HBO Max had removed it from its library entirely.
As first-world problems go, this one would seem to be relatively insignificant. But it’s indicative of the broader, troubling trend in which streaming services banish existing programs—some of which have already been produced yet never actually aired—to avoid paying residuals and other associated, incomprehensible costs. This is new, and it’s bad. The utopian conception of the #PeakTV era was a glutted marketplace where viewers had infinite choices, and their only problem was deciding which shows to pluck from the sprawling meadow of lush entertainment. Now that meadow is morphing into a weedy garden, and providers are less interested in planting new seeds than in pruning moldy shrubs which don’t earn their keep. TV shows used to last forever; now, some of them die before they’re born. Read More
If Brandon Cronenberg is anxious about being compared to his father, he’s doing a good job hiding it. His prior feature, the art-house hit Possessor, leveraged the metamorphic gifts of Andrea Riseborough (newly minted Oscar nominee!) for a sordid story of corporeal invasion and existential agony. Now he returns with Infinity Pool, a wild and grimy phantasmagoria full of damaged bodies and deranged images. It may lack the deceptive polish of his pop’s best work, but it rivals him for sheer nastiness.
This is a matter of theme as well as form. In broad terms, Infinity Pool is a crude satire of white privilege and colonialist prerogatives. It’s set in the fictional country of Li Tolqa—filming took place in Croatia and Hungary, but the looming specter of “rainy season” suggests Southeast Asia—which attracts tourists with its opulent resorts and sandy beaches, but which someone ominously describes as “uncivilized.” The movie’s premise, which stirs echoes of last year’s Dual (and also The Prestige), revolves around a particularly perverse kind of black market: When interlopers break the law and find themselves subject to the third-world nation’s draconian justice system, they can evade punishment by paying the authorities (embodied by a louche Thomas Kretschmann) a hefty fee to manufacture a double—a perfect recreation endowed with their memories as well as their appearance—who will then suffer the death sentence in their stead. The only catch (OK fine, there are lots of catches) is that they must bear witness to their doppelganger’s execution. Read More
If you think the title of Women Talking is bluntly descriptive, wait until you hear the perspective of Neitje (Liv McNeil). Fifteen years old and perpetually frustrated, she takes stock of the surrounding proceedings—a nonstop parade of feminine discourse and verbiage—and groans, “This is so boring!” It’s a wry meta moment that also (ahem) speaks to the unenviable difficulties facing Sarah Polley, the gifted and empathetic director who has chosen, for her first feature in a decade, to adapt the popular novel by Miriam Toews. That title is no lie; this is a dialogue-driven movie with limited action (the catalyzing incidents occur offscreen) and minimal plot. The challenge for Polley, who also wrote the screenplay with Toews, is to invest what’s primarily a verbal exercise with cinematic verve and dramatic urgency.
If she doesn’t exactly succeed, she has at least answered Neitje’s complaint with guile and skill. Women Talking is hardly kinetic, but it’s paced briskly enough to stave off accusations of sluggishness. If anything, some of Polley’s editing techniques—rather than deploying typical flashbacks, she frequently inserts random, lightning-quick cuts to prior brutalities (blood smeared on walls, bruises dotting legs)—are too abrasive to be boring. These moments tend to be more distracting than disquieting, and they don’t so much jolt the story to life as disrupt its fluid rhythms. Still, Polley evades point-and-shoot banality, and some of the film’s artistic choices—the desaturated color scheme that looks like the camera is fighting through a scrim, the rippling guitar-plucked score from Hildur Guðnadóttir, the ominous overhead shot of wagons pushing past onlookers in white straw hats—lend double meaning to an early title card that reads, “What follows is an act of female imagination.” Read More
Hey, the Oscars just announced their nominations for the 95th Academy Awards! They were pretty good, except for the ones that were terrible. If you’re a member of the unfortunate class of cinephile who ritualistically follows such matters, you have by now performed the standard series of compulsory reactions: celebrating the precious few overlaps between your own ballot and the Academy’s, bemoaning the collective’s egregious failings of judgment (have I gotten over The LEGO Movie missing in Best Animated Feature in 2014? Reader, I have not), and frantically updating your mental list of favorites to win Best Picture.
In other words, this year was business as usual: a few welcome inclusions, several more head-scratching omissions, and the typical plethora of “Ah well that was inevitable” selections. But for those of you with social lives who are less enmeshed in Academy arcana, let’s quickly run the various categories and how they matched (or didn’t) with my own predictions: Read More
