The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022) | Directed by Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy

 5/5

Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is an absolutely lovely little short film and one of the best made for children in a very long time. The animation is stellar, made to look like a picture book come to life, complete with all the rough edges and stray lines. It’s remarkable how effectively the film weaves aphorisms and lessons into a simple fable, managing to make the whole experience engaging and utterly captivating from beginning to end. There are lessons and truths here that, while designed for children, we adults would do well to listen to some of the simplicity of the wisdom here – especially these lessons of kindness towards others. Everyone with a child in their life should have them watch this wonderful film about finding home, finding family, and loving and caring for the different parts of yourself.

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BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022) | Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

 5/5

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is a magnificent, moving film about what it’s like to exist in liminal spaces – being from one country but living in another, striving to be an artist but retain your journalistic integrity, holding onto your grief while trying to let it go, remaining on threshold of life and death… The use of surrealism as a stylistic choice allows the film to bring this feeling of dislocation to life in a powerful, captivating way as it interrogates the nature of truth, myth, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. This is a film that is keenly aware of the class privilege that allows its main character to traverse borders freely, yet because of his country of origin it also understands the prejudice and racism he faces regularly when coming into the United States. This is undoubtedly Iñárritu’s most accomplished film – and certainly his most personal – and he seems willing to be honest and vulnerable in a way that he hasn’t allowed himself to be in other works, revealing fears and truths that go deeper the surface-level machismo of his previous efforts.

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Night Ride (2020) | Directed by Eirik Tveiten

 3.5/5

Eirik Tveiten’s Night Ride is such a charming short film, one with a lovely sense of discovery as the main character fumbles her way through her attempt to drive the tram she has accidentally stolen. The film uses the confines of the tram exceptionally well – isolating our main character from her unintended passengers and keeping the incident of harassment she tries to ignore just over her shoulder. It’s so moving to see a film that encourages active involvement when harassment occurs, and the character’s approach to challenging fragile and toxic masculinity is absolutely delightful.

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Ice Merchants (2022) | Directed by João Gonzalez

 4.5/5

João Gonzalez’s Ice Merchants is a lovely work of short animation, filled with intricate illustrations and beautiful designs. The use of repetition throughout the film is so effective as it sets up for the film’s poignant conclusion. While grief is at the core of this short, it exists in the background as an ever-present emotion, revealing itself in small moments that build slowly to the film’s emotional finale. This is a gorgeous little film that takes you by surprise, that you can’t help but love the more you consider it – from the simple way movement is captured to the film’s heart and soul.

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My Year of Dicks (2022) | Directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir

 4/5

Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s My Year of Dicks is a very funny, painfully honest coming-of-age short about a teenage girl looking to lose her virginity. The variation in animation styles used throughout the short is absolutely wonderful and helps differentiate each chapter and the different boys she dates over the course of the titular year, with each style perfectly representing the relationship and her own inner state of being. It’s charming, honest, and oh-so-true true to the experiences of growing up (especially in the ’90s) and of what it is to explore your sexuality for the first time.

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Stranger at the Gate (2022) | Directed by Joshua Seftel

 4/5

Joshua Seftel’s Stranger at the Gate is an incredibly compelling short documentary about one man’s journey from hate to love. Seftel wisely focuses on the community that accepted this would-be domestic terrorist and contrasts their open acceptance with his wife’s tactic of hoping that his anger and rage would simply get better on their own. This is a film that rests on the strengths of its strong interviews and wise editing choices. There may be some questionable b-roll footage throughout, but when the rest of the film is so strong, that’s a minor complaint.

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The Flying Sailor (2022) | Directed by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby

 3.5/5

Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s The Flying Sailor is an incredibly beautiful short film with stunning animation. The mix of styles and techniques is mind-boggling – especially seeing how seamlessly these seemingly disparate techniques are blended together. While there isn’t much below the surface of this short, it is a lovely way to explore what happens when your life flashes before your eyes. It’s charming, light, and clever.

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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021) | Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp

 5/5

Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a lovely, unexpectedly insightful, and incredibly funny animated film. Camp and his co-writers (Jenny Slate, Elizabeth Holm, and Nick Paley) effortlessly capture the beats, rhythms, and spontaneity that you find in traditional documentaries – and yet the rigorous craft and skill it takes to combine the stop-motion animation with live action, all while still making room for improvisation, is stunning. Slate’s performance is outstanding, bringing so much heart and soul to a character that could all-too-easily be written off as cutesy or insubstantial. The camerawork has a warm, rich, and textured look that comes from this marriage of stop-motion and live action, and it captures the light in such a way that it mirrors the film’s own inner warmth and sense of peace and harmony. It’s delightful to see the way the film interrogates the role of “filmmaker” throughout (in its own very subtle and gentle manner), constantly challenging the notion that Dean, the human filming Marcel’s life, can remain a detached and uninvolved observer. The film also provides a sly skewering of the ways social media can push us into performing for one another, making shows of connection without every truly knowing or being known. And really, community is at the core and the essence of the film – can you ever find it again once it’s been lost? This theme is expertly threaded throughout the film – whether it’s Marcel’s quest for his family or Dean coping with the loss of his marriage. This is a lovely, joyous film.

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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) | Directed by James Cameron

 2/5

James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is punishingly long, with so many narrative digressions and self-indulgent, disconnected sequences that the film pushes itself into a tedium that never earns its runtime. While the film’s computer-generated effects and motion captured performances are frequently stunning throughout much of the film, the moments in which the effects aren’t seamless truly stand out. Cameron stages a few truly spectacular action scenes that are well-choreographed and nicely paced, but far too many of them go on for too long and begin to lose the clarity of action that makes them so compelling early on and differentiates them from other modern action scenes. The Way of Water also falls into the problem that far too many “serious” action films succumb to – making depictions of an atrocity appear to be exciting and thrilling through the use of traditional action editing, bombastic music cues, and favoring the viewpoints of the perpetrators of violence.

The narrative itself is too thin to support the grandiose scale that Cameron is trying to achieve here – characters are constantly making unmotivated decisions for plot convenience and to advance the story to the next moment of visual spectacle. The patriarchal “father protects his family” worldview gets tiresome quickly, and the potpourri of Indigenous cultures that Cameron borrows from with no sensitivity and little understanding is backwards and regressive. Cameron continues to show that he is unable to write convincing dialogue – conversations are wooden and plodding, with the same lines and even series of lines repeated over and over again. Zoe Saldaña‘s performance through motion capture is very strong, and while there are a few inspired sequences and ideas throughout the film, but those ideas are never developed and those sequences are diluted by being drawn out far too long. This is a film (and franchise) with so much squandered potential due to Cameron’s problems with story, pacing, and dialogue, as well as his own inability to see outside of his own limited experiences.

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All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) | Directed by Edward Berger

 5/5

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a brutal depiction of war, unrelenting and bleak, that never allow viewers to settle into the comfortable or familiar spectacle of violence. This is a film that constantly finds ways to complicate and humanize enemy soldiers so that the killing is never easy, it always comes at an emotional and spiritual cost to the characters we follow through the narrative – as well as ourselves. Because the film is so brutal throughout and places us so often in close point of view of soldiers at the front, it can come across as emotionally cold and distant, giving itself over to dread and terror more than the sadness and grief over all these wasted lives. Still, that’s preferable to the often mawkish and overly sentimental depictions of war and combat that we’re often presented in cinema. The true villains of the film aren’t enemy soldiers, but the generals and powers-that-be sending these young men off to die – depicted as grotesque, out-of-touch, blinded by the safety and security of their opulence and privilege. The sound design here is exquisite and essential to enveloping us in the terror of battle, contrasting it with the quiet times in between. This is a magnificent film – hard and challenging, but a powerful statement on the cruelty of war.