‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: Ireland’s Lovely, Heartbreaking Oscar Entry Is One Of The Best Films Of The Year

There’s a lot of talk about how 2022 was a ‘flop’ year for film. The quality of the movies was constantly called into question without considering that many of these films were shot during the height of the pandemic where money, space, and resources were limited. Regardless of what anyone thinks, this year produced some phenomenal cinema, with even better performances. My best of 2022 list is meant to highlight some of the titles that left an impression on me. The choices range across genres from action, drama, documentary, and animation. 

If you’re tapped into the world of Film Twitter, you probably noticed that social media exploded recently when Sight & Sound updated its Best Films of All Time list. People were debating for weeks about what films would end up getting booted out of the top 100, which would have huge leaps in popularity, etc… It was a whole thing.

The shortlist of 15 films to vie for a Best International Feature Film Oscar nomination is set to be announced Wednesday. In all, films from 92 countries are eligible this year, and as we regularly see, they offer up an embarrassment of riches. For the first time in a while, however, there doesn’t appear to be a hands-down clear frontrunner. 

This year, society almost got back to normal, with some caveats, and we all went back to film festivals and theaters, thankful for the myriad features from some of the best filmmakers around. In the following 19 essays, directors offer praise and insight into their favorite films — the movies that moved them the most or ones they found just plain astonishing — of 2022. Guillermo del Toro found Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” fascinating.

Colombian cinema has shown a ferocious loyalty to the country’s dispossessed: to the generation that lost its lands to exploitation and its moral moorings to the drug trade, to the kids who grew up parentless on the streets or found some kind of refuge in the militias that terrorized the country. It has also proved to be a hotbed of vibrant artistic experiment. Films such as Monos (2019) and La Jauria (2022), in which myth, magic and documentary observation collide and mingle, are notable for their untethered energy and complete disregard for prescribed categories. Stories are not so much told as imaginatively experienced. Perhaps, in a country with so few visible rules, anything is possible. 

From Bergen to Malta, Liverpool, New York and Halifax: Norwegian merchant seamen Alfred (Kristoffer Joner) and Sigbjorn (Pal Sverre Hagen) sometimes seem to be competing for screen time with datelines in Gunnar Vikene’s epic War Sailor, Norway’s Oscar submission. Sprawling, packed with anecdote and surging from one dramatic peak to the next, War Sailor sets out to tell the stories of the ordinary but unsung heroes who helped defeat Germany in 1945. It has the best of intentions.

Cáit runs back home, we see a crying baby, and her mother upbraids her for coming into the house with mud on her shoes.Bairéad and director of photography Kate McCullough (Hulu’s “Normal People”) emphasize Cáit’s alienation from her surroundings in their compositions, but they also strive to give the images a very soft look, with ghostly light on Cáit’s serious face. Cáit is always looking down and then looking up apprehensively, as if she expects some calamity at any moment, which is justified when boys knock some milk into her lap at school; other kids call her “a weirdo” because she keeps so much to herself.The effects with light that McCullough gets in these early scenes can be entrancing, as when she catches the way that a white neon light above a bar molds the head of Cáit’s father in profile, or the pink light from a television set as it is reflected on a wall.

A trio of teens navigates relationships in contemporary Helsinki in Girl Picture, Finland’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar. Directed by Alli Haapasalo (Love and Fury), it’s an engaging portrait of young women that’s as refreshing as it is entertaining. To call this a “Finnish Booksmart” would be doing its originality a disservice, but there are coincidental similarities as a quick-witted lesbian and her straight girl friend try to help each other with their love lives over a series of parties and amusing encounters. 

Why do we have children? Cait’s Mam and Da would be hard-pressed to answer that, with a house full of sour teenage daughters, a toddler barely walking, another baby about to land and not enough money to pay a day laborer to bring in the hay. These are the kind of kids who go to school with no lunch. 

Young Plato comes last, alphabetically, on the list of documentaries qualified for Oscar consideration this year. But it may come in first in the hearts of many Documentary Branch voters as they cast their ballots determining the feature shortlist.

It’s 2002 and raining brains in Riyadh, at least from the gormless Nasser’s wonky perspective. Nasser’s doctor is firmly convinced he has a brain tumour, which is his explanation for the protracted hallucinations Nasser experiences and that he, Dr Ahmed, is all too ready to excise. Nasser isn’t so sure: his dreams, fantasies and visions are more fun than the rest of his life, yoked beneath the twin tyrannies of his fanatical father and his boss at the thinly patronized Dove Hotel. Why get rid of the good stuff? Especially once those visions start to include the mysterious young woman who arrived unannounced one day to ask for the key to room 227. She’s welcome to walk the corridors of his mind any old time.

An Afro-European woman connects with her roots in Bantú Mama, the Dominican Republic’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Co-written and directed by Ivan Herrera, it’s was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing. It’s a compelling drama featuring a strong performance from Clarisse Albrecht, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

2022 was a generous year for movie lovers: a new Sight and Sound list was released to stir the pot about the greatest 100 films of all time; film festivals around the world returned to in-person experiences; even the whimsical gibberish from Nicole Kidman and AMC Theaters about going to see a movie gave us something to bond over as things adjusted to a strange but safer normal.  READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2023 It was a year of cinematic memoirs, with Steven Spielberg, Alejandro G.

A devastated father has said that he took his young daughter to hospital A&E on three separate occasions prior to her being admitted to Intensive Care where she later died from Strep A. Five-year old Stella-Lily McCorkindale became the ninth UK child to pass away from the bacterial infection outbreak after initially feeling unwell on November 26.

What can we do when everything seems to be going against us? Young Cait is facing what appears to be insurmountable challenges in “The Quiet Girl.” The film looks at its central character’s life before and after being shuttled to a foster family with its own secrets. “The Quiet Girl” is an important cinematic venture for all involved — being picked as Ireland’s official Oscar entry for Best International Feature.

Jordanian director Darin J. Sallam and producers Deema Azar and Ayeh Jadaneh have accused Israel of mounting a disinformation campaign against their film Farha and also rebuked the country for attempting to get it removed from theatres and Netflix.

Over the course of 144 minutes, Philip Yung’s true-crime drama Where the Wind Blows covers an awful lot of ground. An epic in the style Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in New York, it pairs Asian superstars Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok in a story spanning several decades of police corruption in Hong Kong during its time as a British colony. The detail is sometimes dense, but the tone turns playful and refreshingly light at times, and there’s even a memorable musical routine for “The God of Dance” Kwok.