Chris’s Favorite Watches of 2022

After Life
A group of newly-dead people are in a way station between heaven and Earth where they are given three days to choose a favorite memory which they will relive for eternity.

Beyond Skyline
When the population of Los Angeles is vacuumed off the face of the Earth, Detective Mark Corley storms his way onto an alien ship to rescue his estranged son. But after crashing the ship in Southeast Asia, he must forge an alliance with a band of survivors to discover the key to saving his son and taking back the planet once and for all.

A Bread Factory
In part one, after 40 years of running a community arts center, Dorothea and Greta are suddenly fighting for survival when a celebrity couple come to town and build an enormous complex down the street. Part two revolves around rehearsals for the Greek play, Hecuba, but the real theatrics are outside the theater where the town has been invaded by bizarre tourists and mysterious tech start-up workers.

Millennium Actress
When a movie studio is torn down in Japan, television personality Genya Tachibana tracks down Chiyoko Fujiwara, a recluse and one of the studio’s most famous stars, and is drawn into the story of her mysterious past.

Il Buco
During the economic boom of the 1960s, Europe’s highest building is being built in Italy’s prosperous North. At the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe’s deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland. The bottom of the Bifurto Abyss, 700 meters below Earth, is reached for the first time. The intruders’ venture goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of a small neighboring village, but not by the old shepherd of the Pollino plateau whose solitary life begins to interweave with the group’s journey. Another work of nearly wordless organic beauty that touches on the mystical from the visionary director of Le Quattro Volte, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco chronicles a visit through unknown depths of life and nature and parallels two great voyages to the interior.

Revolutionary Girl Utena
Utena is a tomboyish school girl who attends the prestigious Ohtori Academy. Her strong sense of chivalry pulls her into a series of duels with other members of the Student Council for the possession of the Rose Bride.

Donbass
In the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, mid-2010s: a hybrid war takes place, involving an open armed conflict alongside killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by Russian-separatist gangs. In the Donbass, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth, and hatred is declared to be love. Life is suffused with fear and suspicion. What is real and what is fake news?

Chan is Missing
A cabbie and his nephew in San Francisco’s Chinatown search for Chan, who is missing with $4000 of their money.

Matewan
A wrenching historical drama that recounts the true story of a West Virginia coal town where the local miners2 struggle to form a union rose to the pitch of all-out war in 1920. Written and directed by John Sayles, this film issues an impassioned cry for justice that still resounds today.

All About Lily Chou-Chou
Yuichi is constantly bullied at school. At home he manages a fan website for his favorite singer, and meets a fellow fan named Blue Cat. But when Yuichi heads out to a Lily concert, he’s unaware of the tragedy that awaits him.