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The film's precision and elan are extraordinary. The friend turns out to be the child version of the girl's own mother, who is somehow aware of this situation fantastique, allowing her to befriend the girl, and offer her a glimpse of the womanhood to come. 'Petite Maman': Celine Sciamma's wondrous film is indeed petite in running time (73 minutes), and scope (a young girl meets another young girl in the woods, and they become instant friends), but certainly not in emotional impact. What we get to see of the man is a warm, self-effacing counterpoint to Putin's joyless autocrat, a sense of where Russia might be allowed to go had they a leader with less design on absolute power. 'Navalny': Sticking with Putin's Russia, Daniel Roher's doc, captures the time after would-be political rival Alexei Navalny was nearly poisoned to death by Putin's FSB hench people, recovering in Germany right up until returning back to Russia, where he was promptly arrested at the airport, and put in prison (where he remains now). Given the current state of affairs, it's essential viewing. It's a thoroughly harrowing experience, but gives you a significant inkling into the horror that has been transpiring over the last few months.

Its witheringly on-point, verite-style, which depicts the tremendous misery and casual brutality of the dispute as it affects a married couple living on a farm while expecting their first child, couldn't be more prescient and necessary. 'Klondike': I saw Maryna Er Gorbach's searing war drama about the 2014 skirmish between Ukrainian loyalists, and the Russian-backed separatists that led to a passenger plane being shot down over the Donbas region, back in January at Sundance, a few short weeks before Russia's invasion. It conducts a difficult balancing act and absolutely nails the landing. You take a college comedy about a trio of friends wanting to complete a legendary frat party sweep, and add to that a sobering racial statement about the manner in which Black people have to constantly consider their actions with respect to law enforcement, without ever losing the comic vibe, or dramatic impact, and Carey Williams' smart, sharp-eyed film earns its place on this list. 'Emergency': This one scores high in the degree-of-difficulty scale. According to, last weekend, it was still the eighth highest grossing film domestically and it was released more than three months ago. In an industry in which most first-run films come and go inside of three or four weeks, that's extraordinary to sustain. In a telling testament to the film's sneaky assault on the box office, at many theaters it's still playing, after having been first released back at the end of March. 'Everything Everywhere All At Once': Mentioned above, and certainly the most fun I've had in a theater so far this year. It's that much more compelling and powerful for not subscribing to an obvious agenda. For more agriculturally minded people, however, it's not a simple screed against the evils of the industry (in fact, the farm is small, and the workers seem relatively kind-hearted toward their bovine charges), but an honest depiction of the life (and, it must be said, death) of a single cow over the course of several seasons. 'Cow': Andrea Arnold's indelible doc isn't for everyone: People already invested in animal welfare might well find the film - a portrait of a dairy cow living on a rural farm in England - overwhelming. Here are the best things I've seen this calendar year so far. It's everything an audience might conceivably want, wrapped up dervish style and coming at you like a freight train.ДЄs good as that one is, however, it's in fine company with some of the other standouts from the first seven months of 2022.

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This year, so far, that movie was Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's absolutely thrilling 'Everything Everywhere All At Once,' a phantasmagoria of action, comedy, pathos, and martial arts mayhem that leaves you wrung out and breathless as if you'd done a leg of the Tour de France. In an era when studios are so skittish and leery of missing their financial marks they've mostly regulated the cinematic year into specific quadrants - Dead Winter, Early Summer, $UMMER!!!!, Fall Prestige Fare - in order to try and best control an audience's interest, it's especially pleasurable when a truly wonderful film escapes from these confines and gets released into the wild.

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