WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, WEST SIDE, HARLEM AND POINTS BEYOND...

There's been a lot of bashing of 2021 leading up to the New Year. I certainly wouldn't deny that it's been a rough 12 months, ending with passing of the great Betty White; still I'm loathe to speak too harshly of a year which has allowed me, my family, and, however precariously, my beloved country to survive, at least to fight another year.

So here's to a superb 2022. And here's my Top Ten list for the rather inauspicious movie year just past:

1. In the Heights--On balance, I don't think that any new movie I saw this year left me feeling as invigorated as this version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's pre-Hamilton musical about life in Washington Heights. Olga Merediz shines as the Abuela.

2. West Side Story--Yeah, I was skeptical too, but it really works.

3. Summer of Soul--Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary, pieced together from film of the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, features thrilling outdoor concert footage of Sly and the Family Stone, The 5th Dimension, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, The Staple Singers and Gladys Knight and the Pips, to name only a very few. Does anything more need to be said?

4. Belfast--Some of the sentiment doesn't register, and it's worth remembering that writer-director Kenneth Branagh's childhood point of view as a Protestant (the only point of view available to him, of course) was a good deal cozier than the Catholic point of view. Still, this is a warm, touching and beautifully-acted memory play, enriched with Van Morrison songs.

5. Nightmare Alley--The first half is livelier than the second half, but this lower-depths carny melodrama packs a final punch that the 1947 original didn't.

6. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time--Made over more than 30 years, this documentary chronicle of the author and his friendship with director Robert B. Weide seems uncommonly intimate.

7. Zola--Probably the first movie ever based on a Twitter thread, Janicza Bravo's tale of a young stripper realizing she's been lured into a sex trafficking ring is tense and grimly funny, and it rings disturbingly true.

8. The Mauritanian--This near-Kafka-esque drama about the Gitmo-ing of Mohamedou Ould Salahi and the legal battle to free him is blood-boiling, as it should be.

9. Spider-Man: No Way Home--This all-star line-up of villains--and Spideys!--is a deep dive into the endlessly re-booting Marvel "Metaverse"; really it's an elaborate and pretty amusing joke on the common, obsessive nerd need to make every version of a pop franchise jibe with every other version of a pop franchise.

10. The Amusement Park--Completed in 1973 but not premiered until this year, George Romero's hour-long allegorical drama on the abuses suffered by the aged, produced by the Lutheran Society, has true emotional impact. It's a fine time capsule of a western Pennsylvania amusement park in the early '70s, too.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Dear Evan Hansen would both have made the list if they were as good overall as their lead performances. Other flicks that, however uneven or trivial, I'm not sorry I sat through this year: Joel Coen's version of Shakespeare's Scottish Play; A Quiet Place Part II; Godzilla vs. Kong; Cruella; Spencer; Werewolves Within; Flag Day; YouthMin: A Mockumentary; King Richard; Sam & Mattie Make a Zombie Movie; Don't Breathe 2; The Green Knight; The Tender Bar; Old; Blue Bayou and the slightly maligned Cinderella, among others. I should also note that there are movies I haven't caught up with yet, including Licorice Pizza and The French Dispatch, that might well have altered this list.

AGE FRIGHT

Playing at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 5 and 8 p.m. Sunday, June 6 only at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Chandler; streams starting June 8 on Shudder: 

The Amusement Park--Scary movie buffs around the world revere the name of George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh-based auteur who directed the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead and its 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead, two of the more influential horror pictures ever. So the release of a "lost" movie by Romero is no little thing. But moviegoers will have their chance to see just that at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Chandler this weekend: Romero's 53-minute opus The Amusement Park, made in 1973 but shelved and thought lost until a print was discovered and restored a few years ago.

Romero's widow has been quoted as calling it his "most terrifying film." Having seen it, I'm not sure she's wrong, although it's not, in the usual sense of the term, a horror movie. It's an "industrial" that Romero made for hire for the Lutheran Society, a social service agency for the aged, about a terrifying subject: Aging and ageism. But it is atmospheric and haunting, even shocking at times, to the extent that the Lutheran Society declined to use it.

The star is Lincoln Maazel, who later played the elderly vampire killer in Romero's 1978 chiller Martin (and was also the real-life father of conductor Lorin Maazel). Here he's a sweet old guy in a white suit wandering around a rather seedy-looking old-school amusement park. But this is an allegorical amusement park: The rides and other attractions depict the economic, racial, medical and other abuses and humiliations suffered by the elderly.

The quality of The Amusement Park is bleakly dreamlike. There are some touches that have an unfortunate student-film quality, but they don't lessen the overall emotional impact. As the poor man's miseries and torments increase, culminating in a scene involving him trying to read The Three Little Pigs to a child, Maazel's performance becomes heartbreaking.

Maazel also appears, out of character, in a prologue in which he notes that the other elderly people in the film were from area homes, and their time at the park, working on the film, was the first fun outing that some of them had had in years. He addresses us again in an epilogue, asking us to consider volunteering for services helping seniors.

The setting, by the way, was West View Park, near Pittsburgh; Romero's film is also a vivid time capsule for the attraction. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, and while I don't remember ever visiting this particular park, the movie quickly brought back the nostalgic sense memories of parks of that sort, and that period. It was founded in 1906, and closed in 1977, just four years after the film was made. Turns out it was a victim of aging, too.