Continuing the countdown of my favorite 2022 movies…

Best Films of 2022
#4 – Kimi

Steven Soderbergh is a fascinating filmmaker. Since pioneering the 90s Independent Cinema movement with his 1989 debut Sex, Lies and Videotape, he has directed 34 movies in 34 years.

Among them are micro-budget experimental films featuring only non-professional actors and high-budget blockbusters starring the biggest movie stars in the world. He’s dabbled in coming-of-age films, true crime, sports dramas, martial arts action, historical drama, biopics, and thoughtful dramas about female escorts and male strippers.

Given the volume and breadth of his filmography, he has a strong track record. But in the past decade and a half, he’s been pretty hit or miss. Here are the six films he directed between 2017 and 2021: Logan Lucky, which I loved; Unsane, which was decent but forgettable; High Flying Bird, which I found lacking despite strong reviews; The Laundromat, a big miss; Let Them All Talk, which made my 2020 top ten; and No Sudden Move, a well-received movie that I found borderline incomprehensible.

So when I heard Soderbergh was releasing a movie shot in the middle of the pandemic that took its cues from Rear Window and The Conversation, I didn’t know if I should expect another noble failure or one of my favorite movies of the year.

Kimi was definitely the latter.

Clocking in at a delightful 89 minutes, the film follows agoraphobic tech worker Angela (a brilliant Zoe Kravitz), safely ensconced in her Seattle loft apartment, where she fine-tunes the algorithm of the titular Alexa-like device by correcting users’ misunderstood voice commands.

One of the files she reviews sounds like a recording of a violent crime, and she must figure out how to respond while navigating her own company’s increasingly suspicious security department.

David Koepp’s script is taut, funny and clever, and Soderbergh executes it beautifully. He really pulls out the stops when Angela has to venture outside, using skewed camera angles and claustrophobic editing to put us in her troubled head.

The film makes excellent use of its pandemic setting, tapping in to the strangeness of human interaction during a period where masks and hand sanitizer were ubiquitous. It also drops us right in the middle of a protest of Seattle’s anti-homelessness measures, a scene created for the movie that feels like it was pulled off of CNN. Movies and TV shows have handled the pandemic in different ways, but Kimi is the best time capsule I’ve seen of that surreal year-plus.

At the center of this creatively-filmed, socially-relevant, whip-smart thriller is a brilliant performance by Kravitz. As I wrote in my Best Actress post last week, I love how she builds Angela from the outside in, giving her a unique physicality that matches her frenzied mental state. I remain obsessed with the way she dries her hands after applying sanitizer. Now that’s cinema.

I had Kimi lower on this list when I started prepping these posts, but the more I thought about it the higher it climbed. I’ve seen it three times already and would gladly fire it up again right now. The world needs more 89-minute smart, stylish thrillers, and the world needs more Zoe Kravitz. I’ll be treasuring this movie for a long time.