THE TOP FILMS OF 2022
There are no certain answers, but the way that we engage with film is changing. This may require the Oscars to adapt in dramatic fashion, but an institution such as the Academy may not be able to change fast enough.
1. TÁR (dir. Todd Field). Not since Margo Channing have we received such an iconic portrayal of an artist that is intersected with persuasive portrayals of a woman's place in the arts, sexuality, a touch of the Gothic, and a dash of camp. Lydia Tár may not be the actual conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but we engage on such a deep level with her artistry, that this film feels like a sophisticated biopic, much more incisive than Bohemian Rhapsody or Baz Luhrman's Elvis. Cate Blanchett occupies Lydia with the fierceness we expect from one of the greatest actresses of her generation. She is a consummate technician, but the performance is rooted in a shaded compassion that forces us to wonder whether Tár is culpable of unspeakable acts, or even question whether she is fully sane. Few films can skewer the world of classical music with such a rapier wit. And just as Marvel movies assume their audience's deep knowledge of the universe of the Avengers, Field expects his viewers to know their Mahler, Bach, and Michael Tilson Thomas. He seems to taunt us when he refuses to explain jokes. And Cate conspires with him in what may be one of the greatest performances of her life.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once (dir. The Daniels). Initially, I had been hesitant to see this film. Yet another multiverse movie that opened on the heels of a Marvel Spiderman movie that had all the past Spidermen actors meet in some parallel universe, and opening shortly before Dr. Strange had to control these multiverses from exploding. Did I need to see yet another movie with colliding versions of characters spread across the fabric of space and time? Reader, I was wrong. "Everything Everywhere All at Once" is this year's most compelling, heart tugging family drama of the year. Evelyn Wang's life is a constant struggle to keep her head above water with her flailing laundromat. She and her daughter are constantly bickering, and she appears deeply unsatisfied with her meek but loyal husband. As she is audited by a supercilious IRS agent, Evelyn questions whether there is a world where her life has a more appealing sheen. An evil avatar of her daughter is seeking her mother in an attempt to end the hurt feelings. We then are launched on a journey to explore all the universes where these characters intersect. The film never loses its pace or its place within this multiverse, and everything everywhere is held together by Michelle Yeoh, in a part that finally gives her the ability to portray a complex, shaded character. She turned herself into a superstar in this one performance that was originally written for Jackie Chan. It doesn't hurt that her supporting cast consists of Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and Jamie Lee Curtis, all of whom, including Yeoh, received Oscar nominations for their performances. It is a film that provides a sentimental family drama in a truly innovative framing.
3. Triangle of Sadness (dir. Ruben Östlund). This artsy European film was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May. It is a deeply cynical, but hilarious, look at the world's superrich. Weapons manufacturers rub shoulders with Russian oligarchs and social media influencers on a yacht embarking on a rather troubled journey, with a drunken Woody Harrelson at its helm. After a harrowing, and rather disgusting, voyage, the ship capsizes. It is in the third act of the film when the drama truly begins and is held together by the performance of Dolly De Leon, playing a "toilet manager" on the yacht, who becomes captain of the rich survivors because only she can forage, fish, and keep them alive on this deserted isle. It brilliantly exposes the vapidness of the rich and demonstrates the class politics undergirding the global economy.
4. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dir. Dean Fleischer Camp). The most touching film of the year was a stop-motion animated feature about a talking mollusk. Marcel the Shell has been separated from the entirety of his family, save for his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini). He must embark on a quest to find them and he enlists the man living in his airbnb and legendary 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl. Following the spunky crustacean on his journey, we are led through a bevy of emotions, and tears are consistently. This is a moving meditation on the meaning of family.
5. Three Thousand Years of Longing (dir. George Miller). An academic literary critic, self-identified as a "narratologist," travels to Istanbul for a conference. While in a souk, she purchases a glass vial that she discovers contains a djinn. This djinn has millennia worth of stories of his attempts to gain his freedom from containment in a bottle, but every valiant effort is thwarted through the centuries, whether it is with the Queen of Sheba or the Ottoman Turks. A fantastical story told by Miller, with illuminating performances charged with chemistry from Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, it bristles with insights about love and life. This allegory is meditation on how we search for meaning in life and we craft our identities through the stories we tell. Although this film did not engender the same breathless embodiment of the zeitgeist that Miller's previous film, Mad Max: Fury Road, may have, but this smaller film is somehow weightier and more ambitious.
6. Women Talking (dir. Sarah Polley). Sarah Polley's "Women Talking" seems to posit Spivak's immortal question, "Can the subaltern speak?' The film follows the aftermath of a closed cult-like religious community that has been roiled by the realization that many women and young girls of the community have been sexually molested by male members of the congregation. The movie focuses on the discussion these women have as the men bail out the accused, and they ponder their place in a community that has refused to educate them, or even accord them the dignity of personhood. Unlike the similarly titled "She Said," Polley's film trades in a nimble and complex narrative formula. This is a film that will have a long afterlife, and I assume that it will be adapted as a stage play in the coming years.
7. All Quiet on the Western Front (dir. Edward Berger). When a classic is remade, one must always ask if such a re-examination is warranted or necessary. The 1929 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's blockbuster novel has become a cinematic classic, not just for its sensitive pacifist politics, but for some of the technical mastery of its sequences. The final shot of a hand reaching out for a butterfly that has alit in the trenches is a heartbreaking summation of the novel. Edward Berger's reimagining of the novel (which is a bit more faithful than Lewis Milestone's version, but still diverges from the text in numerous instances) has provided us with a war movie replete with the technical visual effects and explosions required of a war film today, but with an eye that simultaneously holds the macro view of our once-enthusiastic protagonist with the macro view of the negotiations to create peace that is effected by the German and French governments (and hindered by von Hindenburg). This allows the film to comment on the numerous levels of which a war is experienced, and leads its viewers to query: to what end is all of this destruction?
8. Living (dir. Oliver Hermanus) When I learned a remake of Kurosawa's breathtaking "Ikiru" was being filmed, I was dubious. Why try to recreate the magic of what is a beautiful existential meditation on the meaning of life? When I learned Nobel laureate Kazoo Ishiguro was adapting the screenplay, an adaptation, in turn, of Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich, I was intrigued. In this tale of a lonely bureaucrat who experiences the gamut of experience as he faces down death, Bill Nighy gives a finely shaded performance, and he rightly received his first Oscar nomination for this film. There may be more sentiment to this than Kurosawa's original, but the sentiment is so well placed and gives a beautiful view of London in the postwar years.
9. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (dir. Sophie Hyde). A sex comedy that is aimed at an adult audience? How refreshing! Emma Thompson is a recently widowed Briton who has decided that she wants to explore her sexuality by ordering a sex worker, played by the objectively gorgeous Daryl McCormack, to meet her at a hotel. She reveals that she has never experienced an orgasm and has (and has had) a fraught relationship with her own sexuality. The series of meetings between these two transform into deep conversations about the meaning of sex and its relationship with one's identity, and how damaging a refusal to attend to one's desires can be for an individual, their family, and society. The ending may be a bit glib and offer a vision of a society where everyone suddenly experiences their body, but seeing Thompson and McCormack play off each other is a welcome exercise in the deepening of our own relationship with our own bodies.
10. White Lotus, Season 2 (Dir. Mike White). Who would have thought that a satire of the ultra-rich on vacation in Sicily would become the show that made everyone tune into television at the same time on Sunday nights. We rushed home from dinner to see what would happen to Jennifer Coolidge ("These gays are trying to murder me!") before Twitter could spoil it for us. We reacted alongside Aubrey Plaza as she sneered at her vacation companions, and wondered how dumb Albie was to fall for a hooker who haunted the hotel bar. This is the Love Boat for the millennial generation, and it is the best that we can expect.
11. Emily the Criminal (dir. John Patton Ford). Aubrey Plaza had quite the year. After emerging in pop consciousness as the snarky civil servant of Pawnee, Indiana's Parks and Rec department, she appeared in numerous supporting turns as a snarky friend (and an excellent leading turn in "Ingrid Goes West"). But this year, she earned her dramatic acting chops both with White Lotus and Emily the Criminal, wherein she plays a woman down on her luck. She is drowning in student debt, which is doubly worse because she was never able to complete her degree after a felony conviction kept her from her studies. The conviction and the debt conspire to keep her from finding a job or keeping her head above water, so what is she forced to do? Commit crime. Petty thievery turns into run-ins with organized crime and even murder. It is a harrowing story, but Aubrey keeps you with her until the last frame. And once she goes bad, she may never return to a life of upholding the law.
12. X and Pearl (Dir. Ti West). It is fitting that a woman named Mia Goth gave us the spookiest set of horror protagonist/antagonist of the year. X which premiered first follows a rag-tag team of porn filmmakers to a ranch to shoot their latest extravaganza. Unfortunately, this farm house is occupied by two elderly pensioners who seem to have perverted designs on their guests. The film is high camp and involves the horror at a crone's sexuality (akin to this year's Barbarian, as well) and a man-eating crocodile. It is silly and serious all at once. In the film's prequel, we learn of the journey that brought Pearl to feel such dissonance with her society. We see her in 1918, as her husband is off at war in France, and she suffers under the thumb of her controlling mother. The film seems to eschew any desire at historical exactitude (films of 1918 did not look like the musicals shown in this film), but we are given a more than five-minute monologue by Pearl as she lays out her plea to be heard. It is a devastating speech and its incoherence demonstrates that she will never escape her demons.
13. Matilda: The Musical (dir. Matthew Warchus). There is nothing more frustrating than a film adaptation of a musical that feels static and is nothing more than a film of a stage performance. When Matthew Warchus, the director of the West End and Broadway renditions of this show, was announced as the film's helmer, I thought this would be a serviceable but unimaginative version of Roald Dahl's classic, paranormally gifted child character; however, I was very wrong. The film breaks open the staginess and provides each character an arc that feels more realized than what happened on stage. The filming of "Revolting Children" is a master class in how to stage the 11 o'clock number of a hit musical. And it gave us Emma Thompson as a cruel headmistress. Who can ask for more?
14. Spoiler Alert and Fire Island. Although the Judd Apatow produced Bros was supposed to be the big screen gay romcom we all wanted, the film flopped with a thud. Who was this film for--the straights or the gays? The answer was no one liked it. In the lead-up to its release, its star and writer Billy Eichner kept speaking as if he had thrown the first brick at Stonewall, and even dismissed "Fire Island" because it was on Hulu and wasn't a studio film released to theaters. However, Fire Island, a gay adaptation of Pride and Prejudice set at the gay vacation destination, had more heart than Bros. Additionally, 'Spoiler Alert," the type of old-school, three hankie weepie that is no longer made, gave us a gay Terms of Endearment, even though it made virtually nothing at the box office. Maybe skip Bros, and see one of these instead.
15. Elvis (dir. Baz Luhrmann). Is it bombastic, over the top? Yes, most certainly. Does it take a rather white-kid glove approach to the life of America's first true rock superstar? Yes, there are only slight references to Ann-Margaret, and the true depths of his addictions and struggles are only casually portrayed. But is it one heckuva a ride? Also, yes. Austin Butler has made a star-making turn simply because he is able to occupy and portray some of the charisma of one of our greatest entertainers. Many have quibbled with directorial choices and the presence of Tom Hanks in a fat suit with an undecipherable accent, but if this film accomplishes anything it is spurring you on to come home and watch the 1968 comeback special on Youtube, or find an old vinyl of Blue Suede Shoes. In that, if nothing else, it is a success.
16. The Woman King (dir. Gina Price-Bythewood). Although the film is not terribly historically accurate, "The Woman King" gives us one of our first studio productions of West African history. It follows the real-life female warriors of the real life Kingdom of Dahomey, as they battle rival states in the seventeenth century, the same moment when Europeans, led by the Portuguese, are interacting with these regional leaders in order to accrue the individuals needed to quench the insatiable need of slavers in the new world. The film argues that Dahomey saw itself as a state that refused to engage in the slave trade. That is false, but perhaps I should not hold this film to a higher standard of historical accuracy than Braveheart or Gladiator, which both have some real doozies in their scripts (Commodus did not murder his father Marcus Aurelius). The film allows Viola Davis to give a strong performance as a woman warrior with moral conviction, and she occupies a place that is rare in historical pieces like this: a woman with a mind and little deference to the men around her.
17. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (dir. Anthony Fabian). I will always have a fondness for a 1990s TV movie of Paul Gallico's novel that starred Angela Lansbury, Diana Rigg, and Omar Sharif, but a big-screen adaptation with Lesley Manville and Isabelle Huppert will do just as well. Mrs. 'Arris has saved her pennies and can afford to buy a Dior gown in post-war London. She encounters a lot of obstacles to getting her dress, but once she has donned her couture creation, she has transformed the lives of everyone she has come in contact with. Just a charmer of a picture.
18. Babylon (dir. Damien Chazelle). What a mess of a movie. I mean a mess. The dialogue is almost uniformly atrocious. And I think Jean Smart was actually bad--was that supposed to be her accent? The first time I saw this three-hour epic, I wasn't even sure what the point was. We already had a classic movie about the transition from silents to talkies in Hollywood, and the last scene of the movie has our protagonist watching 'Singin' in the Rain', inexplicably. On the second viewing, it seems that Chazelle is making a point about how every technological leap forward in cinema, whether its towards sound, color, or digital processing, will destroy whole swathes of the industry, but those left in the wake of this immolation are afforded one lasting reward: immortality on the screen. Even with the absolute mess that this movie is, I can say I was never once bored. It may have angered, perplexed, and even disgusted me, but Babylon was somehow always interesting.
19. Pinocchio (dir. Guillermo del Toro). The stop-motion animation of Guillermo del Toro's latest is simply stunning. A featurette on Netflix is available, and I insist you watch that; it demonstrates the absolute endless work needed to create even the shortest sequence in the film. I am still unsure as to whether we needed an adaptation of Pinocchio that is framed as an allegory of fascism (which was clearly not a part of Collodi's book from 1881), but the artistry and technical dazzlement seen in this film is well worth the watch.
20. Aftersun (dir. Charlotte Wells). A.O. Scott of the New York Times stated that Charlotte Wells is "very nearly reinventing the language of film." If that sounds like utter hyperbole to you, I agree. This intimate story of an estranged father and daughter on holiday in Turkey is affecting because of the power and charm of its two leads, Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio. Although I do not see this film reinventing the language of cinema (it is a series of flashbacks, how is this innovative?), Aftersun does demonstrate that Wells will be a serious auteur in the coming years.
21. The Batman (dir. Matt Reeves). I was the first to ask whether we needed another Batman flick. And was Robert Pattinson the right choice to succeed Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, or even Ben Affleck? I wasn't sure about that either. After another three-hour commitment, I came away from a film that stresses the vigilante nature of Bruce Wayne, which holds even more weight after the insurrection at the Capitol. And we have a quirky and independent Catwoman, played by Zoe Kravitz. It's a light entertainment, with some serious themes.
22. The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers). Eggers has such a keen eye for framing a shot and an attuned ear for creating an eerie atmosphere. "The Northman," an adaptation of a legend that helped inform Shakespeare's Hamlet, doesn't quite add up to his earlier features (The Witch or The Lighthouse), nor is either able to achieve the dazzling aesthetic highs of those movies, but this gives us a warped perspective into Norse legend that seems to posit that our current political factions are not that much different from those when marauders ruled the North Seas.
Notable entities that don't make the top twenty.
Avatar: The Way of Water. If James Cameron previously gave us a version of "Dances with Wolves" with blue people, this one is clearly "Waterworld." Should we expect Avatar 3 to be a mash-up of Kevin Costner's other big hits, Field of Dreams and the Bodyguard. The effects in this film are awe-inspiring. Animating the water so the audience feels like its drowning is masterful. The story telling, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired.
Top Gun: Maverick. The sequel to a movie made almost forty years ago did not seem to augur certain success, but this became the biggest hit of Tom Cruise's long career. It became the film that everyone left their house to see this past summer. Cruise, who is now over 60, still resembles a spritely adolescent, and he was paired by a group of young actors, including Miles Teller and Glenn Powell; it is almost a handing over of the torch. The real heart of the film is Cruise's meeting with Val Kilmer's Ice, a moment rich in sentiment as Val Kilmer's personal health struggles are clearly evident. That said, is it really a Best Picture contender?
The Fabelmans. There are things to like here: the first sequence feels like an homage to Cinema Paradiso, David Lynch as John Ford is an inspired piece of casting. But did I really need a two-and-a-half-hour movie about Spielberg being bullied in high school? I think not. And then at the one moment when the film picks up and gets interesting, the young Spielberg walks into the sunset on a studio lot and it ends. I would have much preferred a film about what happened when he got to the set, instead of this dime-store psychological approach to Speilberg's frustration with his mom having an affair with his father's best friend.
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