Films of 2022

Yes, you did not read that wrong – I said 2022, not 2023, not 2024, but 2022.

Ok, a little background. I’ve always loved movies – I thought I was going to be a film major when I started college, which is the only reason I bought the first (and only) Mac I’ve ever owned. But around four years ago when the world shut down for reasons we’d all rather forget, I started getting more serious about watching movies. A large part of that was simply taking the time I would have spent watching several seasons of a tv show and realizing that with that I could watch twenty or thirty movies. What’s more, I became very interested in cataloguing the films I had watched and planned on watching. This took two forms: first, I discovered Letterboxd, which is sort of like Goodreads for movies, only if Goodreads was actually well designed. Second, I had gotten really into the Blank Check podcast, which goes deep on directors and filmographies, and one of the hosts would frequently refer to his spreadsheet of movies, in which he recorded what films he would have nominated and awarded for Oscars for every year going back decades. This appealed enormously to my list-making brain, which will seize on any pointless procrastinatory project possible, perambulating & pettifogging pro bono, profitless, but, peradventure, pleased.

Which is to say, I immediately made such a spreadsheet for myself.

Now, I had planned to post a blog about the films released in 2022 a year ago, right after the end of that year – but then, I was still catching up on them. For one thing, I go by the Letterboxd release date, which in the case of foreign or festival films often predates their actual date of accessibility in the US by many months. And for films I don’t see in the theater, I tend to catch them by slowly rotating through different streaming services, so I don’t have to pay for a bunch of them at once, which takes more time. And then, in the middle of the last year, I packed up and moved to a new state, and my attention was wholly focused elsewhere for several months. But now I’m finally getting around to it, a year late – though I think I will simply continue to do these a year late, in order to allow time for me to see more movies.

So, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to run through an overview of the movies I would nominate for my own personal awards that came out in 2022, along with some other notes and asides, and then I’ll post my overall Letterboxd ranking list for the year. A couple caveats: first, as I mentioned, these are films dated 2022 in Letterboxd, which means there will be some that didn’t really come out until 2023. Second, I’m not holding myself to any rule or limit about how many things I mention or exclude. Finally, I’ll leave this post up, but the list will change in the future, as I reconsider and watch more films. And of course, this is only drawing on the movies I happened to see.

As of this writing, I have seen 76 films from 2022. Here’s what I think of them.

Worst Picture

Not to be obnoxious like a certain horrible mock-awards show which I won’t name, but if I’m posting a ranked list of movies, it’s always interesting to see what the bottom looks like. Now, I have lists for most of the years in the past century, but because most of them are quite short, and I tend to only bother watching older movies that I suspect I will like, very often there are no bad movies on those lists at all. And, in fact, even on a list 76 films long, the vast majority of them are pretty good. But there is still a bottom.

71: Don’t Worry Darling – I mention this simply because it was a trainwreck that had film twitter rubbernecking all fall, but that wasn’t really about the movie, it was more about the gossip about the mess of a set. At the end of the day, the movie is simply flawed, but interesting. It falls well short of the potential of its themes, but Florence Pugh gives a typically good performance.

72: See How They Run – This movie is o.k. You’d think I’d love a movie starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan, both of whom I’m quite fond of, but this simply put me to sleep. The most enjoyable thing in the movie is Adrien Brody’s film director character, who honestly would have directed a more interesting version of this given the chance. I’m happy for Rockwell that he got to make a movie in which he gets to nap the whole time, but I with Ronan would get some better material than this.

73: Thor: Love and Thunder – I was very ready for this to be good. I generally enjoy Marvel movies, I liked Taika Waititi’s two previous films, including the preceding Thor movie, and I was hoping this would be a fun, loose, and energetic picture, with some of the energy of Guardians of the Galaxy. Unfortunately, while the movie was certainly loose, it was also flat, both visually and narratively. Somehow this movie, which cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make, looks like a cheap TV show from twenty years ago, and it constantly undercuts any emotional beat it might have. I also think that the direction the story takes is fundamentally misguided and wrong, both for the characters and the MCU (although the universe has already been fumbled at this point). I wish this was fun.

74: Moonshot – I like rom-coms, I like space, I should like rom-coms in space, but I think my standards for rom-coms are kind of high and hard to articulate. Rocketships work because of chemistry, as hydrogen oxidizes into fire and heat – and that chemistry just was not there.

75: Moonfall – Funnily enough, another lunar portmanteau. I’ve got no beef with big stupid movies, but this manages to be as stupid as humanly possible, while having no redeeming qualities or entertainment value whatsoever. At one point our protagonist utters the completely unironic phrase “What would Elon do?”, and that’s the level the film is operating at.

76: Pinocchio – Once upon a time, Robert Zemeckis made good movies. What happened? This movie is the only actually loathsome picture I saw that year; it’s utterly charmless and off-putting. People said that Tom Hanks gave a bad performance in Elvis (not true) – this is Tom Hanks actually giving a bad performance. Truly cringeworthy and repugnant, with writing as didactic as an after-school special or one of the worst preachily bad Christian movies made by an asylum director hired by a megachurch – only this was directed by the man who made Back to the Future with the full resources of Disney behind him. Pinocchio himself is utterly creepy to a degree that breaks any ability to empathize with him.

Pinocchio, Pinocchio, Holy-smokey-oh

please kill me

Miscellany: So, I don’t promise to follow the Academy in all things (nor do I wish to), so I’m going to leave out some categories I’m ill-equipped to speak to, like editing, or which I simply didn’t see enough of, like documentary or short, and throw in some random extras. So:

Best Ensemble: Women Talking – I basically wanted to nominate every single person in the movie. As its name suggests, this is a film centered on a conversation, and it’s exquisitely cast and acted. Even the smallest supporting players are superb, and it truly is an ensemble picture.

Best Romance: Decision to Leave – Yes I realize this isn’t a straightforward romance in any sense, but it’s still the strongest and most perversely compelling encounter between two characters that year.

Best Makeup & Best Costume Design: Flux Gourmet – Gwendoline Christie’s terrifying appearance in this is so strange and memorable that I have to award this odd little movie. Her performance is also terrific. On the costume front, I want to give a shoutout to Colin Farrell’s blue sweater in The Banshees of Inisherin. I would like one please.

Best Visual Effects: Avatar: The Way of Water – There’s no competition here. There were other great effects movies that year; of the Marvel crowd, Wakanda Forever looked particularly good. The Batman used the Volume in a better way than I’ve seen yet, and seamlessly integrated locations on different continents to create a uniquely gothic Gotham. And Nope achieved a level of day-for-night cinematography that has to be heralded as a technical breakthrough. But Big Jim remains the king of VFX with his return to Pandora, which looks simply astonishing. Most of the movie is in, around, or under water, while also being almost fully computer generated, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

Best Production Design: The Batman – This movie manages to somehow still visually differentiate itself from all the other versions of Batman and Gotham city. By placing stone gothic buildings from Europe on top of American skyscrapers, flooding everything with amber sunsets, and giving everything from the costumes to the cars a sort of timeless elegance, The Batman is a pleasure to look at.

Best Locations: The Eight Mountains – I’ll say more about this movie later, but I wanted to acknowledge the tremendous Alpine locations used in this. The movie is largely about place, and where one puts down roots (or doesn’t), and so much of its poetry is in the silent grandeur of the mountains.

Other great locations this year: Decision to Leave’s rocky beach, No Bears using the real border between Iran and Turkey in a way that approaches documentary, the hotel in The Eternal Daughter, the rock-walled islands of The Banshees of Inisherin, Pacifiction’s sultry Tahiti skies, and, of course, Iceland, which appears to great effect in The Northman, but even more so in Godland.

Best Original Score: The Batman – Michael Giacchino has really come into his own on this one, and delivered a score that can sing along with Elfman’s work on the Burton films and Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight. It weaves a beautiful, plaintive melody throughout, while seamlessly slipping into dark and percussive rumbling. I’ve never been a huge Giacchino fan, to be honest, but I will be paying more attention to him going forward.

Other great scores: The Northman, Wakanda Forever (the title track is incredible), Suzume, Babylon, The Eight Mountains, Living, Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Best Animated Picture: Turning Red – I love animation, and there were a few fun movies this year. As many people noted, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was very well done, even for someone like me who really, really does not care about Shrek. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, so titled to distinguish it from the awful Zemeckis picture, was by contrast a well-crafted engagement with both the beauty and ugliness of life, diverting creatively from the original story into a confrontation with Italian fascism. Suzume was another sumptuous otherworld journey from Makoto Shinkai, and Henry Selick finally got to make another crazy and ghoulish stop-motion story in Wendell & Wild, which was terrifically energetic, heartfelt, and off-the-wall. But the best of the lot was easily Turning Red. Many people have talked about how well the film’s narrative themes are designed, and just how smart it is, which is all true. But I want to point out something else, which is that this movie has finally cracked how to make 3-D animation of people look worth doing, by abandoning both the lazy blob-people of early Pixar and attempts to be photorealistic, in favor of what all animation should have done from the beginning – simply being a cartoon, with a stylized, not a realistic, view of the world. The pastel color palette used in this is the cherry on top – there’s something about it that I find so rich and rewarding. This is also director Domee Shi’s first feature, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Best Cinematography: The Fabelmans – Even if you didn’t know this was an autobiography of Steven Spielberg, you can tell it’s his movie because of the unique quality of the light in it – it’s just so hyperlucid and warm, and every shot is beautiful and creative. You don’t necessarily expect a movie which takes place entirely in suburban America in the mid-twentieth century to look breathtaking, but this does. And of course the film ends with one of the wittiest cinematographic jokes of all time.

Best Director: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave – All of the films at the top of my list had great directors, but Park’s signature innovation and dynamic flair stand out. He just has incredible verve, and he has mastered the incorporation of the smartphone into the visual language of cinema.

Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once – This is the exception where I actually align with the Oscars, because Ke is not just the heart of the movie, he also gives a performance I don’t think anyone else could have given – it’s so specific and so charming, and it’s really several performances to boot.

Others: Best Supporting Actor was the longest column on my spreadsheet this year, there were simply far, far too many great performances. To mention only a few:

· Andrew Scott is such great fun in Catherine Called Birdy

· Tenoch Huerta Mejia is an immediately dominant presence in Wakanda Forever

· Michael Stuhlbarg is quite unsettling in Bones and All, and Mark Rylance in the same picture is thoroughly unhinged and hilariously hammy

· Barry Keoghan is heartbreaking in The Banshees of Inisherin

· Nicholas Hoult is such a specific type in The Menu, and I love him

· Don Cheadle is hilarious in White Noise

· Ingvar Sigurdsson is the key to Godland

· Claes Bang came out of nowhere for me in The Northman

· And of course, Paul Dano in The Fabelmans is so exquisite and precious

Best Supporting Actress: Michele Williams, The Fabelmans – I went back and forth on who to give this to, because there was some stiff competition, but the thing about this performance is that the plot of the film literally depends at various points on Williams’ facial expression shifting slightly. I think it’s also very difficult to give such a big performance and have it go well, and she pulls it off with aplomb.

A few others:

· Gwendoline Christie is haunting in Flux Gourmet

· Burcu Gölgedar is utterly tragic in Three Thousand Years of Longing

· Nicole Kidman had a great year between the AMC video and The Northman

· Lashan Lynch is intensely compelling in The Woman King

· Judith Ivey is fantastic in Women Talking

· Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir is essential to making Godland work as well as it does

Best Actor: Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans – Yes, I’m saying the best actor was essentially a debut performance. LaBelle plays the fictionalized version of the young Spielberg, and the movie lives or dies with how he looks at things. The key scene of the film, in many ways, is simply LaBelle reacting to something with no dialogue, but he’s absolutely captivating, and he runs away with the whole picture. I’m looking forward to a long and fruitful career from him.

Others:

· Colin Farrell is so perfect in The Banshees of Inisherin

· Daniel Kaluuya gives a very soft-spoken and effective performance in Nope

· Austin Butler becomes Elvis

· Luca Marinelli & Alessandro Borghi are both deep pools of emotion in The Eight Mountains

· Bill Nighy successfully wears the mantle of Takashi Shimura in Living

· Diego Calva really holds his own against A-list movie stars in Babylon

· Paul Mescal is heartrending in Aftersun

Best Actress: Tang Wei, Decision to Leave – This is one of a number of films which hang their entire narrative on the premise that Tang Wei is the most compelling woman alive, and some man goes out of his mind being obsessed with her. But she’s not a passive ideal – in this movie, she’s an instigator, even a troll, on a grander scale than we’ve ever seen before. And the thing is, she is the most compelling, charismatic, and mysterious woman alive.

Others:

· Rebecaa Hall is so tortured in Resurrection

· Andrea Riseborough was nominated for the wrong movie, she was so funny in Please Baby Please

· Zoe Kravitz gives one of the most realistic and uncomfortable depictions of acute anxiety in Kimi

· Park Ji-min is inimitable in her debut film role in Return to Seoul

· Frankie Corio gives one of the most nuanced child performances of recent years in Aftersun

· Michelle Yeoh is given the scope her talents deserve in Everything Everywhere All At Once

· Keke Palmer is so charismatic and energetic in Nope

· Cate Blanchett’s Tár became a meme for a reason

· Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, and especially Rooney Mara are all transcendent in Women Talking

· Viola Davis is so weary and yet so strong in The Woman King

Best Picture:

10: Living – I was surprised when this held up, because it’s a thing I usually dislike – an English-language remake of one of the greatest films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. While Living doesn’t equal its predecessor, the film’s restrained touch, gently beautiful imagery and fantastic score create space for Bill Nighy to give possibly a career-best performance in one of the most emotionally powerful existential stories around. I don’t think I can say this is as creatively crafted as some others, or as impressive on a directorial level, but the sentiment just moves me so.

9: Aftersun – Speaking of sentiment, this film sings with a special kind of nostalgic pain. It’s so simple – just a father and his daughter on vacation – but there’s a whole lifetime in that short span.

8: Godland – Iceland is place of haunting beauty, and it’s photographed with such awe even in a film which apes the style of early, flawed photography, a gimmick which actually works atmospherically here. It’s a sort of reverse Heart of Darkness, where journeying further into the strange land reveals the evil we bring with us.

7: Return to Seoul – A kind of antinostalgia, or rather, a film which lives in the complexity of searching for a lost home, trying to approach it, while simultaneously being repelled and rejecting it, in a way which seems incredibly truthful.

6: Babylon – Equally hilarious and brutal, a big old sweaty masterpiece that actually did need to be three hours long because it simply holds on things for as long as it needs to. Also, one of the boldest endings to a movie ever.

5: Women Talking – This screenplay is like Shakespeare, and its perfectly performed. The only thing I didn’t love about the film was the desaturated colors, which I think do sort of work thematically, but it still makes the world ugly to look at – but that is also the point of this very painful film.

4: The Fabelmans – The most incredible heart-baring work of slightly-fictionalized autobiography (more of it is real than you’d expect) from the great king of the cinema, Steven Spielberg, at the height of his powers. It looks like magic, every performance hits like a meteor, and the whole thing comes together in a symphonic synthesis.

3: Tár – Speaking of symphonies, this character study in human arrogance and the destructive and self-destructive evil of pure blind selfishness – not even seeing others as people – is as masterfully directed as its orchestra is conducted. A vivisection of a fully-realized character.

2: Decision to Leave – Park Chan-wook can’t actually direct an uninteresting shot. I watched almost all of his movies this last year, and I can attest that he’s physically incapable of ever being even slightly less than fascinating. This film is a vortex, centered around Tang Wei’s mysterious smile, and it’s perilously easy to get pulled under.

1: The Eight Mountains – This movie snuck up on me at the last minute and jumped to the top of the list, but it would be hard to dislodge it. Every image is vivid, beautiful, and gentle, and the camera drinks in reds better than anything since Ozu. Beyond that, this is the ultimate film about friendship, about the relationships we miss or try desperately to cling to, amid the current of mortal life. I felt acutely that I was experiencing a sort of emotional crisis about the course of my own life as I watched it.

So those are the highlights, but there are many other good and interesting films which came out in 2022. My full list, which will go on changing as I watch more in the future, is below: https://boxd.it/fV492

TV I Watched in 2023

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