Bigger, Better, Weirder? In 2022, Movies Went For It
Assuming the future still contains books, when one is written about what moviegoing was like in 2022, it will have a hard time finding a theme. Think pieces on the state of Hollywood (including several penned by this critic) over the past few years often bemoaned the industry’s caution and overreliance on industrially producing sequels to safe IP. The concern grew that, post-pandemic, theaters and audiences would stick to the familiar. To a degree that did happen, with even supposed arthouse theaters showing Wakanda Forever. But as the year closes with the usual late-December crush of award contenders muscling into crowded release schedules, fears of a movie landscape dominated only by superhero flicks with quarter-billion-dollar budgets have not quite panned out.
Yes, the top of the box office charts were definitely cluttered with thudding mediocrity. People rushed to take in The Batman’s cynical recycling of better movies, Bullet Train’s ill-founded faith in its own awesomeness, The Gray Man’s insulting dullness, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ inability to find anything of interest across infinite realities.
Nevertheless, multiplexes abounded with better options. The Lost City presented a gender-reverse Romancing the Stone update that was wittier than expected. Jordan Peele’s Nope gave a Spielbergian gloss to a premise that neatly threaded comedy and horror into a smart commentary on spectacle. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis felt like the only movie he had produced since Romeo + Juliet that had any juice to it. And while Top Gun: Maverick was not exactly the year’s most original blockbuster, it at least updated the original with smarter writing and eye-popping cinematography.
Looking just a little past the top-line releases, you could easily find more movies worth seeking out than most people have time to see in a given year. The McDonagh brothers Martin (The Banshees of Inisherin) and John Michael (The Forgiven) delivered icy comedies that chilled as much as they amused. Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi and John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal proved there was still room for taut, clever thrillers with a noir kick. Jon Hamm showed in Confess, Fletch that yes indeed, the world needs more chill, sarcastic private investigators. Filmmakers from Mark Mylod (The Menu) to Rian Johnson (Glass Onion) and Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness) lacerated the one percent.
Not everything succeeded. Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling and Alex Garland’s Men both intrigued at first before driving off a cliff. Nicholas Stoller’s Bros never balanced the romance and comedy. David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future lost itself in body-mod horror. David O. Russell’s Amsterdam wasted a chance to tell the story of the attempted coup against FDR. But these failures were often not for a lack of trying.
In fact, it was a year for maximalism. S. S. Rajamouli’s gonzo epic RRR packed massive action set pieces, foot-stomping musical numbers, and boundary-crossing romance into a three-hour extravaganza. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon created an early-1920s Hollywood riot of jazz, cocaine, and ambition with a running time as egregiously inflated as its characters’ sense of importance. For all its faults, Robert Eggers’ painstakingly crafted, darkly gorgeous, and operatically violent The Northman was the rare mainstream auteurist release to be worthy of the description “visionary.” Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel Glass Onion packed in as many cameos (was that Ethan Hawke?) and celebrity gags (Jeremy Renner’s hot sauce) as possible inside a perfectly acceptable if unoriginal plot that hinged more on comedy and character than mystery. In White Noise, Noah Baumbach slapped a fantastic full-scale LCD Soundsystem music production at the end of an already tripped-out vision of 1980s’ consumerism and paranoia.
Because in the end, why not?
The Best Movies of 2022
1 / TÁR
One crucial moment early in Todd Field’s acerbic masterpiece could have been the climax of another movie. Lecturing a Juilliard class, renowned composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, sharp as a tack) takes on a student who doesn’t feel comfortable with Bach, verbally cutting them to ribbons. A more didactic artist (looking your way, Mamet) would have made this identity debate a culture war applause-getter (Tár mocks the self-identified “BIPOC pangender” student, terming herself a “U-Haul lesbian”), casting her as the rough-hewn culture warrior defending the Western canon against woke insurgents. But while Field is clearly sympathetic to Tár’s refusal to hold artists to arbitrary standards, he is just getting warmed up. The rest of the movie picks apart the legend of Tár, crafting a sparkling, seductive world of acclaim and artistry before revealing the predation, bullying, manipulation, and venality underpinning her success. Even then, though, Field keeps complicating the narrative until the portrait that emerges of this unforgettably driven character is as rich and multi-faceted as a great novel. Watch here.
2 / Retrograde
The most biting, epic war movie in many years, Retrograde has all the finality of a slammed door. Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) embedded himself in 2021 with a Green Beret team advising Afghan soldiers in a remote Helmand province outpost. As the May 1 pull-out date nears, the focus shifts to Afghan general Sami Sadat, pensively navigating how to lead his demoralized troops once American logistics and air support is gone. Heineman builds the action and drama with an almost unwatchable intensity. Sadat’s forces are increasingly beleaguered under furious Taliban assault and their American allies (busy “retrograding,” or destroying equipment before it falls into enemy hands) besides themselves with impotent fury as the final chaotic collapse at Kabul airport approaches. Watch here.
3 / All That Breathes
In New Delhi, a pair of brothers spend their days and nights dedicated to a very specific cause: Rescuing the city’s renowned black kites. Shaunak Sen’s beautifully shot documentary is a study in radical empathy, showing how Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud pour everything they have into their rescue operations (at once point, risking their lives to ford a river to get to a wounded kite) and nursing them back to health. Their profound, soulful love goes beyond words, suggesting an innate connection between living things that seems to shine all the brighter amidst the city’s shroud of smog and literal mountains of garbage. Inspiring without stooping to sentimentality. Watch here.
4 / Triangle of Sadness
Below Decks meets Lord of the Flies as directed by late-1960s Jean-Luc Godard in one of Cannes’ few Palme d’Or winners that lives up to the hype. Ruben Östlund’s satire about the ultrarich and those who serve and emulate them is both expansive in scope and snappy in tone. The humor in the first part, set on a luxury yacht where the crew scrambles to address every whim of the passengers, chucks subtly over the railing, going often for gross-out chaos and characters (Woody Harrelson’s drunk Marxist captain, Zlatko Buric’s atavistic fertilizer magnate) whose manic broadness does not quite hide the underlying sting; at one point, a live grenade provides an actual punch line. The second half upends the social dynamic with comedy, shock, and occasional savagery. Watch here.
5 / Fire of Love
If The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou had been a romance. Katie and Maurice Krafft were lovebird French volcanologists who spent decades doing what they liked most: studying volcanoes with each other. Sara Dosa’s romantic documentary threads together the hundreds of hours of grainy footage shot by the Kraffts into a portrait of a life well lived, despite the tragic conclusion. Miranda July’s sorry-was-just-napping narration brings a dreamy and dozy tone to an already wonderfully lyrical story. Watch here.
6 / Everything Everywhere All at Once
This frenetic kitchen-sink sci-fi opus from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert could be dinged for trying too hard to impress were the results not so, well, impressive. As the put-upon Chinese immigrant matriarch trying to keep both her laundry business afloat and family intact in the midst of a reality-fracturing multiversal battle she barely understands, Michelle Yeoh delivers another master class in creating a character who is both an impeccably skilled wuxia master and relatable human with relatable human problems. The rest of the cast — particularly Ke Huy Quan’s sweet-natured husband whose weaponized fanny pack proves crucial — also manage the improbable feat of standing out amidst the Daniels’ SFX whirlwind, providing a model for the Marvel Cinematic Universe if anybody over there is paying attention. Watch here.
7 / Decision to Leave
While Park Chan-wook has left some of his more ultraviolent habits behind (Oldboy), this Hitchcockian mystery shows he has not abandoned the commitment to baroque psychodrama that made his last movie, The Handmaiden, so intoxicating. Investigating a murder, detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) has suspicions that the wife Seo-rae (Tang Wei) was responsible. A careful, fussy perfectionist, he investigates thoroughly. Naturally, he spends a lot of time studying Seo-rae and her inexplicable reactions. As these things tend to go, he is pretty soon spiraling into obsession. What keeps Park’s dreamy and haunting movie from being only a South Korean update on Vertigo is the story’s humor, elliptical slipperiness, and atmospheric romance. Watch here.
8 / Navalny
Say what you will about the second decade of the millennium, the encroachment of authoritarianism has produced at least a few heroic figures. One of the more impressive, Alexei Navalny, is profiled in this enthralling documentary by Daniel Roher. A Russian lawyer, opposition politician, and thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side, Navalny was nearly killed by a 2020 poisoning strongly linked to the Russian security state. Roher follows the dramatic aftermath. Navalny recuperates, explains his pro-democracy cause in bracing yet charming straight-to-camera soliloquies, plots with the investigative bloodhounds at Bellingcat to uncover stunning evidence of corruption that may help undermine Putin, and plans his return to Russia and nearly certain (and possibly fatal) imprisonment. Not just an astounding journalistic film (Roher makes She Said seem staid by comparison) but an inspiring story of what one person can accomplish. Watch here.
9 / Holy Spider
Released not long before the mass Iranian anti-government protests over the death of Mahsa Amini started in September 2022, Ali Abbasi’s gutsy and provocative thriller provides a street-level view of the theocratic misogyny that sparked the movement. Based on a true story, the story follows Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), a female journalist investigating the murders of sex workers in the city of Mashad. Shot with the neon harshness of a 1970s Abel Ferrara shocker, the movie tracks the killer (Mehdi Bajestani, eerily methodical) in an unblinking manner. Rahimi’s hunt for clues becomes a battle against sanctioned cruelty, as officials and everyday people shrug off the brutal killings as not crimes to be stopped but divine punishment to be celebrated. Watch here.
10 / The Eternal Daughter
After her two artistic coming-of-age The Souvenir movies, Joanna Hogg detours into riskier territory with this schizoid haunter. Filmmaker Julia takes her mother Rosalind on a birthday trip to a hotel occupying a country manor where Rosalind weathered the Blitz as a child. The subtext to the trip has Julia, who seems creatively stuck, prodding Rosalind for memories and surreptitiously recording her for material. In the first sign that Hogg is refracting this familial melodrama through a skewed lens, Tilda Swinton plays both roles with similarly pursed-mouth and watchful stillness. Hogg also presents the hotel as something out of The Shining or a Hammer horror classic, so empty and fog-shrouded that it is easier to imagine Julia and Rosalind facing down a vengeful banshee than the truth of their stilted relationship. That may be the question underpinning this outwardly low-key yet surprisingly suspenseful film: Which of those outcomes is the more truly frightening? Watch here.
Other Bests / Worsts
Honorable mentions: All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, Athena, The Banshees of Inisherin, Confess Fletch, The Fabelmans, Glass Onion, God’s Creatures, The Janes, Kimi, The Menu, My Imaginary Country, Nope, One Fine Morning, RRR, Sundown, Three Thousand Years of Longing, White Noise, Women Talking
The disappointments: After Yang, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ambulance, Amsterdam, The Batman, Blonde, Bros, Bullet Train, Don’t Worry Darling, The Gray Man, My Policeman, Saint Omer, Sharp Stick, Vengeance, The Woman King
Director: Todd Field (TÁR)
Actors: Cate Blanchett (TÁR), Zlatko Buric (Triangle of Sadness), Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin), Nicholas Hoult (The Menu), Nicole Kidman (The Northman), Rory Kinnear (Men), Theo Rossi (Emily the Criminal), Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter), Emily Watson (God’s Creatures), Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once)
Ensemble: Women Talking
Screenplay: Noah Baumbach (White Noise)
Music: All The Beauty And The Bloodshed
Cinematography: Athena
Debut director: Lila Neugebauer (Causeway)
Breakthrough performance: Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness)
Best Use of a Nail Gun: Kimi
Most Fun Had in a Not-Fun Film: Brad Pitt (Bullet Train)
