TOP 10 of 2022: Movies
I'm finishing 2022 by looking back at my top 10 choices for the best movies of 2022, plus some honourable mentions and disappointments.
This year, I clocked in over 200 films, most of them either new movies or pictures I watched for the first time. It’s probably my best year for film watching in about two or three years and on the whole, I’d say 2022 has been a decent year for cinema. Nothing this year I have given the full 5/5 of 10/10 but my top two choices came very close.
Anyway, here were the movies that both affected me the most, and seemed to contain the greatest artistic measure, from 10 through to number 1.
Would love to know your thoughts as to your top 10 choices...
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10. THE PRINCESS (Ed Perkins)
Ed Perkins gives it to us straight. No talking heads, no voiceover or commentary. This is pure archive footage, pure unfiltered history, and one largely without agenda. Though the film is at pains to underscore how Diana became the ‘people’s Princess’, and how Charles suffered in the public eye, it’s not a hagiography. Not everyone is in the thrall of her royal celebrity. Yet it remains largely sympathetic to a woman it’s hard not to see as a victim of a pernicious press and antiquated monarchical machine.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/the-princess-2022/
9. THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (George Miller)
Quietly moving and often beautiful fare from the eclectic George Miller. You can tell he’s wanted to make this film for many years because he adapts A. S. Byatt’s short story with a zeal for both narrative and visual flair. It helps having two excellent central performances with Tilda Swinton in decidedly pragmatic form opposite Idris Elba, who manages to shed his urbane hard man swagger for a genuinely otherworldly & noble take on the Djinn legend. They work better off each other than you ever might have expected off.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/three-thousand-years-of-longing/
8. PREY (Dan Trachtenberg)
Dan Trachtenberg understands the power and importance of mystery behind the creature and amplifies its place as legend and myth, considered demonic by swarthy French fur trappers who seek to capitalise on his appearance. The Predator, for the first time in a long time, is fearsome precisely because Trachtenberg places him in the context of a ruthless hunter. There is a code but it isn’t moral. The Predator has never quite had the films to truly do him justice since the first one. Prey changes that.
Added thoughts:
7. ELVIS (Baz Luhrmann)
A carnivalesque piece of bravura biopic filmmaking from a master of exuberance. Austin Butler transforms into a star-making part into which he invests body and soul; this might be the finest example of an actor replicating visually and stylistically an icon of this stature. Wisely perhaps, Baz Luhrmann examines Elvis with distance, however, through the unreliable narrator of Tom Hanks’ grifter Colonel Tom Parker.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/elvis-2022/
6. TOP GUN: MAVERICK (Joseph Kosinski)
While often modern cinematic moviemaking, in all of its franchise baiting glory, can be genuinely exciting and thrilling, Top Gun: Maverick is the kind of mainstream entertainment we just don’t see that often anymore. It is deliberately, pointedly, apolitical (the enemy is never named and just exists to be defeated), as was in many ways the original, and it doesn’t necessarily lionise American naval and aerial power in the same way. They might be the best of the best but they still have a lot to learn, they can’t take anything for granted, and Cruise’s Maverick stands as the bastion of a world being lost - a world where you “don’t think, just do”, a world of the kind of instinct Maverick and Cruise have built themselves on. It is muscular, brave but also sensitive in a way many action films aren’t. It’s a male weepie more than it is a bro movie.
Added thoughts:
5. BARBARIAN (Zach Cregger)
A delicious chameleon of a horror picture, whereby writer-director Zach Cregger pulls more than one rug from under our feet. It has the spirit of found footage (sans jerky cameras) in terms of discovering a strange world underfoot fused with the social commentary of a Get Out, in this case not just the legacy of #MeToo but the unequal standards and power structures between men and women in situations of prospective danger. Cregger uses an Airbnb as his initial device to twist and turn his plot to see both ends of a topical spectrum.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/barbarian-2022/
4. GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (Rian Johnson)
Peeling away Glass Onion would not be fair. You want to experience Rian Johnson’s layers yourself without a great deal of knowledge. It is, however, a real joy. It doesn’t buckle under the weight of expectation Knives Out, as a surprise sensation, never carried. Johnson’s follow up is perhaps a shade less clever than its predecessor but, as you will see, that’s almost the point of his Evil Under the Sun, as it were. Johnson loves taking a scalpel to convention and though he doesn’t invert the murder mystery here, he absolutely has fun with our expectations. His film is a rejoinder to dumbed down discourse.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery/
3. THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Martin McDonagh)
Martin McDonagh re-teams with his most celebrated duo, Colin Farrell & Brendan Gleeson, for a project with even more gallows humour than In Bruges. The Banshees of Inisherin is a sweeter and simpler picture altogether as McDonagh interrogates a simple idea - what if one day someone just wanted to stop being friends with someone else? He frames this in the context of early 20th century rural life off the coast of Ireland, with the titular Inisherin an arthouse Craggy Ireland; indeed an argument can be made that similar characters to Father Ted more than exist in McDonagh’s film (take Barry Keoghan’s village idiot). To compare the film completely is somewhat reductive but DNA connecting the two exists. Both are deeply funny.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/the-banshees-of-inisherin/
2. THE NORTHMAN (Robert Eggers)
Ethereal yet muscular, The Northman was a lot more pulse-pounding, and less art house, than I was expecting from Robert Eggers. A bit like if you dropped Assassins Creed: Valhalla into a blender with a turbo-charged season of Vikings, by way of Gladiator, The Northman drives it’s way through a simple but effective revenge plot-line while never forgetting the kind of weird period detail - tribal ritual, icon worship - that adds depth and immersion. Alexander Skarsgard is both a beast of a warrior and a humane, vulnerable child whose identity is built around a simplification, with Eggers’ plot keen to emphasise the zero sum game that is violent retribution.
Added thoughts: https://letterboxd.com/ajblack/film/the-northman/
1. THE BATMAN (Matt Reeves)
We have seen Batman evolve as a character remarkably since Tim Burton first revitalised the character, immortalised by that point through the joyously camp 1960s series, as a brooding hero for the age of the blockbuster, after which Joel Schumacher fused both stylistics together across the 1990s. Christopher Nolan gave him weight and substance again, enhancing his mythic status, while Zach Snyder—for all of the faults of his take on the DC universe—sought to make him the grounding heart and soul of a cosmic approach. Matt Reeves brings him back down to earth with both grit and a romantic sense of tragedy, filling his Gotham with murky politics and a thrilling sense of the Batman as a force once again. More than a man. A legend. You will also be left with great sympathy for Mr Vengeance by a conclusion which suggests greater trials to come.
The Batman is the triumph we hoped for, and the film DC have desperately been in need of for a long time.
Added thoughts:
HONOURABLES:
SPEAK NO EVIL (Christian Tafdrup)
Good grief. Bleakness personified. Can you imagine the inevitable American remake going anywhere near an ending like Christian Tafdrup does here? Not in a million years.
DEADSTREAM (Joseph Winter & Vanessa Winter)
Ridiculously fun. Deadstream is the first film to my mind that figures out how to both honour and lampoon found footage horror at the same time.
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER (James Cameron)
In much the same way that the first Avatar has improved incrementally as blockbuster quality has depreciated, so too is The Way of Water aided as one of the most distant follow ups in Hollywood history.
Added thoughts:
KIMI (Steven Soderbergh)
There will be deeper and better explorations of the pandemic but Kimi is slick, fun, doesn’t outstay its welcome and most importantly, has plenty to comment on.
DISAPPOINTMENTS:
JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION (Colin Trevorrow)
The clear eyed truth of the matter is that Dominion wants to be Jurassic Park so damn much, it entirely forgets to do anything else across the weighty two hour plus running time.
Added thoughts:
DEATH ON THE NILE (Kenneth Branagh)
A film infamous for several tawdry reasons before it ever finally arrived in cinemas after numerous delays, Death on the Nile turns out to be an overplayed melodrama first and compelling murder mystery a distant second.
Added thoughts:
UNCHARTED (Ruben Fleischer)
Stuck in development hell since the dawn of time, a better take on this probably existed in script form with a better director historically, but this will entertain most people on a Friday night looking for an easy beer and pizza watch.
DEEP WATER (Adrian Lyne)
Deep Water might not entirely work as a film but it does open a doorway long closed. There are better modern erotic thrillers to be made. Perhaps it is well past time fresh filmmakers start going back to the bedroom.
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Anyway, what are your choices for top 10, honourable mentions & disappointments? Do let me know in comments and continue the conversation.
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