One does try to see absolutely everything worth seeing, and sometimes it’s suddenly mid-March, and one must admit that one has failed. And since Oscar weekend is pretty much the official end of any given movie year, it felt like I had better hustle up and publish the 90% complete version of my year-end top 10, rather than wait until some distant point in the infinite future to get it up to, say, 98% (which is what happened to me with the 2021 year-end top 10, compounded by the fact that 2021 was just a world-class, once-a-generation terrible year for movies). So here we are: 2022, a mere 25% of the way through 2023.
It turned to be a solid year. For a long, long time, I was convinced that A) this was the third consecutive year that I’d be seriously tempted to call the worst in the history of the medium (although that’s just tremendously unfair to 2020, which after all didn’t actually exist), and B) as a result, cinema was dead and I needed to give up and cocoon myself in with silent melodramas and 1930s cartoons and never watch anything made in either my or my parents’ lifetimes ever again. But by God it rallied there at the end, with two of the greatest creators of populist cinematic whiz-bang ever born showing up in the last weeks of the year to fill me up with actual, honest-to-god hope. And it also helps that I absolutely loved both the highest-grossing film at the U.S. box office and the highest-grossing film at the worldwide box office, which means that for the first time in ages, I can look at box office receipts, and think to myself: “you know something, people have good taste”. That is of course why my #1 film of the year is an outrageously unwatchable non-narrative art film that I’m not entirely confident was actually released commercially in the United States. But also check out #4, where I cried at the space whale. I am vast, I contain multitudes.
The Ten Best Films of 2022
1. Earwig
2. The Fabelmans
3. No Bears [reviewed by Mike]
4. Avatar: The Way of Water
5. Inu-oh
6. Il buco
7. Vortex
8. The Northman
9. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
10. Benediction
One day I will review this, I promise. Maybe soon; maybe not. I need to be able to watch it without having my brain feel like it has been exploded into ten billion fragments first, and I’m not sure what I can do to make that happen. What we have here is so far at the edges of narrative cinema that for a long time I felt like it was inappropriate to put it on this list at all: it’s mostly a film about the way light interacts with surfaces, and the two things it most makes me think of are Brakhage’s Text of Light and Gottheim’s Fog Line. The latter of which is probably one of my 20-ish favorite movies of all time, so these are extremely satisfying things to be reminded of, but while those movies are strictly part of the formal avant-garde, stretching our perception for the sake of the stretching, Earwig is, ultimately, still telling a story, and so it presses all of this imagist exploration into service creating moods and emotional situations in which the abstract strokes of a narrative can take place. It’s nightmarish but not “feels like being in a nightmare”; it’s more about being a child who feels hopelessly out of control in the world of adults, a world that is old and decaying and deliciously spooky but also petrifyingly unknowable and hostile. It’s not pushing the medium in new directions or to new extremes: it’s out there in the wilderness being a different medium altogether. Three features into her very slow-growing career, I do not think we are good enough to deserve Hadžihalilović, and I’m glad she’s making movies for us anyway.
From the edges of barely-figurative, functionally non-narrative cinema all the way to the heart of cinema as a pop art for a mass audience: the story of how Steven Spielberg, the individual human who is most centrally responsible for what Hollywood filmmaking has been during the last four decades, became Steven Spielberg. I’m not going to pretend to objectivity: I can’t imagine what a gruelin mess of shapeless indulgence this must feel like if you don’t like the man, and it would be severely understating things to say that I like Spielberg; I think he’s probably the living American-born film director with the most instinctive, intuitive understanding of how to convert emotional states into moving pictures and how to tell stories using nothing but images, the single artist best capable of marshalling all of the audio-visual resources of cinema into a harmonious whole that faultlessly manipulates us into the register he wants. For he is manipulative, as his critics say, of course; all cinema is manipulative, down to its bones. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to put one over on you. And The Fabelmans, then, is about how the young filmmaker learned to see the world as framed images and learned how to harness the emotions of reality and transform them into cinema. It is in some ways a harshly autocritical and very sad film, presenting its adolescent artist as somewhat terrifying in his inability to connect in a real human way to the love and need and suffering and loss around him; I think it is perhaps his confession that, after a career of blaming his mom and dad for being bad parents, he is now wondering if he was maybe just a bad son. It is, above all else, honest – honest to a dizzying, frightening degree, possibly the most straightforward accounting a director has ever given us of who he is and how his brain works in all the annals of cinematic memoirs.
More auto-critique, this time in a less heady, emotional register, more of an intricate puzzle of meta-narrative where some of the pieces aren’t even in this film at all. I cannot begin to tell you if No Bears is even legible if you haven’t been keeping up with every one of Jafar Panahi’s feature films since the Iranian government told him to stop making feature films: it’s not so much that it’s quoting from them or drawing on the knowledge of theic content, as that the intellectual journey Panahi makes in this film – playing a version of himself, and we’re not allowed to know how fictionalised a version he is, though we’re certainly invited to speculate – is the culmination, or anyways the further development, of what he has revealed about his thought processes around filmmaking and his house arrest in those earlier works. What started out as simple game of sarcastic political defiance back in 2011’s This Is Not a Film has turned into a deep amount of ambivalent soul-searching, as Panahi begins to wonder, not just how to make films in his current circumstances, but why – what does it mean, as an artist and Iranian, to engage in this form of art-making what is the cost to him and his collaborators, is he actually making movies or just politically complicated gimmicks that sell well to an international audience of erudite gawkers. I don’t know that he comes up with any answers, but if not, it’s not because he’s letting himself off the hook. It is in some ways an extremely uncomfortable film to watch, both in that we’re watching a man so ready to criticise himself that he fabricates sins to blame himself for, and in that he’s more or less telling us directly that by watching this very film, we’ve become active participants in his crimes, if crimes there even are. By leaps and bounds the most intellectually confounding and compelling movie of the year.
I’m not even going to play the “it’s so beautiful and immersive that it doesn’t matter that the script is kind of crummy” card. That’s the first Avatar. Having now seen it twice, and anticipating a third viewing more hungrily than I’m looking forward to rewatching any other movie named in this post, I’ve decided to just flat-out declare that Avatar: The Way of Water has a good script, no notes, full stop. It is immaculately structured, moving from “here is the story of a family set against the backdrop of a grand-scale conflict” to “here is a world-spanning epic of nature and science, destuction and beauty, kindness and greed” and then it gets back to “it’s just about a family again” in time for what I am at this point convinced is the second-best final act of any popcorn action movie of the current century, behind only Fury Road, an unfair comparison for any movie. James Cameron, our all-time greatest truck driver-turned-film director, with the boots-on-the-ground appreciation of how people think and feel that comes from that kind of grubby working class background, understands more than maybe, literally, anyone else alive how to tap into the simplest, most direct, most universal human emotions, transform them into images and character beats, and then paint them in the best CGI that God knows howmuch money can by, micro-managing every frame to make sure it perfectly contributes to the building sense of awe. Awe at the primaal emotionalism, awe at the scale of the world-building, it’s all the same thing. Put it another way: this film’s showpiece is a scene between a blue teenaged catboy and a big four-finned space whale, not one single thing visible onscreen during this scene actually exists, the space whale speaks exclusively through Papyrus subtitles, and despite all of that, I cared more about the rich depth of that whale’s hopes and fears and need for friendship and community than I cared about any other character in any movie I saw in all of 2022.
Yuasa is the most exciting director of animated features, regardless of nation, currently working (or not, as the case may be). Inu-oh is, in some ways, just more of him doing the thing he does, but since “the thing he does” is marshaling the tools of digital animation to create variations on hand-drawn style with stylistic flourishes, lighting technique, camera movement, and character animation that cannot be achieved by hand, inventing a new form of animated media with basically every new major project, I don’t mind if this film finds him operating at only, say, 95% of his talents. This gleefully overstuffed, overcooked sprawl is by turns an anachronistic musical redefining one of the major historical epics in Japanese literature as a tale of learning more about yourself and your place in the world; a story about personal identity that insists that “personal identity” can only be formed by opening yourself up to the world rather than staying trapped in your own brain; and just a really cool tribute to a bunch of ’70s American rock groups that Yuasa digs. It feels like a messy grab-bag of random nonsense to read about it, and then watching it feels smooth and inevitable, a story that unfolds so cleanly and swiftly that it’s hard to imagine what other story it could tell than this giddy hallucination of history, the future, life, death, celebrity, anonymity, friendship, and music. It ties all of this together in a gorgeous aesthetic derived from classical Japanese graphic art but never trapped by it, further giving the feeling of a movie that’s sort about what it might be like if the present were taking place 600 years ago, or the past was taking place right now.
In a just world that cared about art, when I finally get around to rewatching this film to review it, I would be able to do so on a UHD Blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos mix and a top-of-the-line HDR10 image transfer, because this is maybe the year’s most radical mixture of lighting, darkness, and complex sound design, all in a movie that doesn’t act for a second like it’s even thought about being radical. Instead, in the actually existing world, I didn’t even realise that it had been quote-unquote “released” in the United States until like four months after the fact. No blame at all to Grasshopper Film, a distributor doggedly continuing to take chances on some of the most fascinating formal objects contemporary cinema is able to throw out there. In this case, it’s a true story about mapping what was, at the time the mapping was completed in 1961, the third-deepest cave system known to exist. Shot in the actual cave, the film is barely a narrative: it’s not technically dialogue-free, but the handful of words we hear explain nothing worth knowing, and the context for what we’re looking at instead comes through the act of experiencing it, watching cave experts mill through a small Italian town and into a hole in the ground (the title translates as “the hole”, in fact), where all the possibilities of digital cinematograrphy are focused on capturing the textures and claustrophobic mystery of being inside a cave with only one source of light to help flesh out what you’re looking at. It’s both a tribute to the inhumanly vast scale of unknowable nature, and the insatiable human lust to learn as much about every element of nature that we can manage.
French cinema’s premiere nihilistic provocateur (which would make him, by definition, world cinema’s premiere nihilistic provocateur in a world where Lars von Trier didn’t exist) here gives us perhaps his least-provocative film ever: it’s a story about an old couple puttering their house, without ever doing or witnessing anything grotesque or antisocial. And perhaps his most-provocative ever: the entire plot is focused on the single matter of watching these old people die of nothing more dramatic than the gradual degradation of the body that comes from age. It is never exploitative or cruel, except in that it’s cruel to make an entire work of act whose main purpose is to remind you – you, personally, reading this – that you will die, but not untli after many people you love have died, and it will be a glum, tiring process. This is all folded into a real corker of a formal conceit, which is that the frame is split into two halves, and each half is a separate camera following one of the two dying old people, so we’re never allowed to break away from either of them, as they each feel locked into their little box, destined to be alone in the moment of death even as they sometimes drift close together, even blending back into one (it is, in this, almost beyond question the best pandemic-shot film we have thus far). It is made with absolute empathy and absolute no sentimentality, and its lack of stylistic bells and whistles is in a way the most aggressive element of its style: it unforgivingly depicts, in simple, every terms, and give us no escape from the blunt inevitability of its content.
The word “visionary” gets overused, but if we can’t apply it to Robert Eggers, I honestly can’t think of who we could apply it to. Three features into his career, Eggers is at this point in the sweet spot: all of his films spring from basically the same place and go towards basically the same goal, and all of them take a wildly different path to get there. In this case, he’s making something like an ethnographic documentary about a world in which Nordic myth is merely everyday reality, a world that feels like a hallucination precisely because it is so physically tactile and fully-realised in every possible way, giving us a kind of slantways realism in a setting where nothing resembling “realism” could possibly exist. It’s pretty handily my pick for the top-to-bottom best-crafted film of the year, from its costume to its hairstyling to the shocking, unpleasant stylisation of a terrific cast, to the primordial murk that clings to the daytime images, and plunges the nighttime images into a pre-civilized world of shadows upon shadows. Does this add up to anything beyond “ultraviolent death metal Hamlet?” I doubt it, and I don’t suppose it matters: if we believe that one of the main purposes of art is to create a new space for experiences and thoughts that simply cannot fit in our every day life (and maybe we don’t believe that, but I sure as hell do), I can’t think of anything from last year that did a better job of letting us do that while also providing a hell of a big, beefy story of blood and sex and revenge.
I can no longer complain, really, that CG animation is so beholden to physical reality, especially naturalistic lighting and texture, as well as smooth, even movement, that it’s a waste of the limitless horizons that animation is supposed to be primarily good at. More and more, animation studios are actually trying out things that aren’t just Disney/Pixar ultra-realism (Disney and Pixar, however, are not among them, fuck-ugly character designs notwithstanding). But even in this brave-ish new world, The Last Wish – despite being the fifth in a franchise of movies that was, once upon a time, one of the most hatefully hideous perpetrators of this all-realism all-the-time approach – is a completely entrancing dive into all the things we can do in CGI that are expressionist and imaginative and painterly and fantastical. It’s the first film to take a step through the door that Into the Spider-Verse opened in 2018, most obviously in its big, bold use of limited frame-rates in the action scenes, but while that wonderful film was about the kineticism and iconography of superhero comics, The Last Wish is about the sense of unimaginable vistas conjured up by fairy tale picture books blended with the different sense of unimaginable vistas laid out in in CinemaScope Westerns. It’s gorgeous, and evocative, and very fun to plunge into – and, not to bury the lede, but it’s also by a pretty lopsided movie the funniest movie I saw in 2022.
Every new Terence Davies is a cause for mournful, contemplative celebration, and while his latest is nearer the bottom of my Davies rankings than the top, that’s one hell of a filmography to be in the lower half of. In this case, we get the narrative feature where Davies most forthrightly grapples with his very complicated and in many ways unhappy relationship to his homosexuality, in the form of an artful, impressionistic biopic of the poet Siegfried Sassoon that tells us very little about the subject’s life, but a great deal about his emotions. As played by Jack Lowden, giving one of the year’s most unfairly overlooked performances, Sassoon is seen here as a man so profoundly broken by his experiences in WWI that he can no longer access positive emotions; but to reduce it to that plotline is to crudely chop out all of the things that make Benediction such a profound exploration of an interior life that can’t find expression, even when – especially when – it is the interior life of a poet, the exact kind of person for whom expressing the inexpressible is his job. As the title suggests, there’s a deep spiritual element to all of this, primarily in the form of its absence: the protagonist’s desire and failure to forge spiritual bonds with his emotionally distant if not actively abusive sexual partners mirrors and grows out of his sense of spiritual anguish about surviving the war. But there’s also so much empathy and understanding, and all of the biting, erudite wit that Davies has long used to soften the blow of his penetratingly bleak stories of human loss. I’ve probably thought about this film’s final scene more than any other stretch of any movie this year that involved neither extraterrestrial whales nor Michelle Williams’s face.
Honorable Mentions
All That Breathes [reviewed by Mike]
Babylon
The Banshees of Inisherin
Decision to Leave [reviewed by Mike]
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Mad God
Lux Æterna [not reviewed – Wikipedia]
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Top Gun: Maverick
X
Bottom 10
10. Firestarter (Keith Thomas, USA)
There’s almost something soothing about it: time may pass, pandemics may come and go, the very technical underpinnings of the artform may be ripped out and replaced, the concept of “movies” may be degrading from a communal art form to a kind of digital pacifier for adults; but we still can count on chintzy, half-assed Stephen King adaptations. This is a worse-in-every-way bargan basement retread of a 1984 original that was already pretty crummy, foregoing anything resembling an idea, a decent characterisation, or a striking image on its way to presenting the most synthetic-looking, harmless-feeling fire that a pointedly insufficiently studio budget can’t buy. It’s like a glass of warm milk and a blankie, it is.
9. Hocus Pocus 2 (Anne Fletcher, USA) – reviewed by Rioghnach
“Direct-to-streaming sequel to a film that was practically made for cable in the first place” is low-hanging fruit, but this just made me so goddamn angry. It is, for one thing, very possibly the single ugliest piece of audio-visual media that the Walt Disney Company has ever put out into the world, covered in a swarm of brown digital smears. As a pandering nostalgia trip, it can’t even get the nostalgia right, mangling the characters’ personalities, shackling the very game actors in a cluster of pre-chewed, shticky beats, and its finale is the most atrociously unsatisfying manifestation of the horrible current trend of refusing to ever allow any piece of children’s media to be even a tiny bit nasty or biting I have seen with my own eyes.
8. Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green, USA)
Even as abject as some of these decisions might be, the bar for Halloween sequels is low enough that this might not even be in my bottom three of the series. But good Christ, it’s trying so hard to avoid doing anything that might be remotely satisfying as a slasher movie, a Halloween movie, a Halloween movie, or even the culmination of the rather shabby “let’s explore trauma!” motif of the new trilogy of movies begun in 2018. The storytelling is a complete mess: it’s the kind of sequel that probably makes more sense if you’ve never seen the films preceding it, or even if you don’t know they exist, since it’s just not possible to square any of this with any of them. And David Gorden Green seems to have decided quite suddenly that he’s a Real Filmmaker and it would be beneath his dignity to put anything horrifying into his horror movie.
7. Morbius (Daniel Espinosa, USA)
All those memes have done a profound disservice to the world: they make this seem like a goofy, dopey lark. It is not. It’s sheer butchery, a film whose editing, visual effects, and story structure are borderline illegible, leaving one with the feeling of some century-old movie that has been heroically restored to the point where you an almost follow the plot, as long as you read up on some of the details in advance, rather than a movie that was released this way, brand new, because this is how they wanted it. I am sorely tempted to say this is the single worst film ever based on a character who originated in Marvel Comics, and I’ve seen every one of the Fantastic Four movies.
6. Bros (Nicholas Stoller, USA) – reviewed by Brennan
“They literally don’t know how editing works” is going to be a recurrent theme in these capsules, because apparently thirty years of intensified continuity have finally rotted out filmmakers’ brains until there’s nothing left but black sludge coating the inside of the skull. In this case, I swear to God, they couldn’t even make a shot-reverse shot conversation between two people sitting stiill on a couch work right. It’s the most repulsive sin of a movie that is at best indifferent to craft in the manner of so many contemporary comedies, at worst openly contemptuous of the idea that movies are anything other than dialogue-delivery boxes. And such dialogue that gets delivered to us – fight through the unwatchable morass of the film’s form, and you’re rewarded with the treat of Billy Eichner’s gruesomely smug author-insert, an appalling bully and narcissist treated by the film as a recklessly brave truth-teller at every turn.
5. The Requin (Le-Van Kiet, USA)
First problem: “Le Requin” is a title. “The Shark” is a title. “The Requin” is gibberish that doesn’t even end up mattering (there’s never a point where the title is clarified within the movie). Second problem and onward: this is one of the most hellaciously bad-looking, incompetent shark attack movies I have ever seen, setting new standards for how bad CGI can be that still makes it into a commercially-released film. Alicia Silverstone, looking desperate to reignite her career, gives a very intense performance that belonged in a different movie; the script advances through a series of beats that make no sense and have no flow, but exist because other shark movies have used them in the past. Even by the standards of a subgenre with way more misses than hits, this is some miserable shit.
4. Jurassic World Dominion (Colin Treverrow, USA)
This is not, objectively, Actually The Worst to a degree that it should be fourth from the bottom on my list. It has good CGI, atmospheric lighting, Laura Dern having a huge blast coming back to this character, and the John Williams theme music. But it made me angrier than anything on this list other than #2. Bad movies happen – what I cannot forgive is a movie with all the imaginable resources in the world wasting them one the most leaden, confusingly-edited setpieces with blocking that feels bored of itself, and a script this aggressively anxious to avoid being in any way, shape or form satisfying at the one thing it promised: putting god-damned dinosaurs in a god-damned dinosaur movie. This movie radiates contempt for itself and for the ideas that movies can and should be entertaining, and it does it for two and a half hours. You want to know why I get so over-the-top excited for things like The Way of Water? It’s because we live in a world where it’s even possible for something like this to get made, and to win the kind of box office returns that suggest large numbers of people have been brainwashed into thinking it’s acceptable.
3. Prey for the Devil (Daniel Stamm, USA)
Like many formulaic genres, the exorcism movie is a sort of promise to the audience: this won’t be especially good, but at least it won’t be especially bad, either. Well, director Stamm and writer Robert Zappia found a way to make one of the worst exorcism movies I have ever seen, eschewing all of the basic guard rails in telling this story that’s sort of a procedural about the first woman at Exorcism School making literally everything worse while the flim keeps acting like she’s the hero. The absolute best parts are the most rotten clichés, while everything that tries out new angles on the exorcism film manages to present itself as the stupidest possible version of that idea. The final minute manages to take what had been, till that point, one of the most miserably dull experiences I’d had with a horror movie since before the pandemic and find a way to make it even worse.
2. Pinocchio (Robert Zemeckis, USA)
Unless they do something incomprehensibly evil and try to figure out how “live-action Fantasia“would work, I don’t see how this can possibly help but remain the absolute lowest point theoretically reachable by the 2020s incarnation of the Walt Disney Company. These CGI-heavy desecrations of the studio’s animated classics are all bad, but this one rips out the morality and humanity of Disney’s all-time best feature, and transforms its beguiling, timeless visuals into ugly digital slop, bright and sharp and dead-eyed. This isn’t just a bad movie and a career low for all involved, it feels like they decided for some reason to make a movie designed to insult me personally.
1. The 355 (Simon Kinberg, USA/China)
The thing is, we take basic, fundamental competency for granted. Movies cost too much and involve too many trained craftspeople to be wrong in the way that The 355 ends up being wrong: the way that coverage has been shot and then the way it has been edited together, the way that story and character information are parceled out to us. It is completely broken object, not bad because the choices it makes are terrible or because it has bad taste, but because it honestly feels like the people creating it did not know how to make a movie, and proceeded to not do so.
Biggest Surprise
A remake of one of the most emotionally robust films ever made by Kurosawa Akira, a director whose visual sense, skill for pacing, and wonderful ability to extract performances from his actors that are simultaneously expressionist pantomimes of basic feelings and powerfully naturalistic expressions of the human soul? And it got Oscar nomination? Yeah, I was done with Living from the second I heard that it existed. But the actual film is such a subtle and sophisticated blend of craft and absolutely mindblowing acting that I honestly forgot to angrily compare it to Ikiru for every beat of its running time, within minutes of starting it and falling under its cool spell.
Biggest Disappointment
I would not say that my expectations for The Batman were unduly high, and it still managed to pretty consistently underperform them. The film proves to be, first and foremost, an excellent argument that yes, in fact, Christopher Nolan is a good director: because this is what it looks like when somebody tries to “do a Nolan” and they don’t have his keen techinical sense and confident control of mood. Parts of it work – I must have given it a positive review when it was new for some reason – but it’s still pretty soggy and monotonous, visually and narratively. Not by any means the worst theatrical feature with Batman in a leading role, but the one I am least likely to watch again.
Best Popcorn Movie
There are two obvious options here, but I think that The Way of Water is so pleasantly exhausting and transporting that it lacks the sugar rush I want from pure popcorn entertainment. So I shall instead give a nod to Top Gun: Maverick, the film that I think best exemplified in 2022 everything that is intoxicating about classical Hollywood moviemaking, in its gaudy excess of spectacle, its immaculately structured screenplay (the year’s best demonstration of what is meant by the phrase “good bones”), its calculated refusal to be about anything other than its own elemental emotional appeals and absurd spectacle, and the way all of this is anchored by the preposterous charisma of our last unabashed God-tier movie star.
Guiltiest Pleasure
Not one thing that happens in Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster Moonfall is intelligent on any level, the two leads both seem actively despise being involved with the project, it’s much too long, and I am pretty sure I spent more time with a big idiot grin on my face watching it on IMAX than I did at any other 2022 movie prior to The Way of Water.
Best Cameo
If one was not already on the extremely particular vibe of The Northman by this point – and it’s tough for me to imagine someone still being able to tolerate the movie at all if they weren’t – the appearance of Björk as “Björk, but she’s a literal god” would, I think, do a very good job of immediately explaining what the film’s worldview and mood are, taking us out of time and out of lived human reality to place us directly into a spiritual communion with Björk at her most ethereal. Which is extremely ethereal. Bonus points: she is wearing my single favorite movie costume of the 2020s thus far.
Best Moment
The last camera movement in The Fabelmans. Look, sometimes Film Twitter actually does get it exactly right.
Worst Moment
If it’s not the first time we see the hot-dog fingers in Everything Everywhere All at Once, then it’s the second time, unless it’s the thirtieth time. Look, sometimes Film Twitter is a poisonous blight that can only be fixed when nuclear winter claims the life of the last living human.
Best Dialogue
“Do you think God gives a damn about miniature donkeys, Colm?”
“I fear he doesn’t. And I fear that’s where it’s all gone wrong.”
-A priest (David Pearse) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), The Banshees of Inisherin, written by Martin McDonagh
Worst Dialogue
“We need a simple, strong stage name. Slab Oakley. Chad Log. I’ve got it! Chris Pine.”
-Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key), Pinocchio, written by Robert Zemeckis & Chris Weitz
Best Title
Armageddon Time
Worst Title
DC League of Super-Pets
Hardest Title to Seach For
X
Best Poster
TÁR
The easy part first: that is a fabulous diagonal composition. Absolute master-class use of the awkard dimensionsof a movie poster to force the dominant personality at the center of the film to insist upon herself, looming over us with terrifying grandeur and scale. And then the rest is all of the stuff going in to making sure we feel the extreme force of personality that’s going to be bearing down upon us in the film, beginning with those massive slabs of cold text (and how wonderful that Cate Blanchett is just credited as “Blanchett”). And then the arrogant, insistent presence of the year’s most crucial diacritic, right in the goddamn middle of the thing, creating a sense of imbalance by insisting upon itself. Then, last and certainly not least, all of that heavy negative space, a terrible black void in which nothing but Blanchett-Tár’s power and authority is allowed to exist. A perfect summary of the film’s concerns in one image – and even better than the film, I might argue, since you don’t have to look at it for two and a half hours.
Best Teaser Poster
Smile
In a way, this people marketing had an absurdly straightforward, easy job: do you think incongrous smiles that show a lot of teeth are creepy? Great, that’s all we need to show you. Do you not think that? It’s the only thing this movie has, so don’t bother with. And so we get this simple, minimalist threat of pure malce, the poster itself seeming to have been the victim of some horrible act of violence. That much red is always going to look oppressive, of course, but it’s the titles that get under my skin: the way the fake rips seem to extend over the border of the poster, the cheesy visual pun of using the film’s title as teeth, which feels more and more horrible the longer you live with it.
Worst Poster
The Lost City
If it were just the fact that it’s way the fuck too busy, I could handle that, or at least ignore it. But that is just an unforgivably ugly mish-mash of colors: lurid tropical green, washed-out sky blue, tacky CGI orange explosions, that sort of wad of purple in the middle. Also, for a film that is entirely about watching Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum romp and banter and whatnot, it would be nice if their badly-Photoshopped likenesses were looking at each other. Or, since I’m wishing, wearing facial expressions that communicated any slightly warm or friendly human emotion towards anyone or anything. And why are there two Sandras and Channings, for the love of God?
The Five Best Classic Films I Saw for the First Time in 2022
(Yes, it’s usually ten. I didn’t have a lot of time to watch movies last year, and when I had time, I disproportionately watched silent short comedies. I assume you don’t want a top ten where eight of the entries are Charlie Chaplin two-reelers)
The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin, 1917, USA)
The Doll (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919, Germany)
Number, Please? (Hal Roach with Fred C. Newmeyer, 1920, USA)
Soldier of Orange (Paul Verhoeven, 1977, Netherlands)
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992, UK)
Other years in review
2022 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015
2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005