Alright, here I am for another year end column, summarizing my experience with new movies. There was a lot to like this year, a few things on the other end of the spectrum, and as always, I’m summing up the end of the year for me.
Just a note on my methodology: I don’t exactly keep a list or anything of my favorite movies of the year as the year goes on. I mostly just go over the “new releases” entries here and see what stuck with me for one reason or another. Will the movies at the top of this list always be there if I take a second look? I don’t know, but consider this list as where I am standing at this point in time. I mean, I pretty much ignored my own grades when writing these things and am instead thinking of where these movies stand in my mind right now as opposed to then when I wrote the original reviews.
And now for the list.
15. God’s Country
I remember the trailers for this one that made it look like some big city woman, a Person of Color on top of everything else, gets into a fairly standard conflict with a couple of rural white hunters who take great offense to her very presence. Then I saw the movie and it was a lot more complicated than that. Anchored by a great performance by Thandiwe Netwon, this is a story about some folks who both don’t know how to let things go. True, Newton’s character is much more in the right than her antagonistic neighbors, but there’s a feeling here that the characters could take a step back and maybe find a peaceful resolution to some of their problems, but due to a variety of factors that include race, gender, social standing, class, and education, what happens here is pretty much tragically inevitable. Plus, I actually chatted with some strangers about it afterwards while the credits were rolling. That was nice.
14. Violent Night
OK, no one is going to mistake Violent Night for high art or anything along those lines, but I enjoyed the hell out of it in a movie theater and even laughed out loud a couple times, something I don’t often do. Shut your brain off to best enjoy this violent, dark Christmas comedy that is basically if the real Santa was drunk and the hero in Die Hard.
13. The Outfit
Set almost entirely in a cutter’s shop in Chicago, this clever thriller worked off a great script, suspenseful scenes, and a fantastic lead performance by an unassuming Mark Rylance. I’ve recommended this one to a lot of people, and the ones who actually watch it say it was a good recommendation.
12. Prey
The Predator franchise has perhaps been more miss than hit since the 80s original, but Prey managed to reimagine the conflict by putting the alien hunter in 18th century America, facing off against a Commanche woman who wants to be a hunter more than anything. Brutal and exciting fun all the way through, and probably the closest any Predator movie has come to equaling the original.
11. The Batman
I’m a huge Batman fan, and I really dug this movie and how it retold the Batman story, showing a vigilante en route to becoming a great detective and a hero to the city and not just a source for fear of the city’s criminals. True, it was probably a bit too long for some, but I didn’t mind it. But if The Batman is coming this far down on my list, imagine what must have come out ahead of it.
10. Nope
Jordan Peele’s third feature looks at animal abuse by the entertainment industry at its most basic level. It’s a smart, sometimes scary, mystery of a movie where some down-on-their-luck horse ranchers go looking for a UFO and maybe bite off more than they planned to.
9. Top Gun: Maverick
I was not expecting to enjoy a years-later Top Gun sequel. I didn’t care much for the original. Maybe if I saw it when it was new, but I didn’t, and it didn’t do a dang thing for me. That said, not only was this one full of genuinely exciting scenes of actors in actual jets, but it actually made Tom Cruise’s Maverick come across as a believable figure, someone who was still clearly the Maverick of old but also a lot more mature as a result of, well, being a couple decades older. The scene with Val Kilmer alone was worth the price of admission.
8. The Northman
Robert Eggers took a step away from the horror that he usually does to make this stylistic Viking revenge movie based (supposedly) on the story that inspired Hamlet. These are characters that are more figures out of an epic poem than real people, but don’t let that keep yourself away from this one.
7. Till
There have been a lot of good to great movies about the Civil Rights Movement, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as emotionally resonant and raw as this year’s Till. Danielle Deadwyler (as Emmett Till’s mother) and Jalyn Hall (as Till) both give powerhouse performances as the survivor who made things happen and the victim of an unjust murder. Deadwyler should probably be up for consideration for an Oscar this year, and Hall’s turn amplified just how tragic an already tragic death was.
6. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
A movie that could have easily fallen on its face, this sweet story of what looks like a souvenir knickknack trying to get his family back with a bit of help from an Airbnb renter and 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl is a meditation on life, death, and internet fame, and it is oh-so-heartwarming.
5. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Nicholas Cage has a reputation, and credit to the man, he has fully embraced it. This was one of two movies that gave meaty roles to longtime actors while also celebrating their entire career. For Cage, that means contending with himself, the image of himself, and just loving making movies. Seriously, this is as much a love letter to movies in general as it is to Cage in partocular, and it is a ton of fun.
4. Everything Everywhere All At Once
And the other celebration of an actor and their long career was Everything Everywhere All at Once, only this one is about a thousand times more creative in its approach than Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, being a comedy, a martial arts flick, an existential crisis, and a family drama about the relationships between parents and children while acting as a tribute to the great Michelle Yeoh. Oh, and it brought Ke Huy Quan back to our collective attention, and that’s not too shabby a feat.
3. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Guillermo del Toro’s version of the Pinocchio tale was not only the best new version of it this year (beating out both the Disney live action remake and one I know by reputation only featuring Paulie Shore as the voice of the living puppet), but it’s also a beautiful meditation on life, death, and why fascism is bad for children. I would have never thought it possible that a movie that ends with a character outliving all the people he loves would have such a positive ending, but there it is. Then again, del Toro has mastered making movies showing the beauty in the grotesque, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.
2. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Rian Johnson comes through with another fantastic mystery movie, one where he’s both critical of the upper class and puts together a fun mystery at the same time. Daniel Craig makes a great detective with an unusual accent, and everyone looks like they were having fun on some level while making a great movie.
1. The Whale
There’s a chance this movie, which I am not ashamed to say had me tearing up, is #1 due to the fact it was the last movie I saw in 2022, but it would have made my top ten list no matter what.
Honorable Mentions
I suspect I would have put RRR on my list had I seen it on a big screen instead of on Netflix, but it is every bit as good as you’ve probably heard. The Banshees of Inisherin was at first a dark comedy but ended with a deadly serious and tragic conclusion. Barbarian might have been the most creative horror film of the year, but that depends on where you put the outright headscratching (in a good way) Men. And there was probably no better satire this year than The Menu. That said, you probably need to be a fan of the subject of the movie to really enjoy it, but Weird: The Al Yankovic Story was a lot of fun. And while Tár might be a rather obvious bit of Oscar bait, that doesn’t stop Cate Blanchett from giving a knock-out performance as an orchestra conductor whose life and career are falling apart around her.
Special Mention: Mad God
Mad God is more for the experience than anything else as it is one bizarre movie. Created over a period of 30 years by stop motion animation specialist Phil Tippett, Mad God‘s plot seems to be about a saboteur lowered into a strange hellscape of perpetual war, expendable workers made of the excrement of electrocuted giants, and a whole host of other horrors on this straight-to-streaming movie found on Shudder or AMC+. There’s a plot here, but it’s secondary to the setting and the visuals in a movie where 85 to 90% of what’s on screen was done with stop motion models.
And at the bottom…
5. Morbius
Was Morbius bad? Matt Smith’s hamming it up aside, yeah, but it wasn’t the worst for this year. I just felt like I was obligated to list it here in case someone wondered where it was.
4. Luck
Luck was basically Apple TV+’s attempt to make their own Pixar movie, but it was mostly just boring. The stakes never felt that high. I could have put a lot of movies like that here, but this one leapt out for some reason.
3. See How They Run
Like Luck, See How They Run was more disappointing given the level of talent involved. The trailers promised a more madcap murder mystery and I got nothing like that. This could have been another Knives Out sort of comedic murder mystery, but it wasn’t anything like that in the end.
2. Blonde
Ana de Armas gives a really good performance in this. That is literally the only good thing I can say about this dumpster fire of a movie. It doesn’t deserve de Armas.
1. Medieval
Normally, I try to find something good to say about just about everything I see. For Medieval, I just couldn’t. Poorly paced, badly written, and a plot that made no sense, this movie is supposedly about a 14th century Czech hero. I am sure he deserves much better than this. And, oddly enough, my review for it was getting a lot of hits a few weeks ago. My site is small. I get maybe five hits a day, but Medieval was managing double digit hits for a little while there.
As for some (dis)honorable mentions, Disney’s Pinocchio was bland to the point of boring, the exact opposite of del Toro’s fine adaptation of the old story. The Bubble might have worked had it been maybe a half hour or so shorter. It started off promisingly enough, but it never knew when to quit. I wouldn’t call Three Thousand Years of Longing bad or anything, but it didn’t come close to my expectations, though there is a lot to like about it. They/Them tired to be both a throwback to 80s slasher movies while staying socially relevant with a killer-at-a-gay-conversion camp story, but even Kevin Bacon couldn’t save it. I actually forgot Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore even came out this year, so that should tell you all you need to know there. Firestarter‘s only improvement on the 80s original big screen adaptation was casting an actual Native American actor in the Native American role, but otherwise was not really worth seeing. Deep Water continued de Armas’s bad year and included Ben Affleck in a movie that tried to do a chase scene where an SUV was fleeing a guy on a bike. And at this point, I am pretty sure the people at Universal have a bet going to see how mediocre they can make new Jurassic World movies that still somehow sell a billion dollars’ worth of tickets.
So, that was 2022. Will 2023 be better? Well, maybe. There’s only one way to find out. I’ll have to keep going to the movies.
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