THE GIST:

Welcome, again, to another year-end filmography rundown from me. To all the new readers out there, this list is an ongoing tribute to my friend who instituted this format, crappy DaFont stylization and all, and I’m committed to keep it going even as it feels ever more daunting and draining. (But I always feel great when it’s finished.)

In terms of qualifying films considered below, all titles are films that me, as a member of the public, could reasonably buy a theater ticket to see in Los Angeles within 2022.

I must note, the distributor Neon continues to baffle, as year after year, they hold even their limited release windows until the new year. This is why The Worst Person in the World, which I must now consider to be lost in time, is reflected neither in my 2021 or 2022 lists (and yet if the world was just and I could keep my head on straight, it would’ve received a Top 10 placement in either year).

But, that’s all balanced out now by my future-leaning ability to see 2023 releases already, as most significantly, this year I started working in film! To account for unbiased takes, I’ve instituted a new critical separation, removing the films on which I work from consideration (even if that means I would’ve had the opportunity to further applauded Michelle Yeoh).

There are still so many 2022 titles I wanted to watch that I didn’t get to in time (Broker / Corsage / The Inspection / Smile / Women Talking / The Wonder), but this year I successfully became a more intentional film viewer, lessening my tally from previous years’ unsustainable highs. All in though, the following blurbs consider 116 releases from 2022.

Enjoy!

THE UNHERALDED:

The films that never found their audience, could just use some more exposure, or deserve another look.

An intimate, female gaze of a lazy, sun-drenched Turkish holiday, honing in on adolescent ennui and turning the trip into an autobiographical purgatory preceding Charlotte Wells’s grappling with the abyss of adulthood.

Unboxing childhood toys with adult cynicism, this is a clever shot across the bow at shallow nostalgia and constant IP resuscitation.

A twisted, haunting, and wordless rendering of a Hieronymus Bosch-themed Rube Goldberg device that spits out an utterly insane but worthy experience, even if just to test your palatable limit of coherent narrative film.

Cat and mouse confined to closed-door conversations and true-story coerced confessions, this exhaustive police procedural and long-legged sting operation pays proper respect to Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.

Rendering a “final girl” horror spin on a voyeuristic thriller, this film’s foreign (to its protagonist) Romanian setting casts everything in dense, vampiric blacks and plucks a baroque note on taut piano wire.

FAVORITE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE OF 2022:

Thanks to a quote by Mark Twain, comedy and tragedy exist on the same spectrum, two poles joined by nothing more than the stretching and compressing putty of timing. A playful exploitation of pace, Barbarian put my audience entirely off-balance, never knowing which to expect lurking around the next corner: a jump-scare or a jump-laugh.

With its laxidasical first act’s table setting, the film’s little-to-no concern for world-building meant we had to shift focus a cute-awkward first date and a welcome argument for a female protagonist our audience couldn’t shout “don’t go in there!” at. After methodically exploiting every defensive option and breadcrumb mechanic, we had a hero everyone could root for, and were primed to shift our animosity to a big bad.

The villain’s belated introduction sucked the oxygen of the theater I was in, resulting in the most jarring, hardest left turn in any narrative I saw this year (while a hard right would’ve sent us all straight into the ocean).

I WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED:

Heavy is the head that wears the crown of Palme d’Or, but set against a mega yacht primed to accept air-to-sea deliveries of Nutella, this is one ride that can stand to take a few punches.

While Ruben Östlund’s previous Palme-waving satire, The Square also alienated, its dressing down of a world I wasn’t really attentive to at least taught me something about the language and tropes of high-end art criticism. Its text was the chuckle-eliciting salve a museum docent would give you after downloading you on post-modernism.

But in a world of disposable, empty-calorie, but widely enjoyed entertainment like Instagram scammer Netflix docuseries and Below Deck, Triangle of Sadness doesn’t necessarily have anything new to say to anyone, upper crust or otherwise.

Lacking sharpness, it ruminates in the only thing it has: excess. In ensemble cast, runtime, budget, comedic tone, and international flag-planting representation, this boat bloats. Heavily publicized promotional items for this film were branded vomit bags, which sought to flaunt a highlight of its second act: a luxury meal in the center of a storm and the ensuing acrobatic gastronomical ado. At least when Luis Buñuel merged the dining room and bathroom in The Phantom of Liberty, he created an image worthy of a high-end art gallery. The Square would’ve probably nodded and called it “ground-breaking.”

HOT MESS OF THE YEAR:

A neck-and-neck race to the bottom, this year’s award is being shared by two titles who held contempt for people: one for its main character, the other for its mass audience.

If meant to be a reflection of not a true biography but of a literary fiction, I find it utterly baffling that in his adaptation, Andrew Dominik had very little interest in making its main (is she even eponymous?) character an active participant or protagonist in her own story.

My usual benedictine monkish theater-attending composure was shattered as I audibly shouted “Oh, fuck off!” at the screen when a Barbasol can was dropped as a pervy nod to whatever Loot-Crate-wielding nerds were still scanning the screen for acknowledgements two-plus hours into the film.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Because making a ranked list is hard, these shortlist candidates are ordered alphabetically.

Bayhem that can’t—but also shouldn’t—imitated. A technically proficient and brilliant experience that’s also extremely obtuse and possibly uninviting, all made on the fly. Free jazz more than a deliberate work, its highest highs necessitate a backwards approach to how we got there. Spit-take line readings and ad-libs steer scenes, practical stunt hiccups dictate hastily stitched sequences. Its seams are showing, and it makes this 100mph ride even more thrilling when you discover there’s nothing underneath. The emperor may have no clothes, but that won’t stop Jake Gyllenhaal from loudly reminding you he’s glowing in cashmere.

A story about friendship, ambition, and Catholic guilt, all told in a cuss-filled Irish lilt. Superbad for adults.

Wildly imaginative, extremely fucked-up, occasionally hilarious. The body horror master obsessed with our inner selves shifts his dial to soft sci-fi, allowing himself to give a gentler, if still nihilistic, prophetic reading for our self-destructed future.

A lean, mean, white-knuckle pot-boiler featuring the best use of Aubrey Plaza’s bulging eyes. Bonus points for showcasing corporate catering gig delivery drivers and student loan debt as newly available, contemporary cinematic shorthands for an object being squeezed and its complimentary vice.

Bigger, louder, and pointedly not a retread of Rian Johnson’s first whodunit tribute, this Greek getaway embraces manic, screwball energy and spews enough witty one-liners to keep audiences from ever caring about the mystery. The only clue I was doggedly looking out for was the moment when Daniel Craig would again have to work the film’s title into one of his rambling monologues.

A testament to how even the most arrestedly developed individuals can grow and evolve, this legacy outing fine-tunes its editorial flow and embraces an endearingly inclusive, body-positive tone. Never not shocking, but always fun, this thing glides like a 300lb man on a lubed-up slip-n-slide.

The preeminent figurehead of slow cinema, Apichatpong Weerasethakul almost exists more as an art house libertine punchline than an actual director. The discursive camps surrounding him, one of quiet reverence, the other of hushed snickers, only intensified when critic Justin Chang raved about Memoria last year, saying he gave himself over to the cinema as an experience and knelt prostrate before the screen on which it played. And yet, Weerasethakul still had a trick up his sleeve to make us wait before deciding in which camp we’d position ourselves.

This time, he convinced the film’s distributer, Neon, to release Memoria only as an event—promising no on-demand streaming or tangible, physical media object ever—turning this title into an ole-timey “catch it when it comes to your town” never-ending touring circus act.

So, ready to decide for myself if I too would be a true believer, my pursuit of even tracking down a date and tickets to see this at a screening in Los Angeles became as memorable as Tilda Swinton’s pursuit of knowing the unknowable at the heart of her journey.

The line between artist, art, performance, and audience blurred for me, while the difference between creative vision and realization was made clearer. What if you loved something which moved you deeply, and then in recollecting it, were only met with a fuzzy, distant hum? I almost forgot I saw this this year, and I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

A clever retool of the Predator story, Prey strips out the franchise’s high-tech toys and bombastic egos, making this a hunt all about will and wit. Passed down through generations of oral tradition across the Great Plains, it has been said that there was never a more villainous portrayal of French fur trappers.

Great animation, voice acting, score, comedy, and pathos satisfy in this copy of a copy, a sequel to a spin-off. Even its thrift-store finds of the remaining, untapped storybook characters is itself a joke, a wry case for this film having something to say even if there’s no clear audience for it.

Such an amazing work of action filmmaking. Shot with such a clear eye for staging character and motivation, you’re always totally aware of what is going on and why, even when the how bends the laws of physics.

Every bit is heartfelt and hilarious, all the way down to its exuberant embrace of the letter “R”, akin to a high schooler carving their favorite band name into the surface of their desk. With cartoon villainy topping an 11, this post-colonial urtext created the actual loudest, most raucous theater-going experience I enjoyed this year.

GREAT PERFORMANCES:

The actors who defined their films, made bad material great, and occasionally made you crawl the end credits just to see who that was, listed alphabetically.

…And one non-human performance which deserves recognition:

TOP 10:

Park Chan-wook makes his long overdue return to scribing an original story with a showcase of his greatest strengths (inventive camerawork and whip-smart comedic timing) while also demonstrating he can still surprise (mastering the labyrinths of smart phone drama and linguistic babels), making for a twisted romantic noire without a clear beginning, middle, or end.

Although as epic as the D.W. Griffith classic, Intolerance, which famously first brought Babel to life on screen, Babylon has less to do with the rise and fall of the Silent Era than it does with people coming to realize they’re living through history as it’s happening.

It made me think of an old college professor of mine who’d constantly refer back to the brief decade-and-change (which coincidentally almost aligns with this film’s setting) of the Weimar Republic as the height of creative, cosmopolitan, and sexual freedom in a rapidly modernizing Europe. “They were partying like there was no tomorrow… Because they sensed this couldn’t last.” (Spoiler: it didn’t.)

How this sentiment translates to Babylon is the film very early on lets you know what it is and will be: a Sisyphean task of pushing a party animal up a hill, followed by an incessant drumbeat of debauchery that will eventually turn into a cacophony.

By token of its content and scale, this is very clearly something that couldn’t be confined to a TV series. In a different time, even one just ten years ago or so, a summary of this film’s opening party would have been enough of a provocation for Babylon to become the prime target for an organized boycott from a vocal Facebook group of concerned mothers or cable TV news fear-mongering. But now, nobody’s looking, the audience is empty, and that’s the point.

The check is due, and on that line looking for his signature, Damien Chazelle has drawn a big middle finger. After the technicolor tribute of La La Land, only a proper madman would spit in the party’s punch and turn “Singing in the Rain” into a tragic denouement as the life of cinema flashes before our eyes in the form of a flickering, kaleidoscopic Stargate.

I’m notably out on most modern documentaries for their over-reliance on talking heads and crime stories. This is markedly different.

Told entirely in archival images and an extremely economical yet poetic narration (by Miranda July!), this is a document of both a burgeoning field of study and a romantic relationship. Who knew it would take two hip French kids raised on Goddard to show us something the world had never seen or really respected before?

This is a piece built around the power of images, but it’s also an interrogation of how they’re made and framed. If scientific understanding begins with just observing, how can that study be translated into action? There’s a turn in here when the study and interplay with humanity produces a clear objective: “Volcanoes are beautiful, but they kill. My dream is volcanoes no longer kill.”

A documentary which should be heralded not just for the story it tells, but how it does so: with careful writing, editing, and directing.

Some of my initial, dumbstruck reactions upon walking out from this film could be explained by my body’s attempts to recalibrate to the duller, everyday world devoid of IMAX 3D HFR in DOLBY ATMOS. In a way, I had the bends, sickening myself by obsessing only on the depths of its technology-pushing, thrill-ride plaudits.

But if the must-see amusement park attraction comparison holds sway for people considering to also step in line, then I’d have to say, it’s the standing in line bits that I keep thinking back on. While we waited 13 years for the ride to be fixed, I found myself most enjoying just winding my way through its queue, taking in the fully committed world-building.

I’d happily read a fictional encyclopedia entry about Pandora whaling because Big Jim’s on-screen vision is guided by a concept almost entirely unheard of by a contemporary blockbuster crowd: earnestness.

There’s no wink or intentional humor on display here, just a promise that every creature, machine, and bit of jargon has a cultural tenant and history behind it. That’s all the invitation I need to silence my inhibitions and dive into those blue waters to high-five a whale who writes poetry.

Valorizing what is basically a woman listening to a true crime podcast and becoming obsessed with its mystery, Steven Soderbergh successfully mashes up The Conversation and Rear Window with the absolute maximum of 2022 hallmarks. Ready your checklist: we’ve got big tech paranoia, social distancing anxiety (Soderbergh putting his favorite iPhone cinematography to good use), lockdown agoraphobia, a mental health crisis, Zoom etiquette, organized protests against homelessness sweeps, masking vigilance AND laxness, and in a unique creation, hand sanitizer application choreography.

Zoë Kravitz dons blue hair, some scene-stealing cameos pop up, and Soderbergh whisks us to the end credits in just 89 minutes. My most-watched plane movie of the year.

A much-needed shakeup of the Pixar visual style, Turning Red jumpstarts to life with whip pans and snap edits, mimicking a tween’s overconfidence without ever falling into precociousness.

The most personal is the most universal, and Domee Shi’s detailed look back at her coming-of-age in Toronto has imparted this story with a clear sense of time and place, and created an easily accessible pubescent metaphor that radiates a bold, colorful, halcyon sheen.

This cowboy is never gonna ride off into the sunset, at least not on anything ever resembling a horse you or I could ever hope to even attempt to saddle up on.

I say, let Tom Cruise strap himself into an experimental supersonic jet and see the curvature of the earth. If he goes fast enough, he might just de-age right before our eyes, a superhuman feat that would finally explain away his inability to master everyday human tasks like drinking a beer, throwing a football, or knowing how to handle oneself around Jennifer Connelly in an intimate setting.

For the popcorn crowd, there’s much fun to be had in this big-screen spectacle, one that invites active participation in background cloud-gazing and UFO theorizing.

While its ultimate twist into a creature feature is surprising, it’s easy to follow. Jordan Peele’s streak of bending expectations balanced with clear rationale and underlying logic for every element onscreen continues to impress me. As a season ticket holder for Peele, I trust his commitment to the various subtexts that permeate his “social thrillers” will add up.

I could overthink the significance of the Afro-Caribbean origins of the rainbow skydancers that litter this field of the Haywood Ranch, or I could just trust that I’m in good hands, avert my eyes, and live my life.

In another universe, this review has been written for a few weeks now, sitting nicely within a spellchecked draft for timely publication before December 31st, 2022. It features citations. And clever jokes. It will eventually enjoy a minor viral moment when it is circulated around Twitter by a well-respected film critic.

It doesn’t suffer from clarity of focus, one exacerbated by the myriad of distractions and conflicting viewpoints readily available just a few clicks away from the word processor it was typed in. The review doesn’t try to connect its authorship to the film’s fascination with the dizzying rift the internet has created across generations.

In that universe–it should also be noted–this film was directed by other filmmakers who also genuflect in the direction of Wong Kar-wai, ones who are regularly rewarded with inclusion in my Top 10 (in many universes across the infinite amount that exist, a spot is always reserved for such loving homages). Yet regardless of its author, that film features yet another surefire Best Actress win by the current record holder for most Oscars ever, Michelle Yeoh.

There, in that universe, dildo-wielding martial arts and hot-dog finger thigh-slapping mating dances are amongst the most highly celebrated forms of performance, while tu-tu-clad ballerinas are deemed entirely obscene. Purple is red, kitchen toasters work backwards, the Buffalo Bills are four-time Super Bowl champions, and I have perfect teeth.

In that universe, everything sounds pretty great and its version of this review is something roundly enjoyed everywhere. And yet, coming to terms with the fact that in this universe, this review is late, meandering, and discordant all at once is what makes this existence perfectly average and one I’d like to cheer on.

A mystery with no mystery, a horror with no horror, TÁR creates a world where every detail begs to be analyzed or feared, even if their revelations are pedestrian or their violence is bloodless.

Plainly speaking, this is a drama in which every conversation is a lure for a later trap to be sprung, a series of chamber piece rehearsals that will eventually flawlessly reverberate throughout a symphony hall or even the ears of every New Yorker podcast subscriber.

On my own journey to attempt to understand this layered mythmaking, I wanted to be able to cosplay Lydia Tár in her apartment, tapping her bare feet over a collection of record covers to decide her favorite iteration of Mahher’s “Symphony No. 5”. Her pick, Claudio Abbado’s with the Berlin Philharmonic, was the record I too needed to have.

After an exhaustive trek across Wikipedia, Discogs, Deutche Grammaphone’s entire catalog, and a few tumbles down some classical music forum rabbit holes, I realized the record didn’t actually exist (even if the CD does).

I felt betrayed, unable to believe I’d been lied to. I, like a sizable portion of this film’s audience, had believed that this genius wasn’t just constructed, that Lydia Tár was actually a real person. It turns out, when I wasn’t looking, I had fallen for Todd Field’s ultimate trap, turning myself into a weaponized toxic fanboy acolyte of TÁR.

EVERYTHING I SAW IN 2022:

The 355 / A Hero / Belle / Jackass Forever / Kimi / Blacklight / Death On The Nile / The Sky Is Everywhere / Fistful of Vengeance / Texas Chainsaw Massacre / No Exit / Cyrano / The Batman / Fresh / After Yang / Turning Red / Deep Water / Windfall / The Outfit / X / The Lost City / Everything Everywhere All At Once / RRR / Morbius / The Contractor / Memoria / Ambulance / All the Old Knives / Dual / The Bad Guys / The Northman / The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent / Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness / Petite Maman / On the Count of Three / Pleasure / Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers / Men / Top Gun: Maverick / The Bob’s Burgers Movie / Crimes of the Future / Fire Island / Watcher / Hustle / Jurassic World Dominion / Mad God / Lightyear / Cha Cha Real Smooth / Spiderhead / Good Luck to You, Leo Grande / Official Competition / The Black Phone / Elvis / Marcel the Shell with Shoes On / Minions: The Rise of Gru / Fire of Love / Thor: Love and Thunder / The Gray Man / Nope / Not Okay / Resurrection / Thirteen Lives / Vengeance / Bullet Train / Luck / Prey / Bodies Bodies Bodies / Emily the Criminal / Beast / Three Thousand Years of Longing / Breaking / Funny Pages / Barbarian / The Woman King / Blonde / Confess, Fletch / Moonage Daydream / Pearl / See How They Run / Don’t Worry Darling / Athena / Bros / The Greatest Beer Run Ever / Hellraiser / Tár / Triangle of Sadness / Werewolf By Night / Rosaline / Stars At Noon / Decision to Leave / The Stranger / Ticket to Paradise / Aftersun / The Banshees of Inisherin / Wendell & Wild / Armageddon Time / Causeway / Weird: The Al Yankovic Story / BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths / Black Panther: Wakanda Forever / The Fablemans / Is That Black Enough for You?!? / Bones and All / She Said / The Menu / EO / Strange World / Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery / Guiermo Dem Toro’s Pinocchio / White Noise / The Whale / Avatar: The Way of Water / Puss in Boots: The Last Wish / Babylon