What a great year for movies! I’m not sure how much of that can be chalked up to box office-driven decisions to hold off on some releases during the instability of the pandemic (Top Gun: Maverick obviously in this camp), but I thought 2022 saw a volume of creative outpouring which had been absent for the previous few years. I saw 40 movies released in 2022, many of them excellent. A few thoughts on the year prior to Oscar night.
This year’s group of Best Picture nominees is remarkably strong, especially compared to the weak classes of 2020 and 2021. The best among them is Everything Everywhere All at Once. While I find some of the effusive praise that surrounds the film a bit overwhelming, it’s undeniable as a feat of original storytelling and filmmaking, surprising with each frame. I find the central tension — the brutal, paralyzing weight of possibility, each chosen path closing off infinite others, invoking Sylvia Plath’s fig tree — to be extremely effective, and it’s kept afloat by several very strong performances, none better than Stephanie Hsu, asked to play both the film’s antagonist and its empathetic heart. It’s remarkable a film this audacious and uncompromising has enjoyed the level of success it has.
There’s a trio of near-masterpieces on the ballot after that. I loved TÁR, Todd Field’s fantastic examination of power and consequence, so much so that I went back to see it again three days after my first viewing. It’s painstakingly methodical, echoing Lydia Tár’s compulsive need for control (“You cannot start without me,” she boasts in the film’s opening scene, ascribing herself the importance of a force of nature as unforgiving as time), even in its collapse and through its disorienting ending, which brings the best punchline of the year. Cate Blanchett is even better than everyone raves she is. The Fabelmans might be Steven Speilberg’s best film, an extraordinary late-career peak. His greatest asset has always been image- and myth-making, and that’s on full display here. The best visual is Sammy Fabelman, in the midst of a traumatizing, life-altering family argument, looking into a mirror and seeing a damning apparition of himself reflected back, camera in hand. This is a really rich text, aided by a specificity which could only be achieved by someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about this work. I love and feel a lot of compassion for the Michelle Williams character, and that David Lynch role is a baffling, joyous closing note. The Banshees of Inisherin also plays out beautifully, tapping into one of my great fears, of a friend suddenly removing you from their life. It’s a civil war as needless as the one happening across the strait. “Some things there’s no moving on from,” laments Colin Farrell as Padraic, acknowledging he’s disarmed spiritually as well as personally.
Among the rest of the Best Picture class: Top Gun: Maverick is the platonic ideal (and logical endpoint?) of the action film, big and stupid and fun; Avatar: The Way of Water is a true visual marvel, transcending many of the shortcomings of its fantasy storytelling; All Quiet on the Western Front is clearly accomplished but left me very cold, in that I have seen war-is-hell done often before, and better; Triangle of Sadness is exhausting and vapid, and has much less to say on class than it thinks it does; and Elvis is a true disaster, and not even one that’s as fun to endure as I expected it to be. I haven’t yet seen Women Talking, but my hopes are high for it given the talent involved. I did read the Miriam Toews novel when it came out, and found it a bit mechanical, but I expect it’s material which may be better suited for the screen/stage.
A few great films not nominated worth note. Decision to Leave was my second-favourite of the year, Park Chan-wook’s dazzling romance/police procedural about a very ill-conceived affair its participants nonetheless feel drawn to via magnetic forces outside of themselves. The final sequence is crushing, and is probably the scene from 2022 which stuck with me most. Armageddon Time feels apocalyptic, a coming-of-age centred on the realization of the great inequities which underpin all facets of life. Aftersun is so evocative as a washed-out portrait of youth and memory. And Jackass Forever (and the even better accompanying feature, Jackass 4.5) is -so funny-. Give Johnny Knoxville et al. an Oscar for the updated Cup Test alone.
Finally, there was a lot of really great animation this year. The best is Turning Red, which literalizes transformation (i.e. puberty itself, but also the becoming of someone independent from your parents) brilliantly and directly, the kind of document about being comfortable in one’s own skin I wish could have seen when I was 12. Pinocchio (by Guillermo del Toro) is stunningly crafted and makes a lot of surprising decisions, including its pretty harsh scenes on mortality and conception of its world between life and death, populated by poker-playing rabbits. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is slight but beautiful, and very funny. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t deeply enjoy Minions: The Rise of Gru. The scene where the minions hijack a plane might be the most fun I had in a movie theatre all year.
I didn’t see enough documentary work this year to weigh in. I’m very interested in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s portrait of Nan Goldin and the opioid crisis, but haven’t yet gotten around to watching it. I thought the great documentary-adjacent work of 2022 was Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, a very heady and transgressive series which pushes against the limits of the form.