Top Movies of 2022 - Honorable Mentions and Extras

Okay, the Top 15 list is done, but there's a ton of other things to talk about:

Honorable Mentions:

Elvis, dir. Buz Lurhmann

Musical biopics are about as worn a genre of film as I can imagine in 2022, so bravo to one that still has life and energy. Austin Butler’s Elvis was the single greatest acting performance I saw last year. He felt immense, a superstar reborn. Seeing this Elvis perform "Suspicious Minds" halfway through this movie was the first time I actually understood why my Grandma is so crazy about Elvis guy. Any other divine or superhero metaphors I could use in my description were taken first by Baz Lurhmann’s very blunt script. (But whoever said bluntness was a negative?) However, everything great about Butler was matched by the bizarre choices made for Tom Hank’s Tom Parker, which was maybe the single worst performance of last year. He gave us a waddling Batman villain meets the Emperor from Star Wars with an accent less accurate to Dutch than Goldmember. And those two together really is what makes Elvis work, it's as brilliant as it is obvious and stupid.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, dir. Jane Schoenburn

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is the kind of horror movie that will offend and insult people who expect the movie to end with a demon girl climbing out of a computer screen in a big jump scare. Nothing that directly spooky ever happens, or needs to. Instead, World's Fair is a slow burn of increasingly disturbing vibes. As Casey (Anna Cobb) live streams her experiences with The World’s Fair, a creepypasta art collective, she performs the slow loss of self-control, while actually losing control of performance. There are not monsters online can steal our bodies and souls, but there are people out there who can steal our narratives. Older manipulators, forcing people into relationships perhaps entirely imagined. That's much more frightening than just a ghost and ghoul.

The Menu, dir. Mark Mylod

Pig in 2021 was not kind to the high-class food establishment. But it might as well have been a glowing foodie blog compared to how The Menu treats that world. Nicolas Cage could only stare on in disgust at the loveless, over-produced expensive garbage on his table. The Menu is so furious at the extravagant waste that the upper class indulges in, it wants to burn the world down. There is a brilliant scene in The Menu where our murderous head chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) forces his most pretentious fan, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) into the kitchen. Tyler has a sophisticated pallet, he knows everything about Slowik’s methods, he even can forgive the joke of killing the patrons. But Slowik wants him to cook for him, to be more than just a consumer, to create something. The result is the most devastating ending for a person in a movie in 2022.

Prey, dir. Dan Trachtenberg

Prey was one of the best blockbusters of 2022 and should have been on the big screen to be a solid box office hit. But instead I had to watch Prey at home on Hulu. An idea like Comanches vs Aliens deserves a big triumphant screen! Prey is a clever and inventive action movie. Not a single piece of the script buffalo is wasted when every set-up is used against the space hunter. I was cheering on my couch when Naru (Amber Midthunder) tricked the Predator into chopping off his own arm.

The Batman, dir. Matt Reeves

No, the new Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson Batman reboot is not the best Batman movie I’ve ever seen. It is not even the best Batman Year 1 movie, that honor goes to Batman Begins or Mask of the Phantasm. But still, The Batman was the best superhero film of 2022. It kept the more miserable tendencies of the Snyderverse at bay, presenting a gritty and gothic superhero, but still one with a kick-ass car chase scene. Plus they played a Nirvana song and Collin Farrell’s Penguin was great. Importantly, I love that Batman got to some plain old-fashioned hero stuff at the end. Remember when superheroes saved people?

The Northman, dir. Robert Eggers

The most unfortunate flop of 2022. But maybe The Northman was always doomed. Robert Eggers was not making this movie for modern audiences. No, The Northman is a Viking movie made with Viking values in mind. This is a movie about honor, the burden of fate, the glory of bloodlines, and being a damn awesome warrior with a chest so ripped you don’t have a six-pack, you have a ten-pack. The Northman is about getting stoned in a filthy cave and having a psychedelic vision quest with a very hammy Willem Dafoe. Or later fighting what is effectively a Dark Souls boss. If you did not cheer when the lightning bolt crashed across the screen and you saw that Odin had appeared to save the day, you were the wrong audience. Also, this movie ends on a naked fight in an erupting volcano, and no other movie in 2022 was that gloriously metal.

Bones and All, dir. Luca Guadagnino

After my October project all about vampire movies, I'm a big sucker for horror romances. Especially when Bones and All is basically vampires, I'll fight you on this point. Maybe they're just cannibals, but they also have an underground society of social outsiders wandering the countryside dressing like the coolest hipsters in a thrift shop. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are great leads, turning eating people into as much of a liberation road trip as say, Nomadland. Mark Rylance's Sully is the most elaborate villain of the year. Maybe he has one quirk too many (fisherman's costume, Indian affections, speaking in the third person, freaky hair braid). He's the best Stephen King villain that Stephen King has never written.

X

See Pearl, already discussed.

Fire of Love, dir. Sara Dosa

How many great romance documentaries have there been in the past? (Seriously, let me know, I'll watch them.) Fire of Love is a documentary about Katia and Maurice Krafft, a married couple of French volcanologists who became public intellectuals and filmmakers in their quest to study the Earth's most violent forces. I do not know about anybody else, but the idea of living a life wandering the world to climb mountains together with your spouse sounds like a dream, even if a volcano is almost killing you constantly (and indeed, will get our heroes in 1991). Fire of Love uses tons of their footage, which became the Krafft's "children" in a way, their immortal legacy, which we still get to enjoy and admire thirty years later.

Jackass Forever

After a decade break, it turns out I just really love all these dumbasses. Never has doing reckless stupid shit felt so wholesome. Two dudes flatten their junk between panes of glass and then play ping pong on the crushed genitals. That's cinema to me.

Best Performances of 2022:

Tang Wei as Song Seo-rae in Decision to Leave

Mia Goth as Pearl in Pearl and X

Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Margot Robbie as Beautiful Early 20th Century Lady in Babylon and Amsterdam

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Elvis

Cate Blachett as Lydia Tár in Tár

Ram Charan & N. T. Rama Rao Jr. as Raju & Bheem in RRR

Lee Pace as Greg in Bodies Bodies Bodies

Kristen Stewart as Timlin in Crimes of the Future

Claire Foy as Solome Friesen in Women Talking

Mark Rylance as Sully in Bones and All

Robert Pattinson as The Batman in The Batman

Christopher Abbott as Kevin in On the Count of Three

Rebecca Hall as Margaret in Resurrection

Chris Hemsworth as Steve Abnesti in Spiderhead

Dishonorable Mentions:

Men, dir. Alex Garland

Easily the worst ending to any movie of 2022. Men was a great folk horror movie for 90% of its running time. With a few changes, it could have been a more respectable remake of Rawhead Rex. Instead its conclusion was, despite incredible gore, just impossibly lame. Men ended up saying next to nothing about how men interact with women. It offered so little of value despite its ambition, it may have had anti-value, people understand the problems less well thanks to this movie existing. Ultimately, it just felt like Alex Garland feeling sorry for himself and his gender, over-universalizing the issue of abuse. Women Talking means this movie does not really need to exist, luckily.

White Noise, dir. Noah Bambauch

Noah Bambauch's incoherent adaptation of a Don DiLillo book was another example of Netflix just letting anything happen on their platform, no quality control. White Noise is not a horrendous movie for most its runtime. It even has a promising interlude which basically becomes a National Lampoon's Covid-19 Family Vacation. Then it violently lurches back to being about rich comfortable people being unsatisfied with Late Capitalism. Probably worst of all, White Noise seems to conclude with the outrageous statement of "no, all the societal rot is good actually because we're rich and fat, we can dance in the aisles of the supermarket and consume happily". What a mess.

Morbius, dir. Éric Rochant

No movie has ever less deserved its memetic status. Beyond the jokes, Moribus is the least interesting movie I saw in 2022. Kids today deserve a better class of meme movie.

Amsterdam, dir. David O. Russell

Margot Robbie needed better movies in 2022. She really does go all-out in every performance. If anybody should watch themselves in a theater and be enraptured by their own star power, it is her. (I've seen Robbie perform this exact scene twice.) Anyway, Margot Robbie's charisma and beauty aside, Amsterdam lands nothing of its ambitions. The mystery plot has no mystery, the comedy isn't funny, the characters are nostalgic for moments in their lives we do not get to see, the final reveal is painfully obvious, and Christian Bale's Jewish accent sounds like an Adam Sandler character half the time. Amsterdam had everything a great movie needed and completely failed. 

At least Margot Robbie got to be in Babylon, which was also very flawed, but has a great first hour. Amsterdam has nothing.

Moonfall, dir. Roland Emmerich

Black Panther 2 was the biggest disappointment of the year since I expected a great movie. But sometimes you can be disappointed just by expecting a fun movie. Moonfall is the latest Roland Emmerich disaster, and I've enjoyed most of his planet-annihilating schlock. Hell, I even like the Emmerich rip-offs. (The Core is a great movie, Stanley Tucci has an amazing wig!) And even as somebody with tolerance for this kind of trash, Moonfall crashed harder than its celestial premise. It is the worst one of these by many miles. In fact, it's precisely 238,900 miles, the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 

How do you make a movie about the Moon crashing into the Earth unfun? How is Emmerich still sticking to his handful of clichés over a decade after they all started to feel like self-parody in his 2012? I know moons are heavy things to carry around, but how come Geostorm starring Gerard Butler felt like effortless cheese and Moonfall feels like a lumbering slog?

Wildly Inaccurate Predictions for Best Movies of 2023:

15. Suzume, dir. Makoto Shinkai - It was on last year's predictions, and did not come out in the US, so welcome back!

14. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One), dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, & Justin K. Thompson - See above, did not release anywhere in 2022.

13. The Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese - See above. Yeah, this one too.

12. Beau Is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster - See above. This one too! This has changed its title from "Disappointment Blvd" and now has a trailer. I have even less of an idea what it is going to be about having seen that trailer.

11. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan

10. Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig

9. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Part 1) dir. Christopher McQuarrie - Okay, maybe I am hyped a bit for Tom Cruise's latest stupid stunts.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, dir. James Gunn - I know I said I was done with the MCU, but okay, you get ONE MORE CHANCE! ONE MORE!

7. Nimona, dir. Nick Bruno & Troy Quane

6. Napoleon, dir. Ridley Scott

5. Megalopolis, dir. Francis Ford Coppola

4. How Do You Live?, dir Hayao Miyazaki

3. Magic Mike's Last Dance, dir. Steven Soderbergh - I am very hyped to finally have an excuse to watch the Magic Mike (now) trilogy.

2. Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve - DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNE!!!!!

1. Skinamarink, dir. Kyle Edward Ball - I'm cheating. I've seen this movie already and it is one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen. It was so scary, it was unpleasant. We can be 100% certain this is making the 2023 Top 15.