30 Best Movies of 2022
No, not Maverick, ffs.
Update: I belatedly realized I had left out Till and Women Talking. duh. So I've tweaked, because I am just that obsessive. Sorry about that.
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I saw a lot of films in 2022, mostly for work. I’m not the sort of film critic who has a steady gig where I’m assigned to see everything, though, and what I manage to convince people to let me see and write about tends to be very erratic. So part of the idiosyncrasy here is that I’m odd, and part of it is that my viewing is haphazard.
I’ve provided links to my reviews where available (Wealth of Geeks is having some troubles with my content, so links are to caches there.) Also a line or two about why I liked each one. Hopefully you’ll find something here you didn’t see and might enjoy!
And as always, if you find my writing entertaining/enlightening, consider subscribing to my Patreon.
30. Raven’s Hollow (WoG)
dir. Christopher Hatton
“Clichés, ominous music, incoherent plot, silly special effects, and dunderheaded references to Poe’s work are dumped indiscriminately into a New England forest, where they try gamely, if unconvincingly, to fester and giggle.”
29. Ticket to Paradise (NBC Think)
dir. Ol Parker
“Centering on Julia Roberts and George Clooney, two great, aging stars of rom-coms past, “Ticket to Paradise” was always going to be a throwback. But in a fun twist, the movie’s two couples end up giving us a brief tour through the history of the entire genre.”
28. Alienoid (WoG-no cache)
dir. Choi Dong-Hoon
“Choi Dong-Hoon doesn’t exactly have anything to say. He doesn’t exactly say it well. But you never know the next thing that’s going to come out of his brain.”
27. The Runner (WoG)
dir. Boy Harsher (Jae Matthews, Augustus Muller)
“This isn’t really an evil, hungry, desperate, or even downbeat movie. Instead, it feels like a bunch of friends messing around with horror tropes and music they love, working together to create some joy in a difficult time.”
26. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (WoG)
dir. Sophie Hyde
“Mainstream film often touts love, and sometimes Dionysiac excess. But a quieter brief for adult satisfaction is rarer. That makes Leo Grande a refreshing change.”
25. I’m Totally Fine (WoG)
dir. Brandon Dermer
“The SF premise gives the small story a sense of opening out into larger vistas, eternal and external. In the end, maybe the planet does shift a little, after all.”
24. Carmen (WoG)
dir. Valerie Buhagiar
“Many movies use tragic backstories to give characters depth. But here the history simply explains the layers you’ve already seen. It’s deft and compelling filmmaking.”
23. Alone With You (WoG)
dir. Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks
“Women have all the major roles; there are no male speaking parts, and there’s only one man who even appears onscreen. The film itself is a bleak story about isolation and possibilities shutting down. But it’s also an indication of how the industry and the genre are, slowly, opening up.”
22. Women Talking
dir. Sarah Polley
Review is forthcoming, so I won't say anything except that I liked it!
21. Crimes of the Future (WoG)
dir. David Cronenberg
“Cronenberg loves and hates new bodies, new pleasures, new sex, queer panic, and queer ecstasy.”
20. Three Thousand Years of Longing (NBC Think)
dir. George Miller
“It’s a love letter to narrative and to all those who mistrust it.”
19. Nope (NBC Think)
dir. Jordan Peele
“The movie can be seen as a restaging of Peele’s own first film. Or it can be seen as a call to peers to find new spectacles, bigger, better and less racist than Kong. The camera pans across cumulus, looking up, taking a white landscape of horror and transforming it through a Black filmmaker’s lens.”
18. Beast (WoG)
dir. Baltasar Kormákur
“The movie is that rarity: an animal attack film that gives you the requisite chills and jump scares without scapegoating the wildlife.”
17. Till (WoG)
dir. Chinonye Chukwu
"Till is very careful about what it shows and what it does not, acknowledging both the potential and the limitations of portraying injustice.
16. Prey (WoG)
dir. Dan Trachtenberg
“Naru’s prowess threatens the Predator—and the Predator, in Prey, is another name for the patriarchy. When misogynist fans say that a Native woman can’t be a hero, what they mean is that they’re afraid she might be one.”
15. Mad God (WoG)
dir. Phil Tippett
“Lurking beneath the steampunk slime and gothic murk is a decidedly exhilarating exercise in visceral, boisterously unrestrained creativity. This is a weird vision that revels in its ability to realize every snaggle-tooth and rolling eyeball of its weirdness.”
14. Karmalink (WoG)
dir. Jake Wachtel
“A lot of movies tell you that the goal is less important than the journey. But there aren’t many that so gracefully find enlightenment in searching together for a beautiful, unfindable something.”
13. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Chicago Reader)
dir. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
“Lady Chatterley’s Lover may not have the power to shock that it once did, but in Clermont-Tonnerre’s hands it retains both romantic and social resonance.”
12. The Good Madam (WoG)
dir. Jenna Cato Bass
“The Good Madam is about intimate exploitation, and slow, generational, familial betrayal.
11. The Woman King (Boss Level Gamer)
dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood
“Dahomey is beautiful, courageous, and inspiring, but it isn’t where we’re living for the most part. If that’s the world we want, we must fight for it. Gina Prince-Bythewood makes a moving case that we should.”
10. Turning Red (twitter)
dir. Domee Shi
“Some people hated the movie because it suggested that kids should be able to have their own souls.”
9. The Stars At Noon (Document Journal)
dir. Claire Denis
“The film is as small as life. It doesn’t describe a dystopia to come, but one which has already settled in to stay, like the way tropical humidity thickens the air around us.”
8. Thor: Love and Thunder (NBC Think)
dir. Taika Waititi
“You can’t explain evil and can’t always defeat it. But you can care for each other. One way you do that, Waititi suggests, is through telling one another aspirational stories about hope and heroism and better times.”
7. Kimi (Document Journal)
dir. Steven Soderbergh
“A deliberately small thriller designed to be enjoyed in its moment, rather than to dominate everything everywhere all at once.”
6. The Northman (NBC Think)
dir. Robert Eggers
The film is a tale of revenge and blood for its own sake, which forcefully puts a sharpened axe through any moral catharsis. Like the ravens that occasionally flap across the screen, viewers aren’t there to witness the triumph of heroism. They’re there to feast on the carrion.
5. The Princess (no review, alas)
dir. Le-Van Kiet
94 minutes of Joey King beating the crap out of hulking hairy medieval warriors with swords, axes, a beer stein, and her own chains. That’s it. It is awesome.
4. Big Bug (WoG)
dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
“BigBug is a farcical meditation on/pastiche of fears and dreams about robots and technology. It’s a bright, saturated, automated cyborg ballet that compulsively disassembles itself.”
3. Don’t Worry, Darling (NBC Think)
dir. Olivia Wilde
“A film that feints toward an explanation of women’s reality in order to embrace women’s imagination may be too idiosyncratic for critical or commercial success in the short term. But I think it will find its audience eventually.”
2. The Sadness (WoG)
dir. Rob Jabbaz
“Canadian director Rob Jabbaz’s gut-churning Taiwanese zombie film The Sadness builds on the experience of COVID to mash together disease and misanthropy into a new misbegotten birth of disgust and fear.”
1. You Won’t Be Alone (WoG)
dir. Goran Stolevski
“Part folk horror, part queer coming of age, part love letter to the possibilities of film, Goran Stolevski You Won’t Be Alone is a strange, lyrical, gross-out, heart-tugging (in various senses) masterpiece. Some viewers will no doubt find it too slow, too inscrutable, too brutal, and too pretentious.”
That’s it! If you’re so inclined, let me know what I should have included in the comments.
(image at top of post is from You Won't Be Alone.)