2022 Movie Guide: Part II

Awards season is drawing nearer to a close, and I’ve seen a lot since I dropped the first part of my 2022 Movie Guide in November – read on for some recommendations:

The “A” Movies:

• Tár (A)

  • This is a masterpiece of a select breed: something that is at once completely accessible and too deep to fully grasp. Blanchett turns in a towering performance akin to Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, but just as Lewis was complemented by Paul Thomas Anderson, Blanchett is complemented perfectly by Todd Field. He holds long, allowing for dread to build, but by the time the bomb reveals itself, it’s already detonated. There’s a wonderful element of surreality and the film is stuffed with mirrors that confront our perception of our protagonist and the moral judgement we bring to bear to this wonderfully ambiguous piece of work. This is not a question of “this or that” but rather an examination of “this and that”, which is the perfect fit for our times.

• Nope (A)

  • Jordan Peele’s third film boldly tackles new thematic ground. He has the entirety of cinematic history and humanity’s engagement with animals and other harmful sources of spectacle on his mind. It’s one thing to work themes into a film, but it’s another thing entirely to have them be a source of tension and action baked directly into both plot AND filmmaking without sacrificing any conventional entertainment value. Any comparisons to something like Jaws or Close Encounters are earned, and Peele rewires genre with a little humor, splashes of terror, and some great thrills.

• Decision to Leave (A)

  • Shot and edited like little you’ve seen before, Park Chan Wook delivers a sumptuous spectacle and emotionally engaging detective story. With an insomniac detective as the main character, Park flexes his extremely jacked visual muscles to move the camera in and out of screens, forwards and backwards in time, and in and out of characters’ imaginings without tipping off that he’s doing so, and successfully conveys the feeling of a fractured mind fixated on a target that’s beginning to grow aware of his longing. This movie features great performances and stunning style with Hitchcockian sensibilities and makes me yearn for a Hollywood whose best auteurs could sink their teeth so deep into genre fare like this. Alas, this film will have to suffice, and suffice it does.

• Petite Maman (A)

  • This is one for the high-art crowd, since it’s slow, controlled, and intimate. If you’re willing to hand yourself over to Celine Sciamma’s accomplished high-brow filmmaking, you’ll be treated with an incredibly poignant story of grief, the mother-daughter connection, and the friendship between young girls. Even if you didn’t grow up as a young French girl, if you grew up playing imaginary games with your friends and running around in the woods building forts when you were a child, this film will strike about as true as film gets.

• The Banshees of Inisherin (A-)

  • This movie is by equal turns hysterical and tragic, big yet small, odd yet familiar. This story about a halted friendship that turns into a feud that escalates towards violence is packed full of ideas that are woven into the narrative to create, much like Tár, a pure fable. It doesn’t quite feel like this movie’s set in the real world, but when we’re in such great hands that’s feeling is wonderful. This movie features my favorite performances and some of my favorite filmmaking of the year; don’t let any odd and macabre flourishes regarding severed fingers turn you away.

• Benediction (A-)

  • I was blown away by this movie! Those expecting a conventional biopic about Siegfried Sassoon’s life will be very confused, as the film takes frequent narrative breaks to present images from WWI set to readings of Sassoon’s poetry, flash-forwards to Sassoon towards the end of his life, and is otherwise a snapshot of his young adulthood as he navigates his postwar career, struggles with PTSD, and lives as a gay man in 1920’s England. What we’re left with is a beautiful rendering of an artist’s soul, a brilliantly captured glimpse of a love life that’s forced to remain underground, some fantastically catty high society dialogue, and one of the most poignant front-to-back watching experiences I had all year.

• Armageddon Time (A-)

  • We’ve gotten a glut of memoiristic reflections by filmmakers on their youth in the past few years with varying degrees of success, and Armageddon Time flew under the radar in comparison to most. Unfortunately, that seems to perennially be the case for James Gray, but those willing to seek this one out will find something that’s far more challenging than similar work by his peers. This is a portrait of an artistic younger son who’s a nuisance in class, frequently lies to his parents and family, and at 11 years of age is beginning to understand that not only do his actions have potentially dire consequences, but that his dreams likely won’t come true. Through the lens of a working-class Jewish family, Gray pries open a can of racial and socioeconomic complexity when the promise of upward mobility began to die; those left out have nothing to do but clamor over each other.

The “B” Movies

• The Woman King (B+)

  • Top Gun: Maverick was not the only excellent blend of the old-school with the new in 2022. This epic treads new ground for the genre with its deep focus on character and a culture that hasn’t gotten this kind of spotlight in American filmmaking but works in a healthy amount of familiar story beats to be properly rousing. This film is full of great performances, strong craft, fantastic production details, and the physical and emotional thrust of the movie is spearheaded by an excellent turn from Viola Davis that should have gotten far more widespread recognition. As a matter of fact, everything about this movie should have gotten more widespread recognition.

• Babylon (B+)

  • What a beautiful, odd, epic mess we’ve got here. Everything is to the max, from the beauty to the ugliness and gross-out (for real). Damien Chazelle seems to deplore the unabashed hedonism, excess and callousness of the Hollywood of 100 years ago as much as he loves the people who were caught up in the chaos as much as he both loves and hates the movies that they made. The resulting three-hour behemoth of a film is bursting at the seams with ideas and characters in a way that gets unwieldy, but when this film sings true it sings near-perfectly. There’s at least 10 movies wrapped up in this, and like 7 of them are quite good. The only thing that’s holding me back from calling this one truly special is the lack of deftness in juggling everything, but my god do Chazelle and his stacked cast and crew put their all into every ball they send skyward.

• The Fabelmans (B+)

  • On the surface, this is the poster child for the kind of memoiristic effort from a beloved filmmaker that I mentioned we have so much of, and the trailers make it seem like it’s earnestly that and nothing else. That’s not the case; there’s ton of earnestness here, but there’s also an interesting psychological introspection and a frank take on his parents and their divorce. At times this film is the among the most complex domestic dramas I’ve ever seen, wading its way into very fascinating and sometimes challenging territory. The movie doesn’t maintain this tone throughout, which at times gives the audience a welcome reprieve of heart and humor, but the movie’s insistence to explain itself through dialogue is what rubbed me the rawest. However, I fully anticipate a re-evaluation of this film in a few years once more audiences get to see it, and actually think about it afterwards – something this movie inspires, demands, and deserves.

• Glass Onion (B+)

  • Rian Johnson is a fun and talented filmmaker, and Glass Onion is quite a treat. The follow-up to the surprise smash hit of 2019, Knives Out, isn’t quite as neatly contained, engaging, or subversively resonant as its predecessor, but then again it isn’t trying to be either. While both have their sights firmly set on the elite, Glass Onion aims for the ultra-online celebrity in comparison to the first film’s seemingly older-money type, but this approach has its pitfalls. The satire is a little too obvious, the meaning a little firmly too delivered to the audience, the time spent before the key twist a little too meandering, but these are minor flaws. Once it’s clear what’s really happening, the film becomes far more emotionally engaging, but Johnson’s firm hand behind the camera keeps things interesting throughout. I highly recommend to anyone who’s sick of movies that always work the same way but still looking for an easy, enjoyable watch.

• Avatar: The Way of Water (B+)

  • Maybe more CGI spectacle bonanzas should take 13 years to get made? James Cameron delivered the movie he wanted to, and as usual his instincts about mixing simple and straightforward storytelling with lavish effects work has produced something that’s pretty hard to dismiss. If anything, this movie’s issues are around it doing what it does too well, or perhaps there’s too much of it. That being said, it’s refreshing (water haha) to see a movie overstuffed with VFX be completely earnest in everything that it’s doing, and refuse to be self-aware or winking; if the box office is anything to go by, an awful lot of people agree with me. In this way, despite literally inventing new technologies, Cameron is serving up an old-school meal, and audiences were ready to feast.

• Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (B)

  • We got three Pinocchio movies last year, but this one is the only one I watched; after what Del Toro serves up, it would be hard to see this movie any other way. It’s a technical marvel, and beautiful image-making, and very very touching. I’m not sure what kid I’d show this to, but they’d have to be alright with the following: seeing that real-world fascism is bad (Mussolini literally shows up in this movie, and the magical perils are sometimes replaced with the perils of an Italy gripped by WWII), villains suffering realistic deaths, and can accept the fact that we’re all mortal and that’s ok.

• Stars at Noon (B)

  • Highly acclaimed director Claire Denis made two movies this year, but this is the only one I was able to catch. It’s an update to a genre that I love, which is a paranoid political conspiracy thriller where the walls start closing in. What Denis has done, for better or worse, is strip out most of the paranoia and virtually all the thrills but replaced them with a slinky sexuality. I did jell with this low-key affair and the way its modern trappings drove the plot forward, and I think that Margaret Qualley turned in a great performance about a complicated character, but Joe Alwyn’s performance left something to be desired. At the same time, I’m really glad this movie exists and thoroughly enjoyed my watch.

• Stutz (B)

  • While I’m not normally a huge documentary guy, I become one when my wife wants to watch a documentary about her line of work, and there was a lot to like here! I think I responded to its nontraditional structure; the film is essentially a conversation between Jonah Hill and his therapist, renowned psychologist/author Phil Stutz. Hill’s quite open about the issues he’s faced in his life, but it’s Stutz’s own honesty, sense of peace, and acceptance of his own limitations that had the strongest effect on me. Very early on, the documentary explodes its already unconventional form as Hill marries his anxiety with making the movie that we’re currently watching with his other anxious tendencies as a key to exploring Stutz’s “Tools”, which the movie becomes structured around. The audience learns about the personal lives and struggles of both men, as well as a few therapeutic tools to help them in moments of crisis; though my wife would certainly remind me that there’s no substitute for the real thing.

• Argentina 1985 (B)

  • This is a very competently made, occasionally quite stirring courtroom drama that captures a nation committing itself, through its judicial system, to a democratic identity based on justice and respect. As such, it’s quite timely given both worldwide events and on the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of Argentina’s “Dirty War”. The performances are all natural and powerful, but what I was most impressed by was director Mitre’s light touch given the heavy subject matter.

• The Menu (B-)

  • This is a very fun skewering of those who don’t make art but claim to love it and ultimately may serve to destroy it. A thriller that features equal parts dark comedy and trauma-fueled mental torture games, it’s a neatly packaged little gem. It’s got sharp tone, wit, and performances even if it doesn’t have a ton of dynamism in its plot or setting. It also could have been far sharper in its critiques of the elite, as it wasn’t necessarily funny enough to be a pure satire for me, nor scary enough to be a thoroughly effective thriller. Then again, movies that aspire to be the equivalent of a well-made burger can be whatever they want to be.

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (B-)

  • Being over-stuffed with half-executed ideas, none of which were bad and a few of which were fascinating made this a frustrating watch. Every moment not spent contemplating grief and retribution, with Namor and his people, or with Wakanda and our principal characters attempting to find direction felt like wasted time and actively detracted from exploring those concepts properly. On the curve these movies exist on it’s solid, largely because it does feel like it was made by a person and not in a lab. I enjoyed a lot of the performances and most of the humor, but the result is over-filled and poorly plotted. Take me back to the first immediately.

The “C” Movies

• Don’t Worry Darling (C+)

  • With *this* cast involved in *this* much off-screen drama, there was no way my wife was going to let me miss this one. To start with the positives, the production design and cinematography of this film are very crisp; with the exception of the tone, I think Olivia Wilde was able to translate the vision in her head to the screen, in at least the physical sense. There are a few scenes that feature a strong sense of tension, and the earliest stretches of the film convey a paranoid sense of gaslighting that’s rather effective. Where the film begins to lose me, as well as betray its own ideas and sense of stakes, is in its late game-changing twists that took me right out of a movie that I was already beginning to fade out of.

• Amsterdam (C-)

  • This is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time, perhaps because it is full of so much potential. The stacked cast, bless their hearts, certainly all got the same memo to “be weird”, but none of them were told to be the same kind of weird. The movie’s attempts at comedy range from the macabre to screwball, but nothing landed for me. There’s a fun 30’s-set murder mystery film with a powerful and timely idea about fascists manipulating veterans into acting against their country’s founding principles buried somewhere in here, but lies beneath thick convolution in plot, tone, and filmmaking that it falls flat. Maybe that’s why David O. Russell felt compelled to insert a voice over literally telling us that love is better than hate; if you have to spell out the meaning of your film like you’re speaking to a 5-year-old, you might have made a bad movie.