Reflections on Movie Year 2022

“Movie Year” is a concept I came up with about 15 years ago when I was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The idea was that even as a person who saw multiple films in theaters each week, I still couldn’t catch all of the year’s most important movies by December 31 because a significant number wouldn’t be released locally until weeks or even months later. This is even more true now that I live in an even smaller city, as demonstrated by the fact that seven Academy Award nominees and a number of other critical favorites have opened in Ithaca, New York since January 1. The Oscars are, in fact, a driver of what makes it to places like here and for good reason–the screening of The Quiet Girl that I attended yesterday was one of the biggest crowds I’ve been part of in awhile, presumably because anyone planning to watch the awards ceremony wants to see as many nominated films as they can before it starts.

Given all this, I think Oscar night makes much more sense than New Year’s Day as a time for someone like me to publish a Top Ten list. Which, for the record, I still find such lists to be useful, especially in aggregate! I peruse IndieWire’s annual critics poll for titles I missed or never got a chance to see to keep an eye out for because they’re likely to be referenced in articles and reviews I read in the future. There is absolutely no reason why someone needs to be a professional critic to publish such a list, but it is important for amateurs to provide context. To say “these are the ten best movies of the year” is to imply that one has seen every film that deserves to be considered for such an honor. A professional critic can fairly be assumed either to have viewed or to have made an informed decision not to view every movie that has opened in the geographic area that the publication they write for covers. Similarly, someone with a “beat” like documentary or science fiction film can fairly be assumed to have seen everything in their area of specialization. When it isn’t obvious what a film’s inclusion or absence on a list means, that list becomes hard to rely on.

My tweets from the past year indicate that I have currently seen approximately 75 movies that opened in the United States in 2022. That’s not a huge number, but it might be interesting to explore why I chose these films and not others, and this could well yield a definition of “best” that would result in a credible list. But to do it right, I’d likely want to watch many of these movies again because I don’t like to rely on my memory when making qualitative judgements. Which, this is actually crucial to my personal relationship with cinema–I don’t necessarily remember films clearly! Not in their entirety, anyway. Specific lines of dialogue, camera movements, and shot compositions stay with me, as do impressions of color, mood, and sound. This is why I like close reading: it’s a way of pinning down things which would otherwise remain elusive. It’s also why I doubt I could hack it as a daily or weekly reviewer. I watch everything I review for Educational Media Reviews Online or write about on this blog at least twice, which obviously takes time. I regard the concepts of “receiving” and “evaluating” works of art that C.S. Lewis describes in An Experiment in Criticism as the origin of my method, such as it is: I try to open myself up to the film as much as possible during the first viewing, then open up my notebook for the second one. Make no mistake about it, though: without those notes, I wouldn’t be able to say very much at all with confidence!

Anyway, like I said I could put a lot of work into developing a framework which enables me to deliver a verdict on Movie Year 2022. But it would be far easier and much more fun to simply look back on what I watched to see what still stands out in my mind, so I’m going to do that instead. Without further ado, here are my most memorable films of the year:

• Crimes of the Future: My favorite movie of the year by a country mile. Absolutely chock full of unforgettable ideas and images, including the first and last scenes, a post-infection and pain world, first Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty and then Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux naked in a device called “Sark autopsy module,” and most especially for me another product by the same manufacturer known as the “breakfasting chair.” I loved every minute of it.
• Nope: I thought this would be up for at least seven or eight Oscars! Shows what I know. The “creature” shots at the end are absolutely breathtaking.
• Petite Maman: You will likely notice, as I did, that this list contains multiple films about parents and parenting, which I hope is forgivable from a father of two young children. This was my favorite.
• The Northman and Maverick: Top Gun: My loving wife and I only got three date nights out at the movies this year and these were two of the films we saw on them. Both were entertaining and fun to talk about afterward. This is not nothing!
• The Menu: Date night movie number three and my favorite of the lot! I had actually already seen it myself one week prior, making this the only film I saw in theaters twice last year. I spent way too much time squaring the reference to “heirloom masa” with the fact that Hawthorn’s homage to Taco Tuesday looked to me to be made with FLOUR tortillas (I eventually decided they must be “half and half” tortillas), which, please be assured that my poker buddies have already raked me over the coals for this! Anyway, I liked it enough to retroactively add it to one of my Drink & a Movie posts!
• Aftersun and The Quiet Girl: Wow, those endings! It’s hard for me to objectively assess the latter because I only saw it yesterday, but right now it feels like it belongs here.
• Happening and Tár: Movies of and for our historical moment.
• The Forgiven: Because I write about booze and movies and it contains a scene in which Ralph Fiennes’ David Henninger attacks pint of beer with the urgency of a drowning man gasping for air that has everything good and bad about drinking wrapped up in it. Also a more fully-realized use of Tár‘s maneuver of beginning with the end titles. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri remains a major contemporary blind spot of mine, but based on the films I have seen I think John Michael might be my favorite McDonagh brother?
• The Banshees of Inisherin: Which, I mean no disrespect to Martin! The key to this film is that Brendan Gleeson’s character isn’t actually a great musician and thus chooses becoming a folk legend as an alternative path to immortality, right?
• You Won’t Be Alone: Which, I’m fascinated by the idea of *actually* living forever, too, which is what I was talking about when I referred to this film as “an art house version of the Anne Rice vampire novels I grew up with” on Twitter.
• Athena: For the virtuoso long takes and my sudden realization that, oh! If this was another era, this would be a tale of dynasties and kings!
• The Whale: I see this film as the tale of a dying writer trying to author his own redemption story and therefore a companion piece of sorts to Mother! Brendan Fraser is outstanding.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Turning Red: My family’s consensus favorite movies of the year.
• God’s Country and Master: For their hiring and tenure committee deliberation scenes because I’m a higher ed lifer. The latter also resonates with me as someone who currently works at an Ivy League institution.

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I’m not sure I see a ton of value in logging which “old” movies I see in a given year, especially those I watch at home. For what it’s worth, though, my biggest revelations were as follows:

• Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool: Both contain some of the most emotionally-charged camera movements and musical numbers of I’ve seen in any movie ever. I’m embarrassed that it took me this long to discover Guru Dutt! I’m currently planning to write about Pyaasa in my October Drink & a Movie post.
• RR: I am a former rail commuter and train whistles in the distance have always been one of my favorite sounds, so seeing this at Cornell Cinema was a terrific experience!
• Ahed’s Knee, Memoria, and Neptune Frost: All three would have been among my favorite films of 2021 had had they opened here on time.
• The Ring: Like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sunrise: Song of Two Humans, which I also spent time with last year but had seen before, it is a testament to the expressive powers of silent cinema at the dawn of the sound era. Another possible future Drink & a Movie selection.

Also, I doubt anyone else cares, but here’s a procedural note for the sake of posterity: I am hoping (if Twitter survives and remains free) to use the hashtag #onetweettake to quickly identify films eligible for future posts like this one. As such, starting today I will only use it when writing about films from Movie Year 2023 until Oscar night next year, when I’ll begin only using it for films from Movie Year 2024.

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Speaking of the Oscars, they don’t matter to me much when I’m watching tons of movies, because who cares what Academy voters think, or when I’m not seeing very many at all, because what fun is an awards ceremony when you haven’t seen any of the nominated films? When I’m living somewhere in between like I am now, though, they serve as a convenient guide to which film to choose for my weekly theatrical screening and what to do with my weeknight evenings. As a result I managed to see 34 of 39 nominated features and 10 of 15 nominated shorts, which I think is a pretty healthy total! My loving wife and I definitely are planning to watch and here’s what I’ll be rooting for, with the number of nominees I saw in parentheses:

Actor in a Leading Role (5/5): Brendan Fraser, The Whale.

Actor in a Supporting Role (5/5): Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin. This was the hardest category for me to pick by far. For MONTHS I thought I was going to pick Ke Huy Quan, then strongly considered Brian Tyree Henry, but in the end I couldn’t go against a great performance by one of my favorite actors.

Actress in a Leading Role (4/5): Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Full disclosure: I have no problem whatsoever with so-called “legacy picks.”

Actress in a Supporting Role (5/5): Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Animated Feature Film (5/5): Turning Red.

Cinematography (5/5): Darius Khondji, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.

Costume Design (5/5): Ruth Carter, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Directing (5/5): Todd Field, Tár. I see the controversies of content and form that this film has generated as testaments to its effectiveness.

Documentary Feature Film (3/5): All That Breathes. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to see All the Beauty and the Bloodshed before making this pick!

Documentary Short Film (4/5): Haulout.

Film Editing (4/5): Eddie Hamilton, Top Gun: Maverick.

International Feature Film (5/5): The Quiet Girl.

Makeup and Hairstyling (4/5): Adrien Morot, Judy Chin and Annemarie Bradley, The Whale.

Original Score (5/5): Justin Hurwitz, Babylon. This would have been harder to pick if Empire of Light or The Northman had gotten nominations, but I may well have made the same choice.

Original Song (4/5): “Naatu Naatu” from RRR.

Best Picture (10/10): Tár.

Production Design (5/5): Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino, Babylon.

Animated Short Film (4/5): Ice Merchants. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to see An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It before making this pick!

Live Action Short Film (2/5): Le Pupille.

Sound (4/5): Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Al Nelson, Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor, Top Gun: Maverick.

Visual Effects (4/5): Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett, Avatar: The Way of Water.

Adapted Screenplay (5/5): Sarah Polley, Women Talking.

Original Screenplay (5/5): Todd Field, Tár.