2022 in movies

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I almost named this year of movies The Year of Indifference. After struggling along for several years, I finally turned a corner in the spring and just stopped caring about most of the movies that came out.

I can remember the moment. It was April, the year barely begun. I was sitting in a theatre waiting to watch The Northman when the non-stop pre-trailer fluff turned toward the mandatory Disney agitprop. Two youthful people announced—as if any of us could have forgotten—that next month Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would arrive in theatres. Fine. Whatever. But their second sentence was something like, “Here are all the movies and Disney+ shows you need to catch up on before the movie!”

I’m still not sure if I said it out loud, but I certainly thought, “Well, the hell with that.”

I had most looked forward to three movies in the spring of 2022. As it turns out, those were my three favorite movies of 2022. From the last of those in late spring right up to New Year’s Eve, I slid downhill into utter apathy. Movies came and went and I did not care. I did not see the new Dr Strange, or Jurassic World, or Thor, or Black Panther, or any edgy A24 stuff, or any prestige movies about movies like The Fabelmans or Empire of Light or Babylon, or anything that came out on any streaming service, and I probably will not in the future. Not that I felt any hostility toward these movies—the only one I bestowed hate upon was Avatar: The Way of Water, which I certainly will not see—I just did not care. Even the things I felt some flicker of interest in I could not be motivated to go pay money to watch. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

But I hope so, because while the lows of 2022 were, for me, very low, the tiny handful of high points were most high indeed.

So having explained how I came to be even more pessimistic than usual about the state of filmmaking, let me focus for the rest of the post on the purely positive. Rather than The Year of Indifference, I’m taking a cue from a coincidental symmetry in the titles of my top three films and dubbing 2022:

The Year of The _____man (and Top Gun: Maverick)

Top Gun: Maverick

The hype is real.

I have little personal attachment to the original Top Gun, but grew more and more interested in Maverick as it kept getting delayed and as I learned more about it. By the time it arrived in theatres I had even allowed myself to get excited, and boy was that excitement rewarded. A carefully crafted, well-executed action movie with clear stakes, straightforward old-fashioned storytelling, solid if not deep characters, some resonant themes of guilt, mentorship, hard work, and courage, and genuinely awesome action, Top Gun: Maverick thrilled me.

What is more, the movie holds up. I saw it twice in theatres in the late spring. My wife gave me the Blu-ray for Christmas, and my dad set up a great family movie night in his office’s conference room over Christmas break—massive TV, loud, bassy speakers, and plenty of pizza. The movie was just as exciting as the first time I saw it on the big screen.

You can read my full review from May here.

The Batman

The Batman was my first big movie of the year, but one I had looked forward to with some trepidation. I intentionally avoided reviews and information about the movie because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I went in almost cold, with few expectations though admittedly some hopes that it would be good.

Those hopes were fulfilled. The Batman proved a legitimate crime movie, serial killer mystery, police procedural, action thriller, and detective story all at the same time, with a good script, excellent acting, a wonderfully detailed Gotham City—the best I’ve seen in a Batman movie, in my opinion—just oozing and dripping the gloomy atmosphere I’ve always imagined, and a subtle but effective coming-of-age story for Batman. Like Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman takes familiar material and elevates it not only through its surehanded and expert storytelling but through the mature, old-fashioned themes it dramatizes.

You can read my full review from March here, with some further notes, thoughts, and observations here.

The Northman

The Northman is the best Viking movie ever made, and perhaps the only thoroughly good one. (Though I do have a soft spot for one very old-fashioned one.)

Robert Eggers’s stated intention in The Northman was to make a film that felt and worked like an undiscovered saga, one of the many Old Norse stories of outlaws, heroes, revenge, and the supernatural recorded in Iceland a few centuries after the end of the Viking Age. He succeeded brilliantly. This film drops the viewer into an alien world, one utterly indifferent to our modern values or pieties and one in which strength, victory, and the ruthless fulfilment of personal obligations—most notably revenge—offered the only guiding morality. It is a bracing vision, simultaneously breathtaking in its boldness and courage and disturbing in its bleak callousness. Again—accurately capturing the spirit of this lost world.

The Northman is the movie I was most excited about going into the spring of 2022. And while I might have enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more as rock-solid entertainment, The Northman satisfies my most niche historical and cinematic interests like no other film. It’s brilliantly executed and deserves a watch.

You can read my full review from April here.

Three runners-up

In addition to my three favorites, all of which came out in the late winter or spring, here are three good, solidly-made movies I saw that didn’t quite rise to the top. Like my top three, I happen to have already reviewed all three of these in greater detail here on the blog. Links are included with each short recap below.

Devotion—The story of two fighter pilots in the newly integrated US Navy, Devotion follows wingmen Lt Tom Hudner and Ens Jesse Brown—one white aviator, one black—as they get to know each other, testing and pushing one another until a deep bond of friendship grows between these two quite different men. All this plays out as the Cold War slowly escalates, culminating in Hudner and Brown’s deployment to an aircraft carrier providing close air support to Marines in the first terrible winter of the Korean War. It’s here that Hudner and Brown’s skill as aviators and their devotion to one another as wingmen and friends will be tested.

Glenn Powell, who plays Hudner here and another naval aviator, Hangman, in Top Gun: Maverick, was a producer on Devotion and clearly learned a lot of lessons about how to shoot aerial sequences with real aircraft from his experience on Top Gun. So it’s unfortunate that Devotion and Top Gun: Maverick ended up coming out the same year, as I’ve heard several unfavorable comparisons between the two. Devotion is a different kind of movie, with a statelier pace and a greater emphasis on character drama, but it is well-crafted, well-acted, and handsomely shot and both deserves and rewards viewing.

You can read my full review of Devotion—a dual review with Glass Onion—here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play is a fast-moving but stately and intensely moody film. The acting is excellent, but the real draw is the film’s style, an atmospheric throwback to impressionistic black-and-white silent films complete with stagey sets and dramatic high-contrast lighting, all of which intensifies the drama of murder and deception and the pervasive eeriness of the story. This adaptation captures the mood of Shakespeare’s play better than any of the other film versions I’ve seen.

You can read my full review of The Tragedy of Macbeth from January here.

Glass Onion—This is the one exception to my statement above that I saw nothing released on any streaming service, but that’s only because Netflix gave this a short theatrical run ahead of its streaming release. This is apparently a trend, and I hope it continues. Glass Onion is a lot of fun (though I erred in my review when I wrote that it was probably the most fun I’d had at the movies that year, as that distinction obviously belongs to Top Gun: Maverick), with the same whimsical, trickster style of Knives Out but more outright comedy. Writer-director Rian Johnson deftly satirizes the fatuity and self-congratulation of modern day influencers—whether tech billionaires, do-gooder leftist politicians, celebrity fashionistas, or the rise-and-grind types hawking male-enhancement drugs—and the intricate overlapping construction creates genuine mystery, surprise, and humor. I have a few reservations and misgivings about Glass Onion, but as pure entertainment it was a rare treat.

You can read my full review of Glass Onion—a dual review with Devotion—here.

New to me

While most of the movie year was a bust for me, I did see some great old films for the first time. These were the best—or at least most entertaining—of the lot:

The Beast—This is a lesser-known 1988 film directed by Kevin Reynolds, who would go on to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a few years later. The Beast (aka The Beast of War) takes place during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and begins with a platoon of Russian T-55 tanks destroying an Afghan village. The tankers wantonly murder civilians and try to torture information out of a tribal elder by slowly rolling over him—from the feet up—with one tank. After the massacre one tank becomes separated, and its efforts to escape hostile territory as well as violent disagreement among the crew form one half of the film’s story. The other half follows Taj (Steven Bauer), now the Khan of the tribe attacked at the beginning of the film, as he and a band of mujahideen seek revenge. The two stories intertwine suspensefully, converging on the character of Koverchenko (Jason Patric), a Russian tanker tested both by his commander, the violent Daskal (George Dzundza) and the mujahideen. Both a harrowing small-scale war film and an intense, well-acted character drama, The Beast was the best surprise of my year and deserves to be much better remembered.

Dunkirk—Not to be confused with the more recent Christopher Nolan film, this 1958 Ealing Studios film starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee retells the title story of collapse, retreat, desperation, and rescue in the traditional style one would expect from the late 1950s, and it’s excellent. Well-acted, told on a grand scale, and moving between multiple stories that converge in the evacuation, Dunkirk gives the real events well-rounded and unsentimental treatment and represents old-fashioned war movies at their best. Far from being superseded by Nolan’s more stripped-down modern action-thriller, this Dunkirk holds its own. The result is two movies about the same events in two dramatically different styles. The two complement each other well and would make a great double-feature for fans of film history, action, or war movies. Regardless, this Dunkirk is well worth seeing for its own sake.

The Mummy—I have a set of the classic Universal monster movies on Blu-ray and have been working through them for Halloween over the last few years. I had seen Frankenstein and Dracula before, but this year I finally got to the original 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Slow, quiet, and straightforwardly told, The Mummy nevertheless achieves a wonderfully eerie atmosphere—helped in no small part by Karloff’s creepy and tightly controlled performance as Ardeth Bey—and steadily builds tension from beginning to end. This was one I didn’t expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did, and I look forward to revisiting it.

Grizzly—I’m not going to pretend that this movie is good, but it was highly entertaining. (See my carefully qualified introduction above.) Grizzly is an obvious, beat-for-beat knockoff of Jaws, but instead of a shark in the ocean the threat is a bear in the woods. The woods in question are those of Rabun County, Georgia, and part of the fun for me was spotting all the recognizable local places used in the film (e.g. the Rock House in downtown Clayton, an intersection on the Tallulah Gorge Scenic Loop used as the entrance to a fake national park, and the driveway and lab room of my childhood doctor’s office, a moment that gave me the willies because the perspective in the film was exactly that of a patient sitting down to get a finger prick). Also, my dad is in it as an extra. I gather that RiffTrax has done one of its commentaries on Grizzly, and that sounds like it’d be worthwhile. I’d recommend this as a potential Lousy Movie Night classic.

Special commendations—TV

I long ago gave up on most TV shows, not out of the indifference I plummeted into this spring but out of the inability to pick where to start. There’s so much TV out there. And a TV show takes up hours and hours and hours of time I’d rather spend on reading, or playing with my kids, or watching multiple movies. But, given the dearth of good stuff at the theatre, this year my wife and I did get into two excellent shows that provided some of the highlights of our 2022.

“Ghosts”—This is the original BBC series, though there is a recent American adaptation. “Ghosts” follows the centuries’ worth of dead people who have, for whatever reason, not departed the once-stately Button House in the English countryside. There’s a decapitated Tudor nobleman, an early 1990s Conservative MP who died in a compromising situation and so dwells in eternity with no pants, an infantile Georgian lady, a genteel Edwardian lady who falls screaming from an upstairs window every night, a Scoutmaster who died in an archery accident, a Romantic poet killed in a pistol duel, a stalwart British Army officer from the Second World War, a basement full of medieval plague victims from a mass gave under the foundation, and—reaching way, way back—perhaps my favorite character, a caveman.

As befits a show developed by and starring the “Horrible Histories” team, “Ghosts” is hilarious, packed with wit, slapstick, and lots of great historical humor. All these characters from many time periods, plus the two new owners of the house, make a wonderful ensemble, with a rich variety of personal foibles, conflicts, affections and rivalries, and running gags. The show also proves surprisingly moving at times, as in an episode in which the Scoutmaster’s now-elderly widow and son make their annual visit to the house.

My wife found “Ghosts” on DVD at our local library and we watched the entire first season in a few days, stopping ourselves after two episodes each night so that we didn’t stay up until the wee hours binging it. I can’t attest to the other seasons of the show, but season one was a great show that was funny without being mean-spirited, dirty, or insulting to your intelligence. We look forward to watching more.

“Bluey”—Let me repeat what I said about Top Gun above: the hype is real. “Bluey” is a pure delight—a kids’ show that isn’t insulting or annoying, that prizes playfulness and imagination, that showcases a loving, functioning family in which all the members love and respect each other, and that is beautifully animated. It’s also so well-crafted and -written that it works on multiple levels, so that in my family, all three kids—ranging in age from three to seven—as well as my wife and I can enjoy the show together and get different things out of it. (Favorite line: Bandit, the dad, while plunging the toilet: “What are these kids eating?” Based on a true story.)

And speaking as a father, I appreciate seeing a show in which the dad is fun but not an idiot, and has a relationship of mutual love, respect, and hard work with the kids’ mom. That’s vanishingly rare in modern entertainment, and one of the many, many things that make “Bluey” special.

What I missed in 2022

Movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons—including not wanting to pay for a half-dozen streaming subscriptions and finding Redbox a bit of a pain—I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to see these in the new year.

  • Operation Mincemeat—Based on the excellent Ben MacIntyre book, a fascinating true story performed by a great cast.

  • Munich: The Edge of War—Based on Robert Harris’s novel, a political thriller with personal stakes in a crucial historical setting. Jeremy Irons looks like an inspired choice to play Neville Chamberlain.

  • See How They Run—Looks like a charming historical whodunnit. My wife and I actually made plans to see this but it was gone from cinemas before we could make the arrangements for a date night.

  • Nope—I still haven’t seen any of Jordan Peele’s films, but this one involves—or at least appears to involve—UFOs, and is supposed to have smart and hard-edged satire.

  • Amsterdam—An intriguing premise and kooky characters hooked into a fictionalized version of a fascinating true incident—the “Business Plot” to overthrow the US government.

  • Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—I love Weird Al and, far from a straightforward musical biopic, this looks like an appropriately irreverent parody of what is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre in Hollywood.

  • The Banshees of Inisherin—Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, two favorites who have previously starred in one of my favorite films, In Bruges, reunite with that film’s director for this dark comedy about a man from a small Irish village who inexplicably but very pointed ends his long friendship with another.

  • The Menu—This didn’t look like my kind of thing when I first read about it, but I’ve added it to the get-around-to-eventually list on the strength of favorable comments from friends.

  • All Quiet on the Western Front—A new adaptation of one of my oldest favorite novels, and the first in the novel’s original language. I eagerly anticipated this when the first trailer finally dropped but, since then, have had a number of the film’s major departures from the book spoiled, so I’m somewhat more hesitant about it now. Still hoping to see it at least once in the days to come.

So, again, there may be several more great movies out there leftover from 2022 that I’ve simply missed, but I’m going to have to overcome quite a lot of weariness and inertia to seek some of these out.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

I’m afraid my superhero burnout and general apathy continues as I look ahead at 2023’s release schedules, but the few films I look forward to I really look forward two. In order of anticipation, from highest to lowest, they are:

  • Mission: Impossible—Dead Recoking Part I—I don’t see how this could be terrible. Cruise, McQuarrie and company have been on a roll for the last several films in this series. I’ll be there opening weekend.

  • Oppenheimer—It’s striking to me that Christopher Nolan, out of his twelve films, has made three superhero movies, three near-future sci-fi thrillers, three crime films, and three historical films. And out of this last category, two out of the three have centered on crucial events from World War II. I’m very curious to see how he approaches the seemingly uncinematic story of the Manhattan Project’s R&D of the atomic bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer’s role in it.

  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—Please don’t be terrible. At least be better than the CGI in the trailer.

  • Dune: Part Two—Villeneuve’s Dune was one of the most pleasant surprises for me at the movies in the last several years, and as a result I am, to my continuing surprise, quite looking forward to Part Two.

  • Napoleon—Ridley Scott has a shaky relationship with historical fact but his movies are always breathtaking to behold, and Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a nigh-insane sense of drive and intensity to every part he plays, should do something interesting with old Boney.

These are the ones I am actually excited for, but let’s hope that, as in any moviegoing year, there will also be some nice surprises along the way.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the top, despite my overall negative impression of film and the film industry in 2022, the good things I saw weren’t just good, but excellent. I gladly recommend any of the films praised above. Here’s hoping for much more like them in 2023!