I watched over 230 films I had never seen before this year according to my Letterboxd. This feels like a crazy figure, and is really a sign of just how crazy this year has been for me personally. I took on a lot of new challenges in my life this year, met lots of new people and with new friends comes new film recommendations. Now my final list today won't be 230 odd long, that would be insane, but it will be a collection of all 58 new release films I went out to review. This is a pretty interesting list in my opinion; not least because this is the first year since 2016 that I haven't had a superhero or animated feature make the Top 5.
This year has been a really weird one for me as a film fan and I find it quite a strange one to talk about. The past few years has seen me bring streaming exclusives into my review list more often and my top 5 and bottom 5 have a smattering of both. Yet this year saw HBOMax start axing already completed films and shows for the sake of tax breaks and profit, a move that left me quite uncomfortable. Beyond this a number of original content on the service was just vaulted for the same reason; not shopped around to other platforms, vaulted. It's a real sign of the dangerous other side of streaming, in which these features are really treated more as product and value than story and art. I acknowledge that it can be somewhat short-sighted to think making film through big studios is ever going to be seen as anything else, but I firmly believe the inherent value of cinema is storytelling - it is one of the most modern examples of conveying story from one person to a crowd of others. So that situation definitely left me feeling a bit bleak.
More than that, this year more than most I've come to grow tired of how we report on film. Don't Worry Darling became more about the behind the scenes drama than what the feature presented was like, Avatar: The Way Of Water was more about the discourse of whether it could even make a viable profit and even films like Top Gun: Maverick were reported on for being the superhero blockbuster killer. Articles come out now trying to mass report these things, every day has to be the exclusive. You get articles hawking speculation around when the first trailer for a film is going to drop. Studios release promo for thirty second teaser trailers these days. I remember when people used to talk about genre fatigue for things like superhero films or sci-fi features but I think the state of how we discuss film now is creating a perception around cinema that is fragile and easy to break, one loose rumour that pop culture news sites who don't vet their sources report on have affected entire film releases this year. I love the simple expression of joy going to the theatre brings, I hope we can recapture that feeling in how we talk about it.
Around October of this year I started the new venture of filming my reviews, something I'd been passionate about doing and have had encouragement to do for awhile. And I loved doing it, I got to be creative and doing things writing here would have otherwise restricted me from doing. I do a bit of video editing within my profession so it was a nice chance to stretch my skills a bit too. But over the course of doing multiple video film reviews at home while also doing editing at work, it came to feel like I was doing work at home. The reviews didn't become fun even though I so doggedly enjoyed seeing a film a week to review. As one of my writer friends advised me: don't do something to do it, do it because you enjoy it and are passionate about making it. I love seeing film every week and expressing that experience. But for the sake of my love for this whole reviewing process I'm going to carry on writing down my thoughts. However, if you want to see some of my shorter skits and antics around the films I watch once a week you can find my TikTok profile here.
As for what I saw this year, allow me to walk you through some of the high and lows I got to experience in theatres this year...
The Best:
5. Top Gun: Maverick - 9/10
Three months ago I was convinced this was going to be 2nd place for film of the year. It's still very comfortably my favourite blockbuster feature of 2022, and considering how much audience acclaim and box office it pulled that's probably shared sentiment. Top Gun: Maverick is an interesting one for me, I saw the first feature quite late in my life and was never really as connected to the hype. I often felt the first one was quite similar to the protagonist, cocky and overly sure of itself. But this film lovingly pays homage to the original while also finding all the right ways to evolve beyond it. The characterisation of Maverick is just exemplary, you see the man mature and sober up over the course of the film. I know we're getting Cruise back doing Mission Impossible soon but the work he has done here is some of the very best in his later career. But more than this Top Gun: Maverick manages to achieve a new way of capturing practical effects and flying that makes the cinematography throughout the feature some of the very best of 2022. James Cameron made a visually striking blockbuster with Avatar: Way of Water but Top Gun: Maverick is a beautiful reminder that cinema is a combination of beautiful visual design paired with a masterful script.
4. The Menu - 9/10
I wasn't even going to watch The Menu originally, I was going to watch Violent Night right up until it got like no release at all in New Zealand. So on a whim I stumbled upon the best thriller of 2022. This is a film I felt really had a finger on the pulse with how it discussed class disparity in 2022. This idea of the serving/working class at the whim of the wealthy and often inept one percent is not necessarily a new idea but the way it is presented here achieves something powerful. Mark Mylod is a director I want to see do more because if we get more films half a fraction as gripping as The Menu was we'd all be lucky. Also while The Menu is only the fourth best film of the year it probably boasts my favourite acting performance of 2022: Ralph Fiennes as Chef Slowik.
3. The Fallout - 9/10
This film was my number one film of the year end of January and nothing, NOTHING, dethroned this film until the month of October. That is because this film is such an important dramatic coming of age story around the impact of gun violence in America, particularly in relation to American schools. For years growing up I have seen gun violence in America talked about, every year of my life from being a child with no understanding to an adult who gets to see and understand the impact of these life-changing horrific events. This film takes the very rare perspective of not showing the gunman but instead looking at a group of teenagers who survive the attack and the impact this event has on their mental health after that moment. It is such a grounded feature with some very good points to make about how relationships change, the fear and distance that is created and the road to recovery. The Fallout knows that it has to come at things from the perspective of its Gen Z protagonist, so you wind up with some of the most biting and realistic dialogue of the year. Also worth noting is Jenna Ortega, whom most people would have watched in Scream or Wednesday this year. The Fallout is beyond a doubt some of Ortega's best work to date and marks her as a major actress to watch out for over the next few years.
2. Bros - 9.5/10
There will never be a film reviewer who scores everything identically to the other, or I hope not anyway. Film is like any art form, it is experienced differently by each individual who interacts with it. When I came out as bisexual earlier in 2022 I really began to learn a lot more about what that meant, particularly feeling the lack of male bi representation in media. What Bros does by presenting a romantic comedy that has a gay romantic story at its centre is give something back to the LGBTQ+ community that has otherwise only really existed in heterosexual media for awhile now. But greater than this? This film takes the time to really talk about queer history and culture, the entire main cast being LGBTQ+ and racially diverse is a massive deal. I felt so overwhelmingly empowered watching Jim Rash rep bi men in this film, and overall this is a lovely endearing feature that I think everyone should watch at least once. Oh and here's to seeing more trans performers playing trans characters, that shit was great! Less Eddie Redmayne playing trans women in the world please.
1. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - 9.5/10
Turns out lightning really can strike twice, particularly for director Rian Johnson and his Knives Out universe. Back in 2019 I went into Knives Out with low expectations having gone through a lot of Johnson's filmography and feeling underwhelmed. But then I experienced a massive shake up of the whodunnit mystery genre; move aside Agatha Christie there's a new name to remember. So going into Glass Onion I had some pretty high expectations. Yet it is very apparent almost straight away that you are going to be getting a very similar quality of movie here, though an extremely different and exciting narrative. Another film this year that has quite an cool message around modern class, particularly how we treat billionaires as celebrities these days. All I got to say is: Elon Musk, eat your heart out.
This top five was really interesting from previous years, I really felt like smaller releases got rewarded for their creativity this year. There was a lot that came out this year like The Fallout or The Menu that just didn't get the same level of coverage as bigger movies that weren't worth the level of box office attention or news media hype they got. I liked seeing some underdogs really get represented in my top contenders for the year. I'm also overjoyed that more traditional blockbusters made a bit of a comeback as evidenced by Top Gun: Maverick making my top 5. Now, without further ado, my five worst films of 2022...
5. Ambulance - 2/10
The first of my bottom five for 2022 marks a trend a few may notice for my bottom five. There's a number of very well-known directors here that are living their very best slump era: starting with Michael Bay's Ambulance. The script here is agonisingly simple, with a brother who wants to be a criminal and another who doesn't. Seeing this pair botch their way through a robbery and hostage situation with some of the worst dialogue of 2022 and an absolutely overstuffed cast made this a rough watch. Something that I also hated that The Gray Man also employed too much of was drone cinematography. What I mean by this is that drone shots were positioned in the film far more frequently than usual to capture a certain frantic visual style. But it is probably one of the ugliest filming trends I've seen out of Hollywood in the past couple of years.
4. Interceptor - 1.5/10
The most amateur looking film of my bottom five is without a doubt Interceptor. This is a film that looks like it was made with an inexperienced hand and a vision that yearned for low-budget 70s and 80s action films to be cool again. The film has a serious theme around sexual misconduct in the military floating in the background but it drowns it under empowered speeches dedicated to American patriotism that often ring hollow. Interceptor and Spiderhead both being Netflix originals that released this year with obvious Chris Hemsworth ties felt very on the nose and the consequence of this is obvious in this feature. Here Chris Hemsworth gives a great one to two minute cameo as a TV salesman. His wife, Elsa Pataky, leads the feature in what has to be one of the worst leading performances of the year.
3. Pinocchio - 1.5/10
Robert Zemeckis used to be one of the best in the business, but that hasn't been true over the course of his past few projects. And it's not like the man can't make a good family film, he directed Back to the Future for crying out loud. But what we get with this iteration of Pinocchio is an almost joyless adaptation of the 1940 Disney animated film; the special effects are glaringly shoved into every scene and the shooting here is disastrous at best. There are a number of quite bad performances and a lot of what was loved in the original animated feature feels poorly imitated here. Disney Plus original films haven't garnered a lot of faith in me so far but I never expected Zemeckis to make one of the worst ones.
2. Moonfall - 1/10
Speaking of famous directors stumbling about in their latter years, how about Roland Emmerich's Moonfall? Now granted, Emmerich has made some real stinkers multiple times over the years so the fact he's flubbed things yet again is maybe no surprise. This is the dark side of two types of blockbuster genre: the disaster movie and a sci-fi film. One could have functioned without the other but because the disaster side of this film went all out insane like Emmerich's other infamous disaster film: 2012; and because the sci-fi aspect of the film is written in a way that makes no sense and really stretches the imagination to a breaking point the whole thing doesn't work. This film is also thoroughly miscast the whole way through but no more so than the lead three performers, none of whom entirely fit their role very well.
1. Secret Headquarters - 1/10
Think the special effects of Shark Boy and Lava Girl but with none of the distinctive style or charm of that 2000s era family film backing it up. Secret Headquarters poses itself as a superhero film but everything that would make this a cool superhero feature tends to be remarkably absent. Most significantly the main superhero character and antagonist. None of what brings this movie together visually ever actually works and it's no surprise to me that this was one of the first features released solely on Paramount+. The most glaring issue with Secret Headquarters is that it relies heavily on a very young cast to lead the film with a weak script backing them. There is no moment where I felt captured by this film because it didn't find the angle to tell or present this story in an interesting way. It felt like a concept that got pushed into pre-production and beyond far too quickly.
So concludes another wrap up of the year's best and worst films, as
always I'm keen to hear what your own favourite and least favourite
films were! Here's to a new decade of exciting cinema ahead! For those
curious where your favourite film of 2022 wound up check my list below
to see my complete rankings:
1.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – 9.5/10
2. Bros – 9.5/10
3. The Fallout – 9/10
4. The Menu – 9/10
5. Top Gun: Maverick – 9/10
6. Prey – 8.5/10
7. Not Okay – 8.5/10
8. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish – 8.5/10
9. Nightmare Alley – 8.5/10
10. The Survivor – 8/10
11. Nope – 8/10
12. Bullet Train – 8/10
13. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – 8/10
14. The Banshees Of Inisherin – 8/10
15. Thor: Love And Thunder – 8/10
16. Scream – 7.5/10
17. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 – 7.5/10
18. Everything Everywhere All At Once – 7.5/10
19. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness – 7.5/10
20. Persuasion – 7.5/10
21. Where The Crawdads Sing – 7.5/10
22. See How They Run – 7/10
23. Minions: The Rise Of Gru – 7/10
24. The Northman – 6.5/10
25. Elvis – 6.5/10
26. Beast – 6.5/10
27. The Lost City – 6.5/10
28. Avatar: The Way Of Water – 6/10
29. The King’s Man – 6/10
30. Cyrano – 6/10
31. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story – 6/10
32. Don’t Worry Darling – 6/10
33. The Adam Project – 6/10
34. Jurassic World: Dominion – 6/10
35. Disenchanted – 6/10
36. Lightyear – 6/10
37. House Of Gucci – 5.5/10
38. Uncharted – 5.5/10
39. DC League Of Super-Pets – 5.5/10
40. The Batman – 4.5/10
41. Blonde – 4.5/10
42. Marry Me – 4/10
43. The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent – 4/10
44. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore – 4/10
45. Deep Water – 4/10
46. Three Thousand Years Of Longing – 4/10
47. Rosaline – 4/10
48. Senior Year – 3.5/10
49. Morbius – 3.5/10
50. Black Adam – 3/10
51. Day Shift – 3/10
52. The Gray Man – 2.5/10
53. The 355 – 2.5/10
54. Ambulance – 2/10
55. Interceptor – 1.5/10
56. Pinocchio – 1.5/10
57. Moonfall – 1/10
58. Secret Headquarters – 1/10
2. Bros – 9.5/10
3. The Fallout – 9/10
4. The Menu – 9/10
5. Top Gun: Maverick – 9/10
6. Prey – 8.5/10
7. Not Okay – 8.5/10
8. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish – 8.5/10
9. Nightmare Alley – 8.5/10
10. The Survivor – 8/10
11. Nope – 8/10
12. Bullet Train – 8/10
13. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – 8/10
14. The Banshees Of Inisherin – 8/10
15. Thor: Love And Thunder – 8/10
16. Scream – 7.5/10
17. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 – 7.5/10
18. Everything Everywhere All At Once – 7.5/10
19. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness – 7.5/10
20. Persuasion – 7.5/10
21. Where The Crawdads Sing – 7.5/10
22. See How They Run – 7/10
23. Minions: The Rise Of Gru – 7/10
24. The Northman – 6.5/10
25. Elvis – 6.5/10
26. Beast – 6.5/10
27. The Lost City – 6.5/10
28. Avatar: The Way Of Water – 6/10
29. The King’s Man – 6/10
30. Cyrano – 6/10
31. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story – 6/10
32. Don’t Worry Darling – 6/10
33. The Adam Project – 6/10
34. Jurassic World: Dominion – 6/10
35. Disenchanted – 6/10
36. Lightyear – 6/10
37. House Of Gucci – 5.5/10
38. Uncharted – 5.5/10
39. DC League Of Super-Pets – 5.5/10
40. The Batman – 4.5/10
41. Blonde – 4.5/10
42. Marry Me – 4/10
43. The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent – 4/10
44. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore – 4/10
45. Deep Water – 4/10
46. Three Thousand Years Of Longing – 4/10
47. Rosaline – 4/10
48. Senior Year – 3.5/10
49. Morbius – 3.5/10
50. Black Adam – 3/10
51. Day Shift – 3/10
52. The Gray Man – 2.5/10
53. The 355 – 2.5/10
54. Ambulance – 2/10
55. Interceptor – 1.5/10
56. Pinocchio – 1.5/10
57. Moonfall – 1/10
58. Secret Headquarters – 1/10
