My Year in Movies 2022
Movies felt like a key part of my social life again this year. At holiday parties and backyard barbecues, I spent half the year chatting about Top Gun and the other half chatting about Avatar. My fiance brought me to a screening of The Muppets Take Manhattan at the Music Box to celebrate my birthday, and we met up with friends at midnight screenings all year. I revisited some classic series (Back to the Future, Alien + Aliens, the first two Tobey Spider-Mans) in marathon sessions in my friend Mike’s living room. In total, I saw some fantastic modern blockbusters while digging deeper into the horror, sci-fi, noir, and historical epics that influenced them. Below, I’ve written about my favorite movies released last year, my favorite older movies that I saw for the first time, and my favorite screenings. As always, there is plenty I have not seen, so I welcome any recommendations.
Favorite 2022 Movies
Kimi
Kimi (2022)
For an anxious and agoraphobic gig worker like Zoe Kravitz’s Angela, being alone in the early days of COVID-19 is business as usual. She is comfortable in her routine with her day job analyzing bits of audio recording from the titular virtual assistant software and her occasional dalliance with a neighbor, until she discovers a clip that sounds like a recording of a murder, and her conscience runs up against corporate self-preservation. Steven Soderbergh’s latest thriller is a worthy successor to The Conversation and Blow Out that illustrates the dangers of isolation for today’s surveillance state.
Turning Red
Instant classic, top-tier Disney. Director Domee Shi uses the “magical animal transformation” trope to tell a coming of age story based on her own youth in turn-of-the-millennium Toronto, but it’s not a straightforward puberty metaphor. Mei Mei’s two states of being, human and impossibly fuzzy red panda, reflect her struggle to balance the person she is around her parents with the person she’s becoming with her friends. My fiance’s favorite movie of the year, so I have seen it countless times, and I always find something new in the expressive animation or in Rosalie Chiang’s wonderful lead voice-over performance. A great double-feature with Everything Everywhere All At Once, 2022’s other light sci-fi comedy about multiple generations of an Asian immigrant family learning to understand each other.
Nope
It’s Jaws for the livestream era, I think. Like the doppelgangers in Peele’s previous film Us, the creature hovering in the skies above Agua Dulce is too complex to be a perfect metaphor. But Nope does provide a perfect fool in one scene: a tabloid cameraman in a striking mirrored helmet atop a white motorcycle, who ignores the Haywood siblings’ warnings and dies screaming and undocumented. For a film with an ambiguous attitude towards spectacle, it’s packed with unforgettable moments like comic book panels. OJ’s fake-out alien encounter in the stables. Steven Yeun’s spot-on “guy talking about comedy” tone as he describes the worst moment of his life through the prism of an SNL sketch. Keke Palmer Akira bike slide. Keke Palmer Akira bike slide!
Emily the Criminal
Aubrey Plaza is excellent as a food courier saddled with felony convictions and insurmountable student loan debt who turns to petty credit card fraud with the assistance of the charismatic Youcef, played by Theo Rossi. Director-writer John Patton Ford’s screenplay balances Emily’s escalating schemes and romance with her pursuit of a seemingly cushy office job, until a disastrous interview with Gina Gershon’s contemptuous executive reveals the corporate world to be merely a different flavor of exploitation. The moral of the story is it’s best to be your own boss.
Kate Berlant: Cinnamon in the Wind
If it’s not a movie, then how come I watched it in less than two hours on my couch? Kate Berlant performs in a black box theater surrounded by audience members and mirrors, and they’re ultimately the same thing to her impossibly self-absorbed character. She doesn’t have anything to say, but she has the desire to have something to say, and the pride to expose that desire, and the fear that her pride could be off-putting, all the way down the rabbit hole. It left my brain buzzing, and it’s very funny. See also: The Rehearsal, another Jewish comedian’s deconstruction of performance and anxiety, and The Dropout, a fictionalized version of a Silicon Valley fake-it-til-you-make-it icon.
Favorite Movies I Watched In 2022
The Parallax View (1974)
The Parallax View (1974)
I watched a lot of ‘70s conspiracy thrillers this year, and this was the crown jewel. Warren Beatty taps into his innate smugness as a muckraker who’s convinced he’s two steps ahead that he doesn’t realize he’s a pawn until it’s too late. The brainwashing sequence is incredible, an avant-garde montage born from the same primordial psychic muck as the decor detritus in Buffalo Bill’s basement. The climax is stunning, answering the pulsating hope and fear of the voting masses with a corpse, slumped in the driver’s seat of a golf kart, puttering in circles under fluorescent lights.
Adaptation (2002)
Nicolas Cage plays the film’s screenwriter and his fictional twin brother, and that’s just the tip of the metafictional iceberg. I just know that if I first saw this in high school, I’d have shown it to all my friends. But it was Brian Cox’s thunderous speech about the stories happening everyday that resonated with grown-up me. Like all of us, real or not, Cage’s Charlie Kaufman is the protagonist of his own story, and he learns that to deny his agency in his life is to diminish the privilege of living.
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
The ur-Jack Nicholson performance. It’s heartbreaking to watch his character scrape against everyone he meets, and worse to realize he prefers it that way. Whether in the dirt of an oil field or kneeling in the grass of a lush country estate, his true north star is independence, and all the discontent that comes with it.
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Nothing like a ‘90s neo-noir that’s also a period piece set during the original noir heyday. One of my favorite Denzel performances, and the whole cast is stacked. Mel Winkler hints at such history between Joppy and Denzel’s character Easy in the opening scenes that the reveal of Joppy’s betrayal is crushing, as is his death at the hands of Mouse, Don Cheadle’s firecracker enforcer. But after a tale full of double-crosses, Mouse’s nonchalant rebuttal - “If you ain’t want him dead, why you leave him with me?” - is good enough for Easy. Better the devil you know.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Genuinely moving and terrifying. I can see how this became a sensation and so saturated into pop culture that its reputation would degrade. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Toni Collette’s nuanced performance of a struggling mom didn’t enter into the playground oral tradition in the same way as “I see dead people.” It’s so much more than its twist, though I did relish the shock on my fiance’s face as she watched with no idea what was coming.
Favorite Screenings of 2022
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Dawn of the Dead (1978) midnight screening @ Music Box
My first time seeing this pulpy masterpiece, and it felt like red corn syrup would flood the screen and carry us out of the theater.
The Batman (2022) @ Block 37
Overpadded recliners and a platter of nachos are the perfect amount of self-indulgence for the latest cinematic version of the Dark Knight.
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) in 3D @ Landmark Century
You don’t need the biggest screen in the world to take in James Cameron’s latest opus, but you need three hours in a dark room and you need 3D glasses. Can’t wait for the next one.
Shrek (2001) midnight screening @ Music Box
The sold-out crowd went bananas for every line of dialogue and every needle drop. They applauded the Dreamworks title card!
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in 70mm @ Music Box
I’ll never forget watching Lawrence and Gasim emerge on the desert horizon. As Roger Ebert wrote, “in a movie theater, looking at the stark clarity of a 70mm print, we lean forward and strain to bring a detail out of the waves of heat, and for a moment we experience some of the actual vastness of the desert, and its unforgiving harshness.” A mind-blowing relic of a time when blockbusters depicted the wonder of our world instead of dreaming up new ones.