Cinema just had a rough year. While there were definitely upbeat stories to accompany the now constant anxieties percolating throughout the industry—from Tom Cruise once again asserting his dominance as the king of summer via Top Gun: Maverick to the surprise and wholly welcome blockbuster status of A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once—the fact remains that “the movies” are in a state of upheaval and uncertainty. Do massive, mainstream audiences still have taste left in their palates for original adult-skewing films? And if streaming is the future for dramas, comedies, and other “mid-budget” movies, what then is the future of streaming given that market’s own recent crises?
It’s a weird time. Yet one thing stays consistent: the satisfaction that comes with seeing a good movie. Whether that film makes you laugh, cry, or shudder, there is still an ineffable joy derived from being lost for a couple of hours in the dark. Finding those stories has gotten a little more difficult in recent years, but trust us, there is gold up in them hills. And sometimes its shine is as big and gaudy as you’d hope—like an F/A 18F rocketing past IMAX cameras.
To prove this fact, we’ve assembled our entire staff and many of our readers to vote on what’s the best of 2022. Enjoy.
8. The Menu
There has been a recent uptick in films and television shows highlighting the ridiculousness of the super rich, (The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion), and The Menu fits neatly into this genre. It is never not entertaining to watch the wealthy realize too late that they’re in danger or the slow dawning that neither their money nor their connections will save them. The Menu serves several courses of this, each more dangerous and cutting than the last.
The hope is that straight-talking heroine Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) makes it out alive, as the film reiterates several times, she doesn’t belong there. However, the other guests have been hand picked for the dining experience and their desperation for exclusivity is their downfall. Chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) and the Hawthorne staff are the picture of dedication, perfection, and the obsessions that come with. There is blood and gore, but The Menu is also great deal of fun. If nothing else, it’s worth watching to see Chef Julian serve up five-star food and five-star insults.
7. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Guillermo del Toro (along with co-writer Patrick McHale and co-director Mark Gustafson) puts his unique stamp on one of the most beloved children’s stories of the last century. Utilizing breathtaking and intricate stop-motion animation, and updating the story so that it’s set during the rise of fascism during World War I, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is as eerie and weird as you might expect from del Toro, delivering meditations on mortality and love with visuals that are just scary enough to intrigue young potential horror fans without frightening them (or their parents) off.
It’s that tricky balance that Pinocchio excels at. Packed with imagery that’s alternately beautiful and unsettling, its themes of friendship, acceptance, and making the most of our limited time in this world are accompanied with a pointed critique and satire of its era. The song that Pinocchio performs for Benito Mussolini (voiced by none other than Tom Kenny) is exactly the consideration that fascists in any era deserve, too. It’s all anchored by a delightful Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket who is worldly, wise, and sometimes a little weary of Pinocchio’s enthusiasm. A bittersweet delight.
6. Glass Onion
Glass Onion spent only five days in wide release last month. That’s a shorter theatrical window than Tommy Wiseau’s The Room enjoyed. This is a shame for theaters since in that blink-and-you-miss-it engagement, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel cleaned up with $13.3 million on less than 700 screens. It’s also a loss for audiences because this movie is meant to be experienced with a crowd. Luckily even at home, it’s still a supremely entertaining potboiler.
Like the title suggests, Glass Onion is an often visually dazzling spectacle, filmed in gorgeous sun-kissed tones by cinematographer Steve Yedlin, all of which hides a confounding yet surprisingly simple mystery at its core. That real mystery, which extends beyond just a case of murder, suggests Johnson and star Daniel Craig view these Benoit Blanc adventures as being above just surface pleasures, too. For two films in a row now, Craig’s amusingly dubious Southern drawl has guided us through razor sharp satires of America’s obsession with wealth, privilege, and celebrity. But really, this is just a first-rate crowdpleaser with a superb all-star cast that is having so much fun it could prove lethal.
5. The Banshees of Inisherin
Writer-director Martin McDonagh does it again, reuniting his In Bruges team of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for a tragicomic tale of the many cruelties that human beings can inflict on each other in service of their own personal aspirations. Farrell is the sweet-natured but simple Pádraic, who is first befuddled and then hurt when his longtime friend Colm (Gleeson) decides to abruptly end their friendship. Colm, it seems, wants to spend his twilight years composing music that he hopes he’ll be remembered for instead of spending hours and days in idle chit-chat with his former drinking buddy.
Colm’s warning to Pádraic to stay away—or else—soon escalates into a shitstorm that engulfs most of their tiny village, including Pádraic’s compassionate sister Siobhan and rather dim local boy Dominic (Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan, respectively, in fantastic, scene-stealing performances). With the film set in 1923 against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, the smaller conflicts on the fictional island of Inisherin mirror those on the mainland, in all their pointless cruelty and pettiness.
Farrell, who’s had a hell of year between this, After Yang, and his knockout turn as the Penguin in The Batman, does perhaps the finest work of his career as Pádraic, whose innocence and kindness is gradually whittled away until he becomes unrecognizable. The always outstanding Gleeson is ostensibly the “villain” here, but Colm’s question of how much are we willing to give up to be remembered hangs hauntingly over this beautifully shot, poignantly scored, and unsettlingly funny film.
4. Moonage Daydream
Moonage Daydream is director Brett Morgen’s third pop music documentary, and should be watched at least three times by David Bowie fans. It is not a conventional biopic. It skips whole periods, talking heads, childhood anecdotes, and chronological structure. But it is a completely satisfying experience, immersive and impressionistic, throbbing with rhythm, humor, and an endless quest for adventure. David Bowie was more than a musical adventurer, his whole life was an expedition into the unfamiliar. In the film he says he prayed for the most exciting life one could have. Morgen captures this by playing with Bowie’s toys.
Granted unprecedented access by Bowie’s estate, Morgen fills the screen with newly unearthed performances, recordings, paintings, home movies, photographs, journals, and the greatest score on earth: Bowie’s voice, singing or narrating the film, talking with interviewers, or joking with sidemen during soundcheck. A particular gem is extremely rare footage of Bowie’s 1980 Broadway debut as John Merrick in The Elephant Man.
This is no greatest hits package, but a deep dive into buried tracks. Music producer Tony Visconti and music editor John Warhust bring sonic intimacy into the mix. The film isn’t about the life and times of a restless musician. It is a personal examination of how Bowie’s artistic mind worked, from a director who takes it very personally and prefers it at maximum volume. Moonage Daydream isn’t definitive, it’s demonstrative. It is also very moving. Just try to remain seated during some of the sequences.
3. Top Gun: Maverick
The greatest pleasure found in Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski’s euphoric revival of ‘80s sentiments and sensibilities, is neither the jaw-dropping IMAX photography nor the U.S. Navy jets at the center of that celluloid. It’s also neither the stripped down but effective story about a surrogate father and son or the shots of hard bodies tossing pigskin on a beach while bathed in sunset’s magic glow. Nay, the true power of Maverick is Tom Cruise himself, and how he took one of his personally least favorite roles and reinvented it as a metaphor for his whole career.
There once was a time when Cruise’s tenure at the top of Hollywood looked precarious—a moment where he was all but told, “Your kind is headed for extinction.” Those lines are thrown at Maverick too in this year’s legacy sequel. So the nearly 60-year-old Cruise’s weathered smirk as he retorts, “Maybe, but not today” carries meta-satisfaction. Not only does Maverick prove his mettle as still the toppest top gun to ever enter the top of a cockpit, but so does Top Gun: Maverick reassure that there is no other movie star left like the one behind the aviators. On another actor’s shoulders, this would wear as cheesy. Thirty-six years after the first movie though, it looks mythic on Cruise as he pushes 6.5Gs in 70mm while leading a film that almost single-handedly saved the theatrical box office this summer.
2. The Batman (READERS’ CHOICE)
We’ve reached a point in superhero movie history where most of them at least rise to the level of “pretty good,” but only a handful feel like they’ll truly stand the test of time and repeat viewings. More ambitious and cinematic than many of its caped peers, Matt Reeves’ sprawling look at the Dark Knight’s second year on the job and his first encounters with the Riddler, Selina “Catwoman” Kyle, and Oswald “Penguin” Cobblepot immediately earned a place in debates about the greatest Batman live-action stories ever put to film, and yes, even the best superhero movies ever made.
And rightfully so too. As thoughtful and ambitious as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, but displaying a little more willingness to embrace the inherent weirdness of Gotham City (but only a little), The Batman is a bleak tale of a corrupt city machine under assault by a genuinely scary, Zodiac-esque serial killer (played to perfection by Paul Dano). In the course of untangling those threads, Robert Pattinson’s Batman, as detached and awkward as he is driven, is faced with the uncomfortable reality that his mission of vengeance has some unintended consequences.
Despite such heavy subject matter, The Batman balances it all out with some truly eye-popping action sequences, including an edge-of-your-seat car chase featuring a scaled-down Batmobile that is one of the best live action Batman moments ever filmed. There is no shortage of superlatives to go around here, with Jeffrey Wright, Zoë Kravitz, and Colin Farrell delivering what might be the definitive performances of iconic DC characters (with the latter truly disappearing into the role in a chameleon-like turn), a production design that doesn’t sacrifice style for realism, or Michael Giacchino’s score, one of the best to grace any superhero movie in the last decade. We’ll gladly follow Reeves down whatever dark alleys he wants to take us in future installments, but until then, give The Batman another watch and you’ll find even more to enjoy than before.
1. Elvis
When Baz Luhrmann announced he would be making an Elvis Presley biopic, it initially seemed as if the project was arriving a day late and a dollar short. Hadn’t the heyday of “the King” and his most devoted fans already passed? Perhaps. But the patience was still rewarded since it allowed 31-year-old Austin Butler enough time to grow up and slip into the sequined jumpsuit. The result is a dazzling transformation in which actor and historical celebrity merge, and Butler becomes the pinnacle of EP impersonation.
It also helps that Luhrmann’s maximalist instincts go together with Presley iconography like peanut butter and bananas. With an aesthetic as gaudy as the jewelry hanging from latter day Elvis’ neck, Elvis is a carnival spectacle that argues, as far as the 1950s were concerned, Presely invented sex itself. And in the moments he’s swiveling those hips on stage… you kind of believe it. Luhrmann and his writers also sidestep the most frustrating elements of musical biopics by making this more than a collection of greatest hits. Instead we have a Svengali tragedy between Elvis and his vampiric manager, “the Colonel.” The approach is so wild you won’t even mind (much) that Hanks is woefully miscast as a rotund Dutchman.
