The Two Minute Movie Critic
Think of them as notes rather than capsule reviews - listed alphabetically. The list below is by no means a comprehensive summation of everything I was able to see in 2022. These are simply the films outside of my best list about which I felt I had something worth saying. I didn’t bother with plot descriptions. There are spoilers with no indication as to what’s being spoiled. Focusing on underrated or overrated items in my roundup for 2021, I thought I’d abandon depth and go with breadth for 2022:
All Quiet on the Western Front
Dir: Edward Berger
Key details of Erich Maria Remarque’s incendiary anti-war novel, present in Lewis Milestone’s masterful 1930 screen adaptation of the same name (one of early cinema’s humanist triumphs), have been omitted for this update and replaced with other material. Some of that material is much more bombastic, because a nauseating assault on the senses is all a movie with an anti-war stance seems able to provide in presenting its case these days. Other added material is just baffling, like the scenes involving an attempted peace treaty by the German vice-chancellor with the French brass, taking us away from the agony of the young soldier which Remarque insisted was the focus of his story above any overt political agenda. This is still a powerful bit of work. The ignorance and arrogance of the opulent high command comes across especially. But again, the liberties taken with the source material, bordering on disregard, really don’t speak highly for the way “prestige” pictures are made at the moment, with the story’s thoughtful protagonist reduced to the level of a dupe who’s on the wrong end of a bad joke. I cannot recommend the novel or the 1930 film highly enough.
Avatar: The Way of Water
Dir: James Cameron
Had these films asked deeper, more complicated questions (inevitably yielding less concrete and therefore less commercially viable answers) about the natural correctness of harmonious, pantheist, collectivist, subsistence living over the entropy, jingoism and competitive scarcity of industrial capitalism and militarism, I might have more easily been able to ascribe my human concerns to the non-human characters of his saga. To elicit audience sympathy for non-human subjects is immensely difficult, though not impossible (see: Spielberg’s A.I.). But Cameron’s extra-planetary futuristic adventure is still mired in countless off-the-shelf narrative tropes and cliches that the subjects in this future just haven’t been able to transcend (like the destruction-happy military leaders who squint at their destruction as they sip from their coffee mugs, a gesture from the first film I’m shocked they felt was worth reprising). We’re seeing a vibrant, eye-popping ecosystem, beautifully rendered with the most expensive machines available and it feels like its expansion potential is endless. But we’re always pulled back, tethered like children to the stalest storylines from a hundred thousand years ago. It’s depressing.
Babylon
Dir: Damien Chazelle
Chazelle’s La La Land, of which I went from being a supporter to a defender, felt like an elegy for both cinema and jazz. Not offering any suggestions as to how they could be saved or redeemed, even as it offered some hope to people yearning to “make it,” in show business. Just a lament at their passing. So reading this as the next logical step in an ongoing exegesis on performance and professionalism in art (which began with his brilliant 2009 film Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), it could be considered an autopsy. Tinseltown Magic did not die a natural death, but was murdered. Not by decadence, corruption and cruelty, which are all amply on display in Babylon, but by technology - the coming of the sound era. It would not be entirely fair to mention that this idea was explored more joyfully in Singin In The Rain, because the aim of this project is different in its conviction that movies are worth saving and that going to them in person is an experience that should endure. Fine, but though Chazelle's half-fictional version of Hollywood churns its way through history and spits its hopefuls out on the side of the road, it doesn’t do so any faster than actual society at any given point. It’s just does it with more razzle-dazzle. The history of Hollywood is fascinating. It’s an entity that has been demonstrably capable of magic throughout it’s history, becoming synonymous with an idea of glamour and exotic escapism. But also, it’s always been mostly about money, with art as the ghost in the machine, and along comes a colossal movie about it that’s equal parts moving and frustrating to match.
The Banshees of Inisherin
Dir: Martin McDonough
So much I like and appreciate here gets trounced by the gut-punching misanthropy that the movie ramps up in the second half to a relentlessly dour effect. I was poised to take the movie as a parable for social media. After all, it’s about a man unfriended and canceled in a way, making this a sort of spiritual cousin to Tár. Life in the Irish island community of this movie looks appealing and tranquil and McDonough’s effort to assure us that at it’s heart it’s more like hell feels like a pedantic lesson for rubbing our face in his miserablism. His deeply entitled characters feel like a residue of this century rather than the previous one and if not for his talent for smart dialogue, unforced storytelling and the skillfully guided performances, this would have made for a really depressing slog.
Barbarian
Dir: Zach Cregger
Here is where basic narrative plausibility risks being trampled by Important Things The Filmmakers Have To Say, right down to the casting of seemingly harmless goofball Justin Long as a wolf in sheep's clothing to show us how complicated the modern world is supposed to be. What you’re expected to believe in order for the filmmakers to sell their who-the-real-monsters-are concept will put off some, while bracing others. I appreciated and liked the movie in fits and starts, which only may be a tribute to this balancing act. The moment when Long’s disgraced Hollywood hack realizes the evil nature of what’s happening in the bowels of the house only after he sees it on tape, as if its reality can only be validated by a piece of captured media, is an appropriately jarring accusation. The final act conks out, because the invention has been worn threadbare, but this indictment is a nice touch.
Bardo, Or, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Dir: Alejandro González Iñárritu
The most accomplished, breathtaking navel gaze you’d find this year. The Imposter Syndrome of cloistered, egotistical male artists as a subject is played out. Its most famous and lasting exploration in cinema is of course, Fellini’s 8 ½ and for all the respect I assume Iñárritu has for it, he doesn’t seem to believe Fellini had the last word. Unfortunately, all that can be added is more vanity, more panache, more intricate camera moves that serve only their own function, more of the unearned poignancy of spatial and temporal disorientation that’s become his stock in trade. Each sequence has a conceptual or visual gimmick behind it. Some of these concepts work and others don’t but the damper that his solipsism and arrogance puts on all his ideas and flourishes are always bringing the proceedings down in much the same fashion as his over-the-hill filmmaker hero in the opening sequence can take flight but not stay in the air very long.
The Batman
Dir: Matt Reeves
This entire enterprise is suffering from the weight of its own legacy. It’s resurfaced too many times, been thinkpieced to death, fallen increasingly in love with its own designer cynicism, which is by now more a function of the decorum than a thematic reference point. The nouveau tristesse production is impressive but the movie lacks the meditative distance Joker had from its own ugly subject matter. People in large cities too easily see Gotham City in their own hometowns - hopelessly corrupt, not worth caring about or investing in - which is a nice way to shrug off individual culpability and responsibility, justify incessant self-regard as a reaction formation, or waste time sifting through shitty city leaders and officials for any actual good ones. These larger thematic failings rather than smaller disappointments - like Zoe Kravitz’s bland line readings - are what stand out more to me in projects like this. When franchises have to navigate this much prior baggage to where fans feel obligated to see it despite setting themselves up to complain about it afterwards anyway, it may be time to grow up and let those franchises die out. That being said, I could not see enough of Batman putting down incel insurrectionists.
Crimes of the Future
Dir: David Cronenberg
A David Cronenberg fire sale! All recurring themes must go! In a defeated world, the new frontiers are not the cosmos or any kind of evolution in human progress, but a deeper plumbing of the mysteries and discoveries of the body. In what seems like a closing statement for the 80 year-old master director in his fifty-year exploration of “The New Flesh,” he’s foregone the tighter, concrete plotting of his earlier work for a more open, lyrical approach. It’s fitting for this depiction of the way bodily inner space becomes not only the stuff of public spectacle but a form of social currency, like a meme. The body is the ultimate reality, is what I think Cronenberg has been getting at his entire career. He explores inward, towards the corpuscular, while eschewing the vulgarity of the external world in the way he pulls off the feat of making even Greece look ugly and sinister. A mess of peeling bureaucratic offices, dirty back alleys and metal landfills - all seeming haunted by a ghastly phantom presence (I was reminded of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution from 2016). The reason nothing like this is out there, I suspect, is because no one else can pull it off. One of these days, I should sit down and list all the references to other Cronenberg projects the images and mise-en-scène of Crimes of the Future conjured up for me. How they’re repurposed would have to be a separate list - one that will take much, much longer to complete.
Decision To Leave
Dir: Park Chan-Wook
The close collaboration director Park has with his screenwriter Chung Seo-Kyung was evident to me in their fifth project together. Their ideas about the ways in which romance and crime investigation are increasingly complicated by technology cohere organically. Park’s visualizations of the ideas he and Chung must have bounced off each other feel both new and surprisingly simple. The performances he gets out of Park Haeil and Tang Wei (the star of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution) are perfectly in tune with this richly patterned style. He teases out the cynicism of a modern film noir with his doomed characters and yet the movie glows with emotional and sexual longing. Its heart is on its sleeve. Park is one of few directors working whose films I come out of wanting to pick up my camera and shoot something. Not that I would come close to replicating his delicate blend of jarring modernism and classical elegance.
Don’t Worry, Darling
Dir: Olivia Wilde
Olivia Wilde puts her finger on The Problem With No Name but isn’t quite sure what to do when it's time to leave her glossy Betty Friedan Nightmare and face up to the prospect of new technologies as new forms of managerial patriarchy that could be used to further subjugate and placate women. Of course, it would be too much to place on one artist’s shoulders to solve (or even comprehensively address) the entire problem with a film like this. But more payoff to match the degree of setup would have done just fine. Wilde has a well-designed cinematic terrarium for her captive subservients but isn’t quite sure where to go from there in a grander sense. The house walls closing in Florence Pugh as she’s suffocated by sunny Mad Men-style domesticity is a great feminist image but what did it mean for that simulation to be glitching in that way? Or was it imagined? Does doubting the simulation is real cause it to lapse, leading us to believe it’s powered by the conviction of the inhabitants?
Elvis
Dir: Baz Luhrmann
The first Baz Luhrmann picture I was able to really connect with. His approach, accommodating different incarnations of Elvis over three decades would be another dull and reductive Hollywood biopic if not for the scale of the musical sequences, the transitions, the production design and most of all, the sense of energy. Luhrmann is a pure believer in the magic of old Hollywood and I respect that. Even framing the story from the vantage point of a capitalist exploiter adds an interesting dimension, with Tom Hanks’ bizarre and glaringly actorly Tom Parker characterization somehow not feeling out of place.
EO
Dir: Jerzy Skolimkowski
Skolimkowski’s refashioning of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar from 1966, about a donkey drifting from owner to owner, situation to situation, abuse to kindness and then back again, complicates the Bressonian project for 2022 with the increased volume and complexity in the encounters and motivations revolving around the titular animal. Balthazar is one of the greatest films ever made by one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived and Skolimkowski’s bleak but audacious effort earnestly sets out to honor it in its immersive camera work, its reliance on strong imagery and its conception as an allegory rather than as a story. I had doubts going in but this an affirming, large-scale success. It’s visceral power is best felt viewed in a theater.
Everything, Everywhere All At Once
Dir: Daniels
Very nearly runs the risk of overload but the slowing down at about the halfway point thankfully gives you time to consider the implications of the manic narrative. Without this, I’d have given up. I’m bothered when movies feel as if they’re affirming low attention spans and there were moments when the movie’s pandering to those temperments went a little too far as it makes it difficult to find an emotional inroad. But perhaps the film’s ability to connect with audiences and hang around in theaters for months lies in this overload. Modern life bombards us with information and stimuli from all directions. Everyone has a shifting agenda and new days are whole new worlds unfolding that pass us by before we can process them. Our feeling of life in a perpetual state of precarity seems poised to remake our whole reality with each development beckoning us to give in to defeat and despair. At times, you wonder if Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schienert thought that if they threw enough material at the wall, some of it would stick. And it’s not that it doesn’t. There’s just no time to stop and wonder if something made an impression. Still, this is an easy film to like: highly entertaining filmmaking full of spark and vigor, with provocative ideas behind it. Much like the layered dreams in the climax of Inception, the multitude of different universes and their motifs displayed here feel like the projection of familiar film genres, mirroring the way in which media culture has conditioned us to regard our lives. An absurdist Charlie Kaufman world one minute, a languorous Wong Kar-Wai melodrama the next.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
Dir: Guillermo Del Toro
More imagination and planning and delicate craftsmanship went into this than a dozen major studio productions this year put together. Pick whichever ones you want. Del Toro and his team of builders and animators are like an entire single film industry unto themselves. I would never dispute the status of Disney's animated 1940 adaptation as a classic. But a fresh set of eyes has done this story good. As with Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro draws insightful and appropriate parallels between the horrors of childhood and adulthood in setting the story of the wooden boy, with its literalization of metaphors about lying and other forms of misbehaving, against the presence of war and fascism (the ultimate lying bad boy project) encroaching on the world of the characters. Del Toro is every bit as attuned to the emotions and behavior of impetuous young boys as the Disney film, but the level of detail and artistry of the warm and expressive woodshop visuals is what makes this version so effective in pricking our emotions. Disney’s legacy was built on their innovations and the uncanny grasp their animations had on human and animal behavior, present in their early masterpieces like Pinnochio without a doubt. But nothing they’re doing at the moment approaches the soul and passion of an achievement like this.
Jackass Forever
Dir: Jeff Tremaine
Hamstrung by age and ailment, groups of friends try to recreate the good times, and hope they last as long as possible. In a bizarre and often grotesque way, Jackass paints a fairly positive and affirming view of male camaraderie, which is so often depicted as inherently ugly. No one is permitted to back down from a stunt, and yet perversely, the ringleader saves the most brutal stunt for himself out of love for his troupe. Everyone (including bystanders and people behind the camera) has to be in it together, committed to the bit. As always, stunts and setpieces are vaguely modeled on cartoons, vaudeville or classic Hollywood, imbuing the cringe-inducing proceedings with a degree of sweetness. New guinea pigs step up to take their lumps, with new kinds of participants (black, female, elderly) relieving the original broken troupe members, who are not all in attendance. The experiences of physical pain and humiliation are something we look at as private suffering, but based on the last few years in an America in which we’re all feeling a bit knocked around, it’s of some consolation to see that the act of experiencing each blow together eases the pain with the ring of shared familiarity. All the while, laughing from the exhilaration and ludicrousy of it may constitute an exotic and extreme form of personal healing.
Living
Dir: Oliver Hermanus
They do an admirable job of transmitting Kurosawa’s 1952 Ikiru, one of the greatest and saddest films ever made, to the stodgy, self-repressing culture of 1950’s Britain. It says new things using the vocabulary of the Kurosawa film, achieving an emotional power that one used to go to the movies looking for, which is all the more startling for a movie that trades in shopworn forms of cinematic artifice in a way that the Kurosawa film didn’t. This is the amazing thing movies do: using artifice to arrive at truth. It’s not perfect - there are some poorly sketched in family member characters to Bill Nighy’s unfulfilled, dying bureaucrat, who comes to life upon being told he has months to live. But all in all, it’s refreshing to see that this kind of grace and authenticity is, like the movie’s hero, not yet extinct.
Marcel The Shell with Shoes On
Dir: Dean Fleischer Camp
Wanted to chuck something at the screen. Guess I shouldn’t have felt annoyed by the number of people ooohhing and awwwing all around me. That’s what the movie was intended for anyway. The character speaks with enough of mumblecore’s half-sarcastic, half-earnest ironic detachment for the blinkered masses the movie believes are its target audience to see themselves in it. And there’s enough DIY tweeness to win you over fairly quickly, provided you don’t want anything to chew over after it's finished. The movie taps into lingering anxieties from being confined in the pandemic shutdown and all this makes for a perfect storm vessel for pandering shamelessly to the audience with its smothering wholesomeness. Nothing is so bad for art (and comedy) as the need to be liked.
Men
Dir: Alex Garland
An A24 production that feels obligated to present the A24 touch. I look forward to Garland’s thoughtful and provocative output, even putting aside here my inability to warm up to Jesse Buckley as an actor. The overwrought allegory gave me surprisingly little to work into the story psychologically. Less is not more when you have this much to say about the stunted development of modern males. The ideas about what women face everyday under banal quotidian patriarchy - a barrage of aggressions and insinuations both large and small - are intriguing, as is the suggestion of Fregoli Delusion (proffered by Rory Kinnear’s multiple roles) as a feminist critique. But the movie keeps these ideas mostly out of reach. They squirm and writhe around on screen for a while. Then it’s over.
The Menu
Dir: Mark Mylod
The world of American Haute Cuisine had it coming. Obsessing over basic sensations like the consumption of food seems like the next step in the logical progression of a species watching itself run down finite resources in competitive scarcity, accompanied by a palpable sense of loss. Still, there’s a smarmy populism underneath things that takes over, fitted with numerous dubious assumptions; the idea that the world of high-concept fine dining is irredeemably inhuman, pompous and unapproachable, that nobody could find its creations appetizing or interesting and that deep down, all of us really just want a good ol’ cheeseburger. The audience I saw it with found it a laugh riot. I think this was the correct response, and I mean that in a positive way. Its concerns about art and its judgment, from conception to painful creation, and then on to presentation, reception, criticism, commodification and exploitation could validly be applied to other forms beyond cooking. Like cinema.
Nope
Dir: Jordan Peele
Genre movie conventions are not doing Jordan Peele any favors. He has many complicated points he wants to articulate about media culture, institutional racism, capitalism and life in 21st century America. Ideas that are too multifaceted and about which he is too undeniably passionate for the sci-fi and horror trappings of the stories he tells to accommodate. It's lamentable that these ideas have to be packaged this way in order to reach the mainstream, because in this format they can only be hinted at or broadly sketched in, which renders their bite as satire toothless. But Peele has stated this is the way he wants to work, with thrills and suspense as his vessel. No secret his hero is Twilight Zone creator and writer Rod Serling. But Serling’s placement of his social critiques in the mouths of aliens and ghosts in his stories was a matter of necessity for getting them past network censors in the early 60’s. We live in a less restrictive era as far as that’s concerned. I wish Peele would allow himself a more undemanding forum for a deepening of his critique, as I believe audiences need (and seem willing) to hear what he has to say. That said, I’ve liked each of his successive features a little more than the last one. His visions actually benefit from a larger budget to work with. And his output is substantially more interesting and original than a lot of what’s out there.
The Northman
Dir: Robert Eggers
I liked this the least of Eggers’ features. Though he did accomplish the task to set out and make THE viking movie. He even knew not to refine the emotional lives of the characters too much, as human history was in a very base and unreflective early period in its history. He fashions Hamlet into a fable that could serve as a cosmological myth for an ancient race, continuing in his vein of well-researched, historically faithful recreation, with the results neither boring nor very edifying.
Pearl
Dir: Ti West
The second chapter of Ti West’s planned trilogy, which features the waiflike Mia Goth in three separate roles set in three different eras, sees the horror project taking shape as an indictment of the patriarchal manufacturing of arrested development in young women in the form of normalized toxic fandom and celebrity ambition. Reduced to their biological functions, which a male-run world is happy to exploit, Goth’s heroines for West are a stone’s throw from the Annie Wilkes character in Misery; decisive, passionate, strong-willed women who are force-fed stereotype-reinforcing fictions that appear to offer escape from their patriarchal prisons but only serve to box them in further. West’s way of spelling all this out visually is thrilling and imaginative. He knows precisely when to slow the inevitable chaos down (for an astounding monologue from his heroine in a performance that’s attacked with brio) and then get moving again (with a chilling tracking shot). I can’t wait to see what West and Goth cook up next.
Shin Ultraman
Dir: Shinji Higuchi
The purest and most goofy fun I had at a picture this year. Great opportunity for social satire in the manner of 2016's Shin Godzilla, again using a treasured Japanese pop culture icon to slyly take its jabs at Japanese society. Tokusatsu entertainment, in the same manner as the classic Tex Avery cartoon King Size Canary (a cautionary parable for the Cold War), uses dramatic size differences to say volumes about shifting human power dynamics, imperialist hegemony and the arrogance of national superpowers. Like all the best Japanese entertainment in this vein, it’s delightfully and earnestly perverted and bonkers.
Tár
Dir: Todd Field
Ends with a decrescendo when it should build to a rousing crescendo. Let’s say that against all odds, she was permitted (somehow) to conduct Mahler’s 5th at the symphony, which involved manipulating or lying to the right people. Police and her peers at the conservatory gathered to question her at her home. She flees her house and heads to the gig, nervously egging on the musicians and technicians to hurry the start of the performance. With her carefully constructed identity having been stripped away bit by bit, she uses what’s left of her influence for this final performance, with law enforcement waiting in the wings to arrest her. She essentially hides her on stage persona, and we cut between her commandment of the musicians and her noticing the sum total of her transgressions piling up all around her, with the police effectively “conducting” her right back. The performance ends. Hard cut to credits. Like a climactic symphony building towards its grand finale. Todd Field does a skillful job of keeping us engaged with the ambiguity of privileging only his protagonist’s viewpoint, leaving much to discuss afterwards. Loads of swagger, flashes of greatness, a swipe at the craven ideological and technological reflexes of brittle younger generations that I wanted to stand up and applaud. But Field and Blanchett wind up with something that closes its hand on air in leaving us wondering whether the denouement constituted a going back to one's roots or an escape (as the costumed young audience would suggest). The sour taste of that unedifying choice at the end is a hard feeling to reconcile.
Uncharted
Dir: Ruben Fleischer
Perhaps this is the first movie I’ve ever seen in which I was fully convinced that AI programs are now making the major aesthetic decisions in the production of entertainment. I feel that video games got better when they started imitating movies while movies got worse when they started imitating video games. This is a fine example of the results of the latter, even for someone like me who’s more game for good entertainment in this vein than you may think. One medium isn’t pulling their weight in this relationship. This was vulgar, but somehow it should have been more vulgar in the manner of even a trace of showmanship (even the personalized clunky kind found in George Lucas’s prequel trilogy) that hasn’t been paved over by calculation.
The Whale
Dir: Darren Arronovsky
Arronovsky’s character studies pile-drive you with the hyperbolic level of emotional cruelty his characters visit on each other. But so long as his defeated protagonists get their one moment of redemption; no harm, no foul. He gets his recognition off the backs (or comebacks) of actors who get submitted for Oscars for physically or emotionally brutalizing themselves on camera. He’s basically used Samuel D. Hunter’s play of the same name to remake The Wrestler, substituting binge-eating for performative physical pain as an externalization of self-hatred or self-pity. I liked the anger of Arronovsky’s Mother!, but what he really peddles is sledgehammer drama, with a number of strong elements and some noble character work that tend to get lost in the onslaught.
White Noise
Dir: Noah Baumbach
Baumbach tries for more than he could achieve but I was delighted by how much he was trying. Part of the fun might be determining whether he was able to fit elements of the DeLillo book that every hipster my age has on their shelf to his brisk, acerbic style or whether he tempered his style for the sake of the material. Existential dread is a hard thing to depict in a movie and I don’t think Baumbach gets there. His characters talk about their loss of purpose but it’s not shown. You have a hard time buying it. He goes beyond his boundaries with this more ambitious production, utilizing a snazzier and more clever visual style, but he shorts the opportunity for the depth afforded by his intelligent characterization that’s always been one of his biggest strengths. It’s a tough call. It didn’t work for me. And yet I’d surely watch it again.
The Woman King
Gina Prince-Bythewood
If you saw this, there was no reason to then see Wakanda Forever, save for loyalty to the brand. It hits all the same buttons with a sturdier sense of setting and context to hang onto.
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