The Best Films of 2022

1/31/2023

If you're looking for a flashy headline to define the cinema of 2022, a few possibilities come to mind. It was the year of horror, as films like Barbarian, Smile, The Black Phone, Bones and All, Men, and the one-two punch of X and Pearl found varying levels of critical and commercial success. It was the year in which big-screen spectacle roared back into theaters, thanks to movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water (even though Netflix juggernauts like Glass Onion provided stiff competition). At the same time, some of the great arthouse or international films in 2022 could be seen at multiplexes, which felt like a desperate attempt to fill screens as Hollywood continues to struggle post-COVID (though I'm not exactly complaining about the ability to see Petite Maman, for example, practically wherever I wanted). It was, in fact, a year of contradictions, seeming to move both forwards and backwards: despite attempts to grapple with current hot-button issues (e.g., Tár and Women Talking), 2022 actually took a step backwards in terms of representation, and once again, nine of the top ten box-office earners of the year were sequels (and eight of them were American).

Most of all, though, the best movies of 2022 reminded us that vital art can't be summarized by neat-and-tidy headlines, and that there's still a lot of great cinema out there, even if you have to search a little harder to find it (or so it seems). On that note, here are my favorite (and not-so-favorite) films of 2022.

Note: There are some glaring absences from the list below, including acclaimed (or not so acclaimed) movies like Babylon, The Whale, Elvis, and so on. Mostly this is just a product of not having endless free time to watch everything I want, but it's also a case of personal preference: oftentimes, Oscar bait is my least favorite kind of movie, and if I err on the side of prioritizing films that don't get as much exposure, I'm okay with that discrepancy.

1. Il Buco

Simplicity is a powerful expressive device in the films of Michelangelo Frammartino. Nearly wordless, with slow static shots that foreground the natural beauty of Italy's landscapes, films like Il Buco and La Quattro Volte (2010) practice unwavering observation and suggest seemingly limitless interpretations.

Il Buco was inspired by a 1961 caving expedition in Calabria, during which a team of spelunkers descended the 2,250-foot depths of the Bifurto abyss. But there would be no way of knowing that source story if the closing credits didn't tell us so; the film isn't a historical docudrama, still less a rousing story of human ingenuity, so we never really get to know the characters, the context, or even the time period. (Everything in Frammartino's films seems like it could be happening eons ago, despite the massive trucks we occasionally see lumbering over the craggy ground in Il Buco.)

Even with its lack of central human characters, Il Buco still feels like a warm and heartfelt movie, though its compassion is directed towards nature itself instead of identifiable protagonists. Countless movies prioritize the dramas and desires of human beings, so it's refreshing in Frammartino's cinema to see the earth, sky, water, animals, vegetation, the entire troposphere receive greater screen time (something that it has in common with Jerzy Skolimowski's EO).

I agree with Lee Marshall from Screen Daily, who wrote that Il Buco "proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish." Some of the images in the film are the most lovely and awe-inspiring from the last several years. Frammartino's style is painterly—the frame is often static or slowly-moving, suggesting each composition as a painting in motion—but Il Buco reminds us that the element of time is what makes cinema unique. With its emphasis on geological processes, Il Buco is driven by a cosmological sense of time, implicitly stretching back millennia in the ways that the central cave was formed. But it also pays loving attention to the patterns, rhythms, and movements of other kinds of time: human, represented by two people who play soccer around the cave opening (until the ball plummets into its depths); animal, in the flocks of sheep and cattle who rumble over the grass; and botanical, in the gorgeous moss that covers part of the cave interior, somehow growing in these sunless depths. In other words, the film's sense of time is entirely its own, as is its worldview, both humane and divorced from the petty, hurried concerns of human life.

2. Saint Omer

Alice Diop's first non-documentary feature follows a Senegalese writer, Rama (Kayije Kagame), now living in Paris, who attends a court trial in Saint Omer to prepare for her next book. The trial is about another Senegalese expat, Laurence (Guslagie Malanga), who killed her 15-month-old infant by drowning her in the sea.

Saint Omer seems simple on the surface; much of it consists of dialogue in a courtroom, presented through the judge's questioning, Laurence's testimony, and cross-examinations by several lawyers. But to call the film a courtroom drama is to oversimplify its approach. A court trial is never just about delivering justice, the movie suggests; it's political, philosophical, even theatrical, not exactly a microcosm of a particular time and place but a hyperreal distillation of it. (The fact that Laurence initially wanted to study philosophy before she switched to law is a compelling illustration of that idea.) That's why, despite Saint Omer's seemingly simple aesthetic—a lot of static shots which linger for minutes on end, often in medium shot or close-up—this is an unshakably mysterious movie. Each cut is perfectly calibrated and timed: the new perspective afforded by a simple edit carries with it manifold motivations and interpretations. Similarly, whenever the film deviates from its straightforward style—for example, when it flashes back to Rama's own childhood in Senegal and her difficult relationship with her mother (which Laurence also struggles with)—the sense of surprise and meaning is monumental. In the ways that the film asks viewers to extrapolate meaning from its courtroom scenes, Saint Omer reminded me of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), though of course its characters and authorial perspective are distinct in every way.

Kagame and Malanga are fantastic in the lead roles, suggesting the myriad ways in which existing between two radically different cultures impacts one's sense of identity. But Diop is the real star here, and Saint Omer might be the best-directed film of 2022: it's dense and fascinating, emotionally devastating, and deceptively meticulous.

3. The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin may not seem like the most formally audacious film of the year, but read as a low-key chamber drama, its emotional and political resonances are shattering. The concept is simple: a dim-witted but kind-hearted farmer, Pádraic (Colin Farrell), finds that his longtime pal, a musician named Colm (Brendan Gleeson), has abruptly broken off their friendship. From this seemingly mundane occurrence comes an avalanche of tragedy, asking a multitude of deeply human questions: Are some of our desires more important than friendship, especially the later we get in life? Can the qualities that make someone honorable—decency, compassion, humility—be twisted into sources of despair? What happens when we pay little attention to our mental health, allowing depression to fester and sour our relationships? And, finally, can the petty feuds of individuals be extended to the devastating wars waged by nations?

Martin McDonagh's film asks these questions in heartfelt, often darkly funny ways, wielding a lighter, more effortless touch than in his previous Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (a movie I feel great ambivalence towards). My love for The Banshees of Inisherin, though, has no such caveats: it's one of the saddest and funniest movies of the year. Much of the credit goes to Colin Farrell, who might give his greatest performance here. As the sweet but vulnerable Pádraic, Farrell is pitch-perfect, unforgettably portraying a man's descent from naivete to soul-crushing misanthropy.

4. The Eternal Daughter

Joanna Hogg's first film after the Souvenir diptych is a Gothic ghost story in which Tilda Swinton plays dual roles: a mother and daughter who travel to a spooky inn that played a major role in the mother, Rosalind's, past. Meanwhile, the daughter, Julie, is a filmmaker (echoing The Souvenir) who hopes to write a screenplay about her mother. Too late, she realizes that turning her mother's pain into fodder for a creative work is a traumatic experience she may not be able to handle.

It should be no surprise, judging from Hogg's previous work, that The Eternal Daughter isn't so much a ghost story as it is a family drama with macabre undertones. Her command over visual form (some of these shots could be lifted from a Powell and Pressburger masterpiece) and use of deadpan comedy (particularly in the form of a surly front desk attendant) also shouldn't be surprising. And yet, The Eternal Daughter surprises you in practically every scene, adding subtle elements that deepen the relationship between mother and daughter while asking questions about the nature of creative expression as it pertains to both director and actor (thanks to Swinton's typically chameleonic work).

5. X and Pearl

This might be cheating a little bit, but really, these movies should be seen in tandem: like the best sequels (or prequels or spinoffs), each one deepens and complicates the other. Set in 1979, X follows an amateur porn production being shot in an elderly couple's barn in Texas. The cast and crew of the film shoot soon become victims for the demented older couple, whose homicidal tendencies don't have the motivation that you might expect. Pearl, meanwhile, flashes back 61 years to 1918, depicting the origin story of the titular antiheroine, who is the homicidal wife in X. Forced to care for her ailing father and controlled by a domineering mother, the young Pearl becomes obsessed by an all-consuming desire to leave home and find stardom in the nascent film industry, but her powerlessness soon leads to madness and brutality.

In a year filled with strong horror movies, X and Pearl reveal why the genre has such astounding emotional and visceral potential: no one is treated callously in these movies, even when they're being dispatched in violent ways. The desire to create or star in a pornographic film can be a bid for agency, a tool for sexual liberation, even an attempt to make something unique in a much-maligned genre (not unlike horror itself). And for young Pearl, it's not hard to imagine how someone whose life is a prison, who is entranced by dreams she knows she can never achieve, might be driven to such brutal extremes. With stylish direction by Ti West, both films are as hypnotic to watch as they are to contemplate. But Mia Goth is the centerpiece of X and Pearl, as she plays both the younger and older versions of the character (an unexpected parallel to The Eternal Daughter). Along with co-writing Pearl, Goth gives life to a poignant, terrifying character; the scariest thing in the end is how easy it is to empathize with her.

6. Vortex

Gaspar Noé can still be an irritating provocateur at times (in fact, his other film released in the U.S. in 2022, Lux Aeterna, is a good example of that), but he can also create some of the most formally daring and emotionally unflinching films in recent memory. Climax (2018) is a recent standout, but it's arguably outdone by Vortex, which might be Noé's most gruelingly humanistic film to date.

Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun play an elderly husband and wife who are dealing with heart problems and increasing dementia, respectively. Told almost entirely in splitscreen (with deviations from this style in poignant opening and closing scenes), Vortex depicts the couple's everyday lives as well as their relationship with their son, Stéphane (Alex Lutz), who's dealing with his own demons. Inspired by his mother's dementia and a brain hemorrhage that almost killed him, Noé crafts an experience that's unremittingly depressing but also palpably personal, demonstrating a raw sympathy for the pains of human existence and aging in particular.

More than just a formalistic ploy, that splitscreen aesthetic with its stark vertical border is a perfect representation of the film's themes. Often creating bizarre compositions in which objects or human figures are refracted and duplicated, the splitscreen also suggests a human bond being severed as well as a mind being assaulted from the inside out. It is, in other words, an almost flawless melding of visual style, emotional impact, and thematic rigor, culminating in a final shot that's devastating and (I never thought I would say this about a Noé film) almost sweet—a depiction of the spaces left behind by people who are gone.

7. Tár

My full thoughts about Tár can be found here.

On the surface, Tár seems like a hot-button, of-the-moment drama that dives into issues of cancel culture and identity politics, but that's only half correct. Written and directed by Todd Field, with a magisterial performance by Cate Blanchett, the film is first and foremost an acute character study of a supremely flawed individual. Lydia Tár (the name and accent are an affectation meant to denote old-world sophistication) is a renowned composer who treats nearly everyone in her life with callous disregard, with the exception of the daughter she raises with her partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss). It soon becomes clear that Lydia has sexually exploited women in her orbit for years, from students to musicians to assistants, abusing her seemingly untouchable position of power. In our MeToo era, however, Lydia's era of reckoning has come, as news about her predatorial past comes to light and expedites her downfall.

At almost three hours long, Tár takes its time plumbing Lydia's character and the world that buffers her, in which the casual abuse of people lower in the artistic hierarchy has persisted for centuries. With an aesthetic that gradually shifts from icy rigidity to unhinged intensity, the movie takes no pleasure nor pain in witnessing Lydia's comeuppance, viewing her fate from a bemused distance. Unwilling to succumb to easy moralizing and refusing to either persecute or absolve Lydia, the film simply (and complexly) focuses on the character and asks the audience to draw their own conclusions. It's dense, thought-provoking, voluminous cinema—the kind I didn't think could be made in America anymore.

8. Petite Maman

Céline Sciamma's follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) is an unexpectedly modest fantasy about mother-daughter relationships and family bonds that transcend time and space. Without spoiling the quiet inventiveness of Sciamma's story, I'll just say that it follows young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) after the death of her grandmother. As Nelly's mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) struggles to cope with her grief, the two of them retreat to Marion's secluded childhood home, where Nelly meets another young girl who allows Nelly to understand her family more fully.

Almost before you know it, Petite Maman has built up an emotional connection that completely possesses you, until the point that its quiet revelations and dialogue exchanges near the end provide an overwhelming impact. (It's hard to explain exactly why I was more affected by this than by the acclaimed Aftersun, but I think much of it has to do with this tone of gentle whimsy, a kind of wish fulfillment that can only be achieved by cinema.) Featuring two of the best child performances in recent memory (by sisters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz) and a vibrant visual style that epitomizes magical realism, Petite Maman is one of the unassuming wonders of the year.

9. Crimes of the Future

My full thoughts about Crimes of the Future can be found here.

Everyone expected this to be David Cronenberg's triumphant return to body horror, but that assumption did Crimes of the Future a disservice: this is totally its own creation, closer to the weird, essayistic vibes of Cosmopolis (2012) than the bloody viscera of, say, Videodrome (1983). The provocatively messy story is set in a near future in which humans' bodies have begun to evolve in unpredictable ways: the majority of the population can no longer feel pain or contract serious illnesses, while others grow vestigial organs or develop the ability to consume plastic. Two performance artists, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), use these biological anomalies to perform public surgeries—their form of activism against a world which seems to be turning against (or at least transforming) its human occupants—but they soon have to deal with government bureaucrats, mysterious assassins, shady corporations, and freedom-fighting rebels.

This is far from a smooth, cohesive narrative, but what Crimes of the Future lacks in storytelling power, it more than makes up for with its thematic urgency. Essentially, this is a movie that asks how humanity can respond to a natural and political world it no longer understands. Shockingly, the film retains an element of hope, even ending on an ecstatic image in which pain and the creative process can be avenues to liberation. For a director whose career has been devoted to transgression, Crimes of the Future might be Cronenberg's most subversive achievement in its unlikely sense of guarded optimism.

10. EO

The most heartbreaking movie of the year stars a donkey as its protagonist: the titular EO, who is "freed" from a traveling circus (and separated from his beloved trainer), then roams Europe and discovers a swath of human communities—some benign, many hateful, all of them dangerous for our equine hero, who is at the whim of a species that takes their dominance for granted.

Unlike Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), which posited its titular donkey as a religious symbol and bearer of humanity's sins, EO's allegory is more existential: we bear witness to his hopes and dreams (recurring images in which he frolics through a sunlit field with a pack of horses), his fears (a forest at night with all kinds of magical beings), his endless love and trust in humans that don't deserve them. The film's glorious aesthetic plants us even deeper into EO's headspace, as Michał Dymek's cinematography and Paweł Mykietyn's operatic music convey the world as EO sees it, in all its beautiful, horrific glory.

EO strays when its focus wanders to the human characters, as in a superfluous late scene featuring a cameo by Isabelle Huppert (this might be the only time I've ever been disappointed to see her onscreen). Otherwise, Jerzy Skolimowski's film masterfully tells a story that parallels a human life but heightens each emotion. Its unabashed love for the animal kingdom is so moving, any carnivores who watch the film may find themselves adjusting their diet afterwards.

The Next Ten

I was surprised by the mostly negative reaction that George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing received: it's a playful, imaginative, gorgeous, seductive anthology by one of modern cinema's best visual storytellers. The always-fantastic Tilda Swinton plays a narratologist who, at a conference in Istanbul, releases a djinn (Idris Elba) from his bottle. He then proceeds to tell her three stories spanning thousands of years, featuring characters like the Queen of Sheba and King Suleiman and set in what would become Yemen, Ethiopia, Turkey, and elsewhere. One of the film's many pleasures is its wonderful cast of actors who aren't often prominently featured in western films, such as Aamito Lagum from Uganda, Ece Yüksel from Turkey, and Nicolas Mouawad from Lebanon. Anthologies like this are typically uneven, but all three of these stories are compelling and poignant, with the third—in which a sheltered woman named Zefir wishes for knowledge of the world and falls in love with the djinn—moving me to tears. A final act featuring Swinton and Elba back in London is slightly weaker, but even this long denouement expresses the film's themes of loving someone from a distance (of time and space) and the power that storytelling has over our lives.

The Cathedral is a one-of-a-kind autobiography in which personal and familial details aren't as important as tone, aesthetic, and impressionistic intimacy. It's told from the perspective of young Jesse Damrosch, following him from his birth in 1987 through his family's rise and fall during the 1990s and early aughts. Events in American politics play out at the same time, as the film heavily features found footage of George Bush's election to the presidency, the World Trade Center attacks in 1993 and 2001, and other historical events. Jesse views the traumatic experiences of both his family and his nation from an objective remove: an aspiring photographer, we see the world through his eyes, in stylized compositions that allow him to emotionally shield himself from his grueling childhood. Writer-director Ricky D'Ambrose creates a singular tone, achingly sincere even if it feels abstract at times. The Cathedral is proof that filmmakers can still tell stories ripped from their own lives in ways that feel fresh, disconcerting, and revelatory.

In 1938, American David Kurtz shot three minutes of footage in the town of Nasielsk, Poland, which then had several thousand Jewish residents. Seven years later, only about 100 of them remained; the rest had been executed or expelled during the Holocaust. In 2009, David's grandson Glenn found the reel of film in a cupboard in Palm Beach, Florida, and donated it to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, providing the impetus for the remarkable film Three Minutes: A Lengthening. Obviously the footage shot by David Kurtz offers invaluable historical information, depicting Nasielsk's Jewish community—its people, its clothing, its architecture, its culture—before it would nearly vanish from the Earth. But, as repurposed by Three Minutes' director Bianca Stigter, the footage also becomes a source for abstract manipulation: as we linger for minutes on end on a few seconds of footage, its movements slowed down to a hypnotic pace, its grain and light seen in microscopic detail, the film also foregrounds the formal properties of cinema. In short, Three Minutes: A Lengthening is astounding in both its historical and aesthetic detail, highlighting the remarkable expressive potential of found footage.

A lot of critics made the point that You Won't Be Alone is like Terrence Malick meets The VVitch, which isn't wrong but doesn't begin to express the weird ambition of Goran Stolevski's film. Set in 19th century Macedonia, it follows a young woman, confined in a cave for her entire childhood, who is possessed by a witch (or "Wolf-Eateress") on her sixteenth birthday. She soon breaks away from her demonic mentor/surrogate mother and wanders the countryside, getting to know human existence. She discovers that she can inhabit the skin of any creature she kills, allowing her to first assume the identity of a female villager, then a man, then a dog, then a young girl. You Won't Be Alone makes the point that our identities influence the way we perceive and interact with the world, which allows for a multitude of interpretations focusing on feminism, gender identity, even anthropomorphism and the animal kingdom. With cryptic voiceover narration (a result of the fact that the protagonist never totally learned her language) and gorgeous imagery shot by Matthew Chuang, this is one of the best horror movies of the year even though it's in that genre almost by coincidence: despite its frequent gory dismemberments, this is primarily an existential drama that uses the conventions of folk horror to convey its wild and profound ideas.

Stars at Noon, Claire Denis' second film released in the U.S. in 2022 (after Both Sides of the Blade) is a slow, sultry, dour exploration of place and mood, like many of Denis' films. It's also characteristically a jumble of contradictions. It follows Trish (Margaret Qualley), an American journalist in Nicaragua who, after writing about the country's rampant corruption and extrajudicial killings, has become stranded, her passport and press credentials revoked. She now lives in a decrepit motel and sleeps with men for money and political advantages—and, maybe, simply out of boredom, as she wiles away her days with no power or money. When a mysterious Englishman named Daniel (Joe Alwyn) arrives (he unconvincingly says that he works for an oil company), he and Trish begin a tempestuous affair, seemingly born out of cynicism and desperation: they've learned how to take advantage of an amoral world, and the more they tempt danger by trying to outrun the authorities, the more attracted they are to each other and to their own self-destruction. Denis, as always, builds her own distinct aesthetic, lingering on visual and sonic details that don't advance the story but absolutely visualize this distinct world. As much as it belongs to Denis, though, this is Margaret Qualley's movie: as Trish, she embodies a hypnotic mix of sadness and sexiness, a sense that she uses the latter for her own personal gain but never actually benefits from it. Stars at Noon solidifies her as one of the best actresses working today, and if the movie doesn't necessarily engender a lot of suspense with its political intrigue, it does create a slowly-building emotional intensity that stays with you long after the film is over.

In her third great performance of 2022, Tilda Swinton stars in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria, a mystical tale of the intertwined existence of all things, living and otherwise. Swinton's character, a Scottish botanist living in Colombia, keeps hearing a loud boom that apparently only she experiences; in her quest to track down the source of the noise, she meets several characters whose memories apparently intertwine with her own, not to mention the "memories" of the physical spaces she enters (and the animals and people that have been there). Occasionally (as in 2015's Cemetery of Splendour) I think Weerasethakul's recent work has repeated motifs expressed more powerfully in his earlier films, like Syndromes and a Century or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. But Memoria mostly feels fresh and surprising, offering ideas and images that most other filmmakers wouldn't dare attempt. Curiously, the best scene in Memoria is a visit to a recording studio in which Swinton's character asks a sound engineer to recreate the sound she keeps hearing—this long sequence is a unique clash between the tedious and the mind-blowing.

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the maker of Chad's first feature film, wrote and directed Lingui: The Sacred Bonds, a powerful feminist story about hard-working single mother Amina (Achouackh Abaka Souleymane), who discovers that her 15-year-old daughter Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio) is pregnant. The film is tender and convincing whenever it focuses on their relationship: the sacred bonds of the title are those between women in patriarchal communities (particularly those in the same family, like mothers, daughters, and sisters), and Souleymane and Alio are both wonderful, making those bonds convincing and poignant. Lingui can be a little clunky in delivering its other themes, but even then, its commentary is often subtle and humorous, as when an entire community of women bands together to fool a man who wants his daughter circumsised. Haroun deserves credit for offering a call for solidarity to women in his native country and elsewhere, and for imbuing that theme with humor and optimism rather than simply despair and bleakness. The film also offers a bright, colorful aesthetic (these colors are hardly ever seen in American movies anymore) and a fascinating depiction of Chad's capital city, N'Djamena.

Panah Panahi (son of Jafar) wrote and directed Hit the Road, a tender family drama with clear and adamant political subtexts. A husband and wife (Hassan Madjooni and Pantea Panahiha) travel through the Iranian countryside with their two sons, one a precocious six-year-old (Rayan Sarlak), the other a laconic twentysomething (Amin Simiar). It gradually becomes clear that the latter is being forced into exile for unknown reasons, and the family is driving to the Turkish border to expedite his departure. This story has clear resonances for the young Panahi, considering his father Jafar was prevented from leaving Iran and banned from making movies (though he's continued to do so anyway) for "spreading antigovernment propaganda" (i.e., inserting political commentary into his films). The cruel and arbitrary sentences passed down by governments, Panah suggests, can fracture families and turn relationships tenuous and uncertain. Hit the Road includes a few boldly expressive moments which tie the proceedings into Iran's turbulent history and express the cosmological scope of human existence, and even if all of these deviations from reality don't quite work, Panah deserves credit for avoiding a straightforward tone of quiet naturalism. While Jafar Panahi has built one of the most incredible cinematic legacies over the last thirty years, it looks like Panah will soon be creating his own.

I don't know if you can call We're All Going to the World's Fair a horror movie, but it has some of the creepiest scenes of 2022 regardless. Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, a nonbinary artist who sought to express their experience with gender dysphoria and online communities around the turn of the millennium, the film uses minimalism and suggestion effectively. It follows Casey, a teenage girl growing up somewhere in rural America, who joins an underground internet challenge and waits to see what kind of "changes" take place in her mind and body. Shortly thereafter, she's contacted by a mysterious user named "JLB," who turns out to be a lonely middle-aged man with uncertain intentions. The precarity of online experiences, the fluidity of gender, the potential alienation of American life—Schoenbrun's film is chock full of relevant themes that never seem forced or heavy-handed. A few moments feel like nightmares ripped from the unconscious of a young person still figuring themselves out, which is scary precisely because it's so relatable (regardless of your particular identity).

Richard Linklater's Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood might be the most entertaining movie of the year, an eye-popping, rollicking story loosely based on Linklater's own childhood outside of Houston in the late 1960s. Using an animation style similar to the rotoscoping technology Linklater deployed in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, as well as home movies and historical footage, the film tells the story of the Space Race from the charming viewpoint of a young boy primarily concerned with riding bikes, playing with his friends, and generally making the most of his summer. (This leads to an amusing and fantastical subplot in which fourth-grader Milo is asked by NASA to be the first boy to land on the Moon.) There's an unexpected parallel to The Cathedral as the film tells dual storylines, one personal and the other sociohistorical, with both narratives placed alongside each other and occasionally interweaving. When we're young, the movie seems to suggest, the larger forces of history present themselves as spectacular stories that help us make sense of the world.

...And the Rest

21. Aftersun — One of the things I love about film criticism is that it arguably says more about the critic than about the work in question. Case in point: for as much as I admired Aftersun, the moving and sensitive feature debut of Charlotte Wells, I felt myself grappling with a lack of an emotional response. Paul Mescal is devastating as Calum, a father vacationing with his young daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) at a Turkish resort. Sophie's parents are divorced, so she doesn't see Calum very often anymore. They share a loving, affectionate bond, but Calum is struggling with issues that threaten their relationship; I don't want to give away too many details since the film discusses them in subtle, surprising ways, but the humanity and artfulness in Wells' approach are tremendous. That said, I appreciate Aftersun from a distance but wasn't as deeply moved as I was by (to cite a few movies above) The Banshees of Inisherin, Vortex, Petite Maman, or EO, all of which drove me to tears. It's hard to pinpoint why exactly (though I don't think the present-day scenes of adult Sophie reminiscing on her memories of her father are totally successful), so I'll just acknowledge that Aftersun is objectively beautiful, with terrific performances and vibrant, colorful cinematography, even if my response was more muted than expected.
22. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On — Practically irresistible: a funny, heartfelt, magical story about finding one's "people" and taking pleasure in the smaller beauties of life. Those themes probably sound stale and maudlin, which they easily could have been if handled differently. Give credit to director Dean Fleischer Camp and star Jenny Slate (both also cowrote and co-produced the film) for emphasizing the droll, absurdist humor in the story, which follows the titular one-inch-tall shell as he tries to reconnect with his family. Loss and grief are pervasive here, not only for Marcel but also for the human characters who populate the edges of the story; this bittersweet tone helps offset the mawkishness that the movie occasionally indulges. But even if it does, this is the rare modern example of well-earned sentimentality: the movie loves its characters, and clearly so do the voice actors (which, in addition to Slate, includes Isabella Rossellini as Marcel's grandmother). It's one of the only films in 2022 that makes you want to see the world in a different way.
23. Barbarian — This is basically why I love horror as a genre: not many other mainstream movies could present themes around patriarchy, rape culture, urban sprawl, police brutality, cancel culture, MeToo, and the (im)possibility of atonement in such surprising and visceral ways. The plot bobs and weaves in unexpected directions, starting with a tense confrontation between two people who have booked the same Airbnb in Detroit, then leaps backwards or forwards at jarring (but completely logical) moments, shifting and expanding our perspective. Writer-director Zach Cregger (in his feature debut) shows an impressive knack for storytelling and visual composition (particularly in the first act). The genre tropes and larger commentary don't always coalesce very neatly, but even that's a compliment in a way: Barbarian may be broad and unsubtle, but it's as far from boring as possible.

24. Triangle of Sadness — Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winning satire met with a divisive response from critics, but I enjoyed its scathing look at class stratification and the pervasive, destructive effects of capitalism. The film is split into three parts: in the first, models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) argue over money; in the second, they take part in a yacht cruise that goes disgustingly awry when food poisoning strikes; and in the last, the yacht crashes on a seemingly deserted island, with the handful of survivors finding their typical social roles subverted. Many movies in 2022 offered broad, skin-deep satires of the despicable rich (Glass Onion, Bodies Bodies Bodies, etc.), but Triangle of Sadness was one of the few to provide real insight: it's the theory of dialectical materialism in motion, offering an apt, hilarious metaphor in the form of two ship captains, Thomas (Woody Harrelson) and Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), a capitalist and a communist who argue over their political theories while the ship literally goes down around them. Darkly funny, aesthetically precise, and only occasionally as cruel as I thought it would be, Triangle of Sadness poses huge questions and offers fleeting, tantalizing answers.
25. Women Talking — Sarah Polley's adaptation of Miriam Toews' novel is as emotionally potent as expected—not exactly subtle in its feminist themes, but arguably more admirable in its direct and emphatic outrage. In a secluded religious community, the women who have experienced systematic rape and abuse at the hands of their husbands and fathers for generations meet to make a difficult decision: whether to do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. I wish the movie wasn't so rigorously ugly—it might have been more powerful if it allowed for moments of fleeting beauty, especially in the natural landscape—but outside of its visual style, this is an extremely accomplished adaptation. There's a surprisingly semiotic theme about the importance of words as revolutionary agents: talking is never just talking, as signifiers carry explosive power. The rich thematic undercurrent and stellar cast help make up for a few minor flaws: in addition to being Polley's achievement (as both co-screenwriter and director), the film belongs to Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and the rest of the cast, who wring overwhelming pathos (and guarded hope) from this bleak, ripped-from-reality scenario.
26. Murina — Sly character study from Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović about a 17-year-old Croatian girl who works up the courage to break away from her strict, domineering father and repressed mother. Another 2022 movie in which patriarchy rears its ugly head; Murina presents these themes through a mischievous coming-of-age tale, beautifully filmed by Hélène Louvart and with a surprising skill for suspense.

27. Everything Everywhere All At Once — A movie so filled with nonstop imagination and unironic sincerity that it's hard not fall under its spell. Sure, the multiverse concept is overly familiar from Marvel movies and the like, but here, that fantastical concept is fodder for absurd jokes and themes about the lives we could have led had fate nudged us in other directions. The onslaught of sentimentality in the last act can be exhausting, but it's also poignant: the film has earned its emotionalism, largely thanks to the vivid characters. My favorite way to view the movie, though, is as a tribute to Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, who are both able to shine in dramatic, comedic, and martial-arts performances.
28. Both Sides of the Blade — One of Claire Denis' two movies in 2022 (see Stars at Noon above) seems on the surface to be a simple love triangle, but it's actually a nightmarish look at obsession: we're often most attracted to what we know can destroy us. Juliette Binoche conveys that idea through an extremely difficult performance, crafting a character who behaves irrationally and hyperbolically, but also in painfully human ways.
29. Flux Gourmet — Peter Strickland's latest is set at a culinary institute where performance artists use food and kitchen utensils (and, later, bodily fluids and organs) to create bizarre sonic compositions. Some of it is weird for the sake of being weird, but such is Strickland's idiosyncratic cinema. The film asks us to engage in character relationships that aren't always convincing, but otherwise its look at the nature of fringe art—and the artists who lose themselves in their work—is amusing and evocative.

30. The Fabelmans — Steven Spielberg presents a self-analysis I never thought he was interested in attempting with The Fabelmans, which also digs into the nuances between reality and fiction (a subject familiar to the director, most notably also explored in A.I. Artificial Intelligence). In The Fabelmans, young Sammy at first gets into amateur moviemaking as a way to have fun and escape his family's turmoil, but he soon realizes that cinema can't provide an easy escape; the media we create and consume (even and especially the most fictitious kind) reflects, distorts, and influences reality in unexpected ways. There are some blunt, heavy-handed themes around bullying and antisemitism in the last act, but still, this is a visceral, rich, and personal expression from one of the last remaining studio masters.
31. Mad God — Phil Tippett's stop-motion opus, thirty years in the making, follows a gas-masked character known as the Assassin who descends into a nightmarish world filled with demented monsters, gargantuan ruins, and pervasive cruelty. Weird beings are crushed, immolated, electrocuted, dissected, and otherwise brutalized throughout, making for a visceral but exhausting experience. Whenever the carnage becomes overwhelming, there's always the impeccable animation to hold your attention: you feel like you can reach out and graze the threads and rough surfaces of this lovingly crafted hellscape.
32. After Yang — I loved Kogonada's Columbus (2017), so I was somewhat disappointed that much of After Yang, the director's existential sci-fi film about an enigmatic android programmed to be of Chinese descent, consists of familiar motifs around sentient robots and the question of what makes us human. Only occasionally does the film's presentation match the ambition of these grandiose concepts. That said, the film's highlights make it worth watching, especially a scene in which Yang (Justin H. Min) discusses tea with his purchaser/father figure, Jake (Colin Farrell)—a long, meandering discussion that gets to the nature of human personality and the fruitless search for meaning in our lives.
33. Sundown — Michel Franco's boldly alienating film follows Neil (Tim Roth) as he vacations in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two kids. When Neil and Alice learn that their mother has died, they prepare to leave the country and return to England, but Neil makes the excuse that he's lost his passport, continuing to spend his days idling on the beach, drinking and having casual sex with a Mexican woman (Iazua Larios). For much of its running time, this is a difficult character study of a reprehensible man, asking the audience to devote empathy to a character who's probably not deserving of it. But a series of plot reveals near the end shift our perspective of Neil, turning the film into an experiment with character representation and audience identification. Sundown can be an aggravating experience, but it's also surprising and occasionally shocking, refusing to shout out its themes explicitly.

34. The Tale of King Crab — A group of old men meet at a secluded bar in Italy and regale each other with stories; one of their legends plays out before our eyes in The Tale of King Crab, directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. The story concerns a taciturn free spirit named Luciano (Gabriele Silli), who's almost too much of a blank slate: he drinks all day, sleeps in meadows, and holds any kind of responsibility at arm's length, at least until he's exiled for trying to win back his lover, who's been betrothed to a greedy prince. The second half of the film consists of Luciano's exile in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego, consisting of some of the most gorgeous images you'll see in any film this year. As a playful comment on the nature of storytelling, it's hard to be too invested in this myth-like narrative, which even the movie doesn't seem to take very seriously. That makes it hard to stomach some of the bleaker events that take place, including an offscreen rape. All that said, the film creates a unique tone halfway between extravagant fable and anthropological realism; visually, it's almost flawless.
35. Rewind & Play — French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis recycles footage from a '60s French TV show featuring Thelonious Monk. While there are some ravishing musical performances, the film mostly consists of Monk's mistreatment at the hands of the show's host and producers, who condescend to him, distort his words in translating them to French, and generally demean one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. This probably doesn't convey how depressing the movie is: we basically watch a Black man be victimized for over an hour, often seen in rough, extremely raw close-up. Gomis' intention to expose the underlying racism in the supposed bastions of art and culture is admirable, but this can be a difficult, abrasive watch.
36. Hellbender — Folk horror at its most independent: during COVID quarantine, a family in upstate New York collaborated on this goofily entertaining tale of mother-daughter witches who live reclusively in the woods. All hell breaks loose when the daughter decides to leave their property and meet other people. The husband-wife team of Toby Poser and John Adams, along with their kids Zelda and Lulu, collaboratively wrote, directed, shot, edited, and starred in the film. It's highly campy at times (especially whenever the mother and daughter appear in goth makeup to perform death metal songs), with amusingly chintzy CGI, but even these "weaknesses" are DIY badges of honor, and there's real skill in the visual aesthetic and performances.

37. Top Gun: Maverick — Formulaic as hell, but it hits its plot points with satisfying precision. There's a lot of nostalgia for the first Top Gun, but also a sense of big-screen spectacle you don't often get with new releases anymore. (Anytime an action sequence makes you gasp out loud, the movie's doing something right.)
38. Decision to Leave — A lot of critics loved Park Chan-wook's latest, so I'm in the minority here, but its relentless pace, overstuffed narrative, and in-your-face compositions (like bizarre POV shots from a corpse's eye or a cell phone screen) engender more exhaustion than exhilaration. The movie's best ideas (including some political subtext) get lost among the mayhem, and I couldn't help but feel that this would have played better as a modest, 90-minute B-movie rather than a jam-packed, two-and-a-half-hour epic. The conclusion is supposed to be tragically poetic, but I don't think the film has earned its sense of melancholy up to that point.
39. White Noise — I admire that Noah Baumbach is trying something new here, but there's a fundamental tension between his strengths (typically, character study and naturalistic dialogue) and those of Don DeLillo, who wrote the original novel and who often prioritizes abstraction and the deconstruction of language. The characters here are broad (if sometimes humorous) archetypes, and the plot (split into three chapters) is fundamentally absurd, which makes it hard to feel any emotional engagement. Despite a few showstopping scenes, this is mostly a noble failure.

40. Men — I don't think Men really deserved the scathing reception it received: it's clearly meant to be a provocation, not a coherent solution for the ills of patriarchy and gaslighting. Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear are great, committing themselves admirably to their roles, and Alex Garland is able to achieve some striking, nightmarish images. But the film really falls apart in its ending (which fizzles out without much to say); you get the sense that Garland wrote the screenplay and started shooting the film without really knowing where it was supposed to go.
41. Prey — This spinoff of the Predator franchise is set in 1719 on the Great Plains, where a young Comanche woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder), encounters the infamous alien monster. It's a thrill to see such a well-known property transplanted to a setting and culture that still don't get the screen time they deserve in American film and television. It's a good thing that cultural specificity is so effective, because otherwise, Prey is visually bland and its story of a young woman rising up against the odds to become a fearsome warrior is overly generic.
42. Medusa — Anita Rocha da Silveira takes aim at Brazil's religious hypocrisy and misogyny with this horror film about a group of female zealots who roam the streets, "punishing" women who they feel don't sufficiently embrace Jesus' teachings. The visual style is meant to emulate the eye-popping colors of giallo films, but the aesthetic isn't sharp enough to make good on that comparison; outlandish moments like slow-motion dance sequences and musical numbers performed for the camera feel like stunts rather than organic presentations of the movie's themes. With so many potentially provocative ideas, it's a shame the movie winds up being interminably dull at more than two hours.
43. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent — Good, dumb fun (but sometimes a little too dumb for its own good). Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal make their friendship more convincing and poignant than probably even the filmmakers intended.

44. Fire of Love — The footage and photographs of volcanic eruptions seen in Sara Dosa's documentary—courtesy of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, the husband-and-wife subjects of the film—are stunning illustrations of nature's ferocity. Unfortunately, the Kraffts' relationship is made to seem like a heaven-sent romance with the magnitude of tectonic plates, though all indications seem to suggest that their marriage was often tense and rocky. The film would have been more interesting had it honestly portrayed the difficulties of companionship rather than trying to fabricate an epic love affair where it doesn't fit. (Miranda July's wispy voiceover narration doesn't help.)
45. Lux Aeterna — Gaspar Noé's other film released stateside in 2022 is a meta-cinematic look at the production of a film about witches, directed by Béatrice Dalle and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. While filming, the two of them have to deal with misogynistic producers, a tyrannical (male) cinematographer, and hangers-on like an actor trying to pitch his own project and a film critic scrounging for an interview. Meanwhile, onscreen quotes from the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Luis Buñuel allege that directors must be brutal, ruthless dictators to achieve their artistic vision. It all ends with a blinding strobe-light display as women (playing witches in the film-within-the-film) are tied up at the stake. What does it all mean? Who knows! Noé is at his most petulantly provocative here, though it's kind of fun to parse out some kind of meaning from the madness.
46. Saloum — Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot directed this monster movie set in the titular region outside of Dakar, Senegal. Three mercenaries transporting a stash of gold and a Mexican drug cartel leader become stranded in Saloum and encounter a being that conjures their own traumatic histories. This starts very strong, with a stylish aesthetic reminiscent of early Carpenter, but gets worse as it goes along, relying on heavy-handed themes and shoddy CGI. (I miss the pre-CGI days when low-budget horror movies would rely on suggestion and practical effects to create their monsters.)

47. Nope — If Jordan Peele's Us was fascinatingly messy, his follow-up Nope is simply a mess. There are compelling ideas about the connections between art, trauma, and spectacle buried in there somewhere, but they're smothered rather than enlivened by the disappointing plot, which is both jumbled and generic. For a film partially about the history of viewing technologies, this has a surprisingly dull visual aesthetic; its alien invaders might have you asking, "is that all there is?"
48. Avatar: The Way of Water -- If all you're trying to do is (maybe take a mind-altering substance and then) astound your eyes, the Avatar sequel achieves that goal. At everything else, it's not so successful. Seemingly every step along the screenwriting process, James Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silva opted for cliché over originality. That by-the-numbers storytelling might have been more effective if the movie were half as long, but 192 minutes of clunky subplots, simplistic characters, and exposition-heavy backstories become interminable. There is, finally, something hypocritical about these movies' social commentary: they may be environmentalist pleas for harmony and coexistence, but Cameron and company regurgitate old tropes which are only permissible because the characters onscreen are blue, divorced from any kind of real-world race, nationality, or culture. In other words, we shouldn't excuse Avatar's noble savage stereotypes just because they're couched in the world of fantasy. And yet, the movie's underwater scenes offer a visual smorgasbord; it may be all CGI, but it's satisfying in a junk food sort of way. Maybe more impressively, Cameron's ability to stage a visceral action scene is still hugely effective, and the movie's rabid desire to entertain is, at times, ingratiating.
49. Bodies Bodies Bodies — The satirical themes in Bodies Bodies Bodies might be more legible than the ideas in Nope, but they're also less interesting. Halina Reijn's murder mystery, which transplants the closed room format to a mansion occupied by some filthy-rich Gen Z'ers in the midst of a tropical storm, skewers self-obsessed podcasters, trust fund babies, drug-addicted hedonists, and other fairly obvious targets. There's not much depth, humor, or chills to any of the film's twists and turns.
50. Bones and All — This being a Luca Guadgnino movie, there are inevitably some wonderful visuals and a genre mashup of gruesome horror, coming-of-age tale, and road trip. But there aren't many ideas beneath the surface, and the characters aren't as engaging as the movie seems to think they are. Taylor Russell is marvelous in the lead role, but Timothée Chalamet is miscast—it's impossible to buy him as a dangerous outcast—and the supporting ensemble overacts uninhibitedly. With poetic shots of the American landscape ever-present in the background, the movie seems to be tying the characters' outré cannibalistic tendencies to the society around them, but the thematic connection just isn't there.

51. Kimi — Steven Soderbergh's of-the-moment thriller starts strong but gets more ridiculous as it goes on. Zoë Kravitz is charismatic as always as an agoraphobic tech analyst who thinks she uncovers a murder while digging through the data streams of an Alexa-like smart speaker. The movie alludes to anti-government protests and ubiquitous digital devices, but doesn't seem to have much to say about these attention-grabbing subjects. Most dubiously, the film ends by implying that the best way to overcome social anxiety is to brave the outside world and connect with other people, a way too simplistic platitude that ignores the very real constraints of mental health issues.
52. Holy Spider — Serial killer story based on Saeed Hanaei, a religious fundamentalist who killed prostitutes and other "corrupt" women in the holy city of Mashhad around the turn of the millennium. Though the film is set in Iran, it's no surprise whatsoever that the film was produced by European and Jordanian production companies, what with its graphic sex and violence and its blunt denunciation of Iran's patriarchal culture. While presumably well-intentioned, and nuanced in its theme of how misogyny is passed down from one generation to the next, Holy Spider unforgivably lingers on the soon-to-be-victims' destitution and humiliation, watching them get strangled in extreme close-up after they shoot opium or give blowjobs or smear makeup on their faces. It's as though the film punishes these women all over again, negating any kind of political commentary it's trying to deliver.
53. The Bob's Burgers Movie — Basically just an average episode of the series, which plays better in about 25 minutes than ninety.
54. Neptune Frost — Afrofuturist musical by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman is set in a Burundi village overrun with dilapidated technology; it follows the romance between Neptune, a gender-fluid hacker, and Matalusa, a coltan miner, the two of whom lead a revolution against despotic forces. The story makes no sense, and neither do the pseudo-profound proclamations that the characters frequently utter (example: "The golden salute elevates the vibration of metallic injustice to the threshold of planetary sustenance"). With no specifics to the sociopolitical state in which these "rebels" exist, the movie also fails to provide any meaningful political insight. Add in a drab, wandering digital aesthetic and you get a fairly insufferable film as a result.

55. Athena — War breaks out between the police, militant protesters, and far-right provocateurs in the titular housing complex outside of Paris in Romain Gavras' bombastic action film. The opening scene is a single-take marvel that depicts the occupation of a police building by rebels armed with Molotov cocktails, culminating in a soaring drone shot. But, as films like 1917 and Birdman have taught us in the past, the whole single-take aesthetic may be technically impressive, but it doesn't really maximize the emotional or visceral impact of what we're seeing; it turns each take into a stunt rather than an expression of story, character, or theme. Much of Athena feels like a stunt: practically every scene is loaded with visual pyrotechnics and over-the-top music, but such hyperbolic drama is unwarranted. By turning this conflict into, essentially, a male melodrama between three brothers, the film also mutes the impact of its political subtexts: it isn't police brutality or class stratification that catalyze the action here, but a fairly standard story of men on opposite sides of the law.
56. She Will — Slow-moving horror movie in which an aging actress (Alice Krige), after a mastectomy, visits a remote Scottish inn to recuperate. Upon discovering that hundreds of alleged witches were burned in the area centuries ago, she becomes possessed by their spirits and enacts her revenge against the men who have wronged her. The tone bounces messily between satirical comedy, glum drama, and tacky horror; the cartoonishly villainous men, all imminent rapists and child-abusers, behave in ways totally divorced from reality, which saps the power of the movie's social commentary. The horrific moments themselves (brief glimpses of burned witches, sudden possessions, etc.) consist of cheesy montages with split-second edits and abrasive sound effects—the kind of thing you might see on an episode of CSI.
57. Glass Onion — "It's so dumb!" says Daniel Craig's inexplicably accented Benoit Blanc at one point in Glass Onion. "So dumb it's brilliant," responds another character. "No!" Benoit replies. "It's just dumb!" Is it too harsh to say that sums up Glass Onion as a whole? In 2019, when Knives Out was released, its broad satire and cast of caricatures felt fresher, more permissible. Now, the extremely obvious targets of Glass Onion's satire are so silly and unrealistic that the movie's critique of the entitled, amoral upper class rings hollow. Lest I come off like Ben Shapiro, I want to make it clear that I agree 100% with the film's politics: I detest Elon Musk and his ilk as much as anyone, find his exploitation of other people's labor unforgivable, and strongly believe that no one on Earth should be a billionaire. But, by making its central antagonist, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), into a thinly veiled version of Musk—and by making everyone around him archetypes who can be summed up in two words or less (misogynist YouTuber, dimwitted fashionista, corrupt politician, etc.)—Glass Onion ensures that its commentary is only skin-deep. The ending, which is only explosive in a literal sense, pats itself on the back for being "disruptive," but nothing has changed throughout the course of the movie: sycophants are still sycophants, capitalism still rules the day, it's just that one slimy villain has received his comeuppance. (I don't want to spoil the ending, but what seems like a raucous obliteration of the wealth and opulence of the upper class is actually just hollow, feel-good showboating, catering to audiences who are already convinced of everything the movie has to say.) There's a nonstop parade of celebrity cameos (one of the greatest injustices the film commits is that it provided Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim with their final roles) and a bland digital aesthetic which seems to define most of Netflix's releases. (On a related note: can a film released by one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world ever really be politically disruptive?) I know it's just supposed to be entertainment, but the movie considers itself more than that, so we shouldn't let it off the hook for having nothing insightful or revolutionary to say.
58. Watcher — Prestige horror picture is so worried about touching on relevant themes like sexual predators and gaslighting that it forgets to be scary, stylish, or engrossing. Maika Monroe is good as always, and those are absolutely urgent topics to discuss, but Watcher does so about as blandly as possible, its ending easy to predict about ten minutes in.

59. The Northman — Robert Eggers seems increasingly phony with each new movie, masking his lack of originality with a pseudo-pedigreed, Kubrick-lite aesthetic. At its best, The Northman is all style and no substance. At its worst, it delivers "profound" ultraviolence in the manner of 300 or Braveheart, using its source material (the ancient Norse myth of Amleth) as an excuse for the same old, ultramacho, pro-violence posturing.
60. The Black Phone — The concept is so strong that The Black Phone can't help but be a little scary: in 1978, outside of Denver, a boy is kidnapped by a predator known only as the Grabber, then imprisoned in a basement in which he communicates with the killer's past victims on a disconnected phone. But the film sometimes seems to work in spite of its crude aesthetic and questionable details, like the ghosts appearing visually (as pale, translucent clichés) instead of just as disembodied voices. What's worse, the movie's thematic implications are suspect: young Finney can only become a man once he inflicts extreme violence on his tormentors, and his sister Gwen reads her telepathic abilities as messages from Jesus, positing religion as a source of moral righteousness.
61. Wendell & Wild — The most disappointing movie of the year, considering how much I like most of Henry Selick's previous films. It all seems forced and joyless from the start. How do you make Key and Peele as scatological demons boring?
62. Jurassic World: Dominion — I watched this at the behest of friends, somewhat against my will, and still feel salty about it.
63. Pompo the Cinephile — Anime in which a young boy directs his first movie for a major studio headed by a pixyish girl. (Why does this film studio employ children, you might ask? "Who cares!" the movie would answer as annoyingly as possible.) The fledgling director goes through the writing, shooting, and editing process while constantly referring to his "masterpiece," but there's nothing truthful or accurate about either Pompo or the film-within-the-film (which is, indeed, not a masterpiece).

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