Okay. I’ve survived the year-end screener crunch and published my Top 10 Movies of 2022 over at Washington City Paper. I strongly encourage you to take a look. Tried to put a nice mix of films on there: some you’ve seen, some you’ve heard of, and others that, frankly, sound made up but I assure you are real.
But this is America, where we do everything a little extra. So instead of just a Top 10 List, I present to you a 2022 List of Lists. For your reading and viewing pleasure, I’ve compiled several lists that encompass the best of the best from 2022, at least in my view.
Top 10 New-to-Me Movies in 2022
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – A great Howard Hawks comedy that also fossilized Marilyn Monroe. She beautifully plays a parody of a dumb blonde here, but for decades after that’s all the world thought she was.
The Clock – Sort of a prototype for Before Sunrise. Judy Garland and Robert Walker spend half the film just walking around New York falling in love.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream – One of the great unsung Francis Ford Coppola films. The Godfather director makes an advertisement for postwar optimism with just enough of a wink to let you know the sales job is part of the text. You’ll get it when you see it.
A Hen in the Wind – I got way into Yasujirō Ozu this year. Conventional wisdom is that the domestic dramas he made in the ‘50s are his best work, but I have a soft spot for his postwar melodramas. A Hen in the Wind is in the vein of Chaplin’s The Kid or Big Daddy. It’s about an orphan child thrust upon an unwilling adult, but it grounds its story in the ugly realities of postwar Japan, which makes the sentimentality feel earned.
Get on the Bus – I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to this Spike Lee joint about a group of men traveling to DC for the Million Man March. I guess it’s considered minor Spike, but it’s just as full of insight, unseen truths, and hard poetry as his best works.
La Notte – The master of alienation, Michelangelo Antonioni’s work has always spoken to me, so of course I loved this film about a beautiful but bored couple who, over the course of a day and night, confront their own loneliness.
Fourteen – Otherwise known as the NYC Film Twitter Movie for its inclusion in the cast and crew of several known critics and cinephiles, Fourteen is at the very least a cogent character study about two Brooklynites and the devolution of their friendship over time. I thought it was even more than that. I saw an honest, well-drawn picture of mental illness that sneaks up on you.
Imitation of Life – I’d only seen a couple of early Douglas Sirk movies until this year, when I watched his big three: All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life, a racial melodrama about a wealthy white woman and her Black maid that upends all expectations. Juanita Moore was just the fifth Black actor to be nominated for an Oscar. She should have won.
Sunshine State – I recently interviewed writer/director John Sayles for my baseball movie book (he did Eight Men Out), which gave me motivation to catch up on his work. Sunshine State is one of his working-class mosaics, a story about race, economics, and real estate told through a profoundly human lens. There’s a lot of pirate imagery in it, too, which is interesting since, as I recently learned, he grew up a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates!
Top 10 Things I Wrote in 2022
A ranking of Matt Damon’s cameos for The Ringer.
A feature on SNY’s director of Mets broadcasts John DeMarsico for the New York Times.
A report on Missing Movies, a new organization that raises awareness about lost films and fights to bring them back, for The Guardian.
A profile of Terrance Gore for the New York Times. I got to go in the Mets clubhouse to write this one. It was wild.
A case for why the studio comedies of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s look, sound, and feel so much better than comedies do today for Paste Magazine.
A defense of Daniel Kaluuya’s recessive performance in Nope for Decider.
My review of Top Gun: Maverick for Washington City Paper.
An appreciation of Robert Altman’s The Player on its 30th anniversary for The Guardian.
An inquiry into this third act of Tom Cruise’s career for The Ringer.
A soul-searching remembrance of Barry Levinson’s Diner on its 40th anniversary for Decider.
Top 31 Things I Loved in Film in 2022
The aerial sequences in Top Gun: Maverick. The best I’ve ever seen.
How much The Banshees of Inisherin loved its animals. Also Colin Farrell’s sweaters.
The last five minutes of The Fabelmans.
The courage of Nicolas Cage to look like such a fool in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
The opening shot of Athena.
The honesty of Armageddon Time. It wasn’t my favorite childhood memoir from an acclaimed Jewish director this year (that would be The Fabelmans), but it was the most soul-searching. James Gray looks back at the most shameful incident of his childhood and reminds himself how he thrived in life at the expense of someone less fortunate. A searing work of memoir.
The Gordy sequences in Nope (I didn’t love the rest).
A fall movie season with not one but two reference to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (in Glass Onion and Broker).
RRR’s musical sequences. I liked the movie more when it was Bride and Prejudice rather than Braveheart-on-acid.
The first half of White Noise. Even the book, one of my favorites, peters out a little in the second half, but the movie really peters out.
That I’m probably the only person who noticed how Spirited, the Ryan Reynolds-Will Ferrell Christmas comedy, stole a line from About a Boy, Hugh Grant’s best movie: “No, you’ve always been wrong about that. I really am this shallow.”
Jennifer Lawrence’s performance in the little-seen Causeway. I never really bought the hype on Lawrence, but this seems like it could be the beginning of a new, deeper phase of her work.
Barbarian’s audacious structure. The cut to Justin Long driving down the Pacific Coast Highway might be my favorite moment of the year because it tells you, “We’re not playing by the rules here.”
The music cues in Aftersun. They were a little obvious, but it’s a memory movie, so it makes sense. Its use of “Under Pressure” in the emotional climax is so perfect that I’ll probably think of the movie every time I hear the song now. No small feat.
The Amsterdam sequences in Amsterdam.
Zac Efron’s mustache in The Greatest Beer Run Ever. The rest of the movie, not so much.
Saorsie Ronan’s effervescent performance in See How They Run.
Annie Mumolo’s two-scene performance in Confess, Fletch, stealing the movie out from under Jon Hamm (who is also very good). Mumolo co-wrote Bridesmaids and starred alongside Kristen Wiig in Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar.
Regina Hall in Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
Every concert scene in Elvis.
Rebecca Hall’s monologue in Resurrection.
The Marisa Tomei scene (she’s not actually in it) in the hugely underrated Fire Island.
Adam Sandler morphing into America’s Dad in The Hustle.
That long, wonderful section in Apollo 10 ½, when Richard Linklater is just wistfully recalling how great life was in the suburbs in 1969.
The Duke! It’s a sweet little movie about a charming senior British man (played, naturally, by Jim Broadbent) who steals a priceless painting with plans to sell it and distribute the proceeds to the poor.
Jason Segel in Windfall.
Sebastian Stan in Fresh.
Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal. She’s extremely talented, but she sometimes leans on her persona too hard. It was nice to see her in a stripped-down neorealist thriller. She can really act.
Dale Dickey’s face in A Love Song.
Colin Farrell’s impression of Werner Herzog in After Yang.
The lava in Fire of Love, a documentary about two quirky volcanologists who fall in love over their passion for magma.
Top 10 Things I Consumed That Were Not Films
10. Love it or List It on HGTV. It’s the only HGTV show with a good narrative hook. Great banter, too.
9. Michael Giacchino’s score for The Batman, especially the title track
8. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training by Josh Wilker (I hope to write a book like this someday, a monograph about my favorite film that weaves together critical analysis and cultural context. Wilker is an incredible writer, and you should check this book out even if you haven’t seen the movie.)
7. John Fulbright’s new album, The Liar
7. Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens. Reviewed here.
6. My wife’s homemade pizza (her crusts are amazing)
5. Candy House by Jennifer Egan
4. Severance on Apple TV+ (I wrote about it here)
3. SNY broadcasts of Mets games
2. The Natural by Bernard Malamud
1. The Rehearsal on HBO
That’s all for now. If the fates allow, I’ll check in with you one more time before the end of the year. Onward and upward, brave souls.