The year 2022 has not been great for movies. This claim is subject to many asterisks, of course — it’s harder than ever for a movie to break through the wall of noise made by everything that’s streaming and releasing on multiple platforms at any given time, and the global film industry is still as susceptible as any other to the traumas of the pandemic. After emerging from two-plus years spent isolating and distancing and outdoor dining and being utterly unsure of how to most responsibly resume moving through the world, our critics are left wondering, Do we want too much from this medium that we love?
Over the course of this not-so-great year, inevitably some great movies were released: maximalist beloveds like Top Gun: Maverick, RRR, and Everything Everywhere All at Once; quietly stunning favorites like Aftersun and The Banshees of Inisherin, too. Lydia Tár happened this year. But then there were Blonde, The Whale, and Bardo, films that left a sour taste in the mouths of critics Angelica Jade Bastién, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri, respectively, not to mention a slew of middling releases (from mild disappointments like She Said and Decision to Leave to the kinds of blockbusters that need to be far better or worse to be fun, like Jurassic Park: Dominion or Black Adam), which felt like chores to watch. Taken together, the mass of meh-to-miserable movies our critics saw over the past 350ish days ultimately outweighed the mass of exceptional ones, and we’re still deciding what to make of that.
Alison Willmore: I don’t think this has been a great year for movies. There were things to admire, sure. Yet I’m still waiting for that feeling of being utterly obliterated by what I’ve just seen onscreen.
Angelica Jade Bastién: Unfortunately, that has been a recurrent theme in moviegoing for me this year. Very, very few films have really slipped under my skin, and I noticed a few trends and failures that are making me ache with worry about the future of this medium and how people engage with it. I am hungry for awe, but as we come closer to the end of the year, it is clear to me that I will not be fed.
Bilge Ebiri: I will say I saw a number of films in 2022 that I returned to over and over and over again: Athena, Top Gun: Maverick, Cyrano, Murina, Both Sides of the Blade, Three Thousand Years of Longing. But I wonder if my wanting to return to these titles speaks not just to my love for them but also to my relative lack of interest in so many other new movies that feel, at least on the surface, so uninspiring.
I’ve also been surprised by a lot of films this year. I had zero hopes for something like Fire of Love, Sara Dosa’s playfully shattering documentary about a pair of married French volcanologists, and I wound up adoring it. When I read the log line for Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, it sounded thoroughly unremarkable, but the film totally got me, in its subtle, disarming, borderline-experimental way. I was also grateful to be able to see most of these films in theaters. Sadly, that won’t be the case for most viewers.
Alison: As summer was waning, I wrote a piece about the sorta comeback the theatrical release had managed to stage, which was helped along by certain movies — Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, RRR — that promised sprawl and spectacle outsize enough to lure people out of their homes, a possibility we were not that long ago assured was a thing of the past. Of those movies, S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR was the closest thing to a transcendent surprise I got this year, a work of gleeful historical fan fiction that embraced excess with such enthusiasm it was impossible to not be won over, questionable rah-rah nationalism and all. That said, I’m not convinced a future in which movies have to be big events to be considered worth seeing in a theater is all that positive. You mentioned Aftersun, Bilge, which is terrific and which happens to be scaled unapologetically for intimacy. It’s one that really demands you submerge yourself in it, which is so much easier to do in a theater than at home.
Angelica: I am a maximalist at heart and in all aspects of my life, so of course I am attracted to the bombast of films like RRR, Elvis, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, even if they didn’t work for me holistically. But I agree; we need to redefine what’s worth going to the theater to see. I loved seeing a precisely defined masterwork like Tár in the theater. There’s something about riding a wave of swelling emotions among strangers that moves me very deeply as someone who has also had to face the depths of my loneliness over the years of this pandemic. For me, film is all about connection — with the world around us, with strangers, with parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed.
Bilge: Watching something like RRR or Maverick or any number of “maximalist” movies in a big theater with an appreciative crowd and proper projection can be a very special experience. I mean, there were people screaming in my audience for The Woman King at key points; that was glorious. But it’s really in the way the big screen enhances more intimate stories that we come to understand its value. The emotions as expressed by the performers can be subtle; the screen, the form, turns them into something grand and mythic. An Ingmar Bergman doesn’t happen in the age of streaming. The Passion of Joan of Arc doesn’t happen if people are watching movies on laptops. Of course, that movie doesn’t get made today regardless, but so much of cinema’s magic and power lies in the way it turns small things into big things. Suddenly, a human face is bigger than you; that demands your attention and creates a unique connection.
Angelica: And that connection can be built by a single performance. So while films as whole pieces failed to set me aflame this year, many individual performances succeeded. For example, it isn’t Cate Blanchett I keep thinking about from Tár but Nina Hoss. I’m curious to hear from y’all about how performances have shaped your understanding of the year in film. I just want to talk about acting, baby!
Alison: I will confess that Cate Blanchett’s towering, flinty, funny performance consumed all the oxygen in that film for me. Hoss is an amazing actor who conveys so much about those characters’ calculating relationship, and Noémie Merlant similarly navigates these invisible jet streams of power and ego, yet Blanchett is all I think about when I think about the movie (which I’m very much a fan of). She’s not doing something brand-new; in fact, what’s pleasurable about her Lydia Tár may be the ways she feels like a riff on the swaggering characters Blanchett has played in the past, except this time it’s all a put-on. I love the scene where she threatens that playground bully. Blanchett practically glows with self-satisfaction as her character finds as much, if not more, fulfillment in her status as she does in the actual work.
Who else? The mere sight of Ke Huy Quan onscreen in Everything Everywhere All at Once was enough to bring me to tears, but he’s so good, too, flipping between happy-go-lucky flake, multidimensional badass, and suave Wong Kar-wai heartbreaker, somehow embodying all the contradictory desires someone might have for an ideal partner while being quietly heartbreaking. I’m still sorting out how I feel about Return to Seoul, but first-timer Park Ji-min is a real force as its yearning, maddeningly perverse lead. Three Thousand Years of Longing didn’t really click for me, but I think Idris Elba is as good as he’s maybe ever been, as a magical being who’s an embodiment of Orientalist desire as well as a mercurial, complex character in his own right. Rayan Sarlak in Hit the Road and Frankie Corio in Aftersun give uncommonly great kids’ performances of unforced frankess. And I have to mention Rebecca Hall in Resurrection. It’s a ridiculous movie but somehow not ridiculous enough — it just never goes full Possession as much as it seems to want to. But she is amazing, carrying herself as though her whole body is thrumming with tension and at any minute her tendons might snap like too tightly strung guitar strings. At a time when enough genre movies have been clumsily “about trauma” that the phrase has become a joke, Hall’s performance embodies PTSD in a way I keep thinking about, as something that has shaped her character’s very chemistry despite how hard she has tried to push it away.
Angelica: I bristled this year against performances in films that wanted to broadly say something about women and power but could never quite get at the lived reality of these thorny experiences all that well (think: She Said). A Hollywood film with genuine feminist bona fides feels like an impossibility these days. But Alison, you highlight a lot of performances I really loved this year, including Park Ji-min in Return to Seoul and Rebecca Hall in Resurrection. There were some performances I was drawn to for how they layered beauty within a simple emotional story, like Lee Hye-young in The Novelist’s Film. But like I said earlier, I am a dame in love with maximalism. Bette Davis once said, “Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.” I think of that quote when watching Lashana Lynch in The Woman King, a performance with sparks and ingenuity and fierce physicality.
Lynch’s is also a supporting role. For me this year, many of the performances that have struck some chord deep within me are those on the margins or those forced to work within a tighter emotional space than the lead. Which brings me back to Tár. I am happy to see Todd Field’s work once more and to be in the presence of a film as carefully constructed as Tár is. Cate Blanchett’s performance is full of brio so thick she can’t see her way through it, and I am usually utterly enraptured by that kind of performance when done by women. But Tár’s attention to detail compelled me to look around Blanchett to Nina Hoss’s facial expressions, a potent tool for the story. They bring such cunning delight, such humor, to a character that would be thankless in the hands of a lesser performer.
Bilge: Cate Blanchett’s performance in Tár does feel powered by the collective force of many of her previous roles, and we saw quite a bit of that this year. When I profiled Ke Huy Quan ahead of the release of Everything Everywhere All at Once, I was struck by how much his parts in this film seemed to reflect the different stages of his life and career (not just as an actor but as a fight coordinator and an assistant to Wong Kar-wai). And as our colleague Jen Chaney observed, Tom Cruise’s turn in Top Gun: Maverick echoes so many of the parts he has done over the years. Even when the performances aren’t comments on the actor’s star persona, they seem to carry ineffable, existential traces of it. Colin Farrell is unforgettable in The Banshees of Inisherin, and his performance has nothing to do with his roles in prior movies (save for maybe In Bruges since there he was also paired with Brendan Gleeson). And yet some element of Colin Farrell–ness remains onscreen, so much so that another actor giving a perhaps equally great performance would not have nearly the same effect. Maybe it’s just the eyebrows, I dunno.
What I found in 2022 was a nice combination of big, great parts for familiar faces and absolutely immense, ridiculously demanding parts for people I’d never seen before. I can’t even find the words to talk about Sami Slimane, the young star of Athena, who was 19 at the time of shooting and had never acted on film before. Gracija Filipović, the young star of Murina, is absolutely hypnotic in the role of a girl starting to find life within her domineering father’s stifling and whose slow-boil rebellion becomes the movie’s engine of suspense. And then there’s Maya Vanderbeque, the child star of the intense, riveting Belgian bullying drama Playground. She’s what — 7 years old, 8? How does someone that young achieve such incredible depth?
When I interviewed James Gray and Jeremy Strong about Armageddon Time, we discussed the phenomenon of people being fascinated by actors’ processes, and Strong speculated that it maybe has to do with the irreducibility of the whole thing: “In an age where we think we can explicate everything and reduce everything to its atomic particles, I think creativity remains, and acting remains, something that is profoundly mysterious,” he said. A great performance — a great transformation — feels like one of the very few things we have in our lives that are actual acts of real magic.
Alison: That’s a lovely point, though I do think that when an attempt at a major transformation fails, it can look downright grotesque. At least that’s how I felt about one of the most talked-up performances of the year, Brendan Fraser’s in The Whale. I’ve written before about my general aversion to the type of “They’re unrecognizable!” parts that inevitably get a lot of attention during awards season, and The Whale, which puts Fraser in a fat suit to play a depressed 600-pound shut-in attempting slow-motion suicide by binge eating, is certainly one of those. My problem with the film has less to do with Fraser’s acting than with the material itself, which the most incredible of performances couldn’t redeem. Samuel D. Hunter’s play is this incredibly juvenile fantasy of self-abjection that treats its main character’s size with a morbid fascination — he’s a martyr by way of his weight, trapped in this body by the cruelty of the world while all the harpylike women characters circle by to shriek at him. The movie extends no empathy or understanding when it comes to his fatness; director Darren Aronofsky films the character lumbering down the hall to bed like a movie monster, regarding the experience entirely from the outside.
Is Fraser good in this role? I think he has moments, but mostly he is just a spectacle. What you mentioned, Bilge, with regard to someone’s history onscreen and as a celebrity feeding into what they’re doing onscreen, is working in his favor here. Fraser is a comeback story and someone whose body has been subjected to a lot by Hollywood, from all the injuries he sustained doing stunts in his heyday to the sexual-assault allegations he made against former HFPA president Philip Berk. That isn’t the same as what his character goes through, but it’s parallel enough for people to shrug off criticisms of the context in which he might receive the Oscar he’s currently favored to win. I don’t know if The Whale was the worst film I saw this year — that prize would probably go to something more cynical and synthetic, like The Gray Man or The Princess.
Were there any movies you downright loathed this year? Or were there any you can’t stop thinking about even if you don’t think they worked? For me, that movie is Stars at Noon, the maligned Claire Denis drama (her second out this year) about two vapid expats fucking themselves silly while trying to get out of a politically chaotic Nicaragua. There are plenty of things to criticize about the film, yet it captures the ugly romanticism of being an outsider sampling another country’s turmoil so well.
Angelica: I’ve been thinking a lot about Decision to Leave and Till despite being very mixed on those films. Decision to Leave worked best for me when it dropped the stabs at humor and leaned into its dark romanticism. Till really frustrated me. I was a big fan of Chinonye Chukwu’s previous film as a director, Clemency, but Till feels anemic and unable to grapple with the tremendous weight of its subject’s history. Danielle Deadwyler is a strong performer, but I was struck by how certain directorial choices seemed to crowd out her work onscreen.
But the film I utterly loathed this year is Blonde. You could say I’m downright incandescent with rage toward this film. And it isn’t just because I have such admiration for Marilyn Monroe (though that’s part of it). I found its style cloying and bombastic, underlining everything rancid about the story: how it confirms the well-worn myths about Monroe that have been festering since her death, how it fails to say anything novel about Hollywood, womanhood, acting, or power. Blonde isn’t easy for me to brush off because I think it points to grander issues about how the film industry remembers its own past and the misogyny that propels certain depictions of women beset by health issues, physical and mental.
Bilge: Tempted as I am to tussle with you guys about The Whale (which I liked) and Blonde (which I loved), I’ll stick to the topic at hand: stuff I hated. To be sure, there were a lot of acclaimed, high-profile films this year that I was disappointed by (Bones and All, Decision to Leave, She Said, Cha Cha Real Smooth among them) and a fair share of shlock I didn’t care for (Scream, Firestarter, Jurassic World: Dominion, for example). Then there is, of course, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ambitious dream-essay apologia Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which I saw at Venice in its longer version and then rewatched in New York in its reedited version. Neither works at all for me. I’m not counting Bardo among the aforementioned group of “acclaimed disappointments” since it’s not particularly acclaimed; critics have been brutal toward it. To be fair, there is a fairly sizable contingent of critics who just detest Iñárritu’s work outright and were practically salivating over this one. I hope I’m not one of them: There are Iñárritu movies I love and Iñárritu movies I hate. Bardo seems like one I would actually love: The protagonist is a journalist who, like the director himself, got his start in Mexico and was then embraced by the U.S., so among other things, it’s a movie about immigration, assimilation, and emotional exile, subjects near and dear to my heart.
I mention Bardo not because I think it’s the worst film of the year (it’s not) but because I’ve become weirdly obsessed with it. I’ve seen it three times, and though it’s long as shit, I fully intend to watch it again. I keep thinking about it even though the whole thing leaves me totally cold. And I think my obsession has to do not so much with wanting to understand the movie better but with wanting to understand myself better. Because, really, the movies we hate say more about us as people than they do about themselves. In terms of self-knowledge, sometimes a bad movie is even more valuable than a good one.
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