2022 has been a pretty low-volume year for me at the cinema and at what Empire calls the “sofa plex”. Moreso even than most years, my reflections on cinema in 2022 are limited to the emotional response they generated in me. I’ve always maintained that all criticism is ultimately rooted in an emotional response, but good criticism takes that response as a prompt and a guide to explore the mechanisms that generated it. Comedy always suffers in critical estimation because once you engage your “higher thought” it feels dumb to say “the way he farted was just hilarious”.
The emotional response I had to this year’s first film, The Matrix: Resurrections was a combination of profound boredom and exasperation – of a kind that I’ve experienced with almost all post-human/trans-human literature I’ve encountered in the last few years. The basic problem with The Matrix sequels (and “film adjacent” television show Westworld) is that their big idea of post-humanity is just humanity, except digital. Given unlimited freedom, what these “AI” beings do is just live human lives within a simulation. What’s the point? It’s interesting that this question formed the bedrock of a very solid comedy that made last year’s summary, Free Guy. It may not have been perfect, but it offered some kind of perspective on what existence could be if it were unfettered by matching anything like “reality”, which made it much smarter than the latest attempt to recapture the shock of the original Matrix.
The second worst movie I saw this year was at least equally flawed in trying to recapture and recast another work that was a genre-smasher – the King’s Man. The trick that both Kingsmen: The Secret Service and The Golden Circle was to wrap a classic Moore-era Bond villain in a liberal agenda item: climate change and the futility of the war on drugs, respectively. They satirise both sides of the situation, and while both have numerous flaws and missteps, they have a kinetic energy that blows past these flaws sufficiently hard and fast that the bumps don’t ruin the ride. The King’s Man on the other hand fails to find a really suitable satiric target, though I think it was aiming at Colonial Imperialism, that notoriously hard target for criticism and which didn’t spawn any real-life villains at all. The idea that a SPECTRE-like organisation lurks behind the greatest waste of life in the modern era is something that’s been gently and successfully probed before, such as by A Game of Shadows, but here it’s a blunt instrument. And yet, there are flourishes of brilliance in individual sequences and the commitment to their parts by the lead cast paper over many of the story’s cracks.
Perhaps neither of these very bad movies deserves a 1-star kicking. The sound was audible, the shots were in focus, there was an obvious continuity, but it wasn’t the most auspicious start to the year. Indeed, this year has had a higher proportion of moves I really disliked than usual. I could debate in the comments, but I really disliked all of the following: The 355, The Contractor, Incredible but True, Thor: Love and Thunder, The Humans, Amsterdam, Resurrection, All the Old Knives, and Three-thousand Years of Longing. Although none of these made me as angry as previous one-star tirades, they were all bad films.
The first good movie I saw was Nightmare Alley. I thought it was really a terrific confidence story, where you could never really be quite sure who was the mark and who the artist. What didn’t work for me was the coda at the end, where a character clearly adept at doing whatever it takes to survive and with numerous skills buys into a very tragic ending. That felt like a Hayes-code hangover of ensuring that some measure of justice is meted out to the wicked, and felt totally disconnected from the rest of the film to me. I was surprised at the negative reviews it received in some quarters. Robin Laws panned it with a one-star review, “[s]hifting from the moral and psychological spiral of the ‘47 version to a fairy tale about ignoring warnings, del Toro stands back in judgment of his protagonist and bids the audience to do the same. When a remake is more obvious than its predecessor, it shouldn’t also be longer.” I can’t disagree with those statements; the film clearly recognises that the protagonist is a “bad man” and it is long. That missing psychological aspect was probably the bit I needed – I’ll get around to seeing the original any time now.
My feelings are at least as mixed on the other break-out smash-hit 5-star all-time classic, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. My Letterboxd was filled with fawning adulation of what I thought was a pretty decent film. It felt a bit repetitive to me, and baggy. I loved the invention, and it’s criminal how under-used Michelle Yeoh is most of the time, but I can’t quite bridge the gap to seeing this the way it was generally received.
Sadly, most of my festival picks were similarly mixed – you can read the detail for yourself in previous posts. One film which has stayed with me and I’ve thought about a lot is You Won’t Be Alone. I still can’t quite whole-heartedly endorse it’s meandering structure and slow first act though. Hitchcock said something along the lines that as long as you finish your film on a bang the audience won’t mind too much about the start, and this film falls into that camp pretty solidly I think.
With the bad news and prevatication out of the way, we can get onto the films that have my actual endorsement. As usual, these are in ascending box-office order.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon [$-]
I think a strict critic would omit this from their annual list, because I’m not sure it’s actually available to watch anywhere in the world yet outside festivals. I have a horrible sense it’ll show up soon dumped on a streaming platform where it’ll vanish into obscurity.
Ana Lily Amirpour is a unique film-maker. Her two previous films have both been interesting in part because they eschewed dialogue in favour of showing events unfolding and allowing the audience to draw the inferences. She has a fantastic sense of time and place, so her movies really feel like they’re taking place somewhere real even though her first two films are in categorically fantastic locations. In Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon she has made her most conventional film in a lot of ways – I think there may be as much dialogue in this film as in the previous two combined and it’s set in a recognisably real place. It follows the emergence of a girl who’s been confined to an asylum her whole life as she explores New Orleans, where she meets friends and influences people.
Like her previous two films, this film is anchored by a riveting central performance by a young actress, Jeon Jun-seo, supported by a very strong cast, this time inlcuding a venal yet compelling Kate Hudson as a mercurial ally of sorts and Craig Robinson as the cop dedicated to bringing her back under the control of the system. The way the narrative unfolds isn’t quite as surprising as her previous films, but nonetheless it was satisfyingly unusual.
In addition to all that, the soundtrack was full of absolute bangers. I didn’t give ratings in my Letterboxd to most of the festival films I watched, but I walked out of this one and gave it 5 stars as the pick of the festival.
See How They Run [$21M]
A production of The Moustrap is disrupted by a real murder. Bumbling detective Stoppard [Sam Rockwell] is assigned to investigate, with keen assistance from a new constable [Saoirse Ronan].
This is basically a classic-style whodunit with a veneer of postmodern reference, from the name of the detective onwards (Tom Stoppard wrote The Real Inspector Hound, itself a playful deconstruction of the genre). For me it was like someone just distilled down pure joy into a movie and let me watch it. If you’re new to the genre, maybe this won’t be quite so funny, but I laughed a lot. Plus, what a cast!
Tell you what, I see a bright career ahead for this newcomer Saoirse Ronan – what can’t she do?
The Menu [$63M]
Young couple Tyler [Nicholas Hoult] and Margot [Anya Taylor Joy] go to have dinner at an exclusive restaurant run by Slowick [Ralph Fiennes]. Things begin to unravel a bit as it becomes apparent that the selection of guests is not random, and that Slowick has an ulterior motive.
This would be a very easy film to spoil – even the logline above probably tells you more than you need to know. Where this film triumphs though, is not really in the “narrative” as such, but in the exquisite attention to detail in the production design and the presentation of that narrative. In some ways, this is a very simple story just told extremely well.
As a kind of personal kicker, I think any critic who watches this movie and doesn’t see the worst side of themselves on screen personified by food critic Lillian [Janet McTeer] is kidding themselves.
Bullet Train [$238M]
Ladybug is a bagman in the criminal underworld with the simple task of collecting a briefcase. But the train he’s on is laden with a group of nefarious individuals who have that same goal, and won’t stop at murder to achieve it.
The people who didn’t like this dismissed as derivative “post-Tarantino sub-Ritchie CGI-laden schlock that should have starred Ryan Reynolds that tried to do the fight from From Russia With Love 7 times instead of a telling a story”. Which is exactly what this film is – a light and breezy hyper-violent comedy that riffs on the awkwardness of deadly confinement on a train while characters deliver dialogue intended to be witty and pithy more than realistic. I don’t think any bit of it at all makes any kind of logical sense, and most of what happens strains credulity to the limits. The easy response to this is a bland appeal to how effectively it obviously was for audiences, but that does bely the craft that went into achieving that effect, and I think we can do a bit better than that.
Central to the strategy of the film is in making the central characters very appealing. Brad Pitt can be a very charming screen presence, and he deploys that charm here. It’s not his only mode, and it’s easy to forget how versatile he can be. His telephonic banter with his handler is just the right blend of off-beat and earnest to make it endearing without making it saccharine or uncharacteristic. The rest of the cast works similarly hard on actually delivering the performances this film needed, especially Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as mismatched twins. Could the dialogue have been better? I’m sure the Coens or someone like that could have eeked a bit more out of it, but the complaint that it’s in a style whose heyday was perhaps 20 years ago isn’t really a criticism worth bothering with. Did we complain when the dialogue in Knives Out was reminiscent of the long heritage of Agatha Christie? We did not.
Then there’s the action. I agree that the CGI took the shine off the apple in some sequences, notably when they were outside the train, but the precision and kinetic energy of the fisticuffs inside the train were pitched at just the right level of comic violence. There was a deep chasm on either side of this film – tonally, a truly brutal fight like those from Oldboy or The Raid would have eroded the overall comic tone created by the rest of the script and performances, but if the fights had been Kato versus Clouseau that would equally have been too silly.
Basically, this film walks that narrow bridge between action and comedy that has been such a coveted but missed target zone of late – films like the Hitman’s Bodyguard or The Spy Who Dumped Me tried a bit too hard to be comedies while trying a bit too hard to retain action. All in all, Bullet Train delivered a completely engaging experience and I unambiguously recommend it to fans of light-hearted ultraviolence.
Top Gun: Maverick [$1,440M]
What more is there to say or write about this absolute storming phenomenon? I rewatched the original Top Gun earlier this year and it was fine, but I couldn’t really get invested in any aspect of it. Nostalgia probably drove some small proportion of the early crowds, but then word-of-mouth started to build and at a guess most of the people who went to see this did so without any deep love of the original.
This is a very critic-confrontational film, because I think in the early part of the film it really sets out its terms and tells you exactly what it’s going to do. It almost dares you to be jaded about the plot that you’re about to see, and then it goes through and just so perfectly nails every second of time on the screen that you forget all about that and get on board.
Without a doubt in my mind, this was the best film I watched in 2022.
My One Contribution To The Internet 