THE SCREEN-SPACE BEST FILMS OF 2022

As I read through the final draft of this 2022 wrap-up, the year’s most anticipated film has just hit cinemas. Avatar: The Way of Water needs to land with a big splash, and not just for the Disney/Fox merger, who have billions riding on James Cameron’s eco-epic. The entire industry is desperate for a four-quadrant global hit.

Mid-budgeted horror has helped keep theatre doors open this year - Scream, Smile, Barbarian, Halloween Ends, The Black Phone, X and Pearl all performed to or above projections. But adult-skewing prestige pics underperformed (Don’t Worry Darling; The Fabelmans; Tar) or outright bombed (Bros; She Said; Amsterdam). Cash-cow properties stiffed (Pixar’s pricey Lightyear) or petered out (D.C.’s Black Adam; M.C.’s Black Panther Wakanda Forever); niche audiences grew increasingly tough to impress (festival faves EO, Aftersun and Neptune Frost found little traction). So, Avatar: The Way of Water could not arrive at a better time (yes, I have seen it; no, it’s not amongst my year’s best; yes, it’ll be huge).

My Top 10 suggests great movies are still being made for theatres; three were streaming premieres, though came to home viewing platforms via festival acquisitions or reworked distribution agendas. As long as global filmmakers strive for originality of vision, there is hope that big screen audiences (thought to have become overly attuned to home viewing through the pandemic) will return. Let's count 'em down... 

10. DON’T WORRY DARLING (Dir: Olivia Wilde | Stars: Florence Pugh, Chris Pine, Harry Styles | U.S. | 123 mins) The most daring studio-backed feature of the year, Olivia Wilde’s sophomore directorial effort offered a confounding, compelling mix of metaphorical fantasy, gender conflict and dazzling starpower. Some critics called it ‘overly ambitious’, which sounds like a compliment to me; Pugh is being ignored as the award season fires up, which I find bewildering.

9. SHE SAID (Dir: Maria Schrader | Stars: Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan, Patricia Clarkson | U.S. | 129 mins) An instant entry into the list of great films about the integrity and drive of investigative journalism, German director Maria Schrader, making her U.S. feature debut, and stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan capture the incrementally small but sociologically seismic emergence of the Weinstein abuse and subsequent #MeToo movement.

8. CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH (Dir: Cooper Raiff | Stars Cooper Raif, Dakota Johnson, Evan Assante | U.S. | 107 mins) In the wake of 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine came a wave of ‘feelgood Sundance’ films that gave the sub-genre a bad name. Thanks to multi-hyphenate Cooper Raiff’s deceptively rich and adorably cheerful Cha Cha Real Smooth, the ‘meaningful friendship’ comedy/drama is back; the chemistry he shares with Dakota Johnson makes for 2022’s sweetest cinematic confection.

7. THE NIGHT OF THE 12th (La nuit du 12 | Dir: Dominik Moll | Stars: Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Lula Cotton-Frapier | France | 115 mins) Based on a shocking thrill-kill that remains unsolved, Dominik Moll’s drama hides a study in alpha-male dynamics and the fragility of self-belief within a traditional police procedural. As the head investigator whose inability to crack the case becomes a soulful burden, Bastien Bouillon provides a great study in anxiety and fractured ego.

6. LYNCH/OZ (Dir: Alexandre O. Philippe | Stars: Rodney Ascher, Karyn Kusama, Justin Benson | U.S. | 108 mins) The latest in his series of deconstructionist deep-dives into  filmmaking, Alexandre O. Philippe (Doc of The Dead; 78/52; Leap of Faith) explores the influence of The Wizard of Oz on the work of David Lynch. Doesn’t skimp of the strangeness of Lynch’s interpretation and reworking of the fantasy classic, but also acknowledges how the sweetness and base values have inspired cinema’s oddest auteur.

5. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (Dir: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Schienert | Stars: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis | U.S. | 139 mins) This year’s little-film-that-could, The Daniel’s dazzling multidimensional flight of fantasy proved a revelation for audiences timidly venturing back into cinemas after 18 months on their couches. A mash-up of Matrix-style visionary inventiveness, a Rubiks Cube-like narrative unpacked with clarity and conviction and performances from a trio of mature-age performers who know they may have been handed the roles of their careers.

4. TOP GUN: MAVERICK (Dir: Joseph Kosinski | Stars: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly | U.S. | 130 mins) Already dubbed ‘The Film That Saved 2022’, the sequel none of us knew we needed emerged as the pop-culture film event of the year. As the last true movie star on the planet, Tom Cruise played the ‘ageing hero’ card to perfection, his mere presence providing the perfect bridge between the nostalgic bravado of the late Tony Scott’s 1986 original with the clean-cut, chiselled millennial ambitions of Joseph Kosinski’s squadron of new top guns. Most importantly, it demanded to be seen on the big screen; those fully immersive flying sequences brought the patrons back in droves. 

3. HELLO DANKNESS (Dir: Soda Jerk | Australia) The Adelaide Film Festival, in conjunction with the Samstag Museum gallery space, commissioned a new work from those maestros of montage, Soda Jerk, whose Terror Nullius rocked everyone’s world in 2018. The result is the mini-feature Hello Dankness, a satirically savage recutting of hundreds of film, TV and multimedia sources to reflect upon the madness that was American politics, 2016-2021. Take your pick of its virtues - an enormously ambitious art installation; a surreal perception of U.S. democracy in downfall; the laugh-out-loud funniest film comedy of the year. The Germans get it; Hello Dankness is Berlinale bound in 2023.

2. BLONDE (Dir: Andrew Dominik | Stars: Ana de Armas, Bobby Carnavale, Adrien Brody | U.S. | 167 mins) I get that those who adore what Marilyn Monroe has come to represent in our culture don’t want to see her as a victim of systemic and cyclical abuse; that Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carroll Oates’ fictionalized account of Monroe’s journey was, in some eyes, exploitative and unnecessarily brutal. But if any figure in pop culture can, even should, embody the misogynistic horrors of a Hollywood that grinds young, spirited artists into the ground, ought it not be the most famous starlet ever? Dominik’s direction is artistically fearless and technically profound; as Marilyn, Ana de Armas enters the upper-tier of film acting talent.

1. PREY (Dir: Dan Trachtenberg | Stars: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro | U.S. | 100 mins) “Seriously?”, I hear you ask. The umpteenth reboot of action cinema’s most defiantly troublesome franchise is your best film of the year? Dan Trachtenberg tears all the rotten residual meat off the Predator series bones and pares it back to the smashing survival thriller/monster movie premise that made John McTiernan’s 1987 original a brawny classic. That he also launched the best action heroine since Ripley in Amber Midthunder’s Naru and provided a Comanche language version of the film on the Hulu/Disney+ platforms only makes this commitment to the spirit of the source material every bit as breathtaking as Arnie’s original.   

THE NEXT TEN: 

SISSY (Dir: Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes | Stars: Aisha Dee, Hannah Barlow, Emily De Margheriti | Australia | 102 mins)

SMILE (Dir: Parker Finn | Stars: Sosie Bacon, Jesse T. Usher, Kyle Gallner | U.S. | 115 mins)

HATCHING (Pahanhautoja | Dir:  Hanna Bergholm | Stars: Siiri Solalinna, Sophia Heikkilä, Jani Volanen | Finland, Sweden | 91 mins)

SELENA GOMEZ MY MIND & ME (Dir: Alek Keshishian | Stars: Selena Gomez | U.S. | 95 mins)

X (Dir: Ti West | Stars: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson | U.S. | 105 mins)

YOU WON’T BE ALONE (Dir: Goran Stolevski | Stars: Noomi Rapace, Alice Englert, Carloto Cotta | Australia, United Kingdom, Serbia | 108 mins)

THE BATMAN (Dir: Matt Reeves | Stars: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Colin Farrell | U.S. | 176 mins)

MILLIE LIES LOW (Dir: Michelle Savill | Stars: Ana Scotney, JIllian Nguyen, Chris Alosio | New Zealand | 100 mins)

BARBARIAN (Dir: Zach Cregger | Stars: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long | U.S. | 102 mins)

DISTANT THUNDER (Dir: Takayuki Ohashi | Stars: Tomomi Fukikoshi, Akari Takaishi, Miharu Tanaka | Japan | 151 mins)

NOW CHECK OUT OUR WORST FILMS OF 2022 HERE.