An Overview of 2022: Movies I Watched and My Top 10
- Glendon Frank
- Jan 28, 2023
- 23 min read
It’s now 2023 – which means we survived!
We lived through another year, and so did the theatrical experience. After a dicey few years, 2022 set out to prove that the cinema was where it was at. Sure, Dune swept the world by dust storm and theatres worldwide sold out for No Way Home, but in a year where Marvel releases seemed to lose their luster, the rest of the world was putting out one huge release after the other. One review for Damien Chazelle’s divisive ode to the silent film era Babylon commented that it felt like Chazelle thought he was making the last movie ever made, and in that respect, 2022 seemed to think it would be the last year of movies. Everything Everywhere All At Once, a maximalist celebration of hope within nihilism, found a near-universal level of appeal. Baz Luhrmann came back with his own brand of maximalism and made Austin Butler a star through Elvis, a truly wild film. Top Gun: Maverick came out as a borderline perfect action film, the sort of blockbuster we used to get on the regular, but one that feels like a revelation in today’s film climate. Similarly, the Indian action spectacle RRR wow’d all who saw it, presenting a new kind of surrealist fantasy superhero film. And if that all weren’t enough, our boy Jimmy Cameron returned from his hiatus to prove why some things need to be seen on the biggest screen possible with the absolutely dazzling Avatar: Way of Water. It may have started slow, but it’s truly been a wild year for film.
There are a lot of things I’ve been wanting to write – about Andor, about Avatar, and so on, and maybe we’ll get there! But let’s kick off the year with maybe the most blog-like entry I’ll ever write here: a reflection on what I’ve been watching and any other fun new things of 2022. This became way longer than it has any right to be (consider it me making up for not writing anything in December) so I’m going to structure this as much as possible: I’ll start by talking about my year in film broadly before getting to the Top 10 of 2022 at the end. Feel free to skip to the Top 10 if that's all you're interested in! But I felt the need to expand on everything because I have to make caveats for the many films I’ve yet to see at all – I’ve still yet to catch Triangle of Sadness or RRR as mentioned above, as well as big Oscar contenders Decision to Leave and Aftersun (future Glendon here, I’ll be appearing a bit. Uh, Decision to Leave got zero nominations?? I am baffled). I’m torn on whether I’ll actually watch The Whale at all, despite my excitement for Brandon Fraser’s return and how weirdly fascinating Aronofsky’s whole filmography is. Mia Goth got a lot of hubbub for her performances in X and Pearl but neither film really jumped out to me so I never wound up catching them, and I actively avoided Don’t Worry Darling despite my love for Florence Pugh and Chris Pine. Sorry, but nothing I’ve heard of the movie makes it sound worth it. I was also very excited for Three Thousand Years of Longing and have heard incredible things about The Woman King but never got out to see either, and The Northman and Bones and All are supposed to be good but I will maybe catch them later down the line. Oh, and worth noting that I’m desperately behind on TV, so don’t expect any White Lotus or anything here.
I did catch up on a whole lot of other movies, though. I spent a significant chunk of the year with little else to do and wound up filling out a chunk of my backlog, so I wanted to talk about some cool first watches I don’t really see myself getting to in an article any time soon. I spent the first couple months of 2022 getting caught up on that Oscar cycle, but in the midst of that finally started Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, featuring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke walking through European cities and reflecting on life, love, and loss. Just gorgeous, gorgeous, meditative movies. I’ve been spacing them out because the movies all take place several years apart, but I will be finishing up with Before Midnight soon and I’m very excited and nervous. On a similar note, I watched Frances Ha recently and immediately fell in love. Take Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie I adore, but cast Greta Gerwig instead of Oscar Isaac and have Noah Baumbach direct the thing. A winning recipe – every movie should be about a depressed New York artist who has to crash with Adam Driver. It’s perhaps the only movie that I immediately watched again from the beginning, just to keep sitting in its atmosphere. Gerwig plays a deeply awkward woman in her mid-20s, not sure what to make of her life, and still figuring out what being an adult means. These are my favourite movies right now. Send them all to me.
Kind of by complete accident this became my David Fincher year, as I jumped from only having seen Social Network to watching most of his filmography, to the point where Letterboxd listed him as my most-watched director of the year. I don’t really know what I think about Fincher? He’s definitely brilliant but a lot of his movies leave me cold, especially ones like Zodiac and Se7en that are mostly about good, decent people getting slowly sucked into the case. It’s when he really digs into the dirt and grime of humanity that Fincher excels. Fight Club might just be the dirtiest movie I’ve ever seen and is a scarily prescient exploration of the way male entitlement leads to extremism. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is also a pretty grimy flick, cast in this deeply emotive atmosphere that makes it hard not to love, paired with Fincher basically apologizing to Rooney Mara’s Social Network role by giving her one of the coolest characters ever. The last Fincher I watched was Gone Girl, and it might be his opus? Just an incredibly slimy movie with two absolutely awful people playing chess against each other. A delight!
I also filled out a few other filmmakers' filmographies! I’m slowly working my way through the Coen Brothers, and caught Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Are Thou? this year – all delightfully off-beat comedies in a way only the Coens can pull off. Watching Banshees of Inisherin put me on the Martin McDonogh train, so I caught In Bruges before it left streaming ad it really caught me off-guard. McDonogh is also kind of doing a Coen thing: off-beat comedy that gives way to the sad truths of human life. The ending got to me, man. In Bruges is only as funny as it is soul-crushing, and the vulnerability that Colin Farrell portrays is so gripping. But we’ll talk more about that in a moment. On another note, I finally got to Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman! Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one the most delicate and gorgeous movies maybe ever and Petite Maman is a fantastic successor. It’s hard to even describe it without giving away the magic trick of it, but suffice it to say that Sciamma makes another deeply sensitive and joyous film, this one a celebration of childhood and a reflection on growing up. Swinging back on the emotional spectrum, I watched Incendies to finish up all my English Denis Villeneuve films, and what a harrowing movie. Did you think Prisoners was a lot? Or Sicario? Incendies is all that and more, but Villeneuve is a master. Love that French-Canadian man. Oh, and I’m slowly continuing the Paul Thomas Anderson journey with There Will Be Blood, a truly stunning film. I don’t know how Paul Dano wasn’t my most-watched actor this year because I feel like I watched so much Paul Dano. He’s so good!
A few final stand-outs from the year. I finally watched Citizen Kane, which I don’t have a lot to say about because everything that could be said about Citizen Kane has already been said, I just think it’s fascinating that the single most influential American movie ever made is principally about how the capitalistic vision of Americana is a hollow lie. It’s a shame we never learned from that. Speaking of stone-cold classics, I watched Michael Mann’s Heat, and now want to go through Mann’s entire cinematography. It’s wild to watch something like Heat that has been so influential for so many of my favourite directors – especially Christopher Nolan, who made almost a shot-for-shot remake in certain scenes of The Dark Knight. Mann’s films, much like Citizen Kane, expose a core lie at the heart of Americana. Pacino and De Niro play working professionals, experts in their respective businesses (Pacino as a detective and De Niro as a master thief) but for all of their expertise, their lives are still in chaos, they still strive for something more. What’s more, Mann strikes this balance between gritty realism and an almost dream-like sense of fantasy. It’s a stylistic, idealized vision of a very real world. Speaking of, uh, stylized, maybe the weirdest and wildest movie I watched this year was Titane, which is saying something because this is also a year in which I watched Swiss Army Man. I don’t know if I have any thoughts other than wow I love movies and I haven’t been able to get Titane quite out of my head. In what other medium can you start with a serial killer woman getting impregnated by a car and end as a touching found-family movie about her bonding with a firefighter still grieving his son. It’s an insane movie. But that’s film, baby. On the total other end of the spectrum, I wanted to spotlight Room, which is heart-achingly complex and beautiful and damn do I wish people would stop ganging up on Brie Larson and give her more roles like this. I watched Princess Cyd with a friend, and I love a delightful coming-of-age movie, especially one where English majors host fun soirees. I’d heard nothing about this movie before but more people should check it out. I also, just ending on a note of how much I have to overanalyze everything, watched Easy A, one of the last great Mean Girls-styled Teen Comedies, and somehow came out of it thinking of themes of self-sacrifice, apotheosis, and resurrection. That’s what I get for watching it Easter Weekend, I guess.
Anyways, y’all came for some rankings so let’s get down and dirty and talk about the movies that came out in 2022! But before we get into the Top 10, some honorable mentions!
This was a very cool year for animation, and no movie exemplifies this better than Pinocchio (2022). No, not Pinocchio (2022) (the one with Pauly Shore) and certainly not Pinocchio (2022) (the weird Zemeckis project released by Disney) but Pinocchio (2022) (the one directed by Guillermo Del Toro). In a year filled with Pinocchio adaptions, Del Toro’s release stands apart for the sheer love and care put into it. His stop-motion sensibilities draw attention to the handcrafted nature of Pinocchio, and Del Toro explores the questions of humanity inherent in the story by setting it against the rise of fascism in Italy, where a puppet becomes the perfect soldier. It’s macabre and heartfelt and truly a breath of fresh air for this character. Another breath of fresh air was Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the movie that motivated me through the pandemic. It very nearly broke my top ten, but it hasn’t quite stuck with me the way I hoped it would – still, Reeves paints a fun, gothic atmosphere for his Batman, and Pattinson is perfect in this world. I’m really excited to see what his sequel will look like. Prey also freshened up the Predator franchise with a cool new angle that I hope takes off – putting the Predator into a completely new time period ought to feel cliched, but it’s actually very fun and winds up being thematically resonant. Kimi is also pretty thematically resonant, as one of the few movies I’ve seen that was made, released, and takes place during the pandemic. Steven Soderbergh, director of the Ocean’s trilogy, puts together a tight little thriller starring Zoe Kravitz and a fight scene to the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” Every movie with “Sabotage” in it is good. Another movie that was in the top 10 for a while was The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh. I was truly stunned by it when it first came out, and the complex way that it approached religion, but it didn’t really stay with me in the way I was expecting it to. I truly thought it was going to be Netflix’s award-season push… it’s still very good and I recommend checking it out! And I’d be remiss to exclude The Menu, a movie that I broadly thought was a good fun time, but was enhanced by watching it with my good friend who assumed it was going to be Ratatouille-like in tone. Suffice it to say, it is not.
Now, without further ado, the top 10.
10. Avatar: The Way of Water – James Cameron
We never bet against James Cameron in this household. I never really invested in the first movie when it came out; I was too young to get the unique theatre experience it was offering, and I think I only watched it in segments on TV, missing the whole magic and wonder of it. Rewatching it in 2022, it’s stunning how much the original Avatar holds up – a blockbuster with genuine stakes and some real emotional heft to it. The Way of Water follows up on all of these strengths, building a genuine mythos out of Pandora. Cameron toes just the right line between goofy and earnest, resulting in long sentimental sequences of bonding with whales that could come off as exhausting, but in contrast, feels genuinely earned. And then all the investment he’s been instilling pays off in one of the crunchiest third acts I’ve seen in years. He just gets how to do these big action finales in a way that most don’t anymore. As much as I enjoy Marvel, most of those climaxes can best be described as “and then they all fight,” here everyone has clear arcs and emotional heft going into the action and everything is pay off. It’s so good. And a giant whale shows up to fight people. Way of Water rules and I will easily go see four more of these.
9. Top Gun: Maverick – Joseph Kosinski
Oh boy, speaking of crunchy action. Unlike Avatar, I really don’t love the first Top Gun. It’s fine but has the same issues as a lot of younger Tom Cruise movies, where he just kind of comes off as a conceited blowhard that the movie world bizarrely loves. Maverick, however, plays into all the strengths of older Cruise movies. Now it feels like he has something to lose, he’s the old relic having to prove why the analog is better than the new digital. This is the thrust behind all the recent Mission: Impossible films and the Cruise/McQuarrie team-up continues to prove amazing. Maverick just works in a way the original Top Gun never quite did, everything just fits together. It features Cruise, McQuarrie, and Kosinksi basically recreating the trench run from A New Hope, and it is a veritable thrill ride. And then the movie just gets better from there. I only wound up getting out to see this once in theatres, but it was still one of my most memorable theatrical experiences of the year. It’s just good, I don’t know what to say.
8. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once – Daniels Kwan & Scheinert
Maximalism is in, baby. EEAaO is the indie A24 flick that swept the world by storm. In another universe, this probably sits higher on my list, but I think the sheer overexposure this has had at this point has brought it down. Like, yeah, it’s a really good movie – but when people are yelling at critics for not having it in their top ten, that’s when I have problems with people. We’re approaching the level of discourse that made even most people who like The Last Jedi say, “okay can we please stop talking about this movie.” I will still talk about The Last Jedi at the drop of a hat, but I’m about ready to stop hearing people both needlessly complain and over-eagerly praise this one. It’s a little messy and pretty sweaty, but that’s what’s delightful about it! It’s an imperfect celebration of imperfection, about the potential that lies within missed opportunity. It’s also about intergenerational trauma, and the sweeping power of love in a world of apathy, it’s about how nothing matters, it’s about how everything matters. Everything, everywhere, matters to everything. It’s truly a movie that covers so many bases, that resonates on so many different levels, that I think you have to kind of be actively trying in order to not connect with it. This is a really strong fighter in the Best Picture category, and while I think that will ultimately hurt this movie’s reputation, there’s not a lot of arguing that this is one of the most ambitious and creative movies to come out in 2022. If anything from this year is creating a vision to pave the way forward, it might be this one.
7. Glass Onion – Rian Johnson
I don’t know where to put this one – it’s here more by personal bias than anything, after all, by virtue of my watching it three times in the week that it was in theatres. Glass Onion proves that Johnson has a real winner of a formula on his hands while tapping into the modern crises with ease. There is an undercurrent of anger within both Knives Out and Glass Onion, a rage against the societal elite who, in their ignorance and apathy, make the world worse for those around them. Johnson’s central figure, Benoit Blanc, stands as an empathetic figure listening to the pain of others and creating space for them to act against the systems that have chained them, no matter how dramatic that action may be. The real twist in the formula of these movies is that instead of looking for the murderer, they have us looking for the true victim, and listening to their stories. I don’t think Glass Onion is quite as polished as Knives Out is, but the sheer potential here excites me a lot and makes it one of the 2022 movies that excites me the most. That said, as much as I love the conversations Glass Onion is having, and I do think it’s a riot from beginning to end, I don’t know if it’s realistically worthy of being put about some of the other pictures here. A few notes: Janelle Monae absolutely owns this movie. I love that Rian Johnson is using this franchise to elevate rising actors. I was listening to an older podcast the other day that lamented that Monae hadn’t yet been given her chance to really dominate with a performance, and I’m so glad that Glass Onion got to be that chance.
6. The Banshees of Inisherin – Martin McDonough
I’d heard a lot of good things about In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, but had never realized that they were tied together by one director. Like I said above, McDonough is sort of an Irish Coen brother, and Colin Farrell is his George Clooney – a charismatic leading man made into a comedic force. But there’s even more bite in the comedy here than there is in say, Burn After Reading. While the comedy of the Coens lies in a sort of dejected nihilism, here there’s a profound sadness behind it. Banshees of Inisherin depicts the implosion of a friendship, one person suddenly standing up and saying, “no, this is over, actually.” It’s about unpacking the sort of tense fight-or-flight reactions that come out of such a sudden breakdown in communications, the decision to either let the thing die without any effort or to stand up and push back and risk breaking things even worse. What if inaction hurts people but action turns us into monsters? And what if it all ends in ashes anyways? People crumble under these sorts of circumstances, and watching the idealism in Farrell’s character slowly die is a soul-aching thing. Banshees is a quietly profound movie, and having it only at number 6 downright feels like a disservice except for how damn good everything else on this list is. What a year for movies.
5. Babylon – Damien Chazelle
There’s been a lot of movies this year about the art of movie-making, about the myth of art, the making of myth, and the way movies become mythic in and of themselves. Dead in the center of this conversation is Babylon, the raucous 3-hour epic that has been completely rejected by critics. It absolutely bombed in theatres, not even making back its bloated budget. Time will only tell what this means for Chazelle’s career, but I suspect Babylon will get a cultural revival down the line. It’s true, Babylon is a lot to take in – the first thirty minutes consist of one extended orgiastic Hollywood party filled with sweat and fluids, and the movie just gets more insane from there. Chazelle paints the death of the silent film era as the explosive final act of a lost art, one replaced by a stricter, more sterile Hollywood. While the late 20’s silent era is presented as downright hedonistic, it’s also a time when everyone was welcome at the table, regardless of race or gender. As the talkies take hold, however, and the Hay’s Code comes to dominate life, suddenly everyone must either adapt or die to fit into the boxes of the white Western capitalist grind. Suddenly, the wild insane parties of the first hour feel like a nostalgic lost art… until Toby McGuire shows up in the final hour saying, “yeah, the good ol’ times were better, weren’t they?” and takes the audience on a one-way express elevator to hell. Maybe, we realize, some of the rules are good, actually.
What I love about the “movies about movies” from this year is that none of them are quite as celebratory as you might be led to believe. Babylon loves movies but detests the corporate greed of Hollywood, the scheming, and the way it chews up and spits out the hardworking crews behind every production. Death is a fact of life in Babylon, you never know who might die on set next. But these figures get emblazoned into legend by the works that stand the test of time. Movies mean something, they are transitive and transformative and bring the viewer into another world where life can be re-examined. In the end, the insanity behind these pieces of art falls away and leaves a tapestry of wonder. After a few years where the state of moviegoing has been a genuine question, Babylon assures that everyone has always felt that the movies might die at any moment and that maybe the art of film is a constant state of death and rebirth, something new rising out of the ashes of the old.
Maybe this one deserves its own article someday, I don’t know. But it really stuck with me.
4. Women Talking – Sarah Polley
Is it fair to put a movie I just watched in fourth place for the year? When it’s this good – yeah, yeah it is.
It’s borderline passe to call a movie like this “important,” but dammit we keep having to have these conversations and things keep not changing. It’s especially exhausting to see some religious circles be fifty years behind in the conversation. I’m sorry but we cannot keep relitigating the, “hmm, should women have rights actually?” conversation in churches while the rest of the world is already having other conversations of equal gravity. Women Talking narrows in on that frustration, of all the rage and anger that bubbles out when the people allowed at the table simply aren’t listening. Only about thirty minutes or so does the movie reveal that it’s set in 2010 and not the 90s. We’re still having to have these conversations, and it’s killing people. The longer we wait to give people equal access to their humanity, the more it will kill people. This isn’t a question of politics. It’s life and death. This is the anger, the cry for justice, that Women Talking taps into. The cry that says “please, for the love of God, see us.”
Perhaps the most shocking thing about this script is that it refuses to paint clean sides. Women Talking is set in a Mennonite community torn apart by rampant sexual assault that has been entirely dismissed by the (male) leaders of the community. The women are now deciding what their next line of action is – do they stay and fight in this community that has rejected them, or do they give up and leave the world that has always been their home? Not only does the film refuse to draw a clean “good” and “bad” among those lines, it even refuses to fully villainize the men in the community. There’s an awareness that behaviour is learned – on both sides – and the only way to properly untangle the abusive power dynamics is a total re-education. This hesitancy to carve such an emotionally fraught subject into clear blacks and whites leads to a script that camps itself in a complex, messy sense of vulnerability. There are nothing but hard questions and no such thing as easy answers. And all these actors are killing it – Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy are all professionals who have been around the block, but all of them are presenting career-best performances here. Women Talking is structurally straightforward, but the soul-aching resonance here leads to a truly memorable and gripping drama.
Anyways, I’m writing this the night before the Oscars list comes out, and if this doesn’t get a Best Picture nom I will be furious (future Glendon here – we got Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay! We’d better win the latter. Sorry, Glass Onion).
3. TÁR – Todd Fields
Where is the separation between art and artist? This has become an ever-present conversation as the internet has become fixated on authorship. More and more we’re seeing public figures self-immolate in the public eye, leaving their beloved audiences wondering how to engage with the works they’ve left behind. Enter Lydia Tár, played to perfection by Cate Blanchett. She is an EGOT-winning conductor, renowned around the world, and about to present her climactic vision of Mahler’s 5th. Tár is charismatic and compelling, a magnetic force dominating the stage. Everyone gathers to ask – who is she? What is she about? And the audience is in with the characters, trying to peak through the layers and walls that Tár has built up. But over time, a long, buried history catches up to Tár and begins to drag her from the heights she’s climbed to. Contradictions begin to build up, and the audience is left back at the beginning: who is Tár? Was all of this a lie? And what does this mean for the towering legacy of work that she has left behind?
Perhaps the master stroke in the blending between art and artist, artifice and reality, is the fact that there is no Lydia Tár. There are a few ways to interpret that, but chiefly is the fact that you’d be forgiven for thinking this movie is a biopic when it’s actually a fiction about an invented character. There is something about Blanchett’s performance that is so deeply transfixing, there are so many different aspects at play that transform your perception of her at any time. She is captivating, and yet also a deeply problematic person whose entire career is probably built off of exploitation and manipulation. But her work is undeniably genius… right? The best thing about TÁR, the reason I have it so high on this list, is it’s constantly avoiding the clear answers. It’s just slippery enough that you need to keep mulling it over, to keep thinking and talking about it. One of the first scenes is a huge long-take where Tár is set against a grad student, the former critiquing the latter’s willingness to through out old artists for their bigotry. And while one may is initially tempted to see her point, as the movie progresses you’re left wondering if anything can be that black-and-white, and the domineering way she dealt with the student leaves you increasingly uncomfortable, and everything is drawn into this ongoing conversation about the virtue of nuance and how context, perspective, and bias will shape your vision of everything. TÁR is a towering work and is one of my personal Best Picture frontrunners.
2. The Fabelmans – Steven Spielberg
Ah, my other Best Picture frontrunner.
This one has slowly crept up my list by just how much I keep thinking about it. Spielberg’s West Side Story dazzled me last year – obviously, Steve is one of the best to ever do it, but it’s always wild to see his control over his craft. Lighting, blocking, framing, the works, West Side Story was a marvel – and The Fabelmans is no different. As Spielberg’s quasi-autobiography, it would be tempting to assume that Fabelmans is a “celebration of movies” sort of film; this would be missing the point. Because while it reimagines Spielberg’s path to becoming a filmmaker, that love of directing is set within a family tragedy as Steve recounts the events that led to his parents’ divorce. His strained relationship with his parents has cast a large shadow over his filmography, present all over E.T., The Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and so on, but here the catastrophic events are framed through Spielberg’s own obsessive need to control the narrative, to tell the best story. More than a heavenly gift, art and movie-making come off as mythic beasts we can only hope to conquer, ones that have their way with us more often than not. Art is powerful and transcendent, as fierce and uncontrollable as it is beautiful, transforming us for better and for worse. As much as The Fabelmans is a cute coming-of-age story of a young man discovering his love for film, it’s also a family tragedy, and Spielberg maintains such a powerful control over these two disparate tones to create a deeply captivating image of art.
Between this and Babylon, 2022 has really captured this unique idea of art as an exterior, almost alien force. Sammy Fabelman is a true-blue artist, he has it in his blood, an instinct for framing and emotional weight. But he doesn’t understand any of it, it just sort of flows through him, creating stunning images he never meant to portray, and that wind up putting him in increasingly worse trouble. He’s doing everything on a whim and creating beautiful art but it’s eating him alive. Yet as much as he has his mom’s artistry, he also has his dad’s engineering knack, and you can see this impulse to shut down the emotional chaos of his life to laser in on his work. Maybe it’s an escape, maybe it’s therapy. Maybe it’s some movement that continued to drive Steven Spielberg to this day, hence the return to the scene of his parents’ divorce, this time with camera in hand. The meta-joke behind all of this is that Sammy does grow up to tell all of the secrets he promised he would keep, and he’s airing it all on screen for the world to see. Art builds, art destroys – art will have its way, no matter what we want. Because art is ecstatic, it comes from outside of us, and the world will burn if it makes for a beautiful story.
1. Nope – Jordan Peele
“Really?” you say, “Nope is at number one?” “Yes,” I say. “Of course it is.”
No movie demonstrates for me the “return to cinema” vibe of this year more than Nope did. Peele set out to make a Spielberg-like action-adventure epic, merging Jaws with Close Encounters while also pulling from Kubrickian imagery from The Shining and 2001. It is existential horror meets introspective science fiction, placed on an absolute roller coaster ride of dazzling set pieces. Kaluuya, Palmer, and Yeung put in three incredible performances, and it’s a damn shame that none of them are getting the recognition they deserve this awards season. This entire movie has basically been left off the table – it’s not even really being talked about in the technical categories like it ought to be. Everyone somehow forgot about Nope, but I genuinely think this is Jordan Peele’s best outing yet. Because while it is an old-school Hollywood thrill ride, it’s also a stunning critique of the obsession with spectacle that defines our digital age. It’s doing both of the things that the movies in this list all do individually, and it takes an incredible amount of work to be this fun and thematically complex at the same time, not to mention doing it so effortlessly.
Over his three films, Peele’s vision has become increasingly complex and subtle all at once. Get Out is a pitch-perfect screenplay, but there is a sense after watching it a few times that it feels almost excessively plotted. Everything is either set up or pay-off, and there’s not a lot of room made for fleshing out the world or the characters. Moreover, there’s really only one way to read Get Out; its central conversation is very good, but it is not a movie that opens itself for a lot of ongoing conversation. Nope, on the other hand, excels in being both sophisticated and approachable. It’s so many things at the same moment while never being didactic or weighty about it. It’s about using spectacle to cover up trauma, it’s about how storytelling and fame are obsessive, it’s about the exploitation of Black creatives in Hollywood, it’s about the history of animal abuse, and while you could be overwhelmed by all these different conversations, they all feel like they fit together naturally. Down the road, I truly think this is going to be remembered as Peele’s best movie – until, of course, he outdoes it with whatever the next one is.
I was going to leave this write-up here, but then the Oscar nominations came out and Nope got thoroughly snubbed so let me sing its praises just a little bit more. Nope is absolutely my Best Sound winner – listening to this thing in a surround sound theatre was stunning. All of the creature design and sounds add so much to the atmosphere that Peele is building. Best Score? Abels’ John Williams-styled fanfares definitely deserve to be in the conversation. The Cinematography category is absolutely baffling as is, but the exclusion of Nope is glaring; Peele and Hoyte van Hoytema perfected the technology to replicate night photography in broad daylight – not only can you not tell the difference, but the night scenes like gorgeous and crisp as a result. There are movies on the Best Picture list that I would replace with Nope in a heartbeat, but sure, the Academy is hesitant to give respect to horror films. But there’s no way this shouldn’t be in Avatar and Top Gun in the technical categories. Nope is an absolute triumph on every level, and it’s my movie of the year.
That’s 2022! What a crazy year this shaped up to be. I remember coming to the end of 2021 and looking at the upcoming list and not seeing a lot that excited me. Of course, the only movies on this list that I would have had on my radar would have been Nope and Glass Onion. Life is full of surprises. And now we’re well into 2023 – way more into it than I hoped we would be when I started writing this article… several weeks ago. This year promises Dune Part 2, which means Villeneuve is doing his first sequel and I am very nervous about it! There’s a new Wes Anderson in Asteroid City, Indiana Jones 5 is coming out and James Mangold is directing so maybe, just maybe, it’ll be good? Adam Driver is going to fight dinosaurs in 65... there's John Wick 4, Across the Spider-Verse, the conclusion of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, the absolutely legendary double-feature of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie that will change cinema… there’s a new Miyazaki, a new Ari Aster, a new Michael Mann, a new Fincher – it’s a really exciting year. And there are some things happening here at Frankly Speaking that may finally get revealed soon! 2023 is gonna be our year. All of us, collectively! We’re manifesting this now. We’ll just see how well it goes!
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