Best Movies of 2022 - a list of good....and a little bit of bad as well

Cafe Society
1

I don’t want to do a top 10 list, but I will list the 2022 releases I thought were the best and I’ll choose a “best picture” winner, so to speak. I have yet to see Avatar 2 and I’m sure a handful of others, but I’ve seen the majority of movies I was looking forward to this year and here is my list.

Overall Best Movie of 2022:

RRR - This is a combination of the fact that this movie is both fun, funny, I had ZERO expectations for it before it hit Netflix, and I cheered and fist-bumped a few times throughout. My wife and I watched it together the other night(my second time, her first) and while it is overlong in parts, it really does payoff and has some amazing sequences. What a movie! Highly recommended.

The other great movies everyone should see:

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Jackass Forever
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
You Won’t Be Alone
The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft
Men
The Forgiven
Pearl
Satan’s Slaves 2: Communion

Honorable mentions. Close, but not quite in the top heap:

Barbarian
Mr. Harrigan’s Phone
Smile
Hatching
Thor: Love and Thunder
Banshees of Inisherin <–good, but disappointing!

With 12 days left in 2022, it looks like I saw 70 movies released in 2022.

Worst movies of the year. The real stinker:

The Gray Man <–worst 2022 release I saw

and

Black Adam
Bodies Bodies Bodies
Nope <–shocking to some, but I was bored

2

Thanks for starting this thread. I waited until the end of the year to reply, because a lot of the most interesting movies of the year wait until the end of the year to do a qualifying release…

I saw 136 movies in theaters in 2022. Some had actually been released in 2021, so I’m guessing I saw about 125-130 2022 releases.

My “best of” (whatever that means for such subjective judgement) list is:

Fiction:
The Pink Cloud
After Yang
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Petite Maman
Official Competition
RRR
Waiting for Bojangles
Emily the Criminal
Decision to Leave
TÁR
Aftersun
The Fabelmans
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Bones and All
One Fine Morning
The Quiet Girl
Living
Women Talking
Broker

Documentaries:
The Torch
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song
Fire of Love
Nothing Compares
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

And some that just missed, or weren’t exactly great, but were just plain fun (for a very broad definition of fun):
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
My Donkey, My Lover & I
Alienoid
Montana Story
The Worst Person In The World
The Northman
Operation Mincemeat
Thor: Love and Thunder
Nope
Bullet Train
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies
See How They Run
Triangle of Sadness
Amsterdam
Avatar: The Way of Water
Babylon

Movies not mentioned yet with extraordinary performances in a not-great (but not necessarily bad) movie:
The Outfit (Mark Rylance)
A Love Song (Dale Dickey)
Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul (Regina Hall)
The Woman King (Viola Davis)
Causeway (Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry}
The Menu (Anya Taylor-Joy)
Empire of Light (Olivia Colman)
The Whale (Brendan Fraser)
Corsage (Vicky Krieps)

And the envelope goes to (if I were the only voter) - Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once (though The Fabelmans is more likely), Best Documentary: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Best Animated Feature: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Best Foreign Language Film: Decision to Leave

Worst Movie of The Year: The King’s Daughter

Final note: I see a lot of movies, but I select them fairly carefully based on reviews and my own personal biases, so of the 136 movies I saw last year, I disliked only about half a dozen.

3

Wow, you saw that? I avoided that one. My worst was The Gray Man, which I figured would be at least OK, but was embarrassing.

4

Did you see You Won’t Be Alone?

I should also point out that I only saw Werner Herzog’s documentary on the Kraffts and their obsession/love for volcanoes, but I heard positive things about Fire of Love, though. I can’t convince myself anything could be better than Herzog’s on the topic, though.

5

The Gray Man is nowhere near the top or even the middle of my list, but I took it for what it was, a wildly miscast Jason Statham movie. I quite liked the super assassin sent after the hero, though.

The one genre I tend to avoid is horror. I just don’t like the roller coaster effect (build suspense, then swoop with scare, repeat) or most body-horror or the subset that is often described as “torture porn”. Plus, I’m a wimp. :wink:

You should watch Fire of Love. I went in with low expectations and came out thinking it was one of the best pictures of the year. I hadn’t heard about the Herzog movie.

6

I love threads like this. I thought I was a pretty avid movie-hound but I’m surprised at how many of the recommended ones I haven’t seen yet. I’ll post my own list later but I want to get caught up on some of the best ones that I missed. Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the ones I still haven’t gotten around to.

7

I have to say, you should give You Won’t Be Alone a shot. It was really great and despite Wikipedia indeed listing it as a horror movie, I found it to be more of an exploration of human nature.

8

I’ll consider giving it a shot. One of the disadvantages of my location is that there’s a dry spell in January while the rest of the country sees major release I’ve already seen in qualifying runs, so I usually have a theater-free weekend to spend streaming a few titles.

9

I watched this last week on Amazon Prime Video. I was ready to be blown away and…I wasn’t. Maybe I would have been if I didn’t know anything about it in advance. It had some pretty good parts, though.

10

I hope you watched it on the biggest screen with the best sound system you have. Watching this movie on a laptop, tablet, or (shudder) phone would be…underwhelming.

Likewise Avatar, Babylon, and RRR should be watched on your biggest and best home system.

11

I agree about laptop or phone, but one of my secret movie-watching techniques if I’m the only one watching, and especially late at night, is to watch it in bed on my tablet. It’s amazing how well it works for me because I’m naturally near-sighted without my glasses, and holding the tablet close, the screen fills so much of my field of vision that the experience is positively theatrical. The tablet’s screen is 1080p and uses IPS technology, so picture quality even very close up is terrific, and the tiny built-in speakers are remarkable. If I wanted real theatrical sound I could plug in my Grado headphones, but it’s rarely worth the bother. I’ve enjoyed a great many movies this way – it has a more “intimate” feel than being downstairs watching on my nice Sony Bravia and home theater audio system. I suspect the peculiarity of being near-sighted probably helps a lot.

Incidentally, if you want to try to overcome your aversion to horror movies, Pearl is a pretty classy production. It’s definitely horror, but it’s well done (and extremely well acted by all, especially Mia Goth) and has no supernatural elements. It has its “scare” moments, I suppose, but they’re integral to the plot and in no way gratuitous. At least, it’s above-average in the horror genre.

12

chacun à son goût

Pearl sounds like the roller coaster type I tend to avoid, even if it is well done.

13

Pas de souci :slight_smile:

14

Don’t have a lot to add, but I absolutely loved

Babylon - A big, fabulous, chaotic movie. I wasn’t the biggest La La Land fan, but this one was great. The only film on this list I’ve seen twice in the first run.

Avatar - Possibly the most beautiful movie I have ever seen. Just glorious to look at. Not upset about the script because James Cameron has been stripping down his scripts since Piranha 2. By the time Avatar 5 comes around, it’ll just be a travel documentary, you watch. :wink:

The Fablemans - My favorite one of these three, Fablemans may be one of the more emotionally real movies in depicting basic family dynamics I have ever seen. There is a lot here to unpack, from sibling rivalries to parental expectations to even the revelation that Spielberg was a natural leader way back in middle school, because of course he was: how else do you wrangle your classmates to do your movie if you’re not?

The Top Gun movie was fun, not sure of all the hype because it just seemed like a streamed-down TG movie to me. Elvis was quality Baz Luhrmann, but nowhere near Moulin Rouge! levels. EEA@O is probably the Oscar front-runner, and I wouldn’t be upset if it wins, but I truly believe that in The Fablemans Spielberg gave us an absolute treasure of a film.

15

I’ve said this elsewhere, but Hall’s performance is so good I get actively angry that this film isn’t on more people’s radars and that she’s not picking up bigger award nominations for it. I thought the film overall was pretty good too (not “Best Film” material, maybe, but clearly one of the better films of the year).

16

Nitpick – it’s The Fabelmans.

For anyone interested, this is Variety’s take on the likely Best Picture Oscar nominees, as well as a comprehensive listing of all the decent films of 2022. The nominees will be officially announced on January 24.