Other Bests of 2022

Best Cinematography (Film):
Aftersun
The Fabelmans
Nope
The Northman
White Noise

Best Cinematography (Digital):
Ambulance
The Batman
Elvis
EO
Top Gun: Maverick

Best Sound:
Aftersun
Elvis
Kimi
Top Gun: Maverick
The Woman King

Best Stunts:
Ambulance
The Batman
Thirteen Lives
Top Gun: Maverick
The Woman King

Best Costumes:
Elvis
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
The Northman
Three Thousand Years of Longing
The Woman King

Best Hair and Makeup:
Crimes of the Future
Elvis
The Northman
Three Thousand Years of Longing
X

Best Set/Art Direction:
Armageddon Time
Crimes of the Future
Elvis
The Northman
Three Thousand Years of Longing

Best Editing:
Aftersun
Elvis
The Fabelmans
Mr. Bachmann and His Class
Thirteen Lives

Best Visual Effects:
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Batman
Nope
The Northman
Top Gun: Maverick

Best Score:
Ambulance
Babylon
The Fabelmans
Nope
Turning Red

Best Original Song:
“Hold My Hand” — Top Gun: Maverick
“Naatu Naatu” — RRR
“Nobody Like U” — Turning Red
“On My Way” — Marry Me
“Stars at Noon” — Stars at Noon

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Fire Island
Glass Onion
Happening
Thirteen Lives
Three Thousand Years of Longing

Best Original Screenplay:
Aftersun
The Banshees of Inisherin
Crimes of the Future
The Fabelmans
Nope

Best Non-English Language Film:
Decision to Leave
EO
Happening
Mr. Bachmann and His Class
RRR

Best Documentary Film:
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Mr. Bachmann and His Class
Three Minutes: A Lengthening
We Met in Virtual Reality
We Need to Talk About Cosby

Best Animated Film:
Lightyear
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Mad God
Strange World
Turning Red

Best Supporting Actor:
Paul Dano — The Fabelmans
Brendan Gleason — The Banshees of Inisherin
Tom Hanks — Elvis
Ke Huy Quan — Everything Everywhere All at Once
Justin Long — Barbarian

Best Supporting Actress:
Frankie Corio — Aftersun
Nina Hoss — TÁR
Lea Seydoux — Crimes of the Future
Uma Thurman — Hollywood Stargirl
Michelle Williams — The Fabelmans

Best Actor:
Austin Butler — Elvis
Colin Farrell — The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kaluuya — Nope
Paul Mescal — Aftersun
Viggo Mortensen — Crimes of the Future

Best Actress:
Cate Blanchett — TÁR
Viola Davis — The Woman King
Mia Goth — Pearl
Zoe Kravitz — Kimi
Keke Palmer — Nope

Best Director:
Ron Howard — Thirteen Lives
Jordan Peele — Nope
Gina Prince-Bythewood — The Woman King
Steven Spielberg — The Fabelmans
Charlotte Wells — Aftersun

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2022

1. Aftersun
2. The Fabelmans
3. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
4. Nope
5. Thirteen Lives
6. Crimes of the Future
7. The Woman King
8. Elvis
9. Kimi
10. Turning Red

Honorable Mentions:
After Yang; All the Beauty and the Bloodshed; Ambulance; Armageddon Time; Avatar: The Way of Water; The Banshees of Inisherin; Barbarian; Confess, Fletch; Decision to Leave; The Fallout; Fire Island; Glass Onion; Happening; Lightyear; Mad God; The Northman; Pearl; Rien à foutre; Rothaniel; RRR; The Sky is Everywhere; “Sr.”; Stars at Noon; Strange World; TÁR; Three Minutes: A Lengthening; Three Thousand Years of Longing; Ticket to Paradise; Top Gun: Maverick; We Met in Virtual Reality; We Need to Talk About Cosby; White Noise; X

 Other 2022 Bests

Bugged Life: ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

For those of us who complain the superhero spectacles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are getting rote and bland, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania acknowledges our complaints with the sight of a supervillain admitting, of the Avengers, “they all blur together after a while.” Credit director Peyton Reed, then, for trying to keep his Ant-Man adventures a little distinct. The first two had their chintzy cross-overs and obligatory mega-franchise stewardship, but also had some panache as flimsy heist movies in which people and objects shrink and grow in clever, silly ways. This one plunges headfirst into a relatively straightforward adventure. Paul Rudd’s eponymous hero accidentally gets pulled into the Quantum Realm with his daughter (Kathryn Newton), his superhero girlfriend, Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), and her parents (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer). The movie’s just about a journey to an exit that takes them through weird landscapes and kooky designs—talking goo, living buildings, fuzzily CG’d big-headed robot flunkies—on a collision course with an exiled multi-verse hopping conqueror. That’s Jonathan Majors’ Kang, last seen in the pretty fun Season 1 of Loki. This variant of the villain hopes to use Ant-Man tech to escape his sub-atomic prison. The result is diverting enough, a straightforward adventure through computer effects. 

It’s what, in the olden days, might’ve been a stop-motion odyssey through loosely adapted Greek myths or recreations of Jules Verne’s deep dives. Here, though, this weekend matinee approach is given over to Jack Kirby creatures in a vaguely Star Wars-ian side-quest plot captive to the MCU house style of functional blocking and brightly-lit fantasy. It strands likable actors in warehouse-sized virtual environments and has them interact with ping-ponging zaps and splats. The stakes are simple and the emotions paint-by-numbers—Rudd wants to protect his daughter; the rest want to help; the villain schemes and steams. But I found the whole project pleasant enough, at least less of a calamity than certain recent Marvel jumbles. It’s all of a piece, a direct line from beginning to end with a coherent energy and a streamlined style. I especially liked the easygoing heroes’ contrast with the heavy charisma of Majors, who sells the antagonist with enough sturdy screen presence that I won’t mind seeing him pop up in a half-dozen more of these. And Reed is allowed a few fine visual gambits—from a clever no-man’s land of multiplying possibilities that leaves a gazillion Ant-Men swarming on screen, to a reasonably satisfying ant-ex-machina to save the day. Sure, the MCU projects all blur together, but this one’s hardly the biggest failure.

Love at First Slight:YOUR PLACE OR MINE and YOU PEOPLE

Movies should more often be about beautiful people falling in love. It’s one of the most pleasurable plots cinema has to offer. When a movie can make you root for appealing celebrity performers twinkling with charm to finally get on the same wavelength to swoon and smooch, that’s a magic no effects can buy. I, like most who came of age cinematically in the 90s, have a particular affection for that era’s brand of romantic comedy artifice: high-gloss and high-concept, shot in big bright urban spaces and glamorously implausible apartments, and loaded up with reasonably clever banter and pop montages. When all of that is working at a decent clip, what more could you want? We don’t get that enough these days, especially in theaters where the comedy of any sort is a dying breed, and the rom-com leading the way out to the streaming services. That’s why last fall’s Ticket to Paradise was an oasis in this genre desert. How pleasant an afternoon to sit with an appreciative crowd and watch stars pantomime an inevitable slide in romance. Credit Netflix for trying to keep this sort of movie alive, I suppose, although a decent evening home is no substitute for the crowd when it’s a clear crowd-pleaser on screen. They have two new, prominent ones out now, and they each make for a good watch.

I had an amiable time with Your Place or Mine, the directorial debut of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. She’s the voice behind The Devil Wears Prada and Morning Glory, so she knows her way around a charming studio movie of this scale. It stars genre vets Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher as longtime pals who once, in their younger years, might’ve been more than that. They live on opposite coasts, though, and therefore have an entirely call-and-text based friendship. Circumstances contrive to get them to swap houses for a week—he moving into her LA home to supervise her teenage son while she’s crashing in his New York apartment during a business trip. As with Sleepless in Seattle, it makes the most of the continental separation to stretch this romantic tension. But by keeping up their phone chats—in perfunctory split-screen that could’ve used a bit more Pillow Talk cleverness— while settled in the trappings of the other’s routine, they slowly and unknowingly edge back toward their earlier romantic possibilities. Witherspoon and Kutcher can crank up the charm in their voices, even as their eyes sparkle and they slide through the genre’s usual paces. The result is cute and sweet and full of the usual cast of supporting eccentrics of clever friends, oddball neighbors, and other potential partners (Tig Notaro, Steve Zahn, Rachel Bloom, Zoe Chao, Jesse Williams, and more). This is a soft and comfortable version of this sort of movie, with just enough charm to keep proceedings pleasant.

There’s a bit more superficial edge to Kenya Barris’s You People, but it comes around to a satisfyingly sickly sweet sentimentality in the end. It’s the feature debut of the prolific sitcom writer best known for Black-ish, and treads some similar water angling into modern race relations while brushing past class. Co-writer Jonah Hill stars as a Jewish podcaster who falls for a Black Muslim costume designer (Lauren London). Would you believe meeting the parents becomes a rolling social satire once the couple decides to get married? This Apatowian riff on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner gets most of its comic energies here. Hill’s parents are cringingly well-meaning liberals who are so flop-sweat desperate to appear accepting that they circle all the way around to offensive. Played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny, they are devastatingly awkward in scenes that stretch their niceties to clumsy outrages on the regular. Even better are London’s parents. Mother Nia Long side-eyes like a pro and jabs with cutting quips. Her father is Eddie Murphy, who can still take a so-so line of dialogue into the stratosphere of hilarity through nothing more than sheer charismatic commitment. In a supporting cast full of funny people (every role, down to the smallest is cast with amusing figures), he’s the biggest reason to see the movie. His constant testing of Hill is a fine, funny skewering, from needling the young man about the title of a rap song to backing him into blustering corners by pressing about the specifics of books it’s clear Hill hasn’t read. The whole thing builds to the mistaken breakups and inevitable apologies and the lovey reconciliation. (And a dance party over the credits, natch.) It errs on the side of sitcom styling, and is gilded with stylistic tics in scattershot establishing shots, but has an ear for honest stumbling conversations that erupt in big punchlines at a good, regular clip. I could imagine a packed theater crowd rolling with satisfied laughter, and maybe sniffling a bit at the finale.

Bust a Move: MAGIC MIKE'S LAST DANCE

Somehow Steven Soderbergh knew a perfect idea for a third Magic Mike movie would be to make it a sexier Step Up movie. After all, star Channing Tatum began his film stardom with the first in that dance-battle series, and his smooth moves have been a feature of the Mikes since their inception. Here’s a series about a frustrated artist. The first film found his dream of making custom furniture an increasingly appealing exit strategy from the world of Miami’s male strip clubs. That was a downbeat but buoyantly portrayed character study. The sequel freed Mike and his friends from the club, and allowed them to stretch out as dancers—albeit still with an edge—in a rambling road trip of self-actualization through male bonding and feminine pleasure. That was a freewheeling and effervescent character comedy, a fine extension of the first while finding a new mode in which to operate. It’s only fitting a third in this shape-shifting series would be different all over again.

Which brings us to Magic Mike’s Last Dance. This threequel is totally different in tone and mood from its predecessors. It’s more romantic, and sparklier with Hollywood artifice, a sweet- and soft-hearted tip of the hat to the same old fashioned put-on-a-show energy that drove a sturdy Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland picture back in the day (or the Step Ups, more recently). Mike is out of the game, gigging as a bartender, when a fabulously wealthy Londoner (Salma Hayek Pinault) hears rumors of his previous life. Impressed by his moves—she gets a slow, sensual private show—she hires him on the spot to choreograph a dance revue for a fabulous theater she’s getting in a divorce from her gazillionaire media mogul husband. Curtain’s up in a month. He’ll have a lot of work to do as he…steps up to the new challenge.

Soderbergh is expert at showing us people at work. It’s why he’s so well-suited to stories of heists and negotiations, attentive as he is to the surfaces of jargon and routine and planning, and the ways they reveal character. Here he gives us some of the casting and rehearsal and stage-directing process. But he’s mostly interested in the ways building this show brings out the best in Mike, in a movie that’s celebrating dance’s ability to make people feel good. There’s less of the male stripper milieu—almost not at all—and more of the razzle-dazzle of the sheer pleasure of bodies in motion. It’s a dance movie! There’s a troupe of talented dancers, characterized only by their signature moves, and assembled to writhe and roll to the rhythms of pounding pop. And it gets plenty sexy by the end, in a dance in the rain with a barely-dressed ballerina and Mike down to his tight briefs, a climax amid climax in a fun final act that’s devoted entirely to the show. It’s the way there that builds the anticipation with fizz and delight, as Soderbergh, with a good eye for the way light dances off faces and bodies can pose across the frame, builds a relaxed and mature movie that’s nonetheless as serious about its lightness as a middle-aged romance can be. That’s work, too.

Tatum and Hayek spark well together, each able to turn on smolder in close-ups and stretch out in long shots, as their characters’ incompatible compatibility pushes and pulls on the possibility of staging this one-night-only event. They’re surrounded by potentially stock characters quickly sketched and well-played with charm and believability—the cranky old butler, the precious teenager daughter, the stuffed-shirt ex-husband, the frumpy city worker, the crinkly old casting director, the feisty young actress. Because the movie cares about these people, and wants to see the power of dance bring them all together for a moment of release, the finale pays off big. I believed they’d all leave smiling because so did I.

The Other Side: KNOCK AT THE CABIN

There’s an intensity borne from earnestness in the films of M. Night Shyamalan. In his latest, Knock at the Cabin, the world is ending. Multiple cataclysmic events are piling up. One family, on vacation, unaware of the lurking global catastrophes, are about to offered an awful choice with the claim that it’s the only way to stop what’s already starting. No devotee of M. Night Shyamalan will be surprised that Cabin juxtaposes apocalyptic stakes with the sentimentality of familial love. He’s as open-hearted a genre filmmaker as ever there was one, using his total control of the camera for total emotional sincerity in his high-concept stories. This can cause discomfort in some audiences—shrinking back from such nakedly earnest emotional appeals, in which characters plainly pour out their souls. But it makes for such fascinating movies! He believes in his fictions, and in characters succumbing to theirs. At his best, it makes for tightly-controlled, high-concept thrillers wound around moving motivations and implications.

His films care deeply about the strength of family bonds, the sincerity of belief, and takes seriously the spiritual dimensions of genre dilemmas. Consider the doubting spirituality in Signs, in which a broken man of faith must find within himself the power to protect his family against unknowable otherworldly threat. Or the children held back by the rituals of their protective parents as the community bands together against the evils lurking in the woods beyond in The Village. Or the grounded superhero fictions trembling with violent real-world implications for parents and children in Unbreakable and Glass. Or the way time inevitably pulls parents and children apart even as it binds them together in Old. In Cabin, the family unit—two husbands and an eight-year-old daughter—is besieged by apparent fanatics whose ominous behaviors are said to result from prophetic visions. These harbingers of doom plead with the family to sacrifice for the greater good. Wouldn’t we all like to think we would? But, when told they must choose among their family for a human sacrifice, that choice is immediately difficult to even begin to contemplate.

The upsetting concept is inherently claustrophobic—captives and captors alike stuck in one small cabin while considering one tragic end or another. Shyamalan shoots dialogue in intense close-ups, tightly held on faces in long, lingering looks that fully take in the humanity of all involved. It’s uneasy, a tremulous tension held in the uncertainty of outcome balanced on the certainty of the telling. There’s a quasi-religious fervor to the invaders. Led by Dave Bautista in a rumblingly sensitive performance—is there a better actor working today at looking a muscular threat while speaking in a gentle softness?—these mismatched dangers confess to sharing visions—or are they delusions? They talk with soft-spoken fervor of their mission, and plead for their victims to heed the warning and make the choice. The family is tied up for most of the movie, wrestling with that question. One husband (Ben Aldridge) is resolutely convinced these antagonists are full of it. The other (Jonathan Groff) is afraid they’re starting to sound believable. Their daughter (Kristen Cui) is adorable and instantly sympathetic—sizing up the situation without being precocious. She’s aware of the dangers, sheltered from the worst of it, and willing to trust in her fathers’ resolve. The film rests on the question of who to believe, and, once believed, what must be done. It’s about the strength of a family’s love in the face of the potential apocalypse, and the necessarily painful nature of sacrifice. It’s all written in their eyes.

This is one of Shyamalan’s saddest movies, suffused with an eerie melancholy. Almost immediately, the conflict kicks in and the film knows life can never go back to how it was—for any of them. The suspense is pushed along by escalating violence, but it’s carefully composed bloodshed, more suggested and more unsettling for it. The ritualistic nature of its killings are given a nasty pull of inevitability and gathering force. And yet the fanatics are so matter-of-fact and sorrowful about it—they cry and lament and choke back vomit—that it makes their fantastical story of impending doom all the more believable. It’s hooked into a vivid spirituality that’s a sincere belief in the potential redemptive powers within all of us—for connection, for reconciliation, for transformative love, and for self-sacrifice. That leaves a movie that’s tremendously unresolved, and ends on a note that may or may not allow space for triumph or release, since it’s committed to leaving its characters in traumatized grief no matter the ultimate outcome.