Best of 2022: Movies
I saw a lot of great movies in 2022, both new and old. Here’s how good of a year it was: I rated each of the top six movies on this list 5 stars! For reference, I think the most 5-star movies I’ve ever had on a best-of list was maybe three or four?
All of this means that I have a pretty extensive runners-up list. So let’s start there:
The Humans (2021) is a family drama that mixes strong performances with elements of psychological horror — particularly Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). It helped that at least three characters reminded me of people I know.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) was way better than it had any right to be, considering it’s a Roku-produced, free feature-length expansion of a Funny or Die sketch. In many ways this feels like a spiritual successor to UHF (1989).
Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) is a movie that I think I’ll like even more when I rewatch it. Great performances, epic landscapes, and a more contained story than in his previous movie, Us (2019).
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) is a great Los Angeles noir. Come for Denzel Washington, stay for Don Cheadle (in his first substantive film role — he kills it).
To Sir, with Love (1967) features a stellar performance by the late Sidney Poitier as a Black school teacher in charge of an unruly class of misfits. Timeless, while simultaneously being very much a product of its time.
Fire Island (2022) was so much fun. Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang are both amazing, but Conrad Ricamora playing Will (the Mr. Darcy character) is just fantastic.
And finally: Paddington 2 (2017). I’d heard that Paddington 2 was a scatching indictment of the prison industrial complex. “Paddington 2???” I’d say in disbelief. And within the first 15 minutes I thought that all those people were just fucking with me — no way could that be true. But then the inciting incident happens, Paddington is thrown in jail, and holy shit if it doesn’t present a strong case for prison reform. Moreover, Paddington 2 feels like a lost episode of Pushing Daisies, so if you loved that short-lived TV show from the 2000s then I think there’s a lot you’ll like about Paddington 2.
10. Blind (1987)
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I love Frederick Wiseman. His documentaries are the epitome of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking. In this case, Wiseman follows a group of students at a K-12 school for the blind in Alabama as they go about their days: learning the piano, going to gym class, or writing essays on what it means to be American. I absolutely love that the opening scene is a group of band students playing the theme from Rocky, because these kids can do anything.
9. After Life (1998)
Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is pretty prolific: Since the early 2000s he’s averaged a new movie every one to two years. Recently he gained acclaim for Shoplifters (2018) and his new one, Broker (2022). That’s why I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I’ve only seen one Kore-eda movie, and that’s Criterion’s release of his second narrative film, After Life. Kore-eda began as a documentary filmmaker, and that influence shows in After Life. The gist of the story is that after we die we’re sent to a purgatory-like building where we have a few days to select one memory to take with us into the afterlife. Thus, most of the movie is interviews with the recently deceased (played by a combination of both professional and nonprofessional actors) as they remember their lives. It’s a really beautiful concept, and the documentary-like approach keeps the focus on the people and their stories.
8. Drive My Car (2021)
Hot take: Haruki Murakami is an overrated writer whose stories work better as source material for filmmakers than they do as stories. See: Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. This 3-hour film follows theater actor-turned-director Yusuke Kafuku as he rehearses a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya following the unexpected death of his wife. On top of that, Kafuku has glaucoma and can no longer drive. Instead, he must rely on a hired driver — hence the movie’s title.
A couple things I loved about this movie: First, Hidetoshi Nishijima’s performance as Kafuku is so good. And second, I love how small details have seismic implications, such as when Kafuku’s wife does and does not wear her wedding ring, or when Kafuku starts sitting in different seats of the car.
For a film that’s basically all dialogue as a group of actors rehearse a 130-year-old Russian play, I found Drive My Car to be riveting. It’s a great example of how long, quiet movies don’t have to be slow.
7. Free Chol Soo Lee (2022)
We just watched this brisk, 80-minute documentary last week, but I feel like I’m still processing everything it covered. Chol Soo Lee was a Korean immigrant living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s when he was wrongfully accused of murdering a gang leader. This event alone requires a lot of unpacking: From being identified as Chinese by the white eyewitnesses, to the public defender who didn’t speak with witnesses who could corroborate Lee’s alibi, to the San Francisco Police Department criminologist who made an assumption that the bullet from the crime scene matched one from Lee’s gun, even though a ballistic report proved they were two different bullets. And this isn’t even the entire focus of the documentary! This is all in the first maybe 20 minutes? Plus, this doesn’t account for the fact that my dad was a Korean immigrant living in the United States around this same time and with a very similar name (Cheul-Soo).
From there we follow the Free Chol Soo Lee movement — a grassroots organization of Asian American activists first in the San Francisco area and later seemingly around the country who protested Lee’s imprisonment. And while this feels like the bulk of the documentary, it doesn’t end when Lee is finally released in 1983. Because the most fascinating part (to me) is what happens next. I won’t tell you what Lee does — you’ll have to watch for yourself to see. But it made me realize that Black folks like Trayvon Martin or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd all died (senselessly!) before becoming the face of the BLM movement. But what happens when that person survives? How do you ever reconcile the person you are with the person everyone thinks of you as, or expects you to be, or wants you to be?
6. George Carlin’s American Dream (2022)
The third (and final) documentary on this list, George Carlin’s American Dream is an epic three-and-a-half-hour long film by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio about the life of one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time. The thing that impressed me most about this film is how Apatow and Bonfiglio were able to sift through so much raw footage and condense it into only three and a half hours. They use archival interviews, audio books, personal recordings — pretty much anything with Carlin’s voice on it — and weave it together so that Carlin narrates his own life story. The organization of all that raw material would be daunting even with a team of researchers and transcribers. So the fact that they put it together so seamlessly is really impressive.
My biggest takeaway from the film is that we can always change. Carlin essentially had three phases of his career — he kept adapting and growing and evolving as a comedian, even into his older age. If he can do it, then the rest of us can, too.
5. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2021)
Speaking of being in awe with how a film is made, Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is by far the most mind-bending movie on this list. Makoto Ueda’s screenplay is the real star of the show. The story is simple in premise but expands in some really complicated and unexpected ways: What would you do if you could see two minutes into the future?
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes combines two of my favorite things: long takes and time travel. Like with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), the film cleverly stitches together long takes to create the illusion of being one continuous shot. Instead of feeling gimmicky, the continuous motion adds to the sense of time spiraling out of control. We have very little time to ground ourselves before the next curveball comes along. I think the reason this never feels all that overwhelming is that the movie is often very funny. In many ways it feels almost like an episode of Doctor Who.
This is a great example of low-budget filmmaking done right. And it should be no surprise that it was heavily inspired by the next movie on my list…
4. One Cut of the Dead (2017)
We watched this Japanese zombie comedy a day after Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. It had some big shoes to fill, and in the end it met those expectations — and, I think, exceeded them.
It’s really hard to talk about this movie without spoiling anything. I would recommend watching One Cut of the Dead with as little foreknowledge about it as possible, if you can, because that makes for the most enjoyable experience. So if you’re at all curious about watching this movie, stop reading right now and scroll down to number 3.
One last chance — you sure you want to have this spoiled?
One Cut of the Dead is about the filming of a low-budget zombie movie. A skeleton cast and crew are filming in an abandoned factory of some kind, when all of a sudden real zombies invade the set. Rather than run for safety, the megalomaniacal director wants to keep filming — after all, the real zombies add an air of authenticity.
The first ~40 minutes of the movie are filmed entirely in a single take. And when the credits rolled, both Kaitlin and I weren’t sure how we felt. It was decently funny, but there were a few odd moments where things felt kind of unnatural. It didn’t seem like it had lived up to the hype I’d heard about.
But of course the movie isn’t over. Next we get to see the weeks leading up to the filming of the movie-within-a-movie. We learn more about the director and his family. This provides some helpful context in regard to who the people are that we saw in the first 40 minutes. But it’s the last act of the film that’s the most brilliant, because we get to see the behind-the-scenes antics of filming that movie-within-a-movie. Confused? If you’ve seen Noises Off! then this will make more sense: Act I is the rehearsal of a play, while Act II is what happens backstage during a performance of the play a month later. That’s the idea here — we’re seeing what we had just seen, but from an entirely new angle.
One of the most brilliant and hilarious things about One Cut of the Dead is also its most risky gamble: Some of those awkward or odd moments we saw in the first 40 minutes? They were intentional. It’s only at the end that you get to see what was happening behind the scenes to cause those moments to feel so stilted, and the payoff is amazing. It reminds me of Arrested Development and how they would foreshadow jokes before you understood what they meant. This is both brilliant and risky because it’s easy to alienate or lose your audience when they don’t fully understand what’s going on. But if you stick with it, then you’re rewarded with some amazing comic moments.
All in all, a really unique structure telling a very funny story. One Cut of the Dead is now my favorite zombie movie.
3. Red, White and Blue (2020)
Red, White and Blue is the third film in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, and it’s my favorite of the ones we’ve seen so far — even more than Mangrove, one of my favorite films from last year. John Boyega plays Leroy Logan, a young Black man who becomes an officer in the London police department. The story focuses not only on the racism and discrimination Leroy experiences from his white colleagues and superiors, but also the pressure from his family — especially his dad, played by Steve Toussaint — to quit the force and do anything else with his life. Leroy’s struggle to reconcile wanting to do good with being part of a rigidly racist institution that isn’t ready for him is the heart of the story.
I love Red, White and Blue for a few reasons. One, it’s a story you don’t often see told: a Black person who wants to join the police. Second, I love the questions the film raises, namely: what’s the best way to reform racist systems? From the inside, or from the outside? (The answer, I think, is from any way you can. Although, as Mr. Logan reminds us, that change will happen slowly — and all too often painfully slowly.) Finally, Boyega and Toussaint give what I think are my favorite performances of the year. Absolutely phenomenal stuff from the two of them.
2. After Yang (2021)
After Yang is the second movie from Korean-American filmmaker and film critic Kogonada, the first being 2017’s Columbus. Kogonada has a great visual eye that reminds me a bit of Terrence Malick. And while Columbus was a small two-person drama grounded in the present, After Yang is a family drama set in a future where androids are a household item. Colin Farrell plays the father, Jake, and Jodie Turner-Smith plays the mother, Kyra. They’re a mixed-race couple raising an adopted girl named Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Mika was born in China, and since neither Jake nor Kyra are Chinese, they purchase an android named Yang (Justin H. Min) to be both a caretaker of and cultural ambassador for Mika.
After Yang is a perfect example of how magical a movie-watching experience can be when all of the elements line up. I went in with high but not astronomical expectations, and I found myself thoroughly engaged in the story and its implications — particularly the part about how best to feel connected to one's heritage when you’re otherwise completely removed from that world. It’s a question that I’m sure Kogonada thought a lot about growing up in the United States, and it’s one I’ve spent my whole life grappling with. In the scheme of things this is a rather minor part of After Yang, but I like how quietly beautiful it is as a whole — from the music to the visuals to the story. I doubt many people will have the same experience watching After Yang that I did, but I can only hope that it connects with other people as much as it did with me that night in July when I randomly decided to put it on while Kaitlin was working on things for her small business.
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Speaking of movies that forge a connection… This big mess of a movie is in some ways the culmination of everything else on this list: It’s about overcoming obstacles (i.e. the fractured world around us), the power to change who we are and what we believe, and family. It is a movie we saw twice — both times in theaters! — because there’s so much going on we knew we’d benefit from a second viewing.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is overwhelming. It’s what I imagine it must be like going through life with ADHD. (According to this interview, making this movie is the reason why co-director Dan Kwan got diagnosed with ADHD.) It is chaotic and frenetic, and I can completely see how and why that might be alienating to audiences. To me, I thought it was a really unique way to capture a feeling that I think we’ve all felt since about 2016, but grounded in a story about an immigrant family and the disconnect among generations.
I love the story. I love the acting. I love the visual style. I love the humor. I love the message. I love that a movie with such a large East Asian cast can be funny. (This is seriously a big deal, and it’s not something I’ve seen mentioned enough. For way too long East Asian characters in movies were sidekicks and/or the butt of jokes — they weren’t given the opportunity to be funny in their own right. Not only does the movie hit its emotional mark without feeling melodramatic or maudlin, it can also pull off comedy in a way I’ve never really seen before.) I love that it is essentially a Marvel movie that is better than all the other Marvel movies. On top of that, Everything Everywhere All at Once is entertaining and fun — it never loses sight of what a movie should be in the first place.
Here’s what’s interesting about Everything Everywhere All at Once: It is distributor A24’s highest grossing film (outperforming other notable movies like Moonlight, Uncut Gems, and Hereditary), it gained overwhelming acclaim from critics, and for a brief period of time it was the highest rated movie of all time on Letterboxd. I guess it should be expected whenever something gets such universal love that the people who don’t like it are going to be very vocal about not liking it. Still, I’m surprised at the backlash Everything Everywhere All at Once has received. People who give this movie one star are expecting a perfect movie, and any kind of minor flaw or something not to their liking immediately plummets it from five stars to one. I think it’d be easy to label Everything Everywhere All at Once as a polarizing movie, as people seem to either love it or hate it. But I don’t think that’s really accurate, because the people who hate it are going out of their way to bash it. A movie that isn’t perfect can still be great, but nor does it warrant such extreme scrutiny. People who give Everything Everywhere All at Once only one star are telling us less about the movie than they are about themselves.
Anyway, I’m just happy that a movie like this can exist alongside a movie like After Yang or Minari or any of the other Asian American stories we’ve seen in recent years. It’s been a long, slow road for representation, and if this recent crop of films is any indication, then I can’t wait for what’s to come.
