The 16 best movies of 2022
By Jake Skubish
16. Reframed: Marilyn Monroe
For a more accurate, complete, and human portrait of Marilyn Monroe’s life than the one presented in this year’s wretched Blonde, I recommend Reframed: Marilyn Monroe, a documentary series released by CNN in January. Reframed provides a terrific overview of Monroe’s career accomplishments and a vital correction to the typical tragic, doomed narrative in which she is placed. Director Karen McGann positions the series from the very beginning in almost direct conversation with the nonsense of Blonde: “When we talk about Marilyn Monroe it’s always about poor Marilyn, poor Marilyn. This vulnerable, passive woman who is being destroyed by Hollywood,” a commentator remarks. “That’s the way the story frames her ... it’s time to reframe her story.”
And so Reframed does, quite successfully over the course of four episodes, as a series of Monroe biographers, experts, and friends (guided by elegant narration by Jessica Chastain) position Monroe as someone who was “an architect of her own fame.” The series presents a convincing account of how Monroe developed her own image, crafted layered and human performances, pushed the boundaries of sexual expression, and forced the studio system to bend to her demands. The film does not paper over the ways in which Hollywood routinely exploits women; it both recognizes this abuse and establishes how much of a force Monroe was in combating this culture.
Reframed frequently turns to Marilyn Monroe in her own words, allowing her to speak on behalf of her own narrative in a way Blonde enthusiastically denies. “Because of the way Marilyn died we tend to look at her entire life as a tragedy,” a commentator says in the final episode of the series. “That simply wasn’t true.” In presenting such observations, Reframed is a thoughtful, comprehensive, and necessary counter to the standard Monroe story. Reframed: Marilyn Monroe is available for rental.
15. CHa CHA Real Smooth
Often when I recommend a movie to a friend it’s for a very specific reason: An actor gave a great performance, or the ending was shocking and fun, or the screenplay was smart. With the best movies, though, you can only really recommend them with a sigh and a smile: you just have to see it.
Such is the case with Cha Cha Real Smooth, one of the best movies I saw at the (online) Sundance Film Festival this year. The film stars Cooper Raiff (who also wrote and directed the film) as Andrew, an aimless college graduate working as a party host for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs till he can figure out what he actually wants to do with his life. But any ambitions to venture beyond his hometown come to a halt when he strikes up a friendship with a woman named Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).
I’ll admit that this is extremely in my wheelhouse — a Jewish guy figuring out his purpose in life while hopelessly pining after Dakota Johnson might be the plot ChatGPT would conjure if you asked it to create my ideal movie — but I think Cha Cha Real Smooth has enough depth to be resonant for a lot of people. Many young filmmakers make coming-of-age stories, but Raiff’s films possess an understated wisdom that most seasoned directors can’t even approach. At 24 years old, Raiff feels less like a newcomer waxing poetic about the frustrations of young adulthood than a veteran of the craft, looking back at his youth and retroactively imbuing his younger self with the sophistication he lacked back then.
It helps that his film has a stellar performance from Johnson at its center. She’s a magnetic actor and one of the most unsung Hollywood stars. She’s successfully eclipsed her notoriety for the Fifty Shades franchise by making consistently interesting choices — Suspiria, The Lost Daughter, and now Cha Cha Real Smooth — and managed to destroy Ellen DeGeneres’ career in between. Johnson is set to enter the MCU vortex in 2024 with Madame Web, and I can only hope she doesn’t get stuck there. If nothing else, we’ll always have the time she slept on Sean Parker.
Beyond Johnson’s performance, Cha Cha Real Smooth has all of the things you would want from a movie like this: A hilarious script, a heartwarming story, a Bar Mitzvah fistfight. But really, I’m recommending this movie because it made me smile. You just have to see it. Cha Cha Real Smooth is available on Apple TV+.
14. Avatar: The Way of Water
Much has been made about the cultural legacy — or lack thereof — of James Cameron’s Avatar. How could the highest grossing movie of all time, its critics ask mockingly, leave behind no discernible impact, no lasting conversation? Where are the die-hard Avatar fans? If a blockbuster grosses two billion dollars and nobody continues to talk about it, did it even matter?
At the risk of offering a half-baked galaxy-brain idea, I’d like to suggest that Avatar’s lack of cultural legacy is, in fact, the legacy of the film, and its status as the blockbuster no one cares about reveals just how much the entertainment industrial complex has changed since the first Avatar film was released 13 years ago.
Consider the highest grossing movies of all time upon Avatar’s release: Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and The Lion King (1994). Each was billed as an event, less something to argue over or adorn with hot takes than an entertaining product that you saw because everyone else did. I balk at the term “monoculture,” a condition that likely never existed, but I do think there’s a difference between the time you could hear about an awesome movie, see it, and walk away satisfied and the world we now live in, where you go into a film burdened by knowing everyone’s opinions, and everyone’s subsequent opinions of those opinions, and so on into infinity.
The catalyst for this transition, of course, was the rise of centralized social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and the proliferation of smartphones, both of which were emerging as dominant cultural forces in 2009, just as Avatar was released. Within this historical context, the confusion over why there was no ongoing debate about Avatar’s place in the pantheon of cinema can be understood as being more about how our entertainment expectations have changed than about the movie itself. Avatar was the last of the old school blockbusters that we watched, enjoyed, and moved on from. But the Twitter Generation expected more: Not just to watch a movie, but to engage with the opinion ecosystem around it. The fact that this was missing from Avatar was perplexing, but it shouldn’t be. It’s just how things used to be.
If movies are not able to play along with what this new internet ecosystem required, they are deemed irrelevant. Memes grant oddball movies a second life; think pieces elevate auteur-driven films; a never-ending web of easter eggs and cameos has sustained the conversation around Marvel films for more than a decade. But what can the internet do with a film whose value is only in seeing it? Avatar promised nothing more than to be the most dazzling visual spectacle you’d ever experienced in a movie theater, and it largely lived up to that promise. It is an unbelievable visual wonder. But after you leave the theater, it is nothing more than that. And in a culture that immortalizes that which can be documented and repurposed, and discards that which cannot, the notion of a one-time experience offers little value.
But movies are a visual medium, after all, and I’d like to hope people can still find some magic in witnessing something they’ve never seen before on screen. If you’re wondering why I’ve gone this long without even mentioning Avatar: The Way of Water, it’s because I don’t have much to say about it beyond its ability to conjure this magic. I saw a packed 3-D IMAX showing of the movie, and halfway through the film, when Cameron full immerses the story in his bafflingly gorgeous underwater filmmaking technique, I leaned over to my friend and said “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” It doesn’t have to be anything more than that to be worth something. Avatar: The Way of Water is available in theaters.
13. Everything Everywhere All at Once
An imperceptible vibe shift underpins the action in Everything Everywhere All at Once, a frenetic, multiverse-jumping kung fu epic from Daniels (the self-given title of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Wang, a laundry store owner who finds herself given access to technology allowing her to jump between infinite alternative universes containing different versions of herself. This timeline exploration is not frivolous: She is brought into the multiverse by an alternate version of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who tells Evelyn she plays a key role in stopping an amorphous evil force from wreaking havoc on the multiverse. In describing the situation to Evelyn, Waymond employs the language of a vibe shift. “You’ve been feeling it too,” he tells her. “Something is off.”
That Everything Everywhere All at Once quickly became a phenomenon (the film very quickly ascended to the number one all-time ranking on Letterboxd) speaks to how widely its recognition of the vibe shift in our culture has resonated. Daniels manage to craft a cinematic experience encapsulating the information overload defining the internet age without ever losing narrative clarity. The film combines philosophically playfulness à la The Matrix — plumbing the concepts of path dependency and probability theory — with pop culture references and unabashed silliness. One joke in particular, involving a riff on a beloved Pixar character, delightfully melds these seemingly dissimilar tones into elevated moments that are both intellectually curious and absurdly hilarious.
In its finale the film pivots from an obvious appeal to kindness to something more transcendent, a reverence for some undeniable, eternal impulse toward love and connection. And for a movie that mostly takes place inside a laundromat and an IRS office, Daniels somehow make it all feel like a multiverse-spanning epic. In the sweeping finale, images of people with hot dogs for fingers become poignant reflections on persistence and optimism in a challenging world, illustrating just how successfully Everything Everywhere All at Once grounds its celebration of weirdness in emotional wisdom.
Everything Everywhere All at Once will endure, I think, because it addresses both the possibility that the change we are experiencing is just a fluctuation of modern conditions and the possibility that we are experiencing a fundamental alteration in the way life is experienced. Daniels bring to the film an awareness of our modern cultural moment without constraining it to be a commentary on 21st century consciousness. Something is particularly off now, but maybe something has always been off; life is inherently weird, and the greatest joy of Daniels’ work is their embrace of that weirdness in the face of calamity. Even if nothing matters, Everything Everywhere All at Once makes the case that we will always want to be here with each other anyway. Everything Everywhere All at Once is available for rental.
12. After Yang
In director Kogonada’s debut feature Columbus, which premiered at Sundance in 2017, characters grapple with loss in the “Modernist Mecca” of Columbus, Indiana, home to many architectural wonders from the likes of I.M. Pei and other titans of the industry. In an interview about the film, Kogonada spoke about why he was drawn to building a story around architectural design. “Architecture is the art of space,” Kogonada said. “It also constructs our sense of emptiness. It makes us see nothingness and absence in a way that, without it, is almost invisible to us.”
After Yang is Kogonada’s follow-up to Columbus, and the film is a poignant transfiguration of that architectural exploration of nothingness from the physical realm to the sensory, emotional, and philosophical. The film stars Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith as a couple who purchase a human-like A.I. automaton named Yang (Justin H. Min) to support their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). When Yang suddenly malfunctions and shuts down, the family scrambles to fix Yang and confronts the possibility that he may be beyond recovery.
Kogonada employs unique editing choices to explore the complexities of perspective in After Yang, a film just as patient as Columbus but more formally playful. Its title is wonderfully deceptive — the events take place not in the aftermath of the loss of Yang but in the thick of it, yet the film suggests that everything happening now will forever color everything that is yet to come. The highlight of the film is its emotionally riveting memory sequences, accompanied by an astonishing piano score by ASKA.
Just as the memories of its characters take on meaning with the passing of time, After Yang is a film that has grown in my estimation since I watched it. It’s a beautiful story about memory, loss, and the power of imagery. After Yang is one of the best films of the year, and one I can’t wait to watch again. After Yang is available for rental.
11. Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel
Rothaniel is an uncategorizable work — an hour-long performance by a celebrated comedian that’s not really a “comedy special” at all, exchanging laughs for an emphasis on a searching emotional catharsis. Directed by Bo Burnham, Jerrod Carmichael’s deeply personal, confessional performance is headlined by the comedian coming out as gay but shines in Carmichael’s exploration of that announcement’s implications.
In Rothaniel, Carmichael reckons with whether his family and friends can accept his identity and whether he can continue to love them back if they do not accept him. For long stretches of the special Carmichael appears to have no script. He meanders through his thoughts and ideas, actively trying to make sense of his past and his future on stage. He takes long pauses collect himself, and patiently responds to inquiries from the audience.
The rarity of Rothaniel’s beauty derives from this methodical pace. Confrontations of shame, the denial of love by those closest to you, affirmation of one’s true self — these are concepts too often displayed with the unyielding American impulse toward progress or improvement; we work through these issues to reach a better place, as a step toward an endpoint, rather than sitting in the discomfort and accepting whatever may come of it. In this introspection Rothaniel is miraculous, even if I don’t quite know what to call it. Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel is available on HBO Max.
10. Happening
Happening, director Audrey Diwan’s abortion drama set in 1960s France, is often brutal (a few scenes, in particular, may be difficult to watch for squeamish viewers), but the film is thankfully not entirely devoted to this harsh framework. Diwan lends the film a welcome focus on Anne’s (Anamaria Vartolomei) experience of pleasure even as she struggles to end her pregnancy. Unlike other abortion films, our protagonist has sex while still pursuing an abortion. It’s a positive experience for her, and a moment of much-needed relief. By including this late in the narrative, Diwan’s film insists that Anne should not have to deny herself sexual autonomy even as the legal apparatus around her punishes her sexual activity. At one point a character asks Anne, “Who cares what you feel like? Can we afford to only do what we feel like?” Happening gracefully asks whether we can afford not to.
Diwan’s framing of the story, showcasing the consequences of individual choices within a larger political struggle, is a poignant and oft-ignored perspective. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, the tendency among those decrying the decision was to focus on the daunting structural barriers toward restoring abortion rights. In an incisive New Yorker article, Jia Tolentino wrote about the dawning era and inevitably tragic consequences of “widespread state surveillance and criminalization” of abortion. News outlets wrote about the states with immediate abortion bans. The aftermath of the decision has been heartbreaking, and it will continue to cause dire outcomes on a scale that feels beyond our control.
The sort of coverage written by Tolentino is both courageously righteous and vitally informative, and it is valuable for understanding the landscape of what those fighting for reproductive rights now face. Overcoming these systemic hurdles will take time, and what we can do as individuals is simply not enough.
Diwan’s film, however, suggests that even if our individual choices are not enough, what we do to support each other does matter. Some people choose to turn away from Anne, others help her in ways big and small, and each choice is monumentally important for her future. In the moment it is not clear whether these choices will dramatically improve the future, but they are what can be done today. Happening is a moral tale and recalls a teaching of the Talmud, memorably employed in Schindler’s List, that whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world. This lesson is not told triumphantly in Happening, but it is made firmly in defiance of a world that deliberately alienates those who might support each other. Happening demonstrates the value of contributing such support, even when it does not feel like enough. Happening is available for rental.
9. Don’t Worry Darling
This review contains spoilers.
Taking on a dramatic thriller like Don’t Worry Darling may seem, on the surface, like a departure for writer Katie Silberman, whose prior credits include a teen comedy (Booksmart), a rom-com (Set It Up), and a parody of rom-coms (Isn’t It Romantic). Yet there is a commonality in the plots of these films that continues with Don’t Worry Darling: Each centers on a woman attempting to escape from a repressive system, making the choice to abandon the suffocating aspects of that environment that she once thought gave her power and comfort.
In Set It Up, Harper (Zoey Deutch) leaves behind her thankless pursuit of workplace prestige; she chooses love and career independence instead. In Isn’t It Romantic, Natalie (Rebel Wilson) finds herself stuck inside of a romantic comedy, a genre she’s convinced is full of “lies set to terrible pop songs”; she chooses to reject the genre’s cliché of being completed by finding a soulmate in favor of self-love. And in Booksmart, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) ditch their narrow fixation on academic excellence; they choose a balance between fun and studiousness. Don’t Worry Darling raises the stakes of this liberation plot: Alice (Florence Pugh) is being held against her will inside a virtual world run by men operating a cartoonishly simplistic and (from their view) idealized vision of 1950s family life. In escaping this world, Alice chooses herself. It’s Silberman’s most ingenious script yet, rich in its details and visually enthralling with the help of director Olivia Wilde’s assured vision and across-the-board superb production.
Don’t Worry Darling gathers momentum on its way toward a dramatic third act twist. What makes the film great is that it is not dependent on this reveal. A frequent complaint levied against films with late-game plot twists is that they are too easy to see coming, which I think misses the point entirely. The real question is not whether you can see the film angling to pull the rug out from underneath you, but whether anything interesting remains after it happens. The twist in Don’t Worry Darling serves to give depth to everything that came before it, and it’s a blast on repeat viewings to take note of the visual and character-driven clues that hide the reveal in plain sight. The obviousness of the Victory Project scheme, in fact, is essential to the thematic ambitions of Silberman’s script. The elaborate conspiracy Jack (Harry Styles) thinks he has established is shown to be paper thin, while Alice is forced to question how much of her reality she simply chose not to see.
There are countless details that anticipate the truth behind the Victory Project. Some are purely visual. I love the flourishes that suggest the laziness of Victory Project creator Frank (Chris Pine): The empty egg shells and bottomless coffee cup in Alice’s kitchen, indicating Frank forgot to finish coding them; the plane crash on the outskirts of town, suggesting an add-on to his game that he can’t manage to get off the ground; the game reset button he only bothers to put right outside of town.
Other details are found in the characters’ actions, in ways that show how the suave 1950s performances they are crafting can’t really mask that they are losers. Frank openly invites Alice to question the reality of the Victory Project at a dinner party; he delights in the “debate me” exchange familiar to online discourse, supremely confident that nothing she says can rupture the world he has built. (His whole empire is soon toppled by Alice, and Frank is killed by his wife Shelley, played by Gemma Chan, who cynically aims to carry on the enterprise better than Frank could.)
Jack, meanwhile, desperately wants to be a charismatic and masculine caretaker for Alice but is just as inept in the virtual realm as he is in the real world. No finely pressed suit or sleek car can change the fact that he can’t cook, doesn’t know how to dance, and can’t maintain the British accent he’s opted for inside the game.
Jack’s wavering British accent is a deliberate choice made by Styles, one small example of how Styles’ and Pugh’s performances are working in lockstep with Silberman’s script. A highlight comes after the dinner party scene, in which Alice insists to Jack that she needs to leave. The text is that she wants to get out of town; the subtext is that she has gained a modicum of awareness about what is really going on. Her plea is forgiving by necessity; she sees a sliver of the evil Jack has participated in but needs him on her side in order to get out. Jack, meanwhile, is made to confront this evil. Styles’ performance here is layered, evoking the sense that Jack is both genuinely regretful about his actions yet resolute in his desire to maintain the pernicious illusion. He knows what Alice is really saying, and chooses to do nothing.
Pugh is miraculous in her role as Alice. No actor can more swiftly make a scene foreboding or distressing than Pugh can when shifting her face into a sharp frown. “It was my life!” she yells at Jack in the climactic confrontation, my life enunciated with a chilling, guttural yell. “You don’t get to take that from me!” Pugh infuses this line reading with more life than perhaps any other actor working today could.
Wilde ends the film with a virtuosic coda that accentuates all of the film’s outstanding production components: Matthew Libatique’s sumptuous cinematography; John Powell’s score, ramping up from a pulsating hum to a panting-screaming ruckus; Wilde’s own deft camera movement. As Alice makes her final escape, she pauses briefly to reflect on what she had in this fabricated reality. Silberman laid the groundwork for this moment of hesitation throughout her script, and it heightens the impact of the film’s conclusion. When Alice decides to leave the Victory Project for good she is not just running from something, but proactively choosing an imperfect, autonomous life.
Wilde cuts the screen to black as Alice gasps for air, back in the real world at last. She has learned what many, with the hive-mind criticism of Don’t Worry Darling, failed to do: Reject the reality everyone else has agreed upon, assess the details, and think for herself. Don’t Worry Darling is available on HBO Max.
8. The Banshees of Inisherin
How should we spend our time? The strictures of living under capitalism demand this question skews toward productivity and efficiency. Rather than pursue that which is nourishing to the soul or beneficial to one’s community, time is meant to be optimized — and is therefore wasted when one is not producing. Our monochronic conception of time means that which can be measured or monetized is of much higher value than, say, having a pint with your best friend.
This is the dilemma at the heart of The Banshees of Inisherin. Pádraic (Colin Farrell), a dim-witted, congenial man living on an island off the coast of Ireland, finds that his best friend and drinking buddy Colm (Brendan Gleeson) has decided to abruptly end their friendship. Colm feels an urgency to leave behind an artistic legacy and has concluded that his chats with Pádraic are interfering with the music he intends to compose. Pádraic, distraught, tries desperately to change Colm’s mind, to disastrously violent effect.
What director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) creates in this story is, in its opening acts, the funniest film of the year (a joke involving a bread truck culminates in the biggest laugh-out-loud line of the year). As the story progresses, Banshees also becomes deeply depressing. One line, uttered by the island’s lovable weirdo Dominic (Barry Keoghan) after he receives some bad news, was the most gutting movie moment of the year. (Keoghan is delightfully odd in the role, and I hereby nominate him to be the lovable weirdo in as many movies as possible.)
The film’s humor and its sorrow work seamlessly in tandem because the object of their scrutiny is the same: The absurdity produced by the choices we force ourselves into by trying to make the most of our time. Between all of Pádraic’s hilarious feckin’ expletives is a poignant kernel of truth: All we have is now, and all that matters now is to be good to one another. And yet even with this surprising level of enlightenment, he struggles to avoid letting Colm’s decision lead him down a dark path. In trying to optimize our time, we end up destroying the pieces of life that make our time feel most valuable.
This is not to say that McDonagh is entirely on Pádraic’s side, and it’s telling that he opted to name his film after Colm’s unpolished tune. There’s something to be said for investing in a creative pursuit that feels meaningful to you; it is, after all, McDonagh’s own edict as a director. But he’s wise enough to know that to do so at the expense of the people who love you creates a world with less love in it. The Banshees of Inisherin is a triumph because it lays bare the feckin’ foolishness of the constraints we impose upon ourselves, and addresses not only the question of what it means to live a good life, but what framework we should use to approach this question in the first place. The Banshees of Inisheerin is currently playing in theaters.
7. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
This review contains spoilers.
Murder mysteries stand beside rom-coms as one of the great comfort food genres, satisfying in their meticulous unraveling of seemingly unsolvable puzzles. This problem-solving acumen and attention to detail are the fortes of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), returning from director Rian Johnson’s genius 2019 film Knives Out to once again sift through the clues and identify the killer. This time around Blanc finds himself in Greece, in the company of some of the world’s wealthiest celebrities and online influencers. All have motives and opportunities for the murder, of course; all possibilities are delightfully on the table.
In Knives Out Blanc possessed a patient foresight, a sense that he needn’t rush the case because the pieces would inevitably fall neatly into place for him to explain everything in the third act. Not so in Glass Onion: Blanc is frustrated with his inability to put this puzzle together, just as he expresses irritation with his failure to excel at Among Us and Clue. Is Blanc’s skill slipping, or has he simply met a case with a level of complexity beyond his grasp?
The answer, it turns out, is emphatically neither, and the way in which Johnson rolls out his reveal is both a departure from his first film and a clever indictment of the ways in which we idolize the rich and powerful. Blanc struggles to come to an answer precisely because the answer is uncomplicated. “I expected complexity,” he muses. “I expected intelligence.” And yet the ways in which the killer carried out his plot were so exceedingly dumb that Blanc overlooked them. “Like the rest of the world, I expected Miles Bron to be a genius,” Blanc says. “Why?”
Johnson is a master of both honoring and subverting the murder mystery genre, and this wrinkle is at once thrilling, surprising, and a thoughtful critique. The narratives we allow to be told about the enlightenment of the ultra-wealthy only serve to mask the fact that they are ripping us off, and I’ve been thinking about Glass Onion a lot since the downfall of the cryptocurrency platform FTX. Like Bron’s Glass Onion abode, its technology appeared to be complex and transformative until it was revealed to be hollow and outright fraudulent.
“There’s nothing really complicated there, but it looks complicated if you don’t understand what they’re doing,” crypto critic James Block said in an article in The Atlantic after the collapse of FTX. “Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated … but it’s nothing. It’s smoke and mirrors.”
The trickery of the rich hiding their idiocy behind made-up language is the basis for one of the funniest reveals of Glass Onion, and an example of the remarkable shrewdness of Johnson’s script. Johnson wasn’t omniscient in his critique of society’s celebrated hucksters in Glass Onion — the grifts carried out by the rich are routine. That he can consistently package such sharp observations into star-driven, hilarious, entertaining is another feat, and I am fully on board with the prospect of Johnson making as many Knives Out films as he pleases.
When I saw Glass Onion at the Toronto International Film Festival, the crowd erupted in cheers when Blanc remarks, after an impassioned speech by Bron about why these influencers’ flippant “disruption” of the status quo is meaningful, that “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.” It’s a keen observation, but less interesting than where Blanc lands by the end of the film. “I gave you the truth,” he says. “This is where my jurisdiction ends.” Glass Onion is yet another elevated entry into the murder mystery genre by Johnson because he takes what makes these stories so pleasurable — the all-seeing outsider fixing our problems — and puts the onus back on us. Revealing the truth can only take us so far; it’s what we choose to do with that knowledge that matters. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is available on Netflix.
6. Broker
Somewhere along the way in the formation of the film criticism lexicon, action movies and superhero flicks were deemed “big” and original dramas were assigned the status of “small.” It’s an appropriate dichotomy when considering a movie’s budget, or the scale of its cinematic displays — there’s nothing small about a Marvel battle or a Fast and Furious car chase. But it becomes peculiar when viewed through the lens of how much the subject matter of these films is or is not meaningful to our lives. Caped crusaders fighting back against a nefarious plot to end the world can be a nice distraction, but films that devote themselves to topics like family, loss, or financial struggle are the ones dealing with the issues that truly feel big.
Many dramas, I think, fail because they seem themselves as small, modestly capturing the trivialities of daily life. Director Hirokazu Kore-eda never falls into this trap, and his soft-spoken dramas reach greatness precisely because of his conviction that, for his characters, the conflicts they face feel just as big as the world ending. For them, it might as well be.
Broker stars Song Kang-ho (Parasite) as Sang-hyeon, a laundromat owner with a morally dubious side hustle: stealing unwanted babies left at a church’s infant drop box and selling them on the adoption black market. He and his partner Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) run a smooth operation — until So-young (IU) comes back for the baby she had abandoned at the church.
Kore-eda doesn’t shy away from the ethical ickiness of the infant-selling operation, even as a genuine connection forms between this found family (a theme Kore-eda is returning to after his 2018 masterpiece Shoplifters). Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo begin the film at odds with So-young, but the eclectic group bonds as their shared status as societal outsiders becomes apparent. Kore-eda laces his films with an understanding of the alienation wrought by economic insecurity, and insists on family as the binding force allowing his characters to forge a path forward, together, in spite of their circumstances.
Kang-ho is charming and lively in the lead role, but it’s IU who steals the show. Wickedly funny and carrying an impassioned, tenacious resolve, IU grounds Broker and matches the delicate tone of Kore-eda’s direction. There are two scenes in the final act of the film, one in a hotel room and one on a ferris wheel, in which IU’s performance is completely heartbreaking. Broker ends quietly, but like the temporary, makeshift families at the heart of Kore-eda’s films, its impact lingers long after it is over. Broker is not yet available in the U.S.
5. Armageddon Time
This disturbing rise in antisemitism of late — and the abundance of apologists for that antisemitism — has made clear that much of America has never really understood Jewish identity, nor has it ever bothered to try. In Armageddon Time, director James Gray presents a story of intergenerational Jewish American identity that is both a personal exhumation of Gray’s childhood regrets and an illuminating portrait of the complexities of Jewish identity within American society. It is a rare film of uncompromising vision, and I have been saddened to see how roundly it has been ignored by audiences and the awards circuit.
Appearing on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, James Gray said while discussing his film that “You can be the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time.” Such is the tension at the heart of Armageddon Time, cleverly deployed by Gray in the film by sandwiching Paul (Banks Repeta), the stand-in for Gray’s younger self, between the trauma experienced by the elder members of his family and the boundless promise his life in America seems to offer. Paul has an impishness and brash defiance of authority allowed to him by his privilege; his whiteness and financial security free him to fail upwards in school in a way that his friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who is Black, cannot. At the same time, Paul returns home to hear from his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) about the horrors of Jewish persecution during the Holocaust. These lessons from his grandfather haunt Paul, wiping away his childish disobedience as he is forced to confront the dangers his family has faced.
Gray approaches this dichotomy with a pained exploration of his own privilege and the choices he made with it; to do so without coming off as self-indulgent or self-congratulatory is a small miracle. Armageddon Time is a requiem for a friendship lost, and a reckoning with Gray’s regret over past choices and responsibility for future ones. Critics who have dismissed the film as othering Webb’s Johnny miss the film’s poignant deliberate demonstration of how that othering is a tragically inevitable fact of the American social hierarchy. When the consequences for their rebelliousness catch up to them, it comes as no surprise to Johnny; Paul, meanwhile, sees the unfairness of the world for the first time.
In less able hands this realization could have felt contrived, with Johnny acting as a mere rhetorical device for Paul to learn and grow as a person. But under Gray’s direction there is a genuinely touching relationship between Paul and Johnny on screen, and Paul’s transformation is less a celebration of his betterment than a moral damnation of his failure to see the world for what it is, and a call for him to open his eyes.
Lurking in the background of this ethical decision is the Trump family, who have a presence at the private school Paul is sent to after he is booted from public school. Fred and Maryanne Trump (John Diehl and Jessica Chastain) appear sporadically to indoctrinate the privileged class with ideas of their own superiority, insisting to the students that they earned their place, a place that was in reality bought for them. The Trumps, alongside the election of Ronald Reagan, serve as a harbinger of the coming armageddon in America. They are a signal that people are turning toward their own enrichment at the expense of others, and underscore the historical weight of the choices Paul must make. To recognize one’s own privilege and do the right thing is not just a personal decision, but a fork in the road that can sway the political path of a nation. As Jeremy Strong (who plays Paul’s father Irving in the film) described it in his thoughtful interview with Stephen Colbert, Armageddon Time is “Both the origin story of an artist and the origin story of our country … it’s a movie about integrity … and our failure to make the right choices, choosing social acceptance over courage.”
The voice in Paul’s head helping him to make the right decision is his grandfather. “Never give in, Jelly Bean,” we hear him tell Paul, as Gray zooms the camera in on an old family photo. The Jews have faced fascism before, Gray is saying, and as the Trumps loom, they soon will again. What is important for Paul to understand is both the privilege and the danger he faces, and his obligation to use the former to prevent the latter, for himself and others. Armageddon Time is a mournful examination of identity and moral duty, so perhaps it makes sense that it did not catch on with a moviegoing audience that has little patience for nuance or emotional ambiguity. But it is a vital film, and I am grateful it exists. Armageddon Time is available for rental.
4. Top Gun: Maverick
What is there to say? This movie fucking rules. Maverick breaks Mach 10, woos Jennifer Connelly, and boldly pulls off a dangerous mission in enemy territory. He rides around on his little motorcycle, leads the squad in a game of sweaty beach football, and literally throws the rule book in the trash.
Cruise is our greatest movie star, and if the insane promo for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is any indication, he won’t be slowing down any time soon. He has, you could say, a need for speed. His desire to fly military-level jets and free dive thousands of feet is thrilling and, frankly, concerning; Cruise is living squarely in the danger zone. He can’t keep doing this forever, and at some point his action movie run will come to an end. But as Maverick tells his superiors, “Maybe so … but not today.” Top Gun: Maverick is available on Paramount Plus.
3. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Almost as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic started, we were arguing over what made for a good pandemic movie and what made for an unwatchable one. Some films using the pandemic as their backdrop earned near-universal derision from critics (Locked Down, The Bubble), while others successfully wove it into their plot while producing something reflective of the time (Kimi, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery). Some documentaries (Homeroom, The First Wave) powerfully trained their cameras on the social and political ramifications of the crisis. Some productions borne of isolation emerged as essential time capsules (Bo Burnham: Inside), while others exposed with their simplicity how little the writer behind them had to offer (Malcolm and Marie). All of these films, though vastly different in tone and approach, capture a small slice of what it was like to live through one of the most calamitous public health disasters of our lifetimes.
Yet none of these movies evoke both the crushing weight of loneliness and the transcendent happiness of being with those you love quite like Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a movie not at all about the COVID-19 pandemic that encompasses its lessons more than any other film. The movie stars Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a walking, talking shell with googly eyes who’s been tragically separated from his family. He’s managed to cobble together a satisfactory life since then — he cares for his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), the only family member still left with him, and finds small ways to amuse himself. But more than anything, he wants his family back. This daily routine is just one way in which Marcel stands apart from the standard pandemic films, in which life is irrevocably changed. Marcel’s foibles are adorable, yet his routine is laced with the recognizable sadness of the way in which life carries on through a tragedy, even as it has lost some of its luster.
Marcel eventually enlists the help of the human living in his home, Dean (Dean Fleischer-Camp), in order to track down Marcel’s family. Dean is dealing with a loss of his own, and in their partnership Marcel and Dean each provide the emotional support the other desperately needs. Dean also introduces Marcel to the internet, and Marcel discovers how the digital realm can facilitate connections that are meaningful, connections that are shallow, and those that are both.
What makes Marcel such a pleasure to spend time with is his unwavering honesty. When he marvels at a new discovery his joy is unvarnished; when he faces a setback his heartache is out in the open. As an outsider learning about the human world for the first time he has the perspective required to ask the questions we wouldn’t think to, to make simple the things we’ve made needlessly complex.
And so, to make it simple: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a perfect film. I loved Marcel from the first minute of the film, and I walked away knowing I couldn’t wait to watch it again. It is the movie of the pandemic era, I think, because it not only captures what it looks like to be alone but evokes why it’s essential to be together. It’s something we all know, I think, even if in the years since the pandemic began it’s become easier to forget. Sometimes, we need a talking shell with googly eyes to point out what we fail to see. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is available to rent.
2. Tár
When writing about a movie I typically avoid reading anything about it until I’ve finished my own review, lest I end up merely parroting the eloquent analyses of critics much more insightful than myself. Todd Field’s Tár, however, demands consuming as many different takes and opinions about it as possible. For a film this densely intellectual and precisely constructed there is little risk of stealing another writer’s thoughts, because each new perspective on its intentions only serves to deepen the labyrinth of possibilities found within its details.
Consider Dan Kois’ review in Slate, titled “Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?” Kois helpfully surveys the landscape of critical interpretations before positing that “Tár is a kind of ghost story, in which we’re so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár’s psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate.” Kois goes on to point out the clues that suggest Tár may be a literal ghost story, in which Krista, the subject of Lydia Tár’s complicated past, can occasionally be seen on the edges of the frame, haunting Lydia. Am I convinced that everything that unfolds in the film’s final act is imagined, or some sort of dream? Not entirely. But I know the film feels like a ghost story, and Kois’ review opens up new ways of thinking about that reading. This is the sort of film Tár is, one that raises new questions with each additional interpretation.
That Kois’ review hardly focuses on Blanchett’s performance as Lydia Tár makes sense in so far as she is so blindingly great in the film it feels inadequate to say so. As Tár, Blanchett invents a character so blustering, confident, and finely calibrated that it is hard to believe Lydia Tár isn’t based on a real person. Setting aside the fact that the Oscars are often a poor judge of the year’s best performances, Blanchett’s turn as Tár may be the most decisively resounding “She is going to win the Oscar” performance I have ever seen.
I was also struck by the inventiveness of Field’s narrative structure in Tár. The film concerns the intersection of events from Lydia Tár’s past catching up to her and shaping her future, both personally and professionally. Field manages to avoid gauche flashbacks or arduous exposition by allowing the events unfolding in the present day to inform our understanding of what might have occurred in the past. In doing so, Field not only creates a streamlined plot but also adds an ingenious layer of ambiguity to the story — our belief about Tár’s misdeeds are not informed by what is actually shown on screen, but what is implied. It’s a structure that implicates the audience in our assumptions about what we truly know, and by the end leaves open the question of whether Tár was a virtuoso or a self-created brand propped up by a cult of personality.
These ideas are endlessly fascinating upon reflection, and even more impressive upon reading other dissections of Tár and realizing they only scratch the surface. To describe the film as intellectual perhaps diminishes the extent to which Field’s curiosity and rigor are thrilling to take in. I didn’t see anything else like Tár this year — and with each new analysis of the film, my estimation of its achievements grows. Tár is available for rental.
Nope
Just three movies into his filmography, Jordan Peele is already known for a set of distinct cinematic elements: psychological horror, social commentary, and the intricacy of his puzzle box screenplays, which always reward repeated viewings. What Peele is not typically associated with is joy. He is praised for his films’ splendor but has been seen primarily as a cultural critic, an artist who enhances genre tropes and plot twists with incisive commentaries about our most entrenched societal defects.
Nope, his genre-defiant western-sci-fi-horror-comedy epic, is a departure from that mode of cultural admonition. Working on a much grander scale than he does in Get Out or Us, Peele manages to cast judgment on those acting in bad faith before pivoting to a celebration of creativity and familial connection, and a rejection of self-exploitative image-making. Nope is his least accessible film thematically, swapping exposition for visual grandeur. It is also his most accomplished movie yet.
Typically mum on the meaning of his own films, Peele himself suggested an important distinction from his previous work in an interview for Essence. “It's so tricky being considered in the vanguard of Black horror, because obviously Black horror is so very real, and it's hard to do it in a way that's not retraumatizing and sad,” Peele said. “I was going into my third horror film starring Black leads, and somewhere in the process I realized that the movie had to be about Black joy as well.”
The critical reception to Nope, while lauding Peele as an auteur, was disappointingly ignorant to the film’s joyfulness. Indiewire focused its analysis of the film on the “awful power” we lend tragedies “by sanctifying them into spectacles,” and our “fatal inability to look away from them.” Vox zeroed in on the personal failings of a society glued to its devices, citing how “a culture built on spectacle can only get more spectacular, coaxing us to always look at it, to never tear ourselves away, to gorge ourselves on it.”
These reviews position Nope as yet another artifact of cultural damnation, a reasonable interpretation considering the film opens with a calamitous Bible verse. Before the action begins, the text of Nahum 3:6 appears on screen: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Nahum was prophesying how God would punish the city of Nineveh due to its rampant vices, describing it as a “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder.” The implication is that Nope is suggesting humanity will realize a similar fate due to our own propensity to reframe reality into indulgent, ugly spectacles.
Peele is certainly interested in the ramifications of documenting spectacle and turning it into entertainment. Yet the true meaning of Nope is much more nuanced than the facile reading that Peele is shaming us for being on our phones too much. The genius of Nope is its enlightened understanding of the difference between what it means to chase and capture spectacle for the right and wrong reasons. The characters of Nope who falter do so because they are mired in a mindless, self-aggrandizing pursuit to mine spectacles for their own gain. But OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) come out on top because they have the fortitude to abandon the false promises of fame and greed, instead trying to capture the imagery of spectacle in order to honor their family and reclaim ownership and representation in a more meaningful sense.
Peele infuses Nope with an unabashed love for spectacle. He is as visually creative and precise a director as any filmmaker today, and the complex ideas embedded within his screenplays never crowd out his ability to also be our greatest entertainer. Like the UFO in Nope, Peele’s films fly above the rest of Hollywood, defying expectations, making reality a little more spectacular by creating unique, transcendent spectacles on the director’s own terms. It’s a joy to watch. Nope is available on Peacock.