Films I Watched in 2022

Ranked and Reviewed

Happy New Year! I watched 81 films in 2022, 74 of them for the first time. Below, I've given them star ratings and mini-reviews, and ranked them all from worst to best.

2 Star Films

81. Moonfall (2022)

An incompetent and noisy disaster movie. If you want something good about the moon falling to earth, I would recommend R.C. Sherriff's 1939 novel "The Hopkins Manuscript", which is as subtle and lovely as Moonfall is blunt and crass.

80. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

Nicolas Cage plays himself in a generic thriller. Other than namechecking some Cage movies, there's nothing specifically about Cage here - it could be any actor in the lead role. It never digs into Cage's actual art or persona.

79. The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)

English folk horror. There are some impressive shots of the bleak landscape: twitching crows and silent forests. But this is mostly a confused and muddy film, occasionally breaking out into grim exploitation.

2.5 Star Films

78. The Grey Man (2022)

Netflix mulch. A spy film that could have been written and directed by an AI. It's not exactly boring, though, and Chris Evans is having sleazy fun as the villain. The sort of movie which is fine with you checking your phone as it goes on.

77. The Rainmaker (1997)

Francis Ford Coppola directed a John Grisham legal thriller? There are fun moments in the trial scenes, but the problem is the structure - it's baggy and directionless.

76. Willow (1988)

Inert fantasy romp. Some nicely imaginative special effects sequences, and Warwick Davis is good at projecting warmth and kindness.

75. The Adam Project (2022)

More Netflix mulch. The high concept is good (Ryan Reynolds is a future-hero who teams up with his child-self in the modern day), and it's just about witty enough. Inconsequential.

74. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Sam Raimi tries to bend the MCU formula, and ends up with something incoherent. There are some good horror sequences, and good ideas for action sequences, but much of this is low-contrast cgi-gloop with Elizabeth Olsen desperately trying to insert stakes and drama.

73. Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

Often charming. But I don't think you should build kids’ movies entirely out of product placement.

72. Mad Max (1979)

Low-budget near-future action thriller. Jagged, scratchy, deliberately ugly. Not without interest, but it's like living inside a bad temper.

71. Spiderhead (2022)

Based on George Saunders' disturbing, Vonnegutesque short story "Escape From Spiderhead". They've tried to sand it down, and you've rarely seen a more visually bland movie, but you can still feel the sour bite of the source material underneath.

70. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

There are some joyful sequences here (the art museum, the parade), but this is a gross monument to selfishness and ego. Get back to school, Ferris, your education is important.

3 Star Films

69. Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

The plot of this is literally that she knocks her head and loses her memory? Like in a cartoon? The fashion and interior design are good.

68. The Living Daylights (1987) (Rewatch)

Perfectly acceptable mid-level James Bond.

67. Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

A storm of chaos - monsters and wizards being thrown at the screen with no regard for coherence. The imagination and energy are just enough to keep you going.

66. See How They Run (2022)

A cosy murder mystery set in the 1950s. It's nice to hang around with a cast having fun amidst elegant production design. But this is smug as hell - I like meta jokes and formalism, but keeps hammering you with reminders of what it's doing, terrified that you'll miss its attempts at cleverness. And the solution to the mystery is a damp squib.

65. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

MCU on autopilot. Tonally all over the place, but there's enough talented people involved that this basically works.

64. Amsterdam (2022)

Diverting thriller-mystery with a queasy mix of the twee and the weighty. Christian Bale's wiry intensity holds it together.

63. Death on the Nile (2022)

This is so absurd: Kenneth Branagh is terrified that a contemporary audience will be bored by Agatha Christie, so he abandons all restraint. Mexican Standoffs! Raunchy Dancing! A Moustache Origin Story!

62. The Sparks Brothers (2021)

A good documentary about the band Sparks. The main problem is that I don't like Sparks that much.

61. Licence to Kill (1989)

I like revenge stories - here, a mid-level James Bond film is enlivened by hard-edged cruelty.

60. Ready or Not (2019)

Comedy-horror film about a murderous game of hide-and-seek in a gothic mansion. Silly fun.

59. Don't Worry Darling (2022)

A housewife going mad in a mysterious 1950s town in the desert. The script is *terrible* - you'll guess the twist five minutes in, and the film will still barely make sense. But the craft is great - beautiful set design, flashy cinematography, unnerving dance sequences. And Florence Pugh does a valiant job of giving all this nonsense an emotional core. Treat it as a mood piece and it works fine.

58. Beat the Devil (1953)

Humphrey Bogart in a Mediterranean grifter comedy-drama. The script (by Truman Capote!) wasn't planned in advance, it was written before each day of filming, and this therefore has a woozy directionless feel. But if you lock into its rhythm, there's fun to be had.

57. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Ambitious and thoughtful, often exciting. But there are too many missing pieces for this to really sing. The grip of the MCU production line currently feels too strong for real quality to burst out.

3.5 Star Films

56. M*A*S*H* (1970)

I've no real idea how to rate this - any placement feels like a cop-out. This is brilliant filmmaking, full of wit and flash and murky horror and novelistic depth. It's also horrifically misogynistic: the audience is encouraged to see the sexual degradation of its female characters as a lark. Those sequences poison the movie, overshadowing everything else it does.

55. The Beach (2000)

Achingly of-its-time, all the jittery paranoia of the triumphant west, with its EDM and disposable income. At its best at its least realistic - when it feels close to a fable or science fiction. At its worst when people are just chatting on a beach.

54. The Kid who Would be King (2019)

A fun, imaginative Arthurian kids' movie. If I'd seen this when I was seven, it would probably be one of my favourite films. A high-quality Merlin.

53. The House (2022)

Stop-motion animated horror anthology. The first of its three stories is incredible - a Robert-Aickman-ish childhood nightmare, with long shadows, hostile architecture and unnerving transformations. The other two stories are forgettable and empty.

52. Split (2016)

An oppressive, well-made thriller, which gives James McAvoy a chance to show off as a character with multiple personalities. The script goes to some baffling places, and I'm not sure it handles its most upsetting material with enough care, but there's an admirable pulpy energy here.

51. Coherence (2013)

Ultra-low budget science fiction. The acting is poor, the filmmaking often feels rudimentary, but the script is dense and clever, filled with increasingly head-spinning ideas, sinister implications unfolding in every corner.

50. Encanto (2021)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but for kids! The songs are good. A frictionless unthreatening meander with no meat on its bones.

49. Runaway Jury (2003)

A fun, straightforward John Grisham thriller with some great performances and neat twists. If this were made today, it would be an eight-part tv drama and it would be boring as hell.

48. Wendell and Wild (2022)

Stop-motion animation full of incredible designs and a delight in its own image-making. It throws slightly too much at the screen to work as a narrative, or to achieve the emotional effects it is aiming for, but it has a good heart.

47. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Post-apocalyptic action, with wild and dense world-building. All rock-star theatricality. A shame it loses momentum before it finishes.

46. Shadow (2018)

Wuxia epic from the director of "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers". Stylised and bleached of colour. Takes a while to get going, but once the pieces are in play and the stakes are raised, the climactic battle scenes are delightful.

45. Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)

It desperately wants to be something unnerving and European that you catch on television at 3am, but Del Toro's populist instincts are just too strong for that. Still, making Pinocchio into a film about fascism and mortality pays off a lot better than you would expect.

44. Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Idris Elba, as a genie, is the best I've seen him: soulful and ancient and in pain. Tilda Swinton, as the academic who falls in love with him, is the worst I've seen her: stilted and mannered and brittle. Still, this is a playful and ambitious film, bouncing through centuries, with the best fantasy musical instrument you've ever seen.

43. Alien: Covenant (2017)

To be honest, I just like looking at spaceships. When this is going for tortured metaphors about God and Art and Civilisation, it's good gothy overambitious fun. And it's often visually great. A shame that it needs to turn into a standard Alien movie, the monster picking off a crew in the same way you've seen so many times before.

42. The Holy Mountain (1973)

Astounding hippy nonsense. The conquest of Mexico reenacted by live frogs! Christ awakes screaming, surrounded by plaster-cast replicas of his own dying body! A propaganda tycoon rides an elephant dressed as a clown! An alchemist turns shit into gold! There's a cruelty and unpleasantness to a lot of the surrealism here, but there's also a joy at the freedom that you can just put *anything* in front of a camera.

41. Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Elegant romantic comedy about jewel thieves. For all the silk-smooth charm, you can see the ghost of economic collapse peering through the cracks.

40. Nightwatching (2007)

Conspiratorial arthouse drama about Rembrandt's "The Night Watch", starring Martin Freeman as the painter. I usually love Peter Greenaway films, and there's fierce intelligence and some fantastic images here, but I don't think Greenaway's pitiless eye is the best fit for the earthy humanism of Rembrandt's work.

39. I'm Not There (2007)

A film about Bob Dylan, starring six actors as different aspects of the singer. There are some magnificent sequences, and Cate Blanchett is incredible, but the central thesis seems to be "Dylan is a mystery and we can never untangle him", which leaves you wondering what the point is.

38. The Batman (2022)

I'm pretty fatigued by superhero stuff at the moment, but the rain-soaked hazy maximalism of this Gotham City is worth hanging around in. A shame it goes on too long.

37. Triangle of Sadness (2022)

Broad, expansive, nihilistic satire, centring on a cruise aboard a luxury yacht. I like the way it quietly portrays its world as expensive but unappealing. The highlight is an apocalyptic night-journey, full of gross-out body-comedy, howling winds and drunken Marxism across the tannoy. It loses its way in a long third act which seems to merely restate its earlier ideas.

36. The Menu (2022)

Arch and stylish fun: Ralph Fiennes as a chef at a luxury restaurant on an isolated island, serving guests a series of courses, each more evil than the last. It feels like a Vincent Price movie, full of petty revenge and nonsense twists. Sometimes the subtext seems anti-intellectual, but taking any of this seriously is missing the point.

4 Star Films

35. Glass (2019)

Weird and ambitious: on the surface, this is a slow, stagy movie about a psychiatric institution where superheroes and supervillains are told that their abilities are delusions. Beyond that, this is a metacommentary about a world saturated by superhero stories, wrestling with the idea that one narrative is holding all of pop culture in its grip. The places it reaches are ambivalent and thoughtful.

34. Men (2022)

A nightmare: after the death of her husband, a woman takes a holiday to an idyllic English village where all the men are played by Rory Kinnear. Reality begins to warp and crack in disturbing ways. This is a blunt metaphor for toxic masculinity, but there are all sorts of strange uncertainties under the surface: the woodlands in this film are all bright and clean and colourful - more like insert shots on Countryfile than the inhuman murk of 1970s folk horror. What, then, is the green man doing here? An avatar of ancient wildness in the tamed Cotswolds.

33. Mad Max 2 (1981)

Direct, precise action filmmaking with beautifully unhinged production design.

32. Paddington 2 (2017)

I don't understand the people who think this is one of the Greatest Movies Ever - it's a cosy film for the very young, it's not going to redefine reality for you as an adult - but this is exceptionally well made, as warm and funny as you could hope for.

31. Cat People (1942)

A small, intense horror movie (with possibly the first jump-scare on film!) about a woman who may or may not transform into a panther when aroused. The premise may sound schlocky, but this is sophisticated and measured, about psychological repression and marital disharmony, with supernatural shadows gathering in the corners.

30. Pig (2021)

A truffle-hunter's pig is captured, so he travels through Portland's sinister haute-cuisine underworld trying to get it back. Which all sounds like quirky, eccentric fun - especially given that the truffle-hunter is played by Nicolas Cage. But this is an extremely sad movie - a film about grief which offers very little hope. All the quirk (and the plot elements lifted from John Wick and Ratatouille) are disguise draped over a film in mourning.

29. The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

What The Last Jedi was for Star Wars, this is for The Matrix - A sequel about the making of sequels, a genre film about how genre films function. It's dense with ideas, and happy to tangle itself in self-referential nets. You'll know if this sounds exciting or irritating to you - I'd much rather have introspective invention than more bland product.

28. Saint Maud (2019)

Psychological horror about a disturbed fundamentalist Christian acting as carer to a terminally ill bohemian dancer. The plotting is a little direct - I prefer this kind of movie to have a little more ambiguity and shadow - but its set pieces are extremely disturbing, and the performances are hypnotic.

27. Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

The characters are simple, the storytelling is direct, there are no deep ideas here, it's more than three hours long: I can see why some people hate this. But! If you want to luxuriate in an imaginary world and be blasted by spectacle, this is superb. Also: sentient whale aliens!

26. A Simple Plan (1998)

Sam Raimi makes a film in the style of the Coen Brothers: a briefcase full of cash found in the snow leads to escalating lies and a trail of dead bodies. It's a bleak movie - you can feel the human cost of the bad decisions - more upsetting than the taut entertainment you might be expecting.

25. Belleville Rendezvous (2003) (Rewatch)

French animation, mostly silent, about an elderly woman tracking down her kidnapped cyclist grandson. It slips in and out of surrealism, full of grotesque character designs and beautiful landscapes: the city of Belleville is an astonishing merging of Parisian elegance and American maximalism. There is also an excellent dog

24. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Luxurious Mediterranean surfaces and seething, murderous resentment. The tricks of the farce driving towards tragedy. Everyone is great in this, but Philip Seymour Hoffman is outstanding in his small role as a cunning boor.

23. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

A slow start, and much sillier than the first one, but this is a delight: the detective movie as sunlit magic trick.

22. Princess Mononoke (1997) (Rewatch)

Studio Ghibli does a high-fantasy epic, full of scale and compassion. It's less approachable than some of their other films, more cold and grand. An achievement to look up to rather than to embrace.

21. Nope (2022)

A restless, uncomfortable film. On its simplest level this is a UFO horror - an alien invasion in the desert near Hollywood. But unsettling images pile up, tangents leading to tangents, never letting us click into a rhythm. There are Big Metaphors here, about race, the film industry, violence, spectacle. But the film cannot be reduced to its ideas, as it takes its winding journey through the night.

20. Nightmare Alley (2021)

Bradley Cooper is miscast - in the novel, Stan is a teenager, desperately scrabbling to stay afloat in a hostile world. Cooper is clearly established, it's unclear why he only discovers himself in middle-age. But fixating on that misunderstands this film, which isn't about psychology - like most Guillermo Del Toro, it's about myth: the myth of the carnival, the mind-reader, the conman, the serial killer, the travelling beggar, the femme fatale, archetypes tumbling like tarot cards. This is all the stories America tells itself about the early twentieth century, painted with comic-book excess.

19. The Worst Person in the World (2021)

A novelistic film about the life of a young woman, her family and romance and career. Playful and tragic, mocking and loving its characters.

18. Back to the Future (1985) (Rewatch)

I saw it at the cinema, and its amazing how much that adds: crunch and volume and real heartfelt tension. I cried a bit at Johnny B Goode. For all the precision of its craft, and our familiarity with its workings, it's easy to forget how strange this is - every character is played with cartoon broadness, but all are slightly skewed away from their archetypes - as if the Mad Scientist, the Cool Kid, the Nerd and the Promiscuous Teenager had been designed in a slightly different universe to our own. It is also, of course, about a boy teaching his father violence so that his father can more efficiently participate in capitalism.

17. RRR (2022)

An Indian historical epic, huge in scope and sincerity and absurdity. Three hours of anti-colonial maximalism - this is a movie where a crashing lorry full of wild animals is unleashed on a palace full of British soldiers, and that isn't even the craziest action sequence. Yes, it's propaganda, but what isn't?

16. Witchfinder General (1968)

The English Civil War: familiar countryside is transformed into a vast and broken wasteland. Vincent Price is a psychopathic witchfinder, accusing and killing innocent women for his own gratification. He is opposed by a young swashbuckling officer, but romantic heroism doesn't go far in the dirt. A grim film, honest about its grimness.

15. Drive My Car (2021)

Based on a Murakami short story, this is a slow, methodical character-study about the friendship between a theatre director and his young chauffeur. Full of quiet wit and strangeness, it spends a lot of time creating threads which eventually come together for explosive emotional effects.

14. Cyrano (2021)

A musical about Cyrano de Bergerac, with songs by the National. Visually this is a little inert, a little respectable - it hasn't pushed far past its stage-show origins. But the songs are wonderful - this is a film that aches. Peter Dinklage is superb as a man caught between his self-regard and his self-loathing, building his own destruction.

4.5 Star Films

13. The Other Lamb (2019)

After I watched this, I saw it had received consistently bad reviews? I've no idea why - it's fantastic, unnerving stuff: a folk-horror/coming of age about a girl slowly realising the horror of the misogynistic forest cult where she was raised. A forensic examination of a controlling, threatening culture and the harshness of the wilderness that surrounds it.

12. Her (2013)

Joaquin Phoenix, miserable after a divorce, falls in love with an AI. The premise is unpromising, but the film is well aware of all your objections, and weaves them into something knotty, complicated and romantic. The aesthetic of this thing is also incredible, a slightly-too-polished hipster retro-future which somehow balances hollowness with charm.

11. Revengers Tragedy (2002)

Thomas Middleton's The Revengers Tragedy is one of my favourite plays - jet black 17th century comic-horror with baroque murder methods, absurd convolution and beautiful, vicious dialogue. I directed a production of it at university, and they had to reconsecrate the chapel where we performed it. This adaptation keeps the original language, brings in an extraordinary cast (Christopher Eccleston! Derek Jacobi! Eddie Izzard!), sets it in a grubby post-apocalyptic Manchester and streamlines the plot so the whole thing just glides along like a vulture.

10. Naked Lunch (1991)

Naked Lunch is, of course, an unfilmable novel - it's basically just a collection of gross ideas described in wiry poetic ways. The film takes some inspiration from the book, but is mostly a mashup of a biopic of William Burroughs, and a Science Fiction Spy film, about a double agent addicted to insect-spray caught in a cold-war between identity-warping drug dealers and aliens that appear as a cross between a typewriter, a cockroach, and an anus. Except the whole thing is probably a paranoid hallucination about repressed homosexuality. It's full of grim body-horror and looping dream logic, and its 1950s-fleshy-techo-Moroccan aesthetic is like nothing else.

9. Everything Everywhere all at Once (2022)

Audacious, delightful Science Fiction action, about alternative universes and family and running a small business. Funny and warm and outrageous, there were at least five moments where I couldn't believe what the film was showing me.

8. The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Joel Coen directs Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in an adaptation of the Shakespeare play. All jagged, expressionist monochrome. Washington is predictably amazing - a measured, intellectual soldier, handling the verse with natural grace. And the visual punchline to the Dagger speech is an exhilarating whoosh of cinema.

7. Gosford Park (2001) (Rewatch)

Structured around a murder mystery, but really this is an encyclopaedic journey through a richly detailed place, exploring people and architecture and all the forces that tie them together or push them apart. I've seen this three times now, and on each of my rewatches I've forgotten the killer but remembered the characters.

5 Stars

6. Knives Out (2019) (Rewatch)

A clockwork masterpiece: all the warmth of an old house in Autumn, crackling with dialogue stretched taut over a plot so precise in its rhythms that it feels like music. Movie stars bringing relaxed charisma to something that is All Structure, subverting and upholding all the tropes and games that genres teach us. We all know that the detective will crack the case - so what if that certainty becomes a threat? What if we aren't watching a murder mystery at all? And what if *that* question becomes the mystery?

5. Mad God (2021)

Phil Tippett did special effects on Star Wars and Jurassic Park, among other things, and for the last 30 years he's been working on this stop-motion animated descent into hell. A strange figure in a gas mask travels through violent factories or war-wrecked cities. He descends lower than lower, encountering strange monsters, seemingly aiming to destroy the underland. But time here doesn't work. Things don't end, there is only more darkness. This has the same intensity of the paintings of Bosch or John Martin, with all their raw brutality.

4. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The earliest sections feel like nasty schlock created by the greatest artists in the world. Then it expands and curdles outwards into something quieter and more complicated. All the grubby, small officiousness of twentieth century Britain with rusted spikes driven through it.

3. Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Documentary footage of cities in the Soviet Union, filmed with every imaginable trick - slow motion, or jump cuts, or animations, or split screens... We're also shown the film being put together in front of us - the daring of the cameramen as they scale tall buildings or stand on railway tracks, the editors taking it the footage to pieces and rebuilding it. We're shown cities full of life - factory workers, or commuters, or babies being born, the camera delighted by urban vitality. It's hard to express how joyous and witty and profound this thing is. I watched it with the Michael Nyman soundtrack, which enhanced its restless, propulsive energy.

2. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

I was sort of expecting something worthy and Oscary and respectable, but was absolutely blown away by this. There's a double game here: this is a film about symbols - of masculinity, America, sexuality, the wilderness, camp - and the way they intertwine and blur. But there's also a precisely pitched, beautiful characterised melodrama, too human for the game of symbols to efface.

1. The Green Knight (2021) (Rewatch)

This was the best film I saw in 2021, and after a rewatch it's the best film I saw in 2022 as well. It's hard to imagine something more perfectly calibrated to my tastes. No other movies feel more like medieval Arthuriana: outside of Camelot, the English wilderness is a place of pure narrative. You will stumble across stories that you may not understand, caught in the logic of myth and dream. But even though you may encounter the ghost of a Saint, or a stone giant, or a silent blindfolded old woman, your honour and your life and your desire are all still heavy things. And in that tangle of stories, maybe we can determine the value your honour, or your life, or your desire. In the dark woods, where time or politics are alien concepts, maybe we can see what should be exchanged, and what should be kept close.

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Turns out these things are much more time-consuming to write than I had expected! Hopefully the next one will come sooner - I'm planning on writing about the books I read in 2022.

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