David Stratton, Stephen Romei’s verdict on the best films of 2022
Some of the year’s best films played to thin audiences as many viewers took solace away from the virus and immersed themselves in streaming services, writes DAVID STRATTON. And scroll down for STEPHEN ROMEI’s picks.
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This year was a tough year for cinemas, especially for the smaller films – independents, foreign language releases, documentaries.
There’s no doubt that Covid 19 is still having a major effect on attendances. Anecdotal evidence suggests that while younger audiences, who seem undeterred by the virus that is still so much a factor in our lives, are flocking to superhero films and horror films, older audiences, who normally patronise the more specialised – and arguably more interesting – movies are deterred by the mask-free environment of most cinemas. There’s also the lure of the streaming channels to compete with going out to the movies.
The top box-office film of the year was Top Gun: Maverick, a bombastic celebration of American exceptionalism. I couldn’t stand it, but I have to admit that the aerial scenes were hugely impressive. I wondered, though, who the enemy was supposed to be.
The best of a batch of commercially successful horror films was Barbarian, which boasted a good screenplay, an original idea and a powerful location (the dilapidated suburbs of Detroit). I’m not a fan of superhero films – they all seem the same to me – but I did enjoy parts of Taika Waititi’s Thor Love and Thunder, especially the hilarious scene in which Russell Crowe appears as Zeus. By far the most enjoyable animated film of the year was Minions: The Rise of Gru while, from a handful of very good documentaries, I’d pick The Velvet Queen (French cameramen filming a rarely-seen snow leopard in the Tibetan mountains) and Navalny (a portrait of the courageous man who stood up to Putin).
Australian films of 2022 were a mixed bag. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was by far the most popular, and it’s pretty good, though overlong and over-indulgent of Tom Hanks’ curious performance as Colonel Tom Parker. I much preferred Gracie Otto’s delightfully original Seriously Red, a film about copycat performers that has something of the aura of Luhrmann’s debut, Strictly Ballroom. I also very much liked George Miller’s original and handsomely made Three Thousand Years of Longing, a series of age-old stories told by a master story-teller. A trio of smaller independent local films deserve mention: James Vaughan’s intelligent Friends and Strangers, Sasha Hadden’s touching A Stitch in Time, which had a pair of fine lead performances from Maggie Blinco and Greg Shorrock and Sissy, an original kind of horror film from talented directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes.
Quite a few American films that were a cut above the average. David O’Russell’s Amsterdam was given a rather lukewarm reaction, and for my money was the most underrated film of the year. I enjoyed this richly textured movie so much that I saw it twice over a space of a few days. With its Hitchcockian blend of humour and suspense, and boasting an unusually fine cast – Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy plus Robert de Niro at his best, this has an intriguing plot inspired by real events – the fascist movement in pre-World War II America. I also very much liked Blonde, Australian Andrew Dominik’s film about Marilyn Monroe; this wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but the stellar performance from Ana de Armas as Marilyn anchored a consistently inventive and intriguing biopic.
Among the best American films of the year I’d also mention James Gray’s autobiographical Armageddon Time, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which boasted a memorable performance from Cate Blanchett, She Said, the film about the journalists who exposed the odious Harvey Weinstein, and The Menu, a quirky and original dramatic comedy.
In the aftermath of Brexit, British films seemed to be mainly interested in nostalgia. Several of the best UK films of the year looked back to true stories of the past, often with considerable success.
The Duke starred Jim Broadbent as the man who – perhaps – stole a priceless Goya painting from the National Gallery in 1961. Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden, starred Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen as backroom boffins involved in tricking the Germans as to the location of a planned landing on the European mainland during World War II. See How They Run was fiction based on the factual success of Agatha Christie’s enduring play, The Mousetrap. The Lost King, made by veteran Stephen Frears, starred the great Sally Hawkins as an Edinburgh wife who tracked down the burial place of the reviled King Richard III.
My top British film of the year, however, was directed by an Australian: Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande was a sublime two-hander in which Emma Thompson is unforgettable as a widow who hires a male prostitute (Daryl McCormack) – a touching, beautifully acted chamber-piece.
There was no shortage of excellent foreign language films in our cinemas this year. One of the best was the harrowing Quo Vadis Aida, a Bosnian film by Jasmila Zbanic, set during the Balkans War in 1995 and focusing on a translator, played by the exceptional Jasna Djuricic, who tries to save her family from the occupying Serbian forces.
Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers is one of his best, a gripping melodrama about two contrasting mothers and also – a first for this director – a commentary on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. And the South Korean film, Decision to Leave, by Park Chan-wook, is a fine mystery story in which a cop is attracted to the widow of a man who may have been murdered.
There were plenty of other excellent foreign language films, several from France, including Lost Illusions, Xavier Giannoli’s adaptation of the Balzac novel; Full Time, the story of a single mother commuting to work from the outer suburbs of Paris; The Night of the 12th, a true-life mystery; Happening about a young girl who requires an abortion in the repressive 1960s; Everything went Fine in which a sickly father asks his daughter to help him die; Petite Maman a time-travel film in which a young girl encounters her own mother as a child; Farewell M. Haffmann, about a Jewish shopkeeper hiding out during the German occupation; Both Sides of the Blade, Claire Denis’ passionate love story; and Kompromat, in which a French cultural attache is hounded by Russian police in Siberia.
From Iran came two fine films: Hit the Road and A Hero; and from Scandinavia there were minor gems such as The Innocents, A Taste of Hunger and Margrete Queen of the North.
Finally, three excellent films from Ireland, one from the North and two from the South. Kenneth Branagh’s memorable Belfast is an autobiography about the filmmaker’s childhood during the Troubles; there are fine performances from Jude Hill as the boy, a character based on Branagh himself, and from Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds as his grandparents. From the Republic of Ireland came the Gaelic language The Quiet Girl, a poignant portrait of a child shunted from place to place, and – my choice for the best film of the year – Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which I reviewed last week.
Those were the highlights of 2022 – now let’s see what 2023 has to offer, and let’s hope that audiences will return in significant numbers to our cinemas.
David Stratton’s top movies of 2022
Amsterdam
The Banshees of Inisherin
Belfast
Blonde
Decision to Leave
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Parallel Mothers
Quo Vadis Aida
Seriously Red
Three Thousand Years of Longing
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Stephen Romei’s top 10 movies of 2022
David Stratton and I agree more that we disagree, so I expect a few double-ups on our best of 2022 lists. I know David prefers not to rank his films from top to bottom. That’s an area where we differ, so here’s the 10 best new releases I saw this year.
10. Blonde. Andrew Dominic’s excoriating account of Hollywood and the real woman who lived behind the mask of Marilyn Monroe.
9. The Drover’s Wife. Leah Purcell’s reshaping of the Henry Lawson story is an instant Australian classic.
8. I’m going to cheat and list documentaries I can not separate: Moonage Daydream, about David Bowie, Sidney, about Sidney Poitier, and Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time.
7. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street. The most uplifting. The story of the unlikely birth and extraordinary life of Sesame Street.
6. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. The funniest. Nic Cage stars as Nic Cage and that weight is huge.
5. The Children in the Pictures. The most disturbing. A hard-to-watch, must-watch Australian documentary about online sexual predators.
4.Parallel Mothers. Pedro Almodavor’s babies swapped-at-birth drama, which also considers Spain’s fascist past, is poetic and moving.
3. Belfast. Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about growing up in Belfast during the Troubles is his greatest work to date.
2. Another cheat, as I have two very different films tied in second place. The Banshees of Insiherin. Martin McDonagh’s Ireland-set drama about a friendship that breaks is a reminder that acting matters. Astonishing performances all round and Colin Farrell should win an Oscar …. except there’s Elvis. Baz Lurhmann’s epic take on the king of rock’n’roll should win lots of Academy Awards, especially for the star Austin Butler.
1. Mad God. No film made me think more than this undefinable masterpiece directed by the legend of stop motion animation Phil Tippett.
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