The year’s top films (plus a few of the worst)
Tom Cruise wins the award for multiplex superhero of 2022.
One of the few old-school movie stars left standing, he pushed back on the salvageyard business strategy suggesting “Top Gun: Maverick,” in limbo amid a series of pandemic release delays, ought to settle for Paramount’s streaming service. That would’ve been a plus (or, rather, a Plus) for the streaming service but the latest setback for bigger screens worldwide.
Cruise pressured the studio to wait for a pause between pandemic variants and rolled the dice in May. A $1.5 billion worldwide box office later, the 36-years-later sequel to “Top Gun” flew high all summer.
Maybe more sequels should wait 36 years between releases, though merely typing such a sentence gives the Marvel Cinematic Universe the vapors.
The film medium’s need for speed, its addiction to high-velocity propulsion, was there at the beginning when the train pulled into the station in the Lumiere brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” the smash hit of 1896. With the conspicuous whirligig exception of A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” not part of any franchise universe except its own, the movies that got by in theaters this year hit
the sweet spot where velocity meets branding.
Here, then, are the Tribune Top 10 for movies, 10 runners-up and seven soul crushers. There’s a lot more international and independent work than the average year. Maybe you’ll check out one or two of the recommendations; maybe you won’t.
Maybe the movies are dying. Maybe the theatrical experience has been in trouble for decades and the pandemic simply sped things up by slowing things down and turning the mainstream Hollywood studio pipeline into a drip.
Maybe the combination of COVID-19, flu and RSV, plus whatever else 2023 has in store … well. As Ricky Roma says in “Glengarry Glen Ross”: “I don’t know anymore.”
Roma, played by Al Pacino in the film version, says that line just before he cons an unsuspecting customer into buying what he’s selling. It’s an apt metaphor for the state of the movies in 2022.
Nobody knows anything anymore, certainly not about the business. But we crave the product because it’s not just a product, depending on who’s behind the camera.
There’s more to cinema than the business of cinema. The artists may not run the show, but they are everything. Everywhere. All at once.
In alphabetical order:
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
(directed by Laura Poitras). Two, even three remarkable documentaries sharing the same subject, about the life photographer Nan Goldin, her addiction and her activist efforts to hold Purdue Pharma accountable for its profiteering role in the opioid epidemic. Chicago premiere Dec. 16 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
“Compartment No. 6” (directed by Juho Kuosmanen). On a train bound for the Arctic Circle, a Finnish archaeology student meets a Russian miner. This international coproduction, in Finnish and Russian, has stayed with me since its early ’22 premiere. Now streaming.
“EO” (directed by Jerzy Skolimowski). A donkey’s life, inspired by the only film director/co-writer Skolimowski remembers making him cry: Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar.” More sociological than spiritual, as many (including Bresson acolyte Paul Schrader) have noted, it’s a bittersweet beauty. Through Dec. 22 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” (directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp). My kind of IP recycling, the deeply charming animated feature
did its source material justice (short films, huge on YouTube) while requiring zero familiarity with the lil’ mollusk with the enormous heart and Jenny Slate’s exquisite vocal performance. Now streaming.
“KIMI” (directed by Steven Soderbergh). Talk about velocity! With Zoë Kravitz as the razor-sharp Seattle tech worker who uncovers a corporate conspiracy by way of an Alexa-type “personal assistant,” screenwriter David Koepp’s tight, quick thriller found the perfect directorial match. Now streaming.
“Let the Little Light Shine” (directed by Kevin Shaw). The Chicago movie of the year. A tale of National Teachers Academy, Chicago Public Schools chicanery and grassroots, rabble-rousing, no-holds-barred activism. Now streaming on PBS.
“Saint Omer” (directed by Alice Diop). A one-of-a-kind courtroom drama, about a writer (Kayije Kagame) covering a murder trial and how its revelations lead to a series of interior revelations for the observer. My favorite film premiering at the Venice Film Festival. U.S. premiere Jan. 13, 2023.
“Tár” (directed by Todd Field). A film I’m eager to see a third time, since its ghostly atmospherics surrounding the gradual, then sudden fall of a world-famous conductor (Cate Blanchett, tiptop) has generated the most intriguing interpretations and counter-interpretations of anything this year. Now streaming.
“Turning Red” (directed by Domee Shi). Peak 2022 animation from Pixar, and Pixar’s freshest since “Inside Out” seven years ago. Now streaming.
“The Woman King” (directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood). Rousing, vividly fictionalized historical saga, with Viola Davis leading what expands into more of an ensemble piece than expected. Now streaming.
Plus a few honorable mentions, in alphabetical order: “Aftersun”; “After Yang”; “Decision to Leave”; “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; “The Fabelmans”; “Nope”; “Prey”; “She Said”; “Till”; “Women Talking.”
Regrets, a few: “Bardo,” “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” “Elvis,” “The Gray Man,” “Morbius,” “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Violent Night.”