A Midyear(ish) 2022 Movie Roundup
Disentangling the bright and the gloom. Plus, the best movies of the year so far: #10-#6
Yes, I know: it is not remotely close to “midyear”. But I have always found that the natural point in time to conduct a check-in on the year in cinema was at the beginning of fall, after all of the major indie releases of the spring and blockbuster releases of the summer have been mulled over, and before the fall festival and awards season kicks off in earnest. More honestly, this week I was able to see the last few movies from earlier this year which I had been wanting to catch but missed out on.
So, what has 2022 had to offer filmgoers?
From a business standpoint, the situation seems dire. Though the box office numbers this year do represent a jump from the equivalent period last year, they are far from the kind of bump that was hoped for with the rolling back of pandemic restrictions and the fuller reopening of theaters. The summer’s $3.13 billion domestic box office haul is up from 2021’s $1.71 billion, but still only 72% of the $4.34 billion racked up in pre-pandemic 2019.1
These numbers can be partially explained by the simple fact that fewer films are receiving theatrical releases. In comparison with the 131 movies that went wide in theaters in 2019, just 104 are expected to go wide this year, and even that may be an overestimate given studios’ recent penchant for delaying releases at the last minute. In addition to the shift towards streaming-only releases, these low volumes are yet another consequence of the pandemic, which brought about shutdowns and production delays for many films that would have already been shot, edited, and put out by this point.
The sluggish return to theaters has compounded the problems facing cinema halls. While they naturally had a disastrous pandemic, they faced secular declines in filmgoing far predating Covid-19, driven by the rise of streaming along with broader shifts in consumer preferences.2 While many independent theaters and small chains have been forced to shutter, the larger chains have been forced to rack up massive debts, which have in turn put their balance sheets under tremendous strain. While the US’s biggest chain AMC has managed to keep things at bay due the absurd meme stock run-up in its share price, the controlling company of the second-biggest chain Regal has had no such luck: Cineworld recently filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to stem the bleeding.
In the dimension of artistry, though grim portents lurk, matters are not quite as bleak. The dominance of intellectual property over original stories in the big releases continues, with just three of the year’s top 10 grossers being non-franchise entertainment (and even then, one of those three is the video game adaptation Uncharted). This is not troubling in isolation; my list of the year’s ten best so far will attest to that in its top pick. The trouble stems instead from the fact that too many of these IP-oriented works exist less as artistic endeavors than as corporate products, and that these creatively bereft films are crowding more adventurous works out of the industry’s mainstream.
The nadir of this trend was the year’s sixth highest grossing film, Thor: Love and Thunder, which is simply one of the worst pieces of mainstream “art” I have engaged with in recent memory. It oscillates wildly in tone between self-seriousness and self-deprecation, attempting to both impress upon the audience the gravity of its central conflict (the fate of the very universe is at stake, of course!) and simultaneously make light of the whole enterprise. Its performances are aggressively lazy3, its special effects aggressively mediocre, its plot aggressively nonsensical. It all comes down to a complete, shameless lack of effort from all parties involved – a byproduct of their knowledge that nobody will try to take the film seriously as art, and that the movie will only serve as yet another product in the slate of corporate offerings. Why, indeed, would anyone involved be remotely bothered to bring their best under such circumstances?
This is not to say that there aren’t heartwarming instances of artistically imaginative cinema achieving box office success. Consider A24’s proudly eccentric Everything Everywhere All At Once, which has become the indie studio’s highest grossing film of all time. While far from the epochal masterpiece that Film Twitter made it out to be, Everything Everywhere is a wonderful example of audiences embracing something offbeat, an indication that the appetite for non-formulaic films still exists among the community of filmgoers.
In any case, regardless of box office successes, the year’s best films thus far demonstrate that there still exists a robust spirit of originality among filmmakers. Plenty of excellent cinema continues to be released; it is simply a matter of whether they shall retain a place in the mainstream, or be increasingly relegated to the anonymity of the streaming/VOD landscape.
With all of that prologue out of the way, here are numbers 10 through 6 of my favorite films of the year up to now; the remaining five will follow tomorrow. First, some honorable mentions: The Batman, Matt Reeves’ noir-infused take on the Caped Crusader, a demonstration of how artistry and franchise entertainment can work together propitiously instead of coming at each other’s expense; Bodies Bodies Bodies, a brutal, hilarious takedown of my generation’s psychologically damaging hyperaddiction to hyperconnectivity and our cooption of the language of trauma for first-world problems; RRR, a simultaneously mesmerizing and deranged South Indian action epic whose commitment to its absurd, awesome set pieces is almost enough to cover up its (unsubtle) undertones of Hindutva propaganda; and X, a delightfully gnarly slasher picture which is deeply aware of its genre tropes and flits between playing into and subverting them.
10: Watcher
I wrote about this tight, taut horror-thriller when I saw it back in May, and unlike most of the other films that I caught at the Chicago Critics’ Film Festival, my appreciation for it has only grown in the interim. Watcher is about a woman who feels she is being watched through her window by a menacing neighbor, sure; but it is more fundamentally about the dislocation and disquiet of moving to a new, unfamiliar city. Star Maika Monroe dances brilliantly on the edge between justified suspicion and outright paranoia, while director Chloe Okuno’s cleverly subjective camerawork and purposefully lethargic pacing elevates the suspense to almost unendurable heights.
9: Crimes of the Future
David Cronenberg’s return to filmmaking after eight years serves as a kind of return to roots. The Canadian auteurs’s fundamental fascination with the body as both an intellectual and visceral object is well-established; here, he explicitly interrogates the body’s potential as an artistic canvas, both extending the themes of his early career and meta-textually examining his oeuvre. His elegantly constructed new film imagines a future in which the eradication of pain and disease has led to an acceleration in human evolution involving, among other things, people sprouting new organs at a hyperactive rate. One afflicted individual, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortenson) decides this to be perfect fodder for a new brand of performance art: live surgeries performed by his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). The magic of Cronenberg is his ability to dance on the line between exploiting revolting body imagery for pure shock value and employing it for his more cerebral purposes. Indeed, his genius (on full display in Crimes of the Future) is recognizing that far from being in conflict, the cerebral and visceral can accentuate and intensify one another.
8: Ambulance
This 136-minute adrenaline shot is the cinematic equivalent of watching a child delightedly play with every toy in his toy box. Sure, this heist action-thriller is not particularly coherent on either a narrative or thematic basis. Yet one who comes to a film from Michael Bay (of Transformers, Armageddon, and Bad Boys fame) expecting intellectual stimulation is, quite simply, a fool. I could write about the frenetic, heart-pounding editing, the liberal and deeply entertaining use of swooping drone shots, the perfectly deranged performance of Jake Gyllenhaal that features the poetic line “Well, I wish I didn’t have herpes, but we all gotta go with what we got” – but the best way to make a case for this film’s exhilarating majesty is to let it speak for itself:
7: After Yang
It is no coincidence that films featuring artificial intelligence are often filled with more humanity than most exclusively-human films. After Yang follows in the footsteps of masterworks like Blade Runner and A.I. Artificial Intelligence in using the notion of sentient A.I. to ask perhaps the most fundamental question of all (do not roll your eyes): what it means to be a human. These existential conundrums are here incited by the desperate attempts of Jake Fleming (Colin Farrell) to resuscitate his family’s malfunctioning humanoid robot Yang (Justin H. Min). The revelations begin with Jake discovering a whole hidden life Yang lived away from the family, and spiral outwards from there. Director Kogonada’s unabashed audacity in asking questions that most filmmakers shy away from allows one to easily forgive the film’s occasional ponderousness, as does Colin Farrell’s heartrending evocation of the process of grieving.
6: Navalny
Until about one hour into this documentary, I was convinced that this was a somewhat pedestrian treatment of Alexei Navalny, a chief opposition figure – the chief opposition figure – in Russian politics. Everyone at this point knows the story of his botched poisoning at the hands of Russian secret police, his recovery in Germany, and his eventual decision to return to Russia despite knowing that he would immediately be sent off to a modern gulag. It is when the precise details of how Navalny and his team pieced together the circumstances and malefactors behind his poisoning that Daniel Roher’s film transforms from a serviceable political documentary into effectively an espionage thriller. There is a scene in which Navalny himself calls his poisoners one-by-one, trying to coax information out of them, that needs to be seen to be believed – a stunning moment that would be considered outlandish if it were in a work of fiction. I was in tears by the film’s end, tears of both admiration at Navalny’s sheer gusto and of fury at the rank injustice wreaked on him by a puny, cowardly man. Navalny is a timely and tremendous reminder of the high price that so many must pay to fight for the freedom that us in the West take all too deeply for granted.
And that is before adjusting for inflation. The present value of the 2019 summer box office is about $5 billion, meaning that this year’s haul is just 62.6% of 2019’s in real terms.
It seems difficult to deny that the rise of social media and Youtube has perhaps been the most significant factor in this preference shift. Though I am not making any claim at causality here, consider the fact that the growth trend in the annual number of Youtube users forms a stunningly precise mirror image of the decline in the gross number of movie ticket sales in the same period. There is of course the direct effect of Youtube and social media being an immediate substitute for where one can train one’s eyes. More subtle, but in my opinion more important, is the indirect effect that these media have had in diminishing attention spans. Many of my friends cannot take sitting through a 30 minute sitcom without simultaneously partaking in The Endless Scroll; forget about trying to make them sit through a 100+ minute film even at home, much less in a crowded theater where a phone is off limits.
With the exception of Christian Bale as (I kid you not) Gorr the God Butcher, the only bright spot in this shocker.