Oscars 2022: The Odds and Ends

Jeremy BeckOscars
A scene from Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

It’s March 2023, so it must be time to wrap up our coverage of 2022. The Oscars are on Sunday, so per annual tradition, we’ll be spending this week analyzing all of the feature categories. (Sorry, short subjects, maybe next year.) Today, we’re looking at seven different fields that are, shall we say, low-profile.

Get your pools ready! (Do people do Oscar pools?)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

NOMINEES
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
The Sea Beast
Turning Red

WILL WIN
The general rule here is just to pick Pixar. But for whatever reason (perhaps its lack of a theatrical release?), Turning Red never developed the sort of momentum that most of the studio’s releases easily accumulate. In fact, only two of these movies received a meaningful run in theaters, and only Puss in Boots: The Last Wish actually generated a significant sum of money. That might have meant something a few years ago, but the stigma which once attached to streaming services has slowly eroded. Instead, the likely winner is Pinocchio, which somehow shrugged off the weirdness of being the second such adaptation of the year—three months before it aired on Netflix, Robert Zemeckis’ version landed on Disney+ with a thud—and became a critical smash thanks to its stop-motion artistry. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2022 (sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Sandra Bullock in The Lost City; Rebecca Hall in Resurrection; Viola Davis in The Woman King; Ana de Armas in Deep Water; Rachel Sennott in Bodies Bodies Bodies

Yesterday, MovieManifesto published its list of the best movies of 2022. Today, per annual tradition, we’re ranking everything else, with a comprehensive list of every movie we watched last year. Except we aren’t really “ranking” them, because rankings are dumb and obnoxious and falsely imply quantitative rigidity in a medium that’s fundamentally fluid and amorphous. Instead, we’re breaking out my beloved concept of tiers, which are somewhat nebulous in their own right but which do a decent job striking the balance between the internet’s demand for comparative metrics and my own distaste toward numerical measures.

Aside from serving as an exercise in nerdy recordkeeping, this piece is meant to serve as a primer for readers who invariably ask themselves that age-old question: Hey, what movie should I watch tonight? That’s why I include which service each film is (currently) streaming on—so that you can use this list as a guide as you mull your evening selection. (On the other hand, I’ve decided to omit the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic data that I’ve typically appended in the past; I might elaborate on this in the future, but for now suffice it to say that those sites are bad and stupid, and I don’t want to promulgate their dubious methodology.) [Update: I did, in fact, elaborate on this.]

Here’s the complete list of all 138 new movies I watched in 2022, broken into sensible, not-at-all random tiers: Read More

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The Best Movies of 2022

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All at Once; Margot Robbie in Babylon; Anya Taylor-Joy in The Northman; Daniel Kaluuya in Nope; Sofia Kappel in Pleasure

Are movies better than they’ve ever been? This isn’t a rhetorical question, nor is it a trolling provocation. Concordant to the annual list-making ritual—the absurd and irresistible exercise of reducing a year’s worth of cinema to a discrete number of worthy titles—is the compulsion to take stock of the industry at large. This is frequently a demonstration of despair: a lament that movies are dying, are childish, aren’t what they used to be. The perpetuity of these vague assessments—that they invariably allude to some unspecified past in the medium’s history, a golden age when Then was indubitably superior to Now—would seem to diminish their accuracy. But critics are creatures of grievance, and there is always some new cataclysmic trend—the decline of originality, the prioritization of commerce over artistry, the lack of visual and narrative audacity—for us to complain about.

2022 was no different, even if the particular breed of doomsaying it invited was a familiar species. Once again, the box office was dispiritingly ruled by franchises, sequels, and spinoffs; of the 12 pictures that grossed $150 million domestically, only one—Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, whose subject matter isn’t exactly novel—wasn’t rooted in existing intellectual property. (Last August, I bemoaned the financial failures of three largely original movies that simultaneously landed in theaters with a collective thud.) Conversely, many bracing and adventurous films—the barreling excitement of Athena, the silky suspense of KIMI, the dastardly twists of Fresh—virtually ignored theaters altogether, instead requiring a subscription (or at least a friend or family member’s password) to a boutique streaming service. Cinema may not be dead, but in terms of production and distribution, it is undoubtedly changing, and that constant state of flux inspires grave uncertainty about the art form’s future. Read More

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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: A Bug’s Strife

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Rudd and Jonathan Majors in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

The implicit assumption underlying the Marvel Cinematic Universe—the notion meant to infuse it with relatability and heft as well as imagination and excitement—is that its movies (and TV shows) take place in our own world. A fantastical version of our world, sure, but ours nonetheless; for every talking raccoon, purple titan, and junkyard planet, there’s a Los Angeles mansion, a Queens tenement, and an Oakland basketball court. The idea is that, while the narratives feature costumed superheroes and magic weapons, the characters’ behaviors and desires remain rooted in recognizable human experience. Sokovia may not be a real county, but the Washington Monument is at least a real building.

What’s potentially interesting about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—the third movie centering on Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly as the titular insects (he’s the ant, she’s the wasp), and the gazillionth 31st big-screen installment in the MCU’s history (not to mention the first of Phase Five, whatever that means)—is that the vast majority of its action doesn’t take place on Earth at all. It doesn’t take place in outer space either, or on any other faraway planet. It instead mostly transpires in the Quantum Realm, a microscopic land full of alien life forms, misshapen creatures, and animate vegetables. And so, unbound by the usual obligation to chain his fanciful hijinks to the deadweight of realism, the director Peyton Reed (working with the screenwriter Jeff Loveness) appears to have stumbled into the rarest of opportunities: the chance to a make a mass-market superhero movie that’s genuinely weird. Read More

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Knock at the Cabin: Whoever Wins, They Choose

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in Knock at the Cabin

In one of the many tense sequences in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a young woman implores a housemate to shut the door before a malevolent force breaks through: “Don’t let them in!” That same pleading desperation permeates the opening scenes of Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan’s new thriller, which finds a vacationing family—an adorable seven-year-old named Wen (Kristen Cui) and her two fathers, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Spoiler Alert’s Ben Aldridge)—under sudden assault from a quartet of armed, menacing invaders. But where The Village cultivated a tone of suffocating suspense (what will happen?), the mood here is instead one of clammy inevitability. The trespassers break through the cabin’s fortifications with minimal resistance, quickly tying up our heroes and establishing that the movie will not unfold as a typical home-invasion yarn. Sure, you may briefly wonder whether the victims will use their collective guile to escape (did someone just mention Chekhov’s gun?), but mostly you ponder why the intruders are there and—once you learn that answer—whether there is any legitimacy to their stated purpose.

Ever the economical storyteller, Shyamalan answers the first of those questions in a matter of minutes. (Even he isn’t as efficient as the film’s trailer, which naturally divulges the entire plot.) The housebreakers—led by gentle-giant Leonard (a very fine Dave Bautista), who’s joined by the fretful Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the timid Adriane (Abby Quinn), and the surly Redmond (Rupert Grint, currently starring on the Shyamalan-produced Servant)—behave according to a peculiar, seemingly contradictory code. On the one hand, they are obviously threatening, with their crude weapons (mallets, picks) and their grim determination. Yet despite their forcible entry and disturbing fervor, they insist—with apparent honesty—that they aren’t there to hurt anyone. Rather, they solemnly inform their captives that unless the family sacrifices one of its own, the world will end. And to prove the truth of their purported prophecy, they will ritualistically kill one of their own until the prisoners—watching helplessly, and goosed by ensuing television reports of global bedlam—resolve to make an impossible choice. Read More

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