2022 Year in Review: Films
My annual top 25 countdown, along with some liner notes and honorable mentions
It’s the big one: My third annual video countdown of my 25 favorite films of the year! I’ve still got my albums post coming up sometime this weekend, so if you want that in your inbox as soon as it’s out, hit that subscribe button below.
I’ll just get right to it, both because I’ve already done my big year-end reflection and because I talk a lot of shop about this video and the thematic underpinnings I found among the year’s best later in this post.
Don’t read that part before you watch the video, though! Not to toot my own horn, but I think this is my best one yet. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.
Production Notes
I’m not going to give the entire list away, but much like LPs come with liner notes, I thought I’d provide some context to the music choices. Part of this is because I love talking shop about the creative process behind this video (it’s both nerdy and self-congratulatory), but part of it is also to give me a space to write about these films in words, like most year-end lists do. I’m often fascinated by shared thematic or narrative preoccupations between films—which is why the video edit format has been so appealing to me so far—so this is me sharing that fascination with y’all.
Intro: “Stayin’ Alive”, Avu-chan (Bullet Train)
There wasn’t much thematic rhyme or reason here beyond “Stayin’ Alive” just being a bop in any language. It’s a song that was written to be danced to (or at the very least strutted along to), and so many of 2022’s best films felt like something you could dance to as well.
#25-#22: “brutal”, Olivia Rodrigo (Do Revenge)
A lot of Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR is positioned as an anguished howl from Gen Z’s poet du jour, but there’s something universal about being a generation out of step with the world, whether that’s because you’re coming up or coming down. These films deal with creeping obsolescence just as much as they do misunderstood youth, because both sides of the spectrum seem to have something in common: It’s brutal out here for both of them.
#21-#18: “Boys Don’t Cry”, The Cure (I Love My Dad)
Contrary to the song title, boys do cry in these films, which include a documentary portrait of non-toxic masculinity at its finest, a stop-motion mockumentary of two men dealing with separation and isolation in a world more interested in audiences than communities, and a testosterone-fueled blockbuster about grief. Real men (and shells with shoes on) cry.
(The brief interlude in the middle of this section is a capitulation from yours truly that sometimes, honest lists don’t lend themselves to being a series of distinct thematic movements. Consider it an assurance that I did not fudge with the ordering to the convenience of my edit.)
#17-#16: “Bang Bang”, Caroline Polachek (Minions: The Rise of Gru)
A sultry and smoky Caroline Polachek cover of an innuendo-laced Nancy Sinatra classic—recorded, inexplicably, for the Minions: The Rise of Gru soundtrack—graces perhaps the two horniest films on this list, both charming and often funny odes to the irrepressible chemistry that sometimes occurs when you put two (or even three) people in the same circles as each other.
#15-#13: “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”, Whitney Houston (IWDWS)
One could argue that “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” is the best pop song of the last 40 years: A soaring, unapologetically romantic ode to wanting to be close enough to someone to feel the heat from their bodies. All three of these (very different) films deal in both the ecstasy of that closeness and the yearning that happens in its absence, the revelry and agony that comes packaged with being alive among others.
(Funnily enough, all three also quite literally feature characters dancing with somebody who loves them.)
#12-#10: “Unchained Melody”, Lykke Li (Elvis)
The key lyric here is “And time goes by so slowly / And time can do so much”. All three of these films are preoccupied with time—be it as a narrative constraint, a thematic preoccupation, or even a meta suggestion due to the nature of its subject (what is the Internet if not a means of being unstuck from time?)—as well as a dearth of love in their protagonists’ lives. All three are also about characters learning what love—real love, not control—looks like to them, and so a love song just feels right. God speed someone’s love to them.
#9-#7: “Sometimes”, MUNA (Fire Island)
Aside from this being my go-to karaoke song and a firmly-ensconced staple of my beloved “crying-in-the-club” genre, I am also partial to “Sometimes” because it captures so well the conflicting ways in which we both are driven to seek out love and companionship and find ourselves shirking from it. My overarching reflection was about the tricky optimism that comes with seeking connection—about loneliness making you brave—and this song (as well as the three films it soundtracks here) eloquently articulates what I meant better than I ever could.
#6-#1: “Under Pressure”, Queen ft. David Bowie (Aftersun)
I remarked to a friend recently that the top six films on my list all deal with, in one way or another, the memory of those we couldn’t save. All six are stories about nuclear families and makeshift communities ravaged and torn apart by sickness, selfishness, and a world that has never been forgiving of the kind of love families and communities ought to be built on. They are also intrinsically—whether through motif (cameras play a prominent role in four of them), genre (among them are biopics and documentaries), or inflections of magic realism that suggest the artifice of memory—films that feel like they are being remembered.
They feel like elegies.
“Under Pressure” is a duet between two of rock’s most prominent artists and most storied queer icons in Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. Mercury, of course, passed away at the age of 45 due to complications from AIDS, and his death—coupled with the concurrent sudden retirement of NBA legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson due to an HIV diagnosis—was a watershed moment in the history of the epidemic, which had up to then been stigmatized due to its association with historical marginalized communities and lifestyles as well as a sexual prejudice stoked by the conservative Reagan administration in the US and counterparts worldwide.
Invoking “Under Pressure” for Aftersun (which—spoiler!—is among these six films), as director Charlotte Wells did, is potent then even beyond the context of the scene it is in, and the song’s relevance to 2022’s greatest films resonates beyond just Aftersun. Duets are by nature testaments that someone else is singing our songs; there are few more reliable expressions of solidarity in music. A duet sung by a man who embodied through his life these intersections between grief, art, and politics, and whose lyrics talk about the transformative and salvific power of love amid the “pressure” of contemporary living—I couldn’t hit the nail any harder if I wanted to.
(During the tribute concert to Mercury’s memory held the next year, “Under Pressure” was performed by Bowie and Eurhythmics’ Annie Lennox. While that performance itself is excellent, I’ve always been partial to this lower-key version from their rehearsals:)
Ever since I’ve started making these videos in 2020, my top-ranked film has always been about the intersections between grief, art, and activism. This is unintentional, but appropriate for both the broad zeitgeist and my own lived experience of the 2020s thus far. Although no one dies in Garrett Bradley’s Time (my film of 2020) per se, Bradley’s use of time-worn video diaries from a personal past interspliced with HD footage from a political present makes the passage of time—and the grief of remembering time lost—not just implicit but tactile, not just understood but viscerally felt, not just reportage but documentary. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (my film of 2021) is both more straightforward and equally complex in its portrait of art as a means of interpreting grief, as well as its depiction of art unshackled from language.
Art is a form of grieving because art immortalizes those we could not and cannot save. When that remembering is discomfiting because it brings into vision those that society would prefer to remain unseen, that is when art, grief, and activism intersect. These days, that is the art that feels the most essential to me.
Outro: “Dreams”, The Cranberries (Do Revenge)
This is simply a nod to the little trailer I made for my countdown this year, as well as a nice bit of symmetry with the Top 25 segment also kicking off with a song from Do Revenge. Great year for soundtracks that have no business going as hard as they did.
Honorable Mentions
And if 25 films isn’t enough for you, here’s what I had from 26-50. Not quite a year as chock-full of masterpieces as 2021, but more than enough solid cinema to make it all worthwhile.
Avatar: The Way of Water
Nope
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
The Woman King
EO
X
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
The Northman
Emily the Criminal
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Pearl
Elvis
Turning Red
Piggy
Do Revenge
Broker
You Won’t Be Alone
The Menu
The Girl and the Spider
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies
The Batman
The Lost City
Triangle of Sadness
Both Sides of the Blade
Funny Pages
Anything you think I missed? Any films here you loved too? Drop a comment below if so!