Hindsight: A 2022 Cinematic Retrospective

Everything Everywhere All At Once

This is one of those ones where I recognise why people liked it without fully connecting with it myself. I didn't quite engage with the film's message, for whatever reason, as much as I enjoyed the jumping between different realities and the general engagement with the idea of hopelessness. Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan are all great in it, though.

Glass Onion

I recommended Knives Out back in 2019, and it's reasonable to say that Glass Onion also gets a review of "It was good and I enjoyed it." It's not as good as the previous, and at times it feels a bit like Rian Johnson was on autopilot making a Rian Johnson film, but the performances, especially Daniel Craig's, carry it. It's just at the point now where Johnson would be more subversive by not subverting our expectations — but maybe that would in itself be too predictable.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Perhaps the most amusing idea behind this film is that while it's essentially a film about Nicolas Cage's memelike status in modern internet discourse, Cage himself apparently doesn't really get it and had to be persuaded to do the film. His presentation as a partly absent father is a bit lazy, and I think the ending in which he turns the experience into a film of its own is also a bit lazy, but the chemistry between Cage and Pedro Pascal is consistently entertaining to watch and the film is always at its best when the two of them are simply getting up to mischief. It probably needed less actual plot to drive it than it had.

The Menu

Probably my favourite film of 2022, this was an interesting take on "classy horror" or psychological thriller supported by some strong performances. Anya Taylor-Joy is effortlessly sympathetic and Ralph Fiennes is chilling and tragic. Perhaps its message is a little overblown, but it's one I would easily recommend.

The Banshees of Inisherin

A highlight of 2022, this dark comedy drama about two 1920s Irish friends who have a meaningless and increasingly bleak falling out over nothing significant (one arbitrarily decides one day that the other is too boring and stupid to be his friend) is a memorable reflection of the harm of feuding and pride. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson both give simultaneously amusing and tense performances, and the cinematography of the idyllic landscape against the madness of the feud is striking. It's hard to say anything beyond recommending it, even divorced from any subtext about Irish civil conflict and the extent to which it comments on it.

Halloween Ends

While still not great, this is arguably the best of David Gordon Greene's questionable trilogy of Halloween legacy sequels, perhaps suffering most from the fact that it barely needs to be a Halloween film. Laurie Strode and Michael Myers himself don't really need to be in it; on the other hand, I think it would have been more effective if Corey had been set up earlier in the trilogy. This would have been an ideal role for, say, the character of Allyson's boyfriend or one of her other friends. It does something mildly interesting with Halloween Kills' heavy-handed message about how communities create their own monsters by having Corey channel Michael's murderousness, but it's undermined somewhat by still insisting on a final confrontation between Laurie and Michael at the end. By the low standards of the Halloween sequels, and with some amusing nods to Halloween III being "the one without Michael Myers", it's possibly one of the better instalments.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

As a big fan of Weird Al and a reasonable enthusiast for Daniel Radcliffe I was looking forward to this, and it's funny and at times clever if not as uproarious as it might be. By parodying the spate of rock biopics of the preceding years and twisting the facts so that, for example, Al dates Madonna and Beat it is a parody of Eat It, the film is essentially the film equivalent of a Weird Al song. It obviously suffers from being produced during the pandemic, with a small cast and some awkward editing, but I still found it reasonably entertaining. It's not as good as UHF, but making a Zucker Brothers-esque comedy like that these days is probably practically impossible.

Im Westen nicht Neues

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favourite novels, and I also hold the 1930 Hollywood-produced Best Picture winning adaptation in high regard. This new adaptation is perhaps too heightened for my taste, with a flair for the over-dramatic. The majority of the action plays out in the last four days of the war for enhanced tension, rather than over four years, and culminates in a pointless pre-Armistice attack not found in the novel. Nonetheless it is vivid and harrowing, and the friendship between Paul and Kat still grounds a great deal of it. While not, in my opinion, the best adaptation of the novel, being perhaps too concerned with the politics of the Armistice (something entirely absent from the novel), and arguably missing the novel's point, it's still probably one of the best First World War films of recent years, being certainly superior to Sam Mendes' 1917.