Take-10: Best of 2022
Let’s take a quick look back at the best films of ’22.
Well that was 2022. Kind of unremarkable wasn’t it? The ‘rona messed with theatre-going in Hong Kong for a second year in a row, so what was on offer on any given day was hit and miss. Volume felt down, we were still heading to Netflix, Apple and Amazon, not much popped. However when something poppped… man did it. Interestingly Hongkongers went to see the Hong Kong films that came out this year in pretty big numbers, even without a big ticket item like Anita or Infernal Affairs (we’ll delve into the local scene in a few days, sit tight). For now cast your mind back, back, back to April (when the year actually “started”) and check out our picks for best theatrical releases of ’22 – so no Glass Onion, no Blonde, no After Yang and so on. Some are still around to catch on a big screen, many are streaming, most are hopefully setting us up for a bigger 2023. Hopefully. — DEK
10
Hold your horses. Hear us out. The last time we made Smurf jokes, Avatar revolutionised filmmaking and actually got people into a damn cinema. James Cameron, who knows a bit about 1) leveraging technology in a film, 2) making a sequel to match or better an original (Aliens, T2) and 3) directing bloody action scenes has managed to make us all forget why we hate 3D in Avatar: The Way of Water – at least for a few hours. The luminously shot mind-blowing images of the more considered second in Cameron’s planned five-part (!) Pandora saga is the reason BIG screens exist. Is it ridiculously simple? Yes, but when you look like this you don’t need to overstuff your script. Good guys, bad guys, save your family, get into a boss fight with Stephen Lang. Next! Exhibitors can thank Cameron for the US$1.1 billion, and counting, later.
09
Hey, remember The Batman? Liar, you probbly forgot this landed early in 2022. Planet of the Apes maestro Matt Reeves’s dark, deliberate, detective-forward spin on the Caped Crusader was a welcome surprise. Reeves guided a stellar cast that included Jeffrey Wright, Paul Dano, Zoë Kravitz, Andy Serkis and an unrecognisable Colin Farrell through a violent, opinionated mystery about power, corruption and the misguided rage of entitled white men. But who thought former sparkly beauhunk Robert Pattinson would do such bang up job as Bruce Wayne/Batman and make him suitably intimidating and entirely fucked up? Anyone who saw him steal The King from Timothée Chalamet in two short scenes or The Lighthouse, that’s who. As a bonus: Michael Giacchino’s utterly awesome score and no sign of torn pearls. Praise be!
08
Robert Eggers has a, shall we say, distinct, intense auteur vibe. The Witch’s Puritan psychological horrors were trumped only by the film’s creepy AF Black Phillip – the walking, talking goat – and the gorgeous black and white images of The Lighthouse thankfully took the vivid edge off and toned down the scurvy nightmare fuel haunting a pair of 19th century wickies. It’s the one where Robert Pattinson has sex with a giant fish. The Northman, based on the Icelandic legend that inspired Hamlet, is a violent, barbaric revenge tale and deconstruction of masculinity about a prince (played by a perfectly cast Alexander Skarsgård) reclaiming his kingdom that ends with naked Scandinavians in a sword fight in an active volcano. Bleak and beautiful and ripe with grunting and blood, it’s Eggers all over. Cant’t wait for his Nosferatu.
07
Jordan Peele is three-for-three after NOPE, quite possibly his best film yet. The western-scifi-horror mash-up wrestles with the price of fame, exploitation as and for entertainment, and cultural erasure but never forgets its western (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play Hollywood horse wranglers on a ranch), scifi (an alien is abducting the locals), and horror (the barn! the killer chimp!) roots. Nope is meticulously constructed and inspires more than a few “WTF”s along the way, but Peele knows exactly where he wants to go and he understands the cinema history he’s tapping to get there. It’s shamelessly imaginative, weird for weird’s sake, and boasts the most original ET ever. And sound. Such creative sound. Kaluuya drives the action but Palmer provides the film’s emotional core, and stealth star Brandon Perea gets the year’s best The CW (RIP) joke.
06
Few artists of any discipline were as unapologetically curious and ceaselessly expressionistic as singer-songwriter-actor David Bowie, and so it’s only logical that a Bowie biographical doc would need to be equally expressionistic to capture the essence of one of the GOAT. Brett Morgan’s interpretive, kaleidoscopic, totally trippy portrait, Moonage Daydream scraps linear storytelling and talking heads – childhood, piano lessons, comment, influences, first gig, comment – for moderately contextualised archive footage, interview clips and concert material that reveals more about Bowie than any other book or film has (looking at you, Stardust), yet somehow keeps him a bit of an enigma. Wherever you watch this visual masterwork (hope your TV’s a big one), make sure the volume is turned up as high as it will go.
05
The minute director Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) showed off those googly eyes in the nutty trailer for the category-defying Everything Everywhere All at Once the question became one of whether they film would live up to the trailer. Well, that’s always the question but this was altogether different. But lookie there. It did. Michelle Yeoh’s metaphysical, time-travelling, dimension-hopping meditation on family, motherhood, destiny and regret was the year’s best multiverse adventure (sorry Marvel) and gave Yeoh the role of her career in the heartbreaking, hilarious and entirely relatable Evelyn Wang. When was the last time two rocks moved you to tears? Exactly! Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis crushed it as sausage-fingered lovers, and please. Let’s give it up for Short Round, a grown-up, dashing Ke Huy Quan as the one that got away. And didn’t.
04
To pretend that Joseph Kosinski directed Top Gun: Maverick alone is kind of hilarious, because let’s face it. This is Tom Cruise’s movie – his baby. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell looks fantastic, he’s still testing jets, he’s got a hot (age-appropriate) girlfriend and his nemesis-turned-advocate Admiral “Iceman” (Val Kilmer) has got his back. This movie’s ridiculous – and ridiculously fun. A rare legacy sequel that’s actually about something (ageing and obsolescence), Maverick juiced movie-going when it needed it most and reminded us how thrilling some good ol’ fashioned stunts and aerial photography on a big screen can be. Cruise can be accused of a lot of things, but half-assing his work is not one of them. And check out Ed Harris. Guy’s so tough he doesn’t even flinch when he gets buzzed by a fighter. These fuckin’ guys!
03
Mark Mylod’s The Menu is an amusing romp that skewers material as ripe as Ruben Östlund does in Triangle of Sadness but Triangle is way more ambitious and has an absolutely killer Act 2 capper that will send plenty of people to the exits. But defining the film by that one scene is too easy. The way he did with the humiliating extended opening avalanche of Force Majeure and the ultra-awkward man-as-ape fundraising dinner performance art in The Square, Östlund zeroes in on one sequence that will makes us squirm and then make us contemplate what he’s asking. In this case it’s the limits of privilege, how it’s deployed, how we get it and what do we do with it when we do. Among other things. A great ensemble cast ping pongs between black and pitch black humour, with Filipino veteran Dolly de Leon swooping into Act 3, scooping it up and stealing the whole show.
02
Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave is probably the most impeccably directed, most complexly layered, most sophisticated pure filmmaking on this list. It’s been six years since the deliciously chest-heaving, Japanese-occupied Korea lesbian thriller The Handmaiden and he hasn’t lost a step. This shit’s a clinic in formal structure, but it’s also incredibly nuanced storytelling and characterisation, thanks to disciplined performances by Park Hae-il as a fussy, self-satisfied detective looking into a wealthy old’s death, and especially Tang Wei as the man’s immigrant wife, who may or may not have killed him. Sure, the film is a slow-burning bad romance, but it’s also an endlessly twisty mystery with some awesome deadpan humour. Decision also wins the prize for most devastating final shot of the year.
01
This is a no-brainer. The Telugu-language RRR landed in one cinema for three days: That totally counts! SS Rajamouli’s bonkers, thoroughly entertaining “historical” epic follows Indian revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem – played by the stupidly charming duo of Ram Charan and NT Rama Rao Jr – as they execute the batshit craziest child rescue of all time and conquer the Raj by dance off or wild animals. It’s got brotherhood, betrayal, (a little queer) romance, scummy white people and action. So much action. When you think Rajamouli can’t top his last lunatic sequence, he does. Maverick isn’t #1 ’cause Cruise can’t kick it like Charan and Rao, and Vin Diesel’s Fast and Furious rank amateurs could learn a thing or two from these guys. Is the sequel out yet?