By Jon Kissel

In 2022, the last remaining shreds of pandemic-delayed movies trickled into theaters, otherwise known as places that might be destined for the bulldozer. Major chain Regal/Cinemark is in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings and AMC's stock price has returned to its pre-wallstreetbets lows. In my neck of the woods, Atlanta's beloved Regal Tara theater has closed, though the continued thriving of the independent Plaza theater is a bright spot thanks to a combination of expanded screens, repertory shows, and local partnerships. Compounding the concern for film is the looming collapse of streaming services thanks to increased borrowing costs and oversaturation. The days of a streamer throwing nine figures at an esteemed director seem to be ending as surely as they did for traditional studios. 

All those bad omens haven't reached the movies themselves. The key takeaway from the biggest films of 2022 was the value of earnestness, as demonstrated onscreen and by box office returns. Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water both eschewed the tongue-in-cheek irony of the year's subpar-to-terrible MCU offerings, perhaps signaling the end of meaningless that-just-happened script punch-up that increasingly robs superhero pap of any emotional weight. Everything Everywhere All at Once spends its last act begging audiences for kindness, receiving ecstatic praise and breeding the kind of strident fandom that's allergic to kindness. While my favorites of a given year are always going to trend towards the dark and the cynical and the anti-earnest, it's notable how the year's biggest successes aimed less for messages and more for happiness, and not the kind that evaporates like a sugar high as soon as the lights go up. This year wasn't a great one in my estimation, but it does give me hope that stagnant creative trends might be reversing even as financial ones look more and more dire. As long as the French keep funding their genius auteur's pet projects, we should be ok.

A miracle is still one of the criteria for sainthood in the Catholic church.  Per their miter-wielding referees, it’s a real thing with a real definition, but in the secular world, it’s just a term for something statistically rare.  Meaning can be ascribed, but it’s not a requirement.  A random event is just that, a reminder of an indifferent universe and the cold physical laws that govern it.  Jordan Peele’s Nope wonders at miracles from all sides: where they originate from, how they’re observed, and how they’re interpreted.  Informed by cinematic history and laden with religious imagery, the film creates distance from the ‘social thriller’ subgenre that Peele brought to prominence while proving himself as a filmmaker capable of thrilling daylight setpieces alongside his haunting nighttime bonechillers.

​If Thor: Love and Thunder does anything right, it finally frees the waning MCU fan from having to continue caring about this bloated vampire squid of a franchise.  Why should the viewer be invested in the fourth Thor film and MCU’s 29th when the makers can’t be bothered to put forth any effort in a cynical cash grab whose laziness nevertheless gets rewarded at the box office?  Marvel’s been struggling to find a way forward after all the magic stones have been put to rest, and Taika Waititi’s latest cements how lost in the woods the franchise has become.  After Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness’ experiments in TV streaming synergy and Thor: Love and Thunder’s abject disdain for its audience, the spell has been officially broken and these movies will now be taken on a case-by-case basis.  The amount of screaming goat jokes I can stomach before I realize I’m being treated like an idiot is less than the number contained in this film.

​It’s understandable if a viewer is out on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis from its first scenes.  Unfolding kaleidoscopes of rhinestones bedazzle the title card while breakneck zooms in and out of Colonel Tom Parker’s (Tom Hanks) eye accompany his portentous narration in an accent best described as indescribable.  It’s overpowering in its first five minutes and there’s another 150 to go.  Luhrmann will immediately abandon his framing device of the Colonel’s deathbed confession by showing childhood scenes of Elvis that he wouldn’t have known anything about, and the movie will make awful decisions in its storytelling and its filmmaking over and over again.  Luhrmann and Hanks are both doing all they can to break Elvis, but in the titular role, Austin Butler keeps putting it back together.  This is a mess that indulges in all of Luhrmann’s worst impulses to such an aggressive degree that it implies the director is in on the joke of his own filmography.  However, there’s so many lifeless, rote musician biopics that injecting some gonzo energy into one is appreciated, especially with Butler at the center.  

Legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick begins with a prologue that puts fighter pilot Pete Mitchell, callsign Maverick (Tom Cruise) in the cockpit of an experimental aircraft.  He takes off in direct opposition of the orders of Admiral Chester Cain, callsign Hammer (Ed Harris), who’s more interested in drones than manned flight.  Nevertheless, Cruise proceeds to break Mach 10 and vindicate manned flight, though he doesn’t know when to slow the plane down and it disintegrates in a stunning explosion.  With this sequence, Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski have framed their film as an assertion of Cruise’s singular star power.  The industry doesn’t mint new Hollywood icons anymore and has moved into the building of interconnected cinematic universes, but a relic of the 80’s emerges to show that the old way still has the ability to bring the goods, especially when he pushes the medium and what the human body is capable of past what’s imaginable.  Even if it goes wrong, at least the aftermath will leave a beautiful corpse.  Top Gun: Maverick proceeds to demonstrate how there’s no one like Tom Cruise, and that if there’s anyone coming behind him, it’ll only happen with his blessing.  The wild success of the film validates its premise, though the same problems that plagued the original Top Gun and its imitators have lingered just as tenaciously as its star.

Before embarking on her directorial debut, Kate Tsang worked on Steven Universe and Adventure Time, two Cartoon Network series that deftly used fantasy storytelling to dissect thorny emotions.  Adventure Time especially never talked down to its audience; adults failed children, leaders resorted to imperfect solutions, and the universe was unfair.  In Marvelous and the Black Hole, Tsang brings that same spirit to a coming-of-age story that places wonder and despair right next to each other while providing a star vehicle for talented actors both new and stalwart.

​Sam Raimi created his own superhero universe in the early 2000’s and he returns to a totally different landscape with Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, a title that wildly oversells itself.  Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy ultimately collapsed under studio notes, but the best chunks of it belonged to his idiosyncratic sensibilities and resulted in some of the best superhero movies of the 21st century.  Now, Raimi is one of a dozen auteur directors that Marvel has tried to incorporate into its corporate vision, and whatever he wants to do with a Doctor Strange sequel has to gel with a prequel miniseries.  When Raimi is able to assert himself, the film tentatively explores new genre frontiers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the space for directors to take control within this huge multimedia cash cow is shrinking.

Movie stars give high-wattage performances in Adam and Aaron Nee’s The Lost City.  Exactly the kind of original adventure property that rarely gets made, audiences turned out for a chance to see its cast do the things that they do best.  Sandra Bullock is sardonic, Channing Tatum is enthusiastic, and Brad Pitt is an untouchable action hero who gets mooned over by the main characters, regardless of gender.  Combined with Daniel Radcliffe’s sniveling villain turn, the central quartet construct an entertaining cinematic romp through the jungle.  

​Robert Eggers has made a distinctive name for himself after three period-set movies by submerging the audience in whatever bleak era of history he’s chosen to play in.  This applies not only on the costuming/production design level, but in the minds of the characters themselves.  Their fears and superstitions are ratified by the events of the film.  Their vision of morality and cosmology is depicted without modern judgment.  The viewer is a visitor to a world inhabited by humans but a version of humanity completely alien to contemporary values.  Eggers has honed a form of time travel, and with The Northman, the illusion is all-encompassing.  With a budget far greater than what Eggers had with The Witch and The Lighthouse, every dollar is onscreen in a grim fantasia that is thrilling in its bone-deep commitment to its premise.