2022 has been a really fascinating year for movies I'm pretty hopeful about Cinema in general I think there's a lot of quality stuff being made out there it's just having to compete with this endless void of near infinite content that's coming at us from all directions right now my top 10 list is very Loosely ranked what makes it onto the list usually gets there because of one or more of three things how well the movie resonated with me emotionally which is very personally subjective obviously m
y interest level in the ideas themes and Concepts that it's exploring and then third how well the movie is kind of wielding filmmaking as a form and or pushing the boundaries of that Medium to do something that feels new original and fresh to me actually trying to establish what the best movies from a year were is a total Fool's errand especially before the year is even over there are still a bunch of movies that potentially would have made it onto this list that I haven't had the time to see or
just aren't even available for me to watch but what these lists are good for is starting a discussion so let's hang out talk about movies and share with me your top 10 from this year in the comments below final note I will keep this list spoiler free so you can watch this without worrying about whether or not you've seen any of the movies on this list this video is sponsored by mubi get your extended 30-day free trial at movie.com thomasflight first let's get to some honorable mentions so there
are two movies that I got to see at can earlier this year Lucas dontz close and also Kelly reichart showing up but I'm bumping them to the running for next year because they're getting a wide release in the U.S in 2023 but they would almost certainly be in my top 10 for this year other honorable mentions are after Yang from video essayist turned director kagananda after Yang is a soft kind of gentle science fiction film that I think really shows what can be done with the genre at that smaller s
cale in a genre where a lot of stuff is huge big high concept often dark or sort of dystopian it's cool to watch something that just puts forward a more simple beautiful science fiction world I also want to mention the worst person in the world from Jacob and Trier that released way back in February which is a genuinely funny and emotional indictment of kind of millennial malaise that I think still manages to be compassionate and insightful all while doing so with kind of stylistic flair I also
want to mention White Noise the Noah bombach adaptation of the Don delillo novel I love the novel and I don't know if this movie quite manages to elevate the novel but it was fun to see a really faithful adaptation in theaters and it's a it's a fun movie finally I want to mention Memoria by a picture this is a movie that came out last year but which is still slowly touring theaters City by city I really loved this kind of bizarre meditative Art House sci-fi and I can't wait to watch it again onc
e it's out on video but in the meantime I definitely recommend keeping an eye out and if it comes to your city check it out now let's jump into my Loosely ranked top 10 of 2022. different people are going to want different things from the movies and one of the things I've always really valued for whatever reason is commitment commitment to the vision commitment to a concept A Story a perspective nine out of ten times I'd rather watch a movie shoot for something really interesting and specific an
d Miss slightly rather than watch somebody absolutely nail what is a tried and true formula the main appeal of Robert Eggers films for me is this his 100 absolute commitment to the bid and for me the Northman completely exemplifies this in a year of really unique movies there's truly no other movie like the Norsemen that came out this year there's an intention to lore and detail here that I really appreciate but I think most interestingly to me it feels like the movie really commits to the persp
ective of the myth it's telling the Northman doesn't feel like a movie about a myth it feels like a myth itself like what Vikings might make if they got their hands on cameras next up on the list is decision to leave a razor-sharp neo-noir from South Korean director Park Chan wuk it's built around a convoluted Twisted mystery that Rivals the best noirs out there this is one of those like Double Indemnity kind of plots about two people who are absolutely perfectly terrible for each other and just
watching them Collide in a disastrous mess that you can't look away from and you won't want to look away because Park is flying you through the very heart of this relationship with the camera at Breakneck speed he's putting cameras in eyeballs and phones and flying the camera around through time and moving characters in space I've never seen someone intercut the beginning of one scene with the end of another in the way he does in this movie like one out of every three shots in this movie is abs
olutely stunning it kind of astounds me that he was able to pack so much interesting fresh original Direction into one film and it's a great compelling story but it's also worth checking out just for studying what he's doing in this film I looked here whatever it is you're fighting about next up is the Banshees of inner Sharon this movie brings back the Gleason feral Duo that I loved from one of Martin mcdonough's earlier films in Bruges and it's a very different relationship here but the duo is
no less compelling it's a movie about conflict between two friends but that conflict is really emblematic of other larger conflicts in a way that is really interesting and works really well there's an examination of the value of art versus the value of kind of friendship and respect for other people the conflict is also emblematic of larger conflict in Ireland and loss of meaning within this specific community and to that end I think this movie has maybe the strongest sense of place out of any
movie that I watched this year so it's kind of a cliche to say like the location is a character but it's really true here not just in how the location is shot with the cinematography which I think is some of the best photography I've ever seen of Irish landscape in a movie but also just in how the pace of Island life kind of seeps into even the delivery of the dialogue and the editing of the film you really feel like you're inside this place and that allows you to understand the impact that bein
g there has on all the characters and all the characters are amazing some of the best performances from a Supporting Cast this year I think are in this movie this movie immerses you in a world by the end you're going to be haunted by the same banshees as everyone else on the island people who watch my channel know that like it's a bigger Blockbuster stuff isn't necessarily my usual Vibe but I think this was actually kind of an amazing year for larger Blockbuster films I think Ryan cooglers wakan
da forever was one of the most interesting MCU films that I've seen in a long time I think he was pushing what you can do with an MCU film in an interesting Direction the Batman is by far the best superhero movie I've seen in a long time in terms of production I made a video about its sound design earlier this year we also had top gun Maverick which kind of came out of nowhere so I wanted to ask my podcast co-host Tom Vanderlinden why he thought that movie deserves to be among the best of the Ye
ar top gun Maverick was one of the biggest movies this year in terms of theatrical audience response and it's movie I enjoyed but I think struggled to connect with in the same way that I feel like a lot of people who really enjoyed it did and I know it's a movie that you really liked Tom so I'm just curious your thoughts on why you think Top Gun deserves to be considered one of the best movies of this year I think that for me I I have Nostalgia to watch the original I kind of went into this one
blind and I expected it to be this great action movie you know Tom Cruise has been well known by now for doing all this stuff for real and practically and you know the way this real fighter jets and was going to be really cool and indeed it was but what surprised me was that it was actually very emotional in the sense that there was this underlying sense of I'd call it heroic optimism in the way that the whole story felt like it had this energy wherein people could come together they could work
together Elevate each other by you know pushing each other to the limits and then go beyond them and achieve this common goal or common purpose and I felt like that was just something so universally beautiful about that you know even though that's the relation with the military and War which we've discussed but which you know I had a little bit of an easier time to disconnect from seeing as I'm not from a very militaristic country but yeah for me it just that energy is for me what kind of resona
ted the strongest with me and what made this movie so moving beyond its initial experience or its superficial experience almost as a pure action film I really thought Top Gun might be unabashedly the most sincere movie that we were gonna get this year but it might be rivaled by my pick for favorite kind of big Blockbuster of the year which to my utter surprise I'm finding is Avatar 2. I really did not expect this movie to be on this list and it was a last minute Edition and despite kind of likin
g the original I had pretty lukewarm expectations going into this one and I wasn't sure at first there's a lot of rough edges here this is far from a perfect movie but over the course of this movies three hour and 12 minute run time or whatever ridiculous length it is it kind of to be honest won me over this movie's VFX are something that stand completely on their own watching them this is really more like playing Half-Life Alex in VR than it is like watching a movie which is not to say better b
ut just a completely unique and kind of original experience on its own that comparison is probably either going to be a huge selling point or downside depending on your persuasion as a viewer a lot of that just comes down to how much you enjoy the visceral experience of watching this movie but I honestly don't think the visuals and beauty of the experience are just an empty candy coating they're a critical part of the story James Cameron is trying to get you to fall in love with this world and t
hen he's putting that world under direct attack for dramatic effect and with these movies he's doing something really interesting which is modeling sort of an attitude of Engagement with the world in these movies it's aliens engaging with a fake world but he's modeling a certain type of curiosity and attention and care here that can be given to the world that is really an important one to not lose sight of for ourselves in our own real world I think we should be getting lost in sort of the Wonde
r and excitement and joy of our own natural world and so to have a big Blockbuster movie kind of exemplifying that for like an hour in the middle is sort of a special thing I don't know of other movies that come anywhere close to doing that kind of thing besides maybe like the tree of life or the latest nature documentary from Disney plus the way of water never quite escapes the high camp of James Cameron but if I'm going to talk about commitment in movies this movie is committed to whatever it
is that James Cameron is doing it's 100 committed and unexpectedly I found myself on board our society is gripped by spectacle right now spectacle that is transmitted via images and the best most nuanced exploration of that this year was probably Jordan peele's nope I love that Jordan peel is doing this kind of thing in his latest sort of horror Adventure spin nope was the movie I had the most fun picking apart this year and despite multiple viewings I still have the feeling that there's more le
ft there to be discovered in the future the movie has an incredible sense of rhyme there's seemingly disconnected elements that are connected through sound design or imagery or thematic resonance that might feel disparate at first but as you examine this thing and re-watch it it really all kind of comes together into this cohesive whole I think peels past movies have been great but I'm also excited to see him stepping into a kind of thematic exploration that's a little bit more poetic it has gre
at sound performances writing it's the first horror movie shot on IMAX it pioneered a completely new form of day for night cinematography there's way more I could say here but I'd just be repeating what I've already said in the two videos I made about nope so you can go check those out if you're interested why do the greatest directors that have lived do what they do make the art they make this is a question that I find fascinating it's obviously one that I've spent a lot of time exploring on th
is channel and it's a question I love because behind any piece of art or entertainment that captures the imagination and attention of a bunch of viewers is a person or group of people who made that thing for a reason and those reasons don't Define the art itself but it's very interesting still to examine those reasons not only to better understand the art but so we can better understand ourselves why we connect with certain things and why we make the things we do so it's kind of fascinating anyt
ime a director turns the lens more Inward and examines their own personal journey and that can be fraught it doesn't always turn out well sometimes it's a more egoic Endeavor than anything but when Steven Spielberg does it it's a delight because he does it in only the sort of personal completely heartfelt and captivating way that Steven Spielberg could Sammy fableman is using the camera to kind of cope and process painful situations in his life and in a very explicit way we can also see Spielber
g kind of doing that with this film The Strange Bittersweet thing about telling your own story like this is that it can feel like this cohesive thing to the audience but to the artist these things don't go away when the credits roll it's their real life and putting your life into a film to try to contain that or frame it in a certain way doesn't change the sort of reality of those memories or that situation I think the beauty of the Fable men's is that it doesn't sidestep Spielberg's place as th
is great filmmaker in American history but it's still a surprisingly humble and personal examination of the beauty and limitations of the artistic process I command you enjoy the moment now please no the next best movie of the year is Mr morale and the big steppers by Kendra uh one of the most interesting songs of the year to me was Kendrick Lamar's we cried together it's a song that takes the form of a vicious fight between a couple and there's a lot that could be said about it but what I want
to highlight here is for me how the song captured a feeling and that feeling is just kind of what it feels like to be listening to society right now this might sound completely bizarre but triangle of sadness does that same maneuver in comedy form can you just stand here okay to me what's great about triangle of sadness is not that it has this profound specific message or incredibly original satire or commentary mostly what I enjoyed about it was the way that it just managed to capture the feeli
ng of being in society right now it Taps into a vibe in a comedic way and that Vibe is the absurdity of being in this Society where things are kind of out of control and a storm is battering the ship and the upper class and the lower class alike are all just kind of having to go about their business and pretend like everything's fine while the captain of the ship is drunk and arguing about economic theory with a Russian capitalist I love impressionist art there's few things as beautiful to me as
these paintings where you can see the craft itself the impression of each brush stroke and if you really zoom in you'll get lost in a world of abstraction and won't be able to make out any of the details but as you pull back slowly the image itself kind of snaps into view I can think of no better way to really describe after sun a stunning debut from director Charlotte Wells the movie doesn't announce to you what it's doing instead you just sit there with a series of small light brush Strokes a
look here a moment of dialogue there you can tell what's going on literally with the characters but the why behind what's happening is faint and obscured at first all you can see are these individual shapes but as you slip deeper into the film it feels not like the movie is telling you its story but as if it is emerging from those Strokes as a complete image you have a sense watching it of discovering the story and then you realize that all those shapes all those individual Strokes are memories
an affect that places you in the perspective of an adult character actually looking back on and remembering these events and for them the story is also emerging out of a collection of abstract Strokes it's only from their perspective as an adult now that the story is snapping into place it's a beautiful shattering film that is gentle heartfelt nuance and it displays how emotion can be complex and Confused more clearly than I think any other film I've seen recently has tar was the film I was pro
bably least expecting to see this year I knew nothing about it going in I just knew this is a movie Cate Blanchette plays a composer what unfolded surprised me by being one of the most dense fascinating character pieces that I've seen in the theaters in years at the start of the film you're thrown into the deep end of the world of pretentious ostentatious classical composers and the scenes that follow carefully sketch out a character that is haunted by their own misuse of power we've seen this k
ind of character in movies endlessly time and time again it's one of film's most time-honored tradition to examine the minutia of terrible powerful people but director Todd Fields is flipping things on their head just enough that allows us a fresh glimpse into this Dynamic and how it can play out not just across gender but across all kinds of institutions of power or places where we venerate a person or artist Above the value of what they're doing in and of itself Lydia Tara would have you think
that it's only about the art but what haunts her is that really for her it's about anything but that I think this movie is getting misrepresented a little bit as being a movie about cancel culture and it touches on that as a theme but I think it goes much much deeper above all it's a rich expertly crafted character study centered around maybe the year's best perform elements from Key planchette this is a movie that I know has more to offer than what I absorbed the first time through and I can't
wait to explore it further back in April before everything everywhere all at once hit theaters a24 and the writers and directors of the movie The Daniels released a letter explaining some of the motivation behind why they made the movie in it they talk about the weird feeling and pressure of asking an audience for two hours of their time in a world where it kind of feels like there's already objectively too much stuff to ever be consumed I think it's a valid question it's when I think about a l
ot why should you add to the noise when it feels like what people really need is less of it in the letter they say this we realized if we were going to make a film and ask an audience to give us that precious time the only responsible thing to do in return was to blow their minds and change their lives forever or at the very least we were going to attempt that at the time I read the letter I was like okay guys chill what I didn't expect was a movie that would actually maybe come close to doing t
hat I don't know if I would say everything everywhere changed my life but it did manage to tap into the nerve of something and portray certain ideas that I would say are currently kind of changing my life this is the only film that has come anywhere close to capturing the sheer chaos of what life has sometimes felt like over the past few years a feeling I personally linked to spending too much time on the internet and social media in a video that I made about the movie earlier this Summer that y
ou can check out but this movie also captured a crucial piece of something that was very important to me this year there's a moment amid all the Absurd chaos of this movie that I think is very powerful and it's powerful only because of how chaotic and completely over the top and ridiculous the rest of the movie is I think it's very significant that before there's any real change for the characters in this film there's this moment where they completely step back into utter your Stillness and quie
t and examine the value of the mystery of existence at its very core the biggest lesson I learned in my life this year and one that has significantly impacted my mental health for the better is that the answer to the overwhelming chaos can't be found within the noise but only by removing yourself from it into Stillness it's why this sudden cut to just two rocks sitting in the desert had the most emotional impact on me out of anything I saw in a movie this year it's only by taking time away from
the chaos that you can really recenter yourself and humbly return with an understanding of what truly matters it's the holidays and I tend to think of this as movie season not just because a bunch of great stuff tends to drop at the end of the year but also because when you get together with friends or family it's a great time to watch some movies that makes it the perfect time to check out my sponsor for this video movie mubi is an online hand curated streaming Cinema with amazing movies from a
ll around the world one of the movies I highlighted in this list decision to leave by Park Chan Luke is available exclusively on mubi and you can check that out when you sign up for an extended 30-day free trial by going to movie.com thomasflight mubi also makes a great gift for people who love Cinema go to movie.com gifts and you can choose from between three months to a year to give Christmas is just a few days away this is a great last minute gift for the other Cinema lovers in your life Cine
ma is best when you can share it with other people go to movie.com Thomas light click the link in the description below or on the screen to sign up for your extended 30-day free trial thanks again to mubi for sponsoring this video and for another great year [Music]
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