The Best Films of 2022: Here Is the List of Filmyhype Picks Most Loved Films of 2022
Also in 2022, the best films have taken us to new worlds, in splendid, terrifying, moving, magnificent adventures. We at pridenerd have been lucky enough to often go to the cinema to see some of the most interesting stories told this year and we thought we’d offer you a list of films that are worth catching up on. All stories that, in compiling this selection, made us want to come back and see another time.
The Best Films of 2022
To refresh our memories and hear the opinions of other film enthusiasts, we combed through several year-end lists of the best films of 2022. And the truth is, we could have written a long time about stories that have fascinated us and glued the screen. But we have set ourselves some limits. First: Ten Movies Only. Without any order, because they are too different from each other to be able to catalog them from one to ten (although undoubtedly each of us on the editorial staff has his favorites).
We have tried to compile a list of popular titles that we think are exciting to watch and watch again, without forgetting auteur cinema. But we were begrudgingly unable to include the most-watched movie in theaters this year, Top Gun: Maverick. Nor did we find room for the MCU, although Black Panther: Wakanda Forever brought us to tears. We also failed to include RRR, an Indian epic that has wowed on Netflix. And we didn’t find space for The Woman King, Bones and All, The Menu and even Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (which we loved too). There wasn’t even room to say which Pinocchio we liked the most among the three thousand different adaptations released this year. We’ve mentioned these movies, and we’ve got dozens more that we’d gladly recommend you watch. But from here on there is only room for the 10 best films of 2022.
Nope: For Thriller Lover
Jordan Peele with Get Out has gone from being a great comedian to a great horror director. With Us he confirmed his talent, so much so that Nope seemed like an already assured success. And he was not disappointed. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer have insane chemistry as the brother and sister at the center of this film that bends the boundaries of horror and adventure film. And Peele has been able to amaze us with scenes worthy of the best Spielberg and images so strong that we will carry them with us also in 2023.
The interminable wait is over. Jordan Peele’s new Nope is finally making its big screen debut. Much is expected from the director and screenwriter of two milestones such as Get Out and Us. A lot is expected because Jordan Peele has completely renewed the formula of the horror genre by mixing it inextricably with the thriller with writing that reaches the public moving on different levels. The result, at least so far, has always been fun and thick works, involving 360 degrees for the viewer. That’s why we wanted to see Nope, his latest feature film which we will talk about in more detail in our review.
Glass Onion: Murder Mystery
Few things give as much satisfaction as a good whodunit story. After Knives Out, Rian Johnson repeated by bringing Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion. As we explain in our review, the film has enough direction changes that you will change your mind about who the killer may be until the very last scene. But the ability of Johnson and his cast led by Daniel Craig (but with a simply perfect Janelle Monàe) is to make us enjoy every dialogue and every action. We love Agatha Christie too much to make comparisons. But let’s say Johnson is doing his best to live up to the Lady of Murder Mystery.
After the success of Knives Out, the wait was great for the second chapter Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and will make other passages in the room before landing on Netflix, which has bought the rights for the two sequels of the Rian Johnson mystery released in 2019. And the contribution of the streaming company, as we will try to explain in this review of Glass Onion – Knives Out (in marketing, but not in the credits of the film itself, there is the subtitle A Knives Out Mystery), is both flashy and paradoxical.
The Northman: Epic and Brutal
In our review, we immediately explain that Robert Eggers ‘ new film is technically a version of Hamlet (based on the Danish legend from which Shakespeare also draws inspiration). But forget the subtle plots and virtuosic dialogue of the Bard: The Northman is a brutal spectacle but great. This film manages to balance Alexander Skarsgård slaughtering entire villages, Ethan Hawke howling like a wolf while Willem Dafoe hallucinates as a druid, a ruthless Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman and Claes Bang (Dracula’s and Bad Sisters) beautifully theatrical. And the singer Björk is there too, why not. All in a dense and theatrical film, with divine images and violent scenes that seem to come from the best metal video clip ever shot. In short: a film that seems madness to describe, but to admire is magic.
Alongside the Swedish actor, the cast is made up of well-known names: Anya Taylor-Joy returns to work with Eggers after being the protagonist of The Vvitch, Nicol Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang and Willem Dafoe are the mosaic of actors who populate the visions of Amleth. A cast of this magnitude, although in Eggers’ previous works there was no shortage of important actors, it was possible thanks to a budget of 90 million dollars, to come to terms with a Major that however compromised some of the director’s stylistic traits. However, The Northman falls within Eggers’ poetics thanks to two parallel narratives that give the right depth to one of the most exploited archetypes in the history of cinema and literature.
Turning Red: The Pearl of Pixar
To get the blatantly violent scenes of The Northman out of our eyes, let’s go to the cartoons. And once again this year what impressed us the most is a Pixar film: Turning Red. Although it is only one of two animated films with RED in the name (and we also liked One Piece Film: RED) released this year, this story is unique. Yet he speaks to everyone. The director Domee Shi (already an Oscar winner for the short Bao) wrote this story about a huge red panda starting from his childhood, talking about his relationship with his mother, and the traditions of his culture. But the specificity of the story helps make it universal: the Pixar recipe still works, so much so that it has won a place among the best films of 2022.
How beautiful she is, how precious Pixar is when she talks about growth. Not that the most talented and brilliant animation studio at Disney hasn’t been able to go further over the years. Yet there is something different when at the center of the magic “made in Pixar” is childhood or adolescence: regardless of the result, there is a desire to experiment beyond all limits Toy Story 4 and Luca. And here comes Turning Red, the new original movie Disney+ which will land on the streaming platform exclusively from 11 March. A shame not to be able to enjoy the colors and quality of the animation of Domee Shi’s film on the big screen. Hoping, therefore, that Pixar productions will soon return to the room, we must admit that the use in streaming will give everyone access to a small masterpiece, and at an extremely negligible cost. Why yes, Turning Red confirms once again the extraordinary talent of Pixar Animation Studios, in a story of atypical and formation, concretized in a formula that is nothing short of winning.
Prey: Pure Action Not To Be Missed
We have to be honest: when we heard that a Predator prequel Prey would debut on Disney+, we didn’t expect it to be included in the list of the best films of 2022. Still, as we told you in our review, Prey is a great action film, an ‘hour and a half of pure adrenaline that even those who have never seen the other films, or the race of alien hunters, can adore. But that fans of the series cannot miss. Amber Midthunder as Naru has proven to be one of the best action movies leads in recent years. And Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) did what every good director should be able to do: show cause and effect, and “explain” the action with the camera. So that instead of having a jumble of explosions like in other films (even of this franchise), you can enjoy scenes of pure adrenaline. Hunting a Predator with bow, arrow and wits.
It took more than thirty years for the Predator saga to find a film worthy of the 1987 progenitor starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Each of the films in the series dedicated to aliens conceived by Jim and John Thomas contained lights but above all shadows of projects that never managed to find the fulcrum of the first film, touching it more directly (Predator 2, Predators) or moving away from it transversely. (The Predator). This was the case with the spin-offs, which used the macro-icons of the cinematic imaginary to confront them in a struggle made primarily to entertain and continue an ideal universe while not necessarily paying attention to the needs of its extraterrestrial creatures.
Avatar The Way of Water: Avatar Strikes Again
Avatar: The Way of Water is one of those films that deserve to be seen at the cinema. Luckily, you still have time to find a room with the largest 3D screen around and enjoy this show. Because there is no doubt: this second chapter of the James Cameron saga is a great, huge, sensational show. Perhaps the three hours or so of duration and the somewhat cumbersome plot at the beginning of the film could discourage some. But once you’ve seen the sensational finale, you’ll be amazed in the darkness of the cinema, enchanted by what you see on the screen: the magic of cinema, in three dimensions.
It has been awaited and desired for 13 years but also mocked and underestimated for just as long. As if the importance and impact of a film like Avatar: The Way of Water– a new film by James Cameron – could somehow be diminished by the passing of the years. When in reality the exact opposite is now evident because the more the wait increased, the more this Avatar: The Way of Water became something much more important: no longer just the second chapter of a saga that at this point still promises to be more epic and grandiose than we could have imagined in 2009, but also a sort of symbol/manifesto film of the importance and uniqueness of the cinematic experience lived in theaters.
Barbarian: For Horror Lovers
If Prey is the pearl to be recovered on Disney+ for action lovers, Barbarian is one of the jewels of pure horror to be recovered in streaming. As we explain in our review, each new sequence of this film takes you in a different direction, keeping you tense from the first minute until the end credits. A film that has well-defined themes, and interesting and unexpected characters. But above all that he doesn’t use tricks to scare you: all horror comes in an intelligent way. It’s terrifying.
In the US, Barbarian made a splash. After having its world premiere at San Diego Comic-Con on July 22, 2022 and subsequently in cinemas from September 9, Zach Cregger’s film managed to gross over 42 million dollars worldwide on a budget of 4.5 million dollars. This horror film therefore presented itself on Disney+ with an important task: to keep expectations high, to be able to make people understand why a director with only one film behind him – the highly criticized Miss March (2009) – managed to hit a horror film with his first foray into the genre. In our review of Barbarian, we will analyze the apparently intriguing plot of the film, while highlighting the difficulties of maintaining an adequate tone and rhythm to support narrative themes that would like to present themselves as conceptually “lofty”.
The Batman
Will we ever get tired of Batman movies? As we explain in our review, as long as the quality is as high as that of Matt Reeves’s film, the answer seems to be a resounding no. Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne and Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle are great. But as is often the case in superhero films, it’s the villains that make The Batman memorable: Paul Dano as the Riddler, John Turturro as Carmine Falcone, and an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as the Penguin. We can’t wait for the next one to come out, but in the meantime, we’re happy to rewatch one of the best films of 2022.
The Batman Review (2022): The long-awaited moment has come when we can talk to you at length about The Batman, the superhero’s first solo film after Christopher Nolan’s trilogy that established a chair and became one of the most celebrated iterations of the dark knight of all time, in addition to one of the high points of the adaptations of DC. We already told you that the first impressions of the international press had been euphoric and that they elevated the film as sensational… Well, they didn’t fall short: this is an absorbing film that takes its time to develop and has a final magnificent third.
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg tells himself like never before in The Fabelmans. In writing our review we explain how this is only in part a “love letter to the cinema”. This film is both a comedy and a tragedy, it manages to be both an “origin story” for the greatest of directors and a reflection on the weight (not always positive) that art has had on his life. It’s a film that will move you and make you laugh out loud, thanks in part to the Oscar-winning performance of Michelle Williams. And if you are a fan of Jaws, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Saving Private Ryan, or another of Spielberg’s thousand masterpieces, it is practically a must-see. A pill of pure cinema, magical.
Steven Spielberg‘s youth has always been one of the great keys to interpreting his cinema, in particular as regards the family unit torn apart: divorced couples abound in his films, often with the father figure represented in more negative terms. , but not too much (just think that it was the director himself who insisted that, in Try to Catch Me, Frank Abagnale Jr. continued to interact with Frank Sr. where in reality they had already broken the bridges). For Spielberg, the seventh art has always been a deeply personal matter, and he explicitly exhibits it in his 34th feature film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (the first time for the filmmaker, who in the past attended kermesse as a Cannes and Venice). In this review of The Fabelmans, we will tell you about this monumental and extremely autobiographical work.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
We’ve seen Everything Everywhere All At Once more than once and intend to do it again. Yet we still haven’t figured out what genre the new film by The Daniels is. Michelle Yeoh in this film manages to be a laundry owner and a martial artist, Jonathan Ke Quan (that’s right, Data of the Goonies) is at once the most awkward of husbands and the wisest of philosophers. And Jamie Lee Curtis is a war machine but also a tax employee. Stephanie Hsu is everything, for real. The title is high-sounding, yet this film really manages to be Everything Everywhere All At Once. A film that manages to show everything and remain contained, which manages to entertain you and move even the stones (literally). Watch it and, like us, you will find yourself forced to suggest it to everyone you meet: it’s a film you’ve never seen (and will want to see again).
This is our list of the best movies in 2022, however incomplete: This year has seen the release of a lot of great products. Do you have any suggestions to add? Any title to dispute? Let us know in the comments.
