The October-December movie slate is Oscar Season, meaning supposedly the best of the best films of the year should come out at this time. Usually there’s at least 2 to 3 incredible stories I’m waiting for in this batch that are locks for the top 10. However, based on how incredible 2022’s spring was, and how shockingly weak the fall slate appears, I can barely see 1-2 films on this list having a shot at making the Top 10 of the year. Not great, Bob! Hopefully there’s a few great foreign films or documentaries I missed in my research to pick up the slack (like what happened in 2021), but all signs point to 2022 being the front loaded movie year.
Here’s 5 contenders that have a shot to be great, but not quite the heavy hitters I expect them to be:
Gotta love the boldness of Damien Chazelle. Having conquered the musical and space, Chazelle sets his new sights on Hollywood’s Golden age with this film, the transition between silent and talkie films. That choice should garner him double figure Oscar nominations alone. The director is really smart, so I trust Chazelle will find some new inroad to the material. However, his movie will inevitably be compared to Singin’ In the Rain, an EXTREMELY high bar hopefully Chazelle, Margot Robbie, and Brad Pitt can overcome.
Newcomer Florian Zeller burst onto the scene with The Father, the best movie that will be made about dementia. Here’s hoping lightning can strike twice with this sorta sequel starring Hugh Jackman. The story for this one is about a man in a new relationship when his ex wife shows up with his estranged, distant son. Zeller has my trust for now, and even with early strange mixed reviews I’m hoping to fall on the incredible side.
When in doubt, go back to your roots if you’re a director. This is Spielberg’s year to make his Roma/Belfast. The movie is Spielberg’s semi-autobiography of growing up in Arizona, and he got Michelle Williams and Paul Dano to play his parents, and Seth Rogen to play his uncle. It should be heartfelt and well acted at least, but it’ll be exciting to see if the director known for making incredible movie moments gets a chance to do so with his own life, making something special in the process.
Martin McDonagh has found his way to my funny bone, crafting really potent black comedies that hit me in that movie sweet spot. In this one he reassembles the In Bruges super team of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. And most importantly he’s got a great movie premise: one guy decides he doesn’t want to be friends with a guy anymore and the other guy doesn’t know why. If that’s not ripe for comic delights and dark character introspection, I don’t know what is!
Lost in the love for Parasite and Bong Joon Ho was Park Chan Wook. Regrettably so, because Wook has made some of Korea’s best filmsover the last 20 years. He’s back with this film, perfect for him, about a cop falling in love (hopefully Basic Instinct style?) with a murder suspect. Even though the buzz is it’s lesser Wook, that still makes this movie probably better than most of the wanna be great stuff out there.
When you win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, you know your movie is special, because previous winners were movies like Pulp Fiction, Parasite, and last year’s Titane. Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, a previous winner of the Palme d’Or, won again for this film, a wicked satire about social hierarchy. The more I hear, the more I like, and some divisiveness only makes me want to see this movie more.
Director Sarah Polley has assembled an incredible cast to do presumably what the title suggests. The plot synopsis about women in a religious colony certainly gives the movie an added heft and specificity that will hopefully make the dialogue as potent as I expect it to be. If this movie’s buzz is to be believed, I expect the dialogue to be riveting and incredible as well as the litany of incredible female acting performances.
I’m a little scared, since this movie is remaking the greatest WWI novel and one of the great films in movie history, maybe our first. But reports sound like the German filmmakers took this challenge seriously, and stuck to the point of the source material: to show the true terrors of World War I’s trench warfare and empty jingoism in all its modern, boundary pushing horror to remind everyone again, that war is hell.
As a kid of the 90s, I always enjoyed Brendan Fraser’s movies. The guy had this goofy fun loving persona, best used in the Mummy films. But after a horrible life event and some personal injuries, Fraser’s career fell apart for a long time. Thankfully, he’s recently returned as a decent character actor, culminating in this film, which should make him a virtual lock for a Best Actor nomination. And with the bold, always fascinating Darren Aronofsky behind the camera, this has a shot to be one of the best films of the year.
Despite an incredible decade of documentary filmmaking, 2022 has been shockingly low on great docs…until this one. Laura Poitras, the Citizenfour documentarian, finds another incredible subject with this film, giving us the story of photojournalist Nan Goldin and her fight against the Sackler Family, profiteers and creators of oxycontin and the opioid crisis. This should check everyone’s box and hopefully will be as thrilling as Poitras doc’s can be at their best.
