Top Films and Movies of 2022

The film scene is still slowly recovering from the pandemic and frankly there has been a lot of rubbish out there and by rubbish I also mean comic book films 🙂

I didn’t get to see all the films I wanted to see but there are plenty that I did see that didn’t quite make it here. Nevertheless there are worse ways to spend two hours than watching any of these.

10. The Woman King

A year or two ago I wrote how much I loaned Black Panther. A film many saw as being a major event for black people in the USA. Apart from the film being poor in my opinion, I didn’t see it is being very authentically African or aspirational in any way and I don’t particularly agree with only being able to connect or like something if the person on screen looks like yourself.

I do not in any way look like Mr Spock! There are so many great stories that could be told in both contemporary and historic Africa and this is the sort of thing I was thinking about. A historic action epic about Black women is much more culturally significant. It’s immense fun watching Viola Davis and her Amazonian warriors train up and fight the bad guys in 1800s Africa, and it’s moving when you realise how groundbreaking and empowering this is.

Some might say that it proves that Black female stories can smash it at the box office. I’d just say that any good story can and this is one.

9. Joyride

Joyride stars the wonderful Oliva Colman which automatically makes it at least half-way decent and is a British-Irish production.

Set in County Kerry, Ireland, this road movie is centred on 13-year-old Mully who’s just lost his mother, and Joy, a solicitor, and her newborn baby.

His mother Ruth has just died of cancer, and Mully confronts his thieving father James who has just pinched the cancer hospice money from the collection jar at her celebration of life gathering at the pub.

His dad insists she would have wanted him to have it, to use to pay for his own debts. The boy grabs the cash and drives off in a taxi, planning to give it back. Suddenly he realises there are passengers in the back seat.

It’s a lovely low budget film that makes the most of the characters taking the quiet back roads across Ireland as they try to avoid detection.

8. Where The Crawdads Sing

I wish there were more films like Where The Crawdads Sing, a slow cinematic film that just tells a story in a wonderfully rich backdrop and that trusts the characters and actors enough to take centre-stage, almost like a theatre production.

It’s also one of those films where you can’t quite be sure of how it is going to end up until it actually does. I wasn’t surprised but I was fulfilled.

You can see my full review here.

7. Nope

Sometimes I just don’t like film advertising, it does have the benefit of making it easy regarding what I’d want to avoid if not always what I want to watch. This film was advertised for ages and nothing about the trailers made me want to watch it all. Only the concept did and in the end it was the concept and the story I enjoyed. In fact I’d almost say the film doesn’t have much connection with the adverts for it.

Jordan Peele created this by fusing sci-fi, horror and westerns to create a whole new kind of monster movie. At times it is unnerving , unsettling and frequently funny and is lit up by Keke Palmer’s live-wire performance, a killer score and terrifying sound design.

That’s not to say Nope doesn’t have its flaws, it is perhaps the most flawed film on this list but it is bold in following its own story and stand apart from films that came before. That said it’s not a patch on Arrival.

6. Belfast

I wall ready to see Belfast long before it came on and it’s all based on events as remembered by Sir Kenneth Branagh. It is based on the start of what we call The Troubles and the decades long struggle with terrorists.

I have never lived in Northern Ireland but in lots of ways Belfast is similar to the city I spent much of my youth in, Newcastle. Gritty, industrial and with a very special people. This film was funny, heartfelt, sad and scary all in one without focussing too much on the actual terrorist attacks.

It was good to see the Northern Irish humour being portrayed. Belfast isn’t just about bombs and religion. I also liked the relation between the boy and his grandfather and the fact that it was filmed in Black and White.

I missed the start of the Troubles but a few years but aside from that the bombs and shootings overshadowed my childhood as it did most people in these Islands and having been caught up in more than one IRA bomb in London as a student it was a film despite everything that I really related to and enjoyed.

5. The Duke

In 1961, 60-year-old Kempton Bunton stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. He sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting on condition that the government invested more in care for the elderly. What happened next became the stuff of legend. An uplifting true story about a good man who set out to change the world and managed to save his marriage.

This is exactly my sort of film and was one of a number of true life British films that came out in the spring, I still have another I want to watch but this is a tonic for these sombre times. A kind natured light and easy comedy tells the tale of how in 1961 an eccentric man from Newcastle stole a valuable Goya portrait from London’s national gallery.

It’s a wonderfully old fashioned film which echoes well the flavour humour and style of the Ealing comedies, mixing split screen archive film with superbly grimy re-creations of old Newcastle and London, and just a little bit if social comment too. Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren revel in it all, as do rest of the cast, and the whole things cruises along and raises a many a smile – a tonic indeed. It’s also a true story.

It’s not just a good British film but it’s a particularly Northern and indeed NorthEast sort of film and the sort of story that couldn’t easily be told elsewhere.

Highly recommended.

4. The Northmen

Being genetically a third or so of Viking stock, I am automatically drawn to all things Norse and this film fit the bill nicely. A brilliant, blood-soaked Viking epic! Prince Amleth is on the verge of becoming a man when his father is brutally murdered by his uncle, who kidnaps the boy’s mother. Two decades later, Amleth is now a Viking who raids Slavic villages. He soon meets a seeress who reminds him of his vow — save his mother, kill his uncle, avenge his father.

It can seem a little on the long side and it does have its violent moments but I think anyone who goes to watch a Vikings related film is all ready for that!

3. Fall

There are two films that I constantly think of in 2022 and you’d think that would make either of them number 1 but that isn’t how reviews really work is it?

Fall is a very simple story and so often they are the best. Becky who is played by Grace Caroline Currey and her best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner) are keen rock climbers but everything went awry for them when Becky’s husband died year ago after a climbing accident which sends Becky in to a very understandable pit of despair.

Now Hunter thinks it is time for Becky to get over her fears and they do so by climbing one of the tallest and incidentally creaky, dilapidated transmitters in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

I will certainly keep an eye out for Grace Caroline Currey in the future, she was amazing and this film had everyone on the edge of their seats.

2. Bullet Train

I’d been waiting for Bullet Train to come out for what seems like an eternity and this is the other film I often think back to.

The premise for Bullet Train is adapted from Kōtarō Isaka’s 2010 novel and  Brad Pitt plays a privately contracted operative, codenamed Ladybug, who is hired by unknown clients to execute various shady missions. These could involve assassinations, but since he’s re-entering the murky mercenary waters after a period of soul-searching and therapy, his first gig back is theoretically an easy one. He just has to steal a silver briefcase on a bullet train heading to Kyoto. But Ladybug is cursed with appalling luck. And it turns out that the whole train is packed with hired killers, extravagantly armed with guns, swords, grudges and a selection of toxins, all of whom seem intent on knifing each other in the face.

Its funny, stupid, there is good dialogue, plot twists, great fights and choreography. It’s not one of those dumb action films, it’s much much more stupid than that and thats why I like it as its just a fun and entertaining film that still has me chuckling 6 or 7 months later.

1. Top Gun Maverick

This long-in-the-making Top Gun sequel was originally due out two years ago – but that enforced delay detracts not one iota from the purest widescreen thrill ride of the year so far. Tom Cruise’s ace pilot provides heart, soul and some fighter jet manoeuvres that we’re pretty sure defy every law of physics in the book. Mind you, the book gets binned early (and literally) in this one, to reinvent the so-called ‘legacy sequel’ into something that soars way above hollow Hollywood cash-ins.

I think it is the best action film for decades. It’s far superior to the original film and embraces all of the 80’s touches some of us remembering a time when most of our worries were doing our Geography homework and not getting your head flushed down the toilet….Bushey Meads was a horrendous school for almost everyone in attendance!

I’m not particularly a fan of Tom Cruise the person or even the actor but this is such a great film and y film of 2022.