Ballot to Nowhere: Best Movies of 2022

RIP, The A.V. Club

Hey! Hi! So, it’s been a while. I started this Substack during a burst of try-anything pandemic-and-layoff energy, and out of frustration that sometimes I’d have an essay idea I liked that I couldn’t get going at a publication that would pay me for it — too esoteric, too late, too similar to other pieces that already came out, too obsessive about supporting characters from The Phantom Menace. I wrote some pieces I quite liked, had some ideas for ongoing features, and then like a year passed.

I still don’t have a regular-type full-time job and I still don’t get paid to write every single thing that I think up. (This is probably a blessing.) But I’m working consistently enough as a freelancer to push writing for free further and further down the queue. I even have an Associate Editor gig over at Paste Magazine that gives me a fair amount of leeway if I want to write an esoteric essay for real publication, whatever that means on the internet.

So, I’ve arrived at a solution: I will charge each of you a yearly subscription fee of $700, due immediately.

Just kidding! Instead, I will offer a stop-gap solution and a half-empty promise to do better. I hope to at least occasionally send one of these things out for the sheer pleasure of it. The best way for me to do that right now is to make a list.

For a bunch of years, I was part of an annual ritual: Submitting my list of the 15 best movies of the year, a little earlier than I would have preferred, to The A.V. Club, both to cast votes on their master list of the year’s best films, and as an individual ballot to appear alongside some personal superlatives. It was one of my favorite parts of writing for the AVC, because I felt a genuine sense of community, whether that was in the form of forcing God Help the Girl onto the master list because there were only like five voters in 2014, or assuming a place in a larger, more inclusive, and extremely talented group of freelancers in the last few years I participated in the poll. Deserved or not, it gave me a feeling of legitimacy that, to be honest, I never really felt as a critic before.

So, now that the A.V. Club has, uhh, turned over the entire staff and freelance contributor body (I feel like most people who’d be reading this are familiar with the details of how that sort of sudden and complete turnover might happen, but if not, uh, see me after class, I guess?), there’s a little void at the heart of my lumpy critical body. I love all the places that let me contribute regularly, or semi-regularly, or like once a year, and am grateful for all the editors I get to work with; I even had my official ten-best list posted over at Paste alongside the main film editor’s! But I miss the exercise of making a ballot, and there’s something unsatisfying about just throwing a link to my Letterboxd on Twitter, or doing yet another tweet-thread reviewing the times I wrote about (most of) these movies over the course of the year. Then, in the middle of watching Babylon a second time, I thought, wow the overalls-sans-undershirt-look really came back this year why don’t I do it on Substack? I can expand on the ten-best list I gave to Paste, and I can shout out some other movies I wanted to recommend, or ding, or whatever else, and I can update my local Substack subscribers (?!?) on some stuff I’ve written over the course of the year, especially now that you can’t just click on my AVC byline to find a bunch of reviews and such.

So let’s do it! First, my top 20 movies, with the caveat that there are always five or six or 20 more movies I should have seen before the end of the year, but didn’t. I’ve written about most of them and will link to those pieces next door. It’s not a countdown, so I’ll just start from one. But first, a message from me, in button form.

The 20 Best Movies of 2022, According to Jesse

1. Aftersun (review at Paste)

2. X (essay at Paste about why I think it’s one of the year’s best)

3. The Banshees of Inisherin (blurb for Inside Hook; also includes TLDR blurbs for 1+2)

4. Kimi (did I never write about this movie?! I love it so much)

5. The Fabelmans (review for Fox)

6. After Yang (review for The A.V. Club, and the last thing I ever published there!)

7. Nope (essay about Jordan Peele and M. Night Shyamalan for Inside Hook)

8. Turning Red (OK, I didn’t write anything about this, but I will be a little snarky here and say that the New Regime AVC review of this movie was one of the worst-written pieces of shit I’ve ever read from such a storied publication — and it was a rave of a movie I loved!)

9. Decision to Leave (behind-the-scenes tidbit: every time I get to see a movie many weeks in advance, as I did this with one, there’s the chance that my smugness will scrunch and tighten into anxiety as I realize I’m not going to be able to place a piece on it and therefore completely blow the lead I had)

10. Babylon (essay about the movie’s treatment of stars for The Wrap; also mentioned in this Magic of Cinema piece for Inside Hook)

11. Glass Onion (you know what, I was fine not reviewing this; I saw it for fun during its theatrical run and it was a completely satisfying experience, no need for me to butt in and analyze it)

12. The Northman (this was my last piece for The Week! Might be paywalled now)

13. Avatar: The Way of Water

14. White Noise (review for Inside Hook)

15. Elvis

16. Blonde (people hated this! I wrote a positive review for Paste)

17. Barbarian (review of sorts for Inside Hook)

18. Sharp Stick (refuse to rewatch this and find out if I’m crazy for going 4/5 on it)

19. Moonage Daydream

20. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe (review for Consequence)

Outlier: Well, this isn’t a group list, so there’s nothing to point out from my 20 that doesn’t appear elsewhere. So I’ll just shout out some more runners-up that, well, lay outside my list: Emily the Criminal, Watcher, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Three Thousand Years of Longing, and Confess, Fletch all really worked for me.

Most Overrated: I’ll give poor James Gray a break here, and say, you know what, I enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once, but what I was loving at the 90-minute mark, I was more like tolerating by the 120-minute mark. The movie is so eager and desperate for its emotional climax that it tries to have three or four of them, and starts running its jokes into the ground, and left me feeling a bit more worn-out than delighted.

Most Underrated: Halloween Ends may have attracted some manner of insta-cult, but most fans seem to despise it. The more I thought about it, and wrote about it, and discussed it on multiple podcasts, the more convinced I became that it’s terrific—an expectations-defying slasher sequel with a lot on its mind. I don’t love Amsterdam quite so much, but I thoroughly enjoyed it when I caught up with it.

Biggest Disappointment (no pun intended): I’ve heard multiple friends and family members express interest in The Whale, much more so than other holiday releases of that art-house-y scale, and I wish I could confirm that their enthusiasm is well-placed. I’ve liked every Darren Aronofsky movie except this one, which sort of works as a Brendan Fraser showcase, but mostly works in the sense that it appears to be a very faithful adaptation of an absolutely terrible play. (If The Whale is somehow a good play, then the movie is even worse than I thought.)

Most Welcome Surprise: I never even saw a trailer for Fall, so the fact that it turned out to be an extremely effective late-summer thriller on the order of The Shallows or Crawl was one of happiest realizations of the year. Higher profile but still more fun than I expected to have at a press screening: Death on the Nile, in which Gal Gadot is Good, Actually.

There it is: My only Substack of 2022, my little movie ballot to nowhere. Only it’s not nowhere if you’re reading it! So thank you all for failing to cancel your subscription, and I hope to use this space a little more frequently in 2022.