This is normally the part where I say movies were bad until October. Or some variation to that. The general formula is movies were X NEGATIVE QUALITY until Y MONTH, and then they got Z POSITIVE QUALITY. But I don’t have to do that this time because in 2022, movies were pretty good all year round!

Or at the very least, this is the longest my list of movies I’d be willing to consider for a list has ever been, consisting of thirty-three movies total when it finally got to list making time. Honestly, I was so happy I can cry just thinking about it. To be honest, I don’t know if all these movies were spread out over as long a timeline as I think. But who fucking cares! There were thirty-three movies I liked enough to potentially put on this list this year! Thirty-three!

If I do have to piss on my own parade a bit, it’s that there’s a part of me that thinks the bottom half of my list is kind of boring. The problem is that they’re the same movies on seemingly everyone’s list, and my top five are slightly less so. But that’s an insecurity I’ll fight on my time, and just because I join a consensus doesn’t I don’t love these movies.

Let’s get to listing!

SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Runner-Up: Top Gun: Maverick

I saw Top Gun: Maverick at the Airbus IMAX theater at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA. (Even though it’s de facto in Dulles but I won’t bore you with that particular rant.) It’s the annex to the National Air and Space Museum where they hold the overflow of planes currently not on exhibition and it operates as its own museum. I saw this movie mere yards away from hundreds of planes, including a Concorde, a Blackbird, the Space Shuttle Discovery, and even the Enola Gay.

Moreover, the Airbus IMAX Theater is the largest screen in Virginia, and quite possibly the entire DMV area. Specifically, it is 86x63ft. So between that and the hundreds of planes in the same building,I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect venue. (I saw Avatar: The Way of Water there as well.)

It’s such a perfect venue, in fact, that I don’t know if I’m ever going to watch this movie again because I’m afraid it’s not going to hit as hard on a TV. That’s it. That’s the exceedingly dumb reason why it’s not on this list. That and a slightly less dumb one we’ll get into when we get to the movie into the 10 slot.

But while we’re here, we might as well sing its praises. To be perfectly honest with you guys, I was never that big a fan of the first movie. I did find all the bro-y stuff in it funny and its attempts to be apolitical are hilarious. But the kind of thrills it has to offer hit a point of diminishing returns for me. That and I think the ‘80s are ugly in just about every sense of the word and Top Gun is a very very ‘80s movie.

Top Gun: Maverick, somehow, adds grace. As well as some filmmaking techniques and a third act that most movie buffs will spend their lives being in awe of. Are the politics of it a little shitty? Absolutely. In fact, they’re way more than a little shitty, and hopefully, you don’t need me to tell you why movies that pay this much deference to the military are a problem. However, it’s such a big dumb Hollywood thing that I can’t be that mad at it even if I wanted to. Sure, there’s a part of it that’s reprehensible, and I saw this movie in such short proximity to the literal fucking Enola Gay that I couldn’t forget that aspect even if I tried. However, even if I can’t forget it, I can ignore it. Some movies just have too much swag. Too much bravado. They just movie so hard that you just have to give it up. (Yes, that was me using “movie” as a verb.)

That said, there are some movies that movie harder…

10. RRR

Movie wise, one of the prevailing themes of 2022 was maximalism.

There was Top Gun: Maverick, there was Everything Everywhere All At Once, there was Avatar: The Way of Water, there was Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, there was The Northman, there was another movie about the silent era of Hollywood that we’ll be talking about in a few entries from now, and there were many more that aren’t coming to mind. Clearly, the pandemic had an effect, and what we got was one of those rare moments when arts and commerce were aligned in their intentions. Artists wanted to make big wholistic experiences that captured everything they had to lock inside of themselves when they were forced to stay inside, and executives wanted people to get out of their fucking houses and sit their asses in a theater.

Of these maximalist movies, the most maximal, to me, was RRR.

Sadly, I didn’t get to see RRR in a theater. Instead, I watched it on my large 4K TV in my house. Not the ideal experience, but the timing didn’t work out for me to see it in the theater that I wanted to, and much like Top Gun: Maverick, I was going to see it in the biggest theater I could with the most willing audience or not see it at all. (In hindsight, not the correct attitude, but what can you do.) However, though I acknowledged that this is easy for me to say having not seen it in a theater, RRR has this quality to it where watching it just feels like you’re in a theater. It’s just that grand in everything it does.

It’s also one of those movies that’s been so picked to death by various online outlets, youtubers, and critics that I don’t feel like I have a lot to contribute. However, this is a movie where analysis is aggressively not the point. The point is to leave your biases and the sense that you’re above anything this movie is doing at the door and just give yourself over to it. It doesn’t matter if you like action or romantic comedies or musicals or whatever. You’ll watch these two impossibly handsome men tear their way through each genre, and you’ll love every dumb earnest second of it.

However, if I had to choose one reason I preferred this over Top Gun: Maverick and most of the other maximalist movies of 2022, it’s because it has the right attitude about what to do with racist colonizers: Beat them in a dance competition, then attack them with tigers and bears before blowing up all their shit.

Who, worth caring about, wants to disagree?

9. The Banshees of Inisherin

Colm Doherty is one the greatest depictions of a shitty artist I’ve ever seen on film.

Most of the time when we think about the portrayal of bad artists, we immediately turn to examples who literally have no talent. There’s also a sub-category I could go on about movies that think they’re about someone making great art when they are, in fact, making shit. (Looking at you, The Doors. Okay, I’ve got some biases, but you can think of an example that suits your own tastes.) However, my personal favorite kind of bad movie artists are the ones where the movies acknowledge that they have talent, but no vision to back it up with. Someone who can hit the right notes, but can’t arrange them in an order that means anything. Salieri, basically.

Nobody can deny that Colm can play a fiddle, and he does have the know-how to compose… something. However, Colm has the narrowest of perspectives, and he seems to have it by choice. Ultimately, you’re able to make the art you make because your mind reacts to stimuli the way it does, and when Colm is confronted with the notion of making art, his mind tells him to make the same melancholic solo work that his fellow islanders and countrymen have been making for generations. His art isn’t that of expression, but regurgitation. It’s well-played regurgitation that I wouldn’t blame anyone for finding meaningful, but it’s regurgitation nonetheless. Tradition for tradition’s sake. Tell Colm to break from it and he’d never be able to comprehend what you even mean.

However, that’s only a sliver of what makes Colm a terrible artist. The real reason that the kind of immortality he’s supposedly chasing will never come to him is that he doesn’t actually love art or its creation. He loves the artifice of art. He loves the idea that art contains meaning and importance, but not the actual expression or emotionality. This, I think, is the reason Colm has the capability to use “art,” something he supposedly thinks is sacred, as a bludgeon against his friend.

I consider myself a screenwriter first, and boy do I spend a lot of time doing shit that isn’t screenwriting. This very article exists, for example, because I’m not writing a script. The difference, however, is that I realize this is my fault and nobody else’s. Sure, I’ve got a touch of mental illness, a dash of laziness, a pinch of incompetence. But I know that’s on me. Colm probably knows this deep down as well, but he’ll never admit it because of another fault he has as an artist: He’s not fully capable of being honest. Not with others and particularly not himself.

Colm is getting old. Death is tangible, and Colm is now at the phase where he’s beginning to worry about his legacy. (A fear that I will hopefully never share in real life. I’m insecure enough in life. I don’t want to be insecure in death.) Rather than channeling that fear into his work, however, he lashes out at the person closest to him. The man who values him the most. The one who has the kind of emotional clarity most artists, including myself, crave with everything we have. So in the name of “art,” Colm spends the movie destroying that clarity.

There’s a lot of meaning you can read into when it comes to The Banshees of Inisherin. Most men who are older than me probably (and correctly) focused on the friendship and legacy aspects. However, I can’t help but gravitate toward the art angle not just because I’m an artist myself, but because shitty artists have been on my mind a lot in the last few years. You may have read a headline or two about them, as a lot of them are facing charges and allegations over various sexual crimes. The question I keep coming back to is “How do we as a people abuse art?” The answer is all over this movie.

8. Nope

Ever since Get Out, there still exists an impulse to dive deep into what Jordan Peele’s movies “mean.” What racial subtext is Peele getting at now? What’s the metaphor? Can I figure it out first and be very loud about it on Twitter?

It’s this impulse, I think, that’s led to some polarization in his post Get Out work. Peele’s films are getting more experimental and strange, but they’re also more alienating because they’re slightly more impenetrable. Us, for example, has less to do with a direct racial parable and more to do with the darkness we keep in our subconsciouses. Some people loved it (raises hand) and some people certainly didn’t.

I prefer Us, and I also think Nope is Peele’s best film so far.

I completely understand why some may be bummed out that Peele’s going in a more abstract direction as far as his scripts and his subject matter. I also don’t want to dismiss Get Out. It may be my least favorite Peele movie, but I’m certainly not going to fight the critical and cultural acclaim its rightfully earned.

I also have to imagine that people who do love Nope as much as I do love it for more genre related reasons than I do. It is, after all, a bit of a throwback to old school creature movies. It’s Jaws, only instead of it being a tangible creature we understand and have cultivated a lot of information on, it’s a creature in the sky that we can’t comprehend. Add some Spielbergian flair and some genre plotting and you got yourself a hell of a movie regardless of whatever baggage you bring to the table.

However, that’s only a small reason of why I love this movie to the extent that I do. For me, it’s more about my increasing fascination with the images Peele and his team have been creating. Those nights staring out into the canyon, hearing whatever it is we hear in the distance. The static cloud in the sky. The way those kids in the masks creep up in the barn that’s shot so well that it fools you just for a second into thinking they’re really aliens. The blood and guts drenching the house from above.

(Quick note: I write this the day the Oscar nominations were announced, and Nope getting snubbed for Best Cinematography is the snub that personally hurt the most.)

Honestly, I was so transfixed by the visuals of Nope that it almost wouldn’t have mattered what the script did. The images Peele and Hoyte Van Hotema have a stronghold on my brain, which is particularly fitting as this is a movie about the fundamental question of why we feel a need to capture images. Film! It’s a visual medium!

7. Tár

My first impulse when it came to Tár was to just post a bunch of Lydia Tár GIFs.

Of course, Tár is a substantive film worthy of analysis, from its mediations on accountability (or more specifically, fighting it) to its sly commentary on misogyny and so much more. You could also talk about the craft on display and Cate Blanchett and so much more. However, has there ever been a character that so embodies Twitter better than Lydia Tár? A beloved public figure who takes a fall and rather than accepting responsibility, she melts down and goes into attack mode while the rest of the world seems content to drag her and then winds up being accepted by the video game community.

My point is that while Tár is a serious and profound film, it’s also quite funny for reasons both intentional and not. I stress the “not” because I don’t think it was Todd Field’s intention to create the perfect example of a specific kind of public white woman on Twitter, but that’s certainly what he did.

Sadly, however, as of the time I’m writing this, Tár hasn’t hit a streamer, so those GIFs don’t exist. (There are some, but not the kind I want.) So I’ll just say that no movie in 2022 was as horrifying to watch, and no movie made me laugh more thinking about it in hindsight. I’ll return to all of these movies at some point in the future. But Tár is probably the one I’m going back to first.

6. Babylon

The funniest response to Babylon I saw was people complaining about it’s lack of historical accuracy.

Just to be abundantly clear, there are absolutely legitimate reasons for not loving Babylon. It’s almost violently unsubtle, it’s frequently tasteless, it’s exhausting, and there are any number of issues you could have with it. However, I feel like going after its accuracy is missing the point. Almost intentionally so.

Is it accurate? I’m not going to pretend to know. I’ve certainly heard stories of Fatty Arbuckle enjoying a golden shower or two (more than likely a distortion of the case surrounding his trial and Virginia Rappe’s ruptured bladder), excess partying, and other gilded age shenanigans. (I also could’ve sworn I’d seen a precedent for the penis costume at the opening party, but couldn’t find it.) However, again, it didn’t really matter to me whether or not it was accurate. What did matter is that it felt accurate.

There is the world Hollywood has created for itself and the one everyone else lives in. The kind of excess portrayed in Babylon seems over the top, but then you remember that Harvey Weinstein masturbated into a potted plant in front of a woman in a nightclub, ate M&Ms on all fours, and has been accused of sexual assault by so many women that he’s now the poster child for rampant abuse across all industries, let alone Hollywood. And all of those things happened in recent memory, not a time when there wasn’t a massive infrastructure to report on such things or a social imperative to do so. Does Babylon still seem over the top to you? Because it doesn’t to me.

There are the movies and there’s the system that made those movies. The movies themselves mean the world to so many. The system that makes those movies, however, is fundamentally broken. The racism, misogyny, abuse, and outright lack of humanity displayed by the people who keep the machine turning have made it more than apparent in recent years that they’re not worthy of our admiration or our restraint when it comes to condemning them. Babylon, to me, is a rather forceful condemnation. It loves the movies and it hates everything else. As someone who feels the exact same way, I can’t help but love it.

Going back to the accuracy criticism, it bothers me that so many people were so quick to jump to Hollywood’s defense. This isn’t to say that this is the sole reason why people didn’t like Babylon, but it’s a sentiment I saw enough to concern me. Hollywood doesn’t need your defending. It needs to be broken down and rebuilt. I love the movies more than I’ll ever be able to express. But the human toll is something I’m having a harder and harder time justifying to myself.

Also, I saw this movie with my dad and my stepmom lol.

5. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Protagonist Casey lives in the kind of place that I wouldn’t choose to live in even if I could do it for free, at least based on the brief flashes we see of it.

Essentially, it’s a suburb with a few chains out near a main road. Your fast food establishments and gas stations and big retail stores and whatnot. Between these major stores is absolutely nothing. Just that American feeling sense of empty space that has absolutely no meaning, far removed from any kind of sign of life. A dead end.

I fear it because while I didn’t grow up in one of these areas, I did grow up close to one. To the left was nature and quiet little neighborhoods. To the right was strip malls and bullshit. Luckily, I grew up close enough to a DC and Old Town that I had access to the things I needed access to, be it public transportation or community or culture or whatever. I don’t know if the same is true for Casey. Maybe it is and I don’t know the area well enough, but we don’t see it in the snippets we get to see when she’s out and about recording her videos. We can assume, however, that if she has access to a more defined cultural hub, she isn’t taking it.

So, naturally, she turns to the internet.

It’s a perfectly understandable thing to do, despite how much lip service we get about how vapid social media is and how much damage it can do to one’s psyche. Both of these aspects are undeniable, but it’s also where the people are. So Casey starts participating in a Creepypasta like challenge and immediately proceeds to make content that’s frequently self-destructive and only exacerbates her sense of isolation and disconnect.

In short, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is the best movie that’s been made about the internet so far.

Coming of age stories about the internet are increasingly frequent, and as the younger generations who understand it a little better are coming of filmmaking age, the commentary is getting more sophisticated than “Look at all these kids on their phones.” We have Eighth Grade and movies where the appeal of social media and content creation are made abundantly clear. The new angle We’re All Going to the World’s Fair brings, however, is the more intangible role the internet plays in our lives. It’s a force hovering all around us. It’s an invisible hand guiding our actions in ways we’re aware of and ways that are more subtle. You go outside for a walk because the internet’s too exhausting for the day. You go online when the outside world’s too much.

There’s an answer to how we got here, but that answer is frequently surreal, and it’s that haze that rests at the core of the movie. It’s brilliant.

4. Turning Red

I’ve spent more than my fair share of time mocking and criticizing media made “for girls.”

In my lower school days, it was the boy bands. Of course, I didn’t tell anyone at the time that boy bands were the first kind of musical acts I liked because that was the first music I was ever exposed to. I was very much on team Backstreet Boys and Millennium was one of the first CDs I owned. However, once I discovered nu-metal and got swept up in that toxic shitshow, boy bands were dumb “girly” stuff that I couldn’t and wouldn’t take seriously.

Though I thankfully left nu-metal behind early, the trend continued in high school and early college. There was Laguna Beach and The Hills. There was Twilight. There was the pop on the radio and a lot of the fashion and so on and so forth. To be fair, there are legitimate aspects to critique when it comes to a lot of those, and me shooting my mouth off about them was more than hypocritical given how much “girly” content I regularly engaged with, what with the amount of VH1 reality dating shit I watched. But I went after these things, for reasons that changed over time, with an intense gusto.

It’s a dynamic that I’m now much more aware of, and one I try to be conscious of when I talk about certain artists or works. I feel ashamed that I got dragged into all that bullshit. I’m not surprised, mind you. But I am regretful, and it’s part of the reason why I loved Turning Red to the degree I do. It’s a movie that takes the things that were important to millennial girlhood and, for what feels like the first time, doesn’t treat them like a punchline. Instead, it treats that moment with nuance and admiration. It does acknowledge that some of these experiences were very silly, but the joke isn’t at the expense of the subject. It’s at the expense of a collective memory.

It also doesn’t hurt that not only am I a sucker for a good coming-of-age story, but also the kind of camaraderie on display and the vibe Turning Red has to offer.

There are Pixar movies I find funnier and better structured as far as their narratives are concerned. But I just loved being with this movie. The energy of the group of friends and the very genuine feeling that each of them brings to the table. I was not in a group like that when I was their age, but it still made me feel nostalgic. Achingly so. I can’t speak to other aspects of it, particularly in regard to its depiction of Asian culture and girlhood. But I wanted to be there, and it was the kind of hangout movie I needed the most in 2022.

3. Fire Island

Speaking of hangout movies I needed in 2022…

In my top ten albums article, I went on a petty little rant about Conway the Machine’s God Don’t Make Mistakes not being included in enough top ten lists. If there was a film equivalent this year, it would be Fire Island. Now, granted, I just mean this as a rhetorical thing. I’m not actually that mad, particularly in this case because 2022 was a year with so many great films that omissions have to be made.

Moreover, Fire Island is another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, though, to be more accurate, it’s more of an “inspired by” by than a direct adaptation. If you want to be reductive, sure, it’s a loose adaptation about gay men on their annual summer trip to Fire Island. But if you wanted to grant it the nuance it deserves, you’d find so much more.

Mainly, the difference is what Fire Island does with the sociopolitical elements of the original text. Pride and Prejudice is a story about a love that blossoms between a white woman from a relatively well-off family and a prickly white man who has even more means. Fire Island is a movie about of group of decidedly not rich men, most of whom are not white, going on vacation and one of them slowly falls for a rich white dude. The racial and economic differences are much more thoroughly explored, but in a much subtler way than you’d think. For this reason alone, it’s probably my favorite adaptation of the book by a fairly substantial margin.

However, the real reason this movie is on this list is the mood. This is the second film directed by Andrew Ahn, whose previous film Driveways made my top ten of 2020 list. I don’t know what it is about Ahn, but he has a gift for getting his cinematographers to make his films look like the sunniest, warmest movies ever made. The ability to channel this particular yet intangible summer vibe that’s just infectious. It snows on Fire Island. You’d never know it from watching this movie.

2022 was a wild year for me. I had high emotional highs and some of the lowest emotional lows I’ve had in quite some time. You may notice that the movies on the front half of this list are much more low key, and that’s not a coincidence. Whereas most people want to celebrate big maximal movies, I needed smaller films that were more comforting than anything else.

Fire Island is everything I wanted and more.

2. Aftersun

Another theme of this list: Girlhood.

Between We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Turning Red, and now Aftersun, apparently I was in the mood for nuanced portrayals of girlhood in my movies this year. Hell, that doesn’t even apply to just this year or this medium. My favorite game of 2022 was Perfect Tides, an intricate deep dive into the life of a teenage girl in, naturally, a fake Fire Island. Even before 2022, I spent a lot of time reading coming-of-age graphic novels about queer girls growing up in seaside towns. (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me and A Map to the Sun and stuff like that), which is to say nothing of PEN15 and a whole other list of things I could mention.

If I had to take a guess as to why, honestly, I think it’s just because it’s new. At least to me. I’m a white man, and I’ve been taking in stories about myself and my childhood for my entire existence, and so has my father and the generations that came before him. Right-wing dipshits can complain all they want about representation, but sometimes it’s not that deep. We’ve been watching movies about the same people over and over again for god knows how long, and it’s just fucking boring as shit.

When it comes to Aftersun, it’s more obviously a movie about the discovery that your parents are, in fact, human beings. You look at them for protection and the basic necessities for so many years before you discover that they’re barely hanging on doing the same for themselves. My parents had me at an older age, so I didn’t have the experience of having a young parent who’s more susceptible to the emotional back and forth of youth, the kind to which protagonist Sophie’s father eventually succumbs. (It’s left up to interpretation what happened to her father Calum. I think it’s suicide.) It took me a little longer to have this realization for myself, but I got there.

The important thing to remember, however, is that Sophie’s having this realization while she’s going through the normal hurdles of adolescence. Discovering her awkwardness and the attention of boys and the stuff she’s supposed to be doing. These are the moments where most coming-of-age movies inject a little bit of comedy or relatability. However, part of the heartbreak of this movie is how Sophie’s revelations of her father’s unhappiness seem to diminish what should be a more joyous youthful experience, and on some level, Calum knows that he’s putting a damper on this time in her life. He knows that she knows, and it only seems to make him spiral more. And for Sophie, she should be living in the moment. But she can’t. How can she? Her dad is sad, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Draw yourself a line graph. Let’s call the graph “The Emotional Spectrum of the Portrayal of Adolescent Girlhood in 2022.” Draw a happy face on the left side and a crying face on the right. Now, on the leftmost side, put Turning Red, a movie that uses nostalgic adolescence for some occasional pathos, but mostly uses it for positive feel-good interactions. In the middle, put We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a movie that explores both the heights and the depths of this time, depending on what you as an audience member bring to the table. On the right side, put Aftersun, a movie that weaponizes its form of nostalgia to break your heart.

Really, you should get yourself a few more sheets of paper and make the line way bigger and put Aftersun as far on the sad end as you can. But you get my point. Aftersun is not concerned with narrative structure and conventional storytelling. It’s entirely about mood and tone, and that might put some people off. But if it gets you on its wavelength, it’ll destroy you.

1. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Let’s entertain a hypothetical.

Imagine you were born in the ‘50s, one of the most regressive decades in modern American history. Your hero was your sister, who had a free spirit and a lust for life that you found inspiring. But her free spirit had her declared mentally ill, and thanks in large part to her treatment at the hands of the institutions responsible for handling such matters at the time, she ended up committing suicide. You were also lied to about the particulars of that episode for most of your life, but you wouldn’t discover that until later.

You left home and moved to New York, and over the years, you found yourself in a circle of artists, writers, and thinkers who are creating some of the most radical and beautiful art of the time. Times are hard. The money doesn’t last, and you occasionally had to turn to sex work to make ends meet. On top of that, there are lovers that turned abusive, horrifying trauma, you pick up your own substance abuse issues. But the energy is alive and well, the people are beautiful, and there’s just something there.

Then you watch all those beautiful souls die horrible undeserved deaths.

It was the mid/late ‘80s, and AIDS ravages everyone you know and love. The institutions that are supposed to prevent this mass death do nothing because most of them don’t recognize the humanity of some of those people because they aren’t straight or white. It’s an act of inhumanity that should never be forgotten or forgiven, and the much better world the now dead would’ve created is so tangible that you can almost feel it. But it’ll never be.

You have some medical issues, and in order to combat them, you get prescribed opioids. This sends you down your own road of addiction and more people die. Though you’ve become a famous artist at this point, you later learn that yet another institution has lied at the expense of your life and everyone around you. This time, it’s the Sackler family, who knowingly released a highly addictive and dangerous drug to the public and spent a number of years lying about it.

As you may have gathered, this isn’t a hypothetical for Nan Goldin, the subject of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. This was her life. But now we return to the hypothetical. Yet another powerful group has conspired against you and nearly caused your death, as groups like it and people in positions of power over you have been doing your whole life. What do you do?

Me, I crawl into bed. As I said in the albums post, I started therapy this year, and a large part of what me and my therapist discuss is how to keep working when every signal in my brain is encouraging me not to in the face of whatever’s happening in my life.

Nan, somehow, keeps fighting. There used to be Sackler Wings in art museums all around the world. Thanks to Nan and the work of a dedicated group she joins, now there isn’t. There’s even a scene late in the movie where she confronts the Sacklers, albeit in a limited form, directly. You can see everything that led to this moment. Her sisters, those artists in New York. Everything. She may not be winning the war, but she sure as shit is winning this battle.

I’ll never understand how she can keep going, but I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to find that strength. Maybe I’ll find it if I’m lucky.

Honorable Mentions

Armageddon Time
Barbarian
The Batman
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bros
Cha Cha Real Smooth
Decision to Leave
Descendant
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Fallout
Glass Onion
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
Is That Black Enough For You?!?
Jackass Forever
Kimi
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
The Menu
The Northman
Prey
Return to Seoul
Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
(Also, a quick note: Saint Omer’s commercial release was in 2023. It is a 2023 movie! I don’t fucking care what festival it was technically released during! The commercial release, when actual people can see it, should be considered the release date! It might be on the list next year.

Will See Someday

Corsage
The Eternal Daughter
Happening
No Bears
Three Thousand Years of Longing
I’m sure there’s more.