22 great films from 2022. Part 1: 22-11

If 2020 and 2021 were two years in which cinema closures due to the COVID pandemic left the very existence of cinemas in question, 2022 was the year they picked themselves off the canvas and rallied like Stallone in a Rocky sequel. 

Box office numbers bounced back, as people rediscovered that there is no way to absorb a film that compares with watching a giant screen being immersed in the dark. However, numbers were still way down on previous pandemic years. 

Cinemas are still seeing their audiences challenged by the pure strength of streaming platforms production wings, with all of the main players creating a wealth of feature films. 

It is a concern that the likes of Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Disney Plus have eaten into the share of the multiplex, but I will admit that it is nice to have a much talked about film suddenly drop onto your streaming playlist to be watched at your convenience. 

I’m sure Tom Cruise would love to see himself as the saviour of cinema, given he is prone to roles of heroism, but in 2022, there is no denying that he has a shout for that honour. Top Gun Maverick was the thunderous, enduring box office success of the year, driving audiences back into cinemas from May until nearly the close of the year, with the promise of nostalgia, and high-octane fighter-jet sequences. Not bad for a film that had been massively delayed due to the pandemic. Top Gun, living up to its name, was the number 1 box office success of the world.

It’s actually good to see the superhero movies lose their automatic claim to the biggest box office success of the year. The closest was in third and that was Doctor Strange: in the Multiverse of Madness, but that wasn’t even considered to be the best multiverse film of the year, as that was clearly Everything, Everywhere all at Once. Which, incidentally is a title that seems to sum up how good films are released now, since you never quite know when or where an interesting film is going to drop, but you do know, there is no shortage of choice, in an ever expanding film universe. 

That is why the trusty end of year list is always going to flag up a few titles that might have landed on the other side of the film galaxy. No two lists are ever the same, and that is one of the things I like about them. There ain’t no definite answer, just a lot of subjective opinions. 

They are like fingerprints and the diversity of opinion adds to the intrigue.

With that in mind here are my Top 22 films of 2022. Some are big, some are small and some, you might not ever heard of, but be sure to seek them out. 

22. The Duke

Coming out a time when there is a feeling that old people are ignored, neglected or marginalised, seeing the loveable Jim Broadbent portray a character whose life philosophy is to take on the system in the fight for pensioners, was a feel-good favourite for, those over 65 and for everyone else too. 

In a way, Broadbent’s Kempton Button was the British working class answer to John Dillinger. In an extraordinary true story set in the early sixties, somehow, Kempton managed to swipe Goya’s The Duke portrait from a London gallery and stash it in his Northern home. 

The film plays off whether this cheeky, loveable rascal is the pensioner’s Robin Hood type he sees himself as, or a condemn-able selfish opportunist, covering his crime with nonsense about working toward the greater good. 

One of the first things anyone needs to know about Britain is there is a class divide. This was particularly true in the sixties, so there is something quite uplifting about seeing a charming Northern character take on a system designed to keep him in his place. A lot of the humour is generated from seeing this character confound and bemuse when ensnared in the po-faced British legal system. 

Broadbent is a comedy force of nature in The Duke. He seems to understand that there is a character like Kempton Button in every working-class town. A big, larger than life figure, with a lot of passion and ideas about changing the world, whose wife sees him as a stubborn old fool. 

There is a great comedy tension between Broadbent and Helen Mirren as the exasperated wife. 

At the root of the comedy and drama is this idea that the potential of pensioners, the north and the working-class are underestimated.  This is a great observation that made The Duke a likeable and amusing down to earth British comedy.

21. Avatar : The Way of Water

We are at a critical time in history, where we wonder if the last few hundred years of expansion to secure land and resources has created an unstoppable runaway machine that now threatens the last of the Earth’s wilderness. 

James Cameron’s way of dealing with this has been to lock himself away to work on an opus that will serve as a metaphor for the horrors of past colonialism, as well as to correctly forsee, that if we were ever to find another earth like paradise, we would learn nothing from history, and again set upon securing resources with little thought or cost to the inhabitants, flora and fauna that have inhabited a newly discovered planet indefinitely. That is probably one of the reasons why he insisted on going with the little on the nose name of Pandora as the name of this planet. 

A lot of people feel that both Avatar films so far have lacked subtly and nuance, which is hard to argue entirely against, but what the films lack in terms of textured storytelling, they make up for in passion and social and environmental consciousness for the victims of the heinous and forever continuing crimes of capitalism. 

The media had a field day mocking Avatar 2: The Way of Water, choosing to be derisive towards its penchant for blue, but spent little time contemplating its message or its sense of purpose. 

We are all a little disassociated from the crimes of colonialism, perhaps that has something to do with the fact many of us are from countries that acquired their wealth and power from exploiting lands that were not their own. 

There is an innocence to Avatar 2: Way of Water, as we are seeing the story told from the perspective of the naive native tribes, where living in harmony with their environment is seen as the only logical thing to do; the horror of the film is the war-machine like mentality of the invader, ie us. 

We come from cultures that have lost the deep connection with nature as seen by the Naavi or the water-tribes within the film. Some of us see the spiritual value in nature, but we are just returning to it, the aqua blue tribes in Cameron’s creation have had a continuous connectivity to their planet – and if you are connecting to the film, with the same sense of open mindedness that Cameron requires, then it is soul-cleansing and beautiful to witness. 

Some of the storytelling in Avatar 2: The Way of Water may be predictable, but it is because we know the force that is about to be unleashed on the innocence and beauty we witness, by the mindless barbarian foot soldiers carrying out the wants and needs of the invading – but often remote in this – empire. But they do not, as how can a people who understand the need for equilibrium have an inclination as to what the coldly destructive force that is Western colonialism will do? 

Certain portions of the media are just too cynical to really have the spiritual reawakening that Cameron is valiantly trying to induce. At the very least, he is trying to show the emotional devastation when a people face a potential annihilation from an outside force they do not understand. In a way, that is what he was doing with The Terminator, as he seems to sense in both film franchises that man’s technology will lead to a pathway of total, spiritual and physical destruction for both himself and anything that gets in his pathway. No other filmmaker in blockbuster cinema seems brave enough to create a film franchise that speaks to the heart of the problem. Avatar 2: The Way of Water was gorgeous, sensitive world building, simple but powerful.  Cameron isn’t just trying to entertain, he is trying to make epic cinema with the intention of making people understand something from the perspective of those who have been violated with the horrors of invasion. 

20. Belfast 

Lockdown created the chance for a period of deep reflection for a lot of people. But Kenneth Branagh seemed to take that further than anyone, as he pondered his childhood as a young boy growing up on the turbulent streets of late sixties Belfast, as religious tensions between neighbouring Protestants and Catholics simmer uneasily. He went so deep into this chapter of contemplation during COVID confinement that he emerged with a full, impressively detailed screenplay about his formative years. 

The film kicked off with a memorable set-piece which established the tone as a story drawn from the nostalgia seeped, recollections, of an adult calling back to a lost youth. A little boy in a knitted jumper battles an unseen foe in his imagination, with only a toy sword and an upturned dustbin lid for protection. This boy then stumbles into the path of a fully grown violent mob as fantasy fiercely clashes with reality and the threat of living with the constant scourge of non-secular violence sobers up an audience absorbed in the playtime of a little boy. 

Working class life was tough at this time for anyone in the sixties, but to live those hardships with the threat of religious violence just around the corner, made Belfast an informative and sobering watch. 

I think most of us thought that Kenneth Brannagh was born and bred in a middle class London borough, so being taken up close and personal to his childhood life was quite a surprise. 

The film came out in the UK, at just around the time that the Ukraine invasion was taking place, which added many extra layers of poignancy, as Belfast was a story about ordinary civilian life potentially descending into civil war conditions and we were actually watching that same story play out on the news. You can only wonder if surviving children in Ukraine this year will one day write a screenplay as sharp as this about their own experiences. 

It is quite a wonderful endorsement of the flash of inspiration that his childhood went on to become a screenplay that won him the best original screenplay at the Oscars. A great message to anyone that it is never too late to turn difficult childhood memories into worthy stories. 

19. Turning Red

Pixar continue to at least meet the expectations they raise for themselves with each film, and one of the many reasons they keep this high standard of animation, is they seem to build their screenplays around an understanding of the subculture they are depicted with an impressive eye for personal detail. 

They did it with the Haiwaiians in Moana, and the Mexicans in Coco, and in Turning Red, they build the story around the emotional complexity of three generations of Chinese women, living estranged from their heritage, but fully integrated in modern Toronto. 

You come away from Turning Red having been thoroughly amused and entertained by the story of a high-achieving but awkward teenage girl, whose emotional loss of control leads her to get in touch with her inner red panda, but also an understanding of the matriarchal power struggle there can be in the tiger mum culture, of always wanting the next generation to better the achievements of the one before. 

The pressure there is in Chinese culture to succeed feeds into the tension of the screenplay and creates an interesting generational clash in the plot.

On the surface, you have a witty and absurd story of a little girl with an unusual and potentially life-destroying secret power, but underneath, and key to the humour working, you have a script, that understands what it is to be the next generation, trying to balance what it means to fit into the society you are living in, with the expectations and duties set out by your family, and the stricter outside society you live in – having to deal with the release of your inner spirit animal takes the tension and the humour to another level. The answer as to why Pixar always seem to get the cultural nuances so emotionally perfect is that they hand the writing duties to the people who know the intricacies of the culture first hand; the script was co-written by Chinese Canadian Domnee Shi and Julia Cho, and directed by Donmee Shi herself. 

It is an amusing, colorful adventure of a film, but seemingly, with a great sense of heart and purpose, to reach out to both the little Chinese/American/Canadian girls trying to find their identity and individualism whilst balancing the restrictive and demanding expectations of their family and their parents, who could perhaps do with the guidance this film offers to them as a message. 

Turning Red, the title itself is utterly inspired, and represents the film as multi-layered, it appears to be a reference to the transformative color of anger or embarrassment, nodding to the Incredible Hulk/Dr Jekyll template the story is written around, but is also a metaphor for the Chinese colour, and even, a nod to the struggles that all teenage girls have to face, physically, all at once. It’s a title and a novel idea that epitomizes the film as cleverly layered, hilarious, fun and sensitive to social and cultural dilemmas. 

18. The Phantom of the Open

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’ A quote from Oscar Wilde that the charming working class star of The Phantom of the Open, Maurice Flitcroft, (another totally beguiling performance by Mark Rylance) is fond of saying to denote his ambition of participating at the British Open in the mid seventies. Maurice is an ambitious dreamer – but like all those who aim for greatness, but come from the bottom in Britain, he finds the doors firmly shut to those who don’t want lowly outsiders intruding on their little clubs and societies. There is a class system in Britain, and those who don’t belong, find they irk the establishment when they try and find a key to unlocking the world of the elite. We at home refer to it as, your ‘face not fitting’, but it’s more likely your accent. 

But Maurice’s naivete tends to be his calling card, as he doesn’t let his lack of status, or talent deter him, and is determined to have a go at Britain’s most prestigious golfing tournament. 

It would be rather too far-fetched or incredulous if it weren’t for the fact that it is a true story. No country likes a battling underdog quite like Britain, it is what we do best, both in reality and in film. 

Paddington writer Simon Farneby firmly pitches the tone as a feel-good battle of the good-willed trier – it’s this year’s The Full Monty. It is an interesting twist on the formula that Maurice is seen to be a very poor golfer. He’s a bloke who switches on the telly, is green when he sees those on the green and thinks the world welcomes those who don’t let reality get in the way of a good sense of hope. So poor is he at his chosen sport, that he makes Eddie the Eagle look like the professional Austrians he aspired to be. But something magical happens, when a total amateur rubs shoulders with the inspired professionals – and this is why Maurice’s subsequent story is sprinkled with a bit of quintessentially British fairy tale magic. 

Perhaps the passion and sentiment of the film is reflected by the filmmaker himself, who hails from Caerphilly in South Wales and can relate to the story of a chancer trying to hit the big leagues of his chosen ambition. He seems to have a great grasp of the nuances of the British class struggle, whilst also knowing how to capture the inner mind of a dreamer with a sense of flair and panache. He handles the comedy beats in Farnaby’s script very-well too, as the sense of conflict with a system trying to keep Maurice out, often creates moments of hilarity for those who have experienced its truth. 

This was a film for all those who have sent out a letter to a company in following their dreams and been met with a resounding silence. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” – a side character shouts. This is a film that re-invigorates the inspiration for all those who’ve found doors shut in their face when they really tried to achieve something and that folks, is a wonderful thing. 

17.The Wonder

The Wonder found a creative and intriguing way to find the flaws in a society with absolute conviction in those of an entirely religiously devout mindset. It did this by boldly exposing the artifice in its story within, in a style that was oddly haunting and nags in the mind for the entire duration of the sincere story that then plays out.

We are in Post Famine Ireland in 1862 and a young English nurse – another outstanding performance by Florence Pugh – has been summoned to watch over a young girl whose family claim that she hasn’t eaten in months and is living off ‘manna from heaven’. Pugh’s nurse is there to ensure there is no conspiracy playing out, so the local church authorities can claim what is happening in their small village is a miracle.

But there is something that doesn’t quite make sense logically, and her rationality drives her to try to find answers. There is a lot of mystery and eerie intrigue built around this, as we know there is something amiss here, but it is not transparent as to what exactly is supporting the central apparent miracle, as the strange atmosphere slowly sucks the audience in.

Pugh’s strength as a performer is that she seems to convey strength of personality so effortlessly on a screen, so even though she is portraying a woman in a role of servitude to men, she is fiercely strong-willed and that leads to a story being driven by her sense of conviction for truth and answers. It took the film in surprising directions, always with a sense behind this about both the powers and the dangers of being in a world where faith is warping perspective. 

Her conviction leads to clashes, which sets the film down the course of a dramatically, unnervingly dark tone at times, in what was one of the year’s most original films.

16. All My Friends Hate Me

Lockdown gave a lot of people a chance to reflect on just how utterly weird an experience it was to just hang out with a bunch of your mates. Socialising in the age of COVID was something that could actually kill you, so anyone who suffers with social anxiety actually received validation at this strange time. 

This really original, oddly nightmarish British horror-inflected drama landed right into that conversation. It had a simple enough premise: a guy drives up to see his old Uni mates for a reunion a day before his birthday, but he starts to suspect that he might not have the connections with these people that he used to have. 

The clever screenplay was constructed in a way to play out the ambivalence as to whether he is socially paranoid that the distance that there appears to be between him and his estranged friends is actually something coordinated by the group or, just a product of his overly anxious mind. Director Andrew Gaynor plays out the ambivalence of this question for an impressively long time, ensuring the audience is ensnared in the inner mind of the central character who is  called Pete – and intune with the his increasing sense of unease at the mounting feeling of dread and the increasingly fraying of his mental state of mind.  

Some of the tensions play off the class divide as his friends clearly hail from families that have clearly been wealthy over more than a few generations shall we say, and our central character hails from a working class background. Is he playing up this division in his mind or is his attention constantly being drawn to it, by say, being taken on a pheasant shooting day for his birthday? 

All this tension builds to an unusual finale which capitalizes on the sheer awkwardness of the social unease that has been percolating throughout the film. 

This film was brilliantly inspired and given we are living through an age where people are talking more and more about their inner social anxiety, this was a top film to discuss with your mates after in a pub, providing you trust them enough to overcome the paranoia you experienced in the film.  

15. Brian and Charles

There have been so many films in which a robot becomes someone’s companion, so you have to do something special with it to grab an audience’s attention.

Director Rob Archer managed to do this, by flying against the sleekness of the current AI model, and instead having a comically absurd robot, so clumsily assembled, that it looked like it could not last five minutes, let alone a whole feature film. It was this down-to-earth DIY spirit, in both the film making and the story that made you root for both Brian and Charles. 

Quirky, loveable losers are what British comedy has always done best. At the start of the film, we are introduced to Brian, a weirdo, garage dweller who dreams of turning his junk into top inventions. 

He’s a spirited optimist, but his conditions and situation in life suggest loneliness, haplessness and a life of abject failure.  A flash of inspiration sees Brian create Charles, Frankenstein style: a cumbersome looking awkward thing, with a washing machine for a body, and mannequin for a head and a strange love of cabbages. 

Both Charles and the film itself though, were much more than the sum of their parts. From minute one, when we see Brian’s terrible inventions, you feel yourself warming to the film, the character and the faux docu style. The innocence of Charles’ fresh to the world spirit, is pure comedic delight. 

Archer Riff’s on classic films such as Pinocchio, ET,The Elephant Man and Frankenstein, and he brings a Disney spirit to a small sleepy, Welsh village setting. 

The film is an interesting mix of heart, humour and feel-good charm, but underpinning this was a sense of pathos and sadness, with a vibe that this is a film designed to lift the spirits of all those suffering alone out there, dejected and feeling defeated in tough times. Brian and Charles was the kind of film that roused the spirit with a truly hilarious comedy double act routine and, strangely, one of the most loveable robots ever. 

This was an inspiration to filmmakers to show that, if you have the right spirit, it is possible to reinvigorate old ideas with fresh enterprise. No one expected one of the funniest films of the year to spring forth from an old washing machine, but Archer made that happen and Brian and Charles was a gem that refreshed souls and offered hope in times of despair. 

14.Apollo 10 ½

Raise your hand if you were born before 1969? Now raise your hand if you were actually growing up in Houston, when NASA landed on the moon? Very few of us have done this, but Richard Linkater has and it is a tribute to his skills as a director, that he has made the audience watching this story about a boy going to the moon in a lunar capsule made too small for a real astronaut, into a film that makes you actually feel what it would have been to be there, in Houston when America landed on the moon. Or more accurately, a boy watching this unfold.

Richard Linklater’s films have often been a love letter to his beloved Texas, and he does coming of age stories like no other of his generation. This is an animated feature, but the minutia of the time period is captured to such fine detail that you start to wonder if you are in the memory of someone who lived this for real. 

Nostalgia is something of a comfort in these troubled times, and the sense of time and place is rendered so vivid, with Jack Black’s affectionate voiceover, further evoking the feeling of someone telling a story through recollection. 

Even though it is a quirky story about a boyhood fantasy of being an astronaut, it doesn’t feel made up. 

 It was also something of a long-awaited spiritual sequel to Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life, as it uses the rotoscoping animated style that is synonymous with Linklater. It is a delight to see him working with a technology that blends real acting with animation again. 

One thing that Linklater has always been able to do is to make the natural, or even mundane relatable. He did that in Apollo 10 ½, by drawing humour out of the cross generational clashes of a family dynamic, that must be familiar from Linklater’s own childhood and is certainly something we all have experienced, since we all have family members comedically grumbling at a changing world, whilst the younger generation is seeing the changing times as an opportunity. 

The late sixties was such a fervent time for America at this period, and seeing that filtered through the memory and imagination of the filmmaker with his finger on the pulse of youth culture, was a totally far out experience.

13. Everything Everywhere All At Once

The multiverse movie seemed to be multiplying in 2022, and yet one film stood out from the crowd by doing something inventive with the concept. Generally, the multiverse setup now is being used as an excuse to do something random for the sake of random and doing something that would be otherwise inexplicably totally bonkers, and whilst this did also seize the opportunity for random zaniness at every plot juncture, it did also have a philosophy and a set of rules behind it, that made it easily the best use of the multiverse concept so far. 

Rather than have a character land in a different realm because you now can do that, it turned the concept in on itself, so the central character is on a personal journey of discovery of how much infinite potential the self could actually have. We only get one life and we live with the consequences of our actions and decisions, for better or worse. But in Everything Everywhere all at Once, we saw a character, entirely stuck in a dead end of a failing business, drowning in tax obligations, step out of herself, to glimpse the potential that she really had in her soul.

There are a lot of people out there right now in traps of mundanity, fighting losing battles, and on a spiritual level, Michelle Yeoh’s performance and the inspired novelty in the screenplay, seemed to have the heart to go out to those, who cannot rediscover their best selves. It was a film that spoke to the heart of a spiritual crisis. We all know we have potential, but how do we unlock it in a life constantly throwing problems at us? 

Stepping into a time-traveler from another world like an Asian Doctor Who, was our old friend Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The comeback story of 2022, Chinese actor Ke Hey Quan, came back onto our screens for the first time in decades in a role that mirrored the – it-is-never-too-late-to-rediscover-your-potential-message embedded in the screenplay. Michelle Yeoh too, one of the most respected of Chinese actresses, has always shown her range, but here, she was granted the role of her lifetime, which simultaneously displayed her range and it might well win her that first best female actress Oscar. 

Chinese culture tends to be rather pragmatic and reserved, so there seemed to be some sort of satire within this, to have Asian characters have to do novelty things for the purpose the screenplay revealed as logical within the context of the story here. The film wanted to use its setup as a gateway to another dimension and backed that up with some wild, head spinning ideas and visual sequencing. It was an explosion of philosophy, inspiration and creativity, but whether it was thought-provoking or a further sense of just how the multiverse is a machine for generating pure novelty, is still open for debate. There is an element that this is a fantasy day-dream for the soul, rather than something totally meaningful. For my money, it was the concept of the late nineties rom-com Sliding Doors times infinity, with the offbeat, but mind-expanding soul of Douglas Adams, with a whole lot of random cosmic chaos,but for now, directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Sheinert is the new high watermark of the boundary busting metaphysical new direction cinema seems to be going in. 

12. Top Gun Maverick

In a cinematic landscape dominated by sequels and instalments to existing franchises, the biggest film of the year was a sequel to an existing franchise, but this time, it was different, as Bruckhiemer and the Top Gun team had waited 35 years for the next chapter.  With such a length of time passing, boys and girls had become men and women, both in the film and in the audiences and as we all know, the passing of time strengthens emotions. Such patience and restraint, in not rushing to a sequel, is unprecedented, maverick even, and it turned out that the time had both heightened anticipation as to what happened to that cocksure 80s poster boy, and allowed emotions from tragedies from the first film to percolate over time. There were high-octane air chase scenes with an extraordinary physicality aplenty, but that was to perhaps be expected, what was surprising was how it was all powered by a strong heart. From Maverick’s poignant reunion with The Iceman, (Val Kilmer) to his paternal power struggle with Rooster (a confident Miles Teller), the offspring of his good mate Goose, every emotional beat, struck a chord as it seemed Maverick was trying to balance being the renegade of his younger years, with a duty of responsibility to his young charges.

The passing of time offered up great potential for the storytelling and the writing team of Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie seized on its opportunity to resonate. They also had a lot of fun playing with the idea that the character who rebelled with a cause against authority, had now taken on the tricky role of being the dispenser of knowledge and a figure in the establishment. 

As for Tom Cruise, he is no spring chicken at the age of 60, but you could barely tell that time passed at all, looking every bit the movie star he did in his younger years and holding his own impressively against the young guns – while having the emotional depth to back up the notes the screenwriting was hitting. 

It all seemed to be heading in a direction of maximum emotional impact, but sidestepped this in its third act, where the rawness, power and suspense, were cashed in for a tongue-in-cheek final third which made it seem more like 80s actioners like Indiana Jones, than the tone of The Right Stuff it was originally going for. 

It craftily avoided any political statements too, by following up in the the first film’s footsteps by not ever naming the enemy target, as having a team of elite fighter pilots flying into a different continent may seem rather troubling from a country that has just come off of 20 years of intervention in the Middle East. Top Gun de-contextualized itself from real world politics, just about, despite presumably, driving a new generation of young American top guns to want to pursue a career in military aviation, just like the first film did. But we will swiftly move on from this as it was an absolute blast, with the most immersive action scenes of the year and oddly affecting not to mention, the absolute undisputed Top Gun at the Box office with well over a billion in takings earned.  

11.The Batman 

With Ben Affleck bowing out as Batman, in Znyder’s soul-deadening Justice League movies, it seemed like it might be best to let Bruce Wayne recover in his bat cave for a little bit.

But we are in a cinematic age of near instant reboots and almost immediate re-origin stories are acceptable, so in came Matt Reeves as director, and the now intriguing choice of Robert Pattison as The Batman, since he had built a good reputation as an actor on the indie scene. 

The result was a Gothic, brooding Batman film that rediscovered the potential from the Christopher Nolan era, to chime with the modern world. 

Like all good Batman films, its success was defined by the strength of the villain, and Paul Dano’s Joker was a bold reinterpretation of the character that firmly made you look entirely anew at what The Riddler could represent. 

It is a sad state of affairs that we live in times so rife with corruption and shameless self-interest, that there are strange parallels with the worst state of Gotham and how our own politics is run. 

With that in mind, seeing Dano’s Riddler as a sort of ruthless anarchist against institutionalised moral bankruptcy, was a startling vision that really resonated. 

People feel powerless right now. They see the problems with the system, but can do little about them. So, with that in mind, seeing The Riddler as a fearsome exposer of high-end wrong-doing, using his love of cryptic puzzles to hang-out to dry the powerful men who wrongfully assume they can carry out vice without repercussions, was something wryly satisfying to watch. 

It opened up this interesting debate. Is this Riddler actually helping the people, and is he then more of a vigilante than Batman? And if Batman stops these, admittedly borderline terrorist acts, then is he actually working to maintain a system riddled with corruption? 

It was also interesting, to see a Riddler entirely focused and chess-like in what he is doing against a Batman, just finding his feet as a superhero, and prone to making a mistake.  There was a vulnerability to Patterson’s Batman that worked.

Under Reeves direction, the film also had an air of a Chandler detective novel, with The Batman attempting to decipher The Riddler’s clever puzzles, like it was a noir story. The relentless rain, added to this mood and mystery, in a Batman film that really packed a punch. 

Come back tomorrow for the Top Ten films of 2022. Thanks for reading.