#American action movies 2022 movie#

What links existential punching bag Johnny Knoxville to eternal flyboy Pete Mitchell (and the guy who plays him, Tom Cruise) is a desire to be the best of the best at what they do, whether that’s piloting supersonic stealth aircraft or getting blasted out of a cannon. Try to follow me on this one: Top Gun: Maverick and Jackass Forever are basically the same movie-a gracious, public attempt by a weathered icon of American-made sadomasochistic excellence to pass the torch to a new generation of daredevils, except not so fast. Now, I don’t know if any of the films below have a realistic chance of crashing the canon in 2032, but as the year comes to a close, they’re the ones I’ve been thinking and talking about the most. This year, I’ve got all 10 slots to myself, which brings to mind that old line about power and responsibility-one that not only predates the Marvel Cinematic Universe but resonates in a moment when people are paying more attention than usual to film critics and the strange, controversial process of canon formation.

#American action movies 2022 movie#

Rather, it’s a movie that elicits a certain, burning passion in people who want to share their love of the things that cinema can do when pushed to certain limits.įor the past few years, I’ve collaborated on The Ringer’s Best Movies of the Year with Sean Fennessey, a man whose tastes are after my own-to a point. For the record, I don’t think Jeanne Dielman ( which I love, but did not make my top 10 ballot) was a shocking pick, or a random one, or that the fix was in. But beyond which specific titles ended up inside or outside the Top 100 (a few stunners: no Luis Buñuel, no Howard Hawks, no Pulp Fiction), the contents of the Sight and Sound list make a collective case on behalf of analysis and explanation-and against the cynical cheerleading for movies that are “critic-proof” (a euphemism with all kinds of anti-elitist connotations).

(I keep thinking of Carmela’s movie group on The Sopranos starting at the top of the all-time list with Citizen Kane and desultorily concluding, “Well, there was the cinematography” when it ended.) There has also been some scathing backlash, including a Facebook post by Paul Schrader in which the director accused Sight and Sound of a “politically correct rejiggering” of the poll, adding that “ Jeanne Dielman will from this time forward be remembered not only as an important film in cinema history but also as a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.”īad vibes, finger-pointing, quote-tweet dunks: Cinephilia is back, baby.

This sets the stage for countless moments of living-room awkwardness. The upshot of this pick-beyond the predictable frenzy on Film Twitter-is that large numbers of people will seek out and watch Akerman’s superlative, near-real-time exercise in structuralist storytelling. Last week, an international, decennial poll of over 1,000 writers coordinated by the British film magazine Sight and Sound led to the coronation of a new greatest movie of all time: Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s complex, minimalist domestic epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, a movie not only light-years removed from contemporary multiplex aesthetics but formally and thematically opposite from past winners like Citizen Kane and Vertigo.