Malia Callier’s Top 10 Films of 2022

Looking back at the past year, it’s safe to say that the cinema experience has changed for me. After spending the pandemic sitting on the couch watching movies from the comfort of my own home, it was a breath of fresh air to be able to be able to sit in a movie theater again and watch films on the big screen. It takes a lot to get oneself out of the death scroll of their phone, but here are what I thought were the best films of 2022 that were able to demand my attention and keep it entirely. While I accept criticism, I do not accept slander. So just as a warning, the trainwreck Jurassic World, Plane, and that Fantastic Beast movie with no actually notable fantastic beasts won’t even touch this list.

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Harrison Hall’s Top 10 Films of 2022

Perhaps it’s a little too early for me to speak so boldly on this topic, but 2022 was far-and-away the most formative year of my entire life so far, something that movies played no small part in. This was the year that I really discovered my taste in film, beyond the circle of stuff like Pulp Fiction or The Shining that everybody kind of likes anyways. A Sam Raimi binge fine-tuned my brain to horror films– a genre I had previously written off as not-my-thing, now one of my absolute favorites. I’ve begun to crack the pre-1980s bubble that had long eluded me, which opened my eyes to an entire new galaxy of movies. But what’s most relevant to anybody reading this article: 2022 is the year that I set up camp and became a movie theater goblin. I visited the movie theater 72 times in 2022, finishing the year having watched more than 60 2022 releases, a fair increase from having only seen 20 films in theaters the year before (granted, COVID was a much greater obstacle in the way of theatrical releases in 2021 than it is today).  I will disclaim that my viewing habits are strongly dominated by American films, as I only have reliable access to Regal/AMC theaters– i.e., not arthouse. As such, the international presence on this “best of the best” list is more than likely underrepresenting the fantastic movies that are produced overseas– I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t get the chance to see them. But with that aside, here are my favorite films of 2022.

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Review: ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’: Unbound by the Strings of Expectation

For some godforsaken reason, pop culture is currently in the midst of a Pinocchio epidemic. Left and right, up and down, Pinocchio is everywhere. Disney dumped out their live-action remake of Pinocchio earlier this year, a drab, mostly beat-for-beat remake, apart from the addition of pop culture references and Disney+ advertising. Then, over from Russia, we have the infamous Pinocchio: A True Story, a very-fictional animated film starring Pauly Shore, which is almost certainly a front for a mafia money-laundering scheme. And, finally, in the world of gaming, we have Lies of P, a grim-and-gritty reimagining of Pinocchio as a magical steampunk Blade Runner, where Pinocchio himself resembles a cybernetically-enhanced Timothée Chalamet. It’s a little unfair to lump that last one in with the others, but regardless, Pinocchio has become an icon of unoriginality, a soulless husk puppeteered by corporate forces looking to make an easy profit off name-recognition. But just as it seemed that there was no integrity left, out has emerged Guillermo del Toro to grant the character life once again.

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