Best Movies of 2022, #1: RRR

I see so few foreign films these days that it seems silly to include any on these lists. Who am I to say what the best foreign films are if I never go see them? Some years, I’ve specifically made excuses for myself and specified that these are “The Best American Movies of” whatever year. But this year I couldn’t do that because I had to shout to the hills that my favorite movie of the year was from Tollywood, a film center that I had not even previously heard of.

MCU Phase 4 lost its way, but this movie shows how to find it again. With superlative cinematography, music, SFX and editing, this might be the perfect simulacrum of an American blockbuster action flick, surpassing the thing it’s emulating in every way. It works as a straightforward action movie and as a sly parody of action movie ludicrousness at the same time.

I think that one reason the movie is so rousing is that it has a sure sense of good and evil. It helps, of course, that India, unlike America, was enslaved by a purely evil empire for so long. I left the movie wanting to kill the first white person I saw. But though the villains were gloriously villainous, the movie still finds lots of intense moral dilemmas as the heroes debate the best way to confront evil. It really tore me up trying to imagine what I would do if placed in these difficult positions.

I think MCU movies try too hard to get you to sympathize with the villains, partially because they’re primarily made for a country that has played the villain more often in history than it has played the hero. Seeing this rousing action movie made me wish that we had more often been the heroes of our own stories. (Other than one five year period in the 1940s.)

We’ve talked about how long the movies were this year, and the problem that they seemed to wrap up 90 minutes in, only to fire themselves back up again. Those issues were both magnified here. The movie is over three hours long and comes very close to a satisfactory conclusion halfway through, and I found myself thinking “I’ve really enjoyed the first half, but this movie is going to overstay its welcome now. I’m checking out and there’s no way to reignite my interest.” But I should have trusted the movie. The movie fires back up quickly and slammed me back into gear. The second half reveals that there’s much more to the story than we had previously suspected, and culminates in a much more satisfying conclusion than the movie could have previously offered.

The result is three hours of pure cinematic joy. It’s the best movie of the year. Go see it.

Best Movies of 2022, #2: The Menu

My favorite of the three boat/island/rich/poor/murder movies this year, and, in fact, my favorite American movie of the year.

I’ve said before that I only go see movies on recommendations from people I trust or if it’s a brand I know I like. Once I’ve decided to see a movie, I try to avoid seeing the trailer. I like to go in fresh.

This movie was different. I did this old school. Betsy and I went to see Nope, which was just okay (It didn’t get a “Not on the List” post because I didn’t have much to say about it. Suffice it to say it was not as great as Peele’s previous two movies.) Before the movie, there were, of course, lots of trailers, and, for whatever reason, I simply found the trailer for The Menu to be very appealing. I loved the cast, and it just looked like it would be a fun movie to see on a date night.

So I proposed to Betsy that we see it in the theater, just based on liking the trailer, and she agreed. The whole experience too me back to my youth. And we just flat out loved this movie. My best movie theater experience since Summer of Soul.

Anya Taylor-Joy proved in “The Queen’s Gambit” that she has more than enough charisma to carry a movie, and I was so glad she got the chance to deliver here. But the biggest draw is Ralph Fiennes. He’s never won an Oscar, and this should have been it (they could have gone with lead or supporting) but he didn’t even get a nomination. He’s riveting.

Horror Comedy is a tricky genre to get right. When it’s done right, even people who have no interest in horror, like my wife and I, will still love it. “Stranger Things” has mastered it on the small screen. Peele mastered it in his first two movies but stumbled his third time out. Nope didn’t deliver for me, but it did show me a trailer that eventually gave me what I was looking for. I loathe foodies and I was happy to see them suffer.

Triangle of Sadness had my favorite line of the year, but this one had my second favorite: “He kept you open though Covid!”

Best Movies of 2022, #3: Glass Onion

Part 2 of our trilogy-within-a-top-ten-list: As with yesterday, we have the disgusting rich, the struggling poor, a boat, an island, tables turned, and people murdered.

This was an absolutely delightful movie. The whole cast is fantastic. Now that Daniel Craig’s James Bond is dead, I hope they make a hundred of these instead.

Can I do spoilers on this one? If you haven’t seen it, stop reading now! Seriously, stop! Go watch this wonderful movie on Netflix!

Okay, are they gone? Good.

Boy oh boy was this movie a great example of Real Life National Pain. It came true even more than White Noise did. One last SPOILER ALERT! Okay, the big reveal is that the thinly-veiled Elon Musk character is both stupid and evil, but most people didn’t realize the real Musk was stupid and/or evil until just a few weeks before the movie came out, so the filmmakers were shockingly prescient. Who do they want to warn us about next, and can they do so in a more timely fashion?

But now that we’re dishing spoilers, and given that I’ve said that I get easily confused by movies these days, let me ask the big question I couldn’t answer. Given what we know by the end, why did Norton go on with his plans for the weekend after Janelle Monae showed up? Didn’t he think he’d killed her? Wouldn’t he freak out more when he saw her, and instantly abandon his plans? Did he assume that he had failed to kill her? And maybe assume that she didn’t know he’d tried? I just couldn’t follow that, which was a major impediment to me enjoying the movie in retrospect, but I figured there must be a good explanation. Was there? What was he thinking when he saw her?

Best Movies of 2022, #4: Triangle of Sadness

The disgusting rich. The struggling poor. A boat. An island. Tables are turned. People are murdered. Those five elements drove three of the best movies this year. I swear I didn’t manipulate this, but the three movies ended up in 4th, 3rd and 2nd place on my list, so the next three days will examine this trilogy.

This was my least favorite of the three but I still loved it. An extremely wicked satire of inequality. It has no likeable characters, which is always a tough row for a movie to hoe, but this movie shows that it can work. The next two movies we’ll look will introduce us to their boats and islands though the eyes of jaundiced outsiders, but in this movie our POV characters are shallow models and influencers. We come to share their frustrations (with each other and the world), but never root for them or like them. When the pirates show up, we’re relieved that someone has finally arrived to give these characters their comeuppance and we hope they spare none of the passengers. (The line “Is this one of ours?” is the funniest movie moment of the year.  See the movie to understand.)

So why does the movie work? The characters are unlikeable, but they are recognizably human. The male character’s key trait is that he just won’t let things go, even when his points are petty and meaningless. It’s annoying, but an annoying trait that we’ve all fallen prey to at one time or another and we certainly wince to see our own weakness embodied and magnified so memorably.

It helps that they suffer so mightily before the movie ends, earning our begrudging sympathy simply because nobody, not even these louses, deserve to suffer so much. I think all the vomit and shit helps, though it made the movie even harder to take as it erupted onscreen for a long 10 minute sequence. Life reaches down their throats and rips forth their humanity for all to see.

This was definitely another case of Betsy and I checking the time and being shocked that there was another 50 minutes left in the movie. As with The Fabelmans, I was initially annoyed to find the movie starting over again in a new location at the 90 minute mark, but the new location turned out to be fertile new storytelling ground and provided a delightful escalation of all the movie’s themes.

Best Movies of 2022, #5: Tar

Most movies this year were long. This one was especially long (though there is a longer movie yet to come on this list!) Did this movie really need to be 2 hours and 38 minutes? It begins very slow. The first ten minutes is just David Remnick interviewing Cate Blanchett’s character for the New Yorker Festival. This is followed by a very long lunch scene between Blanchett and Mark Strong. I was thinking, “Geez, this movie is in no hurry to get started.”

I try to avoid knowing about movies before I see them these days, and just rely on trusted people to tell me what I should see. All I knew about this movie was that it was some sort of MeToo story, but I was an hour in and there was no hint of such a story (Although later we realize there were some very subtle hints) Eventually, the plot gets underway in the second hour and the story picks up momentum.

So why is this movie on my list? Because I don’t think the last 90 minutes of the movie would have been so good if the first 70 minutes hadn’t been so …let’s say deliberate.

The whole game of this movie is that writer-director Todd Field looked at MeToo and asked “How can I really make the audience feel the pain of a perpetrator being taken down, despite showing that they’re definitely guilty?”

His most cynical choice, of course, was to tell the story of a woman sexually harassing other women, rather than trying to make us feel for a male perpetrator. That did a lot of the work for him, but it wouldn’t have been enough on its own.

I think his best choice was to spend that first 70 minutes really exploring the idea of greatness. It begins as a very relaxed movie about a woman supremely confident about her place atop her world. We spend that time coming to share in her self-assurance, then we painfully feel for her as it all comes apart.

Ultimately, this movie is on the list because of Blanchett’s jaw-dropping performance.  She’s already won a bunch of times and Michelle Yeoh never has, but I would have a hard time not voting for Blanchett.     

The one false note I thought the movie was the deceptively edited video from her class that gets put on the internet. Field’s already got us on board with having sympathy for a guilty perpetrator, but then he puts his thumb on the scales by having her be unfairly smeared by her students, in addition to entirely fair accusations of sexual harassment she’s already facing. The edited video has a “cancel culture is bullshit” element that wasn’t needed. It muddies the message.

I can’t recommend enough that everyone check out the WTF interview with Field. He’s had a fascinating life. When he was a kid, he invented Big League Chew and never saw a dime from it!

Best Movies of 2022, #6: The Fabelmans

The tagline of Superman was “You’ll believe a man can fly” The tagline of this film should have been “You’ll almost believe that Michelle Williams is Jewish.”

But she did a great job regardless. Sometimes you have to cast someone who doesn’t fit the role ethnically if you think they can give a great performance anyway.  The Fabelmans is very similar to Armageddon Time, which is also well worth seeing but didn’t make the list. I spent that whole movie thinking “I just can’t buy Anthony Hopkins as a Jewish grandfather.” What can I say, I’m a gatekeeper.

Others can confirm that I have said out loud at various times over the last thirty years, “I’ll be interested in Stephen Spielberg again when he makes a movie about a Jewish kid in Arizona dealing with his parents’ divorce.” What I meant by that was that there was a profound phoniness about Spielberg’s movies post 80s. He wasn’t putting enough of himself into them. Some were pretty good. Lincoln mostly worked but even that had some profoundly phony moments, with sappy music swelling and dappled light filtering into the Capitol.

So now Spielberg has finally made that personal movie I always wanted him to make. Did it have any phony moments? Yes, but just a few, such as when his sister tells him what’s really wrong with him, which played as poorly as those moments always play. Other than that, this movie felt very genuine. Hard lived and hard-earned.

Of course, as with the next two movies on the list, this movie did suffer from a problem the Onion identified with this year’s movies. It felt like the movie was wrapping up after the divorce, but then it started ramping up again and Betsy and I realized, as we had with so many other movies this year, Holy shit, there’s 50 minutes left. It’s starting to feel like the standard running time for all movies now (blockbuster or art film) is 150 minutes, but they haven’t learned how to pace them appropriate so they don’t feel like they’re ending an hour earlier.

Okay, I’ve done more criticizing than praising here, but it really is a very good movie (that eventually justifies its length.) It’s profound in parts and very funny in others (and sometimes both.) Beginning with the train crash and then the need to recreate it is great.  The mom driving her kids to go see the tornado is a great example of a “This must have really happened” scene.  Go see it.

Best Movies of 2022, #9, #8 and #7

What these three movies have in common is that they all fell into the year’s trend of serious movies being box office bombs, which not only dimmed their own prospects but put at risk the prospect of any adult movies getting made in the future. I guess the only thing that might save adult movies is that kids movies like Lightyear and Strange World were megaflops as well, so Hollywood may just decide that they simply don’t know how to market anything anymore. Hopefully they’ll realize that the movies aren’t letting them down, they’re letting down the movies.

I don’t have a lot to say about these, so I’ll cover them in one day.

#9: Three Thousand Years of Longing

Especially for someone who doesn’t make movies very often, has any director had more varied output than George Miller? Four Mad Max movies, two Happy Feet movies, two Babe movies, The Witches of Eastwick, Lorenzo’s Oil... Now after another many-year break, he returns with his first romance. I saw this on date night with my wife and we both loved it.

Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba are very appealing performers who have been mostly sexless on screen so it’s wonderful that they got to generate some heat here as a scholar and the genie she releases, in a modern story paralleled with various historic tales. Beautiful imagery and a satisfying story.

#8: White Noise

The movie made very little money in its brief theatrical window and equally little impact on its subsequent Netflix run, but surely it’s time to put a new push behind it, giving what’s going on in East Palestine, Ohio. Has there ever been a more timely movie? Well, yes, one… This movie has very much become the China Syndrome of its generation. That movie about the danger of nuclear plant meltdowns came out twelve days before the near meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, sending people to the theaters in droves to find out more about the danger. Now that White Noise has proven to be so oddly prescient, will people also rush to belatedly discover this tale of a deadly cloud rising from a rail disaster chemical spill?

If they do they’ll discover a delightful and disturbing movie. Capturing the delicate tone of a Don DeLillo novel is a tricky business, but writer/director Noah Baumbach does it well, with ample help from the always great Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

#7: Amsterdam

The reviews were dreadful so everybody I know skipped this one, but I knew that I always find David O. Russell movies appealing whether they’re hits or flops, and I’m a big fan of the cast: Christian Bale is always worth watching, and the rest of the sprawling cast, Margot Robbie, John David Washington (sounding more and more like his father Denzel as his voice matures), Anya Taylor Joy, Rami Malek, Robert DeNiro, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon, Zoe Saldana and many others are reliable performers.

The movie is at its best in flashback sequences to World War I and its aftermath, but the non-flashback portions of the story, unraveling a massive conspiracy in the late 1930s, are also quite good. A very enjoyable movie which you almost certainly missed and well worth checking out.

Best Movies of 2022, #10: She Said

A good old fashioned shoe-leather journalism story. All the President’s Men but with a female screenwriter, director, stars and subject matter. I thought it was better than Spotlight, which won best picture. One problem was that that movie pretended that its investigation was revolutionary, when really it was just another in a long line of exposés of the Catholic church. The subject matter of this movie really did change the world. This movie is also more stylish and has more tension.

I also liked how this movie contrasted with one element of “The Dropout.” That was a great TV miniseries, but it really sucked that they felt the need to invent a new editor at the Wall Street Journal. I watched the whole thing thinking “Really? Rupert Murdoch hired a black woman to be the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal? And that wasn’t a huge news story in and of itself? Is this real? Am I going to have to look this up?” And eventually I looked it up and of course they faked it. The real editor was a white man who describes himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon.”  Murdoch would rather tear out a nostril than put the WSJ in the hands of a black woman.

The makers of the TV show just didn’t want to have a whole storyline where two white men (a reporter and an editor) do the righteous work of taking down a white woman and an Indian-American man, because that looks bad. But I think they had a responsibility to lean into the fact that it looked bad. Taking down Elizabeth and Sunny was heroic, but there were uncomfortable elements to that and of course the WSJ would not be totally adverse to lunging when this woman and POC stuck their necks too far out. I think the show had a responsibility to admit that, instead of just inventing a black woman editor.

I like how She Said basically leaned into the fact that the two heroes were two fairly similar women. White working moms of young kids making their way as career women in New York. As in All the President’s Men, we get one Goyish and one Jewish, but that’s the only difference. (Of course, it helps that the NYT actually has a black editor, so they didn’t have to make one up, but he’s not a big part of the story.)

Reluctantly Not on the 2022 List: Everything Everywhere All At Once

I know, I know, here I go again, being the party pooper, disliking a movie that everyone else loved. Let me be clear: This is a well-made movie. I was impressed with it. I liked the performances, and wouldn’t mind if they won things. I laughed at some things. I would call these visionary filmmakers and admired their ability to get their vision on screen.

So why did the movie ultimately leave me cold? Why could I not bring myself to put it on my top ten list?

Here’s the thing: As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had a harder time following confusing stories. In this movie, once things get super-weird, they explain what’s going on so quickly that I just got lost. Really lost. I considered pausing the movie and asking Betsy to explain what was going on, but I decided it was hopeless and just mentally checked out. I spent the whole rest of the moving just saying “Huh? What?” until it ended. I didn’t get a word of it.

The next morning, Betsy was explaining the plot of the movie to our kids and I was gobsmacked. Where was she getting all this from? How had she been able to follow any of it? Then the movie became the most beloved on the year and I felt increasingly stupid. I considered rewatching it so that I could re-evaluate it for this list, but ultimately decided that no, I gave it a fair shot, and it just didn’t do anything for me.

This is a subjective list. There will be movies on it that make you say “He liked that more than Everything Everywhere All At Once??” I just gotta call ‘em like I see ‘em.

I must say that the thing I admired most about this movie was this interview with Daniel Kwan calling out toxic fandom and excusing critics not putting the movie on their top ten lists.  Thanks for having my back, Dan!  

Not on the 2022 List: Dr. Strange 2 (and Thor 4 and Black Panther 2)

This movie wasn’t as awful as Black Widow or The Eternals, but in many ways, it was the most disappointing output of the MCU phase 4. This is because the best element of phase 4 was WandaVision, and this was sort of a sequel to that and couldn’t have dropped that ball more disastrously.

Wanda was such a deeply human and heartbreaking character in that show, and then she shows up here as just a kill-the-bitch horror villain. As I was watching it in the theater, I kept thinking that it was almost as if Sam Raimi didn’t even watch WandaVision. Then I got home and found out that nope, he didn’t, though he had plenty of time to do so. Is there any worse example of directorial malfeasance? Watch the masterpiece you’re making a sequel to, ya doofus!

Ultimately, I realized they could have made it work if they had made it clear that the Darkhold had turned her evil, as in the storyline pictured below, but no, Raimi implied that motherhood alone had warped her brain. Ugh.

By far the best part of the movie was seeing all those cameos on that other Earth, but then they were all gruesomely killed one by one, which was no fun to watch.

Ultimately, other than WandaVision, Loki and Spider-Man No Way Home, phase four was a big disappointment. (And I hear that phase five hasn’t gotten off to a good start either, but I haven’t made it out to see the new Ant-Man yet.) The rule in Hollywood is that if a franchise lives long enough, it will get to see itself become the villain, but we’ll always have phases 1-3.

Not on the 2022 List: Top Gun: Maverick

I don’t begrudge this movie its tremendous success. If anything was going to get people back into theaters, I’m glad it was a fun, old-fashioned, they-don’t-make-em-like-that-anymore nostalgia fest.

But lord-a-mighty this movie was dumb. The dumbest movie to ever get a Picture nomination? Possibly. Specifically, it was a lot dumber than the first Top Gun, which is saying a lot.

Somehow, I had never managed to watch the original over the last forty years, but finally watched it in preparation for this movie. I could see how the movie earned its reputation for cheesiness and the dumbing down of movies. Watching the volleyball scene, cut like a music video in a way that made it impossible to know who was winning the game, was infuriating. But I was shocked at how grown-up the movie was. Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are competing to see who will be the best pilot. Then Tom Cruise’s copilot dies in the air. At this point, I fully expected Tom to have to overcome this obstacle and win the competition anyway. But no, there’s no longer any thought of him winning, and he graciously concedes to Kilmer, as he struggles to get back into the air at all. I respected that.

Compare this to the far-cheesier sequel, where nobody ever accepts the consequences of any setback. The movie reaches its apotheosis of dumbness when Tom Cruise is shot down in Iran and Miles Teller goes back in his fighter jet to rescue him. It turns out that Teller arrives just in time, because Cruise is about to be shot by the guns of an Iranian helicopter, which Teller blows up. But what’s the plan now? How do you rescue a civilian on the ground when you’re flying a fighter jet? How do you land? They’ve already established that the only nearby runway has been carpet bombed. So what is Teller’s plan for picking up Cruise? What happens is the only thing that could have happened: Teller gets shot down too. Once they’re both on the ground, they can work together to steal a plane from the busted-up runway and get out. But what was Teller’s plan if he hadn’t been shot down? This is never explained. We’re just supposed to understand that this is a very dumb movie. (And why were the Iranians going to kill Cruise instead of capturing him? Surely he would have been a high-value hostage?)

Unlike its predecessor, this movie is pure cheese. I’m glad that we’re learning to have a cheesy good time at the movies again. But Best Picture??

Not on the 2022 list: Avatar: The Way of Water

To prepare for this movie, I rewatched the original Avatar (the theatrical cut, I’m not insane) and I thought it was pretty fucking great.

I was in chemotherapy for most of 2009 and not going to the movies. When it came time for the 2010 Oscars, it was the first year in my adult life I hadn’t seen the nominees. I knew the two frontrunners were Avatar and The Hurt Locker, I knew the stories behind them and I knew what I had heard about the two movies. I knew that James Cameron and Katherine Bigelow had once been married until he left her for a younger woman, and now they were coming up against each other with movies at the Oscars, so obviously, I’m going to root for her in that situation. As for the movies, I had heard that The Hurt Locker was really left wing and critical of the war in Iraq, and Avatar was really right wing in that it was a bullshit white savior power fantasy. So I was totally rooting for The Hurt Locker and happy when it won. Then, a year later, once I was recovered, I actually saw the movies. I discovered that, from my point of view, The Hurt Locker actually felt very right wing and its critique of the US presence in Iraq was shallow and insincere. And Avatar, when I actually saw it, seemed to actually be quite left wing, both in terms of its environmental message and its anti-imperialism. I could still enjoy that Bigelow got revenge on the man who left her, but in terms of the movies themselves, being a leftist, I felt that the wrong team won.

I then, like most moviegoers, forgot about Avatar, assuming I would never watch it again. But lo and behold, 13 years later, a sequel arrived and I decided I’d better brush up on the original.

It’s just a very clean, simple movie, despite its length (even the theatrical version is long). It’s a tale as old as time: Colonizers arrive, seeking a resource under the ground, one colonizer falls in love with a local girl from an ecologically balanced tribe, completely changes his mind and joins their bloody revolt, which is successful. Stand up and cheer. (Yes, it’s a little bit white savior-y in a few shots, but it’s more about humbling himself and learning to live their way than imposing his awesomeness.)

The sequel is, alas, nowhere near as clean or clear. It’s a big ole mess.

What exactly is the humans’ goal? When they first return, we logically assume that they’ve come back for the same thing they originally wanted: unobtanium, so that’s the presumed goal for the first hour. Then Edie Falco reveals that no, that’s not why they came back. Instead, they’ve finally ruined the earth and they just want a new place to live. Okay that’s a good twist and escalation. (Not tremendously logical though, since they can’t breathe the air, but whatever) But then an hour later, we get a completely different answer: they’ve come here to go whaling, because there’s some strange substance inside Pandora’s whales that can make humans live forever. So now, assuming that there’s still unobtanium sitting around, the humans have three competing reasons to re-invade the planet, which is just too much. The original movie was so much cleaner in its plotting.

Another issue was a huge case of repeated beats. The big climax goes on for almost an hour and keeps resetting itself. At one point the villain has two of Jake’s kids hostage and handcuffs them to the railing of the ship with guns to their heads. Jake’s other two kids go to rescue them. 74 plot turns later, the villain now has the other two kids captive and he once again handcuffs them to the same railing and puts a gun to their heads. It may be the most egregious repeated beat I’ve ever seen in a movie.

But the real problem in this movie is that our hero, who so memorably kicked the humans’ asses in the first film, sees that the humans have returned in this movie and so he just runs away, and continues running away for the entire movie. I realize that, ever since Empire Strikes Back, there’s been a sense that the second movie should have the heroes be totally luckless, but that’s no excuse for having the heroes just turn tail and run for the entire 3 hour and 16 minute runtime. Not even at the end do they announce that they’re going to take the fight back to the human villains. They’re just happy they’ll be able to hang out with the water guys a little longer.

As with tomorrow’s movie, I’m glad that this got people back out to the theaters, but it’s a big old mess. Not on the list!

Best Movies of 2022, Introduction

You may be asking: Isn’t this a little late?

I’ve always run this series in the two or three weeks before the Oscars, depending on how many movies I wanted to talk about. For a while they were moving the Oscars up in the calendar to try to compete with the Golden Globes, so I was running these earlier, but now they’ve strayed back into March, so I’ve moved back with them.

Frankly, I like it this way. I’ve never understood why everybody insists on running their year end top ten lists in mid-December. What if there are great movies you haven’t seen yet? Are you just trying to beat everybody else to press? Why? Why not run yours in January? That’s a graveyard for movies, so you’ll be lacking for good material, as opposed to December when there’s lots of good movies being released to write about.

But I recognize that running mine in February/March might be pushing things, because who can remember the movies of 2022 at this point? What can I say, it takes me a long time to get around to seeing these things.

As always, I’ll start by pointing out the movies that I didn’t get a chance a see, which in this case includes two Best Picture nominees, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Banshees of Inisherin. Also Babylon and some others that I’m sure I’m forgetting.

I’m going to have four movies to talk about that pointedly aren’t on the list, and ten movies that are on the list. Let me take this time to single out four movies that almost made the list. I whole heartedly recommend Pinnochio, Armageddon Time, Turning Red, and Women Talking. Go see them.

Okay, tomorrow the first movie not on the list!