My 2022 in Pop Culture Top Fives

Sunset on the Oregon Coast

A feeling of time as a nebulous blur has persisted since COVID-19 emerged three years ago — even if the face masks and other basic health precautions have vanished, at least here in the U.S. — but I’m assured by the wall calendar hanging above my desk that 2022 did in fact happen.

It was 365 days of limbo, the world torn between “moving on” and attempting to grapple with past traumas, from the pandemic to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol wannabe coup. Russia invaded Ukraine, LGBTQ hate soared with sometimes deadly consequences, and nearly a decade after Sandy Hook, gun violence devastated yet more communities.

On a lighter note, I traveled for the first time during the pandemic, and it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as I feared, though it seems my uneventful flying experiences were exceptions. Seeing a National Theater Live broadcast of Henry V made me want to take in more live theater, while blowing too much money on Arcade Fire tickets right before frontman Win Butler was revealed to be a creep made me give up on live concerts.

In past years, I’ve been posting my top five favorite movies, TV shows and books on Twitter, but with the takeover by a certain fascist tech bro throwing the platform’s longevity into question, I figured a blog post might be the better approach this time around. Plus, you can get more of my rambling!

Top 5 Movies

While critics have noted the maximalist tendencies of 2022’s most talked-about movies, I was more drawn to introspective character studies that delved into the small lives of ordinary, lost people: the girl seeking to comfort her mother in Petite Maman, Thandiwe Newton’s disillusioned professor from God’s Country. Even the ostensibly escapist fare that stuck with me this year, like Top Gun: Maverick and Nope, was permeated by death and loss.

1. The Banshees of Inisherin. Pádraic and Colm’s breakup starts as a farce and ends as a tragedy, reflecting a world broken by people’s inability to acknowledge the roots of their conflicts, much less resolve them, with piercing clarity.
2. Cyrano. Joe Wright finally went full musical, and it’s as visually and emotionally rich as you’d expect from the rare director capable of breathing life into 19th century literary adaptations. Just thinking about the townspeople beginning to dance as Roxanne’s carriage rolls past makes my heart sing.
3. Aftersun. Frankie Corio delivers one of the most transfixing performances I’ve seen from any actor, let alone a 12-year-old first-timer. Her controlled naturalism extends to director Charlotte Wells, who infuses this coming-of-age tale with both the slipperiness of memory and the dreadful immediacy of life in the moment.
4. A Love Song. Dale Dickey and Wes Studi get a more-than-earned showcase that isn’t quite the romance implied by its title, depicting instead a complex relationship defined as much by regret and absence as intimacy. It never mentions the pandemic but feels like it couldn’t have been made at any other time.
5. Athena. Whenever I start to cool on Romain Gavras’s adrenaline-fueled plunge into a war between cops and fed-up youths, I remember the bursts of light and color from bottle rockets streaking through the night sky, the dust swirling over Abdel as he awaits oblivion, the look on Sami Slimane’s face when his Karim glances at a photo of his slain brother. It’s a spectacle, but what a spectacle.

Top 5 Movie Scenes

If I’m being honest, three, maybe even four of these would be from movies I just listed, so to spread the wealth a bit, I’m excluding my top five films from this list, including Athena‘s 11-minute opening long take and the devastating deployment of “Under Pressure” in Aftersun.

1. The ending of Babylon. Three hours of confrontational excess culminate in an ecstatic, cacophonous montage that satisfyingly concludes Manuel’s love-hate affair with Hollywood, pays tribute to and reframes Singin’ in the Rain, and places the film’s characters in a continuum of cinematic innovation and disruption, from Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” to Avatar. Damien Chazelle breaks the medium down to its most basic elements — moving images, sound, and editing — and it’s electrifying.
2. Swimming with Payakan. Speaking of Avatar, James Cameron’s sequel clumsily pilfers from real indigenous cultures and boasts dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who hasn’t interacted with humans in a decade. By Eywa, though, he can still conjure a sense of awe like no other director. I considered highlighting the Sky People’s fiery arrival or the touching sight of Jake and Neytiri’s kids leading them out of the dark, but the movie’s soul lies in its yearning for a society that lives in harmony with nature, embodied by the mutually respectful bond between Lo’ak and the outcast, whale-like creature Payakan.
3. Lynsey visits her brother. Though I’d name Brian Tyree Henry as Causeway‘s MVP for his layered performance as an empathetic yet physically and mentally wounded mechanic, Jennifer Lawrence and Russell Harvard are spellbinding in this scene that conveys their entire relationship without ever turning subtext into text. I love that you can see her thinking through the sign language and him registering everything she’s not saying.
4. The Batman story in Hit the Road. Khosrow indulges his young son’s fantasy of his older son encountering The Dark Knight and scratching his car, an initially goofy anecdote that gradually opens up the cosmos. Like Causeway, Panah Panahi’s debut illustrates that sometimes, the quietest conversations can be the most profound.
5. Selina’s masquerade outfit reveal. Mr. Malcolm’s List transforms Freida Pinto into a goddess with a glamorous yet tasteful outfit crafted by Pam Downe, the scene lit just so to induce swoons without tipping the largely grounded Jane Austen riff into full-on fantasy mode. Ah, the rush of a rom-com trope done right.

Top 5 TV Episodes

Is it just me, or was TV especially barren this year, in quality, if not quantity? I didn’t watch enough or feel strongly enough about what I did watch to have five favorite shows, but there were some standout episodes worth highlighting, even if nothing rivaled the consistent vision of Fargo season 2, the intensity of Game of Thrones‘ “The Long Night” (it helps when you can see what’s happening!), or the comic genius of “The Triangle” from Cheers. At least the collective disdain for David Zaslav and the Warner Media/Discovery merger provided some sustenance.

1. Westworld, “Fidelity.” Time collapses, and two disparate storylines finally converge in brain-twisting, gut-wrenching fashion. Driven by the cat-and-mouse dynamic that forms between a never-better Aaron Paul and a vicious Tessa Thompson, this episode anchors Westworld‘s signature questions about the nature of identity and the kind of world we have built — or want to build — in a simple constant: a father’s love for his daughter.
2. Atlanta, “The Goof Who Sat By the Door.” The painfully hollow third season was worth enduring for this gem, a fake documentary that recounts one-time Disney CEO Thomas Washington’s absurd quest to make A Goofy Movie “the Blackest movie” in the studio’s history with utter sincerity. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a man turn Goofy’s laugh into a chilling portent of doom.
3. Reservation Dogs, “I Still Believe.” After spending much of the second season on separate paths, Bear, Elora and the gang reunite for their long-imagined road trip to California. Watching them help each other through theft, a cop raid on a homeless encampment and finally, their grief for Daniel with cobbled-together lessons from their elders and The Lost Boys, I thought for the first time that these kids might make it through life okay after all.
4. What We Do in the Shadows, “Go Flip Yourself.” Though I’m not a regular viewer of home-improvement shows, the attention to detail that went into this Property Brothers spoof is breathtaking — literally, because I laughed for 30 minutes straight.
5. Gudetama, “Is That the Best This Country Has to Offer?” In 12 minutes, our titular hero — a sentient, lazy egg yolk — gets chucked at Japan’s prime minister, becomes prime minister themself, resigns “due to poor health,” and gets blown out of a skyscraper by an air vent. This is the political satire our era needs and deserves.

Top 5 Books

I didn’t actively dislike any of the books I read this year, which is good because I only managed to finish 13 of them. The best ones, though, offered windows into realities and perspectives entirely different from my own, transporting me from distant planets to the beginnings of life on Earth.

1. On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. This graphic novel is the most overtly escapist of the bunch, a zippy, bighearted adventure about a crew of misfits who restore aging, abandoned space relics. Equally adept at evoking warmth and loneliness, Walden makes love of both the romantic and platonic kind feel as expansive as the universe without erasing the tensions that can seep into even the tightest of found families.
2. Anthem by Noah Hawley. Hawley’s look at a near-future America tearing itself apart amid an epidemic of teen suicides isn’t the easiest book to recommend, but he deconstructs the chaos and horrors of post-2016 life with a directness that I found galvanizing. A society where conspiracies rule and all politics have been distorted into pure symbolism collapses, leaving behind one unshakable truth: the only way we survive is if we start caring for each other. We all die A11, but we don’t have to live that way.
3. Neuromancer by William Gibson. From its opening description of a gun-metal gray sky, the cyberpunk noir classic had me hooked. Molly is the mirror-eyed samurai cyborg of my dystopian dreams.
4. Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Proof I didn’t only read speculative fiction this year. In Vuong’s poetry collection, desire and violence are unavoidably intertwined, leaving marks on bodies and landscapes alike: tongues become knives, a boy’s dress foreshadows a burning city, Jackie Kennedy shines forever in her blood-streaked pink dress. Annihilation has never sounded so beautiful.
5. Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land by Julia Blackburn. The line between the prehistoric world and the contemporary one feels porous in Blackburn’s account of researching Doggerland — a now-sunken land that once bridged Britain and continental Europe — in the wake of her husband’s death. The richness of what has been lost dazzles, along with the realization of how much more we have left to lose.