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Best and Worst Films from May 2022

Best Films from May 2022:

3. Steamboat Bill, Jr.

May wasn’t a particularly strong month for me as I’ve seen many weak and/or bad movies and not that many really good ones. Fincher’s ‘The Game’ gets an honorable mention this time around while this Buster Keaton feature gets the third spot in the best section. Although uneven and not among his best works, Steamboat Bill, Jr. is still phenomenally crafted visually speaking and particularly impressive in that house crashing stunt. The third act was superb.

2. Punch-Drunk Love

Punch-Drunk Love is a rare PTA movie that I genuinely enjoyed. It’s a romantic comedy, but unlike any other flick in this genre as the main storyline is so strange and the protagonist is so odd. The film’s mixing of darker and more lightweight tones was messy, but it did lead to this very authentic viewing experience. The central performance from Adam Sandler was also great.

1. The Northman

The best movie I watched all month is easily The Northman, which turned out to be Robert Eggers’ most epic film to date. It depicts the Vikings extremely realistically while benefitting from staggering attention to detail in recreating its time period. Mixing Shakespeare with mythology and period piece filmmaking, the result is this thematically rich, nuanced and very honest depiction of revenge and anger and how those emotions can consume a person toward a tragic outcome. It’s such an idiosyncratic picture.

Worst Films from May 2022:

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once

I really disliked this overly praised movie. It is a genre-bender that did not work for me as the action was silly and the humor was also hinging on too ridiculous. Michelle Yeoh was amazing for sure, but any real emotion that could have been mined here saw a diminishing effect due to the story’s immense silliness and goofiness. It is too messy and too annoying for me to respect it.

2. Fifty Shades Darker

Fifty Shades Darker is a bad sequel that looks good and is undeniably entertaining to watch, but the characters were thinly written and the movie is disconnected in its many abandoned and silly subplots and side characters. It’s also badly directed and weakly acted by everybody except Dakota Johnson who was quite good in spite of her poorly written character.

1. Fifty Shades Freed

Fifty Shades Freed is fun and self-aware in its sex scenes and Johnson is quite good as always, but other performers fared poorly and the storyline is expectedly non-existent and scattershot. The movie is terribly paced and directed with too many plot points thrown in, but most were very weakly developed. It’s the worst entry in this very poor franchise, which is why it obviously takes the first spot in the worst section.