The Best Old Movies I Watched for the First Time in 2022
Catching up on the classics
I still have one or two more current releases to watch before doing my Best of 2022 list, so I’m starting by ranking the best of the 65 old movies I watched for the first time this year. Though the full list includes many movies I’d never even heard of before this year, my Top 10 and Honorable Mentions are most filled with classics I’d just never made the time for. They’re classics for a reason, I suppose!
(You can find the entire ranked list of all 65 films here.)
10. When Harry Met Sally… (1989) - dir. Rob Reiner
A classic for many reasons, but chief among them: you could airlift every single outfit in this movie straight to 2022 and no one would notice. Or they would, but only because there’s simply no earthly reason for that couple just frolicking in the park to be so deliciously dripped out.
The movie’s great because it’s funny and sweet, but also because it convincingly understands Love as a silly, preposterous, inefficient malady that we absolutely can’t live without - the kind of hard-earned cynicism and harder-earned sincerity so many superficial imitators could never hope to convey, much less this winningly.
9. Raising Arizona (1987) - dir. Joel Coen
There’s a certain kind of breathless movie opening (usually scored with something upbeat and narrated in a witty voiceover) that feels like the filmic equivalent of getting shot out of a cannon. The problem with most movies that start like this - even the good ones, like Magnolia - is that they rarely sustain that tempo for the rest of the runtime. I’m sure that’s because it’d make for a bad movie, I suppose, and it might even be impossible, I guess. But this little Coen yarn comes close. Helps that their opening is scored with that evergreen banger, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mvmt 4 “Ode to Joy” (Banjo Remix). And what is this movie, if not a desert-fried ode to joy (banjo remix)?
8. The Florida Project (2017) - dir. Sean Baker
This hyperrealistic look at low-income, long-term hotel life just down the road from Magic Kingdom finds a lot of beauty in a place (and situation) that's hard-pressed for it. Maybe that's because a life without frills makes the moments of transcendence more visible, but either way, I'm pretty sure Sean Baker could find them in a minefield.
Possibly a GOATed child performance, certainly a legendary Willem Dafoe one. Easily makes this list for its undeniable quality, but probably too sad to ever watch again.
7. Synecdoche, New York (2008) - dir. Charlie Kaufman
Life imitates art imitates life for Charlie Kaufman, and on and on; the snake eats its tail, then grows legs and moves to the suburbs and falls in love once or thrice. Like the best Kaufman films, Synecdoche starts with some subtle magical realism and blossoms into full absurdity without losing that invisible thread of pathos that holds things together and keeps them from being abstracted past the point of interest. There's a certain dream logic to it all, though not in the more opaque Lynchian way; everything here makes sense in one way or another, if only as a lens through which to view our protagonist’s deepest insecurities. It's an incredibly rich text that could be read any number of deeper ways, but like Being John Malkovich, you can also enjoy it simply as a (less madcap but just as thrilling) ride through one man's unbound imagination. If creativity were a raw energy source, you could power Manhattan on Kaufman's grey matter; beyond being underrated as one of the best writers we've got, he's undoubtedly on the shortlist for most imaginative human beings alive.
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - dir. Stanley Kubrick
Maybe those lunar landing truthers were on to something?
Or maybe they didn’t go far enough, and Stanley didn’t just fake (make?) one of mankind’s Great Achievements, but all of our sound and color? Seeing something like this from 1968 that’s still basically peerless - even with all our future tools and knowledge - certainly feels like unearthing a primordial object from beyond time. I don’t know which latent evolutions it’ll unlock in me, but I do know that taking in its symphonic wordlessness felt like a lava dump straight onto my brain, and I reckon it’ll be sloshing around up there for quite a while.
5. Michael Clayton (2007) - dir. Tony Gilroy
This is cheating because I’ve actually seen this movie once before, many years ago. I’m counting it here anyways because when I finally rewatched it this year (inspired by Gilroy’s sensational Andor), I saw a completely different movie than the first time: a smart, weird, thoughtful, smart exploration of a very specific kind of man finally breaking out of the very specific cage his kind of man rarely breaks out of in real life.
This also boasts one of the rare good uses of an “in media res” opening, because by the time we get back to it in our narrative, we recognize it as the natural endpoint of all kinds of emotional arcs instead of just logical ones. It helps that it’s followed by an all-timer of an ending, one that elevates a rock-solid legal thriller into something more like rock music.
4. The Insider (1999) - dir. Michael Mann
I knew Michael Mann was good - I didn’t know he was this good. This investigative thriller about the real-life 60 Minutes report that blew the lid off the tobacco industry is what prestige movie making should be: capturing the high conspiracies and grand ideals just as well as the on-the-ground hearts perpetrating them, all while being entertaining as hell. It’s one of those movies that make people say, “That felt like a movie made for adults,” and they’re right, and it’s a good thing.
3. Red Rocket (2021) - dir. Sean Baker
Turns out I love Sean Baker! This is a movie about a lot of things that manage to feel like one big thing, without over-specifying what that one big thing is. It’s slippery in that way, like a naked con man sneaking out a window to streak to safety, but it feels cohesive because it feels like real life - or at least, real life with a planet-sized implant of “Hollywood” as its nucleus. In other words, we came out of the theater thinking, “I don’t know what to make of that,” but then spent thirty minutes making fifty different things of it.
I saw someone suggest that Mikey could be read as Trump if he were handsome and came from no money, which may be true, but the movie’s best move is letting those and any other associations free float in a larger tank of lower-case ideas and themes, as they do in actual life. Like Baker’s The Florida Project, this is a movie that could be stunty or broad or heavy-handed and instead is anything but - and specifically so. I’ve hardly seen any movie get small-town Texas righter than this, and every throwaway aphorism or bottle of Big Red feels honest.
2. S#!%house (2020) - dir. Cooper Raiff
Less subversive of its edgy title and party-film trappings than simply not interested in them at all, this is the platonic ideal of gen z mumblecore, which sounds horrible but so isn't. Writer/director/editor/star(/22-year-old!) Cooper Raiff is more focused on the raw emotions of college, and specifically how the rawness and the emotions vary from person to person - all the more interesting when they collide in an adolescent cocktail of hormones and substances and homesickness and a universal desire to belong. The details are different than my college experience (well, not all of them - seeing Alex's blue "The Time is Now" Mavs shirt was a welcome jolt of local grounding), but there's an aching relatability to these characters' attempts at connection and maturation, even - and especially - as they mess them up.
As I've come to terms with some of my own barriers to emotional vulnerability, I find movies like this (and "sensitive" characters like Alex) remarkably moving in their willingness to be messy - and crucially, to embrace and engage with others' messiness beyond just coldly intellectualizing it. I'm working on it.
(Raiff’s second film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, is likely to appear on my “Best Movies of 2022” list, and if you like one, you’ll like the other.)
1. Full Metal Jacket (1987) - dir. Stanley Kubrick
I walked into Full Metal Jacket expecting to be shocked and awed by an anti-war war movie no different from Platoon or the like. I didn’t expect it to completely transcend such humble aspirations, not simulating but utterly, convincingly being war in order to utterly, convincingly be anti-war. Never has the concept of armed conflict seemed so much like a disease; we infect it, it infects us. Lose-lose, negative-sum, game over before it’s even begun.
I watched most of Kubrick’s films for the first time this year, but nothing touched this - hardly anything ever could. How could you compete with the full power and authority of his decades of experience as both a documentary and narrative filmmaker coalescing into a cinematic laser beam aimed directly at humankind’s worst tendencies? The effect is devastating. That we’ve ever gone to war since this movie was released is as incomprehensible as it is inevitable, but Kubrick knew that all the way back at Strangelove.
Honorable Mentions
Set It Up (2018) - dir. Claire Scanlon
Good old-school premise, great jokes, transcendent co-leads chemistry. In other words: an honest-to-God elite rom-com, just hiding amongst the glossy trash of the Netflix Originals bargain bin. Dig it out!!
20th Century Women (2016) - dir. Mike Mills
There’s some really awkward stuff in this and I think everything I liked about the movie would’ve still worked without it, but the heart of the film - about the ways we try to match our missing pieces up with what others have to offer, even if that means forcing some fits out of love or good intentions - shines bright and true. Even the quirkiest touches, like the frequent use of fast-motion and docu-style interludes, feel true both to Mike Mills’ documentary bonafides and the story he’s telling - undoubtedly a personal one, and all the better for it.
CODA (2021) - dir. Siân Heder
I’ve seen people pejoratively comparing this to a DCOM, which is unfair to both CODA and DCOMs - yeah, they all followed a similar corny structure, but each one was about such a vividly specific issue (what to do if your house gets a mind of your own, what to do if you’re a spoiled dairy heiress learning about work the hard way, what to do if you have to play an evil leprechaun in the state basketball championship to win back your family’s lucky coin) that we still remember them clearly decades later.
Perhaps CODA is not quite the overall artistic achievement that some of its fellow Best Picture nominees are, but it’s nice and quietly (pun not intended) inclusive. Far worse movies have won the award, and anything that makes me cry should at least be allowed to be nominated.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) - dir. Jake Kasdan
I have a distinct memory of my dad returning from seeing this with my uncle and just absolutely shredding it, sowing in me a decade-long belief that the movie was widely loathed and irredeemably terrible. Sorry, Dad - you were wrong! Movie rocks. (Love you.) Popstar is its rightful heir, Tim Meadows the true star of both.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) - dir. David Fincher
Me usually: “movies should be shorter”
Me lately: “movies should be longer”
It’s nice to watch a novel from time to time, is what I’m saying - much less one directed by David Fincher, much less with Fincher operating on his warmest possible settings. This movie is like poetry, in that it could be deeply silly or deeply moving depending on whether or not you accept its conceit. I tend to accept the conceit.
Amadeus (1984) - dir. Miloš Forman
This is a great biopic that isn't afraid to be as weird as real people are and thus ends up feeling like something more than a biopic, or at least different. The homes, the outfits, the food - it's all full to bursting, a constant reminder that opulence will fit any container it's offered.
But it can't buy you talent! Salieri - stubbornly, ingeniously the central figure in a movie named after a legend - orients his entire being around the refusal to accept that someone else has access to a level of inspiration he'll never graze. He represents a fascinating philosophical question: if two people put in the same amount of work and one of them just goes farther based on natural ability, is that actually more impressive if they did nothing to earn it? Impossible to answer, or even really test, since Salieri doesn't work as hard as Mozart - he's too busy trying to kill him.
Oh, and: the pink wig look goes crazzzzzzy
Broadcast News (1987) - dir. James L. Brooks
I like how Jane and Tom are both smart enough to know where this thing is going, and so the delays to their eventual union feel like them teasing out the inevitable to keep themselves from getting bored. Of course, the end plays out the way it plays out - given this is the rare rom-com with actual ideological differences between its leads that can’t be bridged by one magic night - and none of us is ever bored.
Drive My Car (2021) - dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Starts kind of slow and mysterious and then slowly and mysteriously evolves into a kind of slow and mysterious Saab story (unsure if I saw this joke somewhere else or if it just popped into my head, but claiming it here either way). “Three hours long” is often thrown out as a pejorative, but this is the kind of movie that fights the good fight of justifying its own length, using it to put a whole lotta highway between its characters’ starting and ending points, with art - not just the Saab - as the vehicle.
Miami Vice (2006) - dir. Michael Mann
This thing rips - like, 70mph in a speedboat rips. I love Michael Mann, and I love how much Michael Mann loves dad rock, helicopters, windshields, and writing quippy dialogue for his cadre of concise warrior poets. I love that trash stache Colin Farrell and buff Jamie Foxx have no backstories, only vibes. Basically: Mann GOATed fr, I hope the floor-to-ceiling window industry never forgets all he’s done for them.
Top Gun (1986) - dir. Tony Scott
Thought this was gonna be way cornier but it’s really only corny in the era-appropriate way that I bet barely felt corny at all in its time. Flight school rocks, beach volleyball rocks, guitar riff rocks. Sometimes the aerial combat is a little illegible but it only made me more excited to see what nearly four decades’ worth of technological advancements look like at supersonic speeds (and boy did they look good). The whole movie is basically that scene in Airplane! when they’re obviously just dumping buckets of sweat onto the pilot.