opinion | Our editor Michael Hille was in the cinema more than 150 times in 2022. He looks back on an eventful year. The cinema flexed its muscles with high-quality blockbusters and art-house films. But he sorely missed one section on the big screen.
2022 was an important year for cinema. For the most part, the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic no longer played a role, so it was interesting to see whether in the age of the streaming boom (it only started in December with Paramount+ the next digital provider in Germany) the people out there still do you want to go to the cinema to have. After all, going to the cinema is so much more than just watching a film. It is an experience, a coming together or as we say today: a social happening.
2022 proved that cinema is still breathing. Three films have managed to break the magic barrier of one billion dollars in sales worldwide. Besides, it was qualitatively a remarkable year: After two years of Corona low tide, there were now wonderful character dramas, atmospheric chamber plays and, despite some flops, also successful, visually stunning blockbusters. I look back on my highlights and my biggest disappointments – and have a wish for 2023.
Quick rubbish: My worst visits to the cinema in 2022
MarvelEntertainment
Marvel has been faltering for a while, but Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is still a new low.
Let’s get the negative experiences out of the way quickly: I started right at the beginning of January thanks to “The King’s Man” started the year with such a lousy blockbuster that I had the worst fears for 2022. How the First World War was turned into a playground for clumsy CGI brawls was simply unbearable. Luckily it was seldom that dumb: “Death on the Nile” was a thoroughly failed crime remake. “Amsterdam” was full of stars (including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie), but unfortunately also pretty boring. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” completely killed my already little interest in Marvel movies. “Jurassic World: A New Age” and “Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore” were disasters, but were saved somewhat by the fact that their predecessors were even worse.
Netflix
Big nonsense: “The Gray Man” is everything that can be annoying about the cinema in one film.
Only two films annoyed me so much so that I thought about leaving the cinema. One of the two was the terrible one”The Gray Man”, a Netflix action film, which was limited to cinemas for a week and really brought together everything that’s currently going wrong in cinemas (e.g. a screenplay that fits on a beer mat, uncharismatic stars in badly written roles, effect massacre, etc as far as the eye can see, etc.) “Hanau” was even worse: In this film, Uwe Boll wanted to get closer to the attack in Hanau in 2020, but ultimately let the terrorists who were murdering migrants (portrayed by a layperson) feed him his right-wing extremist garbage for ages trumpet the world. Pooh! Now onto the good stuff!
Arthouse: The “small big screens” showed famous insider tips
Leonine Distribution
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is very colorful – and very good.
“Arthouse” cinema sometimes has a bad reputation. Wrongly! There were numerous highlights in the smaller arthouse cinemas in 2022: In January and February, the Oscar favorites from 2021 made up for, including “Licorice Pizza”, “Nightmare Alley” or “Belfast”. Later, things really took off on the “small big screen”: The weird multiverse martial arts film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has already been showered with praise and awards – and rightly so! “The Deception” tells the story of one of the biggest deceptions of the Second World War, which the Nazis fell for, with wonderfully British dialogue. “The worst person in the world” has been the ultimate comedy about the supposed generation unable to relate to me since I saw it. “The Forest Stands Silent” proved once again that top-class film art can also come from Germany. “The Northman”, a brutal Viking epic that proved how radical it can still be in the cinema.
Capelight home entertainment
Norwegian horror? It almost didn’t get any better than “The Innocents” this year.
I would like to highlight four films that I particularly liked, but partly even went under in the program cinemas are: The first is “See How They Run”. A crew member is murdered during rehearsals for an Agatha Christie play and two unlikely investigators (Saoirse Ronan & Sam Rockwell) track down the killer in this hilarious crime gem storytelling itself. “The Outfit” was even better, an excellent chamber play in which a tailor from the 50’s becomes involved in criminal activities when two mobsters show up at his door one night. I promise: if you watch “The Outfit” looks at, sticks enthusiastically to the lips of all actors and experiences several big surprises.
My “Arthouse” highlights but there are two others: There would be “Triangle of Sadness”, the big festival sweeper, a broad and hilariously funny satire on prosperity neglect and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. There was no other film that made people laugh so much in the cinema (which, by the way, was jam-packed). And then there’s “The Innocents”: This Norwegian horror film really gets to the heart of the matter. It’s about four children from a welfare building, none older than 9 years. They all have telekinetic powers, can move things with the power of their minds or even manipulate adults. What starts out as harmless experiments turns into a horrific trip from hell that really hits you in the pit of your stomach. Nothing for the faint-heartedbut definitely worth seeing.
“Top Gun”, “Batman” & “Avatar” proved how powerful cinema is
Paramount Pictures
“Top Gun: Maverick” was the film that breathed new life into cinema after 2 years of Corona.
It was similarly visually stunning in “The Batman”, a film that in the TVSPIELFILM.de editorial team knocked everyone off their feet and showed that expensive budgets, superhero figures and real cinema art do not have to be mutually exclusive. Especially in a year when superhero films were faltering (the latest adventures of “Thor” and the “Black Panther” were hardly worth mentioning, even Dwayne Johnson as “Black Adam” was killing time at best alongside his opponents), “The Batman” an exclamation mark. Great character drama in pantyhosean eye-catcher!
20th Century Studios
“Avatar” was a cinema phenomenon in 2009 that would be impossible to repeat – one thought before this year’s part 2 got even better.
At the very end of 2022 I experienced as well as the cinema itself my blue wonder: ““Avatar: The Way of Water” dwarfed anything I saw this year for a total of 157 admissions. James Cameron continued the highest-grossing film of all time, and he surpassed it: The second “Avatar” is a brilliant experience, less a film than an eventthat shakes you and won’t let go. I sat in the seat for over three hours and it could have been three more. In never-before-seen images, you sit and marvel at Pandora, at these underwater worlds, at these graceful creatures. And right in the middle, in this almost surreal frenzy of images, Cameron grabs a highly emotional family story that made tears run down my eyes. So am I perfectly happy with 2022?
One thing was often missing in 2022: the healthy middle
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
“Bullet Train” was one of the few films in 2022 that made it into a hit with audiences without IP in the background.
There were more great blockbusters than usual, and the art-house cinema brought us many beautiful highlights. But what I really missed were films from the middle. Big, expensive productions, but they didn’t use a three-digit million budget right away. Films that reached an audience away from arthouse cinema and the big IPs such as superheroes and sequels. Only a few made an effort: “The Woman King” brought back the battle cinema à la “Braveheart” and would have liked to have been a bigger hit. “Bullet Train” put Brad Pitt on a train full of assassins, caused a lot of fuss and was in its hilarious mixture of anime and group therapy and Guy Ritchie on LSD great fun.
Universal Pictures
A personal highlight for me: “Nope”.
For 2023, I hope that such films will become more popular again. The big surprises, which are not reserved for a few, but have their place in the large multiplex cinema. Because, despite all the streaming successes, films still belong there.
