Austin Butler – Movie Meister Reviews

Released: 28th August
Seen: 30th November

Darren Aronofsky is the kind of director who seems to revel in polarising the audience, in making a film that’s going to get an extreme reaction no matter if it’s positive or negative. There aren’t really any films in his catalogue you could say are just good or well-liked; you either love his stuff or hate it. In recent years, even though I’ll admit he’s obscenely talented, I just wasn’t into his work on films like Mother! Or The Whale, but in the past, he’s delivered truly breathtaking work like Black Swan so undoubtedly there was a chance that he was going to win me back at some point with one of his works. It feels like Caught Stealing seems to be the first time that Darren has tried to make a film with a strong mass appeal (hilarious to say in retrospect since it bombed at the box office), and honestly, it’s just a damn good time.

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2022 has been another weird year in the ‘pandemic trilogy’ and it’s been another rough one to get through but what has certainly helped, at least on some level, has been a bevy of amazing performances by some incredibly talented actors who have made going to the cinema worthwhile… yes that is a stupid way to start this list, we work with what we have around here.

What follows is a list of 20 performances (plus 5 honourable mentions) that I quite liked in 2022. You might not agree with the people I picked, you might think I’m stupid for picking some of them and you would be right on that but it’s my blog and this is my list, to make it you just have to be wildly entertaining in some way and if you can get here by being absolutely batshit crazy, well good for you. We’re only going with films released in Australia that I’ve been able to see, same as the best and worst lists were except this one is longer because sometimes there are good performances in bad films and they deserve a special list of their own. Also, one person per film for the main list because it makes for more of a challenge so any extras go straight to the honourable mentions list

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