I’m not saying this was a great run of movies, but there was some creativity here, some entertainment value, some decent box office — all enough to evoke, in flashes, a normal cinematic summer in the 1990s.
But that was summer. Now, in fall and winter, we’ve returned to the movie apocalypse.
My colleague Brooks Barnes wrote last week on the “carnage” at the art house, the terrible box office showings for so many of the autumn’s spate of Oscar hopefuls: From the Cate Blanchett showcase “Tár” to Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” from David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam” to James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” to “She Said,” about my colleagues’ Harvey Weinstein investigation. James Cameron’s “Avatar” sequel is sweeping in to fill theaters over Christmas — and, judging by early reviews, to help justify their continued existence. But barring an unexpectedly strong performance from the few remaining prestige releases — like Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” which received something of a rough reception at its initial screening — we could be looking at a fall without an honest-to-God Oscar-bait hit.
A theme in Barnes’s piece is that the quality of the films is not the issue, because “reviews have been exceptional.” And I’m confident that there are some structural explanations for the disastrous autumn: the expectations of home viewing set during Covid, the closure of some art-house theaters, plus the fact that the audience for grown-up dramas is also an audience (older, liberal) more likely to avoid hanging out in crowded theaters in the winter illness season.
But at the same time, I agree with the film scholar Barnes quotes who notes the conspicuous dearth of simple entertainment value in the fall’s offerings. I really liked “The Fabelmans,” but do filmgoers want not one but three movies — Spielberg’s, Gray’s and the Sam Mendes flop “Empire of Light” — in which prominent directors indulge in semi-autobiographical longueurs? “Tár” has brilliance, but it’s the definition of a challenging movie to absorb. “She Said” is a newspaper procedural that keeps its famous villain offstage almost throughout; here’s how my colleague Alexis Soloski described its style:
Measured and deliberate, the film avoids grandstanding, speaking in low tones where another movie might shout. Little is glamorized or embellished here. (New York City has rarely looked so blah.) The points the film makes about predation, complicity and silencing are often made in passing. “She Said” concentrates instead on process, prioritizing the patient accretion of testimony and corroboration. It’s a thriller, yes, but rendered discreetly, in sensible workplace separates. Its force accumulates slowly, stealthily even — lead by lead, fact by verified fact — until the tension surrounding a cursor’s click is an agony.
This was a positive review. Does it make you want to rush out to the theater?
The best pieces written on the autumn of apocalypse elaborate on this theme. Richard Rushfield, the longtime Hollywood watcher, points out that there was never some halcyon day when high-minded movies “speaking in low tones” were guaranteed an audience. Instead, the small-budget movies that broke out big were usually ruthlessly entertaining: “Art house always worked when the genre was infused with a fresh, brash D.I.Y. energy,” he writes. “‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is a road trip comedy — a genre that thrived for years at Sundance. ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’ is a great noir thriller. ‘Reservoir Dogs’ is a tribute to genre films.”
Then Noah Millman, a writer and producer who’s getting ready to direct his first feature film, has a realistic comparison between the well-reviewed movies of 2022 and the movies-for-grown-ups of the not-so-distant cinematic past:
So has “quality” declined? Well, take a look at Variety’s list of the 30 films most likely to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Now compare that list to the nominees for Best Picture in the 1980s — a decade I chose because it is widely regarded as a relative low point for Hollywood artistically between the revolutionary 1970s and the indie-fueled 1990s, a time when the rise of the blockbuster had eclipsed films of serious artistry. Some of those nominees are blockbusters: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” most prominently. Others are small canvas dramas: “Ordinary People,” “On Golden Pond,” “My Left Foot.” There are films that are revered by cinephiles: “Raging Bull,” “Tender Mercies,” “The Last Emperor,” and there are more crowd-pleasing films that continue to please: “Tootsie,” “Broadcast News,” “Working Girl.” There are also films on the list that are largely forgotten, or that many people wish to forget. But ask yourself honestly: which films this year feel obviously — obviously — like they would have deserved to be nominated for Best Picture if they had been made 35 or 40 years ago ahead of the films actually nominated then? I’m not asking to put them up against “The Godfather” or “Taxi Driver.” I’m asking to put them up against “Chariots of Fire,” “The Mission” and “A Room With a View.”
“Tootsie” is a good example to linger on, because it’s a case of a movie committed absolutely to being crowd-pleasing — you will laugh, you will, if Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray and Teri Garr have to come through the screen to make it happen — that sacrifices nothing of its comedic greatness in the act of pandering to the audience. This fall, I’ve had that kind of experience only once in a movie theater: during the first hour of “The Menu,” a blackhearted horror-comedy about a celebrity chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, and his restaurant’s final dinner service. The quality drops off a bit in the second half, but for a while it reminds you what it’s like to be unapologetically entertained.