“Saving the best for last” is a phrase commonly used as a consolation for the unfit kid who the coach reluctantly brings on for five minutes of a soccer game. Although there is a profusion of applicable scenarios, perhaps the most renowned is when eating a meal, and saving the best for last comes into play, ending the meal on an unparalleled high.
While Netflixhas had a lot on its plate this year, from losing a quarter of a million subscribers to launching Netflix Basic, the element of “saving the best until last” has certainly contributed to the initial lack of high-quality content during the first half of 2022, with the best of the streaming giant’s output heavily concentrated into the final months of the year. Of course, this is in no small part due to Netflix deliberately coinciding the service’s releases with awards season. Let’s take a look at the best Netflix original movies of 2022.
6 Hustle
Netflix
The shining Adam Sandler of Uncut Gems, The Meyerowitz Stories, and Punch Drunk Love returns in Jeremiah Zagar’s Netflix-backed Hustle. In this zero-to-hero sports picture, Sandler plays NBA and Philadelphia 76ers scout Stanley Sugerman, who goes on the hunt to uncover the world’s next NBA superstar. While in Spain, Stanley is mesmerized by Point Guard Bo Cruz, who convinces him to fly to the States to partake in trials and the subsequent NBA Draft.
5 Pinocchio
Having premiered at the London Film Festival, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio will become the second remake of the film in just three months, with Disney+’s adaptation hurriedly released in September. Del Toro certainly won’t be fretting over the critical failure that was Robert Zemeckis’ take stealing his new stop-motion animation’s thunder.
Following the historic tale of the wooden boy brought to life by a grieving father, the Mexican director’s Pinocchio promised a darker, more mysterious take on the children’s classic, injecting new life and meaning into the story that hasn’t been seen in 80 years.
4 White Noise
Due to premiere on the platform on 30th December, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, based on author Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name, stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle. The dark satire follows the story of Jack Gladney, his wife Babette, and their four children from various relationships along the way.
A Professor of ‘Hitler Studies’ at the local college, Jack is an esteemed name in town, and a well-respected academic voice. Following a train crash at the edge of town, a cataclysmic toxic waste spillage means that the family and everyone else must evacuate. White Noise confronts the inevitability of death, and the mechanisms our minds employ to divert our thinking away from those thoughts.
3 Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Daniel Craig returns to investigative Knives Out duties, reprising the role of Detective Benoit Blanc, everyone’s favorite “Kentucky fried foghorn leghorn” crime solver in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. In the second edition of this punchy murder mystery, we are taken to tech-tycoon Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) Greek island where, you guessed it, a murder is committed, and Blanc suspects “foul play.”
With another all-star acting assembly, and the financial might of Netflix now behind it, Glass Onion is a more grandiose and brasher affair than its predecessor. It is a film that, despite a slightly convoluted middle, once again nails the genre that’s given birth to so many classics, and somehow manages to muster a really contemporary originality.
2 The Wonder
Florence Pugh steals the show in Sebastian Lelio’s science vs. religion flick, the quietly haunting The Wonder. Inspired by several true stories of miraculously “fasting” Victorian girls, The Wonder tells the haunting, and sobering chronicle of an 11-year-old Irish girl, Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy), who has reportedly abstained from any food consumption for several months. Disbelieving nurse Lib Wright (Pugh) is brought over from England to partake in a “watch,” whereby she and a nun merely sit and observe this so-called miracle taking place.
1 All Quiet on the Western Front
There have been several screen adaptations of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front over the years, yet none illustrate the true cost of war quite like Edward Berger’s 2022 version. The remake captures World War I in all its hellish barbarity, as a group of four German soldiers, all under the age of conscription consent, join the German war effort in the hope of realizing some sort of patriotic ideal. Once the four reach the frontline, the grim, blood-scorched reality of battle truly sets in.
The film specifically follows the character of Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), who is employed as the movie’s token of tarnished innocence, an adolescent who should be enjoying his teenage years in the safety of peace, but instead has it bludgeoned by the merciless, pointless act of inter-country conflict. At a time when Ukrainian troops are holding off Russian forces, and bombs fall over Palestine, this a beautifully poignant composition of how mass violence still remains a parasitic stain on mankind.
