Drink in the Movies

Founded in 2018, Drink in the Movies is a film podcast and website featuring reviews, interviews with industry professionals, and festival coverage. All opinions are each writer's own.…

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Jeff Sparks' Favorite Performances of 2022

"2022 was a great year for film and television, and an equally great year for performances. Here, you’ll find five performers that I’ve selected as the most exceptional in all of 2022 and an analysis of their performances and paths to where they are now."

Best Movies of 2022

The illustrious contributors to Drink in the Movies partake in the listing of the best movies of 2022. Click here to see each contributor's picks.

Review: A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Each year, the world celebrates the discovery and spread of broadcasting. October 26th is Public Radio Music Day. Radio waves were first proven and America’s first commercial radio broadcast was in November, and World Radio Day is in February. A fascinating 20th century film warns of how broadcasting is double-edged: good when spreading truth, dangerous otherwise. 

Recent reviews

Victoria

Victoria

★★★★

Every so often there’s a film that boasts the accomplishment of appearing to have been filmed in a single take. In most cases, the reality is that there were multiple takes edited together to look continuous to the naked eye. More often than not this is simply a gimmick and doesn’t add much to the film. “Victoria” is one of the few to not only make good use of this device but a rare example of having actually been filmed…

Handwringing about the opioid crisis seems to be Netflix’s creative direction these days, so it’s not much of a surprise that they’d greenlight an under-the-radar non-Sackler family-focused film to see how it performs alongside the score of other Pharma-bad and Sackler-bad releases on the platform. David Yates the filmmaker known for the last four “Harry Potter” films, and the now-canceled “Fantastic Beasts” series directs this latest imitation of art for the content-purveying giant. Before rising to big-budget filmmaking Yates cut…

May December

May December

★★★★★

The characters in Todd Haynes movies frequently find themselves strained and alienated by the strictures of social acceptability. Take “Far from Heaven” from 2002, Haynes’s glorious ode to Douglas Sirk, where the idyllic suburban life of Julianne Moore’s ‘50s housewife is destabilized by the effects of sexual and racial prejudice. Consider “Safe” from 1995, again with Julianne Moore as a woman withering in a domestic bubble: by that film’s end, illness has led Carol White to a place of hauntingly…

Legend

Legend

★★½

“Legend” is based on the notorious and scandalous Kray twins, who established a criminal empire in London’s East End during the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s. With remarkable finesse, Tom Hardy takes on the challenging dual role of portraying both Reggie and Ronnie Kray, while Emily Browning graces the screen as the glamorous yet delicate Frances Shea, who serves as our insightful narrator. Under the visionary direction of Brian Helgeland, the film brilliantly encapsulates the zeitgeist of 1960s London, immersing the…

Liked reviews

3 Women

3 Women

★★★★★

Watched this for the first time today and I was so blown away I rewatched it immediately with Altman’s commentary on. The story, I learned, evolved out of a dream Altman had, which is no surprise. He describes the film as impressionistic, which is entirely accurate. It’s just what you make of it at the time, through your own subjective lens. But that also falls far short of describing 3 Women, since there are very concrete arcs that characters move…

watch it with the biggest crowd possible. boomer‘s worst nightmare.

Not Okay

Not Okay

★★★

Danni on her Plan B game while she still has the chance.

Better if imagined as the thing that might prompt some young teenager to dig into the goodness that is Dario Argento's world of gaudy color and extravagant gore, worse if graded on its evocation of the '90s, which it rather uncreatively tries for with now cliché period signifiers and its much talked about soundtrack. Music only gets you so far in capturing an era, and this often feels a lot more like 2021 than 1994.