Mixed Feelings Review

The movies I couldn't quite recommend

As the year winds down, I’ve been working on a list of my favorite movies of the year, and this exercise has prompted me to think about the ones I didn’t like as much. For my first bonus post, I thought I’d write about some of the 2022 movies I watched this year that I didn’t recommend.

Let’s start with a debut I thought I’d love: Aftersun. This slice-of-life indie about a divorced dad and his daughter on vacation in the 1990s has been getting a lot of praise from the critics. Whenever I read the positive reviews, I find myself nodding. Yes, I think, Aftersun did capture the “thick, complex reality of the parent-child bond.” Yes, it was “an act of imaginative empathy.” Yes, “this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental.”  And yet . . .