By the end of the month I won’t have named every 2022 movie I watched, but I’ll have come pretty damn close.

This week I’ve covered horror, international, animation, and the movies in my 11-40. A week from now I’ll count down my top ten. So that leaves the movies on the bottom half of my 2022 list.

I won’t list or comment on all of them, but I will call out movies from three categories: Perfectly Fine Romantic Comedies, Middling Superhero Sagas, and Disappointing Efforts by Notable Directors.

Perfectly Fine Romantic Comedies

Great romantic comedies are few and far between (the last two I’d point to are 2020’s Palm Springs and 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians) but I’m always happy to watch pretty people crack jokes and fall in love. Last year produced a few fun examples.

Two of our most iconic romcom actresses returned to the genre in 2022. Julia Roberts paired with George Clooney as a divorced couple rekindling their romance while trying to sabotage their daughter’s impromptu wedding in Ticket to Paradise. And Sandra Bullock played a romance novelist on a jungle adventure with a cover model (Channing Tatum) in the Romancing the Stone-esque The Lost City. I forgot both movies a week after seeing them but enjoyed the hell out of each for a couple of hours.

I forgot Jennifer Lopez’s effort, Marry Me, the day after watching it. She plays a pop superstar who impulsively agrees to marry the divorced father of a fan after being jilted by her famous boyfriend. An absolutely absurd premise that gets some mileage out of an endearing Owen Wilson as the dad.

Then there was I Want You Back, with the eminently likable Jenny Slate and Charlie Day in the leads as newly dumped friends who agree to help each other win back their significant others. I liked this one enough to want it to be much better.

Middling Superhero Sagas

MArvel’s post-Endgame Phase Four has been hit or miss, but mostly miss. I don’t know if it’s the movies or my fatigue as a fan who has watched 30 of these things now.

While Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok is perhaps my favorite Marvel film, last year’s Thor: Love and Thunder was a tonally inconsistent mess. Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness sank almost to the bottom of my Marvel list, in part because I just didn’t care about a single thing happening on screen from the moment it started.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever improved on those films but fell fall short of the groundbreaking first film. While this one deftly and emotionally handled the passing of Chadwick Boseman (and T’Challa), it also felt the need to shoehorn in elements from past and future TV shows, an unfortunate tendency in most of these movies that makes them feel more like advertisements than films.

Over in the DC Extended Universe, Matt Reeves’ The Batman was beautifully shot and scored, and Paul Dano’s Riddler made for a compelling villain. But at just under three hours, it suffered from way too much bloat to warrant a thumbs up from me.

Disappointing Efforts by Notable Directors

I wanted to love Kogonada’s After Yang, but I never got on its wavelength and ended up rather bored. I might have to revisit this one.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam squandered its laundry list of A-list actors on an incredibly sloppy script. At its center is a deadly dull performance by John David Washington, whose career singlehandedly justifies the overblown discourse on nepotism babies.

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a Boogie Nights ripoff with none of that film’s resonance. I loved a few sequences but found the whole thing so smugly in love with itself.

Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is exactly the Marilyn Monroe biopic the world didn’t need. It exploits and belittles one of classic Hollywood’s great talents.

Adrian Lyne ended a two decade hiatus to make Deep Water, a film that puts up a great fight for the title of “worst Ana De Armas movie of 2022.”

And finally, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis featured a star-making performance by Austin Butler but a disastrous turn by Tom Hanks that sinks what could have been a flamboyantly fun time. The fault is not just in Hanks’ performance but in structuring the whole film around his Colonel Parker.