2022 at the movies: A year that’s uplifting and unsettling, all at once

Michelle Yeoh and her googly eye helped make a hit of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” (A24)

You’d be hard-pressed to find two movies more different than James Cameron’s ultra-expensive, special effects-laden epic “Avatar: The Way of Water” and Charlotte Wells’ intimate and home movie-like father/daughter drama “Aftersun,” save this:

Both movies immersed us in a world and took us to a specific time and place in that magical way that only movies can. Whether we were soaring and swimming with the Na’vi on the extrasolar moon of Pandora in the 22nd century or losing ourselves in the deceptively simple story of a man on vacation with his 11-year-old daughter at a downscale Turkish resort in the late 1990s, we were transported to a very specific world.