The 10 Best Movies of 2022

I think it’s time to look back on the year in movies. There were a lot of good movies, but not enough great ones (both in foreign-language and English).

The festivals somewhat struggled as well with quality, a sign of an industry trying to adjust back to normalcy. Cannes, Venice, Sundance and Toronto all had off years. Maybe 2023 will be a better one, I’ve already tackled the 80+ films that show real promise.

A real tell-tale sign that things were not going as planned this year were the number of films delayed to next year, statements by Scorsese, Aster, Anderson, Glazer, Lanthimos, Fincher and Scott all opted for a 2023 release.

I knew this was going to be a bad year when I attended Cannes in May, a Mecca for the best of world cinema, and left feeling rather underwhelmed by a lot of the stuff that I saw there. It set the tone for the rest of the year because if Cannes, a festival almost every elite filmmaker would want their film to premiere at, could come up with such a lukewarm lineup, then we’re probably screwed for the rest of the year.

This all led to total and utter bombast being celebrated by critics for their old-school charms (“Top Gun: Maverick,” “RRR,” “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “Elvis,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Glass Onion,” “The Woman King”) — maximalism is cool again. There’s no time for subtlety, it’s now go big or go home.

There’s were however some great movies that I saw in 2022 that still don’t have a release date and are almost all, presumably, 2023 titles now. Those include Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, Paravel/Castaing-Taylor’s De Humanis Corpis Fabrica, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blowup a Pipeline, Tarik Saleh’s Boy From Heaven, Eric Gravel’s A Plein Temps, Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Tori et Lokita, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s As Bestas, Alexandru Belc’s Metronom, and Dominic Moll’s La Nuit Du 12.

Going through the potential contenders for my ten best list (which will be published next week), I wondered: “that’s it?” Don’t get me wrong, I could easily, in the blink of an eye, make a top 20 this year, but what I realized lacked most was sheer greatness. These were the exception:

1) Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)

Cronenberg may have hinted at retirement in recent years, but his new film is proof the legendary director is not done with cinema. Cronenberg’s best movie since 2005’s “A History of Violence”; “Crimes of the Future” is meditative, horrific, unique and visionary. The Canadian auteur’s usual knack for avoiding conventionality is on display here. His parasite-filled, sexually taboo, and ultra-violent art is what dreams are made of. Or are they nightmares? It’s just the latest surreal body-horror statement from a master who just can’t quit his obsessions.

2) The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)

A near-plotless movie, driven by conversation and a near-biblical dilemma. On a remote Irish island, Colm (a superb Brendan Gleason) suddenly decides to stop talking to best friend Padraic (a never-better Colin Farrell). Why? Nobody knows. It’s an existential character drama that is expertly written and wise beyond words. It encompasses everything I love about movies, the inherently beautiful aura of drama, the mysteriously cinematic that can arise when you watch something that catches your attention and never lets go. McDonagh has gone back to his darkly comic roots and made what is, by far, the best film of his career.

3) TÁR (Todd Field)

Don’t be so eager to be offended,” Lydia TÁR tells a student, “the narcissism of small differences leads to conformity.”What’s brilliant about Todd Field's slowburner of a film is that he leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether “TÀR” is anti-cancel culture or a tongue-in-cheek condemnation of Cate Blanchett‘s brilliant but prickly conductor. For most of the film, Field obstinately hints at what’s to come, but takes his time to build everything up. The plot developments are minimal, but eventually add up to something monumental.

4) Happening (Audrey Diwan)

Here’s an abortion drama that doesn’t speechify. The box aspect ratio Diwan uses in her small-scaled masterwork enhances the claustrophobic nature of Anne’s plight in such tense ways. There’s no time for speechifying in hers and Romano’s screenplay, she doesn’t judge anyone, just let’s the action play out, especially in the earth-shattering final 20 minutes. There aren’t many films where I was tempted to look away at the screen for a few seconds, but this one definitely has these moments.

5) Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

Debut filmmaker Charlotte Wells depicts the personal story of the melancholic and bittersweet resort holiday she took with her father (Paul Mescal) twenty years ago. It’s told in narratively bold fashion. Memories real and imagined pop into the screen as she tries to forgive the father she knew with the man she didn't. Their time together is filled with silences that reveal a lot of baggage via facial expressions and carefully-chosen words. The use of flashbacks and flash forwards is also inventively conveyed to bring out the truth in a well-meaning but failed father. It’s a small-scaled slowburn that you cannot stop thinking about days after having seen it.

6) Funny Pages (Owen Kline)

A bitingly funny coming-of-age story concerning a teenage cartoonist who vehemently rejects the comforts of Kline’s suburban life. Kline’s satirical jabs hit where they hurt. The casting in this one is incredible. The actors not only inhabit their weirdo characters, but make you believe they are true flesh and blood. It’s a lo-fi masterpiece, filled with brilliantly deranged set-pieces, that tackle misbegotten artistic Impulses in weird and dirty ways. No wonder the Safdies produced this one. You can easily see them directing such a film in their early years; it’s pure “gutter poetry.

7) Apollo 10 1/2 (Richard Linklater)

This is not really a space movie as much as it is about Linklater’s childhood in mid-to-late ‘60s Texas. Playing like a slice of life, albeit in dreamy rotoscope animation, Linklater’s film feels like a time machine back to when things were much simpler in America. Like Linklater's very best movies, “Apollo 10 1/2” plays akin to a slice-of-life rumination, avoiding forced drama and instead opting for the beauty of moments. And yet, it never feels overtly nostalgic as you are firmly planted in the suburbia world Linklater creates with his painted-on animation.

8) Kimi (Steven Soderbergh) & Watcher (Chloe Okuno)

This is a tightly-plotted film, filled with the isolation grimness of the COVID-era. And yet, what fun it is to revel in Soderbergh’s 21st century take on “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation.” This relevant depiction of surveillance, isolation and mental health in the COVID-19 era has Soderbergh playfully toying with our current anxieties. The film’s main protagonist lives, just like we do, in a mass-surveillance state and doesn’t realize it until those same walls end up closing in on her. Soderbergh paints his scathing indictment of 21st century bureaucracy, a world with endless personal data stream being possessed by powerful entities

Meanwhile, Chloe Okuno’s film is filled with Polanski-esque dread, as a young American woman (Maika Monroe) wanders around Romania with the feeling that she’s being stalked. Okuno keeps the screws of tension turning throughout her tightly knit narrative, one in which you’re never really sure whether you should trust the main protagonist or not. Much like in Soderbergh’s film, Monroe’s character is eerily being “watched,” but by whom exactly? Here’s a mid-budget, grown-up genre film that deserved a better fate, it came and went this summer, maybe it’ll get reevaluated in the coming years.

9) Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Ostlund)

Ruben Ostlund’s latest provocation, this year’s Palme d’Or winner, is absurdist satire done right. Ostlund again tackles gender and socio-political games. the laughs stick in your throat, it’s a bitingly hilarious movie, and one steeped in absolute social modernity. Characters come and go, and the overall feeling is that Ostlund’s distaste for today’s cultural climate is anger-filled. Ostlund is trying to tell us that, If push comes to shove, and survival comes calling, these people can’t help but blatantly unmask their artificial nature and, above all, the privileged selfishness. It’s the best comedy of the year.

10) Babylon (Damien Chazelle) & Nope (Jordan Peele)

Peele worked on a much bigger canvas with this film. The result is his most ambitious project, but also his most peculiarly structured. It’s quite unique. It’s an impressionist statement; Peele keeps experimenting with his wonderful visuals, and there’s a real sense of big bold filmmaking. There are also a lot of cut to blacks in “Nope,” but especially in the film’s piece-de-resistance: when a chimp actor just snaps and violently attacks his co-stars. It amounts to a madcap avant-garde vision, one which has these unforgettable shots stitched into my memory: the insides of the UFO where we can see the digestion of its victims, Hoyt Van Hoytema’s beautiful day-for-night photography, and the image of a sinister dormant cloud.

Much like Peele’s film, there’s really no way to pin down Chazelle’s into one category. And yet, no film this year aimed higher than “Babylon.” That in itself should earn your respect for this rousingly frenetic epic. Chazelle shoots his film like a madcap painter throwing tone and subtlety out of the window. He doesn’t mold his movie as much as just splatter it with surreal brush strokes. From scene-to-scene there’s constant wonderment at what exactly it is that you’re watching. “Babylon” is such a strangely conceived film. I can’t seem to put my finger on it, but there’s something to be said about a film that goes from gross-out humor to sheer Greek tragedy in the blink of an eye. The whole thing feels like a hallucination, a fever dream of total chaos.

Runners-Up: Vortex, Armageddon Time, Glass Onion, The Menu, She Said, Navalny, Blonde, Resurrection, Elvis, Nitram, God’s Country, Dinner in America, Barbarian