My 20 Favorite Films of 2022

Without a doubt, the biggest complaint about my film lists from the past few years was the choice to reduce the total amount of films from 20 to 15.  Who are these people that still read a Blogspot page in an age where everybody has moved over to Medium or Substack, and are engaged enough to lodge formal complaints?  Don't worry about it, just know that they're 100% real and numerous and pissed.

Well you can delete those death threats you were in the middle of writing for the third year in a row, because the top 20 is back!  I was surprised to learn when tallying up the 2022 films I watched that the total was less than what I watched in 2021, which was 65 compared to last year's 69.  Despite that decrease, I felt better about this year's output, which had enough quality cinema that I never felt like I had to waste much time with the streaming slop and second-tier blockbusters that we always get.  (Please ignore the fact that I saw Black Adam in theaters on its opening weekend.)

As has been the case for the last few years though, the future of cinema still seems pretty bleak.  Alot of films toward the top of my list barely made a dent at the box office -- with one of them being a flop of epic proportions -- so who knows how long we'll get the amount of interesting movies that we got in 2022.  Let's celebrate them while we can.

The rules: Any film that got their first non-festival release in 2022 -- whether that's theatrically, on VOD, or exclusively on a streaming service -- qualifies for this list.

Honorable Mentions (25-21)

Sharp Stick may be 2022's most fascinating film -- not every idea in Lena Dunham's deeply strange sexual awakening dramedy works, but its eccentricities and clearly personal touches are often transcendent.  The MCU system doesn't usually allow for directorial vision, which is what makes the Raimi touches of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness even more of a hoot.  Speaking of the MCU system, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is another success within its constraints, delivering a messy but moving story of how the people in power win when they're able to turn oppressed classes against one another.  A documentary that feels more like an espionage thriller, Navalny tells the unbelievable story of Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader who survived an assassination attempt from the Putin regime.  Inu-Oh is another creative visual feast from the great animation auteur Masaaki Yuasa.

20. X (Directed by Ti West)

Though he's been eclipsed by a new breed of filmmakers, Ti West was once declared by many as the new face of horror around the time of his modest but moody early work like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers.  After a period of inactivity, he came back to reclaim the throne this year with two films, starting with X and continuing with its prequel Pearl.  I prefer the grimy 70s exploitation style of the former over the Classic Hollywood pastiche of the latter, but when taken together it was a remarkable 2022 for West.  X quickly reminds you that he's one of the best at establishing mood and generating tension, able to immerse you in its setting and have you under its control way before things even get gnarly.  It's also got a sly storytelling streak, using its premise of an amateur film crew staying on a sketchy farm to shoot a porno as a way of providing a meta examination of the role sex plays in horror films.  X is a total blast, and a wonderful antidote to the turgid genre films about grief we're always getting lately.

19. The Batman (Directed by Matt Reeves)

We've gotten so many big screen interpretations of Batman, but somehow we've never had one that really focuses on the "World's Greatest Detective" aspect of his lore.  Finally, that box got checked off early this year with the three hour glower that is Matt Reeves' The Batman.  This version shoots for David Fincher in Se7en or Zodiac mode, and while it doesn't quite reach those lofty heights, it lands close enough to feel impressive for a superhero film.  There's a grit here that's different from Christopher Nolan's grounded vision, more noir-soaked in both look and tone, as we follow Batman doing investigative work and intel gathering more than we see him beating up baddies.  The action scenes that do appear certainly pop, but even those have a muted gloom.  It's a refreshing take that sustains its mood without blinking.  With Dune and now The Batman -- this trend of blockbusters that dare to be ponderous is something we hopefully see more of. 

18. Avatar: The Way of Water (Directed by James Cameron)

Well folks, James Cameron did it again.  After 13 years of him toiling away on a sequel, the internet's countless digital ink spent on whether the Avatar franchise is culturally relevant, and a pandemic precipitating the collapse of moviegoing, James Cameron kept his eyes on the prize and delivered the goods with The Way of Water.  This is a sequel that surpasses the original in every way, offering a grand epic that pushes the medium forward technologically and gives viewers a handful of the year's most rousing sequences of visual grandeur.  In an age where blockbusters all have the same snarky, quippy edge, The Way of Water reminds us that there's a place for melodrama and sincerity in the filmgoing experience.  This is a movie that devotes a large chunk of its over three-hour runtime to the politics and history of a herd of space whales, and though that sounds silly, it's that commitment to detail and ritual that makes the world of Pandora so unique.  Plus, when the time calls for it, Cameron reintroduces himself as one of the best action filmmakers alive, giving the last hour away to some truly thrilling, kinetic, and massive setpieces that make full use of the film's jaw-dropping 3D and high frame rate.  Not everything works, but not everything needs to, especially when The Way of Water presents us with so many things we've never seen before.

17. Benediction (Directed by Terence Davies)

Benediction makes for Terence Davies' second film in a row about a poet after 2016's Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion, this time about British war poet Siegfried Sassoon.  And like A Quiet Passion before it, this film sheds off the self-importance of the usual films of its ilk, instead tracing a jagged line through Sassoon's life, which included serving in World War I, dalliances with men, and his eventual marriage to a woman followed by a conversion to Catholicism.  Being Davies' first explicitly gay text allows him to bring to the forefront ideas that are usually only bubbling under the surface of his other work, and he also cuts loose with the dialogue, which is lively with sniping barbs and sharp witticisms.  But those lighter moments give way to moments of quiet agony, as Sassoon is constantly left to ponder what it means to live on in a world where his first love and even his brother died in a war he somehow survived.  At first those two clashing tones seem at odds to the film's detriment, but the shattering finale coheres everything together in a way that feels revelatory.  Benediction is a film that only gets stronger the longer its sorrow sets in.

16. Armageddon Time (Directed by James Gray)

When filmmakers make films about the era they grew up in, there's always an impulse to have it tinted with a heavy nostalgia, which makes it all the more impressive that Armageddon Time is so devoid of that.  Though the 80s-set coming-of-drama from James Gray is heavily informed by his own childhood, and it does feel like it's comprised of moments and details from one's upbringing that you never forget, it's refreshingly sober while doing so.  That's because Armageddon Time has heavier things on its mind, examining the difficulties that come with being a middle class Jewish-American family who left anti-Semitic hate in Europe only a few generations ago.  What does it mean for a change of last name to bring you closer to assimilation when other marginalized groups have skin colors they can't change?  And what is your obligation to those on lower rungs of the ladder?  These are some of the ideas the film wrestles with, and with an eye to the cusp of the Reagan era, it doesn't provide easy or comforting answers.  Gray is not a name that casual audiences recognize, but he's beloved amongst a certain section of cinephiles, and his latest does nothing to dissuade us of his greatness.

15. TÀR (Directed by Todd Field)

There's a reason why so many people came out of TÀR thinking that Lydia Tàr, the esteemed composer at the center of writer-director Todd Field's first film in 16 years, is a real person.  Cate Blanchett does such deep, thorough work fleshing her out as a character, and along with the tactile direction from Field and the detailed sense of history the script gives her life, it's hard for some to think of these events as being imagined.  Set in the classical music world yet anything but removed, TÀR is concerned with a problem we have to reckon with frequently these days: talented artists who commit improprieties, and the consequences they do or don't face.  However, the film is less interested in screeds about cancel culture than it is in this specific character study about power, control, and guilt.  Todd Field's direction is absorbing in its austerity and habit of luxuriating in scenes, until it disrupts the viewer with quick jolts of strangeness and surreality.  It's indicative of what makes the film so alluring, that ability to keep you on your toes both intellectually and morally.

14. Prey (Directed by Dan Trachtenberg)

It's so hard to get original ideas made these days that sometimes the best chance you have is to sneak one into already existing IP.  Director Dan Trachtenberg knows that game well, having already done so with his feature length debut 10 Cloverfield Lane, which functioned like a tense chamber drama that just happened to be in the Cloverfield universe.  Similarly, Prey's early 1700s setting and focus on Comanche nation characters is such a rich milieu that it almost doesn't need everyone's favorite dreadlocked space hunter.  Of course, it's all the more fun because of that juxtaposition between the Predator's advanced tech and main character Naru making the best with her limited means, but formidable skill.  This a lean film, light on dialogue because it knows that the best way to convey information in a story like this is visually, and it does so both in moments of downtime and in the many rollicking action sequences.  The latter are the real highlight, thanks to their legibility, impactful framing, and advanced understanding of geography.  All of these elements come together to make Prey an absolute romp.  Obviously, most cinephiles want truly unique stories that are untethered to IP, but Dan Trachtenberg is doing fantastic work within the confines of the franchise system.

13. Decision to Leave (Directed by Park Chan-wook)

It's hard to even know where to begin with Decision to Leave, a film so chock full of narrative turns and visual tricks that it's nearly overwhelming.  But that's par for the course with Park Chan-wook, who puts more skill and ideas into one film than most filmmakers can dream of across the span of their whole careers.  This twisted romantic mystery throws Vertigo, police procedurals, and trashy thrillers into a blender to make something that feels completely of its own, weaving a tale of desperation and deception that's a slow burn but never anything less than riveting.  That's due to Park's peerless command of the frame, constantly finding new ways to put the audience in its characters' POV or energize standard storytelling devices.  Some filmmakers lose a step when their youthful abandon slips away, but Decision to Leave proves that Park Chan-wook's transition to more reserved, mature dramas is a great fit for him.

12. Jackass Forever (Directed by Jeff Tremaine)

From the silent film gags of Buster Keaton, to the creative choreography of Jackie Chan, to the death-defying thrill seeking of Tom Cruise, some of the most memorable cinema of all time involves artists putting their bodies on the line for the sake of public entertainment.  When you think of it that way, the Jackass franchise doesn't seem so lowbrow.  The fourth -- and hopefully, for their sake, final -- installment in the film series is another celebration of the power of human punishment, and it hasn't lost any of its appeal in the decade-plus since the last entry.  What elevates these films is that they're not just empty carnage -- many of the stunts are held up by clever comedic premises, and watching the creative ways the crew tries to up the ante is a joy to behold.  Some of the stakes are built in from the simple fact that most of the gang is either pushing 50 or on the other side of it, so the agony they put their bodies through feels even more dangerous.  Jackass Forever also contains a surprisingly generous spirit, as seen by the comradery between the mainstays and the ease with which they welcome newer, younger members into the fold.  Never has a film full of nut shots and broken bones felt so cozy.

11. Turning Red (Directed by Domee Shi)

After all these years, Pixar is still putting out quality product -- though this year's thoroughly average Lightyear put that sentiment to the test -- but it's hard to find any disagreement with those who feel like they're not dropping constant classics like they were in their 1995-2010 stretch, or that some of their recent work can have a tech demo artificiality to it.  Turning Red is a breath of fresh air in that regard, and if it's not as airtight as Peak Pixar films, then it's as close as they've gotten since Inside Out in 2015.  Like that film, the movie focuses on the inner life of its teenage girl protagonist, who turns 13 and discovers a curse that causes women in her family to transform into a red panda when they experience strong emotions.  The period parallels are so apparent that it can hardly be considered subtext, and Turning Red uses this conceit to deliver a funny and honest portrayal of the roiling feelings of adolescence and budding sexuality.  Just as she did with her short Bao before this, writer-director Domee Shi imbues the story with an intense personal touch.  Between the soft pastel color palette, the regional specificity, the cultural themes, and the gag-heavy electricity of the comedy, you could never accuse this of being focus-grouped by shareholders.  It's a shame Disney relegated this special crowd-pleaser straight to its streaming service. 

10. Three Thousand Years of Longing (Directed by George Miller)

After he redefined what the modern blockbuster is capable of in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road, nobody could blame you for wanting its director, the septuagenarian George Miller, to spend the rest of his time on Earth satisfying our desire for exquisite action setpieces.  Miller himself had other things in mind, coming back from a seven-year break with Three Thousand Years of Longing, a low-key exploration of storytelling, loneliness, and human folly.  Untethered from traditional structure, this is a discursive film, but the oft-kilter rhythm and gorgeously warm photography makes for an intoxicating mixture.  And Idris Elba's Djinn, who becomes so absorbed in the lives of the people whose wishes he grants that it often leads to trouble for him, feels like a fresh and soulful take on the character archetype.  Together with Tilda Swinton doing uncharacteristically restrained work as an isolated scholar, the two of them make an engrossing pair to watch, even when there is nothing particularly exciting happening.  For those who want more Mad Max, there is still Furiosa in the works.  But it would be a mistake to regard this lovely film as a minor detour along the way.

9. Top Gun: Maverick (Directed by Joseph Kosinski)

If you start cataloguing the best blockbusters we've gotten since 2010, an obvious trend starts to stand out: many of them star Tom Cruise.  Between Edge of Tomorrow, the last few Mission Impossible entries, and of course The Mummy (just kidding on that last one), Cruise just knows how to entertain the masses on the largest stage possible.  At this point, you have to assume that it's not wise to bet against him.  And it turns out maniacally pushing back Top Gun: Maverick until it could be enjoyed in theaters was the right move.  Maverick is the best piece of Hollywood spectacle in years, capturing the rousing tone of the original while also injecting a newfound sense of emotional weight.  The film glides along on the megawatt charm of its cast and its exhilarating setpieces, culminating in one of the most thrilling third acts in recent memory.  Cinema may still be on a long, slow death march, but at least for one summer it got a defibrillator shock from our greatest showman.

8. Men (Directed by Alex Garland)

Maybe subtlety is overrated.  It's all there in the title of Men, Alex Garland's phantasmagoric folk horror film, which turns one woman's retreat to a countryside home after an intense personal tragedy into an examination of the violence and predation propagated by generations of men, perhaps starting all the way back to the Garden of Eden.  There arguably isn't anything insightful in what the movie has to say about the matter, and the abstracted manner in which Garland presents these ideas makes them seem like maybe he thinks they're smarter than they actually are, but absolutely none of that matters when the blunt force of his technique overpowers you in scene after spellbinding scene.  Garland has a knack for coming up with unique and freakish new horrors, which arrive at a rapid clip in the film's bugnuts finale.  While Men may not be as intellectually stimulating as Ex Machina or Annihilation, it more than makes up for it with its pure audiovisual delights.

7. The Banshees of Inisherin (Directed by Martin McDonagh)

What's the best way to reject a person?  Do you do it as harshly as possible so as to create no ambiguity?  Deliver something kinder but run the risk of not conveying the severity of your feelings?  Find a way to avoid it altogether and save both sides discomfort?  The whole gamut of strategies get run through in The Banshees of Inisherin, about a man named Padraic (played by Colin Farrell) whose supposed best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) suddenly decides he wants nothing to do with him, citing he's never really liked Padraic.  Though it may not seem so from a setup like that, this is a bleak film, consumed with deep despair, rage, and loneliness.  Like all Martin McDonagh films, Banshees is a concussive cocktail of absurd black comedy, portentous imagery, and existential crises, but this time around he proceeds with a grim purpose that his film work hadn't quite reached yet.  Though it may not be the most cheerful experience, The Banshees of Inisherin is another winner from one of cinema's most fascinating writers.

6. Nope (Directed by Jordan Peele)

Get Out was such an impeccable debut, a crowd-pleaser of the highest order, that Jordan Peele could have continued doing the same thing ad infinitum and probably would have been successful at it.  Instead, he's continued to get more elliptical and challenging, first with Us and again with Nope this year.  Nope positions itself as a big, awestruck blockbuster in the vein of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but it lands somewhere more left-of-center with alien films like Signs.  In recent Peele fashion, the film has too many ideas on its mind to be tied down to a single one, but its observations about humanity's desire to get a handle on the uncontrollable and our attraction to spectacle are the most clear and potent.  Yet he's also way too much of a craftsman to resist giving viewers scenes that will take their breath away.  Nope features some transfixing big budget imagery, and they're so elegantly composed and paced out.  There are ideas in this that still linger in the mind months later, like a character's choice to repackage their childhood trauma as entertainment, or a couple of scenes of primal horror.  In a cinematic landscape full of empty entertainment that dissolves as soon as it's over, it's nice to have something special like this to chew on.

5. Kimi (Directed by Steven Soderbergh)

Leave it up to Steven Soderbergh to be the one to crack the pandemic film.  Well technically he already did it in 2011 with the very prescient Contagion, but Kimi touches upon the actual real world pandemic we went through.  That's not to say that it's a film About COVID, but it uses that to inform the story of its protagonist (played with effortless charisma by Zoe Kravitz), whose trauma-based agoraphobia gets exacerbated by the onset of the pandemic.  When her job as a programmer for a big tech company who finds errors in their Alexa-esque smart speaker by listening to customers' audio logs causes her to stumble upon a possible violent crime, she's launched into a Hitchcockian thriller for the age of hyper-surveillance, as she tries to solve the case without actually leaving her cavernous Seattle apartment.  Despite largely taking place in one location for a good portion of its runtime, the film is always imbued with life thanks to Soderbergh adopting a classical filmmaking style, and a sweeping Cliff Martinez score reminiscent of Bernard Hermann.  Kimi has a wealth of ideas on its mind -- the creeping overreach of tech mega-corporations, the weaponization of ally-speak by those causing the most harm, the contrast between analog and digital connection -- but they never halt the film's main mission as a potboiler.  Steven Soderbergh is so prolific and consistent that he's a mainstay on these year-end lists, but this is his best and most immediate work in a long time.

4. Glass Onion (Directed by Rian Johnson)

The common line after Knives Out's critical and commercial success was "I could watch a million of these movies," but was that really what we wanted?  Sure, the Agatha Christie paperback mysteries it was sending up are made for multiple installments, but films are different, and it's hard to recreate the magic of a highwire act like Knives Out a second time.  Glass Onion does about as well as you could imagine, delivering a sequel that isn't better, but pretty damn close to its predecessor.  The mystery is certainly more intricate than last time, doubling back on itself and nesting reveals with aplomb.  Genre is a concept that essentially exists for Rian Johnson to subvert, and he once again has fun playing with our expectations for whodunnits.  What's even more important is that he understands that sometimes conventions exist for a reason, and knows that a dash of wit and a neat conclusion satisfy audiences for a reason.  Glass Onion takes on a nearly impossible task and succeeds tremendously.  Perhaps I could watch a million more of these movies.

3. Babylon (Directed by Damien Chazelle)

When film transitioned from the silent era to talkies, it was a huge creative and technological advancement for the medium, but there were also careers that fell by the wayside because they had no place in the new order.  Likewise, the franchise and IP primacy of modern movies has made many audiences happy, but in the process it has also driven out the kind of personal, auteur-driven filmmaking that many others love.  In a literal sense, Babylon is about the former transition, but it's hard not to read it as a reflection of that latter transition -- combining to create a complicated observation on the life and death cycle of the artform.  And if the film represents the last hurrah for an Oscar winning wunderkind like Damien Chazelle to make a movie this big and indulgent, then what a final curtain it is.  Babylon is a work of pure maximalism, containing every scene you could ever think of, every tone under the sun, and every bodily fluid known to man.  Its constant buzzing with motion; its desire to pack every frame with detail, gags, and bacchanalia; that's all kept in control by Chazelle's perfect sense of rhythm.  Every scene has a musicality to it, rising to a frenzy before exploding on a hard stop and resetting to crescendo all over again.  Whether that's exhausting or exhilarating is up to the viewer, but a wild swing that's willing to provoke such strong reactions is a cause for celebration.

2. The Fabelmans (Directed by Steven Spielberg)

Almost every Steven Spielberg film has some piece of his life in it -- knowing about how much his parents' divorce affected him as a child makes you realize that half of his work is informed by that alone -- but it wasn't until The Fabelmans that he went fully autobiographical.  He filters his upbringing through the Fabelman family, whose oldest son Sammy develops a love of film after being frightened and amazed by the train crash scene in The Greatest Show on Earth.  Although not without its many magical moments, Fabelmans transcends the "love letter to cinema" trappings by digging deeper into the power and limitations of film, as Sammy attempts to use it to process the pains of growing up to varying degrees of success.  With a wise and nuanced look back at his past, Spielberg knows that movies can't stop your parents from getting divorced, but they may help you grieve it a little better.  It doesn't hurt that along the way you're being indulged by a master of his craft, littering every scene with a plethora of visual grace notes and rhythmic pop.  Every new Steven Spielberg film comes with the weight of it possibly being his last, so it feels like a gift that he's entered this late career hot streak with West Side Story and The Fabelmans.

1. We're All Going to the World's Fair (Directed by Jane Schoenbrun)

One of the first things I was curious about after watching We're All Going to the World's Fair was how old director Jane Schoenbrun is.  This difficult-to-categorize film, which follows a teenage girl who participates in a viral trend called "The World's Fair Challenge," perfectly straddles the line between two generations of Internet.  In its uncanny replication of the feeling of falling into arcane corners of the web, it recalls an "old Internet," a time when creepypastas could still feel real and you could stumble down a rabbit hole of bare-bones Geocities websites.  But it also deeply understands how the "new Internet" has a way of making you feel like you have access to everything and everyone, yet still feel utterly alone.  The easiest genre to slap on World's Fair is horror, and that is true to an extent.  As much as we're loath to call something Lynchian these days, that's the only way to describe Schoenbrun's innate understanding of sights and sounds that unnerve us for reasons we can't quite put a finger on.  Somehow that classification doesn't seem completely correct either though, because it doesn't capture the chasm of despair that exists at the core of the film and which belongs to something else entirely.  This feels like an unearthed secret instead of a film.  What a thrill it is to come across the arrival of a huge talent.

Well, that wraps things up for my best films of 2022 list.  I love reading other lists, so feel free to share yours in the comments.  Or if you have any thoughts on my list, then you can do that too.  To see a complete ranked list of all the 2022 films I've seen this year, along with a list of my favorite performances and some other data, you can find them on this Google Doc.

Previous lists
2021

2020

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2018
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2015
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2013