Top 10 Films of 2022

In 2022, I stopped working as a full-time film critic. Moving over to Turner Classic Movies has been immensely rewarding, and the past year working among such talented and thoughtful individuals to promote classic film has been a terrific experience. But it’s also been an adjustment.

Life as a film critic meant weeknights at the multiplex screening new releases—even ones I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing. Now that I’m no longer racing the clock to post reviews, I can devote my time to films I’m actually interested in—squeezing in movies that are older or weirder or more niche than I ever had time to see before.

In 2022, I watched more classic films and fewer new releases. Before 2022, I would typically watch around 125 new releases. This year it was closer to seventy-five, enough that I feel confident enough to make this list, but not so many that I can’t think of at least ten or twenty more I didn’t get around to by year’s end.

And yet I’ve made peace with the fact that every year-end list is incomplete. I used to toil over these things, working to see as many new releases as possible and then watching my potential Top 10 movies twice to make sure they held up. But the older I get, the more I see these lists as snapshots. People change, tastes change, and I end up seeing more movies that flew under my radar from a particular year. I recently looked back at my Top 10 of 2007 list and saw that I put American Gangster as my #1 movie that year, which in retrospect is preposterous when we also got There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and No Country for Old Men that year just to name a few. I don’t think American Gangster is a bad movie, but were I to remake that list today, I doubt it would crack the Top 10.

With that in mind, I offer this year’s Top 10 with a lot of humility. Consider it a simple guide and a reflection of where I am right now at the end of 2022. I imagine I’ll feel differently about this list in a few months and certainly in a few years. Nevertheless, I’ve been doing Top 10 Films lists since 2002, and it would be a shame to break the streak now. So without further ado…

10) Barbarian

We need bonkers horror films like this one on a regular basis. In 2021, we got Malignant, and now we have Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, a film that plays audience expectations to a tee. The film is a masterclass in casting as we get the creepy-as-hell Bill Skarsgård playing a guy meant to set us on edge, later contrasted against the lovable Justin Long as a TV actor who slowly shows us what a creep he is. Aside from featuring the best joke of the year (I won’t spoil it, but you know it when you see the movie), Barbarian is the right mixture of creepy, satirical, and madcap. It’s common for horror directors to seek to unnerve their audience, but I always side with those who can’t help but make us laugh a little as as well.

[Currently streaming on HBO Max]

9) Fire of Love

There are still so many documentaries I need to see from 2022, but all of them would be hard pressed to top this stunning love-and-science story. The tale of two volcanologists who gave their lives to understanding this natural phenomenon leads to not only some remarkable footage, but also lives in a place where I’m naturally attracted to the subject matter—people who put their lives at risk because their work and passion demands it (see also Free Solo). It’s hard to say that Katia and Maurice Krafft were “doomed” if they died together doing what they loved.

[Currently streaming on Disney+]

8) Decision to Leave

Park Chan-wook can’t stop, won’t stop. I can’t think of another director who consistently tells the most bizarre love stories around, and yet they all somehow work because of their perversity rather than in spite of it. His latest is no different, the story of a detective investigating a woman after the mysterious death of her husband only to find himself slowly falling for her. What makes Park’s stories so beguiling is how far his characters are willing to reach across the divide and if they will ever make it. The film isn’t really about the mystery aspect as much as it’s about the unique romance between the two lead characters and how they have both beguiled and afflicted the other.

[Currently streaming on Mubi]

7) Glass Onion

There’s something a little bittersweet about Glass Onion. As funny and entertaining as the movie is, I feel like other studios are taking the wrong lesson from Rian Johnson—namely, that movies simply need more stars to succeed. (If that were true, Amsterdam would have been a hit.) But what they really need are good ideas and talented people to execute them. That’s much harder to put through the studio system, but Johnson has proved that an original franchise not based on pre-existing material can not only succeed but thrive. With just two movies, Johnson and star Daniel Craig have created a film character for the ages with Benoit Blanc, a Columbo-infused Southern gentleman who fights on behalf of society’s neglected against rich doofuses. If Johnson and Craig wanted to make only these movies for the rest of their careers, I would be more than okay with that.

[Currently streaming on Netflix]

6) Top Gun: Maverick

It’s rare for a blockbuster action movie to serve as such a rich text about its lead actor. Yes, Top Gun: Maverick is a sequel, and yes, it’s a theatrically impressive movie in a time when theaters desperately need audiences to come back, but more than anything, it is about as personal as Tom Cruise is willing to get in his films. In a year where multiple directors were telling stories about themselves and their pasts, Cruise also put himself on screen albeit through the layers of Christopher McQuarrie’s direction and script, the Pete “Maverick” Mitchell character, and the mind-blowing aerial sequences. Top Gun: Maverick is a fun movie to watch, but all of its depth comes from Cruise knowing that his time as an action star is running out due to his age and the larger cinema landscape, and answering that he’ll go as hard as humanly possible until the wheels fall off.

[Currently streaming on Paramount+]

5) The Fabelmans

I wish this hadn’t been marketed as “The Magic of Movies,” because it’s not really about that. It’s about a young man discovering his passion and the difficulty in wielding the power it provides. The lens of the film isn’t simply a retelling of Steven Spielberg’s childhood; it’s a refraction of it. It’s an old man looking back at the decisions his parents made and the decisions he made that he wished had been different. A young filmmaker who knows that his mother cheated on his father with his father’s best friend would not make Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., films about a father abandoning his family and a family living with an absent father, respectively. Nor would he make Catch Me If You Can, a film about a child learning the impossibility of making his family whole again. Instead, The Fabelmans is the dream, a director now fully in control of what cinema can and can’t do, and living in that liminal space in between.

[Available to rent on VOD]

4) The Banshees of Inisherin

No one does a parable quite like Martin McDonagh. His knack for tenderness and dark comedy is unmatched, and The Banshees of Inisherin is arguably his best movie yet. On the surface, it’s deceptively simple—two guys in a small Irish town near the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 are breaking up. Colm (Brendan Gleeson) doesn’t want to be friends with Pádraic (Colin Farrell) anymore because he finds Pádraic dull and a waste of time. What makes the story so potent is that McDonagh asks what we owe to each other and what we owe ourselves. What does it mean to wrong another person, and what does it mean to do right by them, especially if that means causing pain to yourself? The questions swirl around the film and have continued to haunt me.

[Currently streaming on HBO Max]

3) RRR

Sometimes it feels like you’re sleepwalking through cinema, and it takes a movie from the other side of the world like RRR to wake you up. A lot of credit goes to the early adopters on this movie and folks like Patrick Willems and Siddhant Adlakha for explaining to Western audiences what to expect from this bombastic delight. An imagined friendship between two Indian revolutionaries, RRR leaps off the screen to make every moment land with maximum impact. I don’t think any scene this year brought me as much joy as the “Naatu Naatu” dance-off. The whole movie is a delight I never knew I needed, and my hope is that more people can experience this film with a crowd.

[Hindi version currently streaming on Netflix; Original Telugu dubbing available on Zee5]

2) Tár

I’ve written at length about Tár already, and it’s a film I expect to revisit in the years to come (although I’m a bit disappointed that the new 4K is so bare bones). On the surface, it seems like a movie about cancel culture, but probe deeper and it’s a movie about competing anxieties and fears, how the need to succeed and the need to control and dominate are frequently intertwined, and how the most potent nightmare for a woman who has willed her own reality is when that reality starts to unravel. We had to wait 16 years between movies from director Todd Field, but he and the luminous Cate Blanchett made it worth the wait.

[Available to buy on VOD]

1) Everything Everywhere All at Once

Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once feels like the perfect movie of our age. We are inundated with possibilities and noise that makes us feel small, and it’s not like life was already a breeze to begin with. Is a world of infinite possibilities daunting or exhilarating? If we imagined our lives differently, what would we want to be, and in the vast universe of options, would we ask for something else? Everything Everywhere All at Once expands outward across a multiverse, but its focus remains firmly on the Wang family. So many blockbusters rest on the premise of “saving the world”, but that’s kind of unimportant. Saving the multiverse is unimportant. It’s not that other lives don’t matter, but the stories we tell ourselves are about us, the people we care about, and fighting for them, not through supernatural means, but just through sheer love and decency. To pursue this idea with such earnestness and weirdness seems like an impossible task, but Daniels (the collective name for directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) tackled it with amazing grace and nuance. It’s why in a movie where rocks have conversations and women have hot dog fingers, the line that resonates the most is, “So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”

[Currently streaming on Showtime and available to buy on VOD]

Honorable Mentions: Nope, Turning Red, Prey, Aftersun, Armageddon Time