The Best Films of 2022
THE STRANGE HARBORS PICKS FOR THE BEST FILMS OF 2022
After two-plus years floundering in the pandemic, it seems that the film industry is finally regaining its legs. This year, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water blasted off, the Daniels’ multiverse-hopping stunner Everything Everywhere All at Once was the sleeper hit of the year, and old masters in their late eras such as Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg returned in top form. It might have been harder than ever to whittle down a top ten in 2022, but it was an absolute delight to journey through the year’s cinema. Here are my 10 favorite movies of 2022, along with some honorable mentions:
10. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Doctor Strange who? Exploding intimate family drama into a multiverse-jumping, martial arts, sci-fi epic, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a blast of inventive genre fiction. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively and affectionately known as just Daniels, follow up their feature debut of Swiss Army Man with lunatic glee, stretching the limits of visual and kinetic storytelling to its absolute breaking point. Steadied with the incredible - and very game - cast of Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and James Hong, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most fun you’ll have at the movies this year. Read the full review here.
9. Resurrection
Rebecca Hall continues her streak of blistering performances in Andrew Semans’ harrowing psychodrama. A tale about motherhood, hidden pasts, and the limits of control, Resurrection unspools a single mother’s crushing secret in a steely structure that belies its brazen, outrageous horror. Every Sundance has that one Midnight film that lays worms in your brain, and Resurrection is this year’s culprit: a bloody, twisted ride with shocking revelations. It’s likely bad form to invoke the sanctity of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession as comparison, but Andrew Semans’ outrageous psychological thriller traffics in the same shades of noxious bonds, unraveling psyches, and subversive depravity. Read the full review here.
8. After Yang
Five years after Kogonada’s Columbus premiered at Sundance, the prominent video essayist and filmmaker has returned with After Yang, a meditative sci-fi stunner no less affecting than his beautifully-wrought debut. A deeply emotional examination of identity, purpose, and the memory of all things, After Yang tackles its themes — and its surprising thread on what it means to be Asian and Asian American — with grace and craft. The story of a family’s search for answers after their android servant malfunctions, the film drills to the center of the human condition: When you witness something’s vast capacity for love and the ability to be loved, can you still deny its personhood? After Yang will gently break your heart, only to mend it with a quiet balm. Read the full review here.
7. Avatar: The Way of Water
Avatar: The Way of Water is the most compassionate blockbuster of our time. A dazzling gallery frame around cinematic technology in the hands of one James Cameron, its wild spectacle, unbelievable detail, and technical wizardry will blast the eyeballs out of your sockets, but its honest and sincere undercurrents just might be its secret weapon. Like its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water is an essential theatrical experience. If you weren’t sold on the first Avatar’s heart-on-its-sleeve sincerity and inherent goofiness, I’m not sure the sequel will convert you, but betting against James Cameron - his humanism, his love for the ocean, his classical discipline - is a fool’s game. Read the full review here.
6. The Fabelmans
The superstar team of Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner, and Janusz Kaminski ripping another one out of the park is the least surprising development at the movies this year. The entirety of Spielberg’s being splashed upon the big screen, The Fabelmans sidesteps the treacly sentimentality of your typical autobiography to deliver a moving form of self-therapy: the legendary director’s heart and soul, hopes and regrets, delivered through his masterful craft. The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s most personal film, and one of the year’s best. Print the legend. Read the full review here.
5. Crimes of the Future
Body is reality. Surgery is the new sex. David Cronenberg’s first feature in eight long years acts as a furtive peek into a carefully crafted, crumbling dystopia. Taking place in a near-future where graphic surgeries are the only form of entertainment remaining, Crimes of the Future explores - with a demure thoughtfulness - the complexities of art and performance in an increasingly uninhabitable society. In a world where our bodies are rapidly changing to accommodate a hostile climate, what is organic and what is synthetic? What is performance? What is artifice? Come for Cronenberg’s body horror resurgent, stay for the perfect weirdo performances from Viggo Mortenson, Lea Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart. Read the full review here.
4. Nope
A sprawling, sci-fi procedural anchored by weighty performances, white-knuckle set pieces, and thunderous soundscapes, Nope is director Jordan Peele’s most mature and layered work, exploring our primordial obsession with spectacle and our desperate need to capture it. It is, at once, exactly what it seems to be on its surface - a film about hidden and uncanny terrors in the sky - but also a movie about making movies, the pieces of ourselves we feed into the Hollywood meat grinder, and our indomitable obsession with spectacle and its capture. In an era where metaphors are wielded as cudgels and sledgehammers, Nope - with its effortlessly integrated symbolism - is a complete breath of fresh air. Read the full review here.
3. Tár
Director Todd Field’s first film in over 16 years, Tár follows a polymath maestro as her career implodes by her own devices. A stark, thorny confrontation of the ego and arrogance that come hand-in-hand with genius, the stunning devolution of Lydia Tár is abetted by one of the great director-actor pairings. Much more than this year’s “cancel culture movie,” Tár finds a singular Cate Blanchett performance as cinematic Rorschach test: a swirl of guilt and a tempest of comeuppance about how prestige renders an illusory shield from consequences. A searing portrait in the gray about power and those who wield it.
2. Decision to Leave
“The closer you look, the harder you fall.” Park Chan-wook cross-pollinates a police procedural with a femme fatale romance and it’s every bit as good as you think it will be. Circling two lost souls navigating a web of murder, deceit, and desire to desperately cling to their perverse affair, Decision to Leave is a sensual puzzle box - and one of the year’s best films. It’s a stunning duel of fates, but it’s Tang Wei who gives the performance of a lifetime, and perhaps my favorite performance of the year. Absolutely electric with an ineffable mystique, her Seo-rae - equal parts dangerous, manipulative, and soothing - enters the pantheon of femme fatales as an impenetrable paradox and a mesmerizing engine for the film’s illicit romance. Read the full review here.
1. The Banshees of Inisherin
Director Martin McDonagh reunites with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin, a darkly comedic portrait of an imploding friendship amidst mounting pettiness. Men and their decimated kinships unraveled upon the screen, richly textured and frequently uproarious, it’s McDonagh at his best as he explores evaporating bonds, crushing loneliness, and enmity in grotesque escalation. A masterful mix of bull-headed humor and melodrama that eventually gives away into something profoundly sad and wistful, it’s a film on a precarious tightrope that seemingly only Martin McDonagh can navigate. Through the contradictory power Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s mismatched performances, The Banshees of Inisherin finds a curious equilibrium between light and dark. Read the full review here.
Other 2022 Favorites
Top Gun: Maverick
The Eternal Daughter
RRR
Kimi
Elvis
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Prey
Ambulance
The Northman
X
The Batman
Jethica
Something in the Dirt
