The 10 Best Films of 2022

10. Benediction (dir. Terence Davies)

British filmmaker Terence Davies has always had a sense for the poetic and impressionistic like few others, as showcased in beautiful films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, and his latest offering Benediction shows that he hasn’t lost his touch even decades into his career. Here, he follows real-life WWII veteran and poet Siegfried Sassoon (played primarily by Jack Lowden, as well as Peter Capaldi in his older years), who wrote haunting poems about his time in battle and became one of Britain’s most outspoken critics of the war. The film is primarily concerned with Sassoon’s troubled personal life, including his closeted bisexuality, and his dilemma between his affairs and his family life. It’s a complex, quietly devastating work

/Users/audreyloring/Desktop/film1.jpgdefined by r/Users/audreyloring/Desktop/film1.jpgepressed emotions, as Davies flows gracefully through hazy and fractured memories, all anchored by Lowden’s astonishing performance.

9. Top Gun: Maverick (dir. Joseph Kosinski)

Prior to its release, no one could’ve possibly expected a 35-years-late sequel to Top Gun to be much more than just another nostalgia-bait cash grab, let alone the most ubiquitous smash hit of 2022. But through director Joseph Kosinski’s sheer dedication to old-fashioned popcorn craftsmanship, Top Gun: Maverick defied the odds and delivered one of the most thrilling, satisfying summer blockbusters in years. Maverick takes everything that worked about the late, great Tony Scott’s original film, and simply improves on all of it. Tom Cruise returns to his post as top Navy aviator Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who’s now taken the position of training a new group of eager, young cadets for a particularly dangerous mission. As one of the last true-blue movie stars remaining, few are more dedicated to protecting the big-screen experience than Cruise, and Maverick is as definitive a testament to his daredevil stunt work and charisma as anything else. “The future is here, Maverick, and you’re not in it. Your kind is headed for extinction”, Maverick is told by Ed Harris’ commander in one scene. “Maybe so, sir. But not today”, he responds. It’s a purposeful exchange. Cruise is on a mission to save the movies, and Maverick sees him going all out to do so. And did it ever work.

8. RRR (dir. S.S. Rajamouli)

2022 was an unexpectedly great year for blockbusters, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one at quite the same register as the Tollywood epic RRR, a three-hour extravaganza of nonstop action and pure spectacle from Indian filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli. From the very first minute, RRR floors the gas and never lets up for a second of its massive runtime, with Rajamouli’s wildly entertaining maximalism putting most Hollywood blockbusters to shame. Simply put, this movie has everything. It’s got an elaborate large-scale musical number, a motorcycle flying through the air in flames, a prison breakout where a man wields two rifles while riding on his friend’s shoulders, and an ambush on a palace of British colonialists where our hero crashes a truck through the gates while wielding flaming torches and unleashes a massive truckload of wild animals. And that’s just a small fraction of the pleasures to be found in this movie. I don’t even need to describe the plot; it’s completely secondary in comparison to the action, and besides, if the above description doesn’t sell this to you, then I don’t know what else will. RRR isn’t the best movie of 2022, but it’s the most movie of 2022.

7. Crimes of the Future (dir. David Cronenberg)

Leading up to its premiere at the Cannes film festival in May, the advance buzz about Canadian horror legend David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future was that it would be a return to the filmmaker’s classic body-horror roots in films like The Fly and Videodrome, after years of polarizing forays into other genres and tones. That isn’t exactly an inaccurate way to describe what audiences were met with, but it also doesn’t quite account for the strange, complex, and fascinating layers that Crimes of the Future has. Blending his older stylings with the cold,

cerebral, and detached style of his late-period works like Cosmopolis, Cronenberg lands on a brilliant display of an old master returning to old territory with a new mindset.

The film is set in a synthetic future where advances in biotechnology have led to new transformations and mutations in humans, including a lack of physical pain; as a result, surgeries have become a performance art, and surgeons have become celebrities. Performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), alongside his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux), showcases his constant development of new organs in front of a live audience; there’s also a National Organ Registry investigator (Kristen Stewart in a wonderfully weird performance) who obsessively tracks them, and a mysterious group with ulterior motives lurking in the background. Crimes of the Future is an exploration of trying to find meaning in a world where bodily mutilation has become the reigning art form, and humans have simply become tools to be experimented on. The surgery scenes are graphic, but also strikingly artful and precise and elegant in their craft. It feels like the film that Cronenberg has been building up to this whole time, the natural endpoint of his fascination with the human body and how it can be altered. Saul is contemplating his place in this world of body mutation as performance art, and so is Cronenberg at the same time. It’s a strange, beguiling, patient, and masterful film.

6. Avatar: The Way of Water (dir. James Cameron)

When James Cameron’s Avatar debuted in 2009, few films had ever seen such runaway success. It became a smash phenomenon all around the world, stunning moviegoers with the beautifully immersive and immaculately realized fictional world of Pandora. Cameron announced plans for a franchise just a couple years later, but as one of cinema’s reigning perfectionists, Cameron kept pushing his follow-up farther and farther as he continued to experiment with groundbreaking visual technology that he swore would ensure the most immersive and spectacular viewing experience possible. In an age where successful films spawn sequels at the drop of a hat, it’s a real gamble to delay a sequel to one of the most successful films of all time for so long. But after 13 years, Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here, and as it turns out, the gamble paid off. As he’s proven time and time again throughout his career, it’s a fool’s errand to doubt James Cameron.

The first of the film’s three hours is the weakest section of the film, largely because Cameron has to get some necessary exposition and clunky table-setting out of the way to reorient us in this world. But from that point on, The Way of Water becomes something special. As the film

travels further across Pandora and moves its setting to a water-based colony, Cameron spends practically the entire second hour of the film simply luxuriating in the underwater world he’s created, and it’s easily the most breathtaking thing you’ll see in a theater this year. The level of detail, depth, and texture in every frame is nothing short of astonishing. And in the third hour of the film, Cameron reminds the audience why he’s considered the king of the blockbuster, with a rousing and exhilarating extended climax that ranks as some of the most thrilling action and spectacle I’ve seen in ages. There are undeniably flaws to pick apart in The Way of Water, but Cameron is first and foremost a big-picture filmmaker, and the best way to watch this is to simply let the spectacle wash over you. There’s really nothing like it.

5. Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-wook)

With his twisty, lurid, and perverse thrillers like Oldboy and The Handmaiden, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook has established himself as a modern master of suspense, following in the same lineage as Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. His latest film Decision to Leave is perhaps his most Hitchcockian offering yet, a masterful Vertigo-esque exploration of obsession, lust, and identity. The film follows a veteran detective (Park Hae-il) as he investigates the mysterious death of a man on a mountaintop. He quickly comes to suspect the man’s widow (Tang Wei), but what starts as suspicion soon turns to infatuation. Decision to Leave is one of the best thrillers to come along in a long while — an elegant, romantic, beautifully crafted neo-noir with gorgeously lush imagery and mesmerizing editing. Park displays some of the most thrilling craftsmanship and formal mastery I’ve seen recently, deploying every trick at his command to put us in the headspace of the tortured, insomniac, infatuated detective at the center. Every scene is filled to the brim with playful camerawork, rapid-fire cutting, and all kinds of crazy dissolves, crossfades, and zooms. It’s a masterclass of pure directorial craft. And Tang Wei gives one of the most stunning performances of the year in a truly complex, layered, and mesmerizing turn.

4. Aftersun (dir. Charlotte Wells)

As young children, it’s impossible to imagine our parents as anything other than what they present to us. We build a perfect, infallible image of our parents in our mind at an age too young to understand that they might be going through problems of their own that we can’t yet comprehend. It’s only when we’re older that we can understand that our parents are complex, flawed people just like everyone else, and had more going on behind the scenes than we could’ve possibly realized as children. Aftersun, in a stunning directorial debut from Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, brings this feeling to life in devastating fashion. It’s one of the most deeply moving and beautifully rendered films of the last several years, following protagonist Sophie (Frankie Corio) as she reflects on a summer holiday in Turkey she took as an 11-year-old with her father Calum (Paul Mescal). Calum projects a sweet, goofy, unassuming exterior, but he’s hiding deeper feelings of unhappiness and anxiety that he doesn’t know how to express. These feelings go unsaid, and Sophie is left to piece them together as an adult while reflecting on the home movie footage she shot on a miniDV camera on vacation. Aftersun is deceptively simple and understated, telling its story through quiet grace notes and small details that steadily accumulate so that their cumulative impact only hits once the credits are already rolling. And it hits like a truck by the end, with its dreamy, sun-baked imagery and heartbreaking performances lingering in the brain long after the film is over. It’s a truly special film, and one that signifies a major new voice in cinema with Wells.

3. Nope (dir. Jordan Peele)

It’s no secret that Jordan Peele has quickly established himself as one of the most major and exciting cinematic voices in the mainstream, but both of his prior films feel minor in comparison

to this year’s Nope, which shoots Peele into the stratosphere and solidifies him as a modern master of his craft. It’s just about the most thrilling and original blockbuster to come along in a long, long time, following a brother and a sister (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) on an inland California ranch who wrangle horses for Hollywood productions; upon witnessing strange activity in the skies, they set out on a mission to document footage of it to prove its existence to the world.

There’s so much to pick apart in it — it’s a feast of Hollywood mythmaking that blends iconography from classic sci-fi, horror, and Westerns; it acknowledges the history of Black cowboys in the very origins of cinema itself; it’s about how the entertainment industry exploits tragedies, profits from disasters, and chews up and spits out people that it doesn’t really care about in the first place; it’s about the consuming nature of spectacle and the hubris that leads people to believe they can tame beasts beyond their control. And all throughout Nope, Peele deftly balances the intellectually stimulating ideas with a Spielbergian sense for popcorn entertainment and thrilling suspense. It’s formally and conceptually inventive in ways that no other sci-fi or horror film has been in years. Peele displays so much evocative and unforgettable imagery, from the vast open valleys of the ranch, to a deeply unnerving and claustrophobic glimpse into an alien digestive system, to a blood rain on a farmhouse, to the jaw-dropping creature design. It’s image-making at its finest. And Peele draws from the masters in his sheer command of craft, with a perfect handle on how to build suspense, withhold visual information until exactly the right moment, and utilize every inch of the massive frame to pack in details. The spectacle of it all is so enveloping. It's a true marvel of filmmaking, and an instant classic that only grows more rewarding on rewatch.

2. Tár (dir. Todd Field)

Years from now, when we look back on films that defined the year 2022, it’ll be hard to ignore Tár at the top of that list. Rarely do films come along with this kind of commanding precision and formal mastery, possessing such an instantly memorable and complex character as world-renowned classical conductor Lydia Tár (a towering Cate Blanchett in one of the greatest screen performances in years), who sees her public image rapidly unravel in the face of various controversies. Simply put, it’s one of the richest and most dense, complex, detailed, and nuanced films in a long time.

Tár is, above all, a film about reckoning with the personal and professional consequences of flying too close to the sun, and how guilt can manifest from ego and abuse of power. More than any other 2022 film, it feels truly relevant and tapped into “our current moment”, without the annoying condescension that such a statement can easily bring about. Field weaves in topics like the intense scrutinization of the public image, the relationship between social media and the public image, and an interrogation of our notion of celebrity, and treats them all with the complexity they deserve — the key is that Field knows that these are topics that can not, and should not, be easily resolved or reduced to black-and-white. It’s a tough tightrope to walk and shouldn’t work on paper, but Field succeeds by forcing us to confront every troubled facet of Lydia’s character as we take a deep dive into her psyche, anchored every step of the way by

Blanchett’s force of nature of a performance. Field so deftly handles her unraveling that watching the film is like watching a perfect balancing act run by a maestro. The structure of Field’s script is nothing less than masterful, refusing to hold our hand as he drops us directly into Lydia’s perspective and accumulates small scattered details that don’t click into place until later on, until it eventually builds to the most scathingly hilarious and cutting punchline of an ending possible. It’s an impossible film to forget, and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it for the foreseeable future.

1. The Fabelmans (dir. Steven Spielberg)

Steven Spielberg has been telling the story of his childhood and fractured family life throughout his entire illustrious career — whether it’s through the domestic troubles in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the childhood loneliness of E.T., or the complicated father figures he works into Catch Me if You Can or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. But he’s always surrounded these themes with genre trappings and broader narratives. In his latest offering The Fabelmans, Spielberg does away with all subtext and moves his personal story completely to the foreground. Telling the story of his own upbringing, Spielberg swaps himself out for his stand-in Sammy Fabelman (played primarily as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle), following Sammy as he falls in love with the art of filmmaking while struggling to deal with the growing rift between his parents (Michelle Williams and Paul Dano).

Make no mistake, though; The Fabelmans is far from a self-congratulatory pat on Spielberg’s own back. Rather, it’s a towering work of self-reflection and personal catharsis, and easily the most emotionally raw, vulnerable, and honest that Spielberg has ever been. To watch The Fabelmans is to watch Spielberg exorcise his demons over the course of 150 minutes, and in the process, land on an uncommonly resonant truth and catharsis. Simply put, so much of the film lands with the impact of a freight train. But as devastating as The Fabelmans can be, it’s also as wistful and yearning and exhilarating as anything Spielberg has made. Just watch the sheer youthful energy and visual ingenuity in how Spielberg stages the sequences of his teenage self making war movies and westerns with his friends. It’s an absurd flex for such an established legend to make a movie about how not only did he have a gift for filmmaking as young as 6 years old (!), but still has that gift at 75. But if anyone’s earned that right, of course, it’s Spielberg. It’s also one of the definitive testimonies to the complexities of filmmaking, the complications that naturally come with choosing to shoot your world through a camera lens, and the inner complications that arise in someone like Sammy when creating art to put out into the world. By the time it wraps up with an instant all-timer of an ending, featuring an unforgettable cameo for the ages and a hilariously tongue-in-cheek final shot that serves as a perfectly fitting capstone to Spielberg’s mythmaking, I was practically levitating out of the theater. The Fabelmans is one of the defining films of Spielberg’s career, a revelatory late-period masterwork that stands tall alongside his vast array of classics.