This was the year many went back to the movies, and the movies were waiting for us. While some of the year’s biggest franchises disappointed, just below the surface was a colorful array of cinematic pleasures sure to satisfy those with an interest in art that challenges, inspires, frustrates, and rewards. These are the movies I loved most in 2022.
10. Glass Onion
A good whodunit always eats the rich, but few devotees have a carver as sharp as Rian Johnson, whose two Benoit Blanc mysteries precisely identify the villains of our world and vivisect them with glee. In Knives Out, it was a family of entitled blue bloods—a reliable wrongdoer—who earned our scorn, but in the superior Glass Onion, Johnson sets his blade on tech-bro billionaires, men’s rights activists, and YouTube influencers. With a perfectly calibrated performance by Daniel Craig at its core, Glass Onion builds its clockwork structure around a thorough condemnation of an Elon Musk-like villain played with Twitter Blue smarm by Edward Norton, delivering all the satisfaction of a mystery resolved, while providing plenty more to chew on.
9. Athena
Roger Ebert once wrote: “It’s not what a movie is about. It’s how it’s about it.” That’s the only way to explain what’s so special about Athena, a modern war film by Romain Gavras. Set in a French suburb, it’s a classical tale of three brothers who occupy conflicting positions in an escalating standoff between police and a band of rebels seeking justice for state violence. One is a cop, another is a general in the rebel army, and the third is a drug dealer looking for a way out. Its beats are familiar to students of tragedy, but the film is enlivened by the actors’ unfiltered performances and Gavras’ virtuosic direction, particularly his physics-defying long takes. While the consistency of its politics have been the subject of much debate, the power of his filmmaking is undeniable.
8. To Leslie
Andrea Riseborough is a victim of her own success. One of the finest actors working today, Riseborough has never achieved stardom in part because of how she disappears into her characters. In To Leslie, she gets a rare starring role, playing a single mom and lottery winner who, after wasting her winnings on booze, seeks redemption with her grown son (Owen Teague) and love with a tender motel owner (Marc Maron). It’s a country song set to film, but it tiptoes past its cliches on the strength of Riseborough’s raw, radiant work. She soft-pedals Leslie’s redemption, accentuating her weaknesses and hiding her virtues, waiting patiently until we can summon the mercy in ourselves that Leslie, the film argues, so richly deserves.
7. A Love Song
The precocious debut from writer-director Max Walker-Silverman, A Love Song is a neo-Western about two old friends who reconnect in the desert and make one last attempt at romance, but really it’s a showcase for longtime character actor Dale Dickey. You know her face; it’s unforgettable, but here she makes a name for herself with her portrayal of Faye, a woman weathered by life but holding out for happiness. The script gives her only the bare bones of a character. We don’t know how she ended up living in a trailer in a desert campground, or why she decided to reach out to her grade school chum Lito (Wes Studi), but Dickey’s majestically restrained performance reveals more than words can explain. A whole life, really. It’s a capstone to an impressive career, and a performance 30 years in the making.
6. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
An investigation, an elegy, and an impassioned argument for the importance of physical media in a digital age, Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a documentary built around a scant bit of home movie footage taken in a Polish town in 1938. The reel captures the precious banality of life before the war with a twist: Many of the town’s residents had never seen a movie camera before, so they’re all standing around looking straight into it, giving first-time director Bianca Stigter an opportunity to get to know each face, investigate their lives, and unearth their tragic fates. Replaying the footage over and over, Stigter slows down our minds and hearts, asking us to look closer and see the world anew, no matter how much it may hurt.
5. Decision to Leave
Since Alfred Hitchcock left us, many filmmakers have jockeyed for his crown as master of suspense. Only Park Chan-wook deserves it. The director of Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Stoker trades in euphoric tension, keeping the viewer on the edge of their seat as they follow his macabre plots, but managing to make them laugh and swoon while they grab their armrests. Decision to Leave, about a detective who falls in love with a woman who may have murdered her husband, is an old story. But Park’s mastery of craft—there is nary a wasted moment here—and his ability to see his murder plot as thriller and rom-com at once is what earns him his spot on the throne.
For as long as cinema has existed, Hollywood has dreamed of flying. George Méliès took viewers on A Trip to the Moon. Howard Hughes spent nearly his entire fortune on Hell’s Angels. Capturing the majesty of flight is what cinema was made for, which is probably why I’m willing to overlook the flaws of Top Gun: Maverick: its sorely underwritten love interest and the bland, interchangeable set of young pilots who gun for the respect of their instructor, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. The film has four unforgettable flight sequences, with director Joseph Kosinski navigating the complex choreography of the sky better than anyone has ever done it. With a compelling performance by Tom Cruise that harkens back to an era in which movie stardom was at its apex, Top Gun: Maverick isn’t a perfect movie, but when it takes flight, it soars.
3. Happening
Released in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, this French abortion drama was celebrated for its timing, but its real urgency comes from within. When I began watching this film of a young woman carrying an unwanted pregnancy, I sensed it was set in a dystopian near-future. It has that oppressive, apocalyptic feeling. A few minutes later, I was shocked to discover the film was actually set in early ’60s France, when the procedure was illegal and abortion-seekers—here a young woman played intensely by Anamaria Vartolomei—had to risk ostracization, imprisonment, and death to get an abortion. Masterfully directed by Audrey Diwan, the film evokes both our past and, unbelievably, our dystopian present at once, forging a reality that’s both timeless and terrifying. This is happening, then and now.
The first explicitly autobiographical film from Steven Spielberg is one of his best. It’s the story of a child formed by family dysfunction whose burgeoning passion for cinema (don’t call it a hobby) helps him navigate the world. The Fabelmans has a few stumbles along the way, but it’s anchored by a dazzling debut performance by newcomer Gabriel LaBelle as the young filmmaker. Spielberg (with an assist from regular co-writer Tony Kushner) achieves something close to cinematic bliss in the final act, and all without the guardrails and signposts of genre. Telling a story about aliens or dinosaurs is relatively straightforward, but diving into the most painful parts of your psyche and forging something just as magical? It might be Spielberg’s greatest achievement yet.
1. The Eternal Daughter
People will tell you that you need to see the first two films in writer-director Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical trilogy—2019’s The Souvenir and 2021’s The Souvenir Part II—to appreciate The Eternal Daughter. They’re wrong. Yes, it follows the same characters, filmmaker Julie Harte and her mother, Rosalind Hart, although in this one, they’re both played by Tilda Swinton (she only played Rosalind in the other films). The actress gives a remarkably nuanced dual performance as a mother and grown child spending a holiday together in an eerie, isolated British hotel. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the film had no written script, and Swinton essentially improvised the dialogue. The film’s understanding of the mother-daughter relationship is astute, but what dazzled me about The Eternal Daughter is its portrayal of the creative process. As Julie works to write a screenplay about her mom, Hogg miraculously conjures the liminal space between reality and art. To say more would ruin its surprises, but The Eternal Daughter shows us, with imagination and remarkable craft, how artists live in the worlds they’re creating—even as they create them.