Let me level with you: Making a list of the best movies of the year is impossible. It’s highly personal. It’s trying to rank art, which is absurd. There are thousands of movies, and I can only reasonably see several hundred, and this is my job. It’s a task nobody should really undertake.
But undertake it we do, because even a list that’s taste-driven and necessarily partial can be a fun exercise in reading the culture. What did this year in movies serve up? Lots of satire, lots of horror, lots of examinations of the past to see what it teaches us about the present and the future. Watching the year’s best movies (according to me) is one way to see the rich variety of vital work still being done on screens big and small ones, and it reminds us that cinema remains a vital art, even in 2022.
So without further ado, here are the 25 best films of 2022, how and why you should watch them, and a list of honorable mentions to check out, too.
25. Jackass Forever
You want me to explain the inclusion of Jackass Forever on this list? Well, have you seen it? I have, and discovered it was as cathartic, unhinged, and weirdly good-hearted as any of its predecessors. Yes, it’s a movie about (mostly) dudes doing really stupid things together, and that’s what makes it great. Jackass Forever is the first of the films to add a new cast, because Johnny Knoxville and his long-suffering pals are hovering around 50 these days. They’re a lot more brittle than they were in the 1990s. And the new members are delighted to be in the movie we used to watch! Who can blame them? They have taken on a high, low calling: to be the fools who prostrate themselves across a pile of mousetraps or take an enormous belly flop for the camera, for us.
How to watch it: Jackass Forever is streaming on Paramount+ and available to digitally rent or purchase.
24. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
The summer’s funniest movie might have been Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, based on short films that Jenny Slate (who voices Marcel) and Dean Fleischer-Camp (who directs the film) made for YouTube over a decade ago. Slate and Fleischer-Camp were married in 2012; they’ve since split up, and in a somewhat remarkable fashion, they explored that experience obliquely in this feature. The protagonist, Marcel, is a 1-inch-high shell (with sneakers) who lives in an Airbnb rented by a newly single filmmaker named Dean, who decides to make a documentary about his tiny new pal. It’s hilarious and extremely sweet, and also somehow skirts the edge of over-sentimentality with aplomb — a feel-good movie that’s not like anything you’ve seen before.
How to watch it: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is available to digitally rent or purchase.
23. Women Talking
The story of Women Talking springs out of a horrifying true story from 2011, in which seven men from an ultra-conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia (populated by the descendants of the Eastern Europeans who settled there in 1874) were convicted of drugging and serially raping over 100 women from their community. For the film version, writer and director Sarah Polley did what every good adaptation should do and found her version of the story inside the original. With a cast that includes Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand (in a tiny but thematically crucial role), she tells a story about learning to unlearn oppression, about embracing freedom after violence, as the women of the colony decide whether to stay, fight, or flee. It’s a skillfully made, conversation-forward movie that unpacks various ways women have responded to violence and abuse over centuries and across the world: living with subjugation, fighting it, fleeing it, or trying to reform society from within. It imagines a…