Even as the movie industry continues to recover from the pandemic’s debilitating effects, the ongoing story of film is not about loss of quality. This was a year filled with cinematic delights from every part of the world, with first-time filmmakers doing everything they could to shock audiences, and old masters delving into their darkest reminiscences for indelible works of memoir. I remain concerned by the fact that most of my favorite 2022 films didn’t come from major Hollywood studios—an industry that once prided itself on producing a breadth of stories currently seems too focused on the biggest and loudest—but this was still an unforgettable year.
10. Murina (directed by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović)
A razor-sharp debut from the Croatian filmmaker Kusijanović, Murina is a domestic drama set on the stunning shores of the Adriatic. It’s centered on an inscrutable teenager, Julija (Gracija Filipović), who’s a whiz at spearfishing for eels but a destabilizing presence in her household, clashing with both her father and mother as she yearns for more independence. Hope arrives in the form of the businessman Javier (Cliff Curtis), who is looking to buy her father’s land, and Kusijanović adeptly dials up the tension as Julija flirts with Javier in an effort to be whisked away from her provincial existence. The film looks gorgeous, its taut plot is perfectly structured, and the lead performance (another debut) is remarkable—it’s a gripping hit that you can recommend to anyone.
9. Nope (Jordan Peele)
With every film Peele directs, his storytelling ambitions grow, and he has not lost any willingness to take risks with the budgets he’s given and tell stories about the kinds of characters Hollywood rarely puts on-screen. This would be refreshing in any period, but it’s particularly bracing in 2022, when major studios have drifted away from originality. Nope courses with anger and confusion over how people see and process terrible things. Yes, it’s about a ragtag bunch of film-industry castoffs chasing a UFO around the California mountains with cameras, but it’s a horror film that manages to cleverly interrogate the genre without sacrificing the thrills.
8. After Yang (Kogonada)
I have a major weakness for small-scale science fiction, tales of robots exploring higher consciousness, and the work of Colin Farrell (who was also incredible in The Banshees of Inisherin this year). So After Yang was practically made for me, yet still, the director Kogonada’s second feature exceeded my expectations, finding new life in the familiar tale of a malfunctioning android. Buoyed by Kogonada’s whisper-quiet storytelling sensibility, After Yang delves into a future that’s neither dystopian nor utopian, in which a family is shattered by the loss of Yang (Justin H. Min), who is both a nanny and an artificial son of sorts to Jake ( Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith). The emotional revelations build slowly but land with a thunderclap. (It also has the single best opening-credit sequence of any 2022 film.)
7. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun)
A film that feels like it crawled out of some dark corner of the internet, Schoenbrun’s debut narrative feature is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen about the experience of being too online—of clicking one page too deep or watching one video too many. It’s a quiet but still brain-curdling and frightening contemporary folktale about a lonely teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb), who embarks on an inscrutable viral phenomenon called the World’s Fair Challenge. Through Casey’s laptop footage and videos of other “players” around the world, Schoenbrun documents the way a virtual experiment can take on terrifying weight and drive users to unravel in unpredictable ways. In a year of great debuts, Schoenbrun’s is the best.
6. Armageddon Time (James Gray)
Armageddon…
Read More: The Best Movies of 2022 in a Year of Cinematic Delights