Considering the threat that streaming and the inability to shake COVID-era habits have posed to the survival of the theatrical experience, it makes sense that movies in general have retaliated by going so ridiculously big that they demand to be seen on the most giant screen possible. Extravagant maximalism has been the dominant approach of this past year's films, exemplified by the Best Picture Oscar frontrunner and word-of-mouth box-office smash Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is true to its title in its multiverse-spanning size and scope. Every kind of movie imaginable reached for formidable grandeur, from sequels (Top Gun: Maverick) to biopics (Elvis), extending even to documentaries (the shot-for-IMAX Moonage Daydream). James Cameron demonstrated how massive he can go when given 13 years to perfect 3D-rendered spectacle with Avatar: The Way of Water, while Indian filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli emerged as a thrilling new voice in mammoth-scale action cinema with RRR.
But of course, even in a year defined by eye-popping and screen-filling hugeness, it's worth noting that bigger doesn't always mean better. After all, the best film of 2022 is focused on merely two feuding friends living on an Irish island so tiny that it feels like a land time forgot.
1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh). The escalating tragedies that ensue when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) forcefully cuts off ties with regular drinking buddy Padraic (Colin Farrell, both pricelessly funny and heartbreaking in a career-best turn) resonate with themes of mortality, the things we value most in life, and the pigheaded stubbornness of war. McDonagh, who's four-for-four in his filmmaking career, masterfully balances the piercing melancholy with hilarious, precisely structured verbal wit that shines even more on a second viewing. He also suffuses the film with a dark enchantment that makes it feel like a folk tale sure to endure for centuries.
2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells). Delivering what feels like an instant classic with her feature debut, Wells digs into the knotty complexity of being an adult looking back at one's childhood and reckoning with who your parents really were and what they were going through in those formative years. The beautifully fluid editing glides between past and present with a poetic sense of how memory works, while the central father/daughter relationship (played with warmth and authenticity by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio) is captured with powerfully moving intimacy. With how this movie uses Freddie Mercury and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," it may no longer be possible to hear that song without instantly tearing up.
3. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). There's a wild, exhilarating imagination to how the directing duo known as Daniels situate the story of a dissatisfied laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh, stunning in a role that showcases her gift for emotional depth while not skimping on her action hero chops either) who finds herself traveling through the multiverse within dozens of different scenarios, genres, and visual forms. But perhaps even more impressive is how they anchor it with a profound, moving human story of learning to embrace the universe you occupy and the people you surround yourself with. In a triumphant comeback performance as Evelyn's husband, Ke Huy Quan exudes pure decency--and gets to kick ass too!
4. Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgen). The singularly innovative rock icon David Bowie is honored with a documentary that miraculously manages to be as bold and form-busting as he is, courtesy of master non-fiction impressionist Morgen. Assembled as a dazzling collage of live concert footage, film clips, and psychedelic space oddities, this offers a visual and sonic experience like no other. And in the interview snippets we hear of Bowie analyzing his shape-shifting methods and admitting to artistic insecurities, the legend comes to life as both more human and even more of a mind-bending genius than he already seemed to be.
5. Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron). While the first Avatar stands as a unique achievement that introduced us to the planet of Pandora and to Cameron's pioneering use of 3D, this sequel manages to impress in its own distinct way, as perhaps the most lightning-paced three-hour epic ever, as well as a powerfully sincere hymn to the importance of family and of preserving nature. Cameron again manages to show us something truly new with the reach-out-and-touch-it vividness of his 3D underwater sequences, while the spectacularly executed, hour-long climax reaffirms him as a peerless director of action.
6. RRR (S.S. Rajamouli). It's a nifty coincidence to follow up one jaw-dropping, three-hour action epic on the list with another, though the ways in which RRR is different from Cameron's film marks Rajamouli as a genre artist with his own vital identity. There's a bit of George Miller and John Woo to the flamboyant delirium of his style, but also an infectious joyousness (exemplified by the spirited musical number that deploys Oscar-nominated song "Naatu Naatu") that's all his own. The warm buddy bond and vicious anti-colonial critique at the story's center ensure that the story is just as rousing as the ingenious action set pieces.
7. Benediction (Terence Davies). This indelibly haunting portrait of British poet Siegfried Sassoon (played as a young man by Jack Lowden, in the year's most undervalued lead performance, and in old age by Peter Capaldi), who goes from a traumatized World War I veteran using his art to object to the war's architects to a playboy within England's covert circle of gay artists to a tormented Catholic married to a woman, is so inventively shaped by Davies and alert to sad human truths that it transcends the biopic form. Davies' dialogue is addictively witty and sharp, while his charting of Sassoon's futile search for contentment is ultimately devastating.
8. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson). Daniel Craig's second outing as idiosyncratic, Southern-accented detective Benoit Blanc manages to improve on its predecessor by being both a more satisfyingly ensemble-cast-focused whodunnit (Janelle Monae is the acting MVP, in a shrewdly multi-faceted performance that was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination) and a far more deviously twisty and dense feat of narrative engineering. Johnson's ingenious conceit is to make the story itself resemble a glass onion, revealing more to the viewer's eye with every new layer.
9. Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino). It takes a lot of guts to make a cannibal romance, but in the end, it's much more the heart that Guadagnino brings to this simultaneously bloody and swoon-inducing road movie that proves definitive. The self-identified "eaters" of his film are marginalized outcasts traveling an evocatively desolate stretch of middle America in an existence of melancholy loneliness, which makes it all the more cathartic when the two lost souls at the center of the story (Timothee Chalamet, as magnetically vulnerable as ever, and Taylor Russell, whose emotional directness allows her to steal the movie from her better known co-lead) cut (bite?) through each other's defenses and form a real connection.
10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Ostlund). As ruthlessly precise as he is playfully provocative, Ostlund confidently unfurls a savage class satire that plays out in meticulously deadpan compositions and a clever variation on the classic three-act narrative structure. While the third act may be the most incisive when it comes to the sad impossibility of shaping a utopian society without a strict hierarchy, it's the second act that delivers the biggest comic wallop: an utterly hilarious all-timer of a gross-out sequence focused on a storm-tossed captain's dinner on a luxury yacht that's downright Tati-esque in its Swiss-watch-timed physical comedy.
And here are the next ten runners-up:
11. Nope (Jordan Peele). While Get Out and Us firmly established Peele as a filmmaker naturally attuned to both popcorn movie pleasures and brain-tickling subtext, this represents his most spectacular and thought-provoking filmmaking achievement yet for me. He brings a legitimately Spielbergian sense of wonder and terror to the film's big-scale alien invasion sequences, while also interrogating the very nature of spectacle itself--how we culturally process it, who benefits from it, and who is sometimes exploited for the sake of it (with a certain chimp unforgettably symbolizing the dangers of that exploitation).
12. Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine). Sure, some may ask: is this too high a ranking for such a proudly juvenile blast of comic anarchy? Honestly, though, if I were judging solely on the criterion of what provided the most sublime big-screen experience of the year, this would place even higher. I haven't laughed as loudly or consistently at a comedy in the post-vaccine era as I did at this, and not only is it the most unrelenting attack on the funny bone of the four-film series, but due to how close these daredevils are coming to an age where they can't put their bodies on the line, it's also the most poignant.
13. EO (Jerzy Skolimowski). Naturally, it's easy to fall in love with any movie featuring a big-eared, fuzzy-faced donkey as the lead character. But it's how imaginative and stylistically adventurous this particular film is in executing its "cute animal on a road trip" setup that makes it special. Skolimowski distills the premise down to its pure cinema essence, enveloping the viewer in striking, trippy imagery and music. In the process, he demonstrates how an octogenarian veteran auteur can shake up the medium with an experimental vigor that puts younger renegades to shame.
14. Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski). The awesome geographical scope and whooshing velocity of the aerial action combined with Tom Cruise's ageless star power make it clear why this attracted people back to movie theaters in droves. In addition to those considerable virtues, this above-expectations sequel possesses a mind and a heart that not all blockbusters (including the pretty-good-at-best first Top Gun) can lay claim to. In its most moving scene, a reunion between Cruise's Maverick and Val Kilmer's Iceman, it makes a case for revisiting and reckoning with the past that goes beyond one-dimensional nostalgia.
15. Armageddon Time (James Gray). Speaking of reckonings with the past that reject nostalgia, this stood apart from other recent auteur autobiographies (*cough* Spielberg's The Fabelmans *cough*) in being remarkably clear-eyed and tough-minded about the period in which its maker grew up. Without sacrificing his signature, textured classicism, Gray strikes a resonant modern chord in examining the bubble of white privilege that protected him during a childhood spent in 1980s New York City. As his grandfather, the formidable Anthony Hopkins is as staggering as he's ever been.
16. Elvis (Baz Luhrmann). It's easy to be cynical about rock star biopics--the undeserved success of Bohemian Rhapsody proves how formula can easily reign supreme--but then one comes around to invigoratingly shake up the form like Luhrmann's eye-popping, kinetic, inventive portrait of Elvis Presley (played by Austin Butler in a revelatory, soulful star turn). And in pitting the performer's countercultural, sexually liberated, Black-pioneer-honoring artistry against the conservative, capitalist maneuverings of Col. Parker (Tom Hanks), Luhrmann shows how Elvis' story is ultimately America's story too.
17. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater). It's outrageous that the year's best animated movie by far didn't even score a nomination in the Best Animated Feature Oscar category! Linklater has experimented with rotoscope animation before with dreamlike mind-benders Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, but here, in marrying that visual approach to the kind of disarmingly specific portrait of life in suburban Texas that he usually renders in live action (Dazed and Confused, Boyhood), he proves that he can be as precise a filmmaker as he is a disarmingly laid-back one.
18. Fire of Love (Sara Dosa). This offers all the visually stunning natural wonders that you'd want from a volcano-focused documentary bearing the National Geographic Films label, while also being more uniquely heartfelt and surreal to boot. Dosa captures how beautiful and how scary lava-spewing mountains can be with beautiful abstraction, while positioning the story of married volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft as a metaphor for how a couple's shared passion can be so powerful as to risk the lovers' very lives.
19. Babylon (Damien Chazelle). Admittedly, it's easy to see why this poison-tipped valentine to the late silent-film era of 1920s Hollywood earned hordes of detractors, with its hard-R-rated focus on debauched excess and plentiful bodily fluids. However, underneath that focus is a rich consideration of the wide chasm between the magic of the movies and the flawed, fragile mortality of the people committed to making them. Plus, with its lavish period trappings, dazzling camerawork, and energetic editing perfectly matched to Justin Hurwitz's earworm of a score, it manages to summon real movie magic of its own.
20. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras). Adopting an ingenious, bifurcated structure highlighting both the artistry and the political activism of acclaimed photographer Nan Goldin, Poitras illustrates how those two strands of Goldin's life are inextricably intertwined. Even more impressive, the film emerges as an ambitious documentary epic charting how those who are marginalized and, in some tragic cases, left to die to serve America's conservative, corporate interests continue to fight for their right to exist.
And here are 11 more movie highlights from 2022:
21. A Love Song (Max Walker-Silverman).
22. Official Competition (Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn).
23. Resurrection (Andrew Semans).
24. TAR (Todd Field).
25. Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup).
26. Vortex (Gaspar Noe).
27. The Batman (Matt Reeves).
28. X (Ti West).
29. Cow (Andrea Arnold).
30. The Menu (Mark Mylod).
31. Apples (Christos Nikou).
Special Recognition for Non-Eligible Work: The Survivor (Barry Levinson). This powerful chronicle of how boxer Harry Haft (Ben Foster, in a physically and emotionally committed tour de force) made it out of WWII concentration camps using his pugilistic talents bypassed theaters and went straight to HBO, where I wish more people caught it. Levinson has long been criminally underrated, and this reaffirms his gift for bringing authentic humanity and vibrant cinematic craft to fact-based stories.
As Yet Unseen: The Eternal Daughter, We're All Going to the World's Fair, Lost Illusions, Navalny, Descendant.
