The last-minute scramble to share best-of-the-year lists while voters across guilds and other bodies fill out their own ballots means plenty of films will disappear into the ether. That’s especially true of indie films and especially indie films released earlier in the year. While indies like “TÁR,” “Aftersun,” “Bones and All,” “The Inspection,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and “Women Talking” deservedly sit atop the awards conversation and continue to dominate with nominations among blocs like the Independent Spirit and Gothams voters, there are plenty, plenty more that are well worth your time.
Below, IndieWire has rounded up 15 great indies from throughout 2022 that are worth a first or second look, ranging from homegrown American micro-budget movies to documentaries and foreign films released in arthouse theaters and on streaming platforms. Many of these appeared on IndieWire’s list of the Best Films of 2022 So Far published at the year’s halfway point, but six months of more films meant that some of these didn’t make the cut for our 25 Best Movies of the Year published on December 1.
Nicholas Barber, Robert Daniels, Jude Dry, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, and Susannah Gruder contributed to this story.
“The African Desperate”
One of the only Black students on a mostly-white art school campus, Palace (Diamond Stingily) is exhausted. She just sat through her final MFA review with four white professors, where they approached her work with a mix of hyper-seriousness and outright condescension, flinging art-world jargon and vaguely racist assessments at her with abandon while maintaining an air of performative woke-ness.
“People out here really want me to get mad,” she tells her friend Hannah (Erin Leland) afterward as they sit by a lake near their bucolic Upstate New York campus. “And it’s like, I don’t wanna fight you.”
Palace oscillates between this sense of incredulity and indifference as she encounters various shades of ignorance and insensitivity from her teachers and peers. With its everyday setting and social interactions mixed with an obtrusive, innovative soundtrack (composed by the band Aunt Sister, along with Colin Self and Ben Babbit) and hyperactive visual style, “The African Desperate” straddles the line between shock and banality. —Susannah Gruder
Read IndieWire’s full review of “The African Desperate.”
“Anais in Love”
The fizzy yet poignant tale of a millennial who speeds through life as if she’s afraid that it might catch her, Bourgeois-Tacquet’s debut feature needs all of 11 milliseconds to give us a clear impression of its title character. We instantly surmise that life has been a little too possible for Anaïs, as it often seems to be for people so beautiful that even their most fleeting whims can reshape the world. We already sense that she’s always in a hurry because she’s always late, that she’s always late because she’s always present, and that she’s always present because she can’t stomach the idea of being anywhere else. We suspect that Anaïs has been seeing things through the eye of a storm for so long that she’s convinced herself the weather in Paris is always sunny, just as we suspect that if the film around her were any more French it would probably be a croissant. That’s all in the first shot. —David Ehrlich
Read IndieWire’s full review of “Anais in Love.”
“Armageddon Time”
Hear us out: While James Gray’s semiautobiographical, 1980s-set New York coming-of-age piece premiered to solid word of mouth at Cannes and enjoyed acclaimed runs at the New York Film Festival and beyond, plus backing from Focus Features, it’s fallen largely out of sway amid this year’s awards contenders.
From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich: Only James Gray would saddle a modest self-portrait about his memories of sixth grade with a title that makes it sound more like “Apocalypse Now” than any other film ever has (a reference to candidate Reagan’s nuclear hawkishness, “Armageddon Time” borrows its name from a 1979 Willie Williams reggae jam famously covered by The Clash). Likewise, only James Gray would render that self-portrait into such a powerful story of post-war assimilation that a family outing to see “Private Benjamin” might resonate with the same cosmic scale as a trip to Neptune.
“The Cathedral”
Released by MUBI earlier this year, Ricky D’Ambrose’s devastating family odyssey “The Cathedral” is a sort of anti-“Boyhood” that unsentimentally follows two decades in the life of a tristate family. The film garnered three Film Independent Spirit Award nominations and a Gotham nod for Best Feature, and while’s it’s popped up on numerous high-end best-of lists, including Film Comment’s, “The Cathedral” has flown largely under the radar. Brian d’Arcy James is the perennially humiliated and f*ckless patriarch of a family that D’Ambrose observes with a patient distance that’s never clinical. In a climactic throwdown fight scene that would’ve been played up for dramatics in any other movie, D’Ambrose istead cuts to a water glass shattering on the floor amid the scuffle, fixing his camera on it.
“Clara Sola”
In some ways, Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is the most liberated woman in the verdant, remote, and deceptively matriarchal Costa Rican village where she works for God. A semi-feral 40-year-old who — legend has it — was once visited by the Virgin Mary, Clara has been molded into a faith healer by her ultra-religious mother (Flor María Vargas Chaves as Fresia), who’s successfully rebranded her daughter’s curved spine and childlike intellect as symptoms of divinity.
Aside from miracles on demand, little is expected of her. Clara is free to spend her days wandering through the forest, brushing her beloved white horse, Yuca, and making adorable homes for the beetles she finds in the wild. She’s activated whenever someone with a few dollars to spare needs a leg healed or a cancer cured, but for the most part, Clara is left to do as she pleases.
That is, as long as it doesn’t displease her mother. Fresia keeps her only surviving daughter on a tight leash, especially now that Clara’s sister — the jewel of her family — has ascended to heaven, leaving behind a bright-eyed daughter of her own (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza plays the teenage Mariá). Clara is treated like a young girl, even though she’s closer to menopause than puberty. Mariá bathes her and brushes her thick mane of black hair; Fresia chastises her for sticking her head out of the car window (“You’ll get sick”) and makes Clara spit out the stolen cloves she hides on her tongue. She rubs chili oil on her daughter’s fingers when the telenovelas they watch at night inspire Clara to rub her “touch-me-not.” —DE
“Flux Gourmet”
Peter Strickland serves up another gonzo confection with his stomach-churning haute cuisine satire “Flux Gourmet.” The film, which centers on members of a “sonic collective” of musicians who make performance art and music using foods and the sounds they make, also marks something of a homecoming for the British director in two ways. The film not only pulls from Strickland’s autobiography, as the filmmaker and his friends launched their own Sonic Catering Band in the mid-’90s, but “Flux Gourmet” is also an immersive auditory experience a la his 2012 giallo pastiche “Berberian Sound Studio.” Working with sound designer Tim Harrison and electronic recordings from his own band, Strickland has made a film that deserves a big-screen canvas thanks to its lush colors, but also plays just as well on headphones.
Strickland this time trades in giallo for gastronomy in following a collective of gourmands and the internal power struggles that unfold within their midst. At the head of the collective is Fatma Mohamed as Elle di Elle, a toxic creative leader if there ever was one, lording over members played by the likes of Asa Butterfield and Ariane Labed. There’s also Makis Papadimitriou as the hapless journalist tracking their residency at a large estate owned by patron Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). He’s beset with a host of digestive problems that cause excessive and compulsive flatulence, but as Strickland explained to IndieWire, the film sets out to de-stigmatize and avoid making light of such ailments that usually serve as the butt of all jokes in comedies. —RL
“Great Freedom”
In most stories, the liberation of the concentration camps is the beginning of the end of a nightmare. But Austrian film “Great Freedom” shows that the truth wasn’t as simple for everyone. In many cases, LGBTQ+ concentration camp inmates were simply transferred to prison cells.
That’s the most inhuman scandal explored in director Sebastian Meise’s 2021 Cannes Un Certain Regard winner, which repped Austria at the 2022 Oscars: Germany’s Paragraph 175, a provision of a German criminal code that reigned from 1871 to (shockingly) early 1994, criminalizing all hom*osexual acts between men. The story is told through the eyes and heavy, wearied soul of the fictional Hans Hoffmann, who is repeatedly imprisoned over decades in post-World War II Germany for being gay. He’s played by Franz Rogowski, the muse of German director Christian Petzold (“Undine,” “Transit”) and one of the most striking actors working in European cinema and beyond.
See AlsoA 2022 Indie Movies GuideOver the course of his imprisonment, Hans forms a deep but often volatile bond with longtime cellmate Viktor (played by fellow Austrian actor Georg Friedrich), at turns platonic, romantic, sexual, and parasitic as Hans slowly resigns himself to the belief that life won’t change and his may perhaps even be best lived out within the drab, crumbling walls of the dank prison. —RL
“Montana Story”
Both Owen Teague and Haley Lu Richardson are perfectly cast in the sibling drama “Montana Story.” Both have the kind of rough-and-tumble exteriors you’d expect from a person living in the present-day American West. While not a prototypical Western, there are no gunfights or lawmen, this neo-Western covers the new (but familiar) confrontations happening among the mountains and the brush: Indigenous land stripped of resources and white men as a destructive, toxic influence. Amid the big sky, and wide landscapes captured by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens is a modest, tempestuous narrative. Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s “Montana Story” is a patient, captivating portrait of the past that stays with us long after the wind stops blowing. —Robert Daniels
Read IndieWire’s full review of “Montana Story.”
“Neptune Frost”
If the noblest aim of the artist is to become a vessel for divine connection to creative source, then Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman are truly touched. The sheer amount of hypnotic imagery and music on display in “Neptune Frost,” the film chapter in the multifaceted project “MartyrLoserKing” which includes three albums and a graphic novel, is bursting with enough life and ingenuity to fill a solo exhibition.
In this fantastical Afrofuturist universe, characters with names like Memory and Psychology traipse amongst whimsical sculptural sets, draped in art-piece costumes and makeup so eye-popping it makes the looks on “Euphoria” seem conventional. The music is alive and thrumming, tapped into a twin spirit of joy and protest. While these elements never fully cohere to form a discernible narrative in “Neptune Frost,” there is fun to be had in surrendering to the fluidity of its ingenuity. —Jude Dry
“On the Count of Three”
Jerrod Carmichael’s “On the Count of Three” isn’t super heavy on the kind of koan-like quips that have always lent his confrontational standup comedy its velvet punch, but this one — delivered in the opening minutes of his suicide-dark but violently sweet directorial debut — resonates loud enough to echo throughout the rest of the film: “When you’re a kid they tell you the worst thing in life is to be a quitter. Why? Quitting’s amazing. It just means you get to stop doing something you hate.”
Lifelong best friends Val (Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) are both ready to give up. The first time we see them they’re standing in the parking lot outside an upstate New York strip club at 10:30 a.m. with handguns pointed at each other’s heads as part of a double-suicide pact. Nobody’s laughing, but you can already feel the love between them; something about the look in their eyes reads more like “sisters who are pregnant at the same time” than it does “strangers who are about to shoot each other in the face.” —DE
“Peter von Kant”
François Ozon made his best film in years with “Peter von Kant,” one that will be seen by few but relished by all who do. The movie is both a response to and a sort-of remake of workaholic, died-as-he-lived German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” about a sad*stic fashion designer’s taste for demeaning those who try to love her. Here, Ozon has gender-flipped that lead, centering his movie on a megalomaniacal film director (Denis Menochet, who has a physical resemblance to Fassbinder in this movie) who vampirically sucks the joie de vivre out of anyone in his fray, from his uncannily devoted assistant Karl (Stefan Crepon) to the beautiful boy he loves and is determined to make a star (Khalil Ben Gharbia).
This entire 80-minute movie takes place inside Peter von Kant’s apartment, where he’s visited by the likes of legendary diva singer Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani, herself a legendary diva) and his estranged mother (played by Schygulla, one of the Fassbinder women who also starred in “Bitter Tears”). Gay enough for you? “Peter von Kant” is both an agonized cry from a director’s soul and an answer to Ozon’s own obsession with Fassbinder, which dates back to the French director’s debut feature, “Water Drops on Burning Rocks,” itself an adaptation of a Fassbinder play. —RL
“Resurrection”
Fiendishly splitting the difference between the low-rent parental vigilante movies that will always live on basic cable and the high-brow polymorphic freakouts that all but died with Andrzej Żuławski, Andrew Semans’ aptly named “Resurrection” may never quite reach “Possession” levels of psychic collapse (what does?), but it sure gets a hell of a lot closer than the broad familiarity of its setup might lead you to expect.
Rebecca Hall, who can often be found starring in smartly f*cked-up Sundance films when she’s not at the fest for directing exquisite prestige fare, plays a type-A+ Albany biologist who rocks a ferocious power suit at work, dominates a married coworker on her own time, and runs home at an Olympic sprint so that she can supervise the teenage daughter she’s raised by herself.
The grip she maintains over her life is so tight that everything in it seems grasping for air, and when a man from her past (an ominously cast Tim Roth) shows up out of the blue with a wild claim that you really have to hear for yourself, we start to understand why our heroine has developed such a pathological need for control. From that broadly familiar setup, Semans unpacks the kind of guffaw-inducing, hand-over-your-mouth cinematic breakdown that epitomizes the guilty pleasures of a typical psychological thriller at the same time as it transcends them. His artful storytelling and fearless cast help leverage any number of schlocky tropes into an unforgettable, swing-for-the-fences examination of a trauma that can’t be rationalized away.—DE
“Soft & Quiet”
With her workday over and some casual racism behind her, school teacher Emily (a riveting Stefanie Estes) is about to set out on a very important endeavor: gathering a gaggle of like-minded white women for what she hopes will be the first meeting of many. She’s got everything set: a curated guest list, a sunny room in a local church, a large pot of coffee, and sweet treats galore. She really needs this to go well, but even in her most violent, sick, stupid fantasies, Emily could never imagine where this would actually go. First-time feature filmmaker Beth De Araújo, however, possessing both incredible filmmaking acumen and some righteous anger, can.
De Araújo and her cast and crew shot the film from start to finish four evenings in a row, with the filmmaker picking the fourth night’s version as the final film, with a handful of scenes from the third night’s shoot interspersed — seamlessly — into the final cut. The gambit pays off in a myriad of ways; not only does the real-time conceit keep the tension high, but its high-wire demands make clear just how talented of a filmmaker de Araújo is. Even moments when she and cinematographer Greta Zozula are resting on one character’s face or honing in on a single prop (good luck forgetting about Emily’s pie), likely in service to allowing the rest of the cast and crew to assemble new set-ups just off-camera, are suffused with both artistry and drama.
But by the time “Soft & Quiet” zips into its non-stop final half, with Emily and pals cooking up a plan to get a “revenge” on the innocent sisters through a little breaking and entering (and, then, of course, more) that fades away. All that matters is the now, as stomach-churning and, yes, as timely as it all is. Eventually morphing into something of a home invasion thriller, even that admittedly basic framing — all the better to obscure the gut-punch shocks that de Araújo unfurls in rapid fashion — can’t quite impart the deep-seated terror the film will inspire in its audience. Who is in your house, you might wonder, and were they always here? What will they do? What will they destroy? Who will they hurt? And how might we ever get them out? —Kate Erbland
“Speak No Evil”
There are some horror films that rattle you to the core, that make you scream and cover your eyes, your heart beating out of your chest until you feel faint and slightly nauseous. And there are some that sink deep into your bones and stay there, unsettling your psyche and coloring nearly every subsequent event you experience with an overpowering sense of dread. “Speak No Evil,” the latest film from Danish director Christian Tafdrup, is both of these, a masterly work of sad*stic and painstakingly drawn-out social horror that sits with you long afterward, like the dull ache from a deeply lodged splinter.
It almost feels wrong to recommend this film to others — why would I inflict this inhumane experience on someone else? I’ll leave audiences with a warning, one that should lure in the kind of viewer who sees the value in the brilliant brutality of such a work. And for those willing to take the plunge, the pay-off is enormous: “Speak No Evil” is the most cunningly depraved horror film in years, offering a piercing commentary on the ways we accommodate others to the point of self-subjugation.—SG
Read IndieWire’s fullreview of “Speak No Evil.”
“Three Minutes — A Lengthening”
After its pizzicato opening theme, “Three Minutes — A Lengthening” goes quiet for a little bit while showing the three minutes of footage referred to in the title. The only noise on the soundtrack is the whir of a projector, and the only images on the screen are taken from an amateur holiday film shot in a European town in the first half of the 20th century. Some of it is in black and white, some of it has pale colors. There are tree-lined cobbled streets, and apartment blocks with shutters and iron balconies. People wave and smile at the camera, jostling to stay in shot, apparently hypnotized by the novel technology before them. They all seem healthy, reasonably well off, and fundamentally ordinary. And that’s it. The footage comes to an end.
But Bianca Stigter, the Dutch director of “Three Minutes,” doesn’t move onto another set of images. For the remaining hour of her documentary essay, she replays the same fragments over and over, freeze-framing, rewinding, zooming in on particular faces, items of clothing, and architectural details. It should seem repetitive, but it grips the attention from start to finish. —Nicholas Barber
Read IndieWire’s full review of “Three Minutes — A Lengthening.”
