We’re in the clubhouse turn of the awards season honoring the best movies of 2022. So it’s worth looking back on whatIndieWire’s critics survey of 165 film writerspicked as the 50 best movies of 2022 back in December, before the Oscar race had fully taken shape.
Read the full Top 50 list below.
The critics polled, hailing from North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, for a truly global perspective, were in astonishing agreement about their love of “TÁR.” Not only did they vote it as the best film of 2022, they gave it top honors for Best Director (Todd Field), Best Performance (Cate Blanchett), and Best Screenplay (Field).“TÁR” did receive six Academy Awards nominations, but its best chance for a prize remains Blanchett herself. She won the Golden Globe and BAFTA, but overall the film was more popular with critics groups than the organizations with voting bodies more similar to the Oscars. Likewise, the film that placed at number two on the Top 50 list, “Aftersun,” received Oscars recognition only in the Best Actor category for Paul Mescal —it also topped thelist of the best films of 2022chosen by IndieWire’s own critics. (Two of the films in the Top 10 here, “Decision to Leave” and “NOPE,” did not receive any Oscar nominations at all.)
“The Banshees of Inisherin,” which placed third, is still a major contender for Colin Farrell in the Best Actor race. He was awarded that prize by the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics, and, in the musical or comedy category, the Golden Globes.
It’s impossible not to recognize the momentum being gathered by the number four pick on IndieWire’s critics survey: “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It gained an early foothold in the race when it won Best Feature way back at the Gotham Awards on November 28. Since then, the accolades have piled up for lead actress Michelle Yeoh (from the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes) and supporting actor Ke Huy Quan (from Critics Choice, Golden Globes, and numerous critics associations, as well as a Gotham Award himself). But the film has been awarded the top prize by many groups: the Critics Choice Movie Awards, the Directors Guild of America (for directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), andthe Producers Guild. The last of these might be most telling for its Best Picture chancesat the Oscars because the top prize at the PGA Awards has gone on to win Best Picture 23 of the last 33 Academy Awards.
“Everything Everywhere” scored a particularly robust triumph at the Screen Actors Guid Awards February 26, winning Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), as well as Outstanding Cast, the SAGs’ version of Best Picture.
Other Oscar nominees for best picture in the Top 50 of IndieWire’s list include “The Fabelmans” at number five, “Top Gun: Maverick” at number nine, “Triangle of Sadness” at number 15, “Elvis” at 16, and “Women Talking” at 18. “Avatar: The Way of Water” clocked in at 30, and surging nominee “All Quiet on the Western Front” appeared at 32.
Here’s the full critics survey list.
50. “Jackass Forever”
Director: Jeff Tremaine
Cast: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, Wee Man
Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, Rachel WolfsonAccolades: Winner of Best Kiss (for Seth McInerey and a snake) at the MTV Movie & TV Awards
Read IndieWire’s Review: Despite its new failures and familiar assortment of dud stunts (Wee-Man being launched onto a pile of metal is a pretty lame payoff to that musical chairs gag), “Jackass Forever” inevitably benefits from a stronger emotional undertow than any of the series’ previous films. It’s always been kind of beautiful to see these guys act like they’re going to live forever. Haunted by the absence of lost friends and facing a pandemic-fueled world that forces us all to confront with death on a daily basis, “Jackass Forever” is all the more powerful because it was made by — and for — people who know that they won’t. —David Ehrlich
49. “Three Thousand Years of Longing”
Director: George Miller
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba
Read IndieWire’s Review: A bittersweet modern fairy tale from one of cinema’s most bombastic virtuosos, George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” might have some reservations about the 21st century — the movie often wrestles with the impact that science and technology might have on our ancient sense of wonder — but at the bottom of this tightly bottled epic sits a question that should resonate especially hard with people who have spent too many of the last 3,000 days stuck inside their homes with nothing but “content” to keep them company: Are stories enough to satisfy our lives? “Three Thousand Years of Longing” finds that even the most ancient tales can prove illuminating about those things if they’re told with enough gusto, but also that it’s so much easier for us to see ourselves in those stories if we have someone to share them with. —David Ehrlich
48. “The Woman King”
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Cast: Viola Davis, Lashana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu, John Boyega, Sheila Atim, Hero Fiennes Tiffin
Accolades: African American Film Critics Circle top film of 2022
Read IndieWire’s Review: “The Woman King,” while based on a lesser-known segment of West African history during a decidedly fraught time in history, makes for a hell of a time at the movies, a seemingly “niche” topic with great appeal, the sort of battle-heavy feature that will likely engender plenty of hoots and hollers. And if it seems a bit Hollywood-ized, complete with glossy twists and a touch of the soap operatic to boot, perhaps that’s part of what makes it so special. You’ve never seen a movie about this that looks, well, so funnily familiar. If that’s what it took to get made, so be it. In this climate, in this world, stories like this are too precious and special to stay hidden. Bring them into the light. —Kate Erbland
47. “Corsage”
Director: Marie Kreutzer
Cast: Vicky Krieps, Colin Morgan, Ivana Urban
Accolades: Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard winner Best Performance (for Vicky Krieps); London Film Festival winner of Best Film
Read IndieWire’s Review: Spanning the birth of Mozart in 1756 to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War, the golden age of Vienna was — to paraphrase Darlene Madison Cox — an important and exciting time. Yet the Empress Elisabeth of “Corsage” isn’t feeling it. During that time, Europe’s second city of culture — it was never Paris — housed Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss, Klimt, and Freud. And, though Beethoven died a decade before her birth, “Für Elise” sure hits different when it accompanies one of Elisabeth’s breakdowns. Although “Corsage” makes a worthy attempt to recast Elisabeth as independent of her constraints, its final note leaves it feeling a little too much like its own sort of requiem. —Adam Solomons
46. “Fire of Love”
Director: Sara Dosa
Cast: Miranda July, Katia Krafft, Maurice Krafft
Accolades: Sundance Film Festival winner of Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award (Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput); Atlanta Film Critics’ Circle winner of Best Documentary; Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards nominee for Best Documentary Feature and Best Director
Read IndieWire’s Review: At an economical 90-minute running time, “Fire of Love” packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired. “Fire of Love” allows you to contemplate life lived at the edge of the abyss, at the precipice of spewing lava and 1200-degree Celsius heat. It’s that pyroclastic connection that brings together twin flames Katia (who calls herself the “bird”) and Maurice (him, the “elephant seal”), who met on a park bench in 1966, got married, and saved up enough cash to honeymoon in Stromboli, an island off the north coast of Sicily that’s home to three active volcanoes. This is a quintessentially French story about French people, which means it’s filled with plenty of French pop tunes and, visible or not, references to French New Wave cinema (there’s a “Jules and Jim”-ness to their love affair with volcanoes, and a Jacques Cousteau quirkiness to the edit). Ultimately, “Fire of Love” acquires a ticking-clock, lump-in-the-throat inevitability as we inch closer to the ’90s, and to the seething mountain in Japan that would eventually claim the Kraffts’ lives. —Ryan Lattanzio
45. “Moonage Daydream”
Director: Brett Morgen
Cast: David Bowie
Accolades: Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards nominee for Best Documentary Feature
Read IndieWire’s Review: As musical documentaries go, it’s more ambitious than anything you’re likely to witness for quite some time. The film is as much an expression of Bowie’s voice as it is an expression of Morgen’s; it plays like the director’s own search for meaning, filtered through the life of an artist he clearly respects, and who he has the opportunity to reconstruct using unprecedented access from the Bowie estate. Of course, the fact that “Moonage Daydream” is both “authorized” by Bowie’s family and made from a reverential point of view means that it skirts around anything resembling controversy. However, while such a viewpoint may have yielded a more hagiographic portrait had Morgen taken a more conventional approach, the result here is stereophonic immersion and kaleidoscopic imagery geared towards seating audiences at specific points in time. These moments are, at once, distinctly “of” their respective eras, and yet temporally connected to absolutely everything else. —Siddhant Adlakha
44. “The Northman”
Director: Robert Eggers
Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe
Read IndieWire’s Review: It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is. In a movie era that’s been defined by compromise, “The Northman” rides into theaters with the fury of a valkyrie — it’s the rare studio epic that would sooner die than submit to modern precepts of how it should be told. While so many people in the industry are scrambling to change their fates, Eggers reminds us just how awesome it can feel to conquer them. —David Ehrlich
43. “Bardo”
Director: Alejandro González Inárritu
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid
Accolades: Venice Film Festival winner UNIMED Award
Read IndieWire’s Review: With “Bardo,” Iñárritu delivers a cartoonishly indulgent film about the fact that he makes cartoonishly indulgent films — a rootless epic about a rootless man who’s been unmoored by his own self-doubt. It’s a midlife crisis meta-comedy that channels everyone from Federico Fellini to Emir Kusturica in the service of its carnivalesque self-parody. “Bardo” is hardly the first Iñárritu film to argue that “life is nothing but a series of senseless events and idiotic images,” nor even the first of them to do so on purpose, but it is the first of them to use that notion as a starting point rather than a grand reveal. Iñárritu still feels lost by the end of its three-hour running time, but that doesn’t mean “Bardo” isn’t a step in the right direction. —David Ehrlich
42. “Turning Red”
Director: Domee Shi
Cast: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, Tristan Allerick Chen, James Hong
Read IndieWire’s Review: Pixas has never shied away from the tough stuff — there are entire generations of kids who have being guided through the cold terror of nothing less than death, world-wide destruction, and even the afterlife through the animation giant’s charming productions — but Domee Shi’s instant classic “Turning Red” marks the first time Pixar has gone all-in on perhaps the scariest, funniest, weirdest thing of all: puberty.
The film sets a course for what a modern Pixar film can (and should) look like, sound like, and obsess over. The lessons are of the usual sort — how to be true to yourself, how to honor your family and friends, the value of culture in all its forms, the need to find humor — but they are rendered fresh and new, with “Turning Red” turning in one of Pixar’s best films not just about the pain of life, but the very joy of it, too. —Kate Erbland
41. “Descendant”
Director: Margaret Brown
Accolades: Sundance Film Festival winner of U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision; Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Best Historical Documentary, and Best Director
Read IndieWire’s Review: How best should we remember the dead? The critical African American history retold in Margaret Brown’s imperative film, “Descendant,” an unblinking investigation combining local stories with “Erin Brockovich” flair, seeks to answer that question. Because for the many Black folks living in Africatown, Alabama, where the last slave ship made landfall, remembering is what they do best. —Robert Daniels
40. “Il Buco”
Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
Cast: Nicola Lanza, Antonio Lanza, Leonardo Larocca
Accolades: Venice Film Festival winner of FEDIC Award for Best Film and La Pellicola d’Oro Best Camera Operator (for Luca Massa) with Special Jury Prize for writer-director Michelangelo Frammartino; Brussels International Film Festival Jury Award for Directors’ Week; European Film Awards’ European Sound winner
Read IndieWire’s Review: As the shepherd makes his way toward one kind of underworld, so too do the spelunkers, exploring the sprawling subterranean landscape in a series of golden-hued chiaroscuro compositions. To engage with this film on its own terms is to welcome this kind of exploration of the natural sublime. When Frammartino tries his hand at narrative, he does so on his own oblique terms, tracking a soccer ball kicked about by a pair of distant explorers that, like the promise of Chekhov’s gun, is destined to go off into the abyss below. —Ben Croll
39. “The Batman”
Director: Matt Reeves
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis
Accolades: Atlanta Film Critics Circle winner of Best Score; Grammy Award nomination for Best Score Soundtrack in a Motion Picture; People’s Choice Award nomination for The Movie of 2022
See Also15 Great Overlooked Indies from 2022The 25 Best Movies of 2022Indie Movies From 2022 That Should Be On Your Must-Watch List - Looper16 Indie Films to Get Excited About This YearRead IndieWire’s Review: In the burnt orange underworld of Gotham — as in “The Batman” itself — good and bad are as inextricable from each other as the different genres that define their terms, and the film’s hard-earned flares of light are only so capable of pointing the way forward because of how vividly they’re painted against the darkness that surrounds them. Forged from the embers of previous Batman movies despite never indulging in the kind of meta-commentary that has defined so many recent mega-sequels, Reeves’ effort may be too overstuffed and underwritten to succeed on its merits as either a Bruce Wayne story or a blockbuster noir, but there’s something ineffably beautiful to how “The Batman” smelts its many separate components into a new kind of superhero movie. —David Ehrlich
38. “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”
Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monaé, Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Madelyn Clinea
Accolades: Atlanta Film Critics Circle winner of Best Ensemble Cast and Best Supporting Actress (for Monaé)
Read IndieWire’s Review: To say much more about the plot would be silly, as it would both spoil a film that is at its very best when it’s misdirecting and redirecting and constantly turning in and out of itself (like a glass onion, there are so many layers to peel, though the answer itself is really quite clear) and detract from the joy of seeing a well-honed mystery like this one unpacked in increasingly bright ways. Fans of the first “Knives Out” will find plenty of the same elements to love, though Johnson has studiously worked to ensure that “Glass Onion” stands alone, both because of its self-contained story and the filmmaker’s resistance to repeating his old tricks. —Kate Erbland
37. “Nanny”
Director: Nikyatu Jusu
Cast: Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Sinqua Walls, Morgan Spector
Accolades: Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival; Palm Springs’ Directors to Watch; Future/Now winner at Montclair Film Festival
Read IndieWire’s Review: As Aisha, Diop is gifted with a full meal of a role, and she easily embodies all the different Aishas we meet over the course of the film. But which one is the real one? Which one is the ghost? Jusu’s script, while prone to meandering through its second act, delivers a powerful punch as the film ratchets toward its inevitable conclusion. The first-time filmmaker may be attempting to fit too many ideas into one sleek package, but that doesn’t mitigate the truth of “Nanny”: All of it haunts. —Kate Erbland
36. “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
Accolades: IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021: Best Films Opening in 2022; Future/Now Special Jury Prize for Visionary Filmmaking at Montclair Film Festival
Read IndieWire’s Review: Schoenbrun never traffics in easy explanations of what’s happening, and even mentioning that things grow stranger as the film unfolds isn’t precisely true. The circ*mstances Casey finds herself in are unsettling, but they’re also human: She’s looking for connection, and the potential cost of that quest hovers inside every frame of Schoenbrun’s fascinating feature. Even the more shocking twists of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” are rooted in reality, both online and off. —Kate Erbland
35. “No Bears”
Director: Jafar Panahi
Cast: Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani
Accolades: Venice Film Festival winner of Special Jury Prize for Jafar Panahi and nominated for Golden Lion for Best Film
Read IndieWire’s Review: The humane light that Panahi strives to use on even his most oppressive characters belies a sharp awareness of the power lines and misinformation that color an atmosphere where no one is easy around telling the truth. In one gorgeous scene, an old man that he encounters en route to a specific destination tells him to come in and have tea first. They can go on together afterwards, says the old man, which is better for safety reasons as there are bears out there. Later, when they separate, Panahi asks about the bears. “There are no bears. This is nonsense. Stories are made up to scare us,” replies his companion, in a remark significant enough to be the title of the film. It’s an obscure yet bold statement, one that encourages us to mind the fearful stories we choose to heed. —Sophie Monks Kaufman
34. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”
Director: Dean Fleischer-Camp
Cast: Jenny Slate, Lesley Stahl, Isabella Rossellini
Accolades: Independent Spirit Awards nominee for Best Editing; Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture Animated; LA Film Critics Association Awards nominee for Best Animated Feature; NYFCC winner of Best Animated Feature; SXSW Film Festival nominee for audience award in Festival Favorites category
Read IndieWire’s Review: As Marcel shuffles through his missing family’s rooms and wonders about his absent neighbors, it’s impossible not to reflect back on the last few months of human existence. The world has known so much loss in 2020 and 2021, and while the grief of Marcel and Nana Connie would always be pronounced — Slate and Camp bring such texture and care to them — these days, it feels even more rich. Yes, again, we’re still talking about a movie about stop-motion shells. Soon, you will be, too. —Kate Erbland
33. “Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood”
Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Jack Black, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy
Accolades: Cahiers du Cinema nominee of Top 10 Film Award, placing in seventh; SXSW Film Festival nominee for Audience Award in Headliners program
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood” introduces itself as a fantastical adventure about a Houston fourth-grader who’s plucked out of school for a confidential NASA mission in the spring of 1969 (those wacky scientists accidentally built the lunar module too small for an adult), but Richard Linklater’s first animated feature since “A Scanner Darkly” isn’t really a story about a kid who secretly paved the way for Neil Armstrong, or even a story about a kid who had any special interest in the stars above. In fact, this semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow. —David Ehrlich
32. “All Quiet on the Western Front”
Director: Edward Berger
Cast: Daniel Brühl, Daniel Marc Dreifuss, Malte Grunert, Clive Barker, Marc Toberoff, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell
Accolades: Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language
Read IndieWire’s Review: “All Quiet” was one of the works targeted by Nazi book-burnings, and this new film is an attempt to reclaim the novel as an essential work of German culture. It’s coming from inside the house, so to speak, and there is a certain Teutonic seriousness to the filmmaking as well as the subject matter. Just as polished but not quite as flashy as Sam Mendes’ “1917,” the film displays a similar level of commitment to historical detail, but presents its elaborately staged battlefield scenes in a relatively more plain spoken style. —Katie Rife
31. “Three Minutes: A Lengthening”
Director: Bianca Stigter
Cast: Helena Bonham Carter (Narrator)
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Three Minutes” still demonstrates how that footage, which must have seemed so insignificant at the time, now stands as an invaluable document and a humbling memorial. Beyond that, it’s a reminder of what a magical medium film is — how unique it is in its ability to capture so many moments and so much life. The narration quotes a 1930s Kodachrome advert which boasts that film brings back memories in a way that nothing else can. It’s corny, but it may well be true. —Nicholas Barber
30. “Avatar: The Way of Water”
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet
Accolades: Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director – Motion Picture for James Cameron, LA Film Critics Association Awards winner of Best Production Design
Read IndieWire’s Review: Cameron has always treated story as a direct extension of the spectacle required to bring it to life, but the anthropocenic relationship between narrative and technology was a bit uneven in the first “Avatar,” which obscured the old behind the veil of the new where his previous films had better allowed them to intertwine. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof-of-concept, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is such a staggering improvement over the original because its spectacle doesn’t have to compensate for its story; in vintage Cameron fashion, the movie’s spectacle is what allows its story to be told so well. —David Ehrlich
29. “X”
Director: Ti West
Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Martin Henderson, Owen Campbell, Stephen Ure, Scott Mescudi
Accolades: SXSW Film Festival nominee for Audience Award in Midnighters; HCA Award nominee for Best Actress (for Mia Goth), Best Horror, Best Indie Film
Read IndieWire’s Review: The renegade intensity of Ti West’s “X,” another homage by the “House of the Devil” writer-director to independent cinema’s past, and his first horror film in over a decade, is his willingness to ask: What if a slasher, but with p*rn? That genre bending — in a rollicking, wicked dark horror comedy about intrepid filmmakers just barely scraping by, the fetishization of youth, and how the weight of aging into a sexless marriage can lead to mayhem — brings the spirit of the rule-breaking 1970s moviemaking back to modern audiences. While West isn’t always operating on the same levels as his influences, his signature flair for tension through simmering slow-burn pacing remains unparalleled. —Robert Daniels
28. “Kimi”
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson, India de Beaufort, Emily Kuroda, Byron Bowers, Derek DelGaudio, Betsy Brantley
Accolades: Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards nominee for Best Streaming Movie
Read IndieWire’s Review: A surveillance thriller for an age when everyone knows they’re being spied upon at all times — even, perhaps, by the same device on which they’re watching it — Steven Soderbergh’s “Kimi” is a simple but satisfying genre exercise that uses its agoraphobic heroine to ask what people are supposed to do with their paranoia now that virtually everything is out in the open. —David Ehrlich
27. “In Front of Your Face”
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Cast: Lee Hye-young, Cho Yun-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo
Accolades: IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021: Best Films Opening in 2022
“On the Beach at Night Alone” director Hong Sang-soo comes back to the big screen with the mysterious and darkly intimate tale of a former actress who returns home to Seoul, where her hazy but palpably regretful past blooms into an artful consideration of expression and isolation. Lee has received extensive praise for her starring performance, her first for Hong. —Alison Foreman
26. “Hit the Road”
Director: Panah Panahi
Cast: Pantea Panahiha, Mohammad Hassan Madjooni, Rayan Sarlak
Accolades: Cannes Film Festival Golden Camera nominee; IndieWire Cirtics’ Poll nominee for Best Films Opening in 2022; London Film Festival winner in Official Competition for Best Film; SF International Film Festival winner for Golden Gate Award of Best New Director (for Panah Panahi)
Read IndieWire’s Review: A family road trip movie in which we never quite know where the film is heading (and are often lied to about why), “Hit the Road” may be set amid the winding desert highways and gorgeous emerald valleys of northwestern Iran, but Panah Panahi’s miraculous debut is fueled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our mortal coil at some point along the way. —David Ehrlich
25. “After Yang”
Director: Kogonada
Cast: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, Haley Lu Richardson
Accolades: Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard nominee, Gotham Awards Best Screenplay nominee and Outstanding Lead Performance nomination for Colin Farrell, Sundance Film Festival win for Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film prize
Read IndieWire’s Review: Both a perfect complement to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Klara and the Sun,” and an ideal alternative to the emotional brutality of Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.,” “After Yang” is a movie that seems like it was made by and for the sort of people who struggle to be present with their partners and children, but eagerly re-watch home videos of them whenever they’re alone. At the same time, the power of this story is also dependent on a refusal to downplay the positive role that digital technology can have when it comes to forging human bonds. —David Ehrlich
24. “Vortex”
Director: Gaspar Noé
Cast: Dario Argento, Francoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz
Accolades: Festival du Nouveau Cinema audience award winner for Best Film, San Sebastian International Film Fetsival winner for Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Prize
Read IndieWire’s Review: Gaspar Noé is the kind of mad scientist filmmaker whose very name invites expectations of provocative experimentation. “Vortex,” which clocks in at 142 minutes and spends almost all of them in split screen, would appear to be consistent with that trend. Yet this quiet, slow-burn look at an elderly couple suffering from dementia and other ailments is a grounded, emotional variation of “Amour,” as well as the the most sensitive and accessible work from a filmmaker for whom those descriptors rarely apply. —Eric Kohn
23. “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
Directors: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, and more
Cast: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann
Accolades: Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture – Animated, Best Original Song for “Ciao Papa,” and Best Original Score; LA Film Critics Association Awards win for Best Animation
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” reimagines the classic fantasy tale through the most beautifully-made stop-motion animation in years, a powerful and life-affirming father-and-son story about acceptance and love in the face of pain, misery, and fascism, and the filmmaker’s love of monsters in what is easily his best film in a decade. —Rafael Motamayor
22. “Return to Seoul”
Director: Davy Chou
Cast: Ji-Min Park, Oh Kwang-rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-young
Accolades: Cannes Film Festival nominee for Un Certain Regard award (for Davy Chou); Hamptons International Film Festival audience award for Best Narrative Feature
Read IndieWire’s Review: Few movies have ever been more perfectly in tune with their protagonists than Davy Chou’s jagged, restless, and rivetingly unpredictable “Return to Seoul,” a shark-like adoption drama that its 25-year-old heroine wears like an extra layer of skin or sharp cartilage. The film spans eight years over the course of two hours, but you can feel its bristly texture and self-possessed violence from the disorienting first scenes. —David Ehrlich
21. “Happening”
Director: Audrey Diwan
Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Kacey Mottet Klein, Luàna Bajrami
Accolades: BAFTA Best Director nomination; César Ward win for Most Promising Actress (for Anamaria Vartolomei); Gotham Awards winner for Best International Feature; IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021 nominee for Best Films Opening in 2022; Venice Film Festival Golden Lion win for Best Film
Read IndieWire’s Review: Based on a memoir by Annie Ernaux, “Happening” is an authentic and earnest work, and though it declines to polemicize, it is inarguably pro-choice. That it played at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize, in the wake of renewed threats to reproductive freedoms around the world made it feel all the more urgent — but there’s no didacticism here, just one woman’s true story. —Natalia Winkelman
20. “Bones and All”
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, David Gordon Green, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland
Accolades: Venice Film Festival awarded Silver Lion for Best Director and the Marcello Mastroianni Award to Russell
Read IndieWire’s Review: Blood pours across gothic mahogany in rooms lined with chintzy floral wallpaper and ’80s tchotchkes, made better still by the film’s stunning sound design. Some scenes bring detached cannibalistic chomping, others have crescendoing winds across American plains. The soundtrack, largely period appropriate and featuring Duran Duran and Kiss, is perfectly utilized throughout. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s track for the film, “(You Made it Feel Like) Home,” punches through, in awful harmony with the haunting tragedy of the film itself. —Leila Latif
19. “Living”
Director: Oliver Hermanus
Cast: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp
Accolades: Winner of Best Production Design at the British Independent Film Awards; Best Lead Performance awarded to Nighy by Los Angeles Film Critics Association
Read IndieWire’s Review: For his part, Nighy is predictably affecting in the lead role of Mr. Williams, a widowed civil servant so calcified by grief that his younger employees assume that he’s actually incapable of human feeling; if they’re terrified of him in a way that no one ever was of Shimura’s version, it might be owed to the fact that Williams already speaks in the ghoulish whisper of a spirit communicating from beyond the grave. —David Ehrlich
18. “Women Talking”
Director: Sarah Polley
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw
Accolades: Awarded Best Ensemble by the National Board of Review and the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards
Read IndieWire’s Review: Adapted from Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name with fierce intellect, immense force, and a visionary sense of how to remap the world as we know it along more compassionate (matriarchal) lines, Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” never feels like it’s just 104 minutes of bonneted fundamentalists chatting in a barn, even though — with a few memorable, and sometimes very funny exceptions — that’s exactly what it is. Toews’ book could easily have been made into a play, but every widescreen frame of Polley’s film will make you glad that it wasn’t. She infuses this truth-inspired tale with a gripping multi-generational sweep from the very first line, which puts the violence in the rear-view mirror and begins the hard work of keeping it there. —David Ehrlich
17. “Saint Omer”
Director: Alice Diop
Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga
Accolades: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a Debut Film, and more at the Venice Film Festival; winner of the Louis Delluc Prize
Read IndieWire’s Review: There is a tradition of humanizing killers that is rarely afforded to Black women in the movies. For Truman Capote’s seminal non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood” from 1959, he befriended two death-row prisoners guilty of shooting dead a family in Kansas, and turned the resulting conversations into a journalistic doorstop of a book as compelling and detailed as any work of fiction. What made the book so haunting was Capote’s refusal to be daunted by the monstrousness of what the two men had done.
With “Saint Omer,” Diop shows an equally unflinching gaze, yet while Capote examined his subjects with a clinical detachment, the filmmaker distinguishes herself here by daring to empathize with her own. Not with her crime, but with the temporary insanity that afflicted a brilliant, marginalized Senegalese immigrant to Paris. —Sophie Monks Kaufman
16. “Elvis”
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge
Accolades: Winner of Best Film, Best Direction, Best Lead Actor (for Butler), Best Supporting Actress (for DeJonge) and more at the AACTA Awards; Top Soundtrack at the American Music Awards; Butler awarded Drama Movie Star of 2022 at the People’s Choice Awards
Read IndieWire’s Review: Butler’s immaculate Presley imitation would be the best thing about this movie even if it stopped at mimicry, but the actor does more than just nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to defy them, slipping free of iconography and giving the film an opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who’s been frozen in time since before Luhrmann’s target audience was born. —David Ehrlich
15. “Triangle of Sadness”
Director: Ruben Östlund
Cast: Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Dolly de Leon, Zlatko Burić, Iris Berben, Vicki Berlin, Henrik Dorsin, Jean-Christophe Folly, Amanda Walker, Oliver Ford Davies, Sunnyi Melles, Woody Harrelson
Accolades: Winner of the Palme d’Or and AFCAE Art House Cinema Award at Cannes; winner of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (for Zlatko Burić) at the European Film Awards; awarded Best Supporting Performer (for Dolly de Leon) by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assocation
Read IndieWire’s Review: It starts, as all movies should, in the world of high-end male modeling. A muted and dangerously almost-smart Derek Zoolander type who Harris Dickinson plays to perfection, the 25-year-old Carl is reaching the geriatric stage of his career, and the anxiety over his economic future is starting to make his eight-pack look two abs short. A merciful society would simply euthanize Carl rather than make him suffer the slow indignity of losing Instagram followers — and spare us the unpleasantness of having to look upon this hideous creature for another 145 minutes — but the fashion industry is not so kind. Instead, Carl finds himself without a seat at his supermodel girlfriend Yaya’s latest runway show (she’s played by Charlbi Dean), and then haggling with her, exhaustingly, over the dinner bill later that night.
These opening scenes contain occasional glimpses of the impish wit that Östlund has long deployed against male insecurities, and he still loves to watch men squirm their way through pained surrenders of gendered power. On the strength of its staging alone, one bit in which Carl and Yaya fling money at each other while arguing across the opposite sides of a closing elevator door almost manages to generate the same friction that makes Östlund’s previous work so wonderfully itchy. —David Ehrlich
14. “The Eternal Daughter”
Director: Joanna Hogg
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydell, Carly-Sophia Davies
Accolades: Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice
Read IndieWire’s Review: An elegantly slender phantom of a film that channels a spooky hotel’s worth of gothic horror tropes into the heartrending story of a woman trying to see her own ghost, “The Eternal Daughter” finds Hogg returning to the haunted corridors of her personal experience — and, unexpectedly, to the fictional version of herself that she invented to walk through them. Yes, Julie Hart is back, with Tilda Swinton taking over the role that her daughter originated in “The Souvenir” (that was set in the ’80s, this in the present day). —David Ehrlich
13. “Benediction”
Director: Terence Davies
Cast: Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeremy Irvine, Calam Lynch, Tom Blyth, Kate Phillips, Geraldine James, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels
Accolades: Winner of Best Film Opening in 2022 from the IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021; awarded Best Screenplay at the San Sebastián International Film Festival
Read IndieWire’s Review: With “Benediction” — another spectacular and terribly sad biopic about a poet cursed with the ability to express a private agony they could never escape — Davies has once again made a film that feels like the work of someone flaying their soul onscreen. Last time it was Emily Dickinson who provided the prism through which Davies could refract his own wants and wounds, and here it’s the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, an openly but resentfully gay man desperate for a peace of mind he only knew how to look for in other people. Davies has more in common with Sassoon than Dickinson — their lives even overlapped for a time — but viewers don’t have to know a single thing about the director’s work to sense his wounds bleeding through Sassoon’s aching story. This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if “Benediction” is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it’s hoping to find. —David Ehrlich
12. “EO”
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert
Accolades: Awarded Cannes’ Jury Prize and Cannes Soundtrack Award; winner of Best Original Score and the European University Film Award at the European Film Awards; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: Told through the eyes of a modest donkey — often literally — Skolimowski’s madcap, visually experimental “remake” of Robert Bresson’s 1966 black-and-white drama “Au Hasard Balthazar” has plenty of nods to his compatriot classmates and little to do with Skolimowski’s previous films. The titular donkey, onomatopoeically named (it is “Hi-Han” in France), is freed from a circus in central Poland and briefly becomes a hardcore “ultra” fan at a local soccer team, before being whisked away for more adventures, taking in the vastness of life along the way. Eo even meets Isabelle Huppert, a privilege any living being can look back on their years proudly for. (In Cannes’s answer to a Marvel cameo, the gasp Huppert’s appearance produced at last night’s press screening is one for the ages.) —Adam Solomons
11. “Crimes of the Future”
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman
Accolades: Awarded Best Direction in a Feature Film by the Directors’ Guild of Canada
Read IndieWire’s Review: What Cronenberg neglected to specify is that those imagined audience members — as implausible as the crowds who supposedly fled in panic when the Lumière brothers aimed a train at them — would be stampeding up the aisles in response to tragedy, and not gore.
Don’t get me wrong, “Crimes of the Future” is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them. —David Ehrlich
10. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
Director: Laura Poitras
Accolades: Winner of the Golden Lion and Smithers Foundation Award at Venice Film Festival; awarded the Freedom of Expression Award by the National Board of Review; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: Thattitle. Even before it screened, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” cast a shiver across the Venice Film Festival competition, sounding more like a line from a Yeats poem than the latest documentary from the director of “CITIZENFOUR.” The big news: the film lives up to it. Already a robust director,Laura Poitrashas leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power.
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is about the life and art of Nan Goldin and how this led her to found P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group targeting the Sackler family for manufacturing and distributing OxyContin, a deeply addictive drug that has exacerbated the opioid crisis. It is about the bonds of community, the dangers of repression, and how art and politics are the same thing. —Sophie Monks Kaufman
9. “Top Gun: Maverick”
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer
Accolades: Awarded Best Film by the National Board of Review; winner of Action Movie of 2022 at the People’s Choice Awards
Read IndieWire’s Review: Watching Cruise pilot a fighter jet 200 feet above the floor of Death Valley, corkscrew another one through Washington’s Cascade Mountains, and give one of the most vulnerable performances of his career while sustaining so many G-forces that you can practically see him going Clear in real-time, you realize — more lucidly than ever before — that this wild-eyed lunatic makes movies like his life depends on it. Because it does, and not for the first time.
But if “Maverick” can’t quite match “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” for sheer kineticism and well-orchestrated awe, this long-delayed sequel does more to clarify what that means than anything Cruise has ever made. And the reason for that is simple: Tom Cruise is Maverick, and Maverick is Tom Cruise. —David Ehrlich
8. “RRR”
Director: S. S. Rajamouli
Cast: N. T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Shriya Saran, Samuthirakani, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody, Olivia Morris
Accolades: Winner of the Spotlight Award at the Hollywood Critics Association Awards; winner of Best International Film at the Saturn Awards
Read IndieWire’s Review: S.S. Rajamouli’s “RRR” is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once. A pulsating period action drama, it outshines even the director’s record-smashing “Baahubali” movies (viewers familiar with them probably won’t know what to expect here) thanks to its mix of naked sincerity, unapologetic machismo, and balls-to-the-wall action craftsmanship. The film is playing on over a thousand screens in North America, and watching it with a packed audience familiar with Telugu-language cinema is likely to yield one of the noisiest and most raucous theatrical experiences imaginable. Plenty of recent releases have been hailed as “the return of cinema” post-pandemic, but “RRR” stands apart as an unabashed return to everything that makes the cinematic experience great, all at once. —Siddhant Adlakha
7. “Nope”
Director: Jordan Peele
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David
Accolades: Winner of Best Supporting Actress (for Keke Palmer) at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards; winner of Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards
Read IndieWire’s Review: The only sci-fi movie that might scare and delight Guy Debord and Ed Wood to the same degree, “Nope” offers a giddy throwback to the days of little green men and hubcap U.F.O.s that hopes to revitalize those classic tropes for audiences who’ve seen too much bloodshed on their own screens to believe in Hollywood’s “bad miracles.” It’s a tractor beam of a movie pointed at people who’ve watched 9/11 happen so many times on network TV that it’s lost any literal meaning; who’ve scrolled past body cam snuff films in between Dril tweets; who’ve become accustomed to rubbernecking at American life from inside the wreckage. —David Ehrlich
6. “Decision to Leave”
Director: Park Chan-wook
Cast: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il
Accolades: Winner of Best Director at Cannes; winner of Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Music, Best Director, Best Actor (for Park Hae-il), Best Actress (for Tang Wei), Best Screenplay, and the Popular Star Award (for Go Kyung-pyo) at the Blue Dragon Film Awards; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: Here’s a sentence I never expected to write: The most romantic movie of the year (so far) is a police procedural. Then again, I wasn’t aware that “Oldboy” directorPark Chan-wook— whose operatic revenge melodramas have given way to a series of ravishingly baroque Hitchco*ckian love stories about the various “perversities” that might bind two wayward souls together — was making a detective thriller. In that case, the heart-stirring potential of the Korean auteur’s new detective saga would have been as obvious as the identity of its killer.
It’s a good thing, then, that “Decision to Leave” isn’t a whodunnit — as you’ll be able to discern from the pathetic effort its protagonist makes to solve his latest case. In fact, Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her. —David Ehrlich
5. “The Fabelmans”
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch
Accolades: Awarded Best Director and Best Breakthrough Performance (for LaBelle) by the National Board of Review; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: Has any divorce had a more profound impact on the American imagination than the one betweenSteven Spielberg’s parents? It was the breakup that launched a million blockbusters. That made daddy issues into a spectacle all their own. That led directly to “E.T.,” “Catch Me if You Can,” and the last scene of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” while also paving the way toward any number of iconic films about the meltdown of the nuclear family — which any multiplex would tell you was the middle class’ defining crisis of the 20th century.
And so it stands to reason that “The Fabelmans,” in which Spielberg finally addresses his parents’ divorce head-on — and in exacting autobiographical detail, every shot a memory — would feel like our story as much as it does his own. I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation? —David Ehrlich
4. “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Director: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Harry Shum Jr., Jenny Slate
Accolades: Winner of Best Feature and Best Supporting Performance (for Ke Huy Quan) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards; awarded the Best Actress (for Yeoh) by the National Board of Review; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator —or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are. It’s a machine powered by the greatest performance thatMichelle Yeohhas ever given, pumped full of the zaniest martial arts battles that Stephen Chow has never shot, and soaked through with the kind of “anything goes” spirit that’s only supposed to be on TV these days.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is as overstuffed as its title implies, even more juvenile than its pedigree suggests, and so creatively unbound from the minute it starts that it makes Daniels’ previous efforts seem like they were made with Bressonian restraint by comparison (for context, their last feature was a sweet fable starring Harry Potter as an explosively farting corpse). It’s a movie that I saw twice just to make sure I hadn’t completely hallucinated it the first time around, and one that I will soon be seeing a third time for the same reason. I don’t ever expect to understand how it was (or got) made, but I already know that it works. And I know that it works because my impulse to pick on its imperfections and wonder how it might’ve been different eventually forfeits to the utter miracle of its existence. —David Ehrlich
3. “The Banshees of Inisherin”
Director: Martin McDonagh
Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
Accolades: Awarded the Golden Osella for Best Screenplay and Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice; winner of Best Actor (for Farrell), Best Supporting Actor (for Gleeson), and Best Original Screenplay by the National Board of Review; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: “The Banshees of Inisherin” often feels more like a Martin McDonagh play — perhaps the abandoned play of the same name that he first conceived as the conclusion of his “Aran Islands Trilogy” — which might help to explain the stony confidence of his direction and the steady focus with which he follows this story to the mournful finale promised by its title (Sheila Flitton is hilarious as banshee incarnate Mrs. McCormick, an old crone so happy to cosplay as death itself that she might as well hobble around Inisherin with a scythe in her hands). If the film never feels the least bit limited by its scope or location, that’s because the Galway Bay lends it an impossibly gorgeous backdrop, replete with rolling green hills and ravishing ocean views on all sides. It’s the perfect fairy tale idyll for the harps and glockenspiels of Carter Burwell’s ominous score to subvert. —David Ehrlich
2. “Aftersun”
Director: Charlotte Wells
Cast: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio
Accolades: Awarded the French Touch Prize of the Jury at Cannes; winner of Best Directorial Debut by the Natonal Board of Review; winner of Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Music Supervision, and the Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun” isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself. Here, in the span of an oblique but tender story that feels small enough to fit on an instant photo (or squeeze into the LCD screen of an old camcorder), Wells creates a film that gradually echoes far beyond its frames. By the time it reaches fever pitch with the greatest Freddie Mercury needle drop this side of “Wayne’s World,” “Aftersun” has begun to shudder with the crushing weight of all that we can’t leave behind, and all that we may not have known to take with us in the first place. —David Ehrlich
1. “TÁR”
Director: Todd Field
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner
Accolades: Blanchett awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice; winner of Best Screenplay at the Gotham Independent Film Awards; winner of Best Film and Best Actress (for Blanchett) with the New York Film Critics Circle; winner of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress (for Blanchett), and Best Screenplay by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; winner of Best Director with the Boston Society of Film Critics; and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: “TÁR” is so much more than the Great American Movie about “cancel culture” — a phrase that it humiliates with every movement — but this dense and difficult portrait of a female conductor’s fall from grace also demands to be seen through that singular lens from its very first shot. Todd Field’s thrilling, deceptively austere third film exalts in grabbing the electrified fence of digital-age discourse with both hands and daring us to hold onto it for 158 minutes in the hopes that we might ultimately start to feel like we’re shocking ourselves. —David Ehrlich
