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The Best Movies of 2022 (So Far)
From ‘The Worst Person in the World’ and ‘Cyrano’ to ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and ‘Nope,’ here are the best movies we’ve seen so far this year, according to Vulture’s film critics Alison Willmore, Bilge Ebiri, and Angelica Jade Bastién.

The Best Movies of 2022 (So Far)

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos Courtesy of the Studios

It’s summer. The sun is out. And it’s never too early to look back and count our blessings at the movies. The range of cinematic journeys we’ve experienced so far in 2022 so far are dizzying, from poignant hormonal awakenings (Turning Red) to an epic battle across multiple universes in (Everything Everywhere All at Once) to a 50-year-old madman’s doomed flight from a jumbo-sized cannon (Jackass Forever). And that’s just the start. Here are the best movies Vulture has seen and (for the most part) reviewed this year, according to our critics Alison Willmore, Bilge Ebiri, and Angelica Jade Bastién, arranged in unranked and chronological order.

January

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Photo: Elise Lockwood/MGM

Adapted, with quite a few liberties, from A.S. Byatt’s 1994 novella The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, which was in turn inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, George Miller’s latest follows Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), an internationally renowned narratologist who, during an academic conference in Istanbul, purchases a blown-glass bottle at the city’s famed Covered Bazaar and unleashes a Djinn (Idris Elba) who has been trapped inside it. The Djinn, who must grant Alithea three wishes so he can be released from captivity for good, then relates to her his own ornate journey across the centuries. His story is romantic, and ironic, and fantastic, so Miller leans into the exoticism of the setting and the subject, as well as the winding cadences and world-traversing rhythms that anyone brought up on such tales will immediately recognize. What those long-ago storytellers of One Thousand and One Nights did with words, the director does with images, his camera glancing across epic vistas like a rock skipping across a pond. —B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Three Thousand Years of Longing and his interview with director George Miller.

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