The Best Movies of 2022

The Best Movies of 2022,From ‘The Worst Person in the World’ and ‘Cyrano’ to ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and ‘Tar,’ 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

Photo-Illustration: Photo Illustration: Rowena Lloyd and Susanna Hayward; Photos: Courtesy of the Studios

This year, the iron grip that streaming has held on our culture seemed to have loosened a bit. Netflix and several of its competitors took a financial hit in 2022; meanwhile, certain audiences expressed exhaustion with the idea of watching movies at home as the default option. Fans of Prey, Disenchanted, and Glass Onion bemoaned the full theatrical releases that could have been. Fans of Top Gun: Maverick, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and RRR happily embraced the insides of cineplexes after avoiding them since the pandemic (or, for some, even earlier). The future of theaters remains uncertain, but our critics are cautiously optimistic. Hey, maybe there’s a downside to envisioning streaming platforms as tubes from which people consume undifferentiated content, whenever, so long as it’s new. Maybe that ends up cheapening the experience of watching movies to the point where the work doesn’t seem as urgent or valuable?

Of course, no one feels entirely happy that so many studios’ go-for-broke investments in streaming are blowing up in their faces. (Especially when the main casualties of the streaming meltdown wind up being the non-guilty parties: the filmmakers.) And having to worry about the box office as if the entire art form is on the line based on the returns for Bullet Train is less than ideal. (It’s inadvertently turned critics into industry cheerleaders, which is not their job.) Nonetheless, when compiling their lists of the best movies of the year, our critics found some solace in the fact that even though 2022 wasn’t exactly a great year for movies, there were memorable, provocative, and even spectacular theatrical experiences to be had.

Alison Willmore’s Top 10 Movies

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I wish Sarah Polley hadn’t opted to desaturate the colors of Women Talking, because aside from that choice, the film is almost perfect as an fearlessly earnest discussion of how to proceed in the wake of abuse. A Me Too story told with characters who have never heard of Me Too, Women Talking takes place in an insular Mennonite community whose women have been targeted for repeated druggings and rapes by some of the men they live among. Their debate — carried out by actors like Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley — covers the difficult terrain of what to do when you have been harmed, how to grapple with anger, whether forgiveness is possible, and how to prevent the same things happening to others. The aesthetic dulling does the characters a disservice by suggesting they live in a less vivid world, because while their lives are out of step with time, their concerns are incredibly relevant. —A.W.

In theaters December 23 Showtimes