‘Aftersun,’ ‘Banshees’ lead best films of 2022
Film writers’ picks for the best movies of 2022.
JAKE COYLE ‘Aftersun’:
Charlotte Wells’ feature debut, starring Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal as an 11-year-old girl and her father on vacation in Turkey, is such a keenly observed accumulation of detail and feeling that you hardly notice the undertow of heartache that will, in the end, absolutely floor you.
‘Belle’: It was easy to miss Mamoru Hosoda’s glorious anime back in January. It’s a dazzling blend of “Beauty and the Beast,” a girl’s wrenching battle with grief and self-doubt, and possibly the best movie ever made about the internet.
‘The Banshees of Inisherin’:
Martin McDonagh’s latest is a lean fable that throbs with existential conundrum. It plays out between a quizzical Colin Farrell, a doom-laden Brendan Gleeson, an exasperated Kerry Condon and a muchcherished donkey.
‘Decision to Leave’: The Korean master Park Chanwook
marries a police procedural and romance, and the twisty noirish results are at turns delightful and devastating.
‘Descendant’: Margaret Brown’s expansive, ruminative documentary reverberates with history and stories passed down through time. The central incident is the discovery in Mobile, Alabama, of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive on U.S. shores. But Brown’s film is most powerful for the way it captures the community of Clotilda descendants as they weigh slavery’s present-day legacy.
‘No Bears’: Iranian writerdirector Jafar Panahi has been banned from making movies or traveling since he was arrested in 2010 for supporting protesters. Yet Panahi has continued to find ways to make thoughtful, playful, defiant films. “No Bears,” which dramatizes Panahi making a film along the Turkish border, is one of his best. It has grown only more piercing since Panahi was jailed over the summer.
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and ‘Nope’: Ina movie world where spectacles often come with little within, both of these films were absolutely brimming with ideas and images. You could call Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s film and Jordan Peele’s latest opus overstuffed. But their sheer cinematic abundance made them nourishing, vibrant exceptions.
‘Lingui, the Sacred Bonds’:
Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s mother-daughter portrait is an extraordinarily vivid tale — set in the outskirts of present-day N’Djamena — of abortion, motherhood and female solidarity.
‘The Fabelmans’: Steven Spielberg’s natural mode as a filmmaker might not be introspective. And while that awkwardness can sometimes be felt in his movie memoir, there are many scenes here unlike anything he has ever shot before, and among his very best.
‘Kimi’: Steven Soderbergh’s fleet-footed thriller starring Zoe Kravitz as an agoraphobic tech contractor deftly channeled the pandemic times into a riveting little pop gem.
Honorable mention: “Compartment No. 6,” “Till,” “One Fine Morning,” “The Cathedral,” “The Woman King,” “Saint Omer,” “Apollo 10 ½,” “Glass Onion: A Knives
Out Mystery,” “Emily the Criminal,” “Bones and All”
LINDSEY BAHR ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’:
McDonagh’s film is a sharp, funny and utterly devastating work about the end of a friendship. Farrell uses his wonderful brows (and acting chops) to ensure ultimate heartbreak as his world and sense of self crumbles and rots. But it’s the ensemble who imbues this deceptively simple set-up with gravity and depth.
‘Tar’: In Todd Field’s “Tar,” Cate Blanchett is transcendent in bringing this flawed genius to life, challenging the audience to consider big questions about power, status and art.
‘Women Talking’: Sarah Polley’s film was already considered “divisive” before its general release. I’m one who was spellbound by her heady, spiritual vision of a group of abused women in an isolated religious colony questioning their reality and wondering if life could somehow be different.
‘Aftersun’: You don’t have to know anything about Wells to get wrapped up in “Aftersun,” an inspired and fully realized memory piece about an ordinary vacation some 20 years prior that will leave you in pieces.
‘Saint Omer’: A young woman is on trial for the death of her 15-month-old daughter in this haunting French courtroom drama, a tremendous debut feature from Alice Diop.
‘Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris’:
Anthony Fabian’s film about an English housecleaner and war widow (Lesley Manville) in the 1950s who saves up to travel to Paris to buy a couture Christian Dior gown is a balm.
‘Kimi’: Soderbergh’s film is a taut, paranoid thriller with a modern, Alexa/ Siri-inspired spin on the overheard crime scenario of “Blow Up” and a sharp performance from Kravitz.
‘Murina’: There is rot beneath the Adriatic setting of Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s debut feature about a 17-year-old girl who is starting to question the ingrained misogyny around her.
‘Corsage’: Beauty, waistlines, aging, celebrity, duty and desire haunt Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Marie Kreutzer’s intricate and interpretive portrait of dynamic mind and soul that has been stifled by her position and myriad traumas.
‘White Noise’: There is a dazzling rhythm to the entire epic of Noah Baumbach’s Don DeLillo adaptation. But maybe the most surprising thing is that behind all the wit, the style, the commentary on American society and the banal and the profound in the everyday, there is a real emotional weight too.
Honorable mention:
“Happening,” “The Eternal Daughter,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Fire of Love,” “Catherine Called Birdy,” “EO,” “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “Cyrano”