This year, the nervous clench of the pandemic eased up (to some extent), with movie theaters fully reopened and film festivals carrying on like they used to before 2020.  The industry, and moviegoing itself, is still in trouble, but, at least, there was a host of thrilling work to celebrate and enjoy throughout all that tumult. So many, in fact, that plenty of worthy films—the hushed memoir piece Aftersun, the prickly fable The Banshees of Inisherin, the scrappy found-family drama Broker—had to be left off this list, for brevity’s sake. The ten films listed below shone brightest for me in 2022. (See the best movies of 2023 here.) 

10. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

On paper, Dean Fleischer Camp’s film sounds like a mistake. Based on viral shorts from a decade or so ago, Marcel could easily have been lazy, cloying nostalgia, a too-late attempt to cash in on a bygone era of internet quirk. Instead, Marcel is a wistful wonder of a children’s film, one that carefully balances the silly with the serious. The film’s visual invention and graceful writing distinguish it from many of its peers; Marcel speaks to little ones on their level while gently encouraging them to think and feel more expansively about their lives and the life of the world around them. Anchoring the project is the invaluable voice work of co-writer Jenny Slate, who gives the adorable creature of the title some necessary pepper lest he become too cute. Melancholy without being sappy, mordant without being cynical, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was the poignant surprise of the year, a marvelous debut feature from a director who, I hope, will take us on many more humane adventures in the future.

9. Saint Omer

Alice Diop’s quiet and somber film is a courtroom drama, but not in the familiar sense. There is no lawyerly speechifying, no sudden discovery of salient evidence. Instead, Saint Omer is a measured consideration of a tragedy: the death of an infant whose mother, Laurence (a forceful Guslagie Malanda), stands accused of murder. Diop, a documentarian making her narrative debut, based her film on the real-life case of a Senagalese immigrant convicted of killing her child. She  patiently and compassionately listens to Laurence in the form of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant writer who sits in on the trial in search of a story. As these two women mull over, publicly and privately, their lives as Black women in France—and as mothers—Saint Omer whispers with the voices of so many drifting in the margins of what is meant to be a progressive and egalitarian society. The slow build of this precisely structured film is remarkable, as if we are watching the reinvention of a hoary genre. Saint Omer is another sterling entry in the recent spate of films, like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Nikyatu Jasu’s Nanny, that have addressed the West African diaspora with resounding power.

8. Hit the Road

This year, two Iranian filmmakers offered up damning portraits of their country and its government: Jafar Panahi’s filmed-in-secret meta-drama No Bears and Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road. Their last names aren’t a coincidence. The Panahis are father and son, one boldly emerging into a film tradition to which his father has given so much. Jafar is currently embattled in a legal struggle against the Iranian government, banned from making films and from leaving the country, a situation reflected in the stony neorealism of No Bears. The younger Panahi has gone a more florid route, one perhaps befitting of his age. Hit the Road is lively and energetic, even as it considers, much like No Bears does, the binding restrictions of life in present-day Iran. Hit the Road is about a family on a journey to smuggle a son, who is fleeing a prison sentence for an unknown crime, across the border. It is, in some ways, a wacky road trip movie, though the dire reality of what this trek is all about looms large over the boisterous familial squabbles that animate the film. Heartwarming and heartbreaking, Hit the Road darts and glides where many Iranian films made by elder statesmen—including Panahi’s father—solemnly inspect. Both modes have their place and their value, of course, these urgent efforts to push back against a repressive regime. Just as the Panahis’ countrywomen are doing the same, so fiercely and courageously, on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere today.  

7. One Fine Morning

Nobody captures the quotidian ramble of life quite like Mia Hansen-Løve. The French filmmaker’s ninth feature is a sweet and jaunty look at endings and beginnings. Léa Seydoux plays Sandra, a diplomatic translator who is slowly losing her father to a degenerative illness. As she navigates those upheavals, in all their boggling sorrow and morbidly amusing frustrations, she strikes up a romance with a married man who was once a friend of her husband. Hansen-Løve loosely weaves these two narratives together, softly building toward a conclusion that—in an amiable and sober way, entirely devoid of treacly melodrama—reaffirms the grace and beauty of life. It’s a pleasure watching Seydoux in this naturalist mode, a welcome change of pace from Bond capers and dark satires. She’s perfectly suited to Hansen-Løve’s delicate staging of the everyday, alert and responsive as if she is living these moments in the real world, in real time. Sunny and sad, One Fine Morning is a lovely counterbalance to other French dramas about old people fading away (like Amour and Vortex), a gentle picture that still packs a loving punch. 

6. Armageddon Time

James Gray’s trip back to the 1980s Queens of his youth is by no means an exercise in cozy nostalgia. Armageddon Time is a doleful moral drama about a Jewish family’s shifting consciousness of race and class at the dawn of the Reagan era. In its inspection of this country’s tangled and layered systems of prejudice, Armageddon Time stands confidently in its guilt without slipping into preening self-flagellation. Gray instead offers a thoughtful and textured look at a family caught on a particularly American faultline, making terrible choices that are common to so many Americans whose reliance on structures of power, passively or not, becomes complicity. It’s a sharply acted film, from Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong as parents desperate to push their children up the societal ladder to newcomers Banks Repetta and Jaylin Webb as wayward kids on a collision course with unjust reality. Like all of Gray’s best work, Armageddon Time is at once visceral and cerebral, gripping in its immersive technical achievements and in its heady, unignorable conclusions. 

5. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

This captivating documentary from Laura Poitras (an Oscar winner for Citizenfour) is a biography of the artist Nan Goldin and a report on her efforts, alongside many others, to bring the Sackler family, who unleashed Oxycontin upon the world, to some kind of justice. There is an even bigger story being told here, though, one about America’s many failures in its duty of care, from the micro to the macro. As Goldin narrates her life, in words and images, we learn of her tragic childhood, her time spent in the wilds of New York City’s underground scene before and after AIDS came crashing in, and about her present-day campaign against rapacious, murderous greed. In all that scope, we see a terrible pattern emerge, a repeating mural of people dismissed and preyed upon by the artless, unfeeling monster of capital. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a stirring document of empathy and creativity used as weapons against immoral hegemony—mighty tools even in the face of such bitter defeat, such incalculable loss. The personal and the political are tightly fused in Poitras’s meticulously crafted film. She honors not only Goldin and her art, but also her principles. 

4. Benediction

This year’s Fire Island and Bros showed contemporary gay social and romantic life in vibrant comedic shades. Terence Davies’s Benediction is a much graver affair, a biopic about poet Siegfried Sassoon (played with ache and wit by Jack Lowden) as he tries to move past the trauma of his experiences in the First World War. But it contains as intricate and enriching a map of gay community as its cheerier brethren do. Sassoon moved among a tribe of fops, ne’er-do-wells, and dashing semi-closeted aristocrats, men who lived lives as fully as their era would allow (and, in many senses, more than it would). There’s a poignancy to Davies’s involvement here, the director addressing queer issues head-on for the first time in many years. And there is the matter of Sassoon’s writing, so haunted and horrified by war, so mournful of the needless death of millions. Pain and pleasure commingle to devastating—and yet oddly heartening, too—effect in Benediction, a stately period piece that favors deep feeling over stuffy formality. 

3. Empire of Light

Director Sam Mendes has made many gorgeous films, lush and lacquered. Empire of Light is another of those polished gems, but this time, a wealth of humanity lies beneath the luxe aesthetics. The film is a bittersweet short story about two movie theater employees—a lonely and troubled middle-aged woman, Hilary, played by Olivia Colman and a young man, Stephen, played by Michael Ward—making a brief connection as their lives shift and strain in the dawn of a new decade. Roger Deakins’s cinematography and a stunning score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross greatly contribute to Empire of Light’s typically Mendes-ian swoon, but they don’t overwhelm the finespun human drama at the center of the film. Bleary and hopeful, Empire of Light avoids becoming a starchy “issues” drama because it seems to know these two people so specifically, so intimately. Mendes has made a kind and generous film, a balm for fraught times that remains ever cognizant of the intractability of the problems confronting these two yearning friends and lovers. It’s a tearjerker with a real soul, a rare piece of sentimental filmmaking that stays grounded even as it soars.

2. You Won’t Be Alone

One of the most criminally undersung movies of the year, this eerie and pensive supernatural drama from debut feature director Goran Stolevski is dizzyingly vast in its meditation on the human condition. The film concerns a shape-shifting Macedonian witch who can take the forms of other creatures—mostly people, but also a dog in one interlude—by killing them and stuffing some of their guts inside a cavity in her chest. That may sound like gross-out horror, but Stolevski instead turns his film toward the dreamily metaphysical, paying respectful homage to Terrence Malick in the process. As You Won’t Be Alone loops and murmurs, its lead character ruminates on the nature of life: sex, death, longing, love. What she discovers is, to borrow a title from another film on this list, the beauty and bloodshed of our messy existence, grueling and wonderful and worth cherishing. 

1. TÁR 

What a thrill it is to sit with Todd Field’s glorious riot of a film for its nearly three-hour run. Part thriller and part grim satire, TÁR is keenly tuned into the wavelengths of modern discourse, all of our debate about power and abuse, genius and tyranny. In some ways, the film feels as if it was written the night before whatever day you watched it, so bracing and exciting is its timeliness and immediacy. Cate Blanchett—playing a brilliant conductor-composer whose career starts to crumble when past bad behavior is brought to light—has perhaps never been better. TÁR is an ideal vessel for her ferocious intelligence and her slight air of haughty grandeur, which is turned up to near comical volume in Field’s wickedly funny—and yet still bleak and shocking—masterwork. 

Field seems to expect the controversy he courts, but not in a way that feels smugly combative. He really just wants to talk about what we’ve all been talking about the past few years, and to do so in sleek, breathtakingly entertaining fashion. A movie about the possible end of an entire tradition of hero worship, TÁR places itself on the vanguard of a new era, rueful about some of what’s been lost, but charging ahead toward the possibility, and clearer understanding, of whatever comes next. 

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