City Weekly's picks for the best movies of 2022 

• Vince Snelling

I wish, desperately, that this didn't need to be said every year, and yet here we are: Movie critics' top 10 lists are not some conspiracy to celebrate little-seen movies at the expense of box-office hits. This battle erupts persistently, and perhaps more so in 2022 after the release of the every-10-years Sight and Sound list of all-time great films inspired more harrumphing over being elitist and obscurantist. How dare the people who watch hundreds of movies per year not include only movies I already know and love!

This is, to put things quite simply, deeply stupid. The goal of my list, or any other list, is neither to congratulate you on having already seen the year's best films, nor to make you feel insecure for not having seen the year's best films. Mine is an individual, idiosyncratic indication of what moved me, excited me, intrigued me and dazzled me at the movies—and I share those things because I love movies, and love to celebrate what I love about them.

So if you're wondering why [fill-in-the-blank with any movie title] isn't on my list of the year's 10 best, it's because my 10 best are different; it's no more complicated than that. I encourage you to make your own list. Meanwhile, here we go.

• MUBI Films

10. Decision to Leave: Park Chan-wook turns in what might very well be the most dizzyingly entertaining directing work of the year in this psychological drama about a married Korean homicide detective who becomes obsessed with the wife of a man found dead after a fall from a mountain—a wife who also happens to be a suspect in potential foul play. The unfolding mystery and the Vertigo-esque character dynamics are plenty compelling, but the greatest pleasures come from watching Park's camera zig every time you're expecting it to zag, providing a master class in creative filmmaking.

• HBO Max

9. Navalny: A documentary filmmaker doing a "fly on the wall" profile never knows when they're going to encounter that magic, unexpected thing that makes the film impossible to ignore. Director Andrew Roher's profile of Russian politician/Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny deals with material that's already compelling about Navalny's life, including surviving an assassination attempt with a nerve agent, but then Navalny's attempt to gather proof that Putin was behind the attempt yields ... something that's better left discovered if you don't know what's coming.

• Focus Features

8. Tár: Cate Blanchett's lead performance—as a celebrated composer/conductor whose predatory behavior threatens to derail her career—has been rightly praised for the way she captures the ego and power-tripping behind the actions of serial abusers. Writer/director Todd Field combines that with a piece of filmmaking that's elegant, deeply immersed in its milieu of the classical-music world and often surprisingly hilarious, right up until a brilliant final sequence that captures its anti-protagonist's ferocious passion for her work, and how that ferocity is part of what turned her into a particular kind of monster.

• A24 Films

7. After Yang: Kogonada follows up his remarkable debut film Columbus with a tale that's nearly as rich and resonant, set in a near future where a man (Colin Farrell) attempts to repair the android "big brother" (Justin H. Min) of his adopted Chinese daughter, and in so doing discovers the synthetic person had a very real internal life. Instead of making this simply another sci-fi exploration of what makes a being "real," Kogonada imbues Yang with layers of meaning—including the phenomenon of parents allowing their kids to be raised by technology—in a way that's deeply warm and resonant. Plus, it has the year's ultimate banger of an opening credits sequence.

• Netflix

6. White Noise: Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Don DeLillo's notoriously "unfilmable" novel—a 1980s-set tale of a blended family dealing with the anxieties of the time—brings out the absolute best work of the director's career as a visual stylist. Beyond that, it's a mix of components that absolutely should not work yet absolutely does, finding both the absurdist humor in both the everyday and apocalyptic terrors facing protagonists Jack (Adam Driver) and Babette (Greta Gerwig) and the absolute sincerity in two people who fear the death of their partner more than they fear the death of themselves.

• A24 Films

5. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: How in the world do you turn playfully silly three-minute shorts about a stop-motion animated shell with a single googly eye into one of the most heartbreaking stories about loneliness in years? Just like this, as director Dean Fleischer-Camp and co-writer Jenny Slate (who voices Marcel, in one of the all-time great animated voice performances) combine light-hearted visual humor with a character study about the need for family, and how the chance for connection comes only from opening yourself up to the possibility of loss.

• Variance Films

4. RRR: Why did this particular example of Indian filmmaking—with its ambitious mixing of spectacle, melodrama and music—break through to a more mainstream audience? I'd like to think it's because it worked on all three levels, very loosely adapting a real-life story of rebellion against colonial rule into a fascinating mash-up of The Departed, Braveheart and John Wick, with some extraordinary visual set pieces and exhilarating music. It's like Marvel's The Avengers, if the slugfest between Thor and Hulk also included an awesome dance-off.

• Janus films

3. Hit the Road/No Bears: Creatively speaking, it was quite a remarkable year for the Panahi family. Ahead of his imprisonment as a dissident, veteran Jafar Panahi made No Bears, casting himself as himself in a story that allows him to become the stand-in for forces that irresponsibly use power to manipulate others. And son Panah Panahi turned out Hit the Road, a hilarious family road-trip drama about trying to smuggle someone across the Iranian border. Taking two very different approaches to addressing the tumult facing their country, father and son both nail it.

• A24 Films

2. Everything Everywhere All At Once: The title kind of tells you all you need to know about Daniel Kwan and Dan Scheinert's brand of "earnest maximalism" in telling the story of a harried laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) discovering the existence of a multiverse. The performances are sensational across the board—including Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis—in a story that somehow manages to blend kung-fu action, butt-stuff lowbrow humor and a sincere conversation between two rocks into a meditation on what it is that really tears worlds apart.

• Searchlight Pictures

1. The Banshees of Inisherin: What does it mean to be "nice," and why do we treat it like an insult? That's the undercurrent percolating through Martin McDonagh's tale of an Irishman (Colin Farrell) whose best friend (Brendan Gleeson) abruptly decides that he doesn't want anything to do with him anymore. Farrell's performance is the best work of his career and the best performance of any kind this year, capturing how the heartbreak of personal rejection can destroy someone. And the historical context only adds more complexity to a study of the decisions that divide us.