The Best Films of 2022

It’s a staggering portrait of celebrity and power. It’s a seductive peek into the lofty bubble of the classical-music world. It’s an insidiously unfolding thriller about a brilliant artist, addicted to beauty, who’s undone by her own appetites. And it’s a study of a world — ours — in which social media and a newly unyielding public morality have combined to reevaluate the license we used to give to the gifted and the famous (the ones who felt they could be as predatory as they liked). Yet if you had to pinpoint the quality that lends Todd Field’s remarkable film its singular and immersive grip, it is probably best evoked by the fact that so many of the people who see “Tár” come away believing that Lydia Tár, the symphony orchestra conductor played by Cate Blanchett, actually exists. That’s a signifier of the film’s artistry — that it feels as real as if it were happening to us. Blanchett, in a great performance, makes Lydia a sacred monster shuttling between heaven and hell.

Who wants to see a movie about how Steven Spielberg, as a teenage wunderkind in the ’50s and early ’60s, launched himself as an obsessive filmmaker, staging homemade movies with his 8mm camera, pinging off Hollywood Westerns and war films but mostly making it up as he went along, discovering all the beauty and the bloodshed of cinema along with the sheer magic-box fun of it? Not nearly as many people as might have wanted to 20 years ago. Yet Spielberg was right to wait this long to tell the story of his youth on film. He has made a lyrical and layered memoir that looks back in love and anger, that aches at memories of watching the slow-motion split-up of his parents, that tells teen tales of romance and prejudice, and that vibrates with Spielberg’s immersion in the medium he would revolutionize. Gabriel LaBelle gives Sammy Fabelman an inner life of quiet turbulence, and Michelle Williams and Paul Dano (as Sammy’s parents) and Judd Hirsch (as his Old World but fiercely worldly great-uncle) create characters you can’t just feel one way about.

The most sweeping piece of comic book cinema since “The Dark Knight” — and yes, Matt Reeves’ take on the Batman legend owes a lot to Christopher Nolan’s 2008 landmark. But it’s also its own hushed and moody and inky-black thing, with Robert Pattinson, in a supremely tensile performance, playing the Batman like a detective out of a Thomas Harris novel, making his way through a plot that’s canny enough in its labyrinthine design to earn comparison to “Chinatown.” This is the first Batman so scarred he can’t even enjoy being Bruce Wayne. Yet Pattinson makes him a warrior of cracked valor, and Paul Dano’s Riddler is the kind of maniacal dweeb puzzle-maker whose sordid gamesmanship keeps the action several steps ahead of the audience. Zoë Kravitz invests Catwoman with an end-of-her-tether soul that makes her and the Batman tattered desperadoes of cosplay.

If the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio had merely been a gay gloss on a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan rom-com of the ’90s (“Sleepless in Provincetown”? “You’ve Got Male”?), it’s unclear whether even that would have ignited the box office. But guess what? The movie is so much funnier, sharper, richer, bolder and more audaciously observant than that. Billy Eichner, who co-wrote the film, infuses “Bros” with his literate acid wit, and he plays the most entertaining brainiac romantic dyspeptic since the heyday of Woody Allen. Entwined in the tale of Bobby (Eichner), a New York podcast host, and Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), an estate lawyer too sexy for his job, is a full-on comic vision of gay romantic life in the 21st century. The characters may be looking for love, but they keep getting tripped up by the hookup culture they’ve created as a kind of playground — a culture the film both celebrates and scaldingly satirizes. Eichner and his co-writer and director, Nicholas Stoller, root “Bros” in Hollywood tropes, but the movie’s secret weapon is its unconventional ideology: its embrace of the idea that gay culture and straight culture have very different ways to court and spark.

Alexei Navalny is the Nelson Mandela of Russia: the opposition leader, now shackled in a remote prison, all for the crime of calling out Vladimir Putin as a corrupt emperor with no clothes. Navalny’s story is singular in its relevance, but it is also, in Daniel Roher’s momentous documentary, a saga of forceful and staggering twists and turns. The film invites us to hang out with Navalny in Germany after he got poisoned by the Putin regime, an assassination attempt that plays like a hit ordered by a Bond villain and carried out by the Keystone Kops. Navalny himself, with a vast following on social media, emerges as a new kind of freedom fighter: part martyr, part entertainer, as well as a walking profile in courage.

It was made outside Iran (because it couldn’t have been made inside Iran), but Ali Abbasi’s drama is, in spirit if not in fact, an Iranian film, and one of singular power. It’s a neo-realist thriller that meticulously reenacts the story of Saeed Hanaei, who killed 16 women in the early 2000s, nearly all of them sex workers in the city of Mashad. He was on a mission to “cleanse” Iran, and Mehdi Bajestani, the actor who plays him, shows us how a kind of corrupt puritanism could descend into homicidal fervor. Zar Amir Ebrahimi, as the (fictional) journalist on his trail, plays a crusader poised between bravery and terror. “Holy Spider” is gripping, but what’s indelible about it is how the film uses this story to reveal a more widespread absolutism in Iranian society.

The kind of lavish impassioned all-stops-out pop-music biopic you either give in to or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby. As Whitney Houston, Naomi Ackie is far from the singer’s physical double, yet she nails the hard part: channeling her incandescence. She shows you the freedom that made Houston tick and the self-doubt that ate away at her, until she fell from the mountaintop she’d scaled. The director, Kasi Lemmons, creates a portrait of Houston’s dilemmas and demons that’s bracingly authentic, from the drugs to the family backstabbing to the love relationship with Robin Crawford (Nafessa Williams) that a homophobic society made her feel compelled to repress, from the attacks she weathered for her music being “not Black enough” to the self-destructive refuge she sought in her relationship with the sexy scurrilous lightweight Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders). As Clive Davis, Stanley Tucci captures the Arista mogul’s bone-dry dictator-mensch savoir faire. Whitney gets dragged down by forces both in and outside her. Yet through it all, her voice, her songs, her artistry of faith shines like a rapturous light.

The first film written and directed by B.J. Novak, former co-star of “The Office,” is a one-of-a-kind oddball, and that’s a compliment. In this dark but word-happy blue-state-meets-red-state tall tale, Novak plays a whip-smart obnoxious writer for The New Yorker who heads to small-town Texas to attend the funeral of an ex-hookup. Once there, he’s embroiled in a murder mystery that is really a culture clash that is really a meditation on why America has turned its once-vibrant differences into hate-fueled divisions. It takes a born filmmaker to keep a caprice this heady spinning in the air.

At a time when physical media is disappearing (or at least fading), there is now a potent and wistful yearning for the analog age. And there’s no more quintessential an expression of that than the love of books. Yet if Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary about Robert Caro, towering author of “The Power Broker” and his still-to-be-completed multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who has shepherded all of Caro’s books, were just a piece of good-ol’-days literary nostalgia, it wouldn’t be the deep and rapturous movie it is. “Turn Every Page” captures how the writing of books like Caro’s was (and still is) a religion, and that it’s all about the place where a magically crafted sentence can capture … the truth. The two Roberts emerge as intoxicating giants, their egos locked in a sometimes combative dance, but what unites them is their devotion to the civilizing glory of The Word.

When I first caught it on Netflix, I thought it was a minor irresistible bauble. But the more I saw it, the more I looked past the nerdish innocence of the plot — it’s all about Evan (Eli Golden), a New York kid reeling from his parents’ divorce, as he tries to assimilate himself into small-town Indiana and stage a triumphant bar mitzvah — and the more I found myself addicted to the ebullient wizardry of the songs, by Jason Robert Brown, and the humming youthquake dance energy of the musical sequences, which come close, at times, to making Tamra Davis’ movie into the kind of tonic that “Grease” was. Yes, sometimes even a critic just wants to sink into a confection that can make you feel this good.

In “I’m Not There,” Cate Blanchett played a man (Bob Dylan), and now in “Tár,” she’s essentially playing one again. That’s not to say a woman can’t be a world-renowned conductor, like Lydia Tár, or that the abuses of power that ultimately undo her are unique to men. But if you’re going to tackle #MeToo and the subject of cancel culture, it’s less didactic — and a lot more interesting — to flip the genders: Ergo, Blanchett embodies a complex lesbian character, taken down for typically male misbehavior. After a too-long break from filmmaking, “In the Bedroom” director Todd Field returns with a heady look at how a figure at the top of her game — the rarefied world of classical music — oversteps. In Blanchett’s hands, Lydia is cold, confident and ruthlessly indifferent to others’ feelings, which is part of why we love her, at least at first. She’s above it all. But watch out. From such a perch, she has so much farther to fall.

Set largely in a French courtroom and shot in long, seemingly neutral takes, Alice Diop’s shattering narrative debut is a monster movie the likes of which I’d never seen before. An immigrant woman stands trial for an unthinkable crime: She abandoned her daughter on the beach, leaving the 15-month-old child to drown. The female judge questions the accused not with scorn but concern. How could this happen? In the gallery sits another woman, a pregnant novelist who is clearly a stand-in for the director. She appears to recognize the same capacity in herself. Perhaps it exists in us as well. Despite the rigorous formal devices in place, Diop’s approach is so personal that I found myself unable to breathe at times. It’s that devastating, the ideas provoked by an artist in total control of her craft.

Pre-pandemic, we used to think of movies confined largely to a single location as feeling like filmed plays; now they seem like nimble responses to imposed restrictions. Two terrific actors and a hotel room — plus Katy Brand’s shrewd less-is-more screenplay — were practically all Sophie Hyde needed to take audiences on a journey of self-discovery, as Emma Thompson plays Nancy Stokes, a widowed religious studies professor who, over the course of several tête-à-tête sessions with a young male escort (Daryl McCormack), makes a better-late-than-never embrace of her own sexuality. It seems condescending to call Thompson’s performance “courageous.” However, in our image-conscious, body-shaming era, the vulnerability she shows in the movie’s mirror scene is both a radical act and a breakthrough in Nancy’s tentative embrace of self-love.

An elementary school playground (the film’s English title) serves as a microcosm for the world (as it’s called in French: “Un monde”) in Laura Wandel’s tiny gut-punch of a movie. Adapting the immersive documentary style of fellow Belgians the Dardenne brothers to a 7-year-old girl’s perspective — lower to the ground, where grown-ups assume the wah-wah distortion of a “Peanuts” cartoon — Wandel reminds us how it feels to be a child, overwhelmed by new environments, struggling to make sense of unfamiliar social dynamics. Namely, bullying, a topic that most films treat as a matter of victimization, whereas Wandel reminds that even (and perhaps especially) the picked-on tend to push others around … sometimes well into adulthood. It’d make a great double bill with Céline Sciamma’s gentle, generation-bridging “Petite Maman.”

Christopher Nolan set the bar for what Batman movies could be, making me skeptical that Warner Bros.’ latest reboot was anything more than a craven cash grab (the way Sony keeps grinding out Spider-Man movies to keep that deal alive). Come to find, writer-director Matt Reeves had a compelling original vision for this film, going back to the character’s Detective Comics roots, while wrenching the trust-no-one nihilism of film noir into the modern age. While Robert Pattinson’s emotionally damaged vigilante distracts himself with petty criminals, Paul Dano’s deranged Riddler takes on corruption at the top. There may never be a moment when citizens are completely happy with their leaders, but “The Batman” seems scarily in tune with our collective discontent, right down to its terrifying, teetering-on-anarchy inauguration climax.

Audiences have no trouble accepting capricious, contradictory men on-screen, but often rush to judgment when confronted with defiant femmes. Only Vicky Krieps, that elegant Luxembourg-born chameleon with the multilingual skill set, could have handled this most unladylike reappraisal of one of Europe’s most beloved royals, Empress Elisabeth of Austria — or “Sissi” to her fans, including the legions who grew up watching Romy Schneider in the role. Those corny costume dramas, trotted out each Christmas, failed to capture what made Sissi such a modern figure: a restless intellect in a gilded cage, born at least a century too early. Taking a page from “Marie Antoinette” and “Spencer” (but writing a better book), director Marie Kreutzer set out to liberate her, weaving startling historical details — her eating disorder, iconic hairstyle, unfaithful husband — into a deliciously prickly portrait.

When the Venice Film Festival jury awarded Audrey Diwan’s 1963-set French abortion drama its top prize last year, it seemed unfathomable that the Supreme Court might roll back such access in the United States. “Happening” is a political statement, pure and simple, but one Diwan makes simply, with empathy rather than manipulation, by showing how far a university student must go when, early in the sexual revolution, she winds up pregnant by a one-night stand. Lead actor Anamaria Vartolomei makes it easy to identify with 23-year-old Anna, scared and desperate, trying to navigate a situation that countless others before her have faced. If society could only get past the shame and share such experiences as openly as Diwan does here, attitudes would change.

For years, Colin Farrell felt like the most unpredictable star in Hollywood, but this year brought a transformation I never saw coming. No, it wasn’t his appearance as the Penguin in “The Batman,” but a trio of self-effacing turns in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “13 Lives” and this lovely, low-key sci-fi drama. Farrell strips himself of all that movie-star baggage, turning inward to reveal the soulful, introspective side he’s been hiding all these years — or maybe it’s been there all along, hiding in plain sight. (The existential genius of “In Bruges” reveals itself all the more profoundly once you’ve seen “Banshees,” which flips the dynamic between the two leading men.) In a year of multiple “Pinocchio” movies, Kogonada’s future-family portrait gets to the heart of what makes us human.

Great actors can transform themselves into practically anyone, while a great director can take an actor of limited range and draw out of them a great performance. In Brendan Fraser, Darren Aronofsky looked past the “Mummy” star’s goofball appeal and seized on the untapped pain of a faded matinee idol. Swathed in a never-less-than-convincing second skin, Fraser becomes a pitiful, 600-pound high school teacher broken by grief, gradually bingeing himself to death. As in practically all of Aronofsky’s films, from “Requiem for a Dream” to “The Wrestler,” we’re witnessing a kind of slow-motion suicide, and it’s wrenching. Believe it or not, the best performance here comes from Hong Chau as the nurse who remembers the real Charlie, and through whose caring eyes we see him.

If Terrence Malick were to make a genre movie, it might look like this art-house folk horror offering. Set in 19th-century Macedonia and written in a dialect that might not actually exist, it takes a bit of work to figure out, but director Goran Stolevski’s visually poetic debut is on to something profound with its story of an evil curse that turns a wild child into a shape-shifting witch. This naive creature becomes whatever she kills: a nursing mother, a randy shepherd, a witch. Because our protagonist has been raised in isolation, each transformation allows her to experience these systems (patriarchy) and emotions (love) from a fresh perspective. It’s a wonderful metaphor for the movies, which similarly permit us to live vicariously through the people we meet on-screen.