[Spoilers for the rankings below. Watch the above video first.]
From Once to Moonlight, from Only Lovers Left Alive to The Farewell, from Me and You and Everyone We Know to Lost in Translation, my pick for the top movie of the year more often has an air of melancholy--quiet, pensive movies you'd more likely see at the arthouse than at the multiplex (though that distinction feels weirdly dated). But for most of the year, I was prepared to write about how the top of my 2022 list would be a bit of an outlier, as I had two maximalist crowd-pleasers, two box office smashes (at least in relative terms) topping my list. Everything Everywhere All at Once and Top Gun: Maverick were my top 2 movies until very late December since having seen both of them before June. After watching Aftersun earlier in December, I "only" slotted it at #3. But in the intervening weeks, I haven't stopped thinking about it. The movie haunts in the same way the memories haunt its protagonist, Sophie. It's a shattering debut from director Charlotte Wells and as I was compiling this list, it felt inevitable that I had to place it at the top.
There were many movies I wished I could have caught up with before making the list: Armageddon Time, Women Talking, Jafar Panahi's No Bears (though his son Panah makes the top 10 with his moving debut!), All That Breathes, Pearl (the prequel to my #22, X), EO, Return to Seoul, and countless others.
As the Bowie clip at the beginning of the video suggests, a list of the best movies of the year is less an objective statement about the greatest films in any given twelve-month span than it is a story of how I traversed the movie year. It's a micro look at film history, a snapshot of one person's point-of-view. But the end of November gave us the opposite, a macro look at the art form, when the once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Critics' List was revealed by Sight & Sound magazine. There are better analyses out there than anything I could write and I'll link them below. But in some circles (to which I will not link below) will use the topping of the list by Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as an excuse to rail against political correctness, identity politics, and some vague and as always unformed idea of "wokeness", as an excuse to argue that the broadening of the voting base unfairly spits in the face of the traditional canon. To this I will only say that I disagree with this assessment and that even if these assertions are true, so what?
- "The Sight and Sound 'Greatest Films' Poll Presents a Bolder Vision of World Cinema" by Richard Brody
- "Did 'Woke Culture' Sabotage This Best Movies Ever Poll?" by George Edelman
- "2022: The year the Sight & Sound film poll blew up" by Scott Tobias
And by completely unpopular demand, here's my hastily considered list of the greatest movies of all time if I ever should be so dared to submit:
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