1) TÁR Todd Field’s orchestral conductor drama is staggering – pensive, hilarious, haunting, and confounding all at once. Ending of the year.
2) Nope Jordan Peele’s most assured, textured work to date is a marvelous testament to the wonders and horrors of filmmaking.
3) RRR Most American blockbusters should be ashamed not to aspire to this film’s level of such gleeful, absurd abandon.
4) Top Gun: Maverick Tom Cruise cements his status as the last true American movie star. An exhilarating theatrical experience.
5) The Fabelmans Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age film is achingly bittersweet, emotionally brutal, and casually hilarious.
6) The Banshees of Inisherin McDonagh’s best movie in 14 years. Farrell and Gleeson are a wicked pair once again.
7) Decision to Leave Park Chan-wook puts on his Wong Kar-wai hat for a restrained, gorgeous noir yarn of sensual yearning.
8) Crimes of the Future Another reliably alienating late-career Cronenberg film about the fleshy intersection of human evolution and technology. Loved it.
9) Avatar: The Way of Water A dizzying technical marvel and a triumphant return to Pandora that was worth the 13-year wait.
10) Barbarian Scary, funny, savage, smart, perverse. This is the stuff future classic horror midnighters are made of.
Near Misses: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, The Eternal Daughter, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Aftersun
Most Overrated: Triangle of Sadness
Most Underrated: Kimi, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, The Munsters
Wild Card: I’ve been thinking about some of the stunts from Jackass Forever since February.
Acting Kudos (Male): Daniel Kaluuya (Nope), Austin Butler (Elvis), Justin Long (Barbarian)
Acting Kudos (Female): Cate Blanchett (TÁR), Kristen Stewart (Crimes of the Future), Mia Goth (X, Pearl)
Best Director: Charlotte Wells (Aftersun), Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair), Todd Field (TÁR)
Best Original Screenplay: Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin); Jordan Peele (Nope); Park Chan-wook, Chung Seo-kyung (Decision to Leave)
Best Adapted Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio); Ehren Kruger, Christopher McQuarrie, Justin Marks, Peter Craig, Eric Warren Singer (Top Gun: Maverick)
TV Series/Event: I’d say if you were to only watch one thing from this year, that one thing should maybe be Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal.
Worst Film: I’ve never seen a more inept, irresponsible depiction of mental illness on film than in The Son.
The Little Film That Could: Deadstream is a great reinvigoration of the found-footage/livestream genre, now streaming on Shudder. An ideal horror-comedy.
Trace Sauveur’s Top 10 Films of 2022
A version of this article appeared in print on Dec 16, 2022 with the headline: Trace Sauveur’s Top 10 Films of 2022
This article appears in December 16 • 2022.