Every year has its mix of good and bad movies. What makes 2022 a little bit different is that so many of the year’s best movies were the product of a single vision, the work of a lone writer-director.
Six of the following 10 films, including the top four, were written and directed by a single person. Twenty-five years ago, a similar list would’ve contained no films fitting that description. So this kind of film, though not new, is in the ascendant, and that’s a surprising trend to discover.
This tendency is not confined to the top 10, either. What would have been my 11th choice, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was the work of a writing-directing team, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
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No. 1: ‘Tár’
Written and directed by Todd Field, and starring Cate Blanchett in atour-de-force performanceas an internationally lauded orchestra conductor, this is a fascinating, 160-minute portrait of a genuinely extraordinary woman who deserves her great success. However, success on that scale is dangerous, spiritually and professionally, in that there is nothing to check one’s worst impulses save for their own conscience.
And conscience is a rare attribute in someone who is, somewhat justifiably, an egomaniac. Lydia Tár is 2022’s most vivid and complete creation.
No. 2. ‘Babylon’
This love-it-or-hate-it, Cecil B. DeMille-like orgy of a film celebrates the American silent film in the era right before and after the coming of sound.
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, the film isn’t an accurate portrait of the era, but rather a fever-dream riff that captures the splendor of the period and the excitement of being young and at the center of something new and wonderful. This movie is the freshest thing to happen in cinema this year.
No. 3: ‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’
Regina Hall andSterling K. Browngive two of the best performances of the year in writer-director Adamma Ebo’s funny and unsettling cringe comedy, about a married pair of evangelical preachers trying to rebuild their career following a devastating sex scandal. Ebo’s understanding of the Black evangelical church is wide enough for both sympathy and satire.
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No. 4: ‘Emily the Criminal’
Aubrey Plaza— who is on a roll with a number of leading roles in independent films, and a standout performance in season two of“The White Lotus”— plays a young woman whose desperate need for money lures her into the world of credit card fraud, something for which she turns out to have serious talent.
Thisimpressive first filmby John Patton Ford is the best of both worlds, combining the psychological penetration of an independent film with the gut level thrills of commercial entertainment.
No. 5: ‘Elvis’
Baz Luhrmann’s vigorous approach to filmmaking finds its ideal outlet in thestory of Elvis Presley, as narrated by his villainous manager, ColonelTom Parker. He is played by Tom Hanks in a fat suit that, like the movie itself, is strange and bordering on dreamlike.
The filmis a portrait of a trusting, naive young man’s exploitation by an evil opportunist, but the tone is not that of an exposé but rather like that of a dark Grimm’s fairy tale. And Austin Butler makes an ideal Elvis.
No. 6: ‘Mothering Sunday’
Anything but the usual stodgy British period piece, this movie, set in the aftermath of World War I and directed by French filmmaker Eva Husson, is a passionate study of a young woman’s emotional journey.
Interspersing flashbacks and flash forwards,the film focuseson a pivotal day in the life of a British maid (played with striking self-possession by Odessa Young), who will one day grow to become a celebrated novelist.
No. 7: ‘Benediction’
If you want to see freedom and intuition working at the highest levels of inspiration, see this latest work by writer-director Terence Davies, about the poet Siegfried Sassoon’s struggle to live with the sadness and trauma he experienced in the trenches of World War I. Davies’ technique allows for sudden flights of imagination, but he’s never sloppy.His film is a dazzling combinationof wildness and control.
No. 8: ‘Petite Maman’
Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), who must be counted among the world’s great filmmakers, wrote and directed这个现代寓言about a little girl who meets another little girl in the woods, who turns out to be her own mother some 25 years earlier. Being only 8 years old, the girls accept this miracle as normal, as no more impossible than Santa Claus.
Gradually, this beautiful, uncanny film grows into a powerful meditation on mothers and daughters.
No. 9: ‘The Whale’
Brendan Fraser plays a 600-pound man nearing the end of his life in this poignant chamber drama adapted from the play by Samuel D. Hunter.
Like “The Wrestler,” also directed by Darren Aronofsky, this is the portrait of a man whose forbidding appearance can’t quite conceal his delicacy of spirit, one beautifully conveyed by Fraser in one of the year’s best performances.
No. 10: ‘The Menu’
Mark Mylod directed thisfunny, unsettling satireof haute cuisine, featuring Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult, among others, as the invited guests of a star chef, who is putting together a special dinner at a high-end restaurant on a private island. Their only problem is that the chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a dangerous maniac.
Weird and unpredictable, the film is apointed critique of diningat its most decadent.