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While the moviegoing world (heck, the world at large) might be nowhere near \u201cpre-pandemic normalcy,\u201d here\u2019s something to get excited about: a whittled-down annual list of the best movies we\u2019ve already seen from the year to come. Last year\u2019s list was one of our most stacked ever, thanks to a number of hotly anticipated titles (including a wide variety of festive standouts from 2020 and early 2021) getting pushed way back to later, more optimistic release dates. Now, as films make their way to audiences through theatrical releases, streaming options, and more, we\u2019re not waiting quite so long to see some of our favorites.<\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t mean 2022 doesn\u2019t already have a bevy of fantastic new offerings we\u2019ve been lucky enough to see, review, and champion. These films include a number of our favorite festival picks (from 2020 and 2021) gearing up for theatrical and VOD release in the coming months.<\/p>\n
IndieWire has curated 15 titles worthy of anticipation and combined them all into a single guide, complete with release dates and review snippets that provide a sneak peek at several movies bound to be a part of the year-end conversation 12 months down the line. Here\u2019s to better months ahead.<\/p>\n
Of note: This list only includes films we have already seen that have a confirmed 2022 release date or have been picked up for distribution with 2022 release dates to be set. Because of the (continued) weirdness of 2021, we are including films that had qualifying runs in 2021 but opted for wider release in 2022. <\/p>\n
\u201cA Hero\u201d (In theaters on January 7, streaming on Amazon Prime on January 21)
\nEpitomized by the heart-wrenching uncertainty of 2011\u2019s \u201cA Separation,\u201d Asghar Farhadi\u2019s social melodramas begin with straightforward predicaments that are peeled back \u2014 layer by layer, and with deceptive casualness \u2014 while the hard bulb of a moral crisis is revealed deep underneath. His stories are better described as dilemmas, and those dilemmas unfold with the frustration, resolve, and steadily increasing ferocity of a cat batting a tethered ball to itself around a pole until the string is stretched tight enough that everything chokes to a standstill.<\/p>\n
Farhadi plays to his strengths with \u201cA Hero,\u201d as he takes a classic premise and spins it around and around and around with enough centrifugal force to keep you rooted in place even as your sympathies fly in every conceivable direction. By the time this expertly constructed ethical clusterfuck finally slows to a stop, the simplest film that Farhadi has made since his international breakthrough 10 years ago has somehow become the most ambivalent, and also the best (although making such a pronouncement with certainty seems almost antithetical to the spirit of a movie that obliviates your judgment at every turn). Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cBelle\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBelle\u201d (In theaters on January 14)
\n\u201cBeauty and the Beast\u201d meets online bullying in a hyper-modern anime riff on the classic fairy tale (or at least the Disney version of it), as \u201cMira\u00ef\u201d director Mamoru Hosoda pushes his boundless imagination to new extremes in a visually dazzling musical about how J-Pop can save the world. If that seems like too much ground for a cartoon to cover in the span of a two-hour coming-of-age story, keep in mind that Hosoda has a knack for reaching familiar places in rivetingly unexpected fashions. Case in point: The heroine of \u201cBelle\u201d enters the movie atop a flying humpback whale that\u2019s barnacled with hundreds of stereo speakers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fitting introduction to a film that wows you with its wild vision of internet age identity even when it doesn\u2019t reveal anything that isn\u2019t already self-evident. But Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn\u2019t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it\u2019s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cItalian Studies\u201d (In theaters on January 14)
\nA dreamy lark of a movie shot piecemeal between July 2018 and April of the following year, Adam Leon\u2019s \u201cItalian Studies\u201d may be set along (and expertly stolen from) the crowded sidewalks of London and New York, but it\u2019s unmistakably suffused with the woozy dislocation and \u201cwe have to make something\u201d life-force of a COVID film. No one is wearing masks or social distancing in the heat of lower Manhattan on a summer afternoon, yet Leon\u2019s heroine \u2014 a successful author played by Vanessa Kirby at a time just before people on the street would recognize her as one of the gutsiest actresses of her generation, or as anyone at all \u2014 is lost in a fugue state that vividly reflects the isolation and uncertainty of the last 18 months. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
“Cyrano”
\nMGM<\/p>\n
\u201cCyrano\u201d (In theaters on January 21)
\nJust when you think you\u2019ve seen it all, Joe Wright \u2014 one of the last true madmen in Hollywood cinema \u2014 rebounds from the folly of his \u201cWoman in the Window\u201d with a full-throated musical adaptation of \u201cCyrano de Bergerac\u201d soundtracked by The National, shot during COVID on Sicily (with hundreds of lavishly costumed extras singing a mope rock banger on the snowy peak of an active volcano!), and starring Peter Dinklage as a lovelorn poet who possesses the courage to sword-fight 10 men at a time but not the pride to confess his feelings to the one woman he\u2019s loved for all eternity.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s just the clown makeup and corsets talking, but there are moments during Wright\u2019s \u201cCyrano\u201d \u2014 such as the literal rap battle during which Cyrano trades rhymes with a foe while they fence to the death \u2014 that delude you into thinking this must be the most gonzo work of mainstream art that someone has made in defiance of a plague since \u201cThe Decameron.\u201d Is it good? In parts! Is it intoxicated with the same demented bravado that its namesake embodies when he sneaks behind the enemy lines of the Franco-Spanish War, but tragically lacks whenever he\u2019s alone with his true love Roxanne (a ravishing Haley Bennett, with whom Wright himself is besotted in real life)? Absolutely. And that\u2019s plenty to sing about. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cSundown\u201d (In theaters on January 28)
\nThe characters in Michel Franco\u2019s \u201cSundown\u201d are on a luxurious Mexican holiday in which they swim in the clear sea and their private infinity pool, take a regal interest in the local singers and cliff divers, and lie flat out on sun loungers on their hotel suite\u2019s terrace while a waiter brings them their morning margaritas. It\u2019s relaxing for them, but absolutely nerve-frazzling for anyone who saw Franco\u2019s last film, \u201cNew Order,\u201d a traumatizingly gory drama in which a high-society wedding turned into a bloodbath, and things got more stressful from there.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, it doesn\u2019t take long for trouble to come to this particular paradise, but \u201cSundown\u201d is quieter and more oblique than \u201cNew Order.\u201d It\u2019s smaller, too, in terms of its cast and its scope. That film\u2019s merciless depiction of a city imploding in revolution and counter-revolution thrilled some viewers and offended others, most vocally in Franco\u2019s native Mexico. His enigmatic follow-up is more likely to prompt puzzled conversations about what he\u2019s getting at. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Worst Person in the World\u201d (In theaters on February 4)
\nA sharp and entrancing pivot back to the restless films he once made about beautiful young people suffering from the vertigo of time moving through them (\u201cReprise\u201d and \u201cOslo, August 31\u201d being the first two parts of the loose thematic trilogy that led us here), Joachim Trier\u2019s latest film embraces the idea that originality might be a touch overrated. In fact, Julie\u2019s life could even be seen as a cautionary tale about the perils of waiting to become the unique flowers we\u2019re all promised to blossom into one day, even if it understands that some lessons can only be learned the hard way. \u201cWhen was life supposed to start?\u201d asks the narrator on Julie\u2019s behalf, her rhetorical question belying the obvious fact that it already has.<\/p>\n
If Julie is less of a character than a vividly realized archetype, Renate Reinsve didn\u2019t get the message. The flush-cheeked actress (who Trier fans may recognize from her small part in \u201cOslo\u201d) steps into her first major role with a careful mix of forcefulness and frustration; Reinsve\u2019s performance believably renders Julie smart enough to become anything she wants, but also naive enough to feel blindsided by the realization that she\u2019ll eventually have to choose what that will be. Her Julie is so easy to root for, and yet when Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt confront how badly people can treat each other as they scramble to make the best of themselves, Reinsve ensures that \u201cThe Worst Person in the World\u201d delivers on its ironic wink of a title. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
\nCannes<\/p>\n
\u201cLingui, the Sacred Bonds\u201d (In theaters on February 4)
\nMahamat-Saleh Haroun\u2019s slender yet riveting \u201cLingui, the Sacred Bonds\u201d is a story about a woman trying to secure an abortion for her 15-year-old daughter in a country where terminating a pregnancy violates both national and religious laws, but \u2014 as its title suggests in two different languages \u2014 this soft hammer of a social drama is less concerned with the cruelties of Chad\u2019s politics than it is with how people help each other to endure them together.<\/p>\n
\u201cLingui\u201d is a Chadian term that represents a tradition of altruism; a collective resilience in the face of catastrophic ordeals. When a group of young men wordlessly pull the teenage Maria (Rihane Khalil-Alio) out from a riverbed after she tries to drown herself, that is lingui. When Maria\u2019s mother Amina (Achouackh Abakar Soulymane) agrees to aid her estranged sister at a moment of irrevocable crisis, that is lingui. When Maria\u2019s school, afraid of how gossip might reflect on them, expels the girl the minute they learn of her delicate condition\u2026 that is why lingui is so necessary. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cCatch the Fair One\u201d (In theaters on February 11)
\nWith Ronda Rousey lying low for the last few years and Gina Carano not lying nearly low enough, the fighter-to-actress pipeline isn\u2019t flowing as steadily as it once was. But now a new challenger has entered the ring with \u201cCatch the Fair One,\u201d and she\u2019s already a WBA champion in two other weight classes. After her bruising yet vulnerable lead performance in Josef Kubota Wladyka\u2019s sex-trafficking thriller, boxer Kali Reis deserves to add another title belt to her collection (and not just because there\u2019s so little in the way of competition).<\/p>\n
Reis\u2019 sinewy first movie role isn\u2019t much of a stretch, but that\u2019s part of why it packs such a devastating punch. The Providence-born pugilist \u2014 a half-Native (descending from Cherokee, Nipmuc, and Seaconke Wampanoag tribes) and half-Cape Verdean boxer who could probably destroy your entire life with a single jab to the face \u2014 plays a half-native and half-Cape Verdean boxer who could probably destroy your entire life with a single jab to the face. Her character\u2019s name has been altered to Kaylee, but the moniker they share (\u201cK.O.\u201d) is spelled the same. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
‘Strawberry Mansion’ Trailer: Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s Surreal Sundance Mind-Bender<\/p>\n
Music Box Films<\/p>\n
\u201cStrawberry Mansion\u201d (In theaters on February 18)
\nThere have been countless movies about dreams, but \u201cStrawberry Mansion\u201d is the only one save for \u201cInception\u201d that turns them into a hustle. In this visually entrancing and innovative fantasy from co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, the government forces citizens to record their nighttime journeys and imposes taxes on the unpredictable ingredients found within. Audley and Birney, who previously made the lo-fi comic odyssey \u201cSylvio\u201d about a lonely gorilla with an online talk show, excel at grounding outlandish concepts in genuine emotional stakes.<\/p>\n
\u201cSylvio\u201d was just strange and charming enough to show the potential of a silly-poignant balance unique to their combined talent; \u201cStrawberry Mansion\u201d gets there, with a delightful and innovative oddball journey that overcomes its zany twists by taking them seriously. It doesn\u2019t always work, but there\u2019s so much fun in watching the gears turn that it hardly matters. Shot on video and transferred to 16mm, \u201cStrawberry Mansion\u201d looks like some kind of lost \u201880s vision buried in the dustbin of the rental store. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Banquet\u201d (In theaters on February 18)
\nBetsey (Jessica Alexander) has stopped eating. The pretty British teen isn\u2019t hungry, she says, and who can really blame her, what with the recent passing of her father and the pressures of figuring out the next chapter in her own life. It\u2019s not just that she doesn\u2019t want to eat \u2014 not even the lavish feasts dutifully prepared by her mother Holly (Sienna Guillory) each night and happily consumed by her precocious younger sister Isabelle (Ruby Stokes) \u2014 but all food repulses her. Her body no longer wants it, and as Ruth Paxton\u2019s auspicious but ultimately overstuffed debut \u201cA Banquet\u201d eventually lets on, her body may no longer even need it.<\/p>\n
The family\u2019s home serves as the film\u2019s primary location, an awkward suburban residence with a second-story entrance, a first-floor kitchen, and a baffling living room. Here, claustrophobia and disconnection rage, and \u201cA Banquet\u201d attempts to weave together a compelling assortment of absolute terrors. There\u2019s the body horror, of course, plus concerns about growing old, going crazy, being a woman, being believed, and exposing all of that to the wider world. Betsey is an attractive vessel for such worries, and Alexander ably embodies her, but the film never transcends the possibility that Betsey might ultimately be just that: a vessel. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cHit the Road\u201d (Film Forum on April 22)
\nA family road trip movie in which we never quite know where the film is heading (and are often lied to about why), \u201cHit the Road\u201d may be set amid the winding desert highways and gorgeous emerald valleys of northwestern Iran, but Panah Panahi\u2019s miraculous debut is fueled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our mortal coil at some point along the way. \u201cWhere are we?\u201d the gray-haired mom (Pantea Panahiha) asks into the camera upon waking up from a restless catnap inside the SUV in which so much of this film takes place. \u201cWe\u2019re dead,\u201d squeaks the youngest of her two sons (Rayan Sarlak) from the back seat, the six-year-old boy already exuding some of the most anarchic movie kid energy this side of \u201cThe Tin Drum.\u201d<\/p>\n
They aren\u2019t dead \u2014 at least not literally, even if the adorable stray dog who\u2019s come along for the ride seems to be on its last legs \u2014 but the further Panahi\u2019s foursome drives away from the lives they\u2019ve left behind in Tehran, the more it begins to seem as if they\u2019ve left behind life itself. A purgatorial fog rolls in as they climb towards the Turkish border, and with it comes a series of semi-competent guides (one amusingly trying to steer a motorbike from behind a sheepskin balaclava) who show up to give the family vague directions as if they were clueless interns for the ferryman on the river Styx. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cBenediction\u201d (In theaters on May 13)
\nFrom a pair of dreamy memoirs about his formative years (\u201cDistant Voices, Still Lives,\u201d \u201cThe Long Day Closes\u201d), an archival documentary that excavated the city in which those years were spent (\u201cOf Time and the City\u201d), and swooning adaptations of the novels and plays that allowed him to make sense of his own wounded soul (\u201cThe Deep Blue Sea\u201d), Liverpudlian auteur Terence Davies has established himself as one of the most achingly personal of master filmmakers; this despite his adamant belief that his personal life is \u201creally boring.\u201d<\/p>\n
With \u201cBenediction\u201d \u2014 another spectacular and terribly sad biopic about a poet cursed with the ability to express a private agony they could never escape \u2014 Davies has once again made a film that feels like the work of someone flaying their soul onscreen. Last time it was Emily Dickinson who provided the prism through which Davies could refract his own wants and wounds, and here it\u2019s the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, an openly but resentfully gay man desperate for a peace of mind he only knew how to look for in other people. Davies has more in common with Sassoon than Dickinson \u2014 their lives even overlapped for a time \u2014 but viewers don\u2019t have to know a single thing about the director\u2019s work to sense his wounds bleeding through Sassoon\u2019s aching story. This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if \u201cBenediction\u201d is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it\u2019s hoping to find. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
The Black Phone<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Black Phone\u201d (In theaters on June 24)
\nAdapted from Joe Hill\u2019s short story of the same name, \u201cThe Black Phone\u201d is a violent zeitgeist of a horror film that captures the audience\u2019s emotions as quickly as the film\u2019s antagonist kidnaps children in broad daylight. Ethan Hawke stars as a masked kidnapper (nicknamed \u201cThe Grabber\u201d) who terrorizes a suburban Colorado town in the 1970s. Hiding behind the facade of a clumsy magician, he lures kids in with kindness before eclipsing their world with mace and a swarm of signature black balloons. The story is told through Finney\u2019s perspective as audiences get a glimpse into his home and personal life before he becomes the kidnapper\u2019s latest victim.<\/p>\n
In between dodging his classmates on the prowl to beat him up, Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) has to walk on eggshells at home in order to avoid any further abuse from his alcoholic father. The only solace he can find is alongside his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), a sweet yet religious spitfire in pigtails, who has no qualms about cussing out cops or smashing a rock over a bully\u2019s head. Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the Count of Three\u201d (TBD 2022 release)
\nJerrod Carmichael\u2019s \u201cOn the Count of Three\u201d isn\u2019t super heavy on the kind of koan-like quips that have always lent his confrontational standup comedy its velvet punch, but this one \u2014 delivered in the opening minutes of his suicide-dark but violently sweet directorial debut \u2014 resonates loud enough to echo throughout the rest of the film: \u201cWhen you\u2019re a kid they tell you the worst thing in life is to be a quitter. Why? Quitting\u2019s amazing. It just means you get to stop doing something you hate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lifelong best friends Val (Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) are both ready to give up. The first time we see them they\u2019re standing in the parking lot outside an upstate New York strip club at 10:30 a.m. with handguns pointed at each other\u2019s heads as part of a double-suicide pact. Nobody\u2019s laughing, but you can already feel the love between them; something about the look in their eyes reads more like \u201csisters who are pregnant at the same time\u201d than it does \u201cstrangers who are about to shoot each other in the face.\u201d Read IndieWire\u2019s full review.<\/p>\n
Anna Cobb appears in We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair by Jane Schoenbrun, an official selection of the NEXT section at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Daniel Patrick Carbone.All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and\/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and\/or photos is strictly prohibited.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair\u201d<\/p>\n
Sundance<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair\u201d (TBD 2022 release)
\nJane Schoenbrun understands the internet. The filmmaker behind such projects as \u201cA Self-Induced Hallucination\u201d (a 2018 doc \u201cabout the internet\u201d), the tech-tinged \u201cEyeslicer\u201d series, and the dreamy \u201ccollective: unconscious\u201d has always found the space to explore the worldwide web with respect, reverence, and a hearty dose of fear. For their narrative feature debut, Schoenbrun expands their obsessions to craft an intimate tale about the impact of modern internet culture. Part coming-of-age story, part horror film, and the greatest argument yet that something as bonkers as \u201cCreepypasta\u201d can inspire something so beautiful, \u201cWe\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair\u201d is a strong debut for a filmmaker who is nothing if not consistent in their themes.<\/p>\n
Fair warning: If you, like this critic, are not someone positively impacted by ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), \u201cWe\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair\u201d will likely get even more under your skin than it will for audiences who enjoy the whispered noises that trigger the condition. But even when it\u2019s chilling, the movie finds meaning in discomfort.<\/p>\n
View this article at IndieWire<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 15 Best Films of 2022 We\u2019ve Already Seen: While the moviegoing world (heck, the world at large) might be nowhere near \u201cpre-pandemic normalcy,\u201d here\u2019s something to get excited about: a whittled-down annual list of the best movies we\u2019ve already seen from the year to come. Last year\u2019s list was one of our most stacked
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