The Top 10 Movies of 2022

An annual ranking.

This was as “normal” a movie year that we’ve had since the pandemic hit, but it still had that end-of-days vibe every movie year seems to have anymore: It strikes me as a worrisome sign that so many prestige end-of-year releases had “the power of the movies” as their explicit subject, which is not something anyone would feel obliged to say out loud if the movies themselves weren’t in some sort of existential peril. (It’s like the guys who are constantly screaming, “Rock will never die!” at you. I mean, I wasn’t too worried about rock dying until you started making such a fuss about it, but now, well, now I’m kinda concerned.) Movie theaters are a sacred place for me — they were my first job, where I had my first kiss, the first place I realized how much of the world I knew nothing about and how much I wanted to learn — and going to the theater is not something that can be replicated by folding laundry, flipping through your phone and occasionally glancing at your TV to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Movies are transporting: They take you places you can never go, and introduce you to people — even make you one of those people — that you will never meet. I find them absolutely vital to a healthy, curious life.

I saw, according to the Word file I update after I see every movie, 134 movies this year. (You can track my Grierson and Leitch podcast grades for each movie, along with a link to each podcast and a bunch of pretty charts and graphs, on this Excel spreadsheet dutifully updated by an awesome listener named Steve.) That’s a lot of movies, but there are trade-offs: I think I only watched four TV shows all year: Better Call Saul (which ended perfectly), Better Things (ditto), Severance (which was great but which I only got to watch because I had Covid and couldn’t leave the room) and The Patient (which I’m only halfway through). You are all watching TV shows. I’m watching movies. I’m pretty sure I’m coming out the winner in that trade. To quote, again, the critic James Rocchi, who died last year, wrote, “I write about the movies, which is to say, I write about everything.” That’s why I love writing about the movies: I get to write about everything.

So! Here are my top 10 movies of the year. I’ve provided links to where you can watch them: You can actually stream most of these right now.