Best films of 2022 — a year of comebacks, flops and arrests

And the cynics said cinema was done for! Instead, 2022 became the year the movies rode again. Flights of visual invention drew crowds back in blockbuster numbers, so much so that they became a news story. Even governments took note. All this was achieved by Minions: The Rise of Gru, sequel to the prequel of the animated hit Despicable Me. A wordless dose of comic mayhem, the film delighted young fans then inspired a global teenage craze of “gentleminions” donning suits and packing out screenings. But Chinese censors were alarmed by the film, rewriting its mischievous ending to a more moralistic one and attracting widespread mockery.

No joke. A point was proved. The right film, in the right circumstances, could not only take $939mn at the box office but make movies the centre of attention again.

Everything else? Not so much. This time 12 months ago, the industry projected rictus-grin optimism. A bounceback from the pandemic would be fuelled by pent-up demand and big-league titles. The reality has been messier. Any scriptwriter would admire the drama in which every near-salvation has been followed by fresh disaster. The arc has often felt life-or-death, and not only for bankrupt exhibitor Cineworld. Old faces made rescue attempts. (Thanks, Tom Cruise.)

But 2023 looms with fingertips still on the cliff edge. Scattered hits aside, films of every possible stripe have flopped horribly, including Viking bloodbath The Northman, Disney heartwarmer Strange World and, in the US at least, Sam Mendes’s ode to the redemptive wonder of cinema itself, Empire of Light. While movies have flopped since there were movies at all, the scale has suggested something tectonic.

But the news could also be good. It was just erratic and complex. Most cheering of all, commercially — and perhaps in some more poignant sense too — was the success of Cruise’s passion project, Top Gun: Maverick, the year’s undisputed box office champion ($1.49bn and counting).

It was also a deeply gleeful movie, powered by a star who seemed — as he put it in a recent viral video — sincerely thrilled to be allowed to entertain us. (Shortly before saying this, he had jumped out of a plane.) The optimist would see audiences responding in kind to such ardent showmanship. The other lesson in the bleedin’ obvious was that people even now will pay for what they know. The lure of the franchise endured not just with Cruise and Gru, but Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Glass Onion, the Knives Out sequel which played to packed houses in the one week Netflix gave it in cinemas. (The company evidently didn’t need the cash from a longer run.)

But franchise movies tanked as well, and even the streamers caught a cold. For the studios, while huge audiences would clearly still come out for a film, it was harder to know for what. Their thinned-down slates left cinemas without enough movies, exhibitors said: at least the kind that pulled a crowd. Among those that habitually didn’t were the high-end prestige pictures still hailed as the best of the medium. Many of next year’s awards contenders will have been seen by more Oscar voters than actual film-goers.

Ghouls, rejoice. But if the worry was that film-makers might now reflexively shrink their ideas to fit the small screen, that has not come to pass. And how.

In fact, a pointed maximalism reigned among some of the most notable films of the year. Baz Luhrmann released Elvis, a loud and shiny biopic only he could have directed, which duly bedazzled audiences. The gifted Jordan Peele set his expertly divisive Nope on a California horse ranch, but also in the skies above. They proved the perfect canvas for a wealth of chewy ideas about the long-fingered reach of pop culture and television. And instant cult favourite Everything Everywhere All At Once dropped an ordinary Chinese-American family into a comic, cosmic hall of mirrors. If these really are the last days of cinema, it was going out in defiant style. (Was it coincidence that Nope and Everything Everywhere both nodded to the same big-screen megalith, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey?)

But Nope wasn’t alone in pushing back against television. My own movie of the year was Decision to Leave, a lush and haunting psychological thriller from South Korean maestro Park Chan-wook. The Netflix popularity of generic crime dramas from his country had not gone unnoticed by the director. Park set up the first act of his film as if making one — then turned expectations upside down, the story a depth charge of obsession and betrayal. The symphonic flair with which it was shot and cut were cherries on top. Oh yes, you think. This is what a movie can be.

Park co-scripted with regular writing partner Jeong Seo-kyeong. Her voice is now key to his creative process. More generally, the year felt like a critical juncture for women in film. She Said, in which Hollywood itself mapped the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, was an obvious watershed. The film was excellent, but the sense the industry would now like #MeToo to slip into the past was compounded by another box-office disappointment. (Weinstein put out a gloating statement. He ended the year in a Los Angeles courtroom, once more convicted of rape.)

Again, the full story rewarded closer examination. Revisiting my longlist of this year’s favourites, it took a while to see the thread between many of them. They weren’t only directed by women, I realised, but women making first features: Nikyatu Jusu’s pinpoint social horror Nanny; Jessica Kingdon’s documentary of Chinese consumerism, Ascension; Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, a striking X-ray of the American porn industry; Charlotte Wells’s lovely, tragic Aftersun; Playground, an unshakeable story of childhood from Belgian director Laura Wandel. Considering these bold, accomplished films, it was hard not to wonder how many would even have been made five years ago, without the seismic ripple of #MeToo.

The changing place of women film-makers was also the headline of the once-in-a-decade poll of the “greatest films of all time” by magazine Sight and Sound. As ever, critics and film-makers opined. This time, though, with the voting pool much expanded, former title holders Citizen Kane and Vertigo were bumped downwards in favour of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the deadpan 1975 melodrama of sex and household minutiae directed by Chantal Akerman.

The result felt like two things at once. There was something grandly bracing in a woman director finally getting such acclaim, and more so still about the triumph of Jeanne Dielman: under-seen, endlessly radical, a film that makes you see film differently. It was also possible to hear in the hubbub around the poll the sound of a couple of thousand excited people in a room, some way from what is still, at its most meaningful, the art of millions.

For all the lists and industry jitters, the real world kept turning. In January, the documentary Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A gripping snapshot of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, it took on ever more gravity through the year as a proxy for the subject, jailed in notorious penal colony IK-6. Ten months later, the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi released his latest film, No Bears. Dark and metafictional, it would have been among the year’s best even without the freight of Panahi having also been imprisoned, as a critic of the Tehran regime.

And as the year ended, another arrest was made in Iran: celebrated actress Taraneh Alidoosti, star of Oscar-winning drama The Salesman, who was held for condemning the execution of a protester. Obscene as the detentions of Panahi and Alidoosti are, they at least reminded us that filmmakers still frighten tyrants. Maybe cinema isn’t quite done yet.