The Best Movies of 2022

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once

When Everything Everywhere All at Once arrived at SXSW last spring, it was a bit of an anomaly. Filmmakers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the self-styled “Daniels” pair who once convinced Daniel Radcliffe to play a rotting cadaver for a whole movie, were releasing a $20 million multiverse flick starring Michelle Yeoh? Those were big numbers for a modern indie but fractional when compared to all the recent industrialized blockbusters riffing on string theory. Yet as it turns out, you can’t put a price tag on ingenuity or innovation, and Everything Everywhere is so full of both that it’s a wonder the Daniels could keep all that boundless creativity in the frame.

Today, Everything Everywhere is celebrated as 2022’s indie Cinderella story, but its success is more impressive than that; this is the type of instant classic that only comes around maybe a few times in a decade—a startlingly original vision that defies conventions while becoming the yardstick all similar fare will be measured against. And at the center of its multidimensional daydream is Yeoh with an American role at last worthy of her talents. As Evelyn Wang, the disappointed and depressed co-owner of a laundromat, Yeoh is able to showcase all her skills: drama, comedy, and martial arts… so, so much kick-ass martial arts!

Indeed, Everything Everywhere All at Once might be the best martial arts movie to come out of the west since Yeoh appeared in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The movie’s also a science fiction epic; an existential parable for the secular set; and even an intimate family dramedy with no less at stake than the vastness of the universe in its domesticity. With so much on the screen, none of it should work, but it does every time Yeoh or co-stars Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu grasp onto the smallest of cinematic virtues: an indefatigable humanity. – DC

Movies also receiving significant votes: Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Fire Island, Fresh, The Lost City, Turning Red, Nitram, Smile, See How They Run, The Wonder, Petite Maman, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, The Good Nurse, Watcher, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, She Said, Armageddon Time, Prey, Emily the Criminal, Speak No Evil, Nanny, The Adam Project, Flux Gourmet, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Odyssey, Babylon, I Want You Back, Bullet Train, Aftersun, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Weird, Avatar: The Way of Water, I Came By, Confess, Fletch, Mr. Malcolm’s List, Crimes of the Future, Dreaming Walls, All Quiet on the Western Front, Bros, Pearl, Clara Sola, She Will, Honk for Jesus, Deep Water, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Dashcam, Till, Sissy.