8. Speak No Evil
What's shocking—and, oh, does this film shock to the core—is how none of the narrative clues and filmmaking signals of Speak No Evil can truly prepare us for what happens. This is a merciless horror tale. That it doesn't seem at all like one for a while makes it even more distressing.

Director Christian Tafdrup's film borders on the territory of a comedy of manners for a long stretch. Two families meet each other on vacation. Later, Danish husband and wife Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), as well as their young daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg), accept an invitation to stay at the home of the other family: Patrick (Fedja van Huêtt) and Karin (Karina Smulders), living in Holland with son Abel (Marius Damslev).

At first, the story plays with dilemmas of customs and manners, as Bjørn and Louise try to be polite in the face of possible insults and offenses. Tafdrup has a firm command of maintaining a tone of uncertainty, while gradually raising the sinister underpinnings. Again, this is a horror story, and the real terror is in its inevitability—not because of what certain characters decide to do, but because others feel obligated to say and do nothing at all.

7. Official Competition
One act of ego begets so many others in Official Competition, an incisive and layered comedy about the making of a movie. The premise may be familiar and simple, but the filmmakers dig so deeply into the personalities and conflicts on display that the material feels unique. In terms of the jokes, the film, co-directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, certainly is rich and complex.

When a wealthy tycoon decides to produce a movie to support his legacy, director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) hires actors Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas), an international movie star, and Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez), a not-nearly-as-famous "master of acting," to play the leading roles. Mainly, the story consists of those rehearsal sessions. Some of them are straightforward, which allows for the actors to dig at each other in subtle and blatant ways. Other rehearsals are gimmicky, such as a very funny one involves Lola literalizing the weight of a scene by hanging a five-ton boulder over the actors. Eventually, the two actors begin using their talent as a weapon against each other.

The performances, especially from a self-aware Banderas, are great and grounded in various levels of narcissism. The result is a barbed examination of bloated self-esteem that takes a solid joke and runs with it in comically clever and smartly critical ways.

6. The Outfit
For all the twists and turns of The Outfit, nothing about the plot feels contrived or convenient. That's because the screenplay by Johnathan McClain and director Graham Moore, making his feature debut, creates a group of solid, understandable characters, whose personalities, desires, and motives drive each and every decision that's made in this story. That makes all the difference.

The story is set in 1950s Chicago, within a boutique for men's suits owned and operated by Leonard (Mark Rylance, a calm, considered, and actively observant anchor). As for the plot, it cannot (because it's so elaborate) and should not (because it does repeatedly shock) be revealed here. It involves gangsters, a power struggle, a possible rat within the organization, and a briefcase of a MacGuffin. It mostly revolves around how Leonard uses his knowledge of these conflicts to stay out of trouble.

It's as much a battle of wits—between characters who are smart enough to understand that their goals conflict with other characters—as it is a series of betrayals and deceptions. Meanwhile, a claustrophobic sense of the walls slowly closing on these characters is created by Moore's tight staging and smart use of close-ups, as well as cinematographer Dick Pope's atmospherically spare lighting. This is an especially intelligent thriller that finds its tension, not in a plot's spinning gears, but in its characters.

5. Hit the Road
A family of four is on the road, somewhere in Iran and to somewhere else in that country. The reason is unknown at the start, and the specifics behind the reason for the trip remain unclear throughout Hit the Road. The journey of writer/director Panah Panahi's debut film is far more important than the destination. That journey is about them being together for now, while they still can be a whole. This will be the last time the four of them will be one unit for the foreseeable future—or, depending on what that future holds, in general.

The story is a road trip, featuring a frowny father (Hasan Majuni), a glowing mother (Pantea Panahiha), and the couple's two sons. The young son (Rayan Sarlak) is a bundle of seemingly endless energy, but the kid's big brother (Amin Simiar) is quiet in contemplation, moodiness, or both. We gradually learn that the older son got into legal trouble and is trying to cross into Turkey. Along the way, Panahi's screenplay and these performances create these characters and this particular familial dynamic with specific but universally relatable authenticity.

The connections are the point of the film, as its story moves toward the series of inevitabilities Panahi has established. The big one is that this journey doesn't end, even after the family's current mission is finished. It goes on and on and, as long as it's possible, together, thankfully.

4. Bones and All
A genuinely haunting and deeply affecting film that just happens to be about cannibals, Bones and All is a horror film to some degree, but to pigeonhole director Luca Guadagnino's film to a single genre is to do a disservice to the rich material and, especially, how skillfully the filmmaker tells this story. The story comes from a novel by Camille DeAngelis, and Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich allow the narrative to maintain the relaxed pace and focus on character that we would expect from an introspective piece of literature.

The story revolves around 18-year-old Maren (Taylor Russell), who feels compelled to eat human flesh. Abandoned by her father, she goes looking for her mother. On a road trip across the Midwest, the young woman encounters and spends time with others like her.

Some seem friendly, only to reveal themselves as far less than that, and one clearly is capable of doing harm, although he becomes closer to her than anyone else in Maren's life. All of them—especially the threat of Mark Rylance's Sully and Timothée Chalamet's drifter Lee—are as isolated and melancholy as Maren.

Some will be tempted to find some deeper allegory or specific metaphor in the central conceit of the film. Most will find it, too, because the film cuts to the core of something inescapably human. We are all lonely to some degree or another, and none of us wants to be. That's the plain and painful truth in the marrow of this disturbing but poignant film.

3. The Quiet Girl
The Quiet Girl is a small, delicate, and rather specific drama that, regardless, seems to possess entire worlds of insight, meaning, and emotions within the borders of its narrative. Writer/director Colm Bairéad's debut narrative feature is a lovely, heartbreaking film about loneliness and how simple acts of connection can at least start to break through the shells of despair, pain, and grief.

The simple story, based on the Claire Keegan's short story "Foster," revolves around Cáit (a remarkable debut performance from Catherine Clinch), the last daughter in a family of maybe six children. As such, the girl has essentially been forgotten by her family. The girl's parents send her away from the family farm to live with the mother's cousin Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), as well as the cousin's husband Seán (Andrew Bennett), on their farm.

Life on the farm and the growth of these relationships are communicated through vignettes of comfortable patterns and safe routines. The intercutting of these moments forms a sense of cohesion, and that further displays and reflects the bond being formed between these characters. This is how we learn to love and know that we are loved. It's as simple and profound as that.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin
Writer/director Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin is many things—a comedy about two friends who have a falling out, a fable about life on a small island, an allegory about the Troubles of Ireland. At its core, though, this is a film about the persistence and all-encompassing nature of loneliness. It's equally funny and heartbreaking, because it is both absurdly and achingly honest.

The setup is a thing of simple ingenuity and ingenious simplicity: Pádraic (Colin Farrell) is shocked to hear that his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) doesn't want to be his friend anymore. From that straightforward declaration, McDonagh's screenplay opens up to reveal an entire, isolated world of oddities, conflict, past pains, and present despair. While the film does examine broad and universal ideas, it is primarily a comedy about the lengths to which two men will go to accomplish very opposing goals.

The humor expands from this impasse, through clever and natural bickering. As the conflict escalates, matters become gruesomely ridiculous and genuinely antagonistic that it's almost impossible to imagine such dreadful circumstances arising from something so fundamentally simple and simply painful.

It's not all misery, though. A key glimmer of hope is Pádraic's sister, played by Kerry Condon in a performance that radiates with gentle warmth but is also capable of cutting to the core. Another is Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a seemingly weird creep who is just as wounded and lonely as everyone else here.

In this story, doom comes not from some supernatural force screaming in the night. It arrives from feeling ignored or forgotten and in simply being "not nice" when the other option is right there.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
We never know what to expect in Everything Everywhere All at Once, even after the film firmly establishes that just about anything and everything could happen in it. Co-writers/co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's film is an all-out assault of metaphysical possibility. This film, the best of 2022, constantly and consistently surprises.

It's the sort of film that sets out to break your brain, finds an assortment of ways to break your heart in the process, and somehow pieces both together again. The Daniels, as Kwan and Scheinert stylize themselves, pull off all of these tricks with such skill of craft and narrative that it almost feels like a bit of a miracle.

The plot revolves around a family of Chinese immigrants who run and live above a launrodmat. At the start, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, very affecting in playing various shades of kindness) have to worry about an IRS audit, as well as the arrival of her estranged father (played by James Hong) and how to handle the subject of the couple's daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is a lesbian.

Out of this relatively straightforward domestic drama, though, comes an imaginative, unpredictable ride through multiple universes. The gimmick allows the Daniels to employ all sorts of gags, indulge in sometimes hilariously silly action, and pull from various film genres.

The result is a high-wire act of tonal control—moving from absurdly ridiculous to compassionately sincere—and multifaceted storytelling, grounded by Yeoh's dynamic performance, layered and rich characters, and a philosophical dispute between nihilism and the optimism of finding some meaning in the chaos. It's a marvel that the Daniels pull off this trick with equally brilliant skillfulness and thoughtfulness.

Honorable Mention:

After Yang, Aftersun, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, The Batman, Descendant, Fire of Love, Glass Onion, Montana Story, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, RRR, Thirteen Lives, Top Gun: Maverick

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved.