Vanity Fair chief critic Richard Lawson lists his favorite 2022 films.
This year, the nervous clench of the pandemic eased up (to some extent), with movie theaters fully reopened and film festivals carrying on like they used to before 2020. The industry, and moviegoing itself, is still in trouble, but, at least, there was a host of thrilling work to celebrate and enjoy throughout all that tumult. So many, in fact, that plenty of worthy films—the hushed memoir piece Aftersun, the prickly fable The Banshees of Inisherin, the scrappy found-family drama Broker—had to be left off this list, for brevity's sake. The ten films listed below shone brightest for me in 2022.
