The 10 Best Films of 2022 (So Far)

It may be the greatest comic-book movie ever made. Its competition for that honor, “The Dark Knight,” was justifiably compared to a Michael Mann noir thriller. But “The Batman” is a drama I wouldn’t hesitate to compare to “Chinatown” — it’s that heady and absorbing, that intricate a labyrinth, that accomplished in its mood of seething dark-as-midnight existential disquiet. Robert Pattinson plays the title character as a man so convincingly tormented by the ghosts of his past that he doesn’t even want to be Bruce Wayne anymore. Yet when he escapes into the identity of the Batman, he becomes a detective as hypnotic as Will Graham in “Manhunter” — an investigator of smoky-voiced magnetic cunning and skill, threading one needle after another to entrap the Riddler, who is played by Paul Dano as a monumental creep of devious, booby-trapped chaos. The director, Matt Reeves, portrays a world of multi-tiered corruption that’s as sinister as today’s headlines, yet “The Batman” also reaches back to the splendidly grounded comic books of the ’40s, when a lone crime fighter rising from the dank gothic depths could inspire something like hope. — Owen Gleiberman

Everyone has a story worth telling, but few have the perspective or natural sense of cinema to fashion their experiences into a movie that merits it. Rebeca Huntt spent nearly eight years organizing the material that comprises her young yet worldly cine-memoir — a sophisticated mix of interviews, archival footage and reenactment, woven together in the director’s own voice. The mesmerizing result takes Huntt’s life experience, as a New York-born Afro Latina woman, and translates so many of her questions about identity, self-expression and the right to be heard in fresh and original ways. Inspired by artists as diverse as Agnès Varda and Terrence Nance, she weaves a clear political point of view with the instincts of a natural poet. — Peter Debruge

In this dark Tribeca Festival discovery, writer-director Josef Kubota Wladyka delves into the same gnarly territory as movies like “Taxi Driver” and “Hardcore,” where tough guys swoop in to rescue vulnerable young women from situations dire enough to make a QAnonner’s head spin. “Catch the Fair One” shakes up the formula, positioning an indigenous female boxer (Kali Reis, who co-wrote the film) as its hero, while erasing much hope that she’ll ever find the kid sister stolen by sex traffickers. The tone of this thriller may be as bleak and cynical as they come, but the story is ultimately one of redemption, as a character who’s been fighting against the system all her life focuses on her most formidable adversary yet. —PD

In her best roles, Emma Thompson gives off such a wonderfully proper vibe that it’s delightful to watch her squirm as sexually repressed religious studies professor Nancy Stokes, widowed and retired, who decides late in life to investigate what all the fuss is about. Nancy hires an escort (Daryl McCormack) and, over the course of several meetings in the same impersonal hotel suite, slowly relaxes enough to pursue what she came for. Director Sophie Hyde trusts these two actors to carry Katy Brand’s candid, articulate script, and though there’s no denying it feels like a play, that’s a fine way to approach this empowering film’s intellectual slow dance. The setup thrusts these two strangers into a physically intimate situation, and yet, their awkward, endearing ice-breaker conversations are what really matter, as Nancy learns that self-love is what she’s been lacking most all these years. —PD

You can’t ban abortion. You can only ban safe abortion. In America, that’s a lesson half the States seem willing to learn the hard way, and one that drives feminist French director Audrey Diwan’s ground-level 1960s drama, which follows a headstrong student (Anamaria Vartolomei) through a period of confusion and fear. The film, which beat “Power of the Dog” and “Spencer” for Venice’s top prize last year, takes audiences back to a time when abortion was illegal in France, reminding just how scary and alienating the process could be for someone determined to terminate her pregnancy, but unable to find the support and guidance she needs to do it. —PD

A.B. Zax’s documentary follows the life and fate of a beloved independent bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts, and so you might expect it to be the sort of movie that expands into a larger statement about the cherished and precarious state of independent bookstores in the digital/corporate/chain-store era. It does, but only by implication. For 86 reverent minutes, the movie, without ever leaving the premises, simply peers into the nooks and crannies of one deceptively quiet bookstore — which is called, incidentally, The Bookstore — and traces the daily existence of its missionary owner-curator, Matthew Tannenbaum, a jaunty boomer who runs the place as if it were a library, a cocktail party, and a projection of his literary dreams. Can he raise the funds to save the store? Can the oasis of a community bookstore live on in the age of TikTok? “Hello, Bookstore” is the documentary as hang-out movie, yet by the end Tannenbaum has come to seem a vérité version of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” —OG

It’s a Netflix movie, and when you hear about it it sounds like…a Netflix movie: one of those expensive but cut-rate, overly brightly lit, too-long-because-they-don’t-seem-to-have-script-editors “crowd-pleasers” that’s a shadow of the movie it might have been had it been made for movie theaters 25 years ago. But “Hustle,” Netflix be praised, actually is that better version of itself — it’s as savvy and accomplished an inspirational sports heart-tugger as you’d want it to be. Adam Sandler, as a jaded scout for the Philadelphia 76ers who gets back in the game after he discovers a Spanish superstar-in-the-rough, is playing a character out of “Jerry Maguire” meets “Rocky,” but Sandler hasn’t lost the real-world suppleness he had in “Uncut Gems.” His performance is a full-court press of rumpled humanity. —OG

When you watch Daniel Roher’s extraordinary, riveting-as-a-thriller documentary about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who rose up against Vladimir Putin, challenged him in the 2017 presidential election, was poisoned by him (but survived), and has now been imprisoned by him, you may think: If only there were half a dozen politicians in the United States who operated with this much fearless conviction. (If only Merrick Garland were Alexei Navalny!) The movie is a portrait of a freedom fighter whose pragmatic heroism has made him a figure comparable to Nelson Mandela or Lech Walęsa. The story of how he was poisoned, and wound up outing his undercover adversaries, is the stuff of cloak-and-dagger suspense. And while the war in Ukraine hasn’t changed the film’s meaning, it has heightened it. The name “Navalny” now signifies the ability to stand tall against Putin’s tyranny. “Navalny” documents nothing less than the spirit a free society is built on. —OG

Belgian director Laura Wandel brings audiences down to the eye level of a seven-year-old girl in this simple yet profound look at how a child’s brain processes bullying. Borrowing strategies from films as diverse as “Son of Saul” and “Ponette,” this promising new voice intuitively immerses audiences in her sheltered protagonist’s early socialization. We see a girl (wide-eyed young Maya Vanderbeque) overwhelmed by the complex dynamics that await her on the schoolyard, struggling to understand how the older brother she so admires is being affected by primitive power games among his peers. This honest, unsettling movie serves as a microcosm of the adult world (apart from one sympathetic teacher, grown-ups are all but banished to the margins), forcing us to confront unflattering, long-suppressed memories of our own roles as both victim and tormentor. —PD

No, it’s not as perfect a popcorn epiphany as the original “Top Gun.” How could it be, given that it’s working at every moment to tap our nostalgia for the first film, which was an irresistibly carefree quintessence-of-the-’80s music-video-meets-Navy-recruitment-ad fantasy of freedom and revenge in the skies, all built around a movie star who became, with that film, an unstoppable Cruise missile? Yet “Maverick” does more than just tap our nostalgia. It does so with delectable flair and escapist relevance, repositioning Tom Cruise as an aging flyboy mentor who must prove that he’s still got the right stuff. The movie serves up low-flying combat scenes that are so thrillingly real — we’re in those cockpits, as the fighter jets ascend off the ground and zoom around corners that would have crashed Chuck Yeager — that the phrase “like a video game” becomes, for once, an evocation of mainstream Hollywood at its most artful. —OG