The best movies you’ve missed in 2022 — and where to watch them

Even when James Cameron didn’t show up for the final two weeks of the year to put another $1.4 billion into the global box office coffers with Avatar: The Road of Water2022 will still go down like a great year for cinema—both critically and a true blockbuster.

While you may have watched Top Gun: Maverick, Onion, Is notand Inisherin’s Banshees, there are many excellent movies that may have passed you by. Here are some of them.

no bears

With the release in late December, you probably missed out no bears in 2022—but it’s still playing in theaters. The latest film by Jafar Panahi, Iran’s current film master, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, just about a month after Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison for protesting the arrests of filmmakers. film colleagues Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad. Not Panahi was supposed to make the film: In 2010, the director – who first impressed international audiences with films in 1995 white ball, a cinéma Vérité-style meditation on everyday life in Tehran — was banned from directing for the next 20 years due to his alleged propaganda inclinations. But like any great artist, Panahi persevered, and he went on to put together a film that made a legacy that includes Circle (2000), offside (2006), and 3 faces (2018). For his latest work, he made a movie about a filmmaker named Jafar Panahi (played by him) who was banned from making movies and made a daring trip to the border. Turkey to create its art. While it’s a fictionalized version of the director’s life, it’s also a poignant and multi-layered reminder of the power of the cinematic art form and the real heroism it takes to fight back. oppressive.

It should also be noted that Panah Panahi, Jafar’s 39-year-old son, has made a great directorial debut in 2022 with let’s go—a family film that serves as the perfect complement to no bears (and has been included in our list best movies of 2022).

sundown

Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells made her best director debut in 2022 with sundown, a heartbreaking family drama that is both a coming-of-age story and a poignant representation of mental illness. In a way, this feels like two different movies—each telling the same story from a unique but interconnected perspective. Normal personPaul Mescal’s Paul Mescal gives another stellar performance as Calum, a struggling father taking his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) to Turkey for the summer. While Calum tries to hide her inner turmoil for the sake of her daughter, it’s easy for her to see through appearances and try to make a real and lasting connection with him. The chemistry between Mescal and Corio is both real and beautiful. Much of the film is set in the 1990s, and we see much of their vacation through footage watched by adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) years later. While the film has its humorous and tender moments, there’s still a palpable tension that leads to a somewhat ambiguous ending, in which Wells lets the viewer fill in the blanks for themselves. In the hands of an inferior director, that may seem like an evasive; in case sundownit just adds depth to the movie.

kimi

Like coming Magic Mike’s Last Dance Reminds us: Steven Soderbergh is definitely not retired. And given his prowess — he could easily be trusted to release one, if not two, features a year — it’s hard to imagine that he would stick to any award. any way to give up. This is a very good thing for movie fans, when his smaller scale movies release, like 2021 Do not move suddenlywell worth watching like bigger budget movies like Magic Mike or Ocean of eleven series — if not more. In kimiWhat Soderbergh shows us Rear window might look like in our (not quite) technology-obsessed post-pandemic world. Angela (the always mesmerized Zoë Kravitz) is a dreaded voice stream interpreter for Amygdala, a soon-to-be-mass tech company that sells smart home devices that can eavesdrop on your every move. While processing data, Angela hears what she believes to be a violent crime. But she ran into resistance when she tried to report it, based on what was likely to happen to the company. But Angela, an attack survivor, can’t let go of it—and is forced to face her greatest fear and return to the vast, woeful outside world to seek justice.

You won’t be alone

Robert Eggers’ Fans Witch (2015) will especially appreciate this beautifully shot horror film, set in a strangely isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia. To save the life of her newborn daughter Her Nevena, a mother who made a deal with the town’s infamous Wolf-Eateress (essentially a witch) that she would give her up when she reached her 16th birthday. For a decade and a half Next, Nevena (Sara Klimoska) is secretly raised in a cave in an attempt to protect her from the aforementioned witch. But when that important birthday arrives, Maria returns and transforms Nevena into one of her own, giving the teenage girl the ability to take the form of any living creature she kills. Not fully understanding what happened to her and curious as she explores the world that exists outside the cave, Nevena uses her newfound abilities to experience human (and otherwise) reality. — both the good and the bad — by literally entering the cave. shoes and everything else by a string of people who eventually taught her what it was like to be human.

Daughter of Eternity

Between souvenir (2019), Souvenirs Part II (2021), and now Daughter of Eternity, famed British filmmaker Joanna Hogg and the always-surpassing Tilda Swinton are rapidly cementing their place as one of cinema’s best director-actor pairings. After the death of her father, filmmaker Rosalind (Swinton) decides to take her mother (also Swinton) to a hotel turned into a creepy gothic mansion that once belonged to their family, in hopes of making a movie about her mother. But Rosalind gets more than she bargained for when family secrets are exposed and it’s revealed that a mother-daughter outing may not be quite what it seems.