How to Make a Top 10 List

The best movies of 2022, and some thoughts on the whole decimal enterprise.

I’m currently in Paris for the holidays, and the other day my family hit up the Musée d’Orsay, which houses the world’s largest collection of Impressionist masterpieces (and also a damn fine collection of cats). We made our way up to the fifth floor and started following the signs to Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait, but no sooner had I squiggled through the crush and gotten close enough to savor the texture of paint on canvas than I found myself staring instead at the back of a cellphone case. After pushing their way to the front, the person next to me had immediately thrust their phone Van Gogh-ward, apparently oblivious to or more likely uncaring about the fact that placing their device a few feet away from the painting prevented anyone else from seeing it. Having attained the desired proximity, they then snapped a picture, promptly turned, and left, undoubtedly off to check some other timeless masterwork off their list.

What struck me about this moment was twofold: One, that this person took not so much as a second to regard the painting with their own eyes, no care to absorb the three-dimensional details that you can only perceive in person and not in print. (Personally, I like to get up close and stand off to the side, partly so I can get the best look at the ridges and swirls of paint, the places where it’s scraped so thin that you can see the weave of the canvas through it, and partly because I’m fairly tall and don’t want to be worrying that I’m in people’s way.) The other is that, thanks to the miracle of screen technology, I could see the photo they were taking, and that photo, well… it sucked. It was the kind of photo you see people taking at concerts, with no thought to framing or composition or even whether you can see what’s going on, just the minimal requirement that it contain some record of the famous thing to prove that you and it-slash-them occupied the same physical space at one point in time. Maybe this person will go back and fix up their Self-Portrait portrait later, straighten it and crop it and play with the lighting so it can take its place alongside the bajillions of similar shots on Instagram. But no matter what they do with it, the photo will be, in some way, a lie, because the circumstances of its capture undermine the one thing it’s intended to convey: I was there. Sure, you and Van Gogh were in the same room for a hot minute, but you weren’t there, any more than the fact that I once shared an elevator with Chris Rock means we’re best pals.

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So, you may well be asking… what does this have to do with Top 10 lists? And where’s yours? The answer to the second question is: It’s coming. (Or just scroll down, I’ll be here when you get back.) As for the first, well, there’s a thing that happens when people make lists, or really, when they read them, which is that they sometimes take on an importance beyond not only what was intended but beyond what’s even possible. The moment Jeanne Dielman was announced as the top film in the Sight & Sound poll, people started pushing back: Is this really the greatest film of all time? I mean, sure, I love Chantal Akerman—and don’t get me wrong, I’m as feminist as they come—but the greatest film of all time? To which I can only say: Of course it’s not, because that’s not actually a thing that exists, let alone something anyone should waste their precious life arguing about.

If you take a poll, something has to come out on top, and if you call that poll The Greatest Films of All Time, it follows that the #1 movie has to be the greatest—not just great, but greater than 2001, greater than Citizen Kane, greater than whatever movie you previously thought was the greatest. That’s a very powerful idea, so powerful that 5,000 people added Jeanne Dielman to their Letterboxd watchlists on the day the poll results were announced. But it’s also just an idea, more of a feeling than a factual determination. When people find out I write about movies, they sometimes ask what my #1 movie of all time is, and I usually tell them I have no idea. But sometimes I answer Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, partly because that’s as true an answer as any, and partly because it tends to end the conversation quickly.

That’s how I think of a Top 10 list. We all know what a Top 10 movie feels like, right? It fills you with joy or sorrow or thought; it makes you want to shout its greatness from the rooftops, or it feels like a secret shared only with you. I try to keep a list of such movies as I go through a year, although sometimes I forget and have to start one in October or November when I know that various organizations I belong to will start voting soon. Sometimes there are 12 or 15 or 20 movies on it; sometimes there are 6; and in either case I’m inclined to leave it as-is. I understand why people like a nice round 10—we are a decimal-oriented culture, after all—but it seems silly to me to cut a list down or pad it out to hit that arbitrary limit, and as someone who holds Alice in Wonderland close to his heart, it seems perfectly logical to me that a list of 10 could have 12 things in it. Far less logical are my feelings about ranking, which is that, if you are going to submit to the exercise in the first place you need to commit to it and actually number your choices, not just chuck them all up on some faux-egalitarian podium. Put simply, alphabetizing Top 10 lists is the coward’s way out.

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That said, these are my Top 10* movies of 2022.

1. After Yang A movie that absolutely walloped me, left me sitting quietly in the dark at 2 am after I finished watching it. There’s a moment—you’ll know it when you see it—when Kogonada’s deft exploration of memory and loss takes a simultaneous emotional and conceptual leap, the kind that makes you realize the world it describes is much bigger than you ever imagined, as are the inner lives of everyone around you. I’m not really a gasper, but I gasped.

2. Aftersun Wallop #2. Save my detailed breakdown of the movie’s devastating final shot for after you’ve watched this delicately shattering movie based on Charlotte Wells’ memories of a childhood vacation with her father.

3. Armageddon Time James Gray’s autobiographical tale turns the coming-of-age movie inside-out so delicately that some missed its subversions entirely, taking it for the very thing it means to critique. The story of a young Jewish boy from Queens whose brief history with a Black classmate throws his unexamined privilege into perspective—a perspective it will take him years to grasp—shames the simplicity of the Hollywood version this could have been. Put it this way: Two of the characters in the story are named Trump, and Gray is still harder on himself.

4. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Laura Poitras’ documentary is two stories in one: the story of how Nan Goldin escaped a repressive childhood and survived years of drug use and abusive relationships to become a celebrated photographer, and the story of how, in recent years, she has used her art-world clout to wage war against the opioid-peddling Sackler family, whom she (quite fairly) accuses of using artistic institutions to launder their justly besmirched reputation. It’s the way those stories interact that make it special, and the contemplation of how both survival and success give rise to new responsibilities.

5. The Eternal Daughter Some wrote this off as an asterisk to Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical The Souvenir and The Souvenir II, but I found its elliptical autofiction even more engrossing. During a vacation in a creaky British country estate, a filmmaker plies her mother for family stories to flesh out the screenplay she’s working on, which starts to sound a lot like the movie we’re watching. The filmmaker and her mother are both played by Tilda Swinton, who played Hogg’s mother in the Souvenirs, which lends a hall-of-mirrors touch to a classic English ghost story.

6. Return to Seoul As a Korean adoptee returning to the country she’s never known, Park Ji-min is a runaway rocket, an absolutely staggering debut for an artist who’s never acted before.

7. The Banshees of Inisherin Martin McDonagh is at Maximum Irish in the story of two men from a tiny island community whose friendship is ruptured for reasons as mysterious as they are bloody. Colin Farrell is an absolute marvel as the simpler and more innocent of the two, somehow rendering himself almost unrecognizable by draining every drop of guile from his face.

8. No Bears Now-imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi plays himself as a director trying to stay one step ahead of a repressive government, holing up in a small border village while a crew shoots his movie on the other side of the border. (The scenes where he tries directing over video link seem tailor-made for the era of exasperating Zoom meetings.) The villagers’ provincial suspicions eventually take on the force of state repression, without the state having to do anything so clumsy as actually show its hand.

9. Fire of Love If 16mm film wasn’t made for shooting erupting volcanoes, why even bother?

10. All That Breathes Two brothers run a ramshackle bird hospital in New Delhi, in a documentary that suggests preserving nature can be the sincerest form of worship.

11. Emily the Criminal A gritty ’70s style thriller about a very ’20s problem, with Aubrey Plaza as a millennial who turns to crime to pay down her college debt.

12. Resurrection Better I don’t tell you what this is about, just that the chilly restraint that foils so many Rebecca Hall performances has never been put to better use than in this psychological horror, and the single-take monologue that anchors the movie is just jaw-dropping.

13. Descendant A story hundreds of years in the making, and yet ideally suited to the age of “critical race theory” panic. Near Mobile, Alabama, divers search for the remains of the Clotilda, which the Black residents of the Africatown community have long insisted brought slaves to the U.S. well after the practice was officially outlawed. The forthrightness with which some Alabamans say they simply don’t want the truth to come out, no matter what it is, speaks volumes about how far this has do go in reckoning with its past.

14. Triangle of Sadness The movie’s third section, which contains its conceptual hook, is also its weakest, perhaps because Ruben Östlund is more of a mannerist than an idea guy. But the first part, built around a real argument the writer-director had with his now-wife, is a sharp-edged delight, and the second is a gross-out blast.

15. Speak No Evil Seriously one of the most fucked-up movies I have ever seen, and I could not mean that as more of a compliment.

16. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair In some ways there’s barely enough for a movie here, just a desktop’s-eye view of a young person following the trail of an online myth. But Anna Cobb’s performance in the leading, almost only, role is utterly magnetic, in part because I can’t figure out what she’s doing or if it’s even acting at all.

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The Top 3 Pieces of the Week: I wrote about Avatar: The Way of Water’s tulkun, aka space whales, and the surprisingly robust history of sci-fi cetaceans. (Is Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home involved? Do you really have to ask?) I also got together with my Slate bud Dana Stevens to talk about said Avatar 2 in podcast form, which I hope is as fun to listen to as it was to do. And lastly, I parachuted into Slate’s annual Movie Club to talk about the good news for movie theaters in 2022, and why it’s not good news for everyone.

Thanks as always for reading, subscribing, and joining me on this lil’ journey at the tail end of the year. Much more to come in 2023.