The 10 Best Movies of 2022 (Ranked)

Joseph Kosinski bypassed digital green-screen fatigue by mounting IMAX cameras directly inside roaring F/A-18 cockpits, letting Tom Cruise and his younger ensemble endure genuine gravitational punishment. The narrative is spare, classical, and intensely focused, staging aerial dogfights with astonishing spatial clarity while grounding Pete Mitchell's arc in genuine grief over Goose. Christopher McQuarrie's disciplined screenplay keeps every mission objective razor-sharp. Across the theatrical landscape of 2022, Maverick stood tall as the blockbuster that genuinely rescued movie theaters from post-lockdown paralysis. It reaffirmed the unrivaled thrill of large-canvas, practical action filmmaking at a moment when Hollywood desperately needed a shot of pure adrenaline.

Relocating Carlo Collodi’s classic fable to Mussolini’s fascist Italy gave Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson room to craft something achingly poignant. Hand-carved stop-motion puppets move with imperfect, organic weight, establishing an earthy, melancholy aesthetic where life and mortality dance in tandem. Del Toro rejects traditional moralizing about conformity, turning Pinocchio’s defiance into a virtue amidst wartime obedience, supported by Alexandre Desplat’s haunting acoustic score. In 2022, this dark, anti-authoritarian parable marked a triumphant high point for auteur-driven animation. It challenged the sanitized conventions of family entertainment, proving that handcrafted stop-motion still holds unmatched psychological power for mature audiences.

Few expected an eleventh-hour DreamWorks spinoff sequel to reckon so boldly with panic attacks, vanity, and the terror of looming death. Director Joel Crawford blends painterly, variable-framerate action inspired by anime with genuine dramatic stakes, framing Wagner Moura’s scythe-wielding Wolf as a genuinely terrifying avatar of Death. Antonio Banderas injects weary vulnerability into his swashbuckling feline, balancing comedic bravura with hard-earned humility. Amid the crowded 2022 theatrical slate, The Last Wish shocked the industry by becoming an absolute critical darling and box-office endurance runner. It pushed commercial 3D animation into stylized, expressionistic territory while treating younger audiences to a mature meditation on mortality.

Makoto Shinkai continues his peerless exploration of environmental anxiety and communal loss, sending a high school girl and a talking three-legged chair across Japan to lock portals of impending ruin. The animation is radiant, contrasting rural ghost towns abandoned to economic decline with kinetic, supernatural road-trip escapades. Underneath the fantasy mechanics lies a devastating confrontation with the collective trauma of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. Internationally released late in 2022, Suzume reaffirmed Shinkai’s status as a premier architect of modern anime. The film captured the year’s overarching cinematic appetite for healing, turning historical catastrophe into an intimate journey of acceptance and shared remembrance.

Adapted faithfully from Charlie Mackesy’s beloved illustrated book, this hand-drawn short unfolds like a gentle balm for a bruised world. Directors Peter Baynton and Mackesy preserve the calligraphic ink lines and watercolor washes of the source illustrations, creating a tactile story of four mismatched travelers seeking home. The dialogue is whisper-soft yet piercing, emphasizing kindness, self-compassion, and quiet perseverance without tipping into cloying sentimentality. During a turbulent 2022 marked by collective burnout, this unassuming piece of animation felt like an essential emotional refuge. Its subsequent Academy Award win recognized an enduring truth: modest, human-scale storytelling can resonate just as loudly as the loudest tentpoles.

Director Alek Keshishian strips away every conventional trope of polished pop-star publicity to deliver an unflinching record of psychological collapse and slow rehabilitation. Filmed over six turbulent years, the documentary tracks Selena Gomez through lupus flares, bipolar diagnoses, and the suffocation of international fame. There are no staged rehearsal montages or triumphant stadium finales here; instead, the camera lingers on quiet breakdowns in hotel rooms and unfiltered existential dread. In the streaming landscape of 2022, this vulnerable portrait separated itself completely from the era’s parade of glossy promotional music documentaries, setting a new benchmark for raw, non-sanitized celebrity self-examination.

Bang Woo-ri’s debut feature taps directly into late-nineties nostalgia, framing its central romance through dial-up modems, camcorders, and pager messages. Kim Yoo-jung shines as Na Bo-ra, a high schooler whose loyalty to her best friend spirals into a tender, messy first love of her own. The palette is drenched in soft golden sunlight, evoking an era before smartphones altered adolescent intimacy forever, right before the narrative delivers a devastating emotional gut-punch. Arriving amid the global crest of Korean content in 2022, this bittersweet teen romance proved that specific regional memories carry universal emotional resonance, cementing its spot as one of streaming’s sleeper emotional heavyweights.

By benching Goku and Vegeta off-world, director Tetsuro Kodama boldly hands the franchise mantle back to Gohan and Piccolo, rejuvenating a decades-old formula. The jump to expressive, cel-shaded 3D-CGI pays off with razor-sharp martial arts choreography, quirky Red Ribbon Army villains, and endearing comedic beats centered around Piccolo's unlikely role as an attentive babysitter. The climatic power escalations carry genuine emotional payoff for long-time devotees. In the 2022 anime theatrical boom, this release demonstrated the enduring global power of legacy shonen franchises. It proved that taking creative detours with fan-favorite supporting characters could successfully breathe fresh life into massive, historic pop-culture properties.

Directed by Peggy Holmes, this inaugural animated feature from Skydance Animation invents a whimsical, split-level universe where good and bad luck are meticulously engineered. Eva Noblezada voices Sam Greenfield, an aging foster youth whose relentless misfortune brings her into contact with an elusive Scottish black cat voiced by Simon Pegg. While its bureaucratic worldbuilding occasionally bogs down the momentum, the physical gags and vibrant character designs keep the journey cheerful and lightweight. As a 2022 streaming exclusive, Luck offered safe, colorful family viewing that demonstrated technical polish, even if it lacked the narrative boldness and thematic audacity seen across the year's top-tier animated offerings.

Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum’s military romance leans heavily into well-worn enemies-to-lovers tropes, pairing a struggling singer-songwriter with a troubled Marine for a fraudulent healthcare marriage. Sofia Carson and Nicholas Galitzine generate genuine on-screen chemistry, carrying the melodrama through several clunky political conversations and predictable third-act conflicts. Carson’s original pop ballads provide the narrative with an accessible emotional rhythm that hooks casual viewers. Though critically polarizing and formulaic in execution, Purple Hearts became an undisputed streaming phenomenon in 2022. It highlighted how mid-budget romance melodramas, long abandoned by major theatrical studios, could still dominate modern streaming algorithms and capture massive global viewership.