The best films of 2022, from period dramas to thrillers

1. Drama

In Living, Bill Nighy plays a bureaucrat in rainy 1950s London who finds that he is dying of cancer. Tender but unsentimental, it is one of those rare films that “may actually inspire you to live differently” before it’s too late, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator.

The Banshees of Inisherin reunited the director Martin McDonagh with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, the stars of his 2008 debut, In Bruges. Set in Ireland in 1923, the film swings between “the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer; and the cast is “note-perfect”.

Set in 1969, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast follows the life of a working-class Protestant family at the start of the Troubles. You’d need a “stony heart” not to be moved by it, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, and – an added bonus – it’s fairly short.

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Decidedly not short is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, about young lovers in 1970s California. The narrative style is “deliberately rambling”, said The i Paper, but the film is so subversive and funny you forgive its odd “shaggy-dog approach”.

2. Comedy

Twenty years after they starred together in Ocean’s 11, George Clooney and Julia Roberts were reunited for Ticket to Paradise. They play a divorced couple who are drawn into an uneasy alliance when their daughter announces that she is getting married. It’s not a subtle film, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday; but in an “unrepentantly commercial way, it is sweet and funny”.

Sandra Bullock went hunting for a priceless artefact in The Lost City, aided by Channing Tatum’s ditsy male model. They have an “easy, winning chemistry”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – and Brad Pitt makes a scene-stealing appearance – but the film is let down by a “thunderously miscast” Daniel Radcliffe. As the film’s baddie, he exudes about as much menace as a “ham-and-cheese sandwich”.

3. Foreign language

“With most films, you know exactly what you’ll be getting within the first ten minutes,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Not so with Parallel Mothers, a “delicious and beautifully styled” drama directed by Pedro Almodóvar, and starring Penélope Cruz. The plot, about a photographer who finds herself accidentally pregnant, twists and turns, but it “adds up to an immensely rich, satisfying whole”.

The Norwegian romcom The Worst Person in the World won its star, Renate Reinsve, the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. She plays Julie, a medical student facing up to the end of her 20s. It’s one of the few films I’ve seen that seems “actually invested in why an entire generation can seem so aimless”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent; and Reinsve is superb.

The Quiet Girl, a moving Irish-language drama adapted from a book by Claire Keegan, follows a girl growing up on an impoverished smallholding in rural Ireland in the 1980s. It arrived in cinemas “on unprecedented waves” of acclaim, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times, and it deserved the hype. Although there is “a pervasive sense of unspoken menace lurking just outside the frame”, the film is ultimately a “celebration of uncomplicated human kindness”.

A sense of menace also pervades the Belgian film Playground. Set mainly in a primary school, it nails “exactly what it feels like to be seven years old and starting a new school”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, “which is another way of saying it’s the most panicattack-inducing film of the year”; and it is anchored by Maya Vanderbeque’s “heartlurchingly plausible” turn as seven-year-old Nora.

For something a bit lighter, try the deadpan Danish comedy Wild Men, about a father who decides, during a mid-life crisis, to go and live as a Viking in a forest, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. It’s a likeable and “very funny” film that is “gently moving”, too.

4. Period drama

Frances O’Connor’s Emily takes some bold liberties in fleshing out the little we know about the life of Emily Brontë, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but this is a “speculative biopic” – with no Fleabag-style breaking of the fourth wall or jokey intertitles. Emma Mackey turns in a “ferocious” performance; and the cinematography is ravishing.

Downton Abbey: A New Era offered another big-screen helping of Julian Fellowes’s drama. It’s “outrageously silly”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian; but “I have to admit – like someone with an empty tube of Pringles in their hand that was full ten minutes ago – that I did find this film entertaining”.

Benediction, Terence Davies’s biopic of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, is a “grand-scale melodrama” about “loss, isolation and horror”, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. As befits a film about a great writer, it brims with “brilliant dialogue”, and brings the past vividly to life.

5. Thriller

Filmed in a single take, Boiling Point plunges viewers into a busy London restaurant presided over by a harried head chef (Stephen Graham). “Utterly immersive”, the film evokes “the raw experience of an inexorably accelerating panic attack”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer.

The Outfit, a mob thriller set in 1950s Chicago, also sticks to one location: a tailor’s shop run by a former Savile Row cutter (Mark Rylance). It has the feel of an “old-timey” gangster flick, said Christina Newland in The i Paper, and a brilliant script.

Ambulance, directed by Michael Bay, follows two adopted brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) whose bank heist goes horribly wrong. Bay’s films usually boil down to “guns, big explosions and car chases”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday – and this “preposterous” but thrilling film is no exception.

Things also go badly awry in Beast. Idris Elba is the widowed father who must contend with a killer lion on a family holiday to South Africa. It’s a “B movie”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian, but one that’s “bringing its A-game”.

6. Documentary

My Old School renewed interest in the stranger-than-fiction case of the 30-year-old man who posed as a teenager in 1993, in order to enrol at a Scottish school. The film is “an expertly crafted tale of deception”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman, and it’s told with real “playfulness”.

Director Brett Morgen was granted rare access to every nook and cranny of David Bowie’s archive, and made good use of it in Moonage Daydream. The documentary is ostensibly about the singer’s remarkable life, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but it is more a journey through his “relentlessly mercurial mind”, and its unconventional style illustrates, “rather brilliantly, just how Bowie ticked”.

The Velvet Queen follows a wildlife photographer and a travel writer as they comb the Tibetan plateau in search of its elusive snow leopards. On the way, they find foxes, bears and other “marvellous animals in the stunningly stark and remote landscape”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian; but there is “real wonder in the snow leopards’ eventual appearance”.

7. Action

Top Gun: Maverick – the highest-grossing sequel of all time – saw Maverick (Tom Cruise) return to his Top Gun stomping ground, to train a new generation of aviators. One day we’ll address the film’s politics, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, but for now, sit back and enjoy a film that is as thrilling as a blockbuster can be. It’s an “edge-of-your-seat” spectacular that can unite “a room full of strangers sitting in the dark, and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye”.

Prey is the seventh film in the Predator series, but is set 300 years before the earlier films. With a Native American cast, it is about a Comanche hunter taking on an alien killing machine. Highly graphic, it is true to the spirit of the original, said Wendy Ide in The Observer, but works as a “self-contained entity”.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh plays a Chinese immigrant in the US, who stumbles on a host of alternate realities. The film is “a trifle exhausting”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times, but it’s “exhilarating, funny and moving”, and full of ideas.

8. Animation

Menstruation doesn’t usually crop up in children’s films, but it is front and centre in Turning Red, a Pixar animation about a 13-year-old girl who transforms into a red panda when she feels emotionally fragile. As metaphors go, it’s rather “literal”, said Kevin Maher in The Times, but don’t be put off: the film is “ingenious and light, and deeply lovely”.

Belle followed another teenage girl; this one has a gorgeous singing voice but is too shy to use it in public – until she signs up to “U”, a virtual universe in which she becomes a star. The film combines “dazzling spectacle” with “high-octane action and social commentary”, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, and it is well worth watching.

Minions: The Rise of Gru boasted all the ingredients of a top-rate Despicable Me film, said Wendy Ide in The Observer: silliness, “madcap, Looney-Tunes energy”, and a “big, wet raspberry blown in the face of sophistication”. The film isn’t doing anything new, but it is “extremely funny”.