The best movies of 2022 — and where to find them

The movies returned at something close to full force this year. COVID masks all but vanished from multiplex crowds, and from the audiences at the press screenings I attended (though I kept mine handy). Sundance did cancel its in-person screenings for the second January in a row, thanks to the early omicron surge, but other major film festivals continued on unimpeded. The Oscars made headlines (if scarcely the ones they wanted), as did box office returns. Companies like Netflix, Warner Bros. and Disney all saw their plans for streaming domination hit an iceberg, and reshuffled those plans accordingly.

So why did cinema's apparent resurgence so often feel like a retreat? Maybe it was the sense, even more pronounced than usual, that the audience at large couldn't be bothered to care about movies other than "Top Gun: Maverick," "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" or anything else without a franchise-designating colon in the title. Not that those movies offered nothing to care about; Tom Cruise's irrepressible last-movie-star energy was a