The Best Movies You Totally Didn't Get Around To Seeing In 2022

When you cast a thriller with names like Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman and a central mystery at its heart, it might feel relatively easy to guess how it all might unfold. The former, who has rapidly made a name for herself between "It Follows" and especially "The Guest" (though let's not look past her exceptional work in this year's "Significant Other," as well!), has breathed new life into the idea of the final girl. With her distinctively steely exterior that hints at hidden depths of brittleness underneath, Monroe has carved out an immensely successful niche for herself with some of the most fascinating horror/thrillers in recent years. And Gorman, of course, boasts a particularly menacing aura that threatens to leave him firmly in type-cast territory as the go-to villain.

Add that up and you'd be left with the feeling that "Watcher" might not have all that much new to offer. You'd be dead wrong.

"Watcher," director Chloe Okuno's feature debut, completely weaponizes its central casting — and our assumptions therein — to great effect. Monroe plays Julia, a fish-out-of-water former actor who has moved with her partner Francis (Karl Glusman) to the unfamiliar world of Bucharest. Muted and leeched of color entirely, the drab atmosphere of the film quickly permeates the entire picture and lends an oppressive quality to Julia's struggles to integrate. Naturally, that coincides with reports of a local serial killer on the loose — along with Julia's nagging feeling that the shadowy figure (Gorman) staring out from the apartment window across the street is watching her from a distance and dogging her every step.

What follows is a tense, moody, and slow-burning drama that deftly explores the concept of gaslighting without any accompanying preachiness or condescension. And it's more than worth a watch.

When are we going to collectively appreciate Rebecca Hall as one of the most gifted actors currently working? Let's try not to think about the idea that more people have watched her thankless paycheck gig in "Godzilla vs. Kong" than in films such as "Professor Marston & the Wonder Women," "The Night House," and "Resurrection" combined. But for those in the know, it's never been clearer just how much this actor has commanded the screen in some of the most daring films in recent memory.

This has never been more apparent than in "Resurrection." From writer/director Andrew Semans, Hall's Margaret is a loving but stifling single mother who seems to have every fastidious detail of her life in order ... until a mysterious man named David (Tim Roth) begins to show up with increasing frequency, the very sight of him driving Margaret to panic attacks and irrational behavior. As Margaret's icy cool exterior begins to shatter from the inside out and David remains as implacable as ever, Semans' script keeps us frustratingly in the dark about his backstory and past dealings with Margaret, evoking the same kind of response in us as the manipulative David does in Margaret. All is eventually revealed in a heart-stopping, seven-minute monologue by Hall that — in a perfect world, at least — would provide her Oscars reel at the 2023 Academy Awards.

If this film had been even slightly more conventional, we'd be talking about Hall and Roth as two of the year's best hero and villain performances. But the trade-off is that the hazy, nightmarish tone allows reality to mix with delusions at the drop of a hat. By the end, things take a turn for the abstract in as stomach-churning a way as we've seen since Alex Garland's "Men" that ends with one final shot of Hall that is impossible to forget. If the industry won't give this incredible talent her due, at least we can.

How many actors this year can say they've put in equal work on the two opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum? Zoë Kravitz obviously stole the show in "The Batman," bringing the character's signature tenacity and simmering tension to her take on Selina Kyle/Catwoman in one of the most major films affected by the pandemic. Maybe it's only fitting, then, that the actor's better performance of the two came in a much smallerthriller made, set, and released during the pandemic as well.

In "Kimi," Kravitz's Angela Childs is a paranoid shut-in, using the rather deftly-incorporated pandemic as a mere extension of the character's unhealthy state of mind — one that hardly ever allows her to leave her apartment for any length of time. Preferring to work from home as a software technician for the film's Alexa stand-in, Kimi, Angela cuts off all contact from friends and loved ones — until she stumbles across a murder unwittingly recorded by a client's Kimi smart speaker device.

Though it's been somewhat overshadowed by all the movies that have arrived since, "Kimi" remains one of the year's best thanks to director Steven Soderbergh and the creative team's usual sense of narrative flow, setups and payoffs, and a keen eye on action that never prevents this tightly-wound thriller from ever overstaying its welcome. In the process, "Kimi" reminds us that the timing of its release (in early February) and the platform it was released on (straight to HBO Max streaming) pale in comparison to what actually matters. A filmmaker in the prime of his career, a taut script courtesy of one of the proven greats ("Jurassic Park" and "Spider-Man" writer David Koepp), and a lead actor as committed to bringing this original character to life as she was with one of fiction's most popular characters ever? Yep, that'll play.

Sometimes, a well-rounded moviegoing appetite demands a multifaceted, challenging, and hearty all-you-can-eat buffet. Other times, we need something more akin to a light entrée that gives us what we need and nothing more. "Marcel the Shell With Shoes On," meanwhile, is somehow an appetizer, meal, and dessert all at once: balanced, nutritious, and satisfying to the extreme. Yes, I'm currently a bit hungry as I write this up. What of it?

The effervescent Marcel is, you guessed it, a centimeters-tall shell with a glued-on googly eye, a knack for seeing the positives in life, and, the owner of the cutest pair of shoes you'll ever see on an inanimate object. Filmed mockumentary-style by director Dean Fleischer-Camp, the A24 stop-motion animated film takes its central conceit — an absurdly cute talking shell in search of his lost family — and plays it entirely straight. At no point does anyone pop the bubble of immersion by remarking on how ridiculous it all is. Instead, the plight of Marcel and his grandmother Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) is treated like anyone else's.

Much of the project feels intensely personal, especially with Fleischer-Camp playing the voyeuristic documentary filmmaker who happens upon Marcel while staying at an Airbnb and ex-wife Jenny Slate voicing Marcel himself. But that extends to each of the main players in the film as well. The social media-driven campaign to help bring Marcel's family home draws plenty of laughs and shots at influencer culture, sure, but there's also a yearning for a deeper layer of belonging and community that makes the shell's sudden internet fame ring hollow. And when Dean's polite refusal to build any sort of personal relationship with Marcel becomes too much to ignore, the naïve but blunt shell directly calls him out on his lonely and closed-off existence.

Though some may struggle to get on the same wavelength as this cutesy and kitschy little adventure, "Marcel the Shell With Shoes On" proves just as overwhelmingly winsome as its title character. Like an unfamiliar but appealing meal placed in front of a picky eater, you may resist ... but not for long.

Remember that time the genius mind behind "Mad Max: Fury Road" unleashed his highly-anticipated follow-up upon us: a no-holds-barred film starring two of the most exciting actors around, using the unimaginably large canvas at his disposal to tell a shockingly poignant romance, and the general moviegoing public at large just ... ignored it?

It keeps me up at night to think about just how badly George Miller's "Three Thousand Years of Longing" flopped in theaters upon its release, failing to garner much excitement with its time-hopping tale of a Djinn (Idris Elba) cursed to suffer loss after heartbreaking loss over the centuries until he makes his way into the hands of a scholar named Alithea (Tilda Swinton). Set against the backdrop of Old Testament times, the Ottoman Empire, and the mid-19th century, the epic spans millennia to tell by far the most sweeping love story of the year. Filled with bizarre concepts, unconventional characters, and a sort of ingrained messiness that many may have mistaken for an inherent failing, it's clear that Miller's latest didn't quite fit the mold of a typical night out at the movies. And yet, that's exactly what makes this overlooked curio so moving and timeless in the first place.

Of vastly more import than its box office fortunes, the parable at the heart of "Three Thousand Years of Longing" is potent enough to fill the cold, dead heart of any cynic. Desperate to gain freedom by fulfilling three simple wishes but cursed to be at the whim of a self-assured woman with no real wants, the Djinn plunges into a fairy tale describing his previous interactions with humanity and, in the process, celebrating the power of narrative. It's an essential work from one of our greatest storytellers — one that demands our attention.

If we accept that movies as a whole are meant to capture the breadth of humanity — triumphs and flaws and all — then that implies a certain sense of messiness in our storytelling that can never fall into easy delineations of black and white. There's always a grey area that muddies the easiest and most simplistic interpretations, refusing to be placed in a box to be dissected on a whim. Sometimes, villains are just as much of a fantasy as heroes.

Given the subject matter of the film and the behind-the-scenes controversy that has unfolded in the wake of its release, there's perhaps no more fitting representative of this concept than Asghar Farhadi's "A Hero." A stark and deeply-felt portrait of a man named Rahim (Amir Jadidi), who faces prison time for failing to pay off his debts until he lucks his way into the feel-good story of a lifetime, the critically acclaimed Iranian film (reviewed by /Film's Chris Evangelista here) debuted to rave film festival reviews in 2021 ahead of its limited theatrical and subsequent streaming release on Prime Video in January of 2022. But much in the same way that the too-good-to-be-true circumstances surrounding the hapless Rahim's turn of fortune begin to unravel at an alarming rate, Farhadi ("A Separation," "The Salesman," "Everybody Knows") has found himself coming close to reliving his protagonist's fate as he's faced serious accusations of plagiarism regarding the original concept of the script.

While such real-life complications might be enough to turn viewers away completely, they'd only be robbing themselves of the incredible performances, tension-ridden twists of the knife, and one of the most fascinatingly well-realized stories of self-incrimination that you'll ever see. "A Hero" takes no easy way out, giving its main character the dignity of making his own choices — as woefully misguided as they may be.

It's a tale as old as time. An obsessive police detective investigates a murder. The prime suspect is as beautiful — and dangerous — a femme fatale as it gets. The two end up circling each other in an increasingly fraught spiral. The fallout of such an ill-advised choice causes reverberations far beyond what our protagonist ever conceived. The actual execution of these time-honored neo-noir tropes, however, immediately puts "Decision to Leave" in a league of its own.

Co-written and directed by Park Chan-wook, this film borrows liberally from Hitchcockian thrillers, classic detective yarns, and more to fill this particular story with its own distinct identity altogether. Park Hae-il plays the fastidious, insomniac detective Jang Hae-joon who, as his wife Jeong-ahn (Lee Jung-hyun) complains, is never more at ease than when he has a grisly murder-mystery to solve. The appearance of Tang Wei's Song Seo-rae, a young and irresistible immigrant who becomes the number 1 suspect in the untimely death of her husband, seems to be the only thing capable of shaking Hae-joon out of his stupor. As the investigation crosses personal and professional lines, Park Chan-wook's assured direction takes several visual leaps across time and space to put the cop literally in the same frame as the suspect he's tailing. The dazzling visuals don't end there, working in perfect concert with a script firing on all cylinders.

As /Film's Chris Evangelista noted, the wry sense of humor in the first half gives way to something much darker and more tragic. The final result is a clever, twisty, and refreshingly adult story that ends on an absolutely killer note.

As implied by the title, what's missing from "After Yang" is almost more notable than what remains.

When the intuitive "techno-sapien" android Yang (a preternaturally great Justin H. Min) malfunctions early on in the story, set vaguely in the near future, his glaring absence causes the perfectly synchronized family unit of three — you'll want to check out the glorious opening credits sequence — to disintegrate even faster than his core functions already have. Each frame, meticulously blocked by writer/director Kogonada and DP Benjamin Loeb, masterfully uses the distancing effect of negative space to convey what the film's largely stifled characters cannot. Snippets of moments and memories ("Memory-belia," one character refers to the now-quaint term "memorabilia" early on in one of many instances where Kogonada rightfully dispenses with subtlety and subtext) fill in the gaps of Yang's life. Before we even know it, we're shedding tears for a robot that we hardly even got to know in the first place.

Part sci-fi allegory, part meditative mood piece about the fleetingness of life, "After Yang" uses scalpel-like precision to figuratively dig under the circuitry of Yang and pull out the parts that make him — and us — so human in the first place. Led by a wonderfully understated Colin Farrell as Jake, the family patriarch struggling to be more present for his longsuffering wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), the script takes the blank space that Yang used to fill and explores a range of heady topics that never once fail to register as a natural extension of story and theme.

Can androids dream of life after death? Can bookish knowledge of a universe of fun facts evoke the feelings derived by memory and firsthand experience? Does a future where technology can so easily replace flesh-and-blood relationships have to be a cautionary tale? All of these questions (and more) are offered up and dissolved into our palate as smoothly as a cup of fresh-brewed tea. You'll be hard-pressed to find a more therapeutic, melancholy, and stirring 2022 film than this one.