The 50 Best Movies of 2022

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – January 4, 2023

Here is Metacritic's final list of the 50 best-reviewed movies of 2022, ranked by Metascore. This list only includes films receiving at least 7 reviews from professional critics.

All films released between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 in at least one U.S. theater or directly to streaming or VOD/digital services were eligible for inclusion. Short films and reissues are excluded. Titles are ranked by Metascore (a weighted average of scores from top professional critics) prior to rounding based on scores as of January 1, 2023.

Additional content by Keith Kimbell.

11 of 25 photo by Cinema Guild

87 A Night of Knowing Nothing

(#13) Indian director Payal Kapadia's poetic feature debut is a bit of a hybrid, blending documentary footage shot over several years by an assortment of film students (plus CCTV and other found footage) with a narration drawn from letters discovered on a film school campus that detail the end of a doomed romance. Both service Kapadia's main mission: To document and detail the state of student life in modern India during a turbulent time when universities have been shaken by a rise in student protests.

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“Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.” —Jessica Kiang, Variety

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