43 Must-See Movies from 2022 Streaming Right Now (2024)

“Aftersun” (VOD platforms)

“A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ ‘Aftersun’ isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself.” —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Aftersun.”

“After Yang” (Paramount+, Showtime, VOD platforms)

“Perhaps more speculative than ‘Columbus’ yet no less poignant, Kogonada’s second feature ‘After Yang’ is the kind of cozy sci-fi marvel that can only be made by someone with an incorruptible belief in the life of objects and the humanity of all things.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “After Yang.”

“All Quiet on the Western Front” (Netflix)

“Berger’s ‘All Quiet’ was produced in association with Netflix, and is the first German-language film version of Remarque’s novel, which was originally published in German. ‘All Quiet’ was one of the works targeted by Nazi book-burnings, and this new film is an attempt to reclaim the novel as an essential work of German culture. It’s coming from inside the house, so to speak, and there is a certain Teutonic seriousness to the filmmaking as well as the subject matter. Just as polished but not quite as flashy as Sam Mendes’ ‘1917,’ the film displays a similar level of commitment to historical detail, but presents its elaborately staged battlefield scenes in a relatively more plain spoken style.” —Katie Rife

Read IndieWire’s full review of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

“Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood” (Netflix)

“‘Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood” introduces itself as a fantastical adventure about a Houston fourth-grader who’s plucked out of school for a confidential NASA mission in the spring of 1969 (those wacky scientists accidentally built the lunar module too small for an adult), but Richard Linklater’s first animated feature since ‘A Scanner Darkly’ isn’t really a story about a kid who secretly paved the way for Neil Armstrong, or even a story about a kid who had any special interest in the stars above. In fact, this semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood.”

“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (Netflix)

“‘You inevitably turn into what people think you are,’ someone opines a few hours (or years) into Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths),’ a movie so nakedly personal in spite of its epic scope that even the most benign stray comments betray the sting of self-flagellation. And yet there’s a reason why this one manages to break the skin.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Bardo.”

“Beba” (Hulu, VOD platforms)

“First-time filmmaker Rebeca ‘Beba’ Huntt opens her eponymous debut ‘Beba’ — a complicated and bold self-portrait that explores identity, internalized anti-Blackness, and generational trauma — with a declarative statement: ‘You are now entering my universe.’ Her world, initially, is visually translated via a shaky cam walking through a twisty, moss-smeared forest. A woozy horn hypnotizes over a collage of images: Huntt swaying to the sea, people at the beach, her hand in the sand — all shot on a gorgeous 16mm. Her spoken-word poetry, wherein she says ‘violence lives in my DNA,’ lays the groundwork for the next 79 unflinching minutes.” —Robert Daniels

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Beba.”

“Benediction” (VOD platforms)

“Davies has once again made a film that feels like the work of someone flaying their soul onscreen. Last time it was Emily Dickinson who provided the prism through which Davies could refract his own wants and wounds, and here it’s the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, an openly but resentfully gay man desperate for a peace of mind he only knew how to look for in other people.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Benediction.”

“Bones and All” (VOD platforms)

“The lovers comprise Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), both ‘eaters,’ with a hunger for human flesh passed down their respective family’s bloodlines. We are first introduced to Maren as a seemingly shy wallflower in a run-down high school. Instantly there is a slight eeriness to its hallways with blood-red lockers and walls lined with flat watercolors of American landscapes that the film will soon call its home.” —Leila Latif

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Bones and All.”

“Crimes of the Future” (Hulu, VOD platforms)

“‘Crimes of the Future’ is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (‘surgery is the new sex’). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Crimes of the Future.”

“Decision to Leave” (Mubi, VOD platforms)

“Here’s a sentence I never expected to write: The most romantic movie of the year (so far) is a police procedural. Then again, I wasn’t aware that ‘Oldboy’ director Park Chan-wook — whose operatic revenge melodramas have given way to a series of ravishingly baroque Hitchco*ckian love stories about the various ‘perversities’ that might bind two wayward souls together — was making a detective thriller. In that case, the heart-stirring potential of the Korean auteur’s new detective saga would have been as obvious as the identity of its killer.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Decision to Leave.”

“Descendant” (Netflix)

“How best should we remember the dead? The critical African American history retold in Margaret Brown’s imperative film, ‘Descendant,’ an unblinking investigation combining local stories with ‘Erin Brockovich’ flair, seeks to answer that question. Because for the many Black folks living in Africatown, Alabama, where the last slave ship made landfall, remembering is what they do best.” —RD

“Elvis” (HBO Max, VOD platforms)

“Butler’s immaculate Presley imitation would be the best thing about this movie even if it stopped at mimicry, but the actor does more than just nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to defy them, slipping free of iconography and giving the film an opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who’s been frozen in time since before Luhrmann’s target audience was born.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Elvis.”

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (Paramount+, Showtime, VOD platforms)

“Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are. It’s a machine powered by the greatest performance that Michelle Yeoh has ever given, pumped full of the zaniest martial arts battles that Stephen Chow has never shot, and soaked through with the kind of ‘anything goes’ spirit that’s only supposed to be on TV these days.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full “Everything Everywhere All at Once” review.

“Fire Island” (Hulu)

“A true ensemble piece, the movie is filled with the joy and camaraderie of that cheesiest of queer epithets — chosen family. But under the Day-Glo sheen of the carless beach town filled with glistening shirtless queers, it all feels genuinely dreamy. (Or maybe it’s the Ketamine.)” —Jude Dry

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Fire Island.”

“Fire of Love” (Disney+)

“Sara Dosa’s ‘Fire of Love’ is a documentarian’s dream. With a truly amazing trove of archival footage taken by married volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, the movie is, seemingly, essentially handed to them. However, that surely didn’t make piecing together this vivid and soaringly heart-tugging documentary a simple task. The filmmakers have restored and re-assembled endless reels and dozens of hours of film and video footage dating back to the late 1960s into a witty portrait, aided amply by appropriately monotone and poetic narration from filmmaker Miranda July, and a soundtrack of go-to, let’s-run-toward-our-future pop classics like Brian Eno’s electronic anthem ‘The Big Ship.'” —Ryan Lattanzio

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Fire of Love.”

“Funny Pages” (VOD platforms)

“A comics aficionado and a cartoonist himself, Kline carefully crafts the hermetic world of ‘Funny Pages’ so that it acutely resemble one of an imaginary graphic novel, mostly likely released by Fantagraphics in the ’90s. Every character and setting might have discrete personalities, but they all reflect Kline’s perspective, which privileges oddballs and misfits and alternative culture fetishists over members of ‘straight’ society.” —Vikram Murthi

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Funny Pages.”

“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” (Netflix)

“Rest assured: Johnson isn’t reinventing the mystery movie with “Glass Onion,” but he is having a hell of a time lightly deconstructing it and reorienting it to suit his whipsmart script and central super detective. Perhaps the only whodunit in which its main character will, upon solving the film’s central crime, proclaim it’s all “so dumb!” (and be both right and wrong in that declaration), and all the better for it.” —Kate Erbland

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” (Netflix)

“‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’ reimagines the classic fantasy tale through the most beautifully-made stop-motion animation in years, a powerful and life-affirming father-and-son story about acceptance and love in the face of pain, misery, and fascism, and the filmmaker’s love of monsters in what is easily his best film in a decade.” —Rafael Motamayor

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.”

“Happening” (AMC+, VOD platforms)

“At many points in ‘Happening,’ a weighty, naturalistic drama, Annie (Anamaria Vartolomei) opens her eyes wide. Her pupils shrink into tiny pinpoints. If she were a Marvel character, these would be the moments she transforms into her heroic alter-ego. But for Annie, a French literature student in 1963, power comes not from superhuman brawn but strength of will: She’s several weeks into an unwanted pregnancy, and though abortions are illegal — punishable with prison time — she’s determined to find a way to terminate it.” —Natalia Winkelman

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Happening.”

“Hit the Road” (Showtime, VOD platforms)

“A family road trip movie in which we never quite know where the film is heading (and are often lied to about why), ‘Hit the Road’ may be set amid the winding desert highways and gorgeous emerald valleys of northwestern Iran, but Panah Panahi’s miraculous debut is fueled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our mortal coil at some point along the way.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Hit the Road.”

“In Front of Your Face” (Apple TV)

“‘On the Beach at Night Alone’ director Hong Sang-soo comes back to the big screen with the mysterious and darkly intimate tale of a former actress who returns home to Seoul, where her hazy but palpably regretful past blooms into an artful consideration of expression and isolation. Lee has received extensive praise for her starring performance, her first for Hong.” —Alison Foreman

“Jackass Forever” (Paramount+, VOD platforms)

“For those of you ignorant of American history or otherwise living with your head up your ass (a feat of self-abasem*nt that would earn anyone a spot in Tremaine’s cast), ‘Jackass Forever’ is the first time since 2010 that the Knoxville Family Circus has brought their winsomely violent brand of ‘don’t try this at home’ fun to the big screen. For us in the audience, that ‘getting the gang back together again’ vibe is so visceral that even ‘Jackass’ newbies might feel the warm buzz of catching up with old friends.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Jackass Forever.”

“Kimi” (HBO Max, VOD platforms)

“A surveillance thriller for an age when everyoneknows they’re being spied upon at all times — even, perhaps, by the same device on which they’re watching it — Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Kimi’ is a simple but satisfying genre exercise that uses its agoraphobic heroine to ask what people are supposed to do with their paranoia now that virtually everything is out in the open.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Kimi.”

“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” (VOD platforms)

“Like the trio of early short films Camp and Slate crafted around the stop-motion shell in the early aughts (plus a pair of best-selling storybooks), ‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’ adopts a breezy mockumentary style to tell the tale of the world’s most charming shell.” —KE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.”

“Moonage Daydream” (VOD platforms)

“‘Moonage Daydream’ feels, first and foremost, like a montage of media criticism encompassing the entire 20th century, all of it laser-focused through a single pinhole: the dynamic David Bowie. More sensory experience than straightforward recounting, the documentary by Brett Morgen (‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor.” —Siddhant Adlakha

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Moonage Daydream.”

“Nanny” (Amazon Prime Video)

“Aisha (Anna Diop) is a Senegalese immigrant who has arrived in New York City with her own American Dream, though one that should really not feel so out of reach: she just wants her adorable young son Lamine, who is back in Senegal, to join her. When she gets a new job nannying for an affluent couple with a cute kid (Rose Decker), the steady paycheck seems destined to get Aisha and Lamine on the right track. But the real cost is one Aisha could never have seen coming.” —KE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Nanny.”

“Nope” (Peaco*ck, VOD platforms)

“It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as ‘Nope’ gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as ‘Get Out’ squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that ‘Nope’ searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Nope.”

“Resurrection” (Shudder, VOD platforms)

“Fiendishly splitting the difference between the kind of low-rent parental vigilante movies that will always live on basic cable, and the kind of high-brow polymorphic freakouts that all but died with Andrzej Żuławski, Andrew Semans’ aptly named “Resurrection” may never quite reach “Possession” levels of psychic collapse (what does?), but it sure gets a hell of a lot closer than the broad familiarity of its setup might lead you to expect. In fact, the first act of this impressively deranged Sundance premiere almost seems to lure you into a false sense of security on purpose.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Resurrection.”

“RRR” (Netflix)

“S.S. Rajamouli’s ‘RRR’ is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the ‘fiction’ — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once. A pulsating period action drama, it outshines even the director’s record-smashing ‘Baahubali’ movies (viewers familiar with them probably won’t know what to expect here) thanks to its mix of naked sincerity, unapologetic machismo, and balls-to-the-wall action craftsmanship.” —SA

Read IndieWire’s full review of “RRR.”

“TÁR” (VOD platforms)

“‘TÁR’ is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them. That sounds like a tough needle to thread for a film so micro-targeted that it opens with a long, long scene of its subject onstage for an expository conversation with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who needs no introduction.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “TÁR.”

“The Banshees of Inisherin” (HBO Max, VOD platforms)

“‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ often feels more like a Martin McDonagh play — perhaps the abandoned play of the same name that he first conceived as the conclusion of his ‘Aran Islands Trilogy’ — which might help to explain the stony confidence of his direction and the steady focus with which he follows this story to the mournful finale promised by its title (Sheila Flitton is hilarious as banshee incarnate Mrs. McCormick, an old crone so happy to cosplay as death itself that she might as well hobble around Inisherin with a scythe in her hands).” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Banshees of Inisherin.”

“The Batman” (HBO Max, VOD platforms)

“It was less than three years ago that Todd Phillips’ mid-budget but mega-successful ‘Joker’ threateningly pointed toward a future in which superhero movies of all sizes would become so endemic to modern cinema that they no longer had to be superhero movies at all. With Matt Reeves’ ‘The Batman’— a sprawling, 176-minute latex procedural that often appears to have more in common with serial killer sagas like ‘Se7en’ and ‘Zodiac’ than it does anything in the Snyderverse or the MCU — that future has arrived with shuddering force, for better or worse. Mostly better.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s review of “The Batman.”

“The Eternal Daughter” (VOD platforms)

“An elegantly slender phantom of a film that channels a spooky hotel’s worth of gothic horror tropes into the heartrending story of a woman trying to see her own ghost, ‘The Eternal Daughter’ finds Hogg returning to the haunted corridors of her personal experience — and, unexpectedly, to the fictional version of herself that she invented to walk through them. Yes, Julie Hart is back, with Tilda Swinton taking over the role that her daughter originated in ‘The Souvenir’ (that was set in the ’80s, this in the present day).” —DE

Read IndieWire’s review of “The Eternal Daughter.”

“The Fabelmans” (VOD platforms)

“Everything in ‘The Fabelmans’ is real and unreal all at once, as if a documentary of the director’s life were being double-projected over his own artistic interpretation of the same events. It’s telling that the one actual dream sequence in the movie — a skin-crawling nightmare — is presented at face value and rolls into the scene that follows without so much as a speedbump.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Fabelmans.”

“The Northman” (Amazon Prime Video, VOD platorms)

“Even if ‘The Northman’ had been a dreadful bore — and not a primal, sinewy, gnarly-as-f*ck 10th century action epic that starts with a hallucinogenic Viking bar mitzvah, features Björk’s first narrative film performance since ‘Dancer in the Dark,’ and ends with two mostly naked men fighting to the death atop an erupting volcano — the simple fact that financiers had the chutzpah to bankroll such a big swing in the face of our blockbuster-or-bust theatrical climate would have felt like a (pyrrhic) victory against the forces of corporate hom*ogenization, no matter who was behind the camera.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s review of “The Northman.”

“The Woman King” (VOD platforms)

“While celebrating the creation of something like Prince-Bythewood’s ‘The Woman King’ — a crowd-pleasing action epic that just so happens to center a group of African female warriors — is necessary, it also can’t help but come with a button: in 2022, this should not be the exception. Hollywood should have been making films like ‘The Woman King’ for many years. It should not have been a hard sell in 2015. It should not be a remarkable event in 2022. And, yet, it is.” —KE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Woman King.”

“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” (Hulu, VOD platforms)

“This three-and-a-bit minutes of 16mm footage, explains a voiceover, was shot in August 1938 by David Kurtz, a Polish Jew who had grown up in New York… ‘Three Minutes’ examines and re-examines the footage with the dedication of a Zapruder obsessive, scanning every last millimeter in the hope that it will reveal something momentous or something trivial — because, after all this time, the trivial is momentous, too.” —Nicholas Barber

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.”

“Three Thousand Years of Longing” (VOD platforms)

“A bittersweet modern fairy tale from one of cinema’s most bombastic virtuosos, George Miller’s ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ might have some reservations about the 21st century — the movie often wrestles with the impact that science and technology might have on our ancient sense of wonder — but at the bottom of this tightly bottled epic sits a question that should resonate especially hard with people who have spent too many of the last 3,000 days stuck inside their homes with nothing but “content” to keep them company: Are stories enough to satisfy our lives?” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Three Thousand Years of Longing.”

“Top Gun: Maverick” (Paramount+, Epix, VOD platforms)

“But if ‘Maverick’ can’t quite match ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’ for sheer kineticism and well-orchestrated awe, this long-delayed sequel does more to clarify what that means than anything Cruise has ever made. And the reason for that is simple: Tom Cruise is Maverick, and Maverick is Tom Cruise.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Top Gun: Maverick.”

“Triangle of Sadness” (VOD platforms)

“On the strength of its staging alone, one bit in which Carl and Yaya fling money at each other while arguing across the opposite sides of a closing elevator door almost manages to generate the same friction that makes Östlund’s previous work so wonderfully itchy.” —DE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Triangle of Sadness.”

“Turning Red” (Disney+)

“Thirteen-year-old Mei Lee has big problems long before she unexpectedly turns into a giant, walking, talking red panda. She wants to hang out with her friends, drool over their favorite boy band (4*Town, though there are, inexplicably, five members), have some laughs, just be a kid. But at home, she has to be someone else, buttoned up and proper, a perfect student and a doting daughter, not just some screeching teen (and what were teens best made for, other than screeching?). Being a teenager is tough enough, weird beyond measure, confusing as anything, and then…giant, walking, talking red panda. What’s a girl (panda) to do?” —KE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Turning Red.”

“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (HBO Max, Prime Video)

“Jane Schoenbrun understands the internet. The filmmaker behind such projects as ‘A Self-Induced Hallucination’ (a 2018 doc ‘about the internet’), the tech-tinged ‘Eyeslicer’ series, and the dreamy ‘collective: unconscious’ has always found the space to explore the worldwide web with respect, reverence, and a hearty dose of fear. For their narrative feature debut, Schoenbrun expands their obsessions to craft an intimate tale about the impact of modern internet culture. Part coming-of-age story, part horror film, and the greatest argument yet that something as bonkers as ‘Creepypasta’ can inspire something so beautiful, ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ is a strong debut for a filmmaker who is nothing if not consistent in their themes.” —KE

Read IndieWire’s full review of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.”

“X” (Paramount+, Showtime, VOD platforms)

“The renegade intensity of Ti West’s ‘X,’ another homage by the ‘House of the Devil’ writer-director to independent cinema’s past, and his first horror film in over a decade, is his willingness to ask: What if a slasher, but with p*rn? That genre bending — in a rollicking, wicked dark horror comedy about intrepid filmmakers just barely scraping by, the fetishization of youth, and how the weight of aging into a sexless marriage can lead to mayhem — brings the spirit of the rule-breaking 1970s moviemaking back to modern audiences. While West isn’t always operating on the same levels as his influences, his signature flair for tension through simmering slow-burn pacing remains unparalleled.” —RD

Read IndieWire’s full review of “X.”