The film critic's year-end list of favorites has always struck me as a provisional undertaking at best, a flawed but essential attempt to bring some coherent framing to a year's worth of cinematic plenty. Any honest list, however comprehensive its sweep or authoritative its posture, is made in the full awareness of potential lapses, blind spots and, yes, in-the-moment errors of judgment.
The 2022 halftime report that follows must therefore be reckoned even more hasty, unreliable and premature. Given the glut of movies that will be unveiled over the next six months — many of them timed to drop during that competitive annual scourge we call awards season — I have no idea how many of these terrific 12 will land among my top favorites come December. Even still, despite how cinematically backloaded each year invariably is, I'm gratified by how many good and even great movies I've seen released in the first half of 2022 alone.
I'm also dispirited, if hardly surprised, by how quickly so many of them evaporated from theaters, assuming they played in theaters in the first place. The speed at which independent movies now pass through screening venues, en route to their hopefully long VOD shelf lives, is nothing new. What's especially alarming now is how many art-house theaters, hit hard by the pandemic shutdowns of the past two years, are themselves exiting the fray.
