The outburst – We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Jane Schoenbrun’s breakout horror film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about a lot of things: transgender gender dysphoria, the process of coming out, how the internet mediates teen identity development, parasocial relationships, and the strange culture of folklore, dares and sharing that has built up on the social web.

The glue that holds it all together is Anna Cobb’s amazing performance as Casey, a lonely teen trying to find any sort of a social group to take her in. For most of the movie, Cobb’s interpretation of Casey is a study in understatement, her seemingly stable demeanor only occasionally giving hints of the suffering she experiences on a daily basis. But the two dreadful minutes she takes eviscerating her teddy bear and mourning her sudden outburst are enough to balance out the other 80. The most heartbreaking thing I saw on film in 2022, it’s here that the movie goes beyond simply being a skillful horror movie to become something much larger and far more human, and where Cobb’s performance becomes truly legendary. Veronica Esposito

The table-turning – Kimi

Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi is a propulsive and stripped-down variation on an old mid-90s standby: the internet paranoia thriller, updated to incorporate pandemic anxiety, trauma responses, and surveillance-friendly home-assistant devices like Alexa and Siri.

This movie’s version of the ubiquitous voice-activated gadget is called Kimi, and tech worker/shut-in Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) is charged with reviewing certain Kimi recordings to improve the device’s understanding of human requests. When she hears what sounds disturbingly like a violent assault, she runs afoul of a nefarious cover-up, and eventually winds up surrounded by murderous henchmen at her apartment. So it’s especially satisfying that she turns the tables on her attackers using a series of sudden voice commands: “Kimi! Bedtime lighting! Kimi, play Sabotage! Kimi, max volume!” With just a few short orders, Angela has confused and evaded her enemies – perfectly soundtracked by a Beastie Boys classic, no less. It’s a funny and exciting turn, but also cleverly chilling: Kimi may be spying on its customers, and its parent company may be covering up major crimes, but it’s still an unbeatable convenience that Angela uses to save her life. Angela triumphs, but the invasive tech is here to stay. Jesse Hassenger

The bench – Benediction

For a film mired in great despair both on and off screen (the director, Terence Davies, has spoken about his personal pull to a story about an unfulfilled gay life), there’s a surprising amount of humour in Siegfried Sassoon biopic Benediction, albeit of the caustic kind. It comes from the coupe glass-holding queer culturati of the 20s, bitching about and at each other at various elegant parties, their putdowns as artfully assembled as their outfits.

But melancholy is never too far away, quietly insisting itself on both Sassoon (an astonishing Jack Lowden) and on us until the very last scene where the volume becomes deafening. An elder Sassoon imagines himself younger again, sitting on a park bench, visualising the words of Disabled, a heart-crushing poem by Wilfred Owen, the first man he loved and lost. Accompanied by the piercing chill of the Tallis Fantasia, we witness every possible form of sadness suddenly come crashing down until his tears become overwhelming, the camera staying with him for longer than is comfortable. There’s sadness for those who were lost in the war but also for what Sassoon has lost himself, for what, as a gay man at a time when it was illegal, he was never even allowed to have and for the bitter loneliness he now has to live and soon die with (“How cold and late it is”). It’s a truly shattering ending. Benjamin Lee

The goodbye – Aftersun

In Aftersun’s closing moments, doting father Calum (Normal People star Paul Mescal) records his preteen daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a camcorder while she’s in line at an airport terminal. They’re concluding a modest vacation in Turkey. The fleeting days were filled with tenderness as Calum kept his own unspoken despair at bay. This moment, a return to the film’s opening, plays over and over in my head, which is the best compliment I could pay Charlotte Wells’ confident and powerful debut feature. Her film, after all, is about memories that linger and grow more immense over time.

At the gate, Sophie stops and starts, hiding behind a column, leaning against a wall, tenderly waving goodbye from different positions as she circles the line, not thinking in that moment that this may be the last time she sees her dad. She stretches the send-off out in a film that is very thoughtful about how it contracts, expands and collapses time. The tricky parting shot reveals that we’re seeing this moment in reflection. The camera too goes around in a circle, panning from the camcorder footage on a television screen to Sophie as an adult (Celia Rowlson-Hall), watching the playback, and then to Calum recording her goodbye before ruefully packing it in. That shot, full of longing and melancholy, cuts across time and perspectives, and pierces right through the heart, capturing a final farewell that wasn’t meant to last forever. Radheyan Simonpillai

The performance – Elvis

On the face of it, picking a “moment” from Baz Luhrmann’s whirling Elvis Presley bio-fantasia sounds a bit like picking a single rhinestone from one of the King’s white Vegas jumpsuits: this film is all moments, all peaks and highs, piled together into one cocky, swaggering feature-length montage. (I’m a fan.)

But one scene attains a kind of high-kitsch ecstasy: in his first major public performance, the young Elvis shuffles into stage in a lace shirt and candy-pink suit, surveys his sceptical audience of strait-laced country folk, and launches into Baby Let’s Play House with a stretched, guttural yelp. The crowd goes bananas, and so does the film: the camera practically has a seizure, the cuts are breathless and frantic, the sound design disrupted with thrashing metal guitar and slasher-movie screams. It’s luridly excessive stuff, and as good a cinematic representation of the then-alien power of rock ’n’ roll as any yet put on screen: Luhrmann’s instinctive too-muchness put to perfect use. Guy Lodge

The dance – RRR

Nearly any 10-minute sequence chosen at random from S.S. Rajamouli’s sprawling, brawling, roaring Tollywood (that’s Telugu-language Indian cinema) epic RRR is bound to be eye-popping. But the Naatu Naatu dance is flat-out astounding in a film full of impossibly epic scenes – not to mention it makes the colonizing English look like literal weak-kneed losers.

By the time the song appears in the film, we realize we’ve indeed found ourselves men who can do both: be brawny, swashbuckling, honor-bound heroes as well as flawlessly dance in sync, hitting their vigorous choreography as hard as any foe. Part of the fun is the look of sheer, unfettered joy on their faces, their ear-to-ear grins saying, “Can you even believe how much fun we’re having?” But the infectious song itself is an explosion of wild energy compelling you to dance out of your seat. Indeed, videos abound of audiences (mostly in India, but the screening I attended in New York City was the most raucous I’ve ever been to) dancing up the aisles, tossing confetti and re-creating the moves in front of the screen. Keep your fighter jets, Top Gun – RRR single-handedly jolted cinema back to life this year with an indelible flourish. Lisa Wong Macabasco

The escape – Emily the Criminal

Emily the Criminal sounds a bit too much like Emily in Paris, which must be why I almost made it to the end of 2022 without acquainting myself with this fiery little masterpiece. Aubrey Plaza’s performance as a student debt-saddled ghost kitchen worker is harrowing, and it’s impossible not to root for her art school dropout who falls in with a ring of con artists.

Desperation imbues Emily’s every move: she is a natural at this shady business, and also scared out of her mind. Emily’s first major assignment involves sitting through a closed-door meeting at a dodgy car dealership. A pair of dealers run her false information through their various contraptions, watching her every twitch and grimace. Emily eventually makes it to her new car, only for one of the dealers to tap on the window and ask her to turn off the engine. He’s on to her. A magnificent chase scene ensues, but it’s that moment before Emily makes a run for it, when she sets her eyes on her foe and runs her split-second calculation, that took my breath away. She has everything and nothing to lose, this young woman who is irrevocably screwed but won’t be cornered. Lauren Mechling

The bonfire – Bones and All

Bones and All is about ethics in eating people. As teenager Maren (Taylor Russell) is trying to come to terms with her cannibalistic impulses, she gets some guidance from a slightly older “eater” (Timothée Chalamet) with more experience, but when a filth-caked Michael Stuhlbarg turns up shirtless in overalls, holding court over a 12-pack in the woods, the film shifts into permanent darkness.

With ex-cop turned flesh-eating protege (David Gordon Green), Stuhlbarg’s eater lays out a vision of Maren’s future should she divorce herself from humanity entirely and ravages the living without conscience, “bones and all”. The scene is a mini-reunion between director Luca Guadagnino and two of his Call Me By Your Name stars, Chalamet and Stuhlbarg, and the warmth between father and son in that film has been replaced here by the sinister zeal of Stuhlbarg’s storytelling and an awful, rictus grin. Perhaps this is where the road will ultimately lead them. Scott Tobias

The call – Navalny

The climactic moment of Navalny, the documentary filmed in secret with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny before his imprisonment in January 2021, made international headlines long before the film’s surprise debut at Sundance this year. But whether you know the story or enter cold (as I did), Canadian director Daniel Roher’s framing of Navalny’s shockingly successful prank call with one of the men who nearly killed him is supremely satisfying, if not jaw-dropping. You want to talk about the banality of evil or the stupefying brazenness of Putin’s regime – here you go.

An agent with Putin’s FSB spy agency just explains to Navalny, posing as a diligent bureaucrat, how they applied the powerful nerve agent novichok to Navalny’s underpants in 2020 and how he obtained them for cleanup afterward. Roher’s camera captures a thrilling surge of adrenaline: one Navalny associate uses one hand to film with her iPhone, the other to stifle gasps; another squirms in disbelief. And then there’s Navalny, silently fist-pumping as he carries on the ruse. You cannot make this up, and no moment made me gape this year quite like it. Adrian Horton

The woman downstairs – Tár

Tár is a movie running over with astonishing moments. Scenes and frames impossible to fathom or forget, shocks and suggestions it would take a lifetime to unpick (though this is a tremendous place to start).

I’m going to pick three involving Tár’s neighbours. The first, when Lydia is summoned from horny keyboard reveries to help retrieve from the floor the naked elderly mother of the woman next door, who has fallen en route to the commode. The second after the woman has died, her daughter has been dispatched to an institution (psychiatric? penal?) and her siblings come by. Is she responsible for the music, they ask Lydia. Oh yes, she says, naturally flattered. Can she keep it down a bit then, lest it put off potential buyers.

Both are astonishing darts of puncture, one desperate, one hilarious. Tár’s hallowed world is one of her own construction. Outside, there is anguish and there is indifference. A woman riven with illness and dementia appears to leave our heroine unmoved. But mundane failure to appreciate her genius sends her insane. It even prompts the composition of Lydia’s larkiest (and, perhaps, finest) work: Apartment for Sale, vengefully belted out on the accordion. The sanctuary walls are paper thin. The music becomes a death rattle. Catherine Shoard

The speech – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

By now Angela Bassett should have rooms full of prestigious acting awards. She shined as Tina Turner and music family matriarch Katherine Jackson, played Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King. For the past 30 years she’s alloyed grace and strength like few others, and all while not only barely ageing a day but making us all feel bad for skipping arm day. And yet besides a 1993 best actress nomination for portraying Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It and a smattering of Emmy nominations for other great stuff, Bassett somehow still hasn’t received due respect.

In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the director, Ryan Coogler, goes to considerable effort to right that wrong; among other moments, he gives Bassett (who plays Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda) an arresting monologue for her manifold talents – a scathing deposition of the Dora Milaje general Okoye (Danai Gurira). “Have I not given everything?” she rages at one point. Likely, this will be the scene that plays at the Oscars when Bassett is introduced with the best supporting actress nominees. And if she doesn’t win in the end, well, I give up. Andrew Lawrence

The carrots – Eo

You wouldn’t think a film about a mournful donkey would be one long blizzard of extraordinary, visionary images, but Jerzy Skolimowski’s luminous parable is – I kid you not – a wonder to behold, from the drone-filmed landscapes to the liquidly beautiful donkey-eye. But the best scene, I think, isn’t actually any of these: Eo the donkey has been draped with strings of carrots, and stands patiently while pompous local officials celebrate the opening of a new building. As the humans stagger drunkenly inside, Eo gets to work, ripping up his decoration and scoffing the vegetables.

It’s a scene that could have been lifted straight from Czech new wave classics such as The Fireman’s Ball or Closely Observed Trains, and probably makes you root for Eo as much as anything else in the film. I’m giggling just thinking about it. Andrew Pulver