Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)(Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson)
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun(Wes Anderson)
C'mon C'mon(Mike Mills)
Mayor Pete(Jesse Moss)
Ali & Ava(Clio Barnard)
Hold Me Tight(Mathieu Amalric)
The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation(Avi Mograbi)
The Lost Daughter(Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Montana Story(Scott McGehee & David Siegel)
The Last Duel(Ridley Scott)
The Souvenir Part II(Joanna Hogg)
Black Box(Yann Gozlan)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings(Destin Daniel Cretton)
Oxygen(Alexandre Aja)
Babi Yar. Context(Sergei Loznitsa)
Saloum(Jean Luc Herbulot)
Malignant(James Wan)
The Worst Person in the World(Joachim Trier)
Everything Went Fine(François Ozon)
A Chiara(Jonas Carpignano)
Neptune Frost(Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman)
Licorice Pizza(Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Other Tom.(Rodrigo Plá & Laura Santullo)
Spider-Man: No Way Home(Jon Watts)
Operation Mincemeat(John Madden)
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain(Will Sharpe)
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?(Alexandre Koberidze)
The Green Knight(David Lowery)
Petrov's Flu(Kirill Serebrennikov)
Prisoners of the Ghostland(Sion Sono)
After Yang(Kogonada)
Belfast(Kenneth Branagh)
Cow(Andrea Arnold)
Futura(Pietro Marcello & Francesco Munzi & Alice Rohrwacher)
Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar(Josh Greenbaum)
The Tsugua Diaries(Maureen Fazendeiro & Miguel Gomes)
Judas and the Black Messiah(Shaka King)
Ultrasound(Rob Schroeder)
The Forgiven(John Michael McDonagh)
Dune: Part One(Denis Villeneuve)
Lingui: the Sacred Bonds(Mahamet-Saleh Haround)
Huda's Salon(Hany Abu-Assad)
The Ice Road(Jonathan Hensleigh)
We're All Going to the World's Fair(Jane Schoenbrun)
Flee(Jonas Poher Rasmussen)
Nightmare Alley(Guillermo Del Toro)
Titane(Julia Ducournau)
The Mad Women's Ball(Mélanie Laurent)
Benedetta(Paul Verhoeven)
The Story of My Wife(Ildikó Enyedi)
Cry Macho(Clint Eastwood)
Arthur Rambo(Laurent Cantet)
The Matrix Resurrections(Lana Wachowski)
No Man of God(Amber Sealey)
Azor(Andreas Fontana)
Finch(Miguel Sapochnik)
Spencer(Pablo Larraín)
Procession(Robert Greene)
Mr. Bachmann and His Class(Maria Speth)
Three Floors(Nanni Moretti)
Bergman Island(Mia Hansen-Løve)
Flag Day(Sean Penn)
12 Mighty Orphans(Ty Roberts)
She Will(Charlotte Colbert)
Nitram(Justin Kurzel)
La Fracture(Catherine Corsini)
The Power(Corinna Faith)
There's Someone Inside Your House(Patrick Brice)
Earwig(Lucile Hadžihalilović)
Wrath of Man(Guy Ritchie)
Emergency Declaration(Han Jae-rim)
Casablanca Beats(Nabil Ayouch)
The Black Phone(Scott Derrickson)
Unclenching the Fists(Kira Kovalenko)
No Time to Die(Cary Joji Fukunaga)
The Restless(Joachim Lafosse)
Introduction(Hong Sangsoo)
Parallel Mothers(Pedro Almodóvar)
The Card Counter(Paul Schrader)
Outside the Wire(Mikael Håfström)
The Alpinist(Peter Mortimer & Nick Rosen)
Vortex(Gaspar Noé)
Awake(Mark Raso)
Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard(Patrick Hughes)
The Unforgivable(Nora Fingscheidt)
Inexorable(Fabrice du Welz)
Here Today(Billy Crystal)
Rather than dramatically “unveiling” a top ten list sometime in January (as if anybody who reads this site didn’t already know what it was gonna look like), I revise the sucker as I go along. Here is what my list would look like if (god forbid) I were forced to make it today.
For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.
Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. If a film isn’t currently in my top ten, and I haven’t yet rated it, it ain’t here. There are a whole lot of those — if you’re wondering whether or not I’ve seen the masterpiece you can’t believe I omitted, check my master list.