The A to Z of the films I truly loved this year

Getting to the end of 2022, I was thinking it hadn’t been a great year at the movies. And yet, there have been some absolute gems, from all over the world, made on all sorts of budgets.

Here’s a short – alphabetical – list of a few films I have loved this year and where you can rent them from right now.

Ueda and Kazuko have run their Tokyo ramen house for most of their lives. But with Ueda’s health beginning to crumble, it is clear the next year will be his last behind the stove.

Come Back Anytime takes us back to the couple’s earliest days and Ueda’s surprisingly gritty and vaguely criminal youth.

This is a film about people, community and how our relationship to food underpins everything that makes a society. This is a tiny film, made with love, over a year or more. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This adaptation of a 40-page story by Haruki Murakami stretched to three hours. I didn’t want it to end.

Drive My Car is a portrait of a marriage, a meditation on grief, jealousy and maybe time travel. Writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi teased so much from the lean source material, setting the film against a backdrop of a production of Waiting For Godot seemed almost like showing off.

Drive My Car also contains the loveliest image I saw on a screen all year. Who knew a couple of burning cigarettes and a car sunroof at night could say so much?

Surely this was the most fun anyone had in a cinema this year.

This comedy-thriller about parallel universes, that starts in a Chinese laundromat in suburban California, explored its ideas more inventively than Marvel managed with Doctor Strange and co.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once reminded me of everything from The Matrix to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, but with hot-dogs for hands, philosophising rocks and the sweetest mother-daughter reconciliation yarn in a decade. I adored this film.

It was marketed as the Iranian Little Miss Sunshine. But Panah Panahi’s debut feature was so much more.

This is a family road movie set in near-wartime. An eldest son must be smuggled across a border. But, Hit The Road was not a thriller.

It was a warm, funny and heartfelt portrait of a family doing everything to stay together and survive with their humour intact. At only 89 minutes, this gem stuck with me for weeks.

Veteran director Patrice Leconte and titan Gerard Depardieu teamed up to give the Parisian fictional detective exactly the right film. This chilly, literate, poignant and modest telling of the 1954 novel Maigret and the Dead Girl was just about perfect.

A muted, mordant Depardieu turned in his best work in years and Paris has never looked better – or worse.