The Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick the 20 Best Films of Sundance 2022

AFTERSHOCK
Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s revelatory documentary delves into the crisis of Black maternal mortality in the United States. Chronicling how two families cope in the wake of preventable maternal deaths, it’s a clear-eyed work that investigates and contextualizes this underreported problem without losing sight of the people processing the depths of their loss. — LOVIA GYARKYE

ALL THAT BREATHES
Shaunak Sen’s quietly provocative, dreamily beautiful documentary focuses on two brothers dedicated to rescuing birds of prey injured in the polluted air above New Delhi. One of the film’s pleasures is the way it lets you process things however deeply you choose. Is this a portrait of a city? Of heroic siblings? Of humanity plagued by climate change and on the brink of COVID? This marvel of non-fiction filmmaking is a little and a lot all at once. — DANIEL FIENBERG

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AM I OK?
A tender, gently funny portrait of a friendship in flux, Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s dramedy centers on a woman (an excellent Dakota Johnson) who reveals she’s gay just as her BFF (Sonoya Mizuno) prepares to move abroad. The film has a finely tuned sense of the easygoing intimacy and chemistry between longtime companions. — ANGIE HAN

CALL JANE
Carol screenwriter Phyllis Nagy’s affecting drama tells the story of a suburban woman (stirringly played by Elizabeth Banks) who gets involved in the Jane Collective, an underground service that provided safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade. It’s a bracing and intimate view of a historical moment that’s less distant than we might think. — SHERI LINDEN

CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH
Building on the strengths of his coming-of-age debut, Shithouse, Cooper Raiff’s sophomore effort is more mainstream without feeling generic. Dakota Johnson plays a single mom charmed by a young man (Raiff) who connects with her autistic child. The love story’s complications feel as distilled from life as the previous film’s heartbreak and homesickness. — JOHN DEFORE

FIRE OF LOVE
Sara Dosa’s standout documentary explores the life and death of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who dedicated themselves and their marriage to chasing eruptions around the globe. With dreamy narration by Miranda July, it’s a doomed love story, and a gorgeous collage of a film in which romance, scientific inquiry and mortality do a 93-minute dance. — D.F.

FREE CHOL SOO LEE
Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s steady, sensitive doc examines a Korean immigrant’s wrongful conviction for the 1973 murder of a San Francisco Chinatown gang leader. The film is both a portrait of a man brutalized by the carceral system — the case galvanized California’s Asian American community — and a broader portrait of the system itself. — L.G.

GOD’S COUNTRY
Based on James Lee Burke’s short story, Julian Higgins’ film follows a grieving Black university professor (an arresting Thandiwe Newton) in her escalating feud with two trespassing white hunters. Even with a few overcooked or clumsily expository moments, this is a tense, often exhilarating slow-burn drama that’s impossible to look away from. — L.G.

GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE
This immensely likable and intimate British comedy-drama stars Emma Thompson as a prim, widowed high school teacher who hires Daryl McCormack’s sex worker, hoping to have an orgasm for the first time. The film builds a refreshingly sex-positive portrait of a client-escort relationship, but with a female customer for a change. — LESLIE FELPERIN

THE JANES
Members of a Chicago group that helped thousands of women secure illegal abortions offer firsthand accounts of their work’s challenges, risks and achievements in Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ urgent and thoroughly engaging doc. It’s both a vibrant, thoughtful group portrait and an essential oral history of frontline activism and care. — S.L.

A LOVE SONG
Max Walker-Silverman’s soul-stirring feature debut centers on two 60-ish childhood sweethearts (Dale Dickey and Wes Studi) who meet up for a night at a Colorado campsite. With unflashy confidence and finely calibrated emotion, the film slips under your skin — thanks in large part to the indelibly expressive faces and voices of its wonderful leads. — JON FROSCH

LUCY AND DESI
In her affecting first effort as a director of nonfiction, Amy Poehler explores the marriage and professional partnership of sitcom trailblazers Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Bringing a particularly powerful sense of understanding and connection to the subject, she offers a bright and piercing take on both the belly laughs and the heartache. — S.L.

NANNY
Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, about a Senegalese woman working as a nanny for a wealthy New York couple, is the rare film about the immigrant experience to understand the emotional nuances of physically living in one place while one’s heart resides in another. The movie also makes skilled use of imagery from West African folklore — a breath of fresh air in a horror landscape so often uninterested in the African diaspora. — JOURDAIN SEARLES

PALM TREES AND POWER LINES
In Jamie Dack’s subtle, aching debut about the relationship between a teenage girl and a man twice her age, fleeting glances, changes in body language and deliberate silences come together to form an unnerving examination of consent and predation. Leads Lily McInerny and Jonathan Tucker conjure the endearing awkwardness of any courtship without losing sight of the terrifying nature of this one. — L.G.

PIGGY
Writer-director Carlota Pereda delivers a harrowing genre exploration of bullying, trauma, revenge and desire revolving around an overweight teenage girl in a Spanish town. Though the film spirals into bloody horror, it never disguises the feeling that its social commentary on abuse comes from a very real and personal place. — DAVID ROONEY

RESURRECTION
Rebecca Hall gives a stunning performance as a woman whose traumatic personal history disrupts the calm life she has built as a successful businesswoman and single mother in Andrew Semans’ creepy, sharply effective thriller. A sinister Tim Roth plays the menacing man from her past. — CARYN JAMES

SHARP STICK
Lena Dunham’s bold, messy, singular L.A.-set film straddles the line between coming-of-age tale and sex comedy as it follows a childlike 26-year-old (Kristine Froseth) who sets her sights on the father (Jon Bernthal) of the autistic boy she babysits for. This is Dunham at her most liberated in some time, with a caustic, freewheeling tone that shakes off several years of silence and scrutiny. — J.S.

UTAMA
Writer-director Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s beautifully realized debut feature follows an elderly Indigenous couple trying to survive in the arid, drought-ridden climate of the Bolivian highlands. Resembling a cross between a minimalist Sergio Leone Western and a series of photos by Sebastião Salgado, it’s an artful and powerful cautionary tale of endurance in a dying world. — JORDAN MINTZER

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COSBY
W. Kamau Bell’s four-part Showtime docuseries explores Bill Cosby’s legacy as a TV icon and a convicted predator, showing how his fame, influence and criminality were all connected. It’s provocative, pragmatic and harrowing, tracing a long journey from early stand-up to public shame superseding everything that came before. — D.F.

WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD
Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard star as a mother and son with a thorny relationship in Jesse Eisenberg’s bitterly funny, clear-eyed feature directorial debut. Smart and uncomfortable, the film targets the same vanities that fueled Eisenberg’s own breakthrough as an actor, The Squid and the Whale. — J.D.

A version of this story first appeared in the Jan. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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