Best Movies of 2022: Best Director

Continuing my look at the best movies of 2022, I am now going to look at the directors of 2022. With a great year of movies comes a great year of directing and that’s exactly what 2022 brought us. We got great films from legendary veterans like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Michael Bay, Steven Soderbergh, George Miller, and Baz Luhrman, new films from exciting young artists like Jordan Peele, Ti West, the Daniels, Kogonada, and Riley Stearns, and saw some excellent debuts as well. I am going to pick “nominees” for Best Directoral Debut and Best Director and pick a winner for both, which will be highlighted in bold.  Here are my picks for the best director and best directorial debut of 2022.

BEST DIRECTORIAL DEBUT

Charlotte Welles – Aftersun

Jim Archer – Brian and Charles

John Patton Ford – Emily the Criminal

Graham Moore – The Outfit

Domee Shi – Turning Red

All five of these directors, and several others, had impressive film debuts in 2022 and have me excited for the future of cinema. I was most impressed by John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal, a tight, tense, thrilling crime drama that reminded me of Michael Mann that features career-best work from Aubrey Plaza. I can’t wait to see what Ford, or any of these directors, do next.

BEST DIRECTOR

James Cameron – Avatar: The Way of Water

Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin

Hirokazu Kore-eda – Broker

Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan – Everything Everywhere All at Once

Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans

The five directors listed above are true cinematic visionaries. In 2022, they made films that represented who they are as filmmakers. Kore-eda once again gave us a delicate look at what it means to be a family. McDonagh continued his growth as a director by giving us a compelling character story that perfectly balances humor and drama. Spielberg showed us a first-hand account of how his trauma helped shape him into the filmmaker he is today. Cameron continued to build the world of Pandora on a scale no filmmaker today is working on, and the Daniels took us to a wild multiverse as we’ve ever seen before.

Despite each of these directors being worthy of this award, my pick for the Best Director of 2022 goes to Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan for Everything Everywhere All at Once for several reasons. Their work on the film is a beautiful and chaotic juggling act. There are several tones and genres mixed into the film and all of them are present and none of them get neglected. The multiverse they build is astonishing and layered and intricately made. The action is exciting, the romance is swooning, and the familial center of the film hits hard. This is a vision the Daniels had and they are the only ones who could have executed it. 

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