If this film doesn’t win the Academy Award for cinematography, I’m going to fling myself off a cliff. Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave is a near-perfect neo-noir: a spiraling detective story laced up with a burning star-crossed romance between a straight-laced insomniac detective and a beautiful woman suspected of murdering her husband. (This rules out Athena, and for this I am sorry.) This list is not ranked, as is the case with all our end-of-year content, because how could we put ourselves through something so agonizing? As always, there are no war movies, because that would be too wide a lens flare for us. But the good news is that this list considers international films as well as domestic ones, so I get another chance to go on about Decision to Leave.Īnd, as always, we define “crime” pretty widely, to include all illegal activity from theft, to murder, to cons, to mob stuff, to prison escapes, to frauds, etc, etc. One of the most annoying things is that several of the year’s best crime films-Australia’s Nitram and France’s Happening (not to mention the best overall, non-crime film, Petite Maman)- were technically 2021 releases and are therefore not eligible for this roundup. As usual, all films considered had to be full-length feature films, released (in theaters or on streaming services) in the United States during the 2022 calendar year.

Mystery movies full length free