After two years Hollywood would rather forget, 2022 offered some hope.

There were fits and starts, minor triumphs here and there, as people trickled back into their local multiplexes.

Then in May, along came “Top Gun: Maverick” and blew everyone away.

The high octane sequel to the 1986 smash surpassed all expectations, thrilling audiences and keeping receipts ringing throughout the summer, past the fall and even into the holiday season.

As 2022 comes to a close, these are the best movies of the year which show that, even coming out of a pandemic, no one puts on a show quite like Hollywood.

22. “Elvis”: To director Baz Luhrmann, who took on the King with flash, bombast and no shortage of empathy, we say thank you, thank you very much. It is truly fit for a King.

21. “Fall”: Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner play two adventure seekers who climb a rickety ladder up a 2,000-foot radio tower and then lose their way down in director Scott Mann’s nimble popcorn thriller, which keeps finding new ways to make two people stuck in a fixed position very high in the air interesting and, just as importantly, exciting. “Fall” is a fun, innovative thrill ride that never stops thrilling.

20. “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”: Nicolas Cage plays the greatest actor alive, Nicolas Cage, in co-writer and director Tom Gormican’s outrageous meta comedy, where life mirrors art mirroring Cage’s wild and crazy career.

19. “Bros”: The year’s funniest comedy is also one of its most groundbreaking, as the hilarious boy-meets-boy rom-com is touted as the first major studio picture featuring an entirely LGBTQ+ principal cast. The manic Billy Eichner, who co-wrote the script alongside director Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall”), stars as a 40-something podcaster who’s never been in love, who meets his match (Luke Macfarlane in a head turning performance) and begins to let his guard down.

18. “The Black Phone”: A gripping kidnapping thriller with a supernatural twist, co-writer and director Scott Derrickson’s creepshow is so effectively rendered that you’ll forgive that pesky supernatural twist. Ethan Hawke stars as “The Grabber,” who terrorizes the Denver suburbs in the late 1970s, a time when kids walked home from school unsupervised and sometimes didn’t make it all the way to their front door. Derrickson’s sense of mood and atmosphere is so rich with detail that everything else falls in line, and Hawke has never been scarier.

17. “Watcher”: Indie scream queen Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) stars as an American woman, new to Bucharest, who is unsure of her place or her environs in director Chloe Okuno’s tense, icy cold thriller, which deals with displacement, loneliness and fears of the unknown.

16. “Resurrection”: In the year’s most fierce and tightly controlled performance, Rebecca Hall is a single mother traumatized to the point of physical sickness by her ex-, played by a best-he’s-been-in-decades Tim Roth, in writer-director Andrew Semans’ simmering psychological thriller, which goes places you’ll never see coming. Chilling and unforgettable.

15. “Babylon”: “La La Land’s” Damien Chazelle pays a different kind of homage to Los Angeles in this unhinged, high-flying, completely over-the-top portrait of Hollywood’s early days and the personalities who brought the movies to life as the business changed over from silent pictures to talkies. Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt lead a sprawling ensemble cast and Chazelle doesn’t skimp on any indulgences in his go-for-broke direction, filling the frame with chaos and plunging viewers deep into the underground heart of the Tinsel Town of yesteryear.

14. “Living”: Bill Nighy is note perfect in this tiny, elegant slice of life, in which he plays a man who, at the end of his life, finally decides to start living. The 72-year-old Nighy, best known on this side of the pond for his role as a cheeky rocker in the perennial Christmastime favorite “Love Actually,” doesn’t overplay a single moment in this 1950s set adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” and he winds up giving one of the year’s richest performances.

13. “Jackass Forever”: If you can’t kick your friends in the junk, then who can you kick in the junk? More than a decade after “Jackass 3D,” the boys are back together harming themselves for our entertainment (and theirs) in this raucous celebration of stupid behavior, friendship, and behaving stupidly with your friends.

12. “Tár”: Cate Blanchett gives a monster performance in writer-director Todd Field’s first film since 2006, which looks at art, flawed creators and cancel culture, a topic of particular relevance here in 2022. Blanchett is Lydia Tár, and she’s so convincing as the EGOT-winning, world renowned classical music conductor that you’re forgiven if you walk away thinking she’s a real person. (She’s not.)

11. “The Fallout”: Former Disney kid Jenna Ortega, one of the year’s breakout stars, leads this alarmingly relevant film about a school shooting and its aftermath. Writer-director Megan Park, in her debut feature, takes on the everyday confusion of being a teen and multiplies it by a school shooting, a troubling reality for way too many modern American adolescents.

10. “Moonage Daydream”: If you want to learn facts about David Bowie, there are plenty of books you can read. If you want to experience Bowie, start here. Writer-director Brett Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture,” “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) looks at the life and art of the Thin White Duke and immerses viewers into a cornucopia of his music, his visuals, his thoughts, his philosophies, his utter being.

9. “Pearl”: “X” isn’t included here but consider this a nod for both, and the delirious work of star Mia Goth. Of the two films, “Pearl” is more her showcase, and she does more with an unblinking stare than many actresses do with entire monologues. Writer-director Ti West built this homage to early Hollywood around his star and she runs like hell with it, painting a demented portrait of psychosis through a Technicolor lens.

8. “Everything Everywhere All at Once”: The mundane (laundromats, taxes) gives way to the extraordinary (hot dog fingers, googly eyed rocks, everything bagels standing in for the meaning of life) in the Daniels’ mind-blowing exploration of time, space, fate, family, love, “The Matrix” and reality itself.

7. “Decision to Leave”: It sounds simple enough — a detective falls for the lead suspect in his latest murder investigation — but nothing director Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden”) does is simple, or as it seems, or without layers of meaning and intent. The filmmaker moves his actors (Park Hae-il and Tang Wei, both extraordinary) around like chess pieces, in service of his story about romantic longing, secrets and obsessions. In the end, it adds up to the smartest, most satisfying murder mystery in years.

6. “Armageddon Time”: This year, a handful of filmmakers — including Steven Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”), Sam Mendes (“Empire of Light”) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”) — mined their own personal experiences for material. But none hit harder than writer-director James Gray’s look at his own upbringing in Queens, New York in the early 1980s, and his wrestling with his own privilege and how it affected both his childhood and the way his life ultimately played out.

5. “She Said”: There are no holes to be poked in this grounded, straightforward account of the New York Times journalists who, through good ol’ fashioned shoe-leather reporting, took down Harvey Weinstein and in turn sent shockwaves through Hollywood, the workplace and the sexual politics of the entire world.

4. “Avatar: The Way of Water”: Nobody on Earth makes movies like James Cameron, and nobody comes close. The director’s sequel to his 2009 mega-blockbuster is a trip to another world, a certified trillion watt banger that looks like nothing else you’ve seen before, “Avatar” included.

3. “The Banshees of Inisherin”: Colm doesn’t want to be friends with Pádraic anymore. And so begins the latest from writer-director Martin McDonagh, who reunites Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell from “In Bruges” in this alternately sweet and devastating look at male friendships, spite and mortality, set off the coast of Ireland a century ago.

2. “RRR”: Rise, roar, revolt. Those are the three Rs of “RRR,” the most insane action epic of the year and the most thrilling, joyful, exuberant celebration of brotherhood, bromance and anti-colonialism you’re likely to see this decade. This import from Tollywood — shorthand for a movie in the Telugu language — combines action, explosions, dance sequences, tiger fights and more into a three-hour epic that creates its own laws of physics, history and cinema.

1. “Top Gun: Maverick”: It was the movie that got us back in theaters. After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 original finally hit screens, and delivered the cinematic version of a high-five: a heroic tale of a maverick pilot who defies the odds in front of him and saves the day for all. For star Tom Cruise, it was the ultimate flex of his unmatched movie star appeal; for co-writer Christopher McQuarrie and director Joseph Kosinski, it was a triumph of simplicity in storytelling; and for audiences, it was a reminder of why we go to — and why we love — the movies. In 2022, nothing flew higher.