The bond between humans and animals sometimes passeth all understanding. Wildcat is the story of 20-something British Army veteran Harry Turner, American ecologist Samantha Zwicker, and a young ocelot called Keanu, who becomes an almost mythic talisman of Harry’s battle with post-traumatic stress and suicidal urges.

The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors:

1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)

2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

You may wonder: is this it? James Cameron’s Avatar sequel replays Earth’s colonial assault on Pandora in the original, cancelling out the blue-skinned native Na’vi’s victory under the Dances With Wolves-like, blue-white saviour command of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine mentally steering a genetically engineered Na’vi avatar.

1. Nightmare Alley

It’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.

Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power), it’s the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose journey starts with his miserably paid job at a travelling carnival.

Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).

Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin and Nope are marvellously mad in their own ways.

I’m struck by how many of my 2022 picks deal with relationships in extremis: a love story disguised as a Hitchcockian murder mystery, a long friendship gone suddenly surreally awry, an unlikely romance that unfolds on a sub-zero train journey, a married couple whose shared obsession with mortality is piqued by a toxic dust cloud, a father-daughter bond that’s finally understood through the prism of bitter-sweet memory.

In what feels like a less than stellar year for cinema, some films stand out. In some instances it was because I stepped a little outside my normal fare of blockbusters or star-driven vehicles and saw some films I might have thought a little too arthouse for my tastes. I'm very glad I did because otherwise I might not have seen a couple on this list.

Audrey Diwan’s French abortion drama Happening was the year’s hardest but most luminescent watch, as a fiercely intelligent young woman fights for her future survival as an artist in 1963, when illegal abortion requires wartime subterfuge and bloody violence to female bodies.

Empires rise and fall; every dog has its day. The increased awareness of and need for diverse voices – together with the series-driven streaming revolution – has made Hollywood less relevant now than it has been at any time since the industry colonised Southern California's orange groves. Even stars have become an endangered species.