The Quiet Girl, an Irish-language drama from writer-director Colm Bairéad, was named the highest-rated movie of 2022 on Rotten Tomatoes overall, earning a Critics Score of 97% (based on 149 reviews) and an Audience Score of 93%. This achievement represented more than just critical acclaim—it positioned the film as Rotten Tomatoes’ pick for the year’s best cinema, surpassing hundreds of other releases across all genres and budgets. The film’s dual recognition from both professional critics and general audiences is relatively rare and signals a genuine consensus about its quality.
However, when discussing “highest-rated” films from 2022, the answer depends on which type of film you’re prioritizing. While The Quiet Girl claimed Rotten Tomatoes’ overall best-of-the-year honor, Top Gun: Maverick dominated the mainstream landscape with a 96% Critics Score (464 reviews) and an exceptional 99% Audience Score, plus the Golden Tomato Award for best-reviewed film of the year. These two films represent different tiers of cinema—one a niche, award-season contender, the other a commercial blockbuster that achieved rare critical-audience alignment.
Table of Contents
- How Do Rotten Tomatoes Ratings Actually Work in 2022?
- The Quiet Girl’s Path to 2022’s Best-Rated Film
- Top Gun: Maverick’s Unprecedented Mainstream Achievement
- Comparing the Top-Rated Films of 2022: Critics vs. Audiences
- Why Perfect or Near-Perfect Scores Are So Rare in 2022
- The Impact of Release Strategy on Rotten Tomatoes Dominance
- The Long-Term Significance of 2022’s Top-Rated Films
How Do Rotten Tomatoes Ratings Actually Work in 2022?
rotten tomatoes uses two separate scoring systems: the Tomatometer (critics score) and the Popcornmeter (audience score). The Tomatometer aggregates reviews from hundreds of accredited film critics and uses a simple binary system—each review counts as either “Fresh” (positive) or “Rotten” (negative), then converts to a percentage. The Popcornmeter, by contrast, averages star ratings from audience members on the site, functioning more like a traditional numerical average. A 97% Tomatometer doesn’t mean critics gave The Quiet Girl an average score of 9.7 out of 10—it means 97% of reviewed critics gave it a positive review of any kind, whether a glowing endorsement or a qualified recommendation. This distinction matters because the two scores often diverge.
Audiences may embrace films that critics dismiss, or reject films that critics revere. In 2022, films that achieved perfect or near-perfect scores in both categories were exceptionally uncommon. Most films that reached 95%+ on the Tomatometer showed significant gaps with audience scores, reflecting different viewing priorities: critics often valued artistic innovation or thematic depth, while audiences weighted entertainment value and emotional engagement more heavily. The “Certified Fresh” badge, displayed on Top Gun: Maverick’s page, requires both a high Tomatometer score and a minimum number of reviews (typically 40 or more for theatrical releases). This additional layer of curation attempts to exclude low-profile films that earned high scores from limited critic attention, ensuring the badge signals genuine critical consensus rather than a small group of enthusiasts rating a niche release.
The Quiet Girl’s Path to 2022’s Best-Rated Film
The Quiet Girl, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and competed for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, represents a specific category of highly-rated film—prestigious, critically acclaimed art cinema that earns nearly universal respect from professional reviewers. Director Colm Bairéad’s coming-of-age drama, told entirely in the Irish language (Gaeilge), follows a neglected, selectively mute schoolgirl who is fostered by kind strangers and gradually begins to speak and engage with the world. The film’s intimate storytelling, naturalistic performances, and thematic richness aligned perfectly with professional critics’ values, resulting in the exceptional 97% Tomatometer score. The gap between The Quiet Girl’s critics score (97%) and audience score (93%) is unusually narrow, suggesting the film transcended typical art-house boundaries and connected with general viewers despite its limited theatrical release and non-English dialogue.
Most films in this category—acclaimed international cinema, experimental narratives, or densely thematic dramas—see drops of 10-15 points between critic and audience scores, as general audiences have different expectations than professional critics. The Quiet Girl’s narrow gap indicates that those who actually sought the film and watched it found it as rewarding as critics did, though it never achieved the mass-market penetration of a Top Gun: Maverick. A critical limitation: The Quiet Girl’s relatively small number of reviews (149 critics) compared to Top Gun: Maverick’s 464 means its score rests on a narrower foundation. If more critics had reviewed it, the percentage could theoretically shift, though a drop from 97% would require a significant portion of additional reviews to be negative—unlikely given the film’s consistent praise across publications.
Top Gun: Maverick’s Unprecedented Mainstream Achievement
Top Gun: Maverick achieved something exceedingly rare for a summer blockbuster with a $170 million budget: a 96% Critics Score and a 99% Audience Score, with the Popcornmeter score representing one of the highest audience ratings of any theatrical release in years. The film’s combination of clear commercial success (over $1.4 billion globally), technical excellence in aerial cinematography, emotional resonance, and narrative craftsmanship satisfied both critics’ demands for quality and audiences’ desires for spectacle and sentiment. Rotten Tomatoes awarded it the Golden Tomato for best-reviewed film of 2022, a distinction based primarily on the Tomatometer score and the breadth of critical consensus. The critical distinction between Maverick and The Quiet Girl reveals how Rotten Tomatoes’ best-of-year methodology weighs different categories.
While The Quiet Girl earned a higher critics percentage (97% vs. 96%), Maverick was selected as the “best-reviewed film” due to the sheer volume of professional reviews (464 vs. 149) and the category of wide theatrical release. Rotten Tomatoes distinguishes between films released to hundreds of theaters simultaneously and those with limited or gradual rollouts, recognizing that broad critical coverage and mainstream accessibility are relevant factors in determining the year’s most significant critical achievements.
Comparing the Top-Rated Films of 2022: Critics vs. Audiences
The gap between critic and audience preferences in 2022’s highest-rated films tells a story about how cinema serves different functions. The Quiet Girl (97% critics / 93% audience) and Top Gun: Maverick (96% critics / 99% audience) show inverse patterns—art cinema retains stronger critic support while mainstream cinema builds to near-universal audience enthusiasm. Saint Omer, the French legal drama that achieved a 100% critics score at year-end 2022 (now settled at 94% with 139 reviews), represents another data point: a Venice Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner that earned near-unanimous critical endorsement but didn’t develop significant audience engagement, partly due to its limited theatrical availability.
This pattern reflects a practical reality: critics often value formal innovation, thematic complexity, and artistic ambition, while audiences prioritize narrative clarity, emotional payoff, and genre satisfaction. Top Gun: Maverick succeeded by satisfying both camps—its direction was technically innovative, its screenplay emotionally intelligent, and its structure delivered crowd-pleasing spectacle. The Quiet Girl’s success came from achieving critical respect while finding an audience patient enough to engage with subtitled, linguistically specific cinema. The tradeoff between these two types of success determines how Rotten Tomatoes rankings distribute across the year.
Why Perfect or Near-Perfect Scores Are So Rare in 2022
Achieving a 100% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes has become increasingly difficult as the platform’s critic pool has expanded. In 2022, fewer than 10 theatrical narrative films earned a 100% Fresh score, with most perfect-score films being documentaries (which naturally attract more specialized critical viewership). Saint Omer stood out as one of only two narrative films to reach 100%, but even this score reflects a narrower pool of critics who reviewed the film during its initial festival and limited theatrical run.
As more critics review a film over time, the likelihood of reaching 100% diminishes—a single contrarian or negative review drops the score permanently. This mathematical reality means that highest-rated films in 2022 clustered in the 94-97% range rather than at 100%, and most of those in this tier came from one of two categories: festivals picks that attracted limited critical attention, or wide releases like Maverick that accumulated hundreds of reviews but benefited from near-unanimous approval. A crucial warning: Rotten Tomatoes scores are dynamic and change over time as new reviews accumulate, so citing a year-end score as “final” is technically inaccurate. A film rated 97% in December 2022 might be 96% by 2026 after additional critical reconsideration.
The Impact of Release Strategy on Rotten Tomatoes Dominance
The Quiet Girl and Top Gun: Maverick exemplify how release strategy shapes Rotten Tomatoes performance. Maverick had a traditional wide release across 4,000+ theaters in North America, instantly reaching millions and generating hundreds of critical reviews over weeks. The Quiet Girl premiered at Berlin, was acquired for limited North American distribution, and expanded gradually to more theaters—a strategy that meant fewer immediate critical reviews but also a more curated critic base (those specifically seeking out international cinema).
Limited releases often generate higher critic approval rates because they attract critics with specific interests in that film’s category, whereas wide releases summon critics across all sensibilities. This means Top Gun: Maverick’s 96% score achieved near-universal approval across diverse critical perspectives, while The Quiet Girl’s 97% might represent slightly higher enthusiasm within a more targeted critical segment. For audiences deciding which “highest-rated” 2022 film to seek out, understanding this distinction matters: you’re comparing a different type of critical consensus.
The Long-Term Significance of 2022’s Top-Rated Films
By 2026, the critical standing of 2022’s highest-rated films has proven relatively stable. The Quiet Girl’s reputation has strengthened through award recognition and continued discovery by international film audiences, while Top Gun: Maverick’s cultural impact expanded through streaming availability and continued rewatchability. Neither film has seen its Rotten Tomatoes score collapse—a sign that the critical consensus held.
However, films like Saint Omer, which began at 100% but settled at 94% as more reviews accumulated, illustrate how initial extreme scores often moderate as critic pools expand. For film historians examining 2022, The Quiet Girl and Top Gun: Maverick represent the year’s widest critical agreement: one was a prestige international film that satisfied both critics and engaged audiences, and the other was a commercial blockbuster that transcended its action-film category to achieve rare critical-popular alignment. Both remain in the rare tier of 2022 releases that earned scores above 95%, a threshold only approximately 40-50 films per year achieve across all theatrical releases globally.
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