The Best Films of 2022 (Veronica's List)

Staff writer Veronica on her favorite pieces and films of 2022.

Favorite Pieces Written 

• “On The King of Comedy and the Unsettling Nature of an Unsexy De Niro” — My first major piece as a Film Daze staff writer explored the King of Comedy, the usually charismatic DeNiro’s most cringe-inducing role, and what it means to understand celebrity and self enough to divert expectations in such a way. 

• Review of Soft & Quiet — Because of Film Daze, I have had the immense pleasure of being able to attend and partake in multiple festivals this year. Soft & Quiet was my first ever festival watch — a virtual screening at South by Southwest. I am not sure if I have seen something more brutal since. 

• “Waters, Knoxville, and the Beauty of Queer Filth” — For pride month, I wrote about being inspired by queer filth elder John Waters and king of the debauched and the juvenile, Johnny Knoxville, to embrace a messy, queer understanding of self that makes sense to me, rather than being palatable to the heteronormative world around myself. 

• “Homelander’s Americana” — In the midst of the latest season of The Boys, I wrote about Homelander and “Americana” aesthetics, as well as how we perceive “American” cultural signposts in the midst of an ultraconservative shitstorm. 

• Review of Aftersun  — I was fortunate enough to see my favorite film of the year at one of its first screenings at TIFF. Being able to be one of the early reviewers of the film was a privilege and a pleasure. 

• “Hanky Codes and Bathroom Floors: Queer Subtext in Stranger Things” — When season four of Stranger Things arrived this year, pockets of film and television Twitter hit an all-time discourse high, specifically around queerness and queer-coding in the series. I was not above getting my two cents in (an impulse I can rarely curb). 

• Secretary Retrospective — For my final piece of the year for Film Daze, I wrote about Secretary — one of my all-time favorite films — at twenty years old. It’s a film that’s aged strikingly well, perhaps because of its dedication to fantasy and sincerity instead of trying to make some grandiose cultural point. 

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  Best Films of 2022 List

  1. AFTERSUN

     

     Writer and director Charlotte Wells’ feature debut is an absolute knockout. A meditation on Wells’ own personal memories of vacation with her father, Aftersun relies on immense specificity to tap into nuances of the universal experiences of childhood, girlhood, and what it means to become aware of your parents’ own humanity. 

  2. THE FABELMANS

     

     Spielberg’s “forty million dollars of therapy”, is a movie not just about the making of movies, but the making of movies as something that is tied to one’s very spirit, maybe even at the cost of “normal” life. The Fabelmans is the adolescent biopic turned reflection on the actual creation of art — it’s potential to allow you to cope with, heal from, better understand, or even deflect and distance from your lived truth. 

  3. WATCHER

     

     In an era where “elevated” horror and thriller is a label bandied about with varying levels of scorn, Chloe Okuno’s Watcher is a testament to the thriller as allegory and cultural exploration. An almost Hitchcockian thriller, Maika Monroe shines in a film that insists upon the sanctity of a woman’s gut feeling and potent intuition living amongst those who disbelieve her. 

  4. ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

     

     Laura Poitras’ latest documentary sits at the intersection of the personal and political, the artistic and the activist. The story of Nan Goldin’s life told in a million little pieces — photo and video and intimate voiceover — with chapters being shaded in by telling the life stories of those she has loved and lost along the way. 

  5. JACKASS FOREVER

     

     A bold, brash, and deliciously gross return from the group of men who defined the suburban, MTV zeitgeist in the early aughts, Jackass Forever is an installment to the franchise that is as ridiculous and juvenile as the rest, despite the decade-long break between films. 

  6. I LIKE MOVIES

     

     An ode to the obnoxious teenage cinephile, an ode to the middle-of-nowhere, semi-suburban pockets of Ontario, Canada, an ode to your most self-centered years as a teenager, and an ode to the people who love you through it, even if you eventually leave each other behind. I Like Movies is a tender, funny, and honest delight. 

  7. HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE

     

     Adapted from a political theory book of the same name, How to Blow Up a Pipeline takes the impossible and gargantuan task of “fixing” our current climate catastrophe and offers a more tangible plan of action — if you’re willing to stir up some shit and break a few rules in the process. 

  8. WOMEN TALKING

     

     Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Towes’ novel of the same name is far from an easy watch, but is a deeply moving one nonetheless. A Mennonite microcosm that provides us a sort of feminist thought experiment; what if women could gather en masse to speak about their gendered subjugation? What if there are alternative societal and cultural paths than the one we currently are in where we could live more safely, more freely? 

  9. NOPE

     

     Jordan Peele’s third, much-anticipated feature film was an absolute feat. A film picking apart our cultural fascination with spectacle packaged as a modernization of the classic blockbuster; a spectacle in and of itself. 

  10. BONES AND ALL

      

      Luca Guadagnio’s latest feature is so visually evocative in its hazy southern 1980s aesthetics that it’s been accused of “romanticizing” the practice of cannibalism it presents (though one only has to sit squeamishly through the first consumption of human guts to understand there is not much romantic there at all). A film about love so intense in the face of desperation and abandonment that it literally consumes.