It’s that time of the year when pundits opine on the best and worst in entertainment from 2022. These recommendations you won’t find on many other lists, I guarantee it. Certainly not on Maclean’s or The Globe and Mail’s.
In Another Ruined Dinner Party, I offer my top three choices and honourable mentions in the following categories:
Books
Streamed movies
Streamed TV series
Short films
Magazine articles
Short Fiction
Podcasts
To find out where you can find each one with a short review and a link to where it is, click on the hyperlink. Have a happy holiday season.
Best in Books
Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder
Harsh Times, by Mario Garcia Llosa
Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota
Honourable mentions: 1. Cold Case North, by Michael Nest, Deanna Reder and Eric Bell
2. The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Best in Streamed Movies
Honourable mention: The Imposter
Best in Streamed Series
Honourable mentions: 1. Undercover
2. Ferry
3. The Kingdom
Below: Left- Cameramen outside the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, Ottawa 1923 (Eugene M Finn/NFB); profile of Alfred Hitchcock, director of “The Birds”; 100 Women Directors Hollywood Should be Hiring (photo illustration by Maya Robinson, Getty Images).
Best in Short Films
Life Sentence: on APTN – 20 minutes
Samu; on Omeleto, watch on Youtube – 8 minutes
Settler Violence in the South Hebron Hills, Israel’s Channel 12 (with English subtitles)- 15 minutes
Honourable mention: Play Time on Kanopy – 15 minutes
Best Magazine Articles or Long-Reads
“A Merry-go-round of buck passing”: Inside the 4-year Grenfell inquiry, a Guardian Long-Read
How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student, in the New Yorker
How a Married Undercover Cop Having Sex with Activists Killed a Climate Movement, in Vice
Honourable mentions:
1. How Quebec’s Human Rights Commission Drove Out Its First Black Female President, in The Walrus
2. No Place Like Home: My Bitter Return to Palestine, a Guardian Long-Read
Left: Woman Reading by Edouard Manet (1880-81); woman photographer (credit: Annie);
Best Short Fiction
Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker
So Late in the Day, by Claire Keegan in The New Yorker
In the Name of Bobby, by Julio Cortazar in The New Yorker
Honourable mention: Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood in The New Yorker
Best Podcast Series
Pressure Cooker, CBC Podcasts
Ratfucker, Canadaland
The Nova Scotia Mass Shooting, The NightTime Podcast series
Honourable mention: 1. Obscene– The Dublin Scandal, BBC
2. Death of Darcy Allan Sheppard, Canadian True Crime, and here
Featured image: Cabbage Patch Dolls, the must-have Xmas gift from the 1980s.
Another ruined dinner party... 
Many thanks for this overview, Judy! I’ll see if I can look up a few of these. (I thought I’d mention that the full name of the Peruvian author of Harsh Times is Mario Vargas Llosa.) A freylekhn Chanukah to you and Larry. Carl
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