Despite being framed around individual red carpet events, each piece functions more like a miniature round-up: part travelogue, part running tally of titles to watch, part in-depth review. Churning these out while also trying to catch premieres a day was absolute chaos, and I loved every minute of it.
Head over to Decoding Everything. Previous write-ups : Check out the last decade of end-of-year lists to get a sense of our similarities and differences. This is my 10th consecutive year of writing Best Of movie roundups. As someone who has been listening to David since long before I started writing about movies, this was a massive honor. So the opportunity to reach a wide audience, in collaboration with a creator I admire, was huge for me. The pleasures of cinema are far less textual than textural , communicating something more expressive than a plot.
This bonus award is for maximalism in filmmaking, highlighting two films which have virtually nothing in common except for a shared sense of abundance. Indulgent and overwhelming in the best possible way, they enchanted me from the opening frame. A case could be made that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was the greatest technical triumph in cinema this year. And like Everything Everywhere All At Once before it, that overstimulation is vital to its emotional core. Though the dialogue is technically uttered in French, the characters prefer to speak in a more universal tongue: the love language of food being prepared and enjoyed.
Large swaths of runtime are devoted to their passion, most notably a near-wordless half hour sequence in the kitchen. The camera glides through the crowded space, peeping into bubbling pots of stew and lingering on sweaty hunks of veal with voyeuristic intensity.
From my vantage point in the front row at the red carpet premiere, the experience was borderline pornographic. Eight months later I still vividly recall a glistening rack of lamb splayed beyond my field of vision, literally too much decadence to take in at once. You never forget your first time. I caught new releases last year, but that only reflects about half of my total film intake. For the remainder, I continued a tradition I began early in the pandemic by marching backwards through film history to fill in embarrassing blindspots.
