Slavoj Žižek

The New York Times has called Everything Everywhere All at Once “a swirl of genre anarchy.” It simultaneously works as a tender story of acceptance, an exploration of the pressures of not living up to parental expectations, an existential study on whether or not anything matters, a reminder to be kinder to others, and a love story about reigniting the spark in a marriage that has seemingly run its course. It’s a family drama, a sci-fi mess of multiple universes, a superhero battle to save the world, comedy, and action movie. As Vox's Alex Abad-Santos said, “No amount of description — alternate timelines, jumps, existential crises, moms, hot dog fingers, butt plugs, etc. — could ever accurately describe what’s happening at any given moment during this maximalist fantasia.

In the era of boring Hollywood-Marxist blockbusters like Avatar: The Way of Water, it’s quite refreshing to see Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a half-a-century-old masterpiece of European art cinema, proclaimed the best movie of all time by the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film reached the top after a long delay, thereby confirming the fact that each present era retroactively rewrites its past. Jeanne Dielman is fourth in the series of Sight and Sound's best films, preceded by Eisenstein’s Potemkin, Welles’s Citizen Kane and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The film’s triumph is, of course, the result of a well-planned campaign to promote a woman to the top position.