Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the fictional city-state Ravicka, as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in BOMB, e-flux, Granta, Harper’s, n+1, Paris Review, and POETRY. Gladman has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies

New York–based Paris Starn is a pastry artist, a chef, a designer, and the creative director and founder of her eponymous fashion brand, Paris 99. Her work has garnered attention in the realms of fashion, art, design, and hospitality. Starn, who earned her master’s degree in art history from New York’s Hunter College, staged for award-winning pastry chef Richard Leach in her early years before developing her own style, which involves bringing traditional dishes and desserts into the modern era via innovative techniques and retro aesthetics. Her food emphasizes seasonality and local produce.

The twenty-city “John Waters Christmas Show” tour began November 29 in San Francisco.

1
PETER VON KANT (François Ozon)
By far the best movie of the year. Fassbinder’s classic lesbian melodrama is appropriated and remade as a gay Frenchman’s love letter to the original version. Hilariously stilted, often overwrought, but always highly entertaining, this cock-eyed tribute will make you swoon when Hanna Schygulla finally makes an appearance and Isabelle Adjani soon follows. My God, it’s just plain Douglas Sirk perfect.

2
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)
Another tribute film, this time Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar

Amy Taubin is a contributing editor for Artforum who lives, writes, and teaches in New York.

1–3
AGHDRA (Arthur Jafa), EO (Jerzy Skolimowski), and SEE YOU FRIDAY, ROBINSON (Mitra Farahani)

A tie for first place among three works that testify to the poetic power of image-sound amalgams and to the fragility of all life. An Elias Canetti observation—often quoted by Jean-Luc Godard, including in Farahani’s collage of revelatory fragments they began in 2015, and Farahani finished in 2022—describes how you might react to any or all of them: “We are never sad enough for the world to become better.”

4

James Quandt is a film critic and curator based in Toronto.

1
WHERE IS THIS STREET? OR WITH NO BEFORE AND AFTER (João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata)

In this most poignant of pandemic films, the directors return to the Lisbon locales of Paulo Rocha’s The Green Years (1963), an epochal work of Portugal’s Cinema Novo, to find the streets, parks, and byways now depopulated, emanating recent loss.

2
THE NOVELIST’S FILM (Hong Sangsoo)
Even for the literary, logorrheic Hong, language takes an unusually prominent role in his stinging portrait of a stalled novelist turned amateur filmmaker.

3
THE

Erika Balsom is a reader in film studies at King’s College London.

1
“ENFIN LE CINÉMA! ARTS, IMAGES, ET SPECTACLES EN FRANCE (1833–1907)” (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; curated by Dominique Païni, Paul Perrin, and Marie Robert)
This monumental exhibition examined the rise of the motion picture, not as a machine but as an eminently modern way of looking at the world. The erudition, creativity, and access to collections that informed it were astounding, even if more attention to the tangle of cinema and colonialism would have been welcome.
Co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

2
MUTZENBACHER

Sasha Geffen is a writer living in Denver and the author of the book Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary (University of Texas Press, 2020).

1
SHYGIRL, NYMPH (Because Music)

Shygirl’s debut LP taps into the shades between her previous extremes. Her eros makes room for fear, humor, and failure; there’s more sex in what goes wrong, in what punctures and leaks, than there is in action glued to a script. The gouged, muddied vocals and sagging, detuned notes throughout Nymph play at libidinal obliteration: sex that mutates, sex that melts.

2
ALEX G, GOD SAVE THE ANIMALS (Domino)

Each Alex

Jace Clayton is an artist and writer also known for his work as DJ/rupture.

1
REMA, “CALM DOWN” (Jonzing World)

Flawless Nigerian pop optimized for global consumption, complete with love-song lyrics that double as an ode to degrowth.

2
SHYGIRL, NYMPH (Because Music)

If love is timeless, then sex is now. Shygirl’s lyrics double down on the latter, bulwarked by forward-facing rap and R&B production.

3
LA MATERIA VERBAL: ANTOLOGÍADE LA POESÍA SONORA PERUANA(Verbal Matter: An Anthology of Peruvian Sound Poetry) (Buh)

This exemplary comp pulls together a spectrum of Peruvian sound poetry, balancing the

Planningtorock (Jam Rostron) is a trans nonbinary music producer and artist known for chronicling themes of gender identity, queerness, and being trans in their music.

1
SUDAN ARCHIVES, “SELFISH SOUL” (Stones Throw)

Brittney Parks is a musical genius, and this track is so incredible and powerful! Without a doubt my favorite song of 2022.

2
MEL 4EVER, “TREAT ME (LIKE A TOILET)” (CCP)

Every single that Mel’s put out this year has been a banger, but this is my personal favorite.

3
ARIEL ZETINA, “SMOKE MACHINE” (FEAT. BORED LORD) (Local Action)

So happy that I finally got to meet Ariel at the Whole

Polly Watson is a musician, writer, and editor based in New York.

1
TAMIO SHIRAISHI (67th Avenue station, Queens, NY, March 26)

The experimental saxophonist will occasionally issue last-minute announcements, via his Instagram, that he’s playing the vast columned mezzanine of the subway station near his home. I caught him on a chilly Saturday evening, firing discordant shrieks into the icy ether. A few girls in high suede boots hurried by giggling, covering their ears.

2
SUBVERSIVE RITE, THE END IS NEAR (Chaotic Uprising)

Just a fucking wind tunnel of a cassette channeling early UK warp-speed crust

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist based in New York City. She is the author of A Queen in Bucks County, out this month from Nightboat Books, and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021; Nightboat Books, 2023). With Andrea Abi-Karam, Gabriel coedited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). She is part of the editorial collective for the Poetry Project Newsletter and teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

After graduating from Yale University’s School of Architecture and Design, Barbara Chase-Riboud moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world, living at the center of numerous artistic, literary, and political circles. Her innovative sculptures—which are characterized by the interplay of cast bronze, aluminum, wool, and silk—appear in museum collections across the globe. In 1974, she published her first book of poetry, From Memphis & Peking (Random House), and in 1979, her debut novel, Sally Hemings (Viking), was released to critical acclaim. Her new book, I Always Knew: A Memoir (