2013
That year I watched Spring Breakers and didn’t know what I’d just seen—Korine doing his full fever-dream thing with pink and excess and violence, the kind of film that stays unresolved in your head for weeks. Then Star Trek Into Darkness, which at least tried to reach for something underneath the action. And Despicable Me 2, which just worked because it understood what made the first one stick.
What made the year interesting wasn’t that everything was great. It was the range. A film that weird and unapologetic showed you what cinema could do if it wasn’t worried about being safe—then you’d turn around and watch something commercial just trying to be good at its own thing. The whole year felt like that. Different bets, different people, nobody building one vision together.
I watched enough to feel something happening. Not everything landed. But there was reach in it. Ambition sitting next to entertainment sitting next to pure craft. That’s what I remember—not because the films were perfect, but because the whole thing felt honest in its scatter.