In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here. Dear Dana, Bilge, and David, Being a freelance critic doesn’t exactly come with a ton of bragging rights, but I do have the luxury of making “smaller” films my priority and generally not feeling obligated to watch big Hollywood movies unless I feel like it. It’s not that unpacking Avatar: The Way of Water or Black Panther: Wakanda Forever isn’t fascinating—these are major cultural phenomena, and the work of “reviewing”...