Over the next 10 days, you’ll have more free time than the rest of the year, so use it wisely.

Hell of a year, huh? It’s been hard to keep up with the latest emojis, let alone the more considered emanations from the cultural sphere. Arcade Fire put it well in their latest opus, Everything Now: “Every song that I’ve ever heard/ Is playing at the same time/ It’s absurd.” But that didn’t quite get to the superabundance of new TV series dropping on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the rest, or the millions of words, notes, paint strokes, breaths, tears and megabytes spent trying to make sense of it all. As the smoke clears (a little), we can look back on a vintage cultural year.

There have been blockbuster music releases (thanks for that, Ms Taylor Swift), signs of intelligent life at the multiplex (see Blade Runner 2049), great titans returning (Twin Peaks), plus a whole slew of great fiction, an explosion of podcasts and one of the best years for theatre on record. At last, the holidays bring a few spare moments to catch up with it all. So, with honourable mention to, in no particular order, Lorde, BoJack Horseman, Age Of Anger, St Vincent, Blade Runner 2049, Network at The National Theatre, SZA, Get Out, Cuphead, Pod Save America, Black Mirror, Hurray For The Riff-Raff and both Gallagher brothers, here are MR PORTER’s highlights.

It’s not often that an author wins a big literary prize and all you hear is people saying, “Yes. That’s exactly right. I’m so pleased for him/her.” That’s pretty much what happened when Mr George Saunders won the 2017 Man Booker for his extraordinary debut novel. (If you don’t know his short stories, look them up, too.) It follows a grief-blasted Mr Abraham Lincoln after his beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, dies of typhoid in 1862 at the height of the American Civil War. “He was the sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have children,” one historian wrote at the time. Apparently, Mr Lincoln was so devastated he dug up Willie’s casket to cradle his body. From this image, Mr Saunders takes us deep into the American graveyard, introducing us to a quarrelsome gaggle of ghosts caught between this world and the next, from the tortured slave to a man with an enormous erect phallus who died before he could do the deed with his young wife. Lincoln In The Bardo is a singular achievement, a novel no one else would have dreamed of, wildly experimental, too, but one that makes perfect metaphysical sense. It also makes you happy to be alive, like the suicide who too late regrets his deed. “Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realise how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure.”

The Dunkirk evacuation was a military failure that became a propaganda triumph. In May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force, plus the remains of the French and Belgian armies, found themselves encircled by German forces in Normandy, facing total annihilation. What followed was what Sir Winston Churchill called a “miracle of deliverance”, as the British Navy, working with 100 or so civilian “little ships”, rescued more than 300,000 Allied troops. War on this scale becomes all the harder to comprehend the further we get away from it, but Mr Christopher Nolan puts you right back in there, viscerally and emotionally. He is modern cinema’s pre-eminent creator of worlds (The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar) and here makes war fresh and unfamiliar, every bit a leap forward as Mr Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It’s also a virtuoso piece of storytelling, its three strands, following land, air and sea, told in interlacing time frames, with three of Britain’s finest actors brought to the fore: Sir Mark Rylance, Sir Kenneth Branagh and Mr Tom Hardy (plus, erm, Mr Harry Styles). It’s already a frontrunner for best picture at the Oscars. Just be sure you see it on the highest-spec screen you possibly can.

There’s something reassuring about the presence of Kung Fu Kenny at the pinnacle of hip-hop in 2017. The Compton native has become both the US’s conscience and a mainstream prizefighter through bare wit, resilience and uncanny timing. The follow-up to 2015’s psychedelic free-jazz epic To Pimp A Butterfly, DAMN. falls into that pleasing subgenre of minimalist follow-ups to maximalist masterpieces. It’s raw, personal and purist – all tense beats and pulsing basslines, but not too much to distract from Mr Lamar’s flow. “Get the fuck off my stage, I’m the Sandman,” he hisses to would-be challengers on “HUMBLE.”, the album’s lead single. But it’s also restless and unpredictable, never quite settling into one mood or rhythm. He rises to fury on “DNA.”, details his angst aged seven, 17 and 27 on “FEAR.” and even makes U2 sound rather splendid on “XXX.”. The final track, “DUCKWORTH.” (which becomes the first track on the newly released special edition), is an improbable but apparently entirely true tale of an altercation between his future label boss and father before he was born. It’s the way he tells them.

Blue Planet II is so cutting-edge it falls into the realm of psychedelic TV. Its images are so strange, they’re properly mind-expanding. The sped-up footage of the sea cucumber ramming starfish eggs into its mouth with its 10 arms. The pod of sperm whales sleeping vertically in the open water. The Portuguese man o’ war sailing innocuously across the surface. The octopus evading the pyjama shark by covering itself in shells. The eels jumping in and out of a toxic underwater salt lake. But, as with that man o’ war, there’s always a sting in the tail. You might summarise Sir David Attenborough’s narration thus: “Here’s something rare and beautiful, never before captured on camera. Amazing huh? Well you should have thought about that before you threw that plastic bag away because it’s DEAD now.” Blue Planet II doesn’t hold back on its environmental elegies, but it’s somehow never a downer. Never before have we seen the sheer ingenuity of life on Earth so close, and never has it all seemed so interconnected. Available on BBC iPlayer or DVD.

You couldn’t move far in 2017 without someone monologuing about some great podcast they’d discovered. Or perhaps launched themselves. When there’s so much surface noise, it’s refreshing to go for a deep dive into a 36-hour-long lecture series about Genesis, say, or a forensic history of the Russian hacking scandal or maybe just listen to a couple of teenagers chatting about anime. The best podcasts are often the loosest, most rambling ones, but it’s also a form that lends itself to an overarching structure. In The Butterfly Effect, Welsh journalist Mr Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, begins by meeting a porn star in a hotel in Los Angeles. He winds back to a Belgian geek’s bedroom in the late 1990s, forward again to three women burning a Norwegian man’s stamp collection, and forward again to the murder of an Italian priest. The story he’s telling is about the creation of Pornhub and the long-term effects of this decision to make pornography free and easily accessible. It’s never salacious and frequently surprising.

There’s an important message at the end of Mario’s first adventure for Nintendo’s hybrid Switch console. The pixelated plumber has been rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser’s evil clutches for what, 30 years? But – spoiler alert – when you finally save her in this one, she does not reward you with a kiss, but laughs and flies away. Moral: a good deed is its own reward. She didn’t ask you to save her, did she? Ah, but who needs patriarchal archetypes when you have Cappy? That’s Mario’s new sidekick, a sort of enchanted hat that you can use to “capture” the spirit of passing wildlife (such as frogs) and adversaries (flying bullets) and gain access to a whole new array of moves. It’s a bit like those raccoon suits that appeared in *writer shows his age* Super Mario 3, only played out in three dimensions with added nuances from the Joy-Con controllers. Odyssey has a few new features to get your head around, but mostly it’s a Mario game in the most larkish, escapist, everyone-crowd-round-the-screen traditions. Plus, Luncheon Kingdom might just be the dream holiday destination for 2018.

At an auction in New York in May, a Japanese collector named Mr Yusuku Maezawa won a 10-way bidding war for an untitled 1982 painting of a skull by Mr Jean-Michel Basquiat. The final bid was $110.5m (£85m), which made the Brooklyn-born artist, who died of a heroin overdose in 1988 aged just 27, the most expensive US painter. Auspicious timing, then, for the autumn exhibition at the Barbican in London, which you can still catch if you hurry. Mr Basquiat is in some ways the quintessential tragic young genius, the irrepressible talent who very quickly transcended his street-art roots to become the toast of Manhattan. The Barbican exhibition evokes those restless times with Polaroids, party pictures and films of Mr Basquiat scampering around Manhattan, as well as those madly vivid portraits. You’re left with a sense of him as part of a larger movement in art, somewhere between Mr Cy Twombly or Mr Andy Warhol. It’s fitting for an artist so kinetic and charismatic that it all feels so alive and responsive – the very opposite of a dead retrospective.

Mr Matthew Heineman’s documentary for Amazon Studios is by no means an easy watch. The Emmy award-winning director focuses on the citizen journalists of Raqqa Is Being Silently Slaughtered, a group of activists who formed in 2014 when the Syrian city was “liberated” by Islamic State and anointed the capital of its hellish caliphate. The film does not turn away from the ritualised violence used by Isis (and Syrian president Mr Bashar Al-Assad) both to terrorise the local population and to score propaganda victories. This is a hyper-modern war of information, as well as an age-old conflict of violence and coercion. We mostly see it through the eyes and bodies of Aziz, Hamoud and Mohamad, three ordinary men forced to flee Syria, now attempting to smuggle footage out of Raqqa at huge risk to their friends and families. Raqqa fell to US-backed forces this year. This will remain a key document to this horrendous episode in its history.

Mr Tony Kushner’s two-part play, written at the height of the Aids crisis in President Ronald Reagan-era US, is one of the sky-high achievements of 20th-century theatre. Subtitled “A Gay Fantasia On National Themes_”_, it combines the political, the personal and the metaphysical in a way that remains ultra-fresh. And it’s hard to imagine a more resonant staging than Ms Marianne Elliott’s production at The National Theatre in London, which now transfers for 18 weeks to the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway. Mr Andrew Garfield stars in what he has called his dream role, as the waspish, crotchety, bed-ridden holy fool Prior Walter, a role so demanding he said he needed to be dragged kicking and screaming to the theatre by the middle of the run (a little break should put him right). The cast also includes the peerless Ms Denise Gough and Mr Nathan Lane. The fact that the action opens with a three-way phone call by Mr Roy Cohn, the real-life New York lawyer and mentor to one President Donald Trump, only adds to its piquancy.

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