As you mentioned, I was having a very similar conversation over on Masto with Kira Magrann. I wanted to copy what I said there:

Like, you can’t really do anything but sound and pictures in film, right? But with text (or spoken words) you can directly describe and ascribe internal states (“You feel butterflies in your stomach”), you can editorialize (“Yeah, this guy’s a jerk” etc), you can use other senses (“The smell of fresh bread permeates the house”).