In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri—about the year in cinema.
Dear (but for real, dear) colleagues,
In the midst of responding to Bilge’s previous missive, which goes down at least three separate roads I’d love to pursue, I first heard the unthinkable news of Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths. I promptly entered a fugue state and stayed up late into the night, watching clips from Reiner’s films and reading about his 50-plus-year career as an actor, director, producer, and industry pioneer. By the time this post goes live, the headlines will be more than a week old, and thus outside the gruesome parameters of the typical “news cycle”—though in this case the horrific details of their deaths, about which I’ll say nothing because we know so little yet, may extend that window by a lot.
But Rob Reiner has been a part of the news cycle of my internal life as far back as my conscious memory extends. So I want to take this first post of our last round to remember him: not just as a magnificently versatile director and a skilled comic actor, nor even as the generous fosterer of cinematic talent and boots-on-the-ground political activist that he also was, but as a warm, funny, reliably joy-bringing presence on the big and small screen, behind the camera, in the civic arena, and in all our imaginative lives. For so many decades, whether or not you kept up with his every new movie and business venture and philanthropic effort, Reiner was just there. Working on something new, investing his well-earned success in helping another director or writer to get a leg up, raising funds for a more-than-worthy cause. A figure to be trusted, in whose welcome company you would no doubt soon find yourself spending time again. Just the way you’d feel about—it’s so hard to type this today—a really good dad.
All in the Family’s run lasted from 1971 to 1979, when I was too young to understand that show’s groundbreaking incorporation of contemporary political debates into the network sitcom format, or even, probably, to keep quiet during it. But my family watched it loyally—I can still sing the opening theme song from memory—and my siblings and I knew the characters as types. We got that Archie and Meathead were always fighting about something to do with presidents and taxes and the Bunkers’ Black neighbors, and thanks to my father’s staunch hatred of Richard Nixon and the Republican establishment, we always rooted for Meathead.
I think my father, who died in 2024, must have identified with Mike “Meathead” Stivic, though he (my dad) was not a Polish American sociology student, as Reiner’s character is at the beginning of the series, but a young father in the Air Force. My dad was a few years too old to be of the hippie generation the Reiner character represented, but he had grown up with a socially conservative father who, though not nearly as committed a bigot, was not unlike a much more laconic Archie Bunker. When I once asked my father, who was a small child during World War II, if he had any memories of the war, he recalled hearing on the radio that FDR had died and going to the next room to tell his father, who grunted, “Good.”
As teenagers and young adults, my brother and sister and I could quote virtually every line of This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing and of course that infinite quote generator The Princess Bride. They were among the first films our family owned on VHS, or maybe took so long to return to the video store that we eventually just kept them. These were comfort movies for long weekend afternoons, or party movies, to show to groups of friends who had either somehow not seen them yet or, more commonly, wanted to watch them again and quote along. They were among the first films I remember admiring as films, whose dialogue and performances and directorial choices I noticed and discussed with other people, a part of coming of age as a cinephile. The fact that the Meathead of my childhood was the director who had made all these funny, sophisticated, grown-up movies (grown-up even when they were about kids) never struck me as incongruous. It made sense that in his second public incarnation, not as a long-haired foil for Archie but as a genially bald mensch, the man who had made my parents laugh and shared my dad’s sense of outrage at injustice would make movies that sprang from those same core values, including a keen sense for what ultimately mattered in life: friendship like the Stand By Me kids’, collaborative creation like Spinal Tap’s, and ordinary, squabbling true love like Harry and Sally’s.
After his initial seven-film run of back-to-back bangers in just about every popular genre (romantic comedy, fantasy, coming-of-age movie, mockumentary—I haven’t even yet mentioned the psychological thriller and the legal drama), Reiner settled into a period of making movies that ranged from very good to just-OK to out-and-out dogs, but by that time he was much more than just the movies he directed. After the success of Stand By Me, Reiner and four partners co-founded Castle Rock Productions with the explicit purpose of allowing filmmakers the creative freedom they struggled to retain within the studio system. For the rest of his life, like Sydney Pollack before him (though Reiner’s warmth was less gruff, more endearing), he remained a key player both on-screen and off, just as likely to appear in a good movie as he was to direct or produce one. And without his eye for talent at Castle Rock, which was folded into Warner Bros. in 2002 and is therefore, I suppose, now headed toward the Netflix singularity, we wouldn’t have Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, The Shawshank Redemption, Barcelona, Lone Star, Music and Lyrics, Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, Michael Clayton—all movies that are part of the warp and weft of our shared popular culture.
Admire if you will the deftness with which I now segue back to the present day—not that a segue is really necessary, since Reiner came out with a new movie in 2025, the slight but, I thought, quite moving legacy sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. My question for whoever wants to field it is: What are the Castle Rock movies of our day, the solid midbudget thrillers like Misery or romantic comedies like Miss Congeniality or character-driven prison dramas like Shawshank? The films that aren’t part of an expanded universe with Happy Meal tie-ins, the films audiences claim to miss so much but unfortunately often don’t show up to the theater for? Alison and Justin’s shared admiration for Bradley Cooper’s loose-limbed divorce dramedy Is This Thing On?, or my putting Derek Cianfrance’s low-key based-on-a-true-story romance Roofman on my list of Top 10 honorable mentions, seems like a gesture in the direction of honoring films that fall into that time-honored but increasingly hard-to-find bucket. Alison, to name-check another Rob Reiner–directed classic, what’s on your 2025 bucket list?
Standing by you,
Dana