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 Dana, Alison, and Bilge,
While trying to process this month’s seismically awful events—and while reading Dana’s deeply insightful and moving words about Rob Reiner and what a generous, menschy, joyously committed force for cinematic and civic decency he was—I found myself, like just about everyone, navigating a personal flood of formative Reiner memories. It may be solipsistic, but it’s also only natural, to flash back on our first encounter with an artist whose work means something to us (and in ways that we never thought we’d have to reckon with so cruelly soon). But with Reiner, whose best films became such lasting fixtures of American popular culture, to encounter Hollywood movies at a certain age, really, was to encounter him.
I thought about first seeing The Princess Bride as a kid, with a still-primitive grasp of how TV and movies worked, and feeling mostly confused about what that kid from The Wonder Years was doing in the same film with that guy from my dad’s favorite TV show, Columbo. I was too young to grasp, let alone quote, any of William Goldman’s immortal dialogue, though that would come later, and how. (Officiating my friends’ wedding in my mid-20s, I kicked off my little homily with a hearty “Mawwiage! Mawwiage is what bwings us twogevah twoday.” As they wished.) I thought about watching When Harry Met Sally … with my college dormmates and screening a bunch of Meathead-and-Archie smackdowns from All in the Family in an Intro to TV class. I thought, of all things, about the blowhardy gusto that Reiner brought to the role of a producer in the 1999 Matthew McConaughey-starring reality-TV satire EDtv—the swaggering corporate bully who’s finally humiliated into doing the right thing only when news of his penile implant almost goes public. And, yes, although it represents barely a fraction of Reiner’s heroic activism, I thought about the number of times, post-November 2016, that one of his tweets had crossed my social media feed and given me, if only for a moment, something to cling to amid so much dystopian clamor. Everything might have been going to hell, but among various Hollywood voices of anti-Trump sanity, his was one of the warmest and most reassuring.
Dana, you asked us what the Castle Rock equivalents of 2025 are, and Is This Thing On?—basically a better, waaaaaay less bickersome version of Reiner’s 1999 couples-therapy dramedy The Story of Us—is about as heartening an answer as I can come up with.
(Bradley Cooper, like Reiner, is an actor turned director, and one who’s demonstrated pretty good instincts so far.) Others would surely make a case for James L. Brooks’ awesomely batshit Ella McCay—which Alison described, correctly, as “gas-leak cinema at its finest”—though that might speak more to the generally impoverished nature of Hollywood’s neo-Sturgesian small-town political-satire romantic-dramedy scene than anything else. As a director, usually of other writers’ scripts, Reiner possessed an anti-auteurist touch that—as borne out by his astonishing, genre-skipping run of movies through the ’80s and early ’90s—was notable for its relative invisibility, its actor-driven focus. Brooks, by contrast, is very much an auteur: For better or worse, his big swings, admirable misses, and neo-screwball idiosyncrasies are pretty unmistakably his.
I love Dana’s own suggestion of Roofman, Derek Cianfrance’s fact-based crime-caper romance, starring Channing Tatum as a big-hearted fugitive hiding out in a Toys “R” Us. There’s something especially Reiner-esque in the way that Cianfrance—in lighter, less broody form than you’d expect from the guy who made Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines—allows well-established actors like Tatum, Peter Dinklage, and an especially wonderful Kirsten Dunst to explore new facets of themselves and their talent. I have to quote our colleague Charles Taylor’s marvelous Substack review of Roofman, which he hails as, essentially, the American movie of the year—a story about “how our national spiritual life, our commitment to treating people like human beings, can survive when they have been replaced by the temporary goods and lasting emptiness of consumer culture.” Charley goes on, rightly, to lament that the movie itself has become a casualty of that consumer culture as practiced by Hollywood—an IP-clogged, franchise-driven system that has bred the same fatal laziness and incuriosity among studio decisionmakers and audiences alike.
The collapse of the midbudget studio movie may account for why the success of the exuberantly scary and entertaining Weapons felt like cause for hosannas, when, in a healthier state of affairs, it would simply have been good business as usual. I caught up to Zach Cregger’s Twilight Crone horror-fantasy a bit late, having missed the early screenings, and I’m glad that I did: Seeing Aunt Gladys get her ass royally Romero’d with an enthusiastic multiplex crowd—several of whom did “the run” in the lobby afterward—was one of the whooping-and-hollering highlights of my moviegoing summer. And since Weapons is more or less the best recent Stephen King adaptation not actually adapted from the work of Stephen King, perhaps that’s another one to throw on the Reiner mantle.
Shifting gears: I’ll co-sign every word of Bilge’s pushback against our relentless and often art-deadening emphasis on story, and if anyone wants a “Cinema Is Nothing Without Its Non-Narrative Pleasures” T-shirt, let me know and I’ll add it to my order. (Our story obsession, of course, goes well beyond the purview of cinema or even culture, as my former New Yorker colleague Parul Sehgal unpacked in her brilliant 2023 essay “The Tyranny of the Tale,” in which she dismantles “the doctrine of narrative supremacy.”) The imperatives of story, as Bilge notes, simply don’t account for some of the year’s great moviegoing experiences—which is to say, the often dramatically circuitous and intensely atmospheric ways in which great filmmakers make meaning. Along with the rich and rangy world-building of The Secret Agent and the exquisite micro-detailing of Peter Hujar’s Day, I’d throw in the gobsmacking derangement of Resurrection, a new magnum opus from the terrifyingly gifted 36-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night). Bi’s movie, I should note, happens to be an absolute feast of narrative—a full-blown genre buffet, unfurling four (or five, or six) different plotlines. It’s got silent-cinema monsters, newfangled vampires, serial-killer investigations, grifter hijinks, bodily transfigurations, you name it. More story per capita than most movies this year, in other words, and yet emphatically not something to experience on your TV.
Somehow, amid this discussion, I’ve managed not to say a word about Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt, my favorite movie of 2025 by a Moroccan desert mile, and it seems right to do so now, as my final Movie Club dispatch winds down. Sirāt itself tells a ripping good yarn, but it is also a hypnotic, sensorily overwhelming pure-cinema experience, possessed of a visual, musical, and spiritual power that sometimes tilts gloriously toward abstraction. Minute by nail-biting minute, Laxe’s mix of thunderous doom-and-boom and equally jolting compassion shattered and transported me more than anything I saw this year, and it’s stuck with me for reasons that—unlike the fairly straightforward details of what happens to whom—I have trouble putting into words. Flashing back on Sirāt, which has been gloriously often, I think about two sets of high beams on a pitch-black night, lighting their way across a desert landscape without end. I also linger on Laxe’s extraordinary (nonprofessional) actors, dancing and gyrating with fearless, defiant abandon. I love where the movie goes from there, but honestly, part of me does wish it had stayed right there in the desert—that the rave would go on forever.
Which is sort of how I feel about this edition of Movie Club. Alison, I’m curious to hear about any prime story-adjacent cinematic experiences you had this year, though your earlier thoughts on April and Sound of Falling—neither one a plotless void, I should note—provide some sense of that already. Is now perhaps the time to raise the divisive specter of Eddington, a movie that you both admired and took apart with consummate skill? For all that I found vacuous and meretricious about it, it’s nothing if not its own scabrous attack on narrative, or at least narrative expectation—in terms of how movies are supposed to behave, and also in terms of the petty, self-flattering stories we contrive to get by in a world of ungovernable, extremely online chaos. Wherever we go from here, I look forward to reading your brilliant insights, and Bilge’s and Dana’s, too, through this conversation and beyond. Happy holidays and new year to you all, and I hope our paths cross soon in New York, at a festival, or at some other abstrusely password-protected rendezvous point TBD.
Much love,
Justin