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. Read the first entry.
Dear all,
Bilge’s description of Matthew Lillard’s facial journey in the actor’s single scene in The Life of Chuck—a movie I have yet to watch—brought to mind another highlight of 2025 face acting: Billy Crudup’s one-scene wonder of a performance in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Crudup’s character, Timothy, is the long-ago roommate and acting-school rival of George Clooney’s eponymous movie star. When they catch up over a drink at a dive bar they used to frequent, the energy between them keeps shifting: warm and nostalgic one minute, prickly and combative the next. At one point Jay persuades Timothy to perform his old trick of reading a menu aloud in such a way as to demonstrate his acting range. After taking a moment to find his emotional choice, Timothy delivers a tragicomic ode to truffle Parmesan fries and Brussels sprouts with balsamic glaze, ending on a sobbing salute to iceberg lettuce that leaves both Jay and the audience first cackling, then in awe.
Moments later, the two men are taking swings at each other in the bar parking lot, laying the grounds for a legal dispute that will dog Jay for the rest of the movie as Timothy fades to an off-screen presence. But what stays with me months afterward is the quicksilver surprise of that menu-reading moment, one of the few in Jay Kelly when I couldn’t tell where the movie was taking me (and I say that as a moderate if not passionate Jay Kelly fan). With the most minimal of scripts—just a list of fancy appetizers—Crudup builds a character with a gift big enough to justify the lifetime of repressed resentment he has been carrying around, and for the rest of the movie, as Jay and his retinue of handlers squabble their way through Europe, I found myself wondering what Timothy was up to.
Another actor who essentially owns my memory of a 2025 movie because of his presence in just one scene: the rapper ASAP Rocky in the moment everyone remembers from Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee’s vibrant but uneven remake of an Akira Kurosawa thriller. This wasn’t Rocky’s only moment on-screen in the movie: He appears as a voice on the phone throughout, threatening and taunting Denzel Washington’s record mogul after he kidnaps his chauffeur’s son, and also stars in a music video near the movie’s end. But it’s when we see Rocky behind glass in a makeshift recording studio, engaged in an impromptu rap battle with Washington’s David King, that both actors spark to life, and a movie that had been sluggish for long stretches becomes suddenly, briefly electrifying. A few months later, Rocky would appear in a part that gave him more on-screen time, as Rose Byrne’s hotel-corridor neighbor and partner in ill-advised nocturnal ramblings in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. His charisma even in that underwritten role sealed the deal on his status as an ascendant movie star, but it’s Rocky spitting bars with the ferocity of the abandoned son he feels himself to be that will remain my lasting impression of that shaggy but intermittently thrilling Spike Lee joint.
Alison asked us to name scenes or moments in 2025 movies that brought us joy—and as Bilge notes in his reply, that joy can and often does take on forms more latent than a simple sensation of pleasure. The eerily exultant opening scene of Weapons—a whole suburban town’s worth of front doors opening at 2:17 a.m. as the children in those houses run headlong into the dark, arms spread out like wings—set a bar it would be hard for the rest of that or any movie to reach. Alison correctly argues that it’s among Weapons’ strengths that the symbolic meaning of the film’s specific horror is never quite spelled out (though Justin is also right that the dream Josh Brolin’s character has midway through, culminating in the image of an automatic rifle seeming to hover in the sky, is a pretty big red herring for the movie’s writer-director, Zach Cregger, to fling onto the screen if, as he has claimed in interviews, the image is not meant to allude to the phenomenon of school shootings). I found Weapons’ climactic reveal to be deflatingly un-scary and more than a little sexist; how many more movies do we need to see where the ultimate, unspeakable horror turns out to be a (shriek) postmenopausal woman? But that moment when George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” plays under the image of the running children—who, as Alison suggests, seem to be flying as much as fleeing—may be 2025’s most powerful needle drop.
Bilge mentions a moment in the anthology film Sunfish (& Other Stories On Green Lake)—another one I haven’t seen, but honestly, who among us can keep up with the number of movies in a year Bilge does?—prompting me to note that one of the anthology format’s established masters, Jim Jarmusch, came out with a new one this year, opening Christmas Eve: Father Mother Sister Brother, a family-drama triptych that’s so minimalist it’s nearly translucent. As with most anthology movies, one chapter stands out among the rest. In this case, it’s the opening one, in which Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings on their way to an awkward visit with their eccentric and semi-estranged father (Tom Waits, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure) two years after their mother’s death. Their encounter is almost devoid of drama by any conventional measure, as they exchange stiff banalities about liking each other’s sweaters and debate whether it’s appropriate to make a toast with glasses of water. (In a clumsy attempt to bring up the absent family member they’re all grieving, Waits’ character reminisces, “Your mother loved water.”)
There’s a patient, observational quality to Jarmusch’s camera as it lingers over details the characters themselves are too uncomfortable to let themselves slow down and appreciate: the gazelle-like beauty of a pair of passing skateboarders, or the recurring image of a character sitting with their back to the camera as they stare out the window at a wintry landscape. One highlight of my cinematic year was spent not in a theater or in front of a screen at all, but on Zoom, interviewing Jarmusch about his longtime passion for Yasujirō Ozu, the great Japanese filmmaker who specialized in filming quietly unhappy families in domestic spaces, for an overview I was writing on Ozu’s four-decade-long career. Father Mother Sister Brother is a clear inheritor of the Ozu tradition, a miniaturist movie in which nothing much happens (though that first chapter does conclude with a sly final twist worthy of O. Henry), but whose power derives from what Jarmusch called, speaking of Ozu’s mastery of the mundane, “the accumulation of tiny things.”
Another of Father Mother Sister Brother’s high points is the haunting, bare-bones soundtrack by the British-German singer-songwriter Anika, written in collaboration with Jarmusch. Most of the music she recorded is original, but under the opening titles, Anika sings a cover of the 1968 pop hit “Spooky,” first sung by Classics IV and later recorded by Dusty Springfield. To close out this year’s Movie Club, I’ll leave you with the first few lyrics of that song, which strike me as a benediction for the movie year to come:
In the cool of the evening when everything is getting kind of groovy
You call me up and ask me would I like to go with you and see a movie
At first I say no, I’ve got some plans for tonight
And then I stop—and say “all right.”
2025 has been far from groovy in so very many ways, but if any of you want to call me up in 2026 and catch whatever’s coming next on the big screen, I can’t think of any plans I wouldn’t cancel.
Love is kinda crazy with some spooky critic friends like you,
Dana