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.
Chers camarades,
I like to think of Movie Club as a safe space where we can let go of our yearlong effort to enter each new screening with a Zen mindset, resetting our brains, to the degree this is possible, to the status of neutral blank slates. Am I the only one among us who has a specific ritual to help perform this reset? As the lights go down and the first production logos appear, I close my eyes and make a silent vow that, no matter what assumptions I’ve brought in with me based on the director’s or performers’ prior work, no matter my accumulated knowledge about the movie’s production history or source material or, God help us, awards-season campaign story, for the next couple of hours I will attempt to give myself over entirely and solely to the sights and sounds unfurling onscreen. (I don’t actually say all that to myself; it’s become a mental shorthand I can get through in the time it takes to open a notebook and uncap a pen.)
But now we’re in the club, a pleasingly grotty 1970s-style conversation pit where we can be our cranky selves: veteran filmgoers and opinion-havers with viewing histories by now thousands of movies deep, histories that have shaped our personal preferences in ways we rarely get a chance to explore (since we’re hired to review the movies, not ourselves). So I will kick off this second round by workshopping a theory about a preference I’ve had to work extra-hard this year to keep erasing from my mental blackboard: I am not a fan of the increasingly influential style that for clarity’s sake I will call the Safdie school, though it’s not limited to works directed by the brothers of that name, either together or separately. The two films that best exemplified the style this year, Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, were not even both made by Safdies; the second was written and directed by Mary Bronstein, who’s connected to the brothers through her husband, their shared producer (and onetime director himself) Ronald Bronstein. But a filmmaker need not belong to this small circle to make movies that display elements of this emerging tendency. A 2025 release that Justin praised in his last post, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, shares some characteristics with the Safdie school, as does Ari Aster’s Eddington (and, to some degree, his 2023 feel-bad epic Beau Is Afraid).
Upon its glowing reception at Sundance, If I Had Legs was described in many a review as a feminist twist on the Safdies’ Uncut Gems (perhaps the ur-text of l’école Safdie), with Rose Byrne taking over the endurance test of a leading role from Adam Sandler. Both movies are dark comedies about self-destructive protagonists hurtling through life, making one appallingly bad decision after another as the consequences of their earlier choices dog them at every turn. Both movies also make a point of putting their audiences through the same anxiety-producing wringer as the protagonist themselves. Indeed, the source of these movies’ comedy—and to their credit, they are often quite funny—derives in large part from our disbelief at the relentless onslaught of terrible experiences the characters, and thus we, are being subjected to. In its fullest form, the Safdie style does not truck in modulation, pacing, or nuance: It’s pedal-to-the-metal emotional and physical intensity all the way to the finish line, a destination that in the case of Marty Supreme takes an enervating two and a half hours to reach.
As our colleague Stephanie Zacharek writes in perhaps the only true pan that Marty Supreme, as of this writing, has received, Timothée Chalamet’s monomaniacal table-tennis champion is “supposed to be a complex character, but maybe he’s just an unbearable one.” I felt exactly this about Rose Byrne’s Linda in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. I get that she’s meant to be a relatable “bad mom” whose journey to the end of maternal dereliction is but an absurdist extrapolation of every parent’s inner certainty that we are just a few bad days day away from fucking up our children, our marriages, and our own livelihoods beyond all repair. But … I actually don’t endanger my physically disabled child’s life every night by leaving her asleep in a sketchy motel room while I get hammered and order drugs on the dark web with a near-stranger?
Nor, turning to Chalamet’s master manipulator in Marty Supreme, do I find it totes identifiable how this silver-tongued dickweed uses and discards virtually every character he meets—especially the women—on his nerve-shredding ascent to Ping-Pong glory. Mind you, this is not in the least a case of me requiring my protagonists to be nobly motivated goody-goodies. I dig a noxiously charming anti-hero or -heroine as much as the next critic, but it would be helpful, if you want to get me invested in their narrative fate, to at least clarify what their motivations are. I can’t honestly tell if I think Byrne gave a career-best performance as Linda or not, mostly because Bronstein’s script and the breakneck pace of her direction gave me so little sense of who Linda was when she was not actively courting physical danger or having a panic attack at the office door of her long-suffering therapist, played with understated wit by Conan O’Brien. By the last glimpse we get of O’Brien’s aggravated mental-health professional, all he wants is for Linda to stop crashing into his sessions with other clients, shut his office door, and leave him the hell alone. Finally a character arc I can relate to.
Byrne and Chalamet have been much lauded for their work in these highly demanding roles, and both get the chance to prove, if we weren’t aware already, that they are prodigiously gifted actors with the stamina of elite athletes. It’s undeniably impressive how tirelessly they commit to their directors’ vision as the chaos piles up around their seemingly doomed (but in the end perhaps too hastily redeemed) characters. It’s that directorial vision itself, maybe, that’s too narrow in its conception of what a messed-up, destructive, but potentially redeemable human being can be. As I wrote in my review of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (a 2025 film that, it’s worth noting, does not make use of the amped-up narrative style under discussion here, though it has its own problems), I’ve always found the brothers’ guiding philosophy to “proceed from the principle that one of the highest aims of cinema is to successfully transfer the anxieties of a film’s characters onto its audience.”
That’s certainly an effective technique for creating bonding among audiences—the crowd I saw If I Had Legs with came out buzzing with conversation about their vicarious flop sweat on the Byrne character’s behalf—and I see why it’s made the brothers’ movies cult favorites among their generation, a demographic that’s all too familiar with the concept of daily life narrowing down to a hellscape of dwindling possibilities. In short, I think that the Safdie school is both a legitimate aesthetic response to the social and economic moment in which we find ourselves, and an annoyingly draining approach to moviemaking, one that, for me, generally fails to provide enough substance to leave me with thoughts any deeper than “Well that was an ordeal” and “Did the sound design give me tinnitus?”
Alison, I’ve now commandeered our cozy conversation pit with a Lorenz-Hart-in-Blue-Moon-length soliloquy on what’s perhaps less a fully formed theory than a glorified petty gripe. Want to be more generous by shouting out some tendency you’ve spotted on the 2025 cinematic landscape that left you with a more positive physical sensation than sticky palms and free-floating jitters? On the other hand, to rephrase a line often attributed to Dorothy Parker, if there’s some particular 2025 release of note you have nothing nice to say about, please come sit by me.
Hurtling through chaos—but in a chill way—I remain,
Dana