The fallout of Blue Moon is an assertive, pile-driving movie star performance from Ethan Hawke, but most compelling is how Richard Linklater and his collaborators have rendered this occasion to tell about a life—even a night’s life—in the terms one uses to speak about art itself.
In a moment when our media is often poisoned by irony, the earnest emotion of the Avatar series seems almost revolutionary, a New Sincerity for a global audience.
As much as If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about motherhood, and the specific difficulties Linda has with her daughter, I feel that it’s more broadly about the intense difficulties of caring for anything besides oneself.
The layering of theme and intention and spectacle is what makes Ryan Coogler's Sinners so rich, so dense, and so sneakily straightforward; like all great horror, Sinners is operating on levels that go as deep inside its characters as the blood and gore it splatters onscreen.
One way to read rental relationships is to treat them as a problem about lying—the actors are deceptive, the clients are pitiable, and the whole arrangement is morally suspect—but Rental Family quietly refuses that framing. After watching who absorbs the cost, the question no longer feels like one about sincerity; it feels like a question about labor, about who is expected to carry emotional weight when the usual supports fail.
The “great mystery” that the opening narration of Train Dreams gestures toward is, perhaps, love. Specifically, the kind of love that survives damage, guilt, and time—a love that forgives and persists without guarantees, that remains present even after the people who inspired it are gone.
Peter Hujar’s Day’s chamber-esque proceedings allow the film to exude a kind of privacy between its leads, with Rosenkrantz’s ear and attentive probing helping steer Hujar’s frustrations about money and art toward their equally frustrating conclusions.
Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag is a study of the notion of trust—who gives it, who earns it, and how it can be assured in a world where everyone is always lying to each other.
Bright Wall/Dark Room editors and contributors on their favorite movies, first watches, and movie moments of 2025.








