"Great cinema has never died, but there's something particularly heartening about the fact that it survived 2025. Looking back at this turbulent year, rife with the usual industry concerns over the viability of the theatrical experience, young people's slipping attention spans, and Hollywood's overreliance on franchises, unearths a diverse crop of gems. Many of my favorite films were major studio releases-blockbusters, even-that challenged audiences in innovative, surprising ways."
"A woman named Shula (played by Susan Chardy), dressed as Missy Elliott from her music video for "The Rain," drives past someone who's collapsed on the road. She discovers that it's her uncle, a problematic yet nonetheless celebrated figure in her family. What follows is an absurd reckoning that mixes surreal humor and domestic drama as Shula chafes against her relatives' hysterical funeral planning."
2025 produced a diverse cinematic crop that proved great cinema survived significant industry anxieties about theatrical viability, attention spans, and franchise dependence. Major studio releases and blockbusters challenged audiences with innovative and surprising approaches while indie and international films offered important triumphs. Movie stars retained cultural impact, and large budgets funded more than superhero spectacles. Notable near-top films included James Gunn's reinvented Superman, Ira Sachs's Peter Hujar's Day, Ari Aster's Eddington, Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent, and Carson Lund's Eephus. Nyoni's On Becoming a Guinea Fowl blends surreal humor and domestic drama in a striking opening and confirms a genre-blurring sensibility.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]