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.
My beloved fellow critics:
Thank you, Dana and Justin, for those lovely tributes to Rob Reiner, a man who always seemed like a mensch in addition to being someone whose big- and small-screen contributions were inconceivably enormous. I love the way you put it, Justin, that Reiner had “an anti-auteurist touch” throughout that incredible eight-year run of films he directed. It’s true that each of those classics (including The Sure Thing, which usually gets skipped over in this context, but which is also great) works miraculously well without bearing the insistent marks of an individual’s creative ownership. But part of me also wonders if the reason I personally took Reiner’s directorial output for granted is that those films are such load-bearing parts of popular culture, so influential and beloved in their respective genres, that it’s easy to forget that they weren’t always there and that someone had to make them. I must have seen a dozen things inspired by This Is Spinal Tap and heard multiple people quoting from When Harry Met Sally … before I got the chance to see either myself. Will a filmmaker ever achieve that kind of saturation again? It’s difficult to imagine, even if we were still getting the Castle Rock–style movies the industry has basically given up on.
To answer Justin’s question about story-adjacent cinematic experiences, April and Sound of Falling are definitely more about immersion than unfurling a plot, intent on dropping the viewer into the perspective as well as the sensory experiences of their female protagonists. But while I’m absolutely with Bilge that to treat movies as merely vehicles for narrative is to miss the point of the medium entirely, I’ve noticed that many of the features that spoke to me most this year didn’t depart from storytelling so much as they maintained a testy relationship with it. That’s true for Ari Aster’s Eddington, certainly, which eventually (and mostly figuratively) blows itself up, but also Sirāt, which does the same thing in a more literal sense. While I don’t love Oliver Laxe’s film as much as you do, Justin, it has lingered with me like a cold I can’t get over, in part because of the way it teases something more conventional when it first introduces Luis (Sergi López) to the group of nomadic ravers he attempts to follow across the Moroccan desert in his quest to find his missing daughter.
Initially, Luis, a fretful, barrel-shaped envoy from a more bourgeois place, in his minivan with his young son and dog in tow, doesn’t trust these pierced, hard-partying bohemians, but then they help out when his car gets stuck, they share resources, and they bond with his kid. And just as you’re getting ready to settle in for a tale of unexpected friendships and found families, Sirāt throws in a development so outrageously bleak that I would have laughed out loud if that wouldn’t have made me look like a sociopath. It turns out that Laxe’s ultimate focus is not the bonds of temporary community that can form between fellow travelers but what it means to exist in an increasingly unstable world—one in which his European characters are gradually shorn of the privilege that allowed them to treat North Africa as just another destination in which to dance, and turned into refugees and casualties of random violence alongside the people who actually live there.
We may tell ourselves stories in order to live, but, as you said, Justin, those stories don’t need to be accurate or healthy to provide a lulling explanation for the capriciousness of the times. Eddington, for all its exasperating choices, is dead-on in the way it depicts how the residents of its small New Mexico town have ended up living in different, internet-enabled realities while remaining neighbors in lockdown. I didn’t like Bugonia (which Aster happened to produce) at all, but the pathos it gives Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), an isolated, abused guy whose downward spiral has been unchecked by any of the threadbare safety nets that might have at least slowed it, is legitimate, and makes the grandiose conspiracy theories he’s latched onto understandable, if incoherent. (The punchline of the film, borrowed from the Korean original, ends up feeling more cruel because of this.) Marty Mauser, the charismatic shithead of a hero played by Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme, clings to a not-dissimilar bit of self-mythologizing in which he’s the chosen one of table tennis, someone who has no choice but to pursue the greatness he’s destined for even if, to everyone else, he’s more wrecking than Ping-Pong ball.
Dana Stevens
Timothée Chalamet’s New Movie Is Part of a Trend I Can’t Stand
Read More
But for me, the movie with the most quietly haunting relationship to narrative this year is actually Weapons, a movie that circles ever closer to the mystery plaguing its small Pennsylvania town, while making it clear that no one, even the audience, is going to entirely understand what happened or why. There’s an argument to be made that Weapons is about school shootings, but while I understand where that’s coming from, I don’t really buy it. Part of the pleasure of Weapons is that it evades any particular allegorical reading, subjecting its community to an outrageous tragedy right out of a fairy tale and then observing the fallout. Everyone in the film wants an explanation, and, more importantly, a culprit they can direct their rage at, but while Weapons does have a villain—a terrific, ghoulishly fun one played by Amy Madigan, who might just saunter her way into an Oscar nomination as Gladys—she’s not one that any of those distraught parents have ever heard of. Instead, they turn their ire toward the nearest target, Justine, the teacher played by Julia Garner, not necessarily because they believe she’s responsible, but because they need someone to blame, and she, this person they turned their children over to for hours a day, is right in front of them.
-
Two of Our Most Lovable Stars Made a Delightful Movie This Year. Then It Disappeared.
-
The Scariest Part of Weapons Is What It Refused to Explain
Those parents have bought into a story as well, which is that towns like Maybrook, with its tree-lined streets and fenced yards, are good places to raise children because nothing bad ever happens there. But the setting, which offers an illusion of closeness and community while sending everyone back to their individual homes at night to watch TV and mind their own business, is actually what allows Gladys to flourish. The only person who notices the accruing signs of neglect around the house she takes over like a parasite is an unhoused outsider, a drug-using drifter who’s scouting for places to rob, and the only person who looks in on the increasingly withdrawn kid who lives there is Justine, who is herself single and seemingly friendless and who has already gotten in trouble elsewhere for lacking boundaries. The more we see of Maybrook, the more isolating its standard suburban setup looks, everyone tucked away neatly in a vision that remains central to the American dream. Maybe that’s why the image of the night of the disappearance, while eerie and upsetting, also has this unsettling air of liberation? All those children, opening their doors and running out onto the quiet pavement together, arms outstretched.
Or maybe this is all just on me, a suburban kid who packed up and moved to the city more than two decades ago now. Either way, it has been such a joy to talk movies with you all again, even if I’m desperately in search of some comforting narratives about what the future holds for cinema, for our own industry, and for the country. Bilge, I’ll throw to you with a hopeful plea—what are the scenes or the images that most brought you joy at the movies this year?
Don’t cross the salt line!
Alison
Read the next entry in Movie Club: My Favorite Movie Scenes of the Year Include One That Tarantino Would Hate.
Read all of the entries in Slate’s 2025 Movie Club.
