A couple of years ago, I made one that could be best described as random nonsense.1 A little sports, a little music, a little of everything, including movies. I had one movie question in there, which was this (which is debatably a music question also):

“Which song, regarded by Brian Wilson as the best song ever recorded, is in the cold open for Mean Streets and over the opening credits of Dirty Dancing?”

If neither of those movies gave it away, see the footnote for the answer.2 Dirty Dancing deserves its own treatment at some point, and we’ll get there when we get there, but for the moment, I’m going to go on record as saying that the cold open to Mean Streets is probably the best opening for any movie of the 1970s and may be the best opening for a movie in the last 60 years.

Mean Streets wasn’t Martin Scorsese’s first film, but it was his first film that you could reliably point to as what we would all call a Scorsese film today: a lot of slow motion and freeze frames, voice-over narration, very graphic depictions of violence and more profanity than my worst drive over the hill on the 405 Freeway during rush hour. Scorsese touches on a lot of themes throughout his films, but the Catholic notions of guilt and redemption are pretty consistent.

Mean Streets is at its core an exploration of redemption without sacrifice and what it means to try to change without any sort of investment.

The Line That Sounds Right, But Isn’t

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets” is one of those lines that sounds like deep knowledge dropped by someone who has seen some shit. It’s tough, earned, worldly even. The first time you hear it, it feels pretty profound.

And it’s the words that Charlie (Harvey Keitel) lives by in the film. He believes that redemption isn’t theoretical and it isn’t quiet. It’s not whispered in confessionals and between you and God. Redemption is a real lived experience, something you endure and pay for in the real world. And the tragedy of the film isn’t that he’s wrong about where redemption happens. It’s that he’s wrong about the cost. The tension that drives the entire film is that Charlie desperately wants redemption, but he’s unwilling to sacrifice anything truly essential to get it.3

That feels very familiar these days.

Guilt as a Substitute for Change

Charlie is never comfortable. He constantly feels bad about everything: sex, ambition, violence, even Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro). He constantly negotiates internally. He worries. He prays. He burns his hand over a candle flame, as if he’s performing a ritual to demonstrate that his pain will provide absolution.

But guilt doesn’t equal transformation. Guilt is emotional, but change is structural. And Charlie refuses to truly change. He doesn’t leave the mob that creates his pattern of guilt. He doesn’t remove himself from their hierarchy or cut off the relationships that pull him back to compromising the person he wants to be and turn him into the person he hates.

He just feels bad about it. And assumes that discomfort in his life is his own moral progress.

There’s actually something deeply and intensely human about that: awareness as improvement. It’s as though if we simply know something is wrong, if we feel the tension of a situation, that’s growth. But discomfort isn’t growth. Discomfort is the condition that creates the opportunity for growth. If you only nod to it, nothing actually changes.

Charlie wants to redeem himself in the streets, but he never actually changes how he moves through them.

And Charlie sees Johnny as his grand act of redemption, the piece de resistance that will finally bring him absolution and inner peace. Johnny is reckless and erratic, charming in the way that chaos can be charming when you’re drinking with it on Saturday night and not the one hungover on Sunday morning and left to clean it up. He doesn’t pay his debts. He escalates conflict, quickly and always. He refuses any accountability. Charlie tells himself that he’s responsible for Johnny and that protecting Johnny is virtuous and absorbing the fallout from his actions earns him some kind of karmic credit.

But (insert pensive music) is Charlie helping Johnny or does Charlie need Johnny more than Johnny needs Charlie?

Johnny’s suffering is Charlie’s currency. There’s ego in saviorhood and control in being the responsible one. If he endures enough, cleans up enough of Johnny’s messes, absorbs enough of the heat, surely that will count. That will redeem him. That will signal his ascendance. The problem is that loyalty without boundaries or care isn’t being a savior. It’s being complicit. You can’t let something break than take the credit for fixing it. That’s not being a hero. It’s cleaning up a mess that you created (or helped create).

Charlie isn’t rescuing Johnny. He’s just creating enough stability to let Johnny break something else, so he can go in and score more points in his own brain. In the end, he sacrifices everything because he won’t sacrifice the cycle of dysfunction with Johnny and ignores the reality that real sacrifice would require him to choose.

What Sacrifice Would Actually Look Like

Here’s the uncomfortable part the movie explores: what redemption actually requires.

Redemption would require walking away from the mob entirely and letting Johnny face his own consequences. It would require choosing Teresa (Amy Robinson) publicly and without shame4 and accepting that rising in the hierarchy of the mafia means a specific type of moral compromise and deciding that compromise isn’t worth it.

Those choices each cost something very real: belonging, status, identity, access, power or some combination therein. But Charlie never makes any of those cuts with anything that could be described as cleanliness. To be clear, that’s an understandable and very human decision. But it’s a decision with a price tag.

Charlie wants redemption that hurts, but not enough to meaningfully dismantle his life. He wants suffering, not sacrifice and the difference is that one changes everything and the other just feels that way.

An Aside

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about realism in 1970s art. There’s a grit that runs through the art of the time that reflected the reality of life in a way that, as a for instance, Ozzie and Harriet very much did not reflect the reality of the 1950s. As I was working through my thoughts on Mean Streets, I thought about a weird alignment between the film and Barney Miller5, which is nominally a sitcom about detectives in an NYPD precinct and the parade of criminals that run through for processing.

The reason that I say nominally there is for a couple of reasons. One is that unlike many sitcoms of the time, Barney Miller didn’t have any laugh track. The second reason is that while it was funny (if you like a certain type of humor on the darker side6, when taken together with Mean Streets, they reflect the overarching theme of redemption without work and that’s a theme that runs through much of 1970s storytelling.

As I’ve articulated at least a dozen times, Mean Streets reflects a belief that suffering might redeem you without sacrificing anything real if you endure it - a kind of moral romanticism. Barney Miller’s overarching theme is that systems don’t offer any redemption at all. People come in, they get processed and they leave. The institution’s job isn’t change; it’s throughput. It’s to run as frictionlessly as possible - something like institutional realism.

We love the idea of narrative chances and the visual of struggle, reform and comeback. What we don’t seem to love is what redemption actually costs: time, accountability, structural change and genuine loss. And it’s this gap, between the story we want to believe and the systems we actually live within, where the drama lives.

The Modern Parallel: Instant Everything

The quiet indictment of Mean Streets is that it isn’t just about crime. It’s about human nature and how we try to reconcile ambition, loyalty and morality without actually choosing between them. The film’s ultimate message is that you can’t have it all.

And that’s weirdly and obviously reminiscent of how we operate today.

How many times when buying something on Amazon, and given the choice between immediate delivery or lower carbon footprint delivery that means waiting a day or two, do you opt for the immediacy? I don’t have statistics on this at my finger tips, but I’m willing to bet the vast majority of people choose the former.

That’s a very specific example of a very macro trend of instant gratification and outcomes that we’re currently obsessed with as a culture. We live in a world obsessed with outcomes. We want all the spoils. We want the hero’s arc without putting the work of the apprenticeship. And increasingly, we believe we can skip the part where we earn it. We’ve become extremely comfortable with performative public discomfort without private transformation.

That’s Charlie in a paragraph. He wants the moral payoff without dismantling the surrounding systems that require it.

But at some point, the bill comes due.

Redemption Costs Something Real

The enduring power of Mean Streets isn’t the emerging Scorsese stamp: the violence and the voice over and the style. It’s not even the performances7. It’s the recognition that wanting to be good isn’t the same as putting in the work it takes to choose to be different and actually be good. Charlie is right that redemption isn’t theoretical.

He’s just wrong about what it costs.

2

“Be My Baby” by the Ronettes. Regarding Brian Wilson’s love of that song, he’s been documented as saying first heard the song on the car radio in 1963 and was so stunned by it that he pulled over to the side of the road to listen more closely. In his words, “I really did flip out. Balls-out totally freaked out when I heard ‘Be My Baby.’ It was like having your mind revamped.” It’s also worth noting that the entire soundtrack to Mean Streets is outstanding.

This essay was originally published for Passover 2025, when Cognitive Frames was still finding its audience. In the year since, many of you have found our publication — and with Passover approaching again, the conversation between DeMille, Kieślowski, and Eisenberg feels no less urgent.

If anything, a year of escalating uncertainty has made the essay's central question — where do we find divine presence when God isn't parting seas? — more pressing.

We hope you’ll take a chance to read or re-read one of our early favorites.

Passover is approaching this week, with an ancient promise of renewal and liberation. It's always been my favorite religious holiday — and it's clearly the most cinematic.

Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) rests easily as one of my favorite films. And despite the fact that it's aired annually on ABC, homaged by everyone from Mel Brooks to Eddie Murphy to James Cameron - I think it's actually underrated.

But if you're looking for an example of a man who gives up worldly power (Egypt and Anne Baxter’s Nefertiri!) in search of a deeper moral truth and liberation for his people — then Charlton Heston's Moses is one of the best Hollywood has ever produced.

The power of the film is its simplicity amidst its grandeur. Heston's Moses is a square-jawed American. He is liberating the downtrodden from tyrants. The miracles he calls forth to humble Pharaoh are epic and beyond belief.

Aside from the Creation and the Flood, "The Exodus" is a story where God's presence is strongest. An active force in the universe that acts for justice.

But what about when God's presence feels faint?

When markets are collapsing and society is polarized?

How do we tell the story of the Exodus when the times lack Technicolor?

Alongside my annual rewatch of The Ten Commandments (1956), I've found myself drawn to two films that seemingly have little in common with DeMille's epic – yet they illuminate Passover's meaning in our fractured age with surprising clarity: Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog (1989) and Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain (2024).

While DeMille sets his film in the deserts of Egypt, Kieślowski and Eisenberg set their cameras in Poland – another land of Jewish exile and mysticism, where trauma preceded return. One film crafted by a Polish Catholic during Communism's final days, the other by an American Jew wrestling with Holocaust memory. Forty years separate them, yet they explore the same spiritual terrain.

The Polish train stations that appear in both works become more than mere backdrops; they transform into theological spaces where divine absence takes architectural form. These are settings where human connections are missed, abandoned, or – occasionally, miraculously – forged against all odds.

For viewers moved by Eisenberg's Oscar-winning film but unfamiliar with Kieślowski's masterwork, there's a cross-generational dialogue happening that feels almost providential. These films speak to each other across decades, revealing how our smallest human connections participate in creation's daily renewal.

Concrete Cinema, Concrete Commandments

The Dekalog was created during Poland's transition from Communist rule (1988-89). Kieślowski's ten-hour television masterwork corresponds to the Ten Commandments, though never explicitly stating which episode matches which decree.

This ambiguity is deliberate—a cinematic acknowledgment that moral principles cannot be reduced to rule-following but must be discovered within the texture of daily existence.

Set primarily in a single Warsaw housing complex—concrete apartments whose architectural uniformity suggests both Communist collectivism and spiritual barrenness—the films explore moral quandaries through everyday encounters. The housing complex itself becomes a cinematic Mount Sinai where commandments are not handed down but worked through in painful human interaction.

Within this brutalist architecture, Kieślowski creates a surprisingly intimate visual language. His camera frequently finds characters reflected in windows, televisions, and mirrors—visual fragmentations that suggest spiritual disintegration.

When moments of genuine connection occur, his framing shifts from division to unity, from obscured to direct vision—a visual grammar of divine presence emerging through aesthetic choices.

Green Screens and False Idols

Without revealing the specific narrative journeys that make Dekalog (1989) such a profound viewing experience, we can identify how Kieślowski's visual language creates a theological framework that resonates with Eisenberg's contemporary explorations.

In Dekalog I (1989), Kieślowski examines our relationship to technology and certainty through a father's faith in calculation. The eerie green glow of computer screens creates a visual metaphor for false illumination—technology as modern idol.

When certainty fails, Kieślowski's camera discovers warmer light sources—visual transitions from false to authentic illumination that suggest spiritual awakening without didacticism.

Dekalog II (1989) presents a doctor confronting impossible ethical choices through consequential acts of deception. Kieślowski establishes this theological dimension through composition—placing the doctor physically above others during consultation scenes, shooting from low angles to suggest illegitimate authority.

The doctor's apartment overlooks the hospital, his gaze from the window a visual echo of divine surveillance that creates tension between power and responsibility.

By Dekalog VI (1989), Kieślowski explores how mediated experience creates spiritual alienation through the story of Tomek, who observes a woman through his telescope. The director creates a visual system of frames within frames—windows, telescopes, binoculars—that fragment reality.

When unmediated encounter finally arrives, Kieślowski shoots their interaction in sustained takes with minimal cutting, creating visual immediacy that mirrors spiritual presence.

These episodes—along with the complete ten-part cycle—offer viewers who connected with A Real Pain a deeper exploration of the theological questions Eisenberg raises. Kieślowski's work provides not answers but a visual language for contemplating divine presence through its apparent absence—a language that resonates powerfully with Eisenberg's Holocaust pilgrimage forty years later.

Rooftops and Reverberations

Eisenberg's Oscar-winning A Real Pain (2024) continues this theological exploration through two Jewish-American cousins embarking on a Holocaust heritage tour through Poland. David (played by Eisenberg himself) embodies anxious pragmatism – a family man whose routine has calcified into emotional distance. Benji (Kieran Culkin, in an Academy Award-winning performance) represents charismatic chaos – brilliant but wounded, perceptive yet self-destructive. Their contrasting relationships to inherited trauma create the film's central theological tension.

Their journey – funded by their late grandmother who survived the Holocaust – takes them through Warsaw and Lublin before culminating at the Majdanek concentration camp. Polish cinematographer Michał Dymek's camera places us not as detached observers but as fellow travelers, eavesdropping on tour group dynamics that shift between banality and profound revelation.

Eisenberg's visual language is architectural. Throughout the film, physical structures – doorways, windows, monument barriers – frequently separate the cousins within the frame, visualizing their emotional distance from each other and from history itself.

The film's approach to Holocaust sites achieves a delicate balance – neither exploitative nor sentimental. This restraint is particularly evident in the Majdanek sequences, which Eisenberg insisted on filming at the actual location. As he explained in interviews, his goal was "to depict Majdanek as it is now as a tourist site" rather than recreating it as a historical set. In this way, eavesdropping transforms into witnessing.

For Benji and David, there is no dramatic reconciliation, only small moments of connection that briefly overcome their alienation. The most powerful occurs not in any memorial space but on a Warsaw hotel rooftop, where the cousins smoke weed under the night sky.

Elevated above the weight of history below, they find a temporary space for authentic revelation. As they pass a joint back and forth, their conversation moves through reminiscence and regret until reaching a raw emotional truth – David finally admitting that after Benji's suicide attempt, he simply couldn't bear the thought of losing this brilliant, difficult pseudo-brother.

It's a recognition that sometimes absence stems from an excess of care we cannot express.

Psalms for the Fractured

These films resonate deeply with my own experience of the divine.

I’ve always had an ambivalence to the “rules to run the minutiae of your life”, pedantic form of Judaic observance.

I've settled on daily prayer as a means of deliberate mindfulness. I find it deeply comforting to take time each day to consider, praise and petition the god of Jacob. A god who's been with me since childhood - not some abstract concept, but a presence I've felt in moments of both joy and despair. I can't define this presence with theological precision, but I know it when I encounter it.

And while my personal experience may be ambiguous, the daily prayers of Psalms 146 and 147 are bracingly clear. They speak of a God who "executes justice for the oppressed" and "heals the brokenhearted" - not through miraculous intervention but through the actions of those who carry these words in their hearts.

They exhort us to:

"Put not your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no salvation. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish." - Psalm 146:3-4

These ancient words resonate across all three films, and are at the core of their portrayal of alienation and bondage.

Characters repeatedly place faith in human systems—science, law, property, surveillance—only to confront their fundamental insufficiency.

The warning of Psalm 146 becomes a central cinematic theme across both works, visualized through institutional failures and collapsing certainties.

DeMille shows us the glory of Egypt — its buildings, its treasure, its seductive luxury, but also the corruption and cruelty that lead Moses back to his people. The Pharaoh's gleaming architectural monuments and golden idols ultimately cannot protect him from divine judgment. His trust in princely power proves devastatingly ephemeral when confronted with authentic liberation.

The film's most shattering moment comes after the defeat of Pharoah’s army, and the death of Egypt's firstborn, and Yul Brynner's Rameses whispers in defeat, "His God... is God." It's a concession that echoes Psalm 146's warning about the impermanence of human power with devastating cinematic force.

Kieślowski creates images of institutional insufficiency—hospitals where healing is bureaucratic, courts where justice is procedural, schools where knowledge is rote. His camera finds the cracks in these systems—the moments where human need exceeds institutional capacity.

When legal proceedings fail to contain emotional realities, when technological certainty crumbles against human complexity, Kieślowski's visual language creates space for contemplating divine absence.

"The LORD builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds." - Psalm 147:2-3

When genuine connection does occur—those rare moments of grace in both works—they mirror the Psalm's promise of healing and gathering. Characters experience momentary alignment with divine presence not through religious ritual but through authentic human encounter.

These moments aren't sentimental but hard-won—emerging from conflict, misunderstanding, and failure rather than easy resolution.

Similarly, Eisenberg's visualization of healing occurs not in the expected spaces of memorial or monument but in profane locations—a hotel rooftop, a nightclub, a train station bench. His camera discovers moments of grace in these ordinary spaces, suggesting that divine presence emerges not in designated sacred zones but through authentic human encounter in seemingly mundane settings.

The Mechanics of Divine Presence

What elevates these works beyond moral tales into profound theological statements is their recognition that divine presence manifests through cinematic form itself. The medium becomes the message—each formal choice creating a visual grammar of divine revelation or hiddenness.

DeMille's approach is the most direct—divine presence appears through spectacular intervention. The burning bush speaks, the sea parts, the finger of God writes upon tablets of stone. Yet even in these moments of ostensible directness, DeMille's camera maintains a reverent distance. We never see God directly; we witness only the effects of divine action. The burning bush appears, but the voice emanates from off-screen (and it is Heston’s own) — present yet unseeable, a careful formal balance between revelation and mystery.

Kieślowski's silent witness figure—a man who appears briefly in each episode, observing critical moments without intervention—embodies a different paradox of divine presence. Initially appearing in the first episode as a man warming himself by a fire as events unfold nearby, he returns throughout the series, always watching, never speaking. His consistent presence across different stories suggests omniscience without omnipotence—divine attention without intervention.

Eisenberg, meanwhile, finds divine presence in the spaces between people—in the frame when two estranged cousins finally connect, in the momentary touch of hands, in the shared silence at Majdanek. His camera captures the moments when human connection briefly transcends historical trauma and personal alienation.

This visual approach creates a cinema that doesn't merely represent theological concepts but generates them through form. Each director's gaze becomes analogous to a different mode of divine attention—DeMille's as spectacular intervention, Kieślowski's as present but non-intervening witness, Eisenberg's as the connective tissue between isolated individuals

An Obligation of Ritual

Since 2013, we've kept a tradition of inscribing the names of everyone who joins us in the back of our Haggadah. As our family gathers around the seder table this year, these names have become a living record of presence and absence – each entry a testament to connection across time.

My father, who truly loved The Ten Commandments always led our seders. His presence, missed the past four years, appears prominently across the rest of the entries.

Running my fingers over his name, I feel his absence and the ongoing power of his presence. Memory itself becomes a form of renewal, a way of transcending time's linear experience.

The ritual itself – the telling of an ancient story of liberation – becomes not just commemoration but participation in ongoing creation. We don't simply remember Exodus; we reenact it, renew it, make it present again.

This is the lesson these films teach, and what Passover itself embodies: that divine presence manifests not just through spectacular intervention but through our continued gathering, our persistent telling, our refusal to surrender to whatever man made affliction binds us.

As we reflect on Exodus this Passover – its liberation and its commandments – these films have helped deepen my connection to its ancient story.

DeMille gives us the spectacle, the grandeur of divine liberation in Technicolor certainty. Kieślowski offers us the commandments not as tablets from on high but as principles worked out in everyday human struggle. Eisenberg shows us what inherited memory looks like when we've forgotten why it matters.

These films, in their different ways, remind us that Exodus isn't an ancient event but today's challenge. Liberation demands both the spectacular and the intimate – Moses' outstretched arms at the sea and two cousins sharing a joint on a Warsaw rooftop.

Divine presence arrives not only in thunder and flame, but in the moments we truly see each other.

Where to Watch

The Ten Commandments (1956)

• PHYSICAL MEDIA: Available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD from Paramount Pictures

• BROADCAST: Traditionally airs annually on ABC during the Passover/Easter season

Dekalog (1989)

• PHYSICAL MEDIA: Complete Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD set (includes both feature film versions of episodes 5 and 6)

• SPECIALTY STREAMING: Available on Eastern European Movies with English subtitles

• INTERNATIONAL OPTION: Available on MUBI in select countries

A Real Pain (2024)

• STREAMING: Available with subscription on Hulu and Disney+ (with Hulu bundle)

I can’t fully explain it. It’s not escapism. You don’t escape into their madcap world any more than you escape into a fire alarm. But it is a reminder that the world’s absurdity isn’t unprecedented, and should absolutely not be met with grave solemnity.

Earlier this week — with the ongoing bombing of Tehran, the Strait of Hormuz essentially closed, Americans scrambling to evacuate the Middle East, oil prices surging, and the news delivering its nightly buffet of horrors — I sat down with my ten-year-old son and put on Duck Soup (1933).

He loved it.

As always, the Marx Brothers are dialed into the sensibilities of your average ten-year-old boy. He is not, I should note, into this movie for the political commentary. So he loves Harpo’s scissors. His horns. He loves Groucho’s zingers even when he doesn’t fully get them because anyone can see that Groucho is a force of chaos. By the end, he was singing along with “We’re Going to War” and hysterically laughing at their ridiculous faux-minstrel show.

Because it IS hysterical. All of it. The lemonade stand. The mirror scene. Chico selling peanuts while the state crumbles. Freedonia marching into battle because Groucho’s Rufus T. Firefly got insulted at a garden party.

My kid was rolling.

And so was I. Because the Marx Brothers said all there is to say about politics, war and the elite in 1933. Other than Rules of the Game (1939), no other film quite grasps the absurdity of a descent into darkness.

And with all due respect to Jean Renoir — this has better gags.

So where’s our Duck Soup?

Duck Soup is the anarchist demolition of political order and my pick for the best political comedy of all time. The Marx Brothers were four sons of Jewish immigrants from the Upper East Side who looked at the rise of fascism, the collapse of the global economy, and the parade of nationalist strongmen promising to make their countries great again and never, ever broke character. There’s no pivot to sincerity. No Oscar-bait, “socially aware” monologue.

Just pure and honest chaos as the only authentic response to a world losing its goddamn mind.

I’m sure people could make the case that there were funnier people than the Marx Brothers. But I wouldn’t want to hang around them.

What distinguishes their comedy is its precision. Beneath the apparent mayhem lies meticulous craft — Groucho’s wordplay, Harpo’s physical comedy, Chico’s con-artist logic all operate as a coordinated assault on elite, bourgeois pretensions. They represented the kind of ethnic outsiders unwelcome in “proper society.”

Duck Soup takes that class warfare and aims it at the state itself. Rufus T. Firefly IS the strongman — appointed dictator of Freedonia by a wealthy widow because he flatters her. He governs by insult, declares war over a personal slight, and leads his nation into catastrophe while never once dropping the wisecrack.

The country follows him anyway.

Every authoritarian leader in history has depended on the population taking the project of national greatness seriously. Duck Soup takes the project of nationalism and careless warmongering to its logical conclusion. The world ends, but the gag continues.

There is only the joke — and the terrifying realization that the joke is all there ever was.

Everyone Has Their Reasons

Six years later, Jean Renoir made the mirror image. And except for when it was released, Rules of the Game has never been more relevant than right now.

Where the Marx Brothers demolish order through anarchic energy, Renoir reveals an order already dead on its feet.

Rules of the Game unfolds at a weekend hunting party where the French ruling class, consumed by petty affairs, hollow rituals, the mechanical performance of social position — drifts toward catastrophe.

The Marquis de la Chesnaye proudly displays elaborate mechanical music boxes while his marriage crumbles and his servants plot. These are people performing civilization rather than practicing it — going through the motions of social grace while the human connections underneath have rotted completely. We see all the trappings of the pre-War bourgeois order, hollowed out by decadence, rationalizations and boredom.

They are ridiculous and absurd, and yet the individualist creed each character embraces would hardly be out of place in a modern article about Looksmaxxing, or inceldom, or “sexual market value” that details the loneliness and decay plaguing our own modern society.

“Everyone has their reasons.”

As the film progresses, the hunting party slaughters rabbits with industrialized efficiency. Renoir is showing you exactly what’s about to happen to Europe. The camera lingers on the animals’ twitching bodies. It’s one of the only moments in the film where the comedy completely drops away — because Renoir needs you to see what mechanized killing actually looks like before the rest of the world finds out.

And then comes the ending.

Octave’s friend André Jurieux — a heroic aviator, a genuine man of feeling in a world of performed emotion — is shot dead by a jealous gamekeeper who mistakes him for someone else. An accident born of the same farcical chaos of mistaken identities and bedroom intrigues that’s driven the whole weekend. The comedy kills someone. And nobody stops.

The Marquis steps onto the terrace and addresses his guests. A regrettable accident, he explains. A deplorable accident. These things happen. The guests nod. They accept it. They go back inside. The weekend will continue. The rules of the game — the social contract that allows the powerful to manage their affairs without consequence — have absorbed the death and moved on.

“Everyone has their reasons.”

In context, it’s devastating. The jealous gamekeeper has his reasons. The cheating husband has his reasons. The collaborationist government that would surrender France within a year had its reasons. The bourgeois ruling class’s infinite capacity to explain away anything — including its own destruction — as reasonable.

It is an all too familiar feeling.

The audience at the 1939 premiere knew it too — they were so outraged by seeing themselves in Renoir’s mirror that some reportedly tried to set the theater on fire. The French government banned the film as “demoralizing.” Within a year, that same government would surrender to Hitler and collaborate with the occupation.

A mechanical music box performing its little tune while the world around it burns.

The Courage to be Absurd

As we head towards the Oscars, several of the most politically engaged American films are rightly being celebrated for exploring our own society’s decadence. One Battle After Another, Eddington, and Marty Supreme all ask some version of the same question — what is wrong with the American dream? Why does everyone perform their politics instead of living them? Was it all myth, or are we in some sort of terminal and absurd decline?

These are brilliant films. I love them. I’ve written about them at length. But ultimately not one of them has the courage of a Renoir or a Groucho.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another certainly has comic energy, absurdist set pieces, the genre-hopping madness of a filmmaker working without a net. But he can’t let the joke be the ending. His heroes have to choose family over ideology. The revolution has to resolve into the daily act of staying.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is a film without heroes that refuses to take sides politically because it understands that our crack-up is not political, but personal and psychological.

Every character is performing. And their performances serve powers that profit from division. The data center being built outside town advances its agenda regardless of who’s in charge. While the town tears itself apart, algorithmic capitalism quietly advances. That is Aster’s masterstroke — darkly funny in the way Kafka is funny. But he frames it as horror. But unlike the Marx Brothers who found absurd humor in everything, the data-center’s ribbon-cutting isn’t a classic punchline, but more of a nightmare.

And then there’s Marty Supreme — the closest thing 2025 produced to the manic energy of the Marxes. Josh Safdie understands something essential about the American hustle: it’s not a system you can game. In an age of rising anti-semitism, putting the very specific Jewish culture and struggle at the center of the American dream — and showing its limitations — might actually be brave filmmaking. But even Safdie has to land on meaning, with a fully sentimental, and dare I say it, classic Hollywood happy ending.

Courage, Not Distance

The Marx Brothers and Renoir were closer to the fire than any American filmmaker working today. The Marx Brothers were sons of Jewish immigrants in a country where like now, antisemitism wasn’t subtle — where quotas kept Jews out of universities, where Father Coughlin reached thirty million listeners preaching hatred. Renoir made Rules of the Game months before the Nazi invasion and had his film banned by the very government that would soon collaborate with the occupiers.

The Marx Brothers recognized that solemnity in the face of these horrors was itself a form of surrender. The strongman WANTS you to take him seriously. The machinery of authoritarian power depends on everyone agreeing that this is all very grave and important and deserving of careful analysis.

Duck Soup says: No. It’s a joke. A terrible, dangerous joke being played on the entire world. And the only proper response to a joke is to laugh at it.

Even our best filmmakers are too careful for that now. Too aware that every frame will be parsed and discourse-ified within hours of release. They make brilliant films about the absurdity of American life but they can’t quite surrender to absurdity itself.

But my son — singing along with “We’re Going to War” while the real one plays out on the other screens in the house — he understands absurdity instinctively.

I worry it will be a skill he’ll rely on more and more in this world.

Ingmar Bergman is a filmmaker of faith, psychology, and the Swedish countryside, but his work resonates so strongly because he is the great elegist of the 19th century bourgeois world. In many ways, his entire cinema is a mourning rite for the world and the values that the 20th century destroyed.

I came to this understanding over the course of a winter spent inside the Ingmar Bergman Criterion Box Set — 37 films, programmed thematically rather than chronologically, watched as part of a Film at Lincoln Center Discord watch-along where a group of cinephiles committed to the complete filmography together. From Crisis (1946), Bergman’s rough-hewn debut, to Saraband (2003), his devastating farewell. The early melodramas and the Faith Trilogy and the Fårö island period and the marriage films and the late chamber works.

I subsumed myself in deep Scandinavian winters, long close-ups, psychological explorations, and the incredible sweater fits that define much of Bergman’s work. By the time I had finished Cries and Whispers — somewhere in mid-January — I kept thinking of how this film in particular was a beautiful elegy for an era, now so far from memory it might as well be myth.

As Bergman chronicled time over again — the 19th century European bourgeois let their pain be perfumed and ornamented until it rotted away.

The Documents of Decadence

Bergman is a late addition to the literature that mourns the 19th century bourgeois world. Thomas Mann in Lübeck. Joseph Roth in Vienna and Galicia. Stefan Zweig in Vienna, writing from Brazilian exile. Anton Chekhov in Moscow and the Russian provinces. Strindberg in Stockholm. Ibsen in Norway. The tradition that produced this particular kind of elegy runs through Central Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia.

England and France had their aristocracies. Their great literature, from Austen to Flaubert, is organized around the struggle for or against the landed class — the drama of who gets to sit at the top table and what it costs to get there. In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennett gets her happily ever after when she ascends and becomes Mrs. Darcy.

But the German, Austrian, Swedish, and Russian traditions were organized around something different: families who built their identity on work, civic participation, cultural aspiration, and continuity across generations. An accumulated dignity of people who built something, and fought to pass it on.

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901) is one of the key templates. The book follows four generations of a North German merchant family. The Buddenbrooks lack title and estate, but their wealth and success offer significant merchant and civic pride across four generations. We watch as this family’s fortunes rise and fall with the ruthless efficiency of the capital markets.

The bourgeois project was always supposed to be about more than commerce. A promise that prosperity creates the conditions for love, beauty, and family. Mann describes the warm Christmases and parties at the Buddenbrooks’ Mengstrasse home in such excruciating detail because he needs you to feel what’s at stake before he shows you how it goes cold.

But at every decisive moment, the Buddenbrooks heirs choose the firm over the family, the marriage contract over the living woman, the continuation of the line over the actual children. Gold over love. The system over human connection. They are left desolate.

Joseph Roth's novel Radetzky March (1932) is the same diagnosis in imperial uniform. The Trottas are a Slovenian border family — peasants, basically — elevated to minor nobility after the grandfather saves the Emperor's life at the Battle of Solferino. That single act becomes the family's entire identity. Each generation moves further from the frontier.

More refined, more Viennese, more hollow. It's the immigrant story told as imperial tragedy — the grandfather who built something real, the son who maintained it through discipline, the grandson who inherited the name but not the purpose. Carl Joseph Trotta drifts through drawing rooms with nothing to prove and nothing to believe in. He can barely look at his grandfather's portrait without feeling like a fraud.

Mann and Roth were clearly influenced by one of the most important artists of the 19th century who saw this coming and said so, loudly. The brilliant, but incredibly flawed, and anti-Semitic Meister, Richard Wagner.1

The Ring Cycle — four operas composed across nearly three decades, from 1848 to 1876 — is nothing less than a prophecy of bourgeois self-destruction.

The story begins in the depths of the Rhine, where a dwarf named Alberich — ugly, lustful, rejected by the beautiful Rhinemaidens who guard a hoard of enchanted gold — makes a terrible choice. He renounces love forever in exchange for the power to forge the gold into a ring of absolute dominion.2 It’s the first transaction in the cycle, and it poisons everything that follows: power purchased at the price of love, the original sin of the entire mythology.

Wotan — king of the gods, or Odin if you prefer his more MCU-friendly moniker — has problems of his own. He’s commissioned two giants to build Valhalla, his fortress in the sky, and to pay them he’s promised Freia, the goddess of love and youth. It’s explicit: the father of the gods trades love for the system — for gold, for order, for the institution. Without Freia, the gods begin to age. The apples of immortality wither. Wotan scrambles to steal Alberich’s ring as alternative payment, compounding one loveless bargain with another. He gets his fortress.

The entire four-opera cycle — roughly fifteen hours of music, spanning the creation of the world to its destruction — is the working-out of those original transactions. Brünnhilde, Wotan’s warrior daughter — punished for choosing love over duty — finally returns the ring to the Rhine and burns Valhalla to the ground. The world ends in fire because the gods built their house on a foundation of lovelessness.

.

Gustav Mahler heard it too. His Second Symphony opens with a funeral march — the death of the hero, the Romantic project crushed under its own weight — written in Vienna in the 1890s. His question: after the hero dies, after the warmth goes out, is there resurrection? His answer, like Bergman’s, is yes. But only through surrender.

August 1914.

An earthquake in civilization so large, we feel its aftershocks daily. The trenches were the final and most essential command of a culture that prioritized the firm over the family, duty over love, the system over the person.

Seen with over a century of perspective, it is clear that the trenches weren’t an interruption of the 19th century world. Reading Mann and Roth, listening to Wagner and Mahler make clear they were its logical conclusion, given their society’s abandonment of liberal and romantic values for an ornamented decadence.

Ingmar Bergman was born in 1918, amidst the wreckage. He grew up in a Swedish pastor’s household — strict, Pietist, emotionally repressed, culturally serious — surrounded by the aesthetics of a world that had just destroyed itself. He came of age reading Mann and Roth, attending performances of Strindberg and Ibsen, watching his country stand at the edge of a catastrophe it had narrowly avoided. When he picked up a camera, he was already asking the question these artists had all been asking. Why did it choose suicide — and what, if anything, could be saved?

The Buddenbrooks-Ekdahl Connection

Wotan’s bargain — love for power, Freia for Valhalla, feeling for system — is the sin that powers the Ring cycle. The god who was supposed to represent order and civilization traded the one thing that gives civilization meaning in order to build the institution that protects it. It’s circular, self-defeating, and absolutely recognizable.

Every Buddenbrook heir makes that trade. Every Trotta makes it. Every patriarch who chose the firm or the duty or the obligation over the living warmth of his family makes Wotan’s bargain and pays Wotan’s price.

Fanny and Alexander is Bergman’s answer to the Ring Cycle and very explicitly references the Buddenbrooks. His final theatrical film was his most explicit statement about what destroyed the European bourgeois and what must be saved from their lost culture.

The Ekdahl family: theatrical rather than mercantile, warm and sensual and chaotic, presiding over a large Swedish household at the turn of the 20th century. Oscar Ekdahl, the patriarch, collapses mid-performance and dies. His widow remarries a bishop — cold, ascetic, punitive, a man who has made Wotan’s bargain so completely that he cannot understand why anyone would want anything else. The film becomes a story of children fighting to preserve warmth against the encroachment of something dead and ideological.

This is the Buddenbrooks plot in Swedish dialogue. But Bergman refuses Mann’s ending. Mann watches little Hanno exhaust the family line and concludes with extinction. The Romantic project dies because the bourgeoisie couldn’t stop choosing the firm over the child, the system over love, the coldness over the warmth they claimed to value.

Bergman counters with Gustav Ekdahl.

Gustav Ekdahl, Oscar’s brother — hedonist, impresario, lover of life, a man who has conspicuously declined to make Wotan’s bargain — gives a toast at the film’s conclusion that has become a kind of mantra for everyone who has watched it:

“We Ekdahls have not come into the world to see through it. We are here to live in it. To dream. To take pleasure. To feel a bit.”

Gustav is the Buddenbrook who looked at the firm and said: no. Not because he’s lazy or irresponsible but because he understands, bone-deep, what the firm is for. The warmth is the point. The beauty is the point. The pleasure and the family and the smell of a warm kitchen — these are not the reward for getting the system right. These are the system. Everything else is scaffolding.

That toast is Bergman’s answer to Wagner. In Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde burns Valhalla because the system built on lovelessness cannot be reformed — she returns the cursed ring to the Rhine and lets the whole edifice come down. Gustav insists the system doesn’t have to be built on lovelessness in the first place.

The elegy doesn’t have to conclude with immolation. It can conclude with a toast. With the family surviving. With the choice, made consciously and daily, to feel a bit.

Bergman’s Cinematic Search for the 19th Century

Bergman’s films remind me of Picasso’s paintings. There are defined periods, consistent themes, and a prolific output across multiple generations. Picasso had his cubism, but he could also paint very standard portraits that were just a bit more pointed or complicated than his peers. Bergman’s first decade as a filmmaker works the same way — an artist circling his subject before he has language for it. The films are uneven — some are minor, a few are failures — but they share a preoccupation that becomes clearer in retrospect: the texture of domestic life under pressure. The warmth that leaks out of rooms. The look on a face when it realizes something is ending.

Even in his debut, Crisis (1946), Bergman reveals his hand. It’s Swedish Noir — a rough, visually striking melodrama that owes much to Renoir’s La Chienne and Lang’s Scarlet Street, but with far more family-centered pathos than those darker films. That first-film connection to Renoir is worth noting. It’s a lineage that will matter.

He starts with the visual vocabulary of the world he’s mourning. His early films are full of 19th century interiors — the kind Roth was hankering for. Heavy furniture. Long dining tables. Windows onto gardens that belong to another era. Even when the films are set in contemporary Sweden, they feel haunted by an earlier century’s arrangements.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) is where the love affair with that world becomes explicit. Every time I watch this film I want to move to Sweden in the 19th century. That’s the trap Bergman sets — he makes the lost world so charming, so full of erotic comedy and summer light, that you fall into it completely before you feel the melancholy underneath.

He learned the maneuver from Renoir’s Rules of the Game, yes. But Renoir was a sociologist examining his own class. Bergman is an elegist grieving something already gone. A Lesson in Love (1954), made the year before, reveals this impulse in embryonic form — Bergman attempting 1930s screwball comedy with all the standard ruinations about God and death, and producing what would become an early sketch for Johan and Marianne, the couple who would haunt him for decades.

Wild Strawberries (1957) offers another exploration of bourgeois values. Professor Isak Borg is the Buddenbrooks plot compressed into a single life: a man who converted his inherited warmth into professional distinction, who chose dignity over love, who built a monument and lost the thing it was supposed to protect. He made Wotan’s bargain quietly, over decades, one small choice at a time.

Driving across Sweden on the day of his honorary degree, revisiting his failures through dream and memory, he’s the last Buddenbrook — the generation that intellectualized everything and felt almost nothing.

The Faith Trilogy and the Fascist Temptation

Bergman was seduced by Hitler as a teenager. This is documented — he writes about it in The Magic Lantern, his autobiography. The German youth camps, the rallies, the sense that here was a movement that would restore order and meaning and beauty to a world coming apart. He later described it as one of the great shames of his life.

The fascist temptation, for someone with Bergman’s sensibility, was the promise of restoration — the 19th century world brought back by force and purity rather than earned through love. For a young Swedish pastor’s son surrounded by the aesthetics of the lost century, the appeal was real and terrible. But restoration through force is still the same trade — warmth sacrificed for power, Freia surrendered once more, this time at the barrel of a gun. The 19th century couldn’t be commanded back into existence. It could only be mourned and, possibly, salvaged.

The Magician (1958), made between the early comedies and the Faith Trilogy, is Bergman’s most explicit meditation on this very problem — the artist as conjurer, the showman who promises to restore wonder through performance and trickery. It’s an incredible magic trick of a film which keeps you guessing as to what it actually is.

The question it poses is whether the illusion of meaning is the same as meaning itself, and whether the artist’s capacity to enchant is salvation or deception. Bergman leaves the answer suspended, which is the honest move.

Bergman’s Faith Trilogy is a theological accounting for the same crisis. If God is silent — if the 19th century’s faith in a providential order was a delusion — then what’s left?

Through a Glass Darkly (1961) opens the inquiry on Fårö island, where Harriet Andersson’s Karin — a creature of light and beauty and madness and cruelty, caught between two worlds — experiences something that might be divine revelation or might be psychotic break. The distant, disturbed father watches and takes notes for his novel. Bergman’s attempt to offer hope at the end is tough to swallow, but he insists: the lord created the light and the darkness, and each day creation is renewed.

Winter Light (1963) is the trilogy’s masterpiece and one of Bergman’s own favorites. A pastor’s crisis of faith at boiling point. He cannot believe, cannot save, cannot love. Everyone in this film is tempted with absolute despair.

And yet Bergman refuses to let hope die. His faithless pastor chooses to persevere and connect, rather than let the lights go out. The choice to remain alive — to try to connect and serve despite feeling forsaken — is its loud and ringing answer to the purported silence of God.

Shame and the Thin Veneer

Shame (1968) is the political argument, stripped to the bone.

Jan and Eva Rosenberg are musicians — artists, educated people, the precise inheritors of the bourgeois world Bergman has been mourning. They live on an island, trying to maintain a life of domestic warmth while a civil war rages off-screen. They believe their cultivation, their sensitivity, their love of beauty, will protect them.

The war finds them anyway.

And what the film shows, inexorably, is the Buddenbrooks process accelerated to months rather than generations. Jan becomes a collaborator. Eva becomes capable of murder. The thin veneer of civilization is peeled away, one strip of varnish after the other.

Liv Ullmann’s Eva says toward the end: “Sometimes it feels as if I’m being forced to live in someone else’s nightmare. When will they wake up and feel shame for what they’ve done?”

Bergman is so deeply attuned to true human motivations that the script feels incredibly real. Shame takes his deep understanding of human darkness and gives it political context. Even the educated, cultivated, beautiful people lose their humanity.

Shame is how Wotan’s bargain ends, when the fire finally comes.

The Bourgeois Mirror

Part of what makes Bergman so available to American audiences — more available, I’d argue, than Renoir or Godard or Antonioni — is that his tradition is our tradition. The Central European and Scandinavian elegy for the bourgeois world is the story of people like us: merchant families, professional families, people who built their dignity through work and civic life and cultural aspiration and the hope that the next generation would do more with it than they did. The Buddenbrooks could easily be outer borough strivers made good.

When Bergman films the Ekdahl household — its warmth, its theatricality, its absolute conviction that beauty and pleasure and family ritual are how human beings justify their existence — he’s filming something that resonates in an American heart in a way that has nothing to do with Sweden or the 19th century.

The American bourgeoisie is easily recognizable in his cinema. Bergman is telling us what happened to the last people who had what we have and kept making Wotan’s bargain until there was nothing left to burn.

Bergman is essential viewing for this moment precisely because he already lived through it — through the fascist temptation, the war, the theological silence, the slow erosion of everything he was born into — and emerged with something like an answer. An insistence on certain things: family, ritual, beauty, love, the presence of the dead among the living, and a responsibility to them both.

I’ve spent much of this miserable winter traversing the 19th century to the 21st, and Gustav Ekdahl’s toast has become my mantra. If in fact the mad dogs and demons are loose once more, then it is even more important for us to embrace art and beauty and compassion.

Therefore let us be kind.

———

Doug Hesney is the Executive Director of the Cognitive Film Society and the founding editor of Cognitive Frames.

On Long Island’s South Shore, construction on the Malverne Cinema began before World War II, the brainchild of B.S. Moss Theatres, one of the great early New York exhibition chains. When wartime halted building supplies, a skeleton of steel girders stood in the center of the village for years — probably serving, as Cinema Treasures notes, as monkey bars for the local kids. The building waited. The village waited. When the theater finally opened on May 26, 1947, the first film it screened was Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

The Malverne Cinema opened with a story about how places hold the lives of the people who pass through them. Seventy-eight years later, that is exactly the argument being made for its survival.

I visited the Malverne with my son on Martin Luther King Day. It was freezing. The building sits at 350 Hempstead Avenue, right on the main drag in the middle of town, just off the LIRR — an anchor that can be one again.

Nick gave us a brief tour as the renovations were really getting started. Inside, it was grungy — down to studs and exposed wiring, the wall between theaters three and four freshly demolished, electrical cables hanging from the ceiling. But you could see it.

You could see the massive potential for an independent community theater with room for a bar, live events, repertory screenings, all of it, steps from the train. The cement stage that had been hidden behind two movie screens for decades was finally visible. My son looked up at it and I thought: this is what it looks like before the curtain goes up.

Three weeks later, we spoke over Zoom, and the progress was already visible.

For decades, the Stampfel family operated the Malverne with the kind of care that has no corporate equivalent. Anne and Henry Stampfel — she started as a candy salesperson, he as a projectionist, they met at a theater in Oceanside — expanded the single 700-seat house to five screens and built a reputation for curating independent, foreign, and documentary films that drew cinephiles from across Long Island. “It would be sold out all weekend Thursday through Sunday,” their daughter Joanna Volpe told the Herald. “They trusted it would be good because they knew films would be carefully curated.”

On September 29, 2024, the Malverne went dark. The HVAC had failed, the landlord wouldn’t cover repairs, post-pandemic attendance never recovered. Malverne’s chief of police, John Aresta — whom Anne Stampfel had hired as an usher in 1981 — stood in the lobby one last time. It felt, by all accounts, like a shiva call.

When we first wrote about what happened next, we called it “The Malverne Miracle.” That language still holds.

Nick Hudson has deep family roots in Malverne. His grandfather grew up down the block on Malverne Avenue; his great-grandfather lived in Lynbrook and walked to the cinema each day for his job as ticket taker. Hudson runs E2AC, a 501(c)(3) that connects filmmakers and funders to produce social impact entertainment — now supporting over 300 projects, with an emphasis on social impact documentaries. He’d spent over a decade watching what happens to independent theaters after they close. They become retail. They become residential. They become anything except what the community needs.

He connected with Maria Dente, a 13-year special education teacher and founder of Dente’s Dreamers, a Lynbrook-based nonprofit that creates opportunities for people with disabilities across every aspect of theatrical production. She’d been looking for a permanent home. The Malverne had a cement stage behind those movie screens that hadn’t seen light in decades.

On May 29, 2025, more than 200 people packed the patio at Connolly Station for a community information session. They’ve raised over $100,000 toward a $500,000 goal. On New Year’s Eve 2025, Hudson and Dente signed the lease. They picked up the keys on January 2nd.

The timing of our conversation was perfect. Days before, Kristen Stewart confirmed she’d purchased the Highland Theatre in Los Angeles — a 1925 movie palace that went dark in 2024. “Buying this theater feels a little desperate in, like, the most beautiful way,” she said. She joins Tarantino at the New Beverly and the Vista, and a coalition led by Jason Reitman that saved Westwood’s Village Theatre.

Something is happening. But here is what strikes me about this moment: the story of independent exhibition in 2026 is not the story of what we have lost. It is the story of what is being built in its place — often by people with no Hollywood millions, no Architectural Digest photo shoots. It is the story of softball dads hauling broken chairs out of gutted screening rooms on Long Island.

Here’s what Nick and Maria told me about the ongoing Miracle in Malverne.

When I saw the space on MLK Day, you were ripping things apart and pulling seats out. What’s the progress since then?

MARIA: Theater Five — the Independence screening room — is officially down to bare bones. Brick wall, cinder block walls, getting ready to become our coffee shop and bar area. Theaters One and Two are still the same; they’ll get a cleaning and a refresh to become our classics lounge and our independent film lounge. But the most exciting part is theaters three and four. The wall is officially down. The stage is exposed. The seats are out. We’re getting the electrical fixed in the ceiling, the HVAC systems are going in. It’s pretty awesome to see that stage finally out from behind those two screens, getting ready to be renovated and have the stars shining on it.

Nick, how are you thinking about programming? The traditional tension in exhibition is always core audience versus wider reach — do you cater to cinephiles or cast a wider net?

NICK: It’s a great question, and honestly, it’s the same thing any business struggles with. In a normal cinema, it’s really hard to negotiate that tension because you have a limited number of screens, not a lot of space, and you’re in competition with other groups. But I think the way we’re building this one, you really can do both. When you think about it as a twin cinema that sits inside a larger event space, it gives you the opportunity to say, okay, if we have a really cool indie coming out that we know is going to draw, let’s flex it out to the back room and have 400 seats. A normal setting can’t do that.

And structuring it as a nonprofit where the people who helped found it don’t have a specific personal financial interest — it really does give us the chance to say, what do you want to see? Because of the history of the cinema, it’s always going to have a really strong indie and foreign streak. That’ll never go away. But I think it’ll be cool to see how many people we can drag into that who never would have gone there in the past other than for a birthday party.

Maria, you’re one of the driving forces behind uncovering that stage. What’s your vision for how live performance works alongside cinema?

MARIA: The fact that we were able to take the stage out and bring it back — that’s probably my personal favorite part about the cinema so far. Dente’s Dreamers will be able to do their productions there, but also teach the community of those with disabilities the ins and outs of the theater. Whether it’s being stage crew, whether it’s being a ticket taker, publicity, concessions, usher — there really are so many phenomenal life experiences to be had in a theater on a regular day. Whether your disability is visible or not, when you walk in there, you are there to be part of a show. You are there for your job. You are there for all these really cool and important things.

I was at the one-act plays at Hewlett High School recently — my daughter’s very involved in theater there — and I was thinking about community theater groups that might want to rent the space.

MARIA: That’s so important. When I was teaching in the city, we only got one day to do a show. A gymatorium. The seats were just set up for our one day. It’s really not fair. They should get their whole weekend. They should get the matinee. I just directed the life skills musical at New Hyde Park Memorial High School on Friday. Just being able to do it twice was awesome. Being able to rent out this space, have your practices, have your performances more than one night — I think that alone is going to remind people just how important live theater is. We deserve more than one night.

Let’s talk about the bar and café space. The Metrograph in the city has something similar. Are you thinking of this as a broader community gathering space or more of a lobby?

NICK: There’s the concession stand, which was already there — that’ll be a little more traditional, but with community-specific offerings. There’s a mom in town who has something called Rare Treats — her child is allergic to a lot of different ingredients, so she started making them and they’re delicious. We want to sell stuff like that. If we have members-only screenings in conjunction with the film society, we can bring in outside food. It doesn’t just have to be the typical concession stand stuff.

For the front part — it’ll probably lean more toward bar, especially in the beginning. The idea that’s come up a lot is to make it members-only. Because that’s so important to independent cinemas — driving membership and having it be affordable. The cinema has been there since 1947. It’d be really cool if there was a $19.47 recurring donation every month.

I dig that so much.

NICK: And if it does become the membership space, it’ll still be accessible for rentals. Birthday parties, private events — that’s another way to drive revenue, but also open it up to people who are like, where is this? I didn’t know this was here. We’re getting a lot of that because it’s right on Hempstead Avenue.

What are you most excited about?

MARIA: The fact that we’ve received such awesome support from the entire community from the very beginning. Both Nick and I found out about this because of local community members who loved the theater so much and were very sad that it was closing. And I don’t just mean the community of Malverne and Lynbrook. I mean the film societies. I mean the theater friends. Everyone, and especially the disabled population.

Once we did that first walk-in with the keys, we realized something special was happening. It’s for real.

That day we went to turn the key, my husband was videotaping and a gentleman just happened to be walking on the street. He said, “Are you the ones that are taking over the theater?” And we said yeah. He told us this wonderful story. His name was Rob. He used to be a supervisor custodian in a building close by. He was telling us he took his wife there on their first date and remembered the movie.

We’re really excited to have more community members walk through that door and tell us their story, because we get to keep it going for them.

There is a precedent for what Hudson and Dente are attempting. The Bedford Playhouse in Westchester — also opened in 1947, also went dark, also rescued by a grassroots nonprofit — raised $2.5 million in three months, attracted a Clive Davis endowment, and is now one of the most successful nonprofit cinemas in the metro area: three screens with Dolby Atmos, a café, a bar, Broadway performers on the lawn. The model works. It required what cannot be purchased: a community that shows up.

In Malverne, they showed up. Two hundred people on a Thursday night. Marion Dill told the village board: “I was born in this town just about the time when the movie theater opened.” The Stampfels left behind quality projection equipment. Mayor Sullivan told the board the goal was not to “put a coat of paint, throw the lights back on and go back to a business plan that wasn’t really working.” Hudson told the Herald something that sticks with me: “We’ll probably be the first ones to do this. And if all goes well, we will get copied by a lot of places around the country, which adds to the importance that we do this right.”

The steel girders stood in the center of the village through the war, waiting to become something. They became a theater. The theater stood dark through a pandemic and an economic collapse, waiting to become something again. The stage is exposed. The HVAC is going in. There is a $19.47 membership that honors 1947. A documentary crew is filming.

And Rob, a custodian from a building close by, walked up to the new operators on the street and told them about the night he brought his wife there on their first date.

The miracle continues.

The Cognitive Film Society is planning a collaboration with the Malverne Cinema. When the cinema opens in full, we intend to help partner on repertory programming — bringing the kind of curated screenings and community events that have defined our work at the Gold Theater to a venue built for exactly this purpose.

Our Diane Keaton tribute on March 1st — screening Annie Hall at 1pm EST at the Gold Theater, Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library — will feature information about the Malverne restoration. Nick and Maria will join us that afternoon to discuss the restoration and the growing enthusiasm for cinema culture across Long Island.

We’re building film culture on Long Island together.

Support the Malverne Cinema restoration: malvernecinema.org

Donate — tax-deductible

Merch — pick up Malverne Cinema gear

Volunteer — they need skilled labor now and will need ushers, concession staff, and more when they open

Follow: @themalverne on Instagram

Join us March 1st for Diane Keaton at the Gold Theater, Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library. Free admission.

All photos courtesy of the Malverne Cinema & Art Center.

Chunk was the hero.

Rewatching The Goonies as an adult is a strange experience. When we were young, in the halcyon days of the 1980s, the world was a pretty different place, and that makes watching a movie like The Goonies now heavy with the weight of nostalgia2: kids on bikes, no screens other than an old school TV, booby traps, secret maps, a summer that seems to stretch on forever. The kind of freedom that doesn’t really exist anymore (for a lot of reasons). It’s a movie we remember as being about friendship, bravery, and the last gasp of childhood freedom before things change (in this case, the town was being bought by a bunch of rich jerks).

As a child, the heroes are obvious. Mikey’s belief keeps the group moving forward. Brand’s protectiveness gives them muscle and structure. Mouth’s fluency is Spanish. Data’s ingenuity supplies the tools.3 Andy and Stef bring courage and resolve. Each plays a recognizable role in the mythology of the quest.

But watching it as an adult, something else floats to the surface.

Chunk is the true hero of the film. And that matters more than it first appears.

Because beneath the pirate ships and chase scenes, The Goonies is telling a deeper story about outcasts, marginality, and how real change rarely comes from the center. It comes from the edges.

A Story About Outsiders

At its core, The Goonies is already a movie about kids on the margins. They’re working-class families in a town about to be erased by development. Their homes are being foreclosed on by moneyed interests that don’t give a single shit about what’s going to happen to them or where they’re going to go. Adults dismiss them because they’re kids. Institutions fail them. The future feels as though it’s on an inexorable march forward and worse, it doesn’t seem to include them.

The adventure itself is an act of resistance. A refusal to accept that erasure is final. A belief that there might still be another way out.

Remember: Goonies never say die.

But even within this band of outsiders, there are hierarchies. Even among the marginalized, there are degrees of belonging.

There are outcasts. And then there are outcasts among outcasts.

Chunk, on the Outside Looking In

Chunk’s position in the group is unmistakable. He’s the comic relief. The emotional one. The kid who cries, panics, lies badly, and feels everything too much. He’s physically different, socially awkward, and often the butt of the joke even among his friends. And so at the outset, Chunk seems as though he’ll be a side character, someone who rounds out the Breakfast Club-type stereotype in a group.

He’s not the leader. Not the athlete. Not the inventor. Not the romantic interest.

His role is humiliation-adjacent: the Truffle Shuffle, the exaggerated fear, the confessions played for laughs. And when the story really gets going, something telling happens.

They leave him behind.

Not out of cruelty. Not even consciously. They just… do.

Chunk is separated from the narrative center of the film and that separation becomes the whole point.

In stories, heroes at the center push forward. They overcome obstacles head on. They advance the plot through force, cleverness, or belief. But outcasts at the margins see sideways.4

Chunk’s removal from the group isn’t a failure of courage; it’s a narrative necessity. It’s what allows the film’s moral center to shift. While the others race ahead through tunnels and traps, Chunk is forced into stillness. Into vulnerability. Into proximity with someone else the story has hidden away.

This mirrors real life more than we often admit. Innovation rarely comes from the most comfortable seat. People who exist outside dominant systems are forced to develop different muscles: empathy, adaptability, unconventional alliance-building, HUMOR. Vulnerability becomes not a weakness, but a survival strategy.

Sloth, the Other Outcast

Sloth enters the story framed as a monster.5 But it doesn’t take long to see what he really is: abused, isolated, hidden away, treated as disposable by his own family. He’s an outcast even among villains.

Their similarities are striking. Chunk is rejected socially. Sloth is rejected physically. Both are defined by what makes others uncomfortable or what they don’t want to see.

And this is the moment The Goonies quietly reveals its brilliance: only Chunk is capable of seeing Sloth clearly, for who he is. Where others would see threat, Chunk sees loneliness. Where others would react with fear or dominance, Chunk reacts with recognition. Their bond isn’t strategic. It isn’t clever. It’s instinctive.

Two people who have spent their lives being told they don’t belong see each other immediately.

Chunk’s defining trait isn’t courage in the traditional sense. It isn’t intelligence. It isn’t even belief.

Chunk’s defining trait is radical empathy.

He doesn’t befriend Sloth to win. He doesn’t manipulate him to escape. He befriends him because he understands him. Because he sees himself reflected back. This reframes heroism entirely. The movie’s primary and advertised victories come from overcoming obstacles. Chunk’s victory comes from changing a person, and in doing so, changing the outcome of the entire story.

Not domination or cleverness or belief alone.

Connection.

How Chunk Saves the Day

Strip the plot down to its essentials and the truth becomes unavoidable: without Chunk, the Goonies fail. The villains aren’t defeated by traps alone. They aren’t undone by bravery or teamwork at the center of the group. They’re defeated because an outcast forms an alliance with another outcast. With someone no one else bothered to see.

Sloth’s choice to help isn’t coerced. Chunk doesn’t try to trick him. He earns his trust through understanding and authenticity. Sloth’s choice is relational. He gets Chunk.6

This is spoiler energy in the truest sense: not smashing the rules, but rewriting the game from the margins.

This pattern repeats everywhere, not just in movies.

In art, tech, politics, and culture, meaningful disruption almost always comes from people who never fully fit. Outsiders aren’t invested in preserving broken systems because those systems never worked for them in the first place. They notice what insiders normalize. They ask different questions. They form alliances that seem illogical until they work.

Outcasts are generally seen as a threat, not because they’re loud or violent, but because they see alternatives where others see inevitability. And that doesn’t just make them a danger to the status quo; it makes them extremely valuable to society at large.

Chunk is a natural extension of that lineage.

Why This Still Matters

We live in a culture that increasingly valorizes polish, confidence, and certainty. “Main character energy.”7Optimization. Personal branding. Protagonists who never doubt themselves for too long. We’re all the hero of our own story, but many people now seem to take that as a directive on how to behave, as opposed to a lived experience.

Chunk offers a counter-model.

He’s emotional. Afraid. Soft. He cries openly. He needs reassurance. He leads with compassion instead of dominance. All in the name of trying to relate to people.

In a world that sidelines softness, Chunk’s heroism feels quietly radical.

The Goonies endures because myths don’t just entertain us—they tell us what we value. And intentionally or not, this one suggests something profound.

That the kid who cries. The kid who’s left behind. The kid who makes friends in unlikely places.

That kid might be the most important one of all.

Chunk isn’t the hero despite being an outcast.

Chunk is the hero because he is one.

Where to Watch

THE GOONIES (1985) — Directed by Richard Donner

Physical Media: 4K UHD available from Warner Bros. The transfer is solid, though the film’s naturalistic 1980s cinematography doesn’t benefit from HDR as dramatically as more stylized fare.

Streaming: Available on HBO Max.

Note: Watch it with someone who hasn’t seen it. The generational transmission of this film is part of its cultural function.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me. - Holden Caulfield - The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

After “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” became the weepy 1949 Hollywood melodrama My Foolish Heart (an event he considered a massive betrayal) J.D. Salinger never allowed another film adaptation. Hollywood never stopped calling for The Catcher in the Rye. He never stopped refusing.

And yet Salinger’s fingerprints appear everywhere in American cinema—and beyond. His Glass family haunts Wes Anderson’s entire filmography. Wounded romantics influenced by his characters appear in films from Metropolitan to Magnolia. His alienated young men—Holden Caulfield’s spiritual descendants—populate the French New Wave and American auterist cinema from the 1970s to today.

The man who hated movies became one of Hollywood’s most influential and uncredited screenwriters. The paradox tells us something essential about both Salinger and the art form he rejected.

Salinger once occupied the highest pedestal of American literature. Today he's rarely discussed with the reverence I encountered in high school.

But I was inspired to revisit his work over the Christmas break. What did I find? With alienated young men decrying “phony” institutions, with romantic longing reasserting itself against algorithmic optimization, with a New Romantic counterculture emerging across cinema and music—Salinger demands reexamination.

His core questions—What do we owe our gifts? What do we owe each other? How do we maintain wonder in a world that only cares for optimization and materialism? — Are the questions of our time.

The Last Romantics

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs…

Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all.

- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

I was introduced to Salinger in high school as the godfather of cynicism. Holden Caulfield is still shorthand for every disaffected youth calling out adult hypocrisy. “Phony” entered the American vernacular as accusation, dismissal, teenage sneer.

But this misreads Holden entirely.

Holden and the Glass family aren’t rejecting the world because they’re too cool for it. They’re mourning it because they loved it too much and find it consistently unworthy and unfair. Re-reading Holden Caulfield at nearly (*gasp*) 50, I just want to put my arm around the kid and give him a sandwich.

The death of Holden’s beloved brother Allie has given him deep and early insight into the fundamental absurdity of modern life. He knows that the striving is meaningless. And yet he is told he must strive. Like his antecedent in Goethe’s proto-romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, Holden seeks the sublime and is confronted only with the ordinary and the vulgar—both in society and within himself.

That’s Romanticism with a capital R—the same impulse that drove Keats and Shelley, the Brontës and Beethoven. The belief that feeling deeply is both humanity’s highest capacity and its greatest vulnerability.

Salinger was part of this history directly. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, carried manuscript pages of The Catcher in the Rye through the European campaign, and was among the soldiers who liberated Kaufering IV, a Dachau subcamp. After checking himself into a psychiatric hospital in Nuremberg, he came home to an America that wanted to forget everything and move forward fast.

The post-war boom offered luxuries and opportunities unimaginable to previous generations. Levittown. Television. Old neighborhoods and identities to transcend. Who had time for deeper questions when there were markets to conquer?

Salinger’s work was a fly in that ointment. His characters—Holden Caulfield, the Glass family—were among the earliest to reckon with the alienation of a world centered on materialism and rapacious growth. These were the Romantic refugees. Stranded in an age that had no use for wonder.

And from Salinger’s refugees, the movies made icons.

Marlon Brando’s sneer in The Wild One. James Dean’s wounded confusion in Rebel Without a Cause. Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock floating in a swimming pool. These weren’t just performances—they were Holden Caulfield given a body, a motorcycle, a cigarette. Beyond Hollywood, the French New Wave directors who revolutionized cinema in the late 1950s understood what Salinger was doing: not celebrating disaffection but anatomizing the pain of romantics born into an unromantic age.

The loose-limbed alienation of Belmondo and Seberg walking the Champs-Élysées in Breathless. Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, frozen in that final frame of The 400 Blows, has nowhere to go—the same nowhere Holden faces when he asks where the ducks go in winter.

The archetype remains inexhaustible.

Seymour Supreme

Sybil said, "What happens to them?"
"What happens to who?"
"The bananafish."
"Oh, you mean after they eat so many bananas they can't get out of the banana hole?"
"Yes," said Sybil.
"Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die."
"Why?" asked Sybil.
"Well, they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease."

- A Perfect Day for Bananafish, by J.D. Salinger

Despite all the promise in the world, 31-year-old Seymour Glass puts a bullet in his head.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the opening story in Nine Stories, begins with Seymour’s wife Muriel on the phone with her mother, discussing whether Seymour is safe to be around. It ends with Seymour looking at sleeping Muriel and firing a bullet through his right temple.

In all subsequent Glass family stories, we never meet him alive again. He lives only in memory, and his suicide is the catalyzing event for everything written about the Glass family afterwards. Franny Glass’s spiritual breakdown, Zooey Glass’s rage at a world that destroyed his brother, Buddy Glass’s obsessive chronicling of his family’s—but really his brother’s—history. All of it is aftermath.

Seymour was the eldest, the wisest, the most spiritually attuned of the Glass children. A poet. A professor. A veteran who came home from the war and found he couldn’t breathe in the world that was waiting. We meet Seymour again in the memories of his siblings—and find that he was always an unusual empath. Someone who just knew what the people around him were thinking and feeling.

Seymour (and perhaps Salinger) surely suffered from PTSD, but his crisis—as laid out in Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction—was deeply spiritual. Seymour lacks the ability to reconcile all he has seen and will see. He is alienated from the mundane, despite a desperate desire to connect with it.

There is no sublime, there is no mundane, and for Seymour there is nothing.

Seventy-five years later, Josh Safdie gave us his mirror image.

Marty Mauser—brought to life in Timothée Chalamet’s electric performance in Safdie’s 2025 masterpiece Marty Supreme—is Seymour Glass’s doppelganger. Both are Jewish geniuses confronting the impossible promise of post-war America. Both are surrounded by people who cannot fathom the depth of their alienation. Both are traumatized by the gap between romantic ideals, modern materialism, and familial responsibilities.

Seymour retreats into silence and spiritual practice and eventual self-annihilation. Marty hustles. He plays every angle. He finds every edge, schemes his way through a world of fixers and marks and front men. “Hitler’s greatest nightmare,” he calls himself—a Jewish kid from nowhere who’ll secure his own particular piece of the American dream.

Safdie—himself a Jewish filmmaker working seventy-five years after Kaufering IV, in an America where Jewish success is no longer exceptional but expected—can imagine redemption because he inherits a different relationship to catastrophe. Seymour carried the camps in his body. Marty carries them in cultural memory, which is painful but survivable.

Both Seymour and Marty fail in their pursuit of happiness.

But Safdie offers his character something that Salinger couldn’t allow: a way through.

Marty Supreme allows redemption through human connection. The film lets you root for Marty’s hustle, lets you believe that talent and will can conquer the machinery of the world. Then it shows you the cost. Trophies can’t keep you warm. The system will grind you down regardless of your skill.

But Marty doesn’t die alone in a Japanese hotel room. He learns—barely, painfully—that the people who loved him before he was somebody will still be there after the world forgets his name. The dream is a myth is real is a dream—but in the end, all you have are the people who love you.

This is the evolution of the Salinger question across seventy-five years of American film. What happens to romantics in an unromantic age?

One answer appears in Marty Supreme itself—not in Chalamet’s performance but in the woman who orbits his rise and fall. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Kay Stone, a faded movie star. Her glamour calcified into something brittle. It’s a supporting role, but it rhymes with her most iconic one: another damaged woman surrounded by men who study her rather than see her.

A Glass Family Reunion

You’ve got a goddamn bug today—you know that? What the hell’s the matter with you anyway?"
Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I’m sorry. I’m awful," she said. "I’ve just felt so destructive all week. It’s awful. I’m horrible."
"Your letter didn’t sound so goddamn destructive."
Franny nodded solemnly. She was looking at a little warm blotch of sunshine, about the size of a poker chip, on the tablecloth. "I had to strain to write it," she said.

- Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger

Margot Tenenbaum—the adopted sister, the secret smoker, the playwright who “hadn’t written a word in years”—is Franny Glass in eyeliner and a fur coat. Wes Anderson barely hid his debt.

In a 2000 interview with Tod Lippy, conducted while writing the Tenenbaums screenplay, Anderson addressed the Glass family comparison directly: “The Glasses always seemed so sad. Sad and superior. And Buddhist. We don’t have that.”

That last distinction matters. Anderson’s revision of Salinger is theological—his Glasses survive. More than that: they reunite.

What Anderson understood—what makes Margot more than pastiche—is the specific wound Franny carries. In Salinger’s novella, Franny collapses in a restaurant clutching a small green book, repeating the Jesus Prayer while her boyfriend Lane drones about his academic paper. She can’t take it anymore. Not Lane specifically, but what Lane represents: a world of credential-seeking phonies who’ve mistaken cleverness for wisdom, who perform intelligence rather than feel anything.

Margot doesn’t collapse. She dissociates. She takes baths that last hours. She smokes in secret on the service elevator. She stares at nothing while her husband Raleigh—a neurologist who literally studies her—explains what he thinks she’s feeling.

Same wound, different armor. Both women surrounded by men who study them rather than see them.

Beyond Margot, the Glass family and the Tenenbaums are essentially the same family, separated by fifty years and a few tax brackets. Both are clans of child prodigies in upper Manhattan. Both produced early achievers—the Glass children on It’s a Wise Child, the Tenenbaum children with tennis championships and produced plays and business empires built on Dalmatian mice.

“Freaks,” Zooey calls himself and Franny. Seymour and Buddy raised them on the great religious texts, on poetry, on standards the modern world had abandoned. They were prepared for a world that no longer existed—if it ever had.

The Tenenbaum children face the same betrayal, secularized. Their early promise calcified into expectation, then disappointment, then dysfunction. Richie’s tennis career collapsed. Margot’s playwriting dried up. Chas’s business acumen curdled into paranoid overprotection. “Genius” becomes a prison for both families.

Even the homes rhyme. The Glass apartment in Franny and Zooey is practically a character—books stacked everywhere, the bathtub where Zooey reads while Franny has her breakdown in the next room, every surface holding something someone was reading or thinking about. It’s not decoration. It’s sedimentation. The accumulated intellectual life of a family that lived in ideas.

The Tenenbaum house operates the same way. The zebra wallpaper. Richie’s hawk, Mordecai. The board games and fencing equipment. Objects accrete like coral, marking obsessions and phases and abandonments. Both homes are monuments to interiority—museums of who these families used to be.

But Salinger never lets his family gather. We meet the Glass siblings separately, in isolated stories, always in the aftermath of Seymour’s death. Buddy writes about Seymour. Zooey argues with Franny through a bathroom door. The parents hover at the edges. There is no reunion, no reckoning, no scene where everyone sits in the same room and confronts what they’ve lost and who they’ve become.

Anderson gives the Tenenbaums exactly that. Royal’s false illness brings the scattered children home. The family that had splintered into private dysfunction reassembles under one roof—awkwardly, painfully, but together. They eat meals. They have it out. Chas finally screams at his father. Margot’s secrets surface. The estranged become the reconciled.

“I’ve had a rough year, Dad,” Chas admits through tears, finally letting Royal see him.

It’s the Glass family reunion Salinger never allowed

Salinger Inspired Cinema

“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.” - Buddy Glass

- Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger

Salinger’s specific works map onto specific films with uncanny precision—not as vague influence but as structural blueprints, character templates, stolen gestures that reveal how deeply his innovations shaped American and international cinema.

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” → Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

Salinger’s 1948 story and the third segment of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s triptych share a near-identical architecture: two women who shouldn’t be together find themselves in enclosed space, use the encounter to excavate grief over lost loves, and emerge transformed by confessions neither expected to make. It proves a far superior adaptation of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” than My Foolish Heart.

Eloise Wengler and her former college roommate Mary Jane spend a snowy Connecticut afternoon drinking highballs. What begins as gossip about old classmates gradually unearths Eloise’s profound grief over Walt Glass—her great love, killed absurdly in the war when a Japanese stove exploded while being packed. The story’s title references Walt’s tender nickname for Eloise’s twisted ankle: “Poor Uncle Wiggily.” By story’s end, drunk and devastated, Eloise holds her daughter Ramona’s glasses to her cheek and sobs while asking Mary Jane the story’s gutting final question: “I was a nice girl, wasn’t I?”

Hamaguchi’s “Once Again” inverts and deepens this structure. Set in a near-future where a computer virus has forced the world offline, the segment follows Natsuko, an IT engineer who attends her twenty-year high school reunion hoping to reconnect with her first love—a woman named Mika who never appears. The next day at the train station, Natsuko spots a woman on the escalator she believes to be the person she’s been seeking. The woman recognizes her too and invites her home.

They spend the afternoon catching up, reminiscing about the past. Then the devastating reveal: when Natsuko begins to let heavy feelings off her chest, the other woman admits she’s forgotten Natsuko’s name. They realize they’ve mistaken each other for former classmates—they didn’t even attend the same school. A case of double mistaken identity.

But instead of parting in embarrassment, they continue. Natsuko reveals the person she mistook this stranger for was her first love, that they broke up in college, that she’s carried the loss for twenty years. The two women begin to role-play as the people they thought each other was—essentially performing therapy for one another, allowing both to achieve closure on relationships left unresolved for decades.

The parallels operate at multiple levels. Both stories trap women in domestic space—Eloise’s Connecticut living room, the stranger’s Japanese home—where alcohol or circumstance loosens inhibition. Both use the afternoon encounter to process romantic grief that has calcified into permanent dissatisfaction. Both feature women confronting who they used to be: Eloise asking if she was once “a nice girl,” Natsuko literally acting out the reunion she never got to have.

The crucial difference is resolution. Salinger’s ending is devastating—Eloise drunk, sobbing, holding her daughter’s glasses, the afternoon having excavated pain without providing release. Hamaguchi allows his strangers to become genuine friends through their shared confession. The mistaken identity that should have been humiliating becomes liberating. Both works understand that women carry romantic grief for decades, sedimented into permanent dissatisfaction. Salinger offers only the wound. Hamaguchi, characteristically, offers the beginning of healing.

Hamaguchi shows what a faithful adaptation might have looked like: intimate, devastating, trusting the audience to read between lines—but with the grace to imagine what happens when strangers give each other permission to grieve.

The Glass Family → Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)

The Glass family saga and Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Los Angeles ensemble piece ask the same haunting question: what happens to gifted children when the spotlight fades? Both answer with portraits of damaged adults, suicidal impulses, and the psychological burden of early genius—delivered through interconnected narrative structures that reveal thematic unity across disparate storylines.

Seymour exemplifies the destroyed prodigy archetype. He entered Columbia at fifteen, became a professor at twenty, and committed suicide in 1948—shooting himself in a Florida hotel room while his wife sleeps. Franny experiences a nervous breakdown in her twenties, disgusted by “phoniness” and paralyzed by hyper-analysis of her own spiritual seeking. Zooey, a successful television actor, states the Glass children have become “freaks” because “their brothers taught them too much too young.”

Magnolia weaves nine major storylines together over one San Fernando Valley day, connected through a quiz show called “What Do Kids Know?” Quiz Kid Donnie Smith—played by William H. Macy—is what happens to a Glass child without the spiritual vocabulary. A former champion of the show decades earlier, exploited by parents who took all his prize money and left him penniless, possibly brain-damaged from a lightning strike, he works dead-end jobs and delivers the prodigy’s epitaph: “I used to be smart, but now I’m just stupid.”

Stanley Spector, the brilliant current contestant, functions as the “before” photograph—what Donnie once was, what the Glass children were before the radio show ended and real life began. Stanley is exploited by his father, who wants only the money Stanley makes, regardless of the emotional toll. Studio staff prevent Stanley from using the bathroom; he wets himself on-air. The two characters exist as mirrors, reflecting the beginning and end of the child prodigy’s arc.

Both works reach for transcendence as escape from exploitation. Franny’s Jesus Prayer obsession and Seymour’s Zen Buddhism find their equivalent in the film’s rain of frogs and the extraordinary “Wise Up” sequence where characters simultaneously sing about facing truth. Both indict the systems that commodify children’s intelligence for entertainment value. Both suggest gifted children often become adults too sensitive for the world that celebrated them.

“The Laughing Man” → Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)

These two works share perhaps the most structurally precise parallels—both depicting organized groups of boys whose carefully constructed fantasy worlds are disrupted when adult romantic chaos intrudes.

Salinger’s 1949 story uses a triple-layered frame: an adult narrator recalls being nine in 1928, belonging to the Comanche Club—an after-school organization run by “the Chief,” a 22-year-old law student whose greatest gift is the serialized adventure he tells: the Laughing Man, a disfigured hero who wears a mask of poppy petals and outwits his nemesis.

The Chief’s story parallels his life. When beautiful Wellesley student Mary Hudson becomes his girlfriend and joins the outings, the Laughing Man’s fortunes improve. When the romance fails—Mary runs away after a heated, inaudible conversation, surrounded by subtle hints of pregnancy—the devastated Chief abruptly kills off his hero. The Laughing Man rips off his poppy-petal mask and dies. As the narrator exits the bus, “the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask.” Fantasy becomes litter. Innocence is destroyed by something the children cannot comprehend.

Anderson’s film follows the Khaki Scouts of North America, Troop 55, on a fictional New England island in 1965—led by Scout Master Randy Ward, an earnest math teacher who considers scouting his true calling. But Anderson inverts the structure: here the children’s romance is central. Twelve-year-old orphan Sam Shakusky and troubled Suzy Bishop run away together into the wilderness, both escaping adult dysfunction. Suzy’s parents are lawyers whose marriage is crumbling; her mother conducts an affair with the local police chief that Suzy discovers through binoculars.

Both works position boys’ organizations as self-contained worlds governed by their own rules—spaces where children find identity apart from family dysfunction. Both feature adult leaders who bridge childhood and adulthood, providing meaning through ritual and story.

The crucial difference lies in the ending. Salinger’s is tragic: the poppy-petal mask becomes trash, the boys are devastated by adult heartbreak they can’t understand. Anderson allows fantasy to survive in transformed form. A hurricane destroys the cove where Sam and Suzy made their camp, erasing it from the official map. But Sam paints it from memory. The cove is immortalized in art even as it’s erased from geography. Both works acknowledge childhood fantasy cannot survive unchanged—but Anderson offers redemption where Salinger offers only loss.

Down with Phonies

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart. - Seymour Glass, as told by Buddy Glass

- Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger

Salinger would have hated every one of these films — particularly as spiritual adaptations.

Despite their complexity and humanity, they offer what he refused to provide: resolution. Anderson lets Richie live. Safdie lets Marty find his people. Hamaguchi lets strangers become friends. These are beautiful evasions, Hollywood’s irrepressible need to heal.

Holden knew better. He spends much of Catcher complaining how movies betray life, and flatten sentiment into something consumable for phonies. The happy ending isn’t just aesthetically false—it’s a lie about how the world works.

Now the optimized age has produced its own Holdens—young romantics who can see the algorithm behind every recommendation, the data harvest behind every interaction, the engagement metric behind every ending. The resolutions that once felt earned now feel engineered. The system is showing its seams.

This is why New Romantic Cinema is a growing movement. Films like One Battle After Another, Sinners, Blue Moon, Weapons, and even Superman resurrect Salinger’s melancholy defeats, by insisting on feeling in an age that has made feeling inefficient.

Sometimes it’s messy, but it isn’t phony.

Nothing too challenging. Nothing that might lose the second-screen scrollers. Content engineered to go down easy and ask nothing in return.

The machine printed money. Marvel became the most successful franchise in film history. Netflix signed up hundreds of millions of subscribers. The content pipeline flowed.

Finish something and immediately forget it. Scroll for the next thing. Look for the next hit of frictionless entertainment that passes the time without requiring anything from you. Don’t criticize! If people like it, it must be good.

The best films of 2025 demonstrate a renewed and Romantic response to this optimized, populist decadence.

They’re not safe. They assume an audience capable of handling ambiguity and moral complexity and stories that don’t wrap up clean.

They’re betting that the audience Hollywood spent fifteen years underestimating is smarter than the data suggested. And a New Romantic audience is responding.

Sinners crossed $365 million. Weapons turned $38 million into $269 million. Marty Supreme just posted the best per-theater average in A24’s history and a $27 million Christmas opening (and counting). People are talking about movies again.

The pull toward real things is everywhere right now, because the counterculture of the 2020s is more aesthetic than movement. Its primary ethos is to choose human presence and connection over techno-optimized convenience.

Vinyl over Spotify. The repertory screening in 35mm over the couch. Undiscovered gems on 4K Blu-ray over streaming shows intended to go nowhere. Concerts with live instruments over backing tracks. Classic institutions like the NY Philharmonic being reinvigorated with New Romantic energy.

Live events, readings, screenings are emerging everywhere. Kavalier and Clay is being brought back for a second run at the Met Opera. Even Netflix has become one of the top repertory programmers in New York City at the Paris Theater in midtown.

The New Romantic counterculture is suspicious of systemic, all-encompassing ideologies. It’s exhausted by ease that offers no satisfaction. It suspects that what we lost in the pursuit of convenience was the very thing that made culture worth having.

I’ve become somewhat enamored with the Metropolitan Opera this year. Every time, I’m struck by the same thing: this is what it feels like when everyone in the room agrees to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. No phones. No second screens. Just presence. Just the work and the audience in dialogue. The soprano holds a note and two thousand people hold their breath together.

You must be in the room to experience the sublime.

That’s what the best of 2025’s cinema offered. One person’s vision, uncompromised, asking an audience to be present. Given their success - one has to be optimistic about where this counterculture is headed.

Honorable Mentions

Not every great film fits neatly into a thesis. Some are simply well-made—craftsman’s work that reminds you why you fell in love with movies in the first place. Others push against the New Romantic current while still demanding presence. These are the films that didn’t quite crack the top ten but deserve recognition for what they offered audiences willing to show up.

Love Letters to New York

These filmmakers understand that cities and its outlying areas are characters. That streets have memory. That the best New York-centric films aren't just set here—they're about here.

• Materialists — One of the best-looking New York films of the past decade. Celine Song shoots Manhattan like she’s afraid it might disappear—the specific restaurants, the particular light in a particular apartment, the way wealth moves through certain neighborhoods.

  

  This improved considerably on second viewing, and I suspect will only grow in estimation with age. The film feels like a throwback to the great ‘80s New York dramas like Working Girl or The Secret of My Success—films that understood ambition as a New York story.

• Highest 2 Lowest — A worthy variation on the Kurosawa masterpiece, transplanted from Tokyo to the boroughs. Spike loves New York and the Knicks and Kurosawa as much as I do, and like 25th Hour and Summer of Sam and Do the Right Thing, this is a love letter to the greatest city in the world. The class dynamics hit differently when you know these neighborhoods, when you’ve ridden these trains, when the geography of inequality is your daily commute.

• After the Hunt — This is set at Yale, not Columbia, and despite Luca’s best attempts at cosplay, Woody would’ve paced it better. But Guadagnino captures something essential about academia—the dinner parties, the affairs, the way ideology curdles into performance among the professional class. I suspect ATH will only rise in estimation when people ask “How the hell did we end up here?”

Genre: Subtlety and Spectacle

The New Romantic sensibility doesn't reject spectacle—it demands that spectacle mean something. These films range from intimate spy games to cosmic demon-hunting, but each trusts the audience to follow without hand-holding.

• Black Bag — Much better spycraft than 85% of the Mission: Impossible series. Soderbergh strips the spy thriller to its essentials: two people in a room, each trying to figure out if the other is lying. Human, sexy, and lots of great nonsensical intrigue. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett don’t jump out of planes or onto trains—because they don’t have to.

• Bugonia — I’ve often said that if David Muir unzipped his face one night “V” style and said “the invasion began 25 years ago, surrender humans,” it would just be another day that ends in Y. Lanthimos’s brilliantly intense and shockingly funny film does nothing to move me off my priors. His particular brand of absurdist horror—where the comedy and the dread are indistinguishable—continues to evolve in fascinating directions.

• Zootopia 2 — The best Disney animated film in a decade? Surprisingly heartfelt, timely, and exciting. I came in with a cynical, anti-IP, corporate money-grab point of view and this film won me over completely. It earns its sequel status by going darker and more politically complex than the original dared. I could watch a Zootopia mystery once a year if they keep up this quality.

• Ne Zha 2 — The best kung fu, demon-hunting, dragon-riding epic you’re going to see this year. Maybe any year. Chinese animation has been building toward this moment, and the result is staggering—visual imagination that puts most Hollywood blockbusters to shame.

• Avatar: Fire and Ash — A harsher, meaner, and ultimately less satisfying trip to Pandora. This is the series’ Return of the Jedi—where a lot of the trilogy’s best ideas and critical plot points remain unresolved. Still—no one does spectacle like James Cameron, and this film is a complete trip to see in theaters. I will always welcome another visit to Pandora.

The Top 10 of 2025

These are the films that embody the New Romantic vision most fully—auteurist works that trust audiences and find meaning in human connection rather than systematic thinking.

10. Superman

Superman means a lot to me.

Despite its imperfections, Superman understands why Superman means a lot to everyone.

It’s fitting that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman breaks his chains as the opening to DCU films. From the first time Siegel and Shuster put pen to paper, Superman has stood beyond political ideology. Kindness. Truth. Justice. Goodness. Not deconstructed goodness. Not “complicated” goodness that’s actually moral compromise. Just goodness—four-color, sincere, unabashed, unapologetic.

Gunn’s brilliance is understanding that in 2025, just as in 1938, these are radical stances. Despite his alien origins, Gunn restores Superman’s status as the most humanist superhero. He knows the names of the civilians Luthor mindlessly kills. He rejects his “true” Kryptonian mission in favor of humanity. He saves the squirrel.

Compare this to Marvel’s decade-long approach where every hero must be “complicated”—morally compromised, emotionally hedged, sincerity undercut with jokes to protect audiences from feeling too much. Compared to the MCU’s soulless Fantastic Four (2025) which shows us a family without emotional depth, Superman refuses that protection.

In an age trained to distrust genuine feeling, Gunn offers radical earnestness as revolutionary act. Kindness as punk rock.

Look up in the sky.

9. Weapons

What if the reason everyone is acting so strangely is the reason we all suspected?

What if the demon we’re confronting is just the very human inability to let go—the inability to cede the world in its natural cycle of renewal?

If the Frankenstein myth is about creating life that destroys us. Weapons shows how preventing death becomes monstrous.

The film’s genius is making its central question visual: What if our desperate refusal to accept natural cycles—death, loss, the world moving on without us—became physical? What if the sacrifice of the best years of our lives and of our children were made tangible? What if you could see and touch and pity our inability to let go?

Cregger constructs his horror through accumulation rather than shock. Every scene adds another layer of wrongness, that persistent dread of waking up on a bad day, in a bad month, in the current era—and slowly realizing something fundamental has broken. The film doesn’t offer many jump scares. It offers the more terrifying recognition: we’ve been trying to optimize our way out of mortality, and that refusal to accept limits has consequences.

The demon in Weapons isn’t evil—it’s sympathetic, even tragic. Human enough to inspire kindness, empathy, and pity. It’s what happens when love curdles into control, when care becomes refusal to release. The horror emerges from recognizing ourselves in the monster.

Where the humanist films on this list find grace in everyday relationships, Weapons finds terror in our refusal of those relationships—choosing control over acceptance, fighting death rather than ceding the world to renewal.

Weapons lets the dread seep into you. I left the theater unsettled in a way that took days to shake.

8. F1

We are so back!

Bruckheimer filmmaking at its absolute finest. Real movie stars, super fast cars, incredible production value. It’s got romance. It’s got stakes. It’s got training montages and fireworks and teamwork overcoming longshot odds.

After Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski has become the premier director of pure kinetic cinema. He understands spectacle requires reality. When Tom Cruise actually flies a jet, you feel it. When Brad Pitt actually sits in a Formula 1 car going impossibly fast, inches from death, you feel that too.

No LED volumes. No CGI slop. Just real cars, real speed, real danger captured on camera. The pleasures are old-fashioned—craft, tension, physical reality. The kind of spectacle that demands you be present because you can feel the difference.

F1 is not a complicated film. It doesn’t need to be. There’s a washed-up driver getting a second chance. There’s a young hotshot who needs humbling. There’s a race to win.

I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. Yee-Haw!!!

7. The Phoenician Scheme

The Phoenician Scheme hit me hard.

Anderson smuggles his deepest anxieties—about meaning, mortality, and God’s silence—into a madcap caper that somehow holds it all together.

For those of us navigating middle age and its particular terrors, this feels like Anderson made a film directly for us. The film channels everything from Italian crime films to Bergman’s dreamscapes to Vlacil’s surreal Catholic guilt, yet it remains unmistakably Wes Anderson.

The father-daughter relationship is always fraught with questions of legacy, mortality, and responsibility. Underneath the whimsy and the assassination attempts and the immaculate production design, there’s a man reckoning with mortality. And a daughter deciding whether grace extends even to arms dealers.

When systems fail—when ideologies reveal themselves as empty, when even God stays silent—what remains? The irreducible human connections that can’t be explained. Beauty as the only honest response to divine silence.

It is Wes Anderson’s most triumphant film since The Grand Budapest Hotel.

6. Eddington

What cracked in 2020?

Was it the culmination of long-standing injustices finally rupturing the surface? Or did we all just go collectively insane from being trapped inside with our screens? The answer hardly matters when fear and frustration twist the mind the same way, giving license to our worst and most animalistic impulses.

Eddington takes us back to May 2020 and shows a very human path toward anger and violence—one that perhaps we’re still on. Like Nashville and No Country for Old Men, it presents American division and violence as both cyclical and inevitable.

Aster won’t let us escape the brutal truths of those times. While we performed our politics for each other, tearing our communities apart over masks and protests, the dehumanizing march of big tech carried onward.

Every character—progressive or conservative, conspiracy theorist or centrist—is performing. And their performances serve powers that profit from division. Every character has grievances that are justified. Every character uses bad information to make terrible choices.

As Aster insisted: “the movie is just really about a data center being built.” While the town tears itself apart, algorithmic capitalism quietly advances. By the film’s end, after the violence erupts, we see the conspiracy theorist mother-in-law at its ribbon-cutting ceremony, blessing the very development she once manically opposed.

Much like After the Hunt—many of the negative takes are about the film’s politics, or lack thereof. But that’s exactly the point. The systematic politics—Left or Right, progressive or reactionary—are performance.

Excuse-making, while forces that undermine us all advance and our IRL neighbors suffer.

5. Blue Moon/Nouvelle Vague

What a New York Film Festival for Richard Linklater.

Bias plainly stated — I saw these films as a double feature with my daughter—Blue Moon in the afternoon, a conversation with Ethan Hawke and Andrew Scott afterward, then straight into Nouvelle Vague with Linklater and cast. Two films about creative geniuses, so different in tone, that together reveal something essential about the New Romantic vision: creation is the most human act there is. Which means it carries all our human baggage with it.

Blue Moon shows us the shadow side—what happens when jealousy, irrelevance, and alienation poison the well. Lorenz Hart wrote perfect songs like “Bewitched.” and “Blue Moon.”, but human beings are not capable of such perfection. We’re tortured, petty little creatures—and when we give into the dark voices in our heads, well, it ends in dark places.

I knew little of Hart before this movie, save for his music. Such a beautiful soul—would that he could’ve seen that beauty in himself. Ethan Hawke and Andrew Scott give phenomenal performances, showing us a partnership where genius becomes entangled with need, where the intimacy that produces great art also produces devastating pain.

Nouvelle Vague is the antidote—creation at its most joyful and generative. No one makes a hangout movie like Linklater. Two hours with the crew of Cahiers du Cinéma in their prime, inventing modern cinema over coffee and cigarettes. Here the creative energy is pure—focused on the art itself, attracting and building and generating momentum because these young critics believe so completely in what they’re doing. The rivalries exist, but they haven’t yet curdled into destruction. The friendship is still feeding the work.

Together, these films argue that human connection is what makes creation possible—and what makes it dangerous. No AI program could have produced the Rodgers and Hart songbook or the French New Wave. These emerged from specific people in specific rooms, bringing their whole flawed selves to the work.

The Hawke-Linklater pairing embodies this creative intimacy. They made the Before trilogy together—three films across eighteen years, tracking a relationship in real time. They made Boyhood, filming the same actors over twelve years. They understand duration. They understand how people change. This is what auteurist cinema offers that franchise filmmaking cannot: a decades-long conversation between collaborators who trust each other, who’ve grown together.

Both films rest easy within Linklater’s distinguished filmography.

4. Sinners

There’s a scene late in Sinners where the devil sits down for a drink with our protagonists. Not to terrorize them. Just to reminisce. Kick around old times like an old friend. Hear those real Blues.

It’s one of the most unsettling moments I’ve experienced in a theater this year—not because it’s traditionally horrifying but because it’s intimate. The devil isn’t an algorithm. He’s someone you know. Someone who’ll buy the next round.

Honestly, I didn’t know Coogler had a movie like this in him. One of the more powerful films about the true nature of the devil I’ve seen.

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu offers the classic Gothic vision of the devil as all-encompassing darkness, sickness, and contagion. Sinners knows better.

Sinners knows the true lies the devil shares. Knows that we have more in common with the devil than we like to admit. That sometimes, it’s good to have a drink with him and kick around old times.

The devil in Sinners is your brother whom you invited in. Who knows your weaknesses because you shared them. The film draws from From Dusk Till Dawn, from every folk tale about Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson at the crossroads—but it understands these aren’t about supernatural deals. They’re about the human capacity to choose what destroys us.

Evil isn’t systematic or abstract. It’s intimate, personal, human-scale. The devils that plague us aren’t some impersonal force like Thanos, but someone you know. Someone who’ll gladly buy the next round and truly, truly appreciates the good shit.

Reminiscent of Larraz—particularly Vampyres—but considerably less visceral. Sinners captures the same sultry appeal.

3. No Other Choice

Family first!

Park Chan-wook can always be counted on for an intense ride—but No Other Choice is one of his most relatable films. Particularly in my demographic.

War excuses so many inhumane acts, for the most noble reasons or intentions. The performances in this film quite literally bring the war home. A complete triumph in exploring the psychology when a family man quite literally has no other choice.

The film is centered on an incredible performance from Lee Byung-hun.

But here’s what haunts me: the title is the lie systematic thinking tells us. There’s always another choice. The system—war, duty, nation, ideology—convinces us otherwise. It narrows our vision until violence feels inevitable, until we believe the only way to protect the people we love is to become something monstrous.

2. One Battle After Another

What is wrong with America?

Are we racist, militarist right-wing psychopaths, ready to round up innocent families and factory workers? Are we Marxist terrorists, focused on impotent, performative acts of violence and hung up on pedantic language and outmoded ideologies?

Paul Thomas Anderson has been circling this question for three decades. Since Boogie Nights traced the rise and fall of the American dream through the San Fernando Valley porn industry. Since There Will Be Blood watched capitalism and religion devour each other in the California oil fields.

One Battle After Another is his most direct confrontation yet—a $140 million screwball revolutionary epic with the weight of American violence underneath.

Loosely adapted from Pynchon’s Vineland, the film follows Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), a washed-up member of the radical group “French ‘75,” scrambling to save his daughter Willa when his revolutionary past comes crashing back. Sean Penn plays the fascist colonel pursuing them with the kind of unhinged menace that makes you laugh until you realize you’re not supposed to be laughing anymore.

Like many New Romantic films, OBAA understands that politics are pretext and violence belongs to everyone equally. The ideological labels are costumes and justifications for an exercise in power, or vengeance or assuaging fear.

The French ‘75 need their revolution—despite the human lives they ruin. The Christmas Adventurers advocate for racial purity until it becomes inconvenient for business. Everyone’s fighting for America while destroying the very people and values they claim to save.

The only real heroes of the film — Willa, Bob, Sensei — are those who choose family over ideology.

And maybe that’s the hope—Willa, who inherits this mess, seems to understand her mother’s failures. That the revolution isn’t in the grand gesture but in the daily act of staying. Of choosing family above all.

1. Marty Supreme

Marty Supreme is the ultimate paean to Jewish striving.

I’m still coming down from the madcap high of the year’s best movie. A Bernard Malamud novel’s worth of characters refracted through tropes of the heist, the sports film, and the period piece.

Marty Supreme puts the attraction and danger and seduction of the American dream at its center. Along with its benefits. And its soul-crushing defeats.

This is a film about what it costs to be great. What it costs to want to be great. The specifically Jewish hunger to prove yourself in a country that promises greatness to everyone - no matter what your background, if you can respect the hustle. No czars. No Nazis. Nothing standing in your way.

“Hitler’s greatest nightmare” as Marty states so plainly.

But in the pursuit of material happiness - you can win every match and still lose everything.

Josh Safdie understands something essential about the American hustle: it’s not a system you can game. Marty tries. God, does he try. He schemes and angles and finds every edge, every workaround, every way to beat the house - no matter the cost to himself, his friends or loved ones.

And the film lets you root for him—lets you believe, for a while, that hustle and talent and sheer will can conquer the machinery of the world. That in fact, post World War II, an entirely new and modern world had arrived. This time would be different!

But here’s what makes Marty Supreme the best film of 2025: it shows you that even when you achieve these goals, you can still lose big.

No one cares about your hustle. It will grind you down or spit you out. Trophies, whatever form they take, cannot keep you warm.

What saves Marty—what saves any of us—is the thing he almost throws away chasing greatness. Family. Love. The people who knew you before you were somebody and will be there after the world forgets your name.

Chalamet has been a movie star for years. Marty Supreme might make him an icon.

These ten films are proof that the New Romantic counterculture has arrived.

They all understand what Marty learns the hard way: the systems we try to game can never give us what we actually need. Only people can do that.

The pull toward real things is just beginning.

Happy New Year!

“The world is a den of thieves and night is falling. Soon it will be the hour for robbers and murderers. Evil is breaking its chains and goes through the world like a mad dog. The poisoning affects us all, without exception, us Ekdahls and everyone else. No one escapes, not even Helena Viktoria or little Aurora over there in Amanda’s lap.

So it shall be. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy, let us be kind, generous, affectionate, and good. Therefore it is necessary, and not in the least shameful, to take pleasure in the little world, good food, gentle smiles, fruit-trees in bloom, waltzes.” - Gustav Ekdahl, Fanny and Alexander

2025, I often think, will be seen as a hinge year. It was a year when even the most pollyanna among us could no longer deny that lines—once bright, clear, and moral—could be crossed with impunity. A cruel and transgressive glee courses through our society. For many, this feels exhilarating. Like a dark version of liberty.

To others, and what feels like an emerging counter-culture, it is wholly exhausting and enervating. You can hear it in contemporary music when Cameron Winter wails “I try... so hard” in Geese’s “Trinidad,” or in Rosalía’s literal prayers for God’s grace and compassion in “Mi Cristo Piel Diamante.”

In this year’s best films, this theme emerged as a New Romantic movement—a rejection of algorithmic slop and transgressive nonsense in favor of something older and harder to fake: grace, compassion, love, spirituality, connection, family. I’ll be posting my list of 2025’s best new releases later this week - after I get a chance to see Marty Supreme and Avatar.

But this list is different.

These are the films made by artists who’d seen the “mad dog of evil” before and knew what it cost to keep the candles lit.

This was, for me, a year of embracing the sublime. The complex. The work that demands more attention, not less. More presence, not more ease.

Call it whatever you want. Resistance. Counter-culture. Refusing to let transgression masquerade as freedom. Refusing to believe that the only response to a world coming apart is to consume faster and feel less.

These films are part of that refusal. They are not escapes.

During 2025, Letterboxd tells me I’ve watched over 280 films. These are the ones that mattered. The ones that held a light across the darkness.

The vast majority of these films are international in origin. Having seen most of the American classics, “new to me watches” tend to hail from abroad. But in seeking cinema that insists on human potential and the necessity of human connection, I found kindred spirits across Sweden and Japan, Italy and Czechoslovakia, France and Korea.

The fact that this cinema emerges from such different cultures and filmmakers and literary traditions underlines their basic humanism.

Gustav Ekdahl could have raised his champagne glass in any of these worlds.

Honorable Mentions

Iron Curtain Revelations

There’s something about restriction that breeds clarity—or maybe it’s that when you might go to prison for what you’re saying, you make damn sure it’s worth saying.

Ikarie XB 1 (1963, Jindřich Polák) is definitely my new favorite episode of Star Trek. Socialist spaceships, doomed away teams, a crew all impacted by the same strange phenomenon. I know Kubrick used this as a 2001 reference, but Roddenberry must’ve seen it, right? I was expecting East Bloc pathos and got “Encounter at Alpha Centauri”—which was considerably more enjoyable. Czech filmmakers in 1963, imagining a genuinely egalitarian future while their own society only pretended to be one. The irony writes itself. The hope doesn’t.

Carriage to Vienna (1966, Karel Kachyňa) devastated me. The performances are completely haunting. The loss of humanity on display rivals Lord of the Flies. Its redemption and then final loss is devastating. “We’re not Nazis after all,” right? The idea that it can’t happen here—or anywhere—is belied by our essential humanity. We are capable of great evil and great love. The act and the impact on our fellow people are all that matter.

The Ear (1970, Karel Kachyňa) has a clear debt to La Notte and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf but with added layers of mortal danger and totalitarian atmosphere.

Right/Left—the will to power needs no excuse, but will find it in “Socialist greatness” or other forms more homegrown. Tyranny—whatever its ideological excuse—has similar threads running through its long tapestry. The use of flashback and lighting maintains noir-like suspense in every frame. An intense but also highly enjoyable watch.

Genre as Philosophy

Genre cinema—when done right—holds more moral complexity than prestige drama ever dares attempt. These are crime films and ghost stories that meditate on obligation, betrayal, and the weight of choices that can’t be unmade.

Burning (2018, Lee Chang-dong) is the perfect neo-noir. The world is coming apart at the seams, and maybe only the truly alienated belong in this new world. Dream logic, psychological decomposition, unreliable narrators, political undertones, killer—literally—performances. What more do you want from cinema? Lee builds a mystery that might not even be a mystery, a crime that might not have happened, a protagonist who might be more dangerous than anyone he suspects. I watched it twice in a month and found a different film each time.

Intimidation (1960, Koreyoshi Kurahara)—post-war Japan is such an incredible miasma of emasculation, discomfort, and embrace of modernism and lost tradition. This film somehow manages to get all that AND one of the most tense bank robbery sequences you’ll ever see. The twists are so warped they fold back over on themselves.

One of the best noirs you’ll see in any language from any country. The sense that everyone is trapped by codes they didn’t write and can’t escape.

The Bride from Hades (1968, Satsuo Yamamoto)—”She died in protest of the cruelty of the world.” Is it possible to make films that look like this today? Is this film stock and grain lost to us forever? It’s just so beautifully shot and filmed, it’s mesmerizing.

Form and function align perfectly—every character, human, ghost, or otherwise, gets exactly what they deserve. The supernatural isn’t metaphor here. It’s justice.

Big Time Gambling Boss (1968, Kōsaku Yamashita)—no wonder the Yakuza got a reputation for being cold-blooded. A lot more intimate than what I was expecting.

A good reminder that there is never any honor or code or brotherhood among thieves and murderers. The men who believe in the code are the men who die by it. The men who survive are the ones who understood it was always a lie.

The Case is Closed, Forget It (1971, Damiano Damiani) is visceral. The last 20 minutes of this film are a tour de force in making the audience feel trapped, then elated at release. But at what cost? The film feints at morality, even shows some courage. But the weight of cruelty and violence and systemic evil are just too much.

It’s rare we see cowardice and its fundamental appeal placed at the center of a film. This one makes it seem like it’s the only choice worth making. And in these times, that’s absolutely terrifying.

10. Sympathy for the Underdog (1971, Fukasaku)

There’s a moment when the aging boss returns to Okinawa—the place of his exile, the scene of his humiliation—and you realize Fukasaku isn’t making a revenge film. He’s making an elegy.

The deepest and most badass gangster film I’ve seen in some time. Yes it’s cool. Yes it’s ultra-violent and has amazing set pieces. But it also has deep oceans of humanity.

Fukasaku understands something that most yakuza films miss: these men aren’t romantic antiheroes. They’re damaged, desperate, clinging to codes that destroy them. The sunglasses and bloodshed are surface. Beneath them—loyalty that’s also imprisonment, violence that’s also grief, brotherhood that leads inexorably to mutual destruction.

The film follows a gang boss reassembling his crew for one last stand against the syndicate that destroyed them. Standard genre setup. What makes it extraordinary is how Fukasaku refuses to let you simply enjoy the mayhem. Every death costs something. Every victory is also a defeat. The men who survive aren’t better off than the men who fall.

Rare that a brutal gang fight leaves you both elated and grief-stricken.

A masterpiece of the genre—and a reminder that genre, done right, can hold more truth than prestige cinema ever dares attempt.

9. The Bride Wore Black (1968, Truffaut)

Ice-cold revenge about which Klingons would write epic poems.

Jeanne Moreau moves through this film like an avenging angel—or a demon wearing an angel’s patience. She’s methodical. She’s pitiless. She’s one of the great screen presences, and Truffaut gives her room to work in ways Hitchcock never quite allowed his blondes.

Tarantino’s Bride might have samurai swords and machine guns and years of ninja training—but I don’t think she could lay a finger on the OG.

The men she kills barely know what’s happening. They barely remember the wedding they ruined. That’s the point. The asymmetry between her suffering and their obliviousness is the engine of the whole thing. They’ve moved on. She never will. They forgot. She’s built a cathedral of memory around her grief and filled it with their blood.

Hitchcock made films about guilt—the psychological torment of those who’ve done wrong. Truffaut makes one about what happens when guilt never arrives. When the perpetrators feel nothing. When justice must be imposed from outside because it will never emerge from within.

Just so badass. Truffaut!

8. Brazil (1985, Gilliam)

Humanity or the machine?

Terry Gilliam nails the vulgar arbitrariness of fascism. This isn’t some sleek dystopia where trains run on time—this is a world of malfunctioning ducts, incompetent bureaucrats, paperwork errors that get people killed. The inequality, the ever-present threat of violence, the fierce stupidity of it all is on display in this nightmarish work of prophecy.

The production design pulls from City Lights and Triumph of the Will and the whole low dishonest decade of the 1930s. Jonathan Pryce dreams of flying away with the woman he loves while the state tortures people in the next room. The system doesn’t work. It was never supposed to work. Working was never the point.

But Gilliam anticipates something beyond the political—the beauty fixation in a world that lacks feeling. Everyone is getting plastic surgery. Everyone is optimizing their appearance. Nobody is connecting. The totalitarian state and the consumer society aren’t opposites. They’re the same disease with different symptoms.

Truly a work of deep humanism—that shows us the depths to which a society loses its soul.

The film is funny until it’s not. Then it’s the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen. This isn’t dystopia as warning. It’s a cultural diagnosis of the 2020s.

7. High and Low (1963, Kurosawa)

The opening sequences are operatic in their intensity and blocking, but as intimate as a one-set play.

Mifune’s Gondo is the good man in a bad situation. His chauffeur’s son is kidnapped by mistake—the criminals wanted his own child. They demand a ransom that will bankrupt him. He’s not legally obligated to pay. Morally? That’s the film.

Kurosawa splits the runtime between claustrophobic hostage drama and procedural manhunt. Both halves are masterpieces. The first half traps us in Gondo’s living room, watching him wrestle with an impossible choice while the clock ticks down. The second half releases us into the streets of Yokohama, following detectives as they methodically track the kidnapper through the city’s underworld.

But what elevates this beyond genre is Kurosawa’s refusal to let anyone off the hook.

Gondo does not hesitate to sacrifice, and pays for the sins of people who wish him well and those who resent him. And yet he is never pathetic. He is never pitiable. The detective who catches the kidnapper isn’t vindicated. The kidnapper himself gets a scene of such moral weight it reframes everything that came before.

The final image: two men separated by a pane of glass. One who chose to do right despite the cost. One who chose resentment and destruction. They understand each other perfectly. They can never bridge the distance.

Gondo stands up to the resentful little shit that “ruins” his life and shows him the true power of human dignity.

Rivals Throne of Blood as Kurosawa’s finest.

6. L’Eclisse (1962, Antonioni)

Antonioni is either a prophet or a time traveler.

One only needs to go online for five minutes to experience L’Eclisse‘s modernity in full flower. The alienation he diagnosed in 1962—people unable to connect despite constant proximity, meaning dissolving into transaction, beauty becoming background noise—has become so ubiquitous we barely notice it anymore.

Monica Vitti wanders through Rome and the stock exchange and her own apartment with the same gorgeous detachment. Alain Delon pursues her with all the passion of a man completing a transaction. They meet. They talk. They make love. None of it quite lands. Something is missing—something neither of them can name, something the film refuses to provide.

When even peak Monica Vitti is not enough to stir your humanity, then really what is the point of all the striving and clean lines and perfectly minimalist Instagram photos...

They agree to meet at a corner. The film shows us the empty corner where they were supposed to appear. Eight minutes of silence and location shots. No characters. Just the world continuing without them. Street lamps flicker on. A sprinkler waters a garden. A bus arrives and departs. Life goes on, indifferent to the connection that failed to happen.

Antonioni isn’t showing us a missed connection. He’s showing us what we’ve all become—ghosts passing through spaces that no longer hold meaning, waiting for someone who isn’t coming, not even noticing we’ve stopped showing up ourselves.

Long live humanism.

5. Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook)

Maybe revenge isn’t a dish best served cold—but with psychopathic derangement?

I’d been putting this off for twenty years. Everyone said it was brutal, transgressive, one of those films you can only see once. They were wrong about the last part. You can see it twice. The second time is worse because you know what’s coming and you understand what it means.

Twisted beyond belief, violent and outright transgressive. Shades of Hitchcock, Suzuki, and Greek tragedies. Vengeance and retribution can only end like this.

Park Chan-wook builds his revenge narrative like a trap—not for his protagonist but for the audience. We want Oh Dae-su to succeed. We want him to find the truth. We want him to understand why he was imprisoned for fifteen years without explanation. When he does, we wish we hadn’t wanted anything at all.

The corridor fight everyone talks about is great—a single unbroken take of exhausted brutality, a man fighting through an army with a hammer and sheer desperation. But the real violence happens in a conversation. The real damage is done with words. The revelation that recontextualizes everything isn’t a twist so much as a wound.

This is what the Greeks understood: tragedy isn’t bad things happening to good people. Tragedy is the recognition that your own choices led you here. That the gods weren’t punishing you—you were always punishing yourself.

4. Scenes from a Marriage (1973, Bergman)

A work that made me count my blessings.

Scenes is an incredibly raw portrayal of two people who are bound to each other beyond mere romantic love. Johan and Marianne are truly married in the spiritual and literal sense of the word—whatever their legal status.

Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson play a couple who seem happy. They’re successful, attractive, articulate. They have the marriage everyone envies. They give an interview at the start of the film explaining how wonderful their relationship is. Then it isn’t.

Bergman originally made this as a television series—six episodes, each an excavation of intimacy’s failure. No escape. No relief. Just two people discovering that love wasn’t enough and trying to figure out what’s left.

The faces in this film are unforgettable and say far more than the script. There is beauty and pain and sensuality and incredible, almost unspeakable cruelty in this marriage. Johan can be casually monstrous. Marianne can be suffocatingly passive. They hurt each other terribly. They keep hurting each other. And yet—by the end—something survives.

Not the marriage. Something else. Something harder to name.

Incredible stuff from Bergman, who may have accomplished the first prestige TV show.

3. Il Sorpasso (1962, Risi)

Thinking of Wild Strawberries while watching this film—but of course with less obvious pathos and more Italian “ciao bella” attitude and humor.

Vittorio Gassman plays Bruno, a middle-aged man-child who picks up a shy law student on a summer afternoon and drags him through 24 hours of liberation. Jean-Louis Trintignant is the student, Roberto, watching this life force with horror and envy and growing affection.

Bruno talks constantly. He knows everyone. He has an opinion on everything. He’s exhausting and magnetic and the camera loves him the way we love people we know will destroy us. Roberto is studying for exams, buttoned-up and careful and missing his life while preparing for it. Bruno is the opposite—all impulse, no plan, burning through experiences without retaining them.

So much love and humanity in this film. For people. For family. For friends. For the open road. And of course for Italy. The Lazio coastline, the small towns, the restaurants where Bruno knows the owner, the highways where he drives too fast while lecturing Roberto about living in the moment.

This is commedia all’italiana at its peak—social satire so sharp you don’t notice you’re bleeding until afterward. Risi builds the road trip like a hangout movie, all vibes and conversations and beautiful scenery. You forget you’re watching a carefully constructed critique of postwar Italian society. You’re just enjoying the ride.

This looks great, has an amazing soundtrack, and made me snort with laughter.

The ending arrives like a truck.

A classic that deserves to be mentioned alongside other masterpieces from this era from Fellini, Visconti, and Rossellini.

2. Du côté d’Orouët (1971, Rozier)

Near Orouët blows in through the jasmine in my mind.

Three women spend a summer at the beach. That’s it. That’s the plot.

Rozier shot this on 16mm with a tiny crew, following his actresses as they swam and sunbathed and talked about nothing in particular. The film lasts nearly three hours. It has no structure in any conventional sense. Scenes drift into scenes. Days blur together. Time becomes texture rather than progression.

It might be the most perfect film about summer and young friendship that I’ve ever seen. When I think back on my twenties (which are nearly 30 years ago), summer weekends spent with girls you only kind of knew—where relationships stayed indefinable and blurred with ocean water and music and sun and wine—are obviously the ones I remember most fondly.

It’s rare a film can capture a feeling so completely, but Rozier’s film feels like a lost memory. It is so real, you cannot help but feel your own humanity and memories intertwining with Kareen, Caroline, Gilbert, and Joelle. Its nearly three-hour runtime is completely necessary. Despite so little plot, it never ever drags.

And somehow Rozier captures something most films never approach: the ache of knowing a season must end. The way you can feel summer slipping away even while you’re still in it. The specific sadness of temporary friendship, temporary joy, the return to ordinary life that waits at the end of every vacation. The knowledge that you’ll never be exactly this young again, that these particular people will scatter, that you’re living through something irreplaceable even as it’s happening.

I watched this in July. By December I’d thought about it more than almost anything else I’d seen all year.

Very grateful to Criterion for streaming Rozier’s work in the US for the first time, and to Richard Brody for championing it.

This one is an all-time masterpiece.

1. Fanny and Alexander - TV Version (1984, Bergman)

I believe in ghosts too, Alexander.

Fanny and Alexander is the greatest film I have ever seen.

The film portrays such a specific time and place—Swedish bourgeois life at the turn of the twentieth century, a theatrical family celebrating Christmas with magic lanterns and puppet shows and too much champagne—yet experiences emotions that are deeply universal. The magic of childhood. The cruelty of institutions. The persistence of the dead.

Bergman spent his entire career asking whether God exists. Fifty years of circling the question from every angle.

Fanny and Alexander is his answer: The question matters less than how we treat each other while we’re here.

I first saw Wild Strawberries at 19, in Professor Jennings’s film class on a scratchy 16mm print from his personal collection. It was the first foreign film that I truly connected with, particularly the surrealist and deeply psychological dream sequences. I thought I understood Bergman then.

I understood nothing.

There is so much more than a cold, material world. The universality of our experiences—love and death, cruelty and grace, the persistence of those we’ve lost—testifies to that fundamental truth.

Ghosts are real. The dead persist. And the best we can do is build families, tell stories, honor their memories as candles lit against the darkness.

They are surely watching how we choose to carry onwards.

These 10 films are proof that the questions we're asking now have consistent answers: Grace. Compassion. Connection. The willingness to sit with difficulty but embrace the sublime.

Gustav Ekdahl would understand the 2020s all too well. The mad dog is loose. Therefore let us be kind.

With Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings (2023), he arrives at the most intimate stage of all—the lies we tell the people we love about their creative work, and what it costs when those lies get exposed. For anyone who’s ever created something and wondered whether the encouragement they received was real, this one cuts close. – D.H.

When you create anything, whether it’s an essay like this read by hundreds or a piece of art seen by millions1, you open yourself up to all manner of feedback. Often the good feedback feels great. Usually the not so good feedback, even if constructive, feels bad. You’ve spent the time to create and putting yourself out there, no matter how confident you are, comes with a certain vulnerability. And it’s one thing if that comment comes from a stranger or acquaintance, but it’s a different thing when it comes from someone you love, someone whose opinion means something to you.

There’s a moment in You Hurt My Feelings that’s been living rent-free in my head for weeks. Julia Louis-Dreyfus2 and Tobias Menzies are in the middle of an argument. It’s not an explosive one, but the kind you only have with someone who’s been in your life long enough to know exactly where your soft spots are.

He finally says, frustrated, “Who cares what I think?”

And she fires right back, “I care.”

That’s it. That’s the movie. And honestly, it’s also most of our relationships summed up in one small, but significant exchange.

We spend so much of our lives pretending we’re self-contained, immune to other people’s judgments, that we create “for ourselves” without looking for validation. But the truth is simpler and a lot more fragile: we care. We care deeply and intensely and immensely. Especially when the opinion belongs to someone we love and rely on and have let inside all the way into our inner circle where all of our fragility lives and our vulnerability thrives. Their belief in us doesn’t just sit on top of our emotional life; it’s part of the foundation.

And that’s why the small lies, those soft, seemingly kind lies, can feel like a knife. Not because they draw blood in the moment, but because they cut somewhere deep. They cut to the place where trust and self-worth are woven together, indistinguishable.

You Hurt My Feelings is, at its core, a movie all about these little lie.3 The ones we offer not out of malice but out of affection. The ones meant to encourage, soften, protect. The ones we tell ourselves don’t matter because they’re “small.” The ones that, when exposed, feel like deep betrayals to whom they’re told.

It’s a film about the uneasy space between useful honesty and necessary deception and how impossible it is to know which one a moment calls for until we’re already in the wreckage.

The Stakes Are Never Small When What’s at Risk Is Identity

Beth (Louis-Dreyfus) is a writer, which can be described as permanently walking around with your insides outside of your body. Creative work is an emotional striptease. You’re showing people your perspective, your insecurities, your judgment, your talent (or lack of it), and hoping people don’t flinch.

Her husband Don (Menzies) has been cheering her on for years. Encouraging every draft. Offering unconditional enthusiasm. Telling her she’s great. Not because he’s a sycophant, but because he loves her. And because he knows how vulnerable she feels.

So when Beth overhears him telling someone that he doesn’t actually like her new book, it doesn’t just hurt; it hits like a bomb. Holofcener doesn’t give us a dramatic score or a slow zoom—just Louis-Dreyfus’s face as the words land, the quiet devastation of hearing the truth about a lie.

This is where the movie is painfully honest: Beth isn’t devastated because her husband doesn’t like her writing. She’s devastated because she took all those “I love it”s as proof that he saw her, believed in her, and thought she was capable of the thing she’s devoted her life to. She didn’t need him to be her editor. She needed him to be her witness, to tell the truth as he saw it.

And in that moment, the witness stand stood empty.

When Don lied, he wasn’t trying to be deceitful. He was trying to be kind. But kindness without truth eventually feels like mockery and deception. Encouragement without honesty eventually collapses under its own weight.

That’s the soft knife: it doesn’t slice because it’s sharp; it slices because it’s unexpected.

Why We Tell the Soft Lies

Most people don’t lie because they want to deceive the people they love. They lie because they want to protect them.

You don’t tell your partner “Yes, you look fat,” or your friend their business idea is a dog, or your kid their hand turkey looks nothing like a turkey4—because the point isn’t accuracy. The point is affirmation.

These aren’t malicious lies. They’re emotional triage.

When Don lies to Beth, it’s out of fear: fear that honesty will hurt her, fear that he’ll be the reason she stops writing, fear that he’ll become the villain in the story she’s been fighting to tell. He tells himself that he’s supporting her, that the white lie is a cushion she needs to keep going.

And here’s the truth: he’s not wrong. Encouragement does keep us going.

It just has an expiration date.

The problem with soft lies is that they don’t stay soft. Over time, they create a subtle distortion: the person you’re trying to protect is no longer standing on ground you’ve reinforced. Over time, they balance uneasily on something you’ve inflated.5

And eventually, there’s a tiny pinprick and the air begins to seep out.

When Beth learns that Don hasn’t been honest, she doesn’t feel embarrassed. She feels unmoored, completely disconnected. She feels like her creative identity, which already feels shaky, isn’t made of concrete; it’s made of sand.

That’s the betrayal.

We often think that big lies break relationships. And they do. But it can be the little ones, the ones offered with good intentions that create fractures no one sees until they spread like ripples from a pebble in a pond.

Undisclosed Truths

There’s a particularly sharp discomfort that arrives when you realize someone was encouraging you just to protect your feelings. It makes every moment of praise retroactively feel performative, even the genuine ones.

We all get the impulse also, because we understand it and we do it too. But it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to be empathetic about when you’re doing it or someone does it to someone else, but really difficult to understand when it’s happening to you.

Beth doesn’t know which compliments were real. Which reactions were authentic. Which moments were encouragement and which were pity. She starts replaying everything, trying to separate the authentic from the artificial.

This is what soft lies actually do: they shake your trust in yourself, not your trust in the other person.

If Don thought the book wasn’t good, does that mean it isn’t good? Has she been delusional? Has she been working for two years on something no one believes in but her? Was she the only one who thought she had potential?6

The reality is that these questions aren’t about writing. They’re about identity.

And this is where the film transcends its neat indie premise: it tells the truth about how much of our self-worth is wrapped in the belief that the people closest to us think we’re capable of doing something meaningful with our lives.

That scene called out at the beginning of this essay—the argument and the reveal—is stunning because it’s the opposite of dramatic. There’s no thrown vase smashed against the wall. No slammed phone receiver or door. It’s just two people who love each other trying to make sense of the fact that even love has blind spots.

Don’s “Who cares what I think?” isn’t defensive. It reflects a deep panic. It’s the moment he realizes the stakes of what seemed like a harmless lie.

Beth’s “I care” isn’t just a retort. It’s a confession. What she’s really saying is: “I’ve built a lot of my life on the belief that you believe in me and now I don’t know if I can believe in you or myself.”

It’s the most honest moment in the whole movie, which is fitting because it comes right after Beth comes out and says she overheard what she considers to be the most painful deception.

The Line Between Encouragement and Honesty Is Blurry... And It Changes Constantly

Here’s the uncomfortable truth the movie lands on: neither radical honesty nor constant encouragement works in a long-term relationship. Both can be blunt instruments. Both can destroy more than they protect.

Total honesty is often cruelty wearing a merit badge. Total encouragement is often dishonesty wearing a hug.

Healthy relationships require a constant recalibration: When does someone need belief, and when do they need truth? When does encouragement become fuel, and when does it become insult? When does honesty help, and when does it harm?

These aren’t small questions. And they don’t have consistent answers: they shift with mood, circumstance, insecurity, ambition, fear, past failures, and future hopes.

The film understands that the line between a loving lie and a harmful deception is razor-thin... and always moving.

The actual beauty of the film is that it doesn’t resolve with a grand apology or a dramatic gesture7. Instead, Beth and Don do what real couples do: they renegotiate. They figure out how to be honest without being brutal. How to encourage without being patronizing. How to be partners without being exclusively either critics or cheerleaders.

They find the middle path, something like mutual responsibility for each other’s emotional lives and not perfect truth or perfect support.

The real lesson of the film is that love is not about always telling the truth or always cushioning the blow. Love is about learning when each one matters.8

And sometimes, love is about admitting: “I may not always get it right, but I’m trying.”

The Small Lies Will Always Be There. The Work Is Knowing Why We Tell Them

We will continue to tell soft lies. We will continue to pad the truth. We will continue to encourage when we should critique and critique when we should encourage. Because we’re human. Because the people we love matter to us. Because their hope matters to us. Their confidence matters to us. Their happiness matters to us.

But the soft knife cuts deepest when we stop examining our intentions. A small lie can be a lot of things:

A small lie can be compassion.

A small lie can be cowardice.

A small lie can be support.

A small lie can be betrayal.

Often, it’s all four at once.

And maybe the point isn’t to eliminate the lies. Maybe it’s to understand that the closer someone is to us, the more carefully we have to wield them.

Because the people we love will always care what we think. And we will always care that they care.

That’s the price of being seen and known.

And, when handled with honesty and tenderness, it’s also the reward.

Where to Watch: You Hurt My Feelings is currently streaming on HBOMax and available for rent or purchase across VOD streamers.

I’d love to make a great War film. But not the kind you’re thinking.

Five months ago, I walked into the Metropolitan Opera for Fidelio—my second opera ever, first in the Beethoven-to-Wagner lineage. I own the Klemperer recording on vinyl. I’d studied Swafford’s Beethoven biography. I thought I understood what I was about to experience.

I understood nothing.

Sitting in Family Circle Row I, watching Lise Davidsen sing Beethoven’s revolutionary cry for freedom, I realized opera isn’t arias—it’s architecture. Every element—music, staging, performance, light—building toward something that can’t exist in any other form. This was Beethoven’s Eroica made flesh. Total art.

Two months later, Salome.

The most intense live theater experience of my entire life.

Strauss taking Wagner’s techniques and weaponizing them into psychosexual metal opera with severed heads and 50-foot ghosts.

And I kept thinking: How did we get from Beethoven’s revolutionary restraint to Strauss’s overwhelming excess?

What happened between 1805 and 1905 that made Salome possible—and made it so dangerous?

The answer is the War of the Romantics. The Brahms-Wagner rivalry. The original culture war where aesthetic choices became ideological battles that helped shape the 20th century’s catastrophes.

This is the film I want to make.

The Deepest Well of Music

Despite a long interest in rock, country, blues and Jazz, the world of “Classical Music” had always seemed fairly impenetrable. But once you dig into it, and meet the music for the times and intent it was written, it becomes far more accessible. These were after all popular artists.

Their music made them famous and rich (in Brahms’s case anyway). Their music was not meant to be admired on a pedestal - but lived in and experienced deeply.

Since that initial Beethoven biography, I’ve been reading and listening my way further and further into this world. These are some of the best books I’ve read on the era (so far) and what I’d base my adaptation upon:

Jan Swafford’s Brahms: A Biography has prominent place in my music library. It’s where I learned that Brahms’s conservatism was revolutionary restraint. The discipline required to write absolute music in an age demanding theatrical spectacle was its own radicalism. Swafford provides Caro level detail into both the music composition and the life of his subjects. Both his Beethoven and Brahms biographies are must reads for any burgeoning classical music fan.

Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise opens with a scene-setting tour de force: May 1906 in Graz, Austria, where Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg gathered for the Austrian premiere of Strauss’s scandalous opera Salome—possibly alongside a seventeen-year-old Hitler in the cheap seats.

From that single evening, Ross traces how Wagner’s revolutionary vision of total art metastasized from aesthetic movement into political ideology. From Bayreuth’s temple to Gesamtkunstwerk to the Third Reich’s appropriation of that totalizing vision. The book shows how disagreements about musical form became culture war, then actual war.

Alex Ross’s Wagnerism is 800 pages tracing how one composer’s aesthetic vision became a cultural contagion that infected everything it touched. Ross follows Wagner’s influence from French Symbolist poets like Baudelaire (who heard Tannhäuser and rewrote his entire understanding of art) through T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence, all the way to Hitler occupying the Wagner family box at Bayreuth as honored guest.

The book makes clear that Wagner’s seductive brilliance and his catastrophic legacy aren’t separate phenomena—they’re the same thing. The totalizing vision that produced Tristan also produced the ideology that the Nazis weaponized. You can’t celebrate one without confronting the other.

Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame 1848-1849 reconstructs the year when revolution swept across Europe—Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, dozens of smaller cities erupting simultaneously in liberal revolt against conservative monarchies.

Wagner wasn’t just composing during this moment. He was on the Dresden barricades in May 1849, distributing revolutionary pamphlets, conducting revolutionary songs, printing anarchist manifestos while simultaneously working on Lohengrin.

Clark shows how Romantic artists believed aesthetic revolution and political revolution were inseparable—that transforming art meant transforming society. The revolutions failed. But the idea that culture and politics are one didn’t die. It metastasized.

The film would draw from all of these books, but the real source is the music itself.

The Romantic Question

My New Romantic Cinema piece argued that contemporary film is rejecting algorithmic thinking for human-scale moral complexity. That love, goodness, and grace cannot be systematized. That when you try to optimize art, you kill it.

The War of the Romantics was about exactly this question:

Can art transform society through totalizing vision? Or does that path lead to catastrophe?

Wagner believed art powerful enough to transform society. Total artwork—Gesamtkunstwerk—synthesizing music, drama, visual spectacle into overwhelming experience that would remake German culture.

Brahms represented the humanist, liberal tradition. He believed some truths must be protected from ideology. That absolute music—existing for its own sake, not serving extramusical programs—preserved space for human complexity that resists political capture.

I’ve spent the last year building a classical collection1. I own Wagner scores and Brahms symphonies. Strauss’s Salome and Mahler conducting Wagner. De Sabata’s Tristan and Klemperer’s Fidelio.

The more I listen, the more I understand: This was the first and most important culture war. And we’re still living in its wreckage.

The War of the Romantics created the cultural conditions that made WWI and fascism possible.

The Opening: May 16, 1906

The film starts without context. No titles. No names. Just image:

A spring evening in provincial Austria. Crowds gather outside the Graz Opera House. We follow a thin seventeen-year-old boy in a cheap suit. He’s borrowed money from relatives to afford this ticket. He looks out of place among the elegant patrons. We never see his face clearly.

Inside, he finds his seat in the upper gallery. Around him, luminaries settle in: Gustav Mahler and Alma in a box. Giacomo Puccini studying his program. Arnold Schoenberg with his students, including Alban Berg.

Richard Strauss appears at the podium. Raises his baton.

The orchestra launches into Salome—those opening bars that sound like moonlight curdling into poison.

The camera pushes slowly toward the boy. His face catches stage light. Rapturous. Transformed.

As the music swells—

SMASH CUT TO:

Dresden Burns

Smoke. Gunfire. Cobblestones torn up for barricades. Bodies in the street.

Young Richard Wagner—mid-thirties, wild-eyed—stands atop a barricade distributing revolutionary pamphlets between conducting revolutionary songs.

This is May 1849. The uprising is failing. Wagner believes German opera can midwife political revolution. Art and politics are inseparable. “The Artwork of the Future!” he shouts over gunfire. Total transformation.

Soldiers advance. Wagner flees through burning streets as Dresden falls.

CUT TO:

Into the Rhine

Winter, 1854. A gaunt Robert Schumann staggers through snow toward the Rhine. He’s hearing music—fragments, obsessive, tormenting. The opening of what will become Brahms’s D Minor Piano Concerto, circling endlessly in his tortured mind.

He reaches the bridge. Throws himself into the freezing water.

The music—that tortured, beautiful melody—plays over his descent.

Fishermen pull him out. He’ll live two more years in an asylum before death releases him.

FADE TO BLACK.

TITLE CARD: THE WAR OF THE ROMANTICS

The film moves between three periods:

1850s-1860s - How Brahms inherits Schumann’s mantle and Wagner builds his vision from exile

1870s-1880s - The camps harden, manifestos fly, critics choose sides, careers are destroyed

1890s-1906 - Both men dead, their disciples fight the final battle as Europe careens toward catastrophe

The music must be the protagonist.

When we see Brahms compose, we watch him physically wrestling with structure. Twenty-one years on his First Symphony because Beethoven’s shadow terrifies him. The camera stays on his hands—powerful, precise, imposing order on inspiration.

When we see Wagner compose, he’s possessed. He paces, sings all the parts, conducts invisible orchestras. His wife Cosima transcribes frantically. The camera whirls around him—he’s channeling something, not crafting it.

I want massive conducting sequences. Eight minutes of Brahms’s First Symphony premiere at Karlsruhe, November 1876. Full orchestra. Period-accurate hall. Otto Dessoff on the podium.

We watch the musicians’ faces showing the athletic difficulty. We see Clara Schumann in the audience—the woman Brahms loved but could never have, watching him honor her dead husband’s legacy. We see critics scribbling. We see Brahms terrified in the wings.

The music is ferociously Classical but underneath, Romantic feeling threatening to burst through. The finale arrives like a dam breaking. Twenty-one years of wrestling with Beethoven’s shadow, resolved in forty-five minutes of architectural triumph.

Then the matching sequence: Hans Richter conducting Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth that same summer.

The orchestra is twice the size. The audience sits in darkness—Wagner’s innovation. Wagner himself is stage director, watching from the wings as his vision consumes the world. Five hours of mythic German legend through chromatic harmony that dissolves tonality itself.

When the Rhine overflows and Valhalla burns, I want the audience in that theater to feel the world ending.

A Love That Couldn’t Be

The emotional core of this film is Brahms and Clara. Their impossible love. The restraint that defined both his life and his music.

Clara Schumann is one of history’s greatest pianists. Robert’s widow. The woman Brahms loved from the moment he met her when he was twenty and she was thirty-four. He never married. She never remarried. For forty years, they orbited each other—too close to separate, too constrained by propriety and memory to unite.

I need a scene—1854, just after Schumann’s suicide attempt—where young Brahms visits Clara. Robert is in the asylum. She’s pregnant, abandoned by most of “polite society.” Brahms is helping manage the household, giving piano lessons to support them.

Late evening. Clara at the piano, playing Robert’s Kinderszenen. She stops mid-phrase, unable to continue. Brahms enters, stands in the doorway. After a long moment, he sits beside her at the bench. Starts playing the piece from where she stopped. She joins him. Four hands, one keyboard.

When they finish, their hands rest side by side on the keys. Neither moves. The moment stretches. Then Brahms stands abruptly and leaves. Clara watches from the window as he walks into the rain.

Restraint that becomes his aesthetic principle.

Later—1860s, Clara’s parlor—Brahms brings her his D Minor Piano Concerto. The one built from those tormented fragments that plagued Robert, salvaged and transformed. She plays through the opening movement while he watches her hands, her face.

She’s the only person who fully understands what he’s attempting—salvaging beauty from Robert’s madness while maintaining architectural control. When she finishes, they sit in silence. The music has said what neither can speak aloud.

Clara hated Wagner’s music. Found it overwrought, indulgent, bombastic. Theater masquerading as symphony. She called Tristan und Isolde “the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life.” Where Wagner demanded attention, Brahms earned it through architecture and restraint. Where Wagner’s music screamed its emotions, Brahms’s music contained them—barely.

I want a scene—1880s, Clara’s last years—where she’s playing through Brahms’s late Intermezzi.

These pieces are different from his earlier work. More willing to admit sadness, uncertainty, the accumulation of decades of unspoken feeling.

Brahms visits. Stands in the doorway, exactly as he did thirty years earlier. Clara plays without turning, but she knows he’s there. Has always known. When she finishes, she finally looks at him. The weight of forty years visible on both their faces. Everything that was never said hanging in the air between them. His late music, melancholy without despair, has finally learned to express what his early works could only contain.

Their love story is the hidden architecture beneath all of Brahms’s music. The restraint that defines his aesthetic came from years of loving someone he couldn’t have. Building prisons beautiful enough to live in.

The Double Concerto

Joseph Joachim is history’s greatest violinist. Jewish. Starts as a Wagnerian, championing Liszt and the “Music of the Future.” Then he hears Brahms and everything changes.

1860: He co-signs a public manifesto attacking Wagner’s school. It’s the declaration of war. Liszt never speaks to him again. His career in Wagner’s circles ends instantly.

Joachim converted to Protestantism in 1855. Critics still hear “Hebrew intensity” in his playing. His mentor Ferdinand David—also Jewish, also converted—warns him about trying to escape through excellence, that they’ll always hear what he’s trying to hide.

Later, Joachim quits his position at the Hanover court in 1865—protesting when another Jewish violinist is denied advancement despite Joachim’s own conversion having exempted him from such discrimination. He composes his Hebrew Melodies for viola and piano, music that acknowledges what he tried to hide.

In 1878, Brahms writes his Violin Concerto specifically for Joachim. It becomes one of the greatest violin concertos in history. Joachim contributes revisions, writes the famous cadenza for the first movement.

They perform it together—Brahms conducting, Joachim as soloist. Their artistic partnership at its absolute peak.

Six years later, everything falls apart.

Joachim’s marriage collapses in the 1880s over paranoid jealousy. He’s convinced his wife Amalie is having an affair with Brahms’s publisher. Brahms sides with her, writing a sympathetic letter that ends up as evidence in the divorce proceedings. Thirty years of friendship, destroyed.

Years later, Brahms writes the Double Concerto specifically for reconciliation.

I want that premiere performance filmed in a single take. Seven minutes. Summer 1887. Camera moving between Brahms conducting, Joachim’s hands on the violin, cellist Robert Hausmann, their faces. The music weaves the violin and cello together—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension, finally in resolution.

Forty years of friendship. Four years of silence. Seven minutes of reconciliation.

Wagner as Doctor Doom

Jack Kirby understood something about villainy that most comic book artists didn’t: the best antagonists operate on operatic scale.

Watch Kirby’s panels from the 1960s—Galactus consuming worlds, Darkseid reshaping reality, Doctor Doom remaking Latveria according to singular vision. These aren’t bank robbers. These are gods forcing existence itself to bend to their will. Kirby’s visual language was pure Wagner: overwhelming cosmic spectacle, characters speaking in mythic declarations, every panel building toward apocalyptic synthesis.

Kirby had absorbed the same 19th century Romantic tradition that produced Wagner. His villains don’t just want power—they want to remake reality according to totalizing aesthetic vision. They believe they’ve seen the only possible future and possess the will to force everyone into it.

Marvel borrowed Wagner’s Ring mythology wholesale. Thor’s entire existence is Wagner translated into four-color panels—Asgard, Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods reimagined as superhero cosmology. The All-Father Odin making deals that doom his children. Loki sowing chaos. The eternal cycle of gods destroying themselves through their own pride.

But Doctor Doom is the character who most embodies what we might call the Wagner Problem: What happens when a brilliant mind with genuinely revolutionary vision becomes convinced that only totalitarian control can save civilization?

Doom has seen the future—every timeline where he doesn’t rule ends in catastrophe. His totalitarian control becomes, in his mind, morally necessary. He’s not wrong about the threats to human survival. He’s catastrophically wrong about the solution. The certainty that his vision alone can save us becomes the very thing that dooms us.

Wagner believed he’d seen the future of art—total synthesis, overwhelming experience, German culture remade through revolutionary opera. He wasn’t wrong about art’s transformative power. His operas genuinely are revolutionary. He IS a genius.

But like Doom, he’s blind to what happens when totalizing vision becomes totalizing control. When aesthetic revolution detaches from moral restraint. When one brilliant mind decides he’s seen the only possible future and builds institutions to enforce it.

I want a scene—1860s, Swiss exile—where Wagner holds court. The setting should feel like Doom’s throne room—a brilliant mind surrounded by disciples, utterly convinced of his own rightness. Disciples surround him: Franz Liszt (his father-in-law and chief apostle), Hans von Bülow, others.

Von Bülow—who secretly respects Brahms—tries to defend him. Wagner interrupts, warming to his subject. This is him seeing all possible futures, convinced only his path leads to salvation. Art that refuses to engage with power is cowardice dressed as purity.

The Artwork of the Future will synthesize all arts into total experience that transforms society. That’s what he’s building at Bayreuth. That’s what German culture needs to survive.

Von Bülow quietly asks what happens if that power gets misused. Wagner waves this away with the same certainty Doom shows dismissing warnings about Latveria. The only danger is insufficient vision. Art powerful enough to transform society is exactly what we need.

Wagner is partially correct. Art does have transformative power. His operas are genuinely revolutionary.

But like Doom convinced his tyranny saves humanity, Wagner never considers what happens when totalizing artistic vision becomes political ideology. When the dream of total art becomes the nightmare of total control.

The tragedy is that Wagner’s disciples—Mahler, Strauss—would achieve the synthesis he dreamed of.

Salome’s Kiss

As we move into the 1890s, both Brahms and Wagner are dead. But their war spawned the next generation: Mahler (Brahms’s protégé absorbing Wagner’s maximalism), Strauss (Wagner’s heir pushing chromaticism to its limit), Schoenberg (who will soon shatter tonality entirely).

All of them are in Graz that night in 1906.

The Salome sequence needs to be brutal. Strauss has weaponized Wagner’s techniques. The music is violent, erotic, overwhelming. We see:

• Mahler recognizing Wagner’s revolution fulfilled in ways even Wagner couldn’t imagine

• Puccini realizing Italian opera is obsolete

• Schoenberg understanding tonality has reached its breaking point

And throughout: the boy in the cheap seat, absorbing every note of the Dance of the Seven Veils and its gruesome aftermath.

We intercut with Europe’s near future: Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, WWI trenches, the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler at Bayreuth in 1933.

The final shot: The performance ends. The boy stumbles out into the spring night. We finally see his face clearly as he walks past a poster for the performance.

His reflection in the glass shows us who he is: Adolf Hitler.

The boy who borrowed money from relatives to witness Wagner’s vision made flesh. Who absorbed the idea that art should overwhelm, transform, dominate. Who learned that totalizing aesthetic vision could become totalizing political power.

Wagner’s future realized—not through art saving civilization, but through art justifying its destruction.

FADE TO BLACK.

Written from that liminal space between his New York and LA lives, this piece understands sometimes the mask is survival, others suffocation. - D.H.

“Who am I? Why am I here?”

That’s me quoting Admiral James Stockdale kind of flippantly. He was the butt of a lot of jokes in 1992 when he was Ross Perot’s running mate in the presidential election and made the ultimate American societal sin - giving a poor performance on TV. Stockdale was making a joke about anyone watching even knowing who he was, in spite of his military service and his credentials.1

Those are questions that are worth asking and revisiting all the time for a lot of reasons. The answers to them can change pretty dramatically over time. And honestly, sometimes where we are isn’t the right place to get us to where we want to go. Why am I here literally can be a pretty fascinating question.

When I’m in New York, I walk by the building where Dustin Hoffman’s character Babe in Marathon Man lives (it’s down the block from my apartment), so I have the opportunity to think about that movie a lot. And since identity - true identity - is such a central theme of that movie, it naturally gets me thinking about matters of identity: who I am, who I want to be and so forth.

And on my way back to Los Angeles, in a weird stroke, the person next to me turned on a movie that I’d never heard of called The Ballad of Wallis Island, so I watched it also. And in another weird stroke, the notion of who we were, who we are and who we want to be is pretty central to that movie.

As it tends to do, my brain took the ball and ran with the theme of identity and self between the films. When you take them together, a really interesting paradox emerges: sometimes we have to hide our identity to survive and sometimes we need to reveal it to truly live.

Marathon Man and Masks

Babe Levy2 is a character with his feet firmly planted in two different worlds: a man with one foot in the world of academia and the other on the running track. On the surface, he’s a quiet graduate student methodically researching McCarthy-era blacklists, living a life defined by books and long-distance runs through Central Park. But under that surface lies another Babe: the son of a disgraced father whose death was tied to the very witch hunts Babe obsesses over. He runs not only to stay fit, but as a means to escape to outrun a past that still shadows him.

But once the plot erupts into violence, his ability to obfuscate who he actually is becomes Babe’s most essential skill. When his brother is murdered and he’s drawn into a web of stolen diamonds and Nazi war criminals, Babe’s survival hinges on his ability to hide who he is, what he knows, to play dumb when pressed, and to maintain a preternatural calm under torture. His ignorance (real at first, later feigned) is his shield. He wears it like a mask, buying time until he can piece together what’s happening and act accordingly.

And to contextualize this even further, the narrative of hiding and performance fits the mood of the era in which the film was made. Marathon Man is a product of 1970s American cinema, steeped in Cold War paranoia and post-Watergate disillusionment.3

It’s a world where identity is dangerous, knowledge is incriminating, and trust is a luxury no one can afford. In Marathon Man, everyone is performing: the government agent, the Nazi fugitive, even Babe himself. The mask is not a choice. In a world built on secrets, it’s a means to fight and a means to protect and the only way to stay alive long enough to find and face the truth.

The Ballad of Wallis Island and Mirrors

And if Marathon Man is about the mask we wear to survive, The Ballad of Wallis Island4 is about the mirror we finally dare to face. At the heart of the film is Charles’s gradual journey back to himself. His character begins untethered, disconnected from any purpose after the death of his partner and from the emotional core that once defined him.

Wallis Island becomes the crucible where that change happens and it is only in this quirky, remote in-between place that Charles allows himself to confront who he has been and who he still wants to be. His transformation is quiet but profound: a slow peeling back of layers until what remains is not someone new, but someone finally seen.

While Charles’s story is quiet, the film’s real masterstroke is in the very loud, very uneven evolution of Herb McGwyer. Herb is the story’s most dramatic embodiment of identity rediscovery. He arrives on the island as an artist desperate to stay relevant, chasing trends that feel hollow, creating work that is clever but bloodless. His tattoos are tools for him to physically change his appearance in pursuit of relevance. Even his name is part of the act.

Herb McGwyer is a persona designed to be marketable, detached from the small-town boy named Chris Pinner who once made art out of necessity rather than for an audience. Over the course of the film, Wallis Island forces him into confrontation with his past and with Charles, who refuses to play along with Herb’s posturing.

The turning point is subtle but unmistakable: Herb stops running from who he is, from Chris Pinner. And in reclaiming his real name, he reclaims the work that once made him whole. The remote and disconnected from the mainland setting is crucial here. It’s like a mythic exile, stripping him of the noise and demands of the outside world until only his true self remains. By the end and over the credits5, Chris Pinner is making art that is raw, vulnerable, and (most importantly) authentic.

Where Charles’s arc is about finding the courage to be present, Chris’s is about finding the courage to be true. Their evolutions mirror each other. Both men come to understand that the cost of denying the self is too high. If Marathon Man insists that the mask is a survival mechanism, Ballad reminds us that keeping it on too long risks suffocation. Its central argument is that there is a life beyond performance, but you can only live it once you are willing to let the mirror show you who you really are.

The Paradox of Identity

The mask vs. the mirror - what do we hide vs. what do we show. That’s the central way these films explore the notion of identity. Both Marathon Man and The Ballad of Wallis Island circle the same paradox: hiding keeps us safe but isolates us, while revealing frees us but carries risk.

Babe begins Marathon Man behind a mask. He’s a quiet graduate student, running laps as if he can outrun the ghost of his father. But when the repeated question “Is it safe?”6 pops in the Szell torture scene, that mask is violently stripped away and forces Babe to confront not just the pain he tried to evade his entire life but his own capacity for resistance.

What follows is transformation: Babe sheds passivity. He fights back. And he claims a new active identity forged in choice rather than a passive one based in fear.

In Ballad of Wallis Island, the protagonists wear a different kind of mask. It’s a mask crafted from denial and self-preservation. Haunted by past choices, they try to keep their history buried, presenting a curated version of themselves to the world. For Charles and Herb, however, the island becomes a mirror, forcing them to confront what they’ve hidden for so long.

Each interaction peels back a layer of that mask. A casual conversation over dinner, for instance, might suddenly turn when an offhand remark dredges up a memory they’ve both tried to forget, leaving them exposed and vulnerable. The act of facing these truths is dangerous: it puts their relationships, their sense of self, and their carefully constructed facades at risk. Yet in that very risk lies freedom. By the end, they are no longer simply surviving behind disguises; they are living honestly, even if it costs them.

Together, these arcs show that identity is situational. Sometimes we survive by suppression, wearing the mask. Other times, survival requires expression: stepping into the mirror, accepting the risk, and becoming someone new.

What These Stories Tell Us About Us

Of course, we don’t live on Wallis Island or in the 1970s New York of Babe Levy, but the masks worn by the characters in both films feel instantly familiar. In daily life, we put on our own masks more than once every day: the professional persona in the office, the curated identity projected across social media, the carefully edited story we tell at parties.

These masks are not lies or even intentionally false. Each one serves a specific purpose: they help us navigate social expectations, protect vulnerabilities, and even open doors for us. Living authentically is amazing, but in many cases and many ways, it’s both aspirational and really challenging.

The culture we live in, shaped by surveillance, digital permanence, and relentless scrutiny, can make the cost of dropping the mask feel impossibly high. Do we risk too much by allowing ourselves to be fully visible, with all of the warts and scars that make us human?

On the other hand, there is a different danger in never stepping into the mirror, never facing what lies beneath. To live only through projection is to let the mask harden into the face itself, which has a whole host of other challenges.7

Together, these two films offer complementary lessons. Marathon Man warns us of the dangers of exposure. Sometimes concealment is survival. Ballad of Wallis Island, in contrast, suggests that freedom can only come from stripping away the façade.

And as usual, the truth almost certainly lies somewhere between: to live well, we must learn the balance of knowing when to guard our identities against a world that would exploit them, and when to claim them fully, even if doing so feels risky.

That tension is where authenticity, and humanity, resides.

Living Between Mask and Mirror

The question of who we are is never simple. Identity can be both shield and revelation, a way of protecting ourselves from the world and a way of declaring who we are within it.

The characters in these films remind us that wearing a mask can be necessary. It allows us to survive, to maneuver, to keep parts of ourselves intact. To cope. Yet they also show that the mask becomes a prison when worn too long, keeping us from the freedom that only being true to our authentic selves can bring.

We live that same paradox every day. To reveal ourselves completely may feel reckless, but to hide indefinitely is to erode the very self we’re trying to preserve. So the question lingers: are you wearing the mask because you must or are you wearing it because you’re afraid of the mirror?

The box office and film discourse have been dominated by films addressing the central question of our age: How do we live amidst growing dissolution and disappointment in our institutions and ideologies?

The defining principles of New Romantic cinema: Human stakes over systems and political ideologies. Auteurist vision over house style. Emotional truth over conformist entertainment. Experiences that resist easy quantification.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners became the best opening for an original film this decade. James Gunn’s Superman beat Marvel’s latest offering in box office, critical acclaim and overall buzz.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons found success through horror, humor and Magnolia references. Celine Song’s Materialists revived the New York romance with a controversial exploration of 21st century dating.

My favorite films of the year and probably the decade—Ari Aster’s Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—offer fearless, dynamic and explosive (literally) takes on the current American landscape. These films explore polarization without embracing exhausted ideologies, choosing to see people instead of political straw men.

Having just had the opportunity to immerse myself in this movement at the New York Film Festival, it’s clear that it’s growing exponentially. New adherents could be found among the enthusiastic sold out audiences for the secret screening of Marty Supreme but also No Other Choice, Nouvelle Vague, Blue Moon, Is This Thing On, Jay Kelly, Sentimental Value and others that dominated the discourse among festival-goers.1

The Romantic Parallel

The Romantic movement was the bloody cry against industrial rationalism. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein warned that science without wisdom creates monsters. William Blake declared imagination more vital than reason. Beethoven shattered Classical form to reach emotional truth.

In 1802, Beethoven was 31 years old and contemplating suicide. His deafness was accelerating. He retreated to Heiligenstadt, isolated and despairing. But in 1803-1804, he emerged transformed, composing the Eroica Symphony—a work so radical it invented an entirely new emotional vocabulary.

The Eroica refused Classical balance for dramatic intensity. Where Mozart wrote symphonies that moved with clockwork precision, the Eroica surged and retreated unpredictably, building to emotional climaxes that shattered formal conventions. Beethoven broke Classical form because emotional truth demanded it. He wrote music that thinks through feeling, that makes philosophical concepts physically felt.

In 2023, music critic Ted Gioia predicted: “We need a new Romanticism, and we’ll probably get one.” Later that year, Ross Barkan documented the signs—young people ditching smartphones, physical literary scenes returning.

And now the New Romantic movement has dominated mainstream cinema in 2025.

After decades of bland, formulaic, CGI-slopified franchise “content,” and in advance of an impending “AI revolution,” this New Romantic vanguard offers cinema that thinks through feeling, that makes philosophical concepts physically felt, that insists human connection resists quantification and transcends polarization.

A New Romantic Thesis: Kindness is Punk Rock

The Romantics criticized rationalist systems—whether revolutionary or reactionary— as they tend to subordinate human relationships to abstract principles. William Blake called them “mind-forg’d manacles.” These chains built from systematic thinking imprison us more completely than any physical restraints.

So it’s fitting that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman breaks his chains as the opening to the new era DC films. James Gunn’s Superman stands as thesis statement for the entire New Romantic movement.

Superman demands its audience question whether they could choose hope—not optimism, not naivete, but deliberate hope in people, goodness, and love as radical act against systematic thinking. From the first time Siegel and Shuster put pen to paper, Superman has stood beyond political ideology and for essential human values. Kindness. Truth. Justice. Goodness.

Not deconstructed goodness. Not “complicated” goodness that’s actually moral compromise. Just goodness—four-color, sincere, unabashed, unapologetic. Gunn’s brilliance is understanding that in 2025, just as in 1938, these are radical stances. Despite his alien origins, Gunn restores Superman’s status as the most humanist superhero. He knows the names of the civilians Luthor mindlessly kills. He rejects his “true” Kryptonian mission in favor of humanity. He saves the squirrel.

Superman means a lot to me personally. This film understands why Superman should mean something to everyone.

Compare this to Marvel’s decade-long approach where every hero must be “complicated”—morally compromised, emotionally hedged, sincerity undercut with jokes to protect audiences from feeling too much.

Superman refuses that protection completely. In an age trained to distrust genuine feeling, Gunn offers radical earnestness as revolutionary act, reclaiming hope and sincerity against rationalist cynicism.

The Great American Crack Up

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Ari Aster’s Eddington both open with the same question: What is wrong with America?

One Battle After Another asks it directly. Are we racist militarist right-wing psychopaths? Marxist terrorists hung up on pedantic language? The film’s response: Politics are pretext. Violence belongs to everyone equally. The ideological labels are costumes we wear to justify what we were already going to do.

The only heroes stay true to their families. Everyone else is playing a fake war. The Christmas Adventurers need their cause. The French ‘75 need their revolution. They ruin real human lives to sustain fantasies of political meaning.

Eddington asks it differently: Was it the culmination of long-standing injustices finally laid bare? Or were we all just stuck inside, afraid and powerless, and we went a little funny in the head?

The answer is probably both. But Eddington understands the question itself misses the point. What matters isn’t what cracked but how it cracked—and what’s growing through the rupture.

Fear and frustration twist the mind. They give license to our worst impulses. Eddington takes us back to May 2020 and shows the very human path toward anger and violence. A film without heroes that refuses to take sides politically because it understands the crack wasn’t political—it was psychological. We all went a little mad.

Both films reach the similar conclusions: systematic thinking—whether left-wing or right-wing, political or technological—failed America completely. The ideologies we used to make sense of the world became the very things destroying human connection.

Where One Battle After Another shows families surviving fake political wars by staying true to each other, Eddington strips away every systematic answer to reveal the terrifying truth: the algorithms and systems have us perform a terrible dehumanizing act, while forces that prey upon us advance.

The great American crack-up created an opening where systematic thinking failed. These films show growing through that rupture is the insistence that the only thing worth preserving is human connection—messy, unpredictable, unquantifiable.

Love Against Systemization

Celine Song’s Materialists asks: Can love survive when we try to optimize it?

The film’s title operates as provocation: yes, we’re material beings in material cities with material constraints. And despite all that, love thrives in those material conditions if we choose honesty and imperfect fulfillment.

Song knows and loves New York—the real city with its specific neighborhoods and class stratifications. Her materialism operates on two levels: literal (the physical city, economic realities making love difficult) and philosophical (can authentic human connection exist when capitalism treats everything as commodity?).

Her main character, played by Dakota Johnson with deft iciness, initially embodies this commodification. She’s a matchmaker with lists of systemic reasons for successful relationships: height, wealth, education, economic background. Data points that promise to deliver perfect matches through optimization.

Materialists embraces a full-throated understanding of perfection’s appeal, but Song insists that real love operates by an entirely different logic.

Yet the dream of systematic matchmaking is so fierce that many critics thoughtlessly called the film “broke-boy propaganda.” Materialists struck that nerve because so many have committed to the idea that relationships can be optimized, that the right formula delivers the perfect list of qualities rather than an imperfect but lovable human being.2

Her lovers choose each other not because it makes economic sense but because human connection transcends economic calculation. Romantic era writers like Jane Austen wrote novel after novel proclaiming that the world resists our attempts at systemization in matters of love.

Song picks up this torch by allowing for love without fantastical pretenses that material conditions either don’t exist or don’t matter.

The New Romantic stance embraces the reality that human connection operates by its own logic, resists quantification, and survives even when systems promise easier paths.

The Gothic Turn

There’s a scene late in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners where the devil sits down for a drink with our protagonist. Not to terrorize him. Just to reminisce. Kick around old times with an old friend. Hear those real Blues.

It’s one of the most unsettling moments I’ve experienced in a theater this year. It’s intimate and seductive, not traditionally horrifying. Yet the devils that plague us aren’t some impersonal force like Thanos, but someone you know. Someone who’ll gladly buy the next round and truly, truly appreciates the good shit.

I didn’t know Coogler had a movie like this in him. It is one of the more powerful films about the true nature of the devil I’ve seen. And while I Ioved Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu and its classic Gothic vision of the devil as all-encompassing darkness, sickness and contagion — Sinners knows better.

Sinners knows the true lies the devil shares. That we have more in common with the devil than we like to admit. That sometimes, it’s good to have a drink with him and think through old times.

The early Romantics understood something contemporary horror had forgotten in favor of shock and gore: Evil isn’t an external force that stalks us without reason. It’s intimate. Personal. Human-scale. An inclination we all share if left unchecked.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) isn’t about a monster invading from outside. It’s about Victor creating something through his own choices, abandoning it, then being destroyed by what he made. The creature becomes monstrous through Victor’s failure of human connection.3

Sinners goes back to this earliest Gothic tradition. Not invasion but invitation. The devil isn’t Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), some foreign contagion invading England. The devil in Sinners is your brother whom you invited in. Who knows your weaknesses because you shared them.

The film draws from From Dusk Till Dawn and every folk tale about Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson at the crossroads—but it understands these aren’t about supernatural deals.

They’re about the human capacity to choose what destroys us.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons takes Shelley’s logic and inverts it. If Frankenstein is about creating life that destroys us, Weapons is about preventing death until it becomes monstrous.

The film’s Gothic genius is making its central question visual: What if our desperate refusal to accept natural cycles—death, loss, the world moving on without us—became physical? What if the sacrifice of the best years of our lives and of our children were made tangible? What if you could see our inability to let go?

The best horror movies capture persistent existential dread. Not spectacle. That low-grade terror that something fundamental has gone wrong with the world, and no system can fix it. Weapons lets that dread seep into you—like waking up on a bad day, in a bad month, in the current era. And then it shows you why.

Cregger constructs his horror through accumulation rather than shock. Every scene adds another layer of wrongness, that persistent sense that something fundamental has broken. The film doesn’t offer jump scares. It offers the more terrifying recognition: we’ve been trying to optimize our way out of mortality, and that refusal to accept limits has consequences.

The demon in Weapons isn’t evil—it’s sympathetic, even tragic. Human enough to inspire kindness, empathy and pity. It’s what happens when love curdles into control, when care becomes refusal to release, when we try to systematize life itself until we’ve created something that should have been allowed to die.

Both films generate genuine sympathy for their demons. Because the demons are us. In Sinners, we’re making deals we know we’ll regret. In Weapons, we’re clinging to control, trying to engineer our way out of mortality.

Where New Romantic cinema’s humanist films find grace in everyday relationships, its Gothic wing finds terror in our refusal of those relationships. Its villains choose deals over connection, control over acceptance, fighting death rather than ceding the world to renewal.

The Seeds of New Romanticism

The signs were there for years. A24 was the vanguard—quietly building a roster of films that rejected systematic thinking in favor of auteurist vision and emotional complexity.

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) warned about the seduction of artificial intelligence masquerading as human connection—a prescient critique of what tech culture promised versus what it delivered.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) used Frankenstein’s logic to explore bodily autonomy and the construction of self beyond societal systems. Delightfully demented and visually stunning, it celebrated a timeless struggle against degradation. Showing how human consciousness resists programming even when literally created in a lab. Willem Dafoe’s sympathetic Doctor proved that creation through care, not control, matters.

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (2024) showed grief as irreducible human experience that resists therapeutic optimization. Everyone’s pain is particular but also common—the film insisted that wellness culture can’t systematize away what makes us human.

Even Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023)—massive Warner Brothers hit that it was—operated as Trojan horse. Wrapped in pink IP familiarity, Barbie was a film that rejects pre-programmed existence for messy, uncertain humanity. The Kens’ pursuit of patriarchal systems and Barbie’s choice of authentic imperfection over plastic perfection? Pure New Romantic cinema generating over a billion dollars at the multiplex.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) is the movement’s architectural manifesto. The film celebrates how true artistry forces your attention on what’s important and true. Its main character has long soliloquies standing against vulgar aesthetics and systemic cruelty. Corbet was rightly celebrated for a masterpiece about the timeless struggle to create meaning that can’t be commodified or controlled.

Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) captured New Romantic cinema at its most vital—brilliant, dreamlike, exciting, sexy and funny as hell. The film insists on seeing its characters as full humans whose love and ambition resist the easy categorizations that systematic thinking demands.

Now, in 2025, the major studios are finally responding. Warner Brothers has become the unlikely standard-bearer for New Romantic cinema at scale, betting on auteurist vision over franchise formulas. They gave Ryan Coogler unprecedented creative freedom on Sinners. They backed Superman with full creative control for James Gunn. And audiences responded—A Minecraft Movie crossed $950 million, Sinners opened to record numbers for an original film, Superman became a cultural phenomenon.

As David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance—fresh off acquiring Paramount with a franchise-focused approach—prepares a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, the stakes couldn’t be clearer. Warner Brothers just rejected Paramount’s initial offer as too low, with CEO David Zaslav believing the company’s streaming and studio success warrants a “hefty premium.”

The box office triumph of New Romantic cinema isn’t just an aesthetic victory—it’s become Warner Brothers’ negotiating leverage, proof that auteurist vision delivers both critical acclaim and financial results worth protecting.

The New Romantic moment isn’t just about individual studios—it’s about an industry-wide recognition that audiences want something systematic thinking can’t deliver. They want to feel. They want surprise. They want human connection that resists quantification.

Film at Lincoln Center just had their best year of box office ever. Repertory screenings of classic films on 35mm and 70mm projections are becoming badges of honor. Letterboxd subscriptions are surging.

Audiences in the know are returning.

Eroica Anew

In 2023, ended his essay predicting the New Romanticism with a question: “But what does that kind of music sound like? In 1800, it was Beethoven. And today?”

In 1804, Beethoven emerged from despair in Heiligenstadt and composed the Eroica—a symphony that refused to comfort audiences with Classical balance. It demanded they feel something genuine, something that couldn’t be systematized or predicted. It made philosophical concepts physically felt.

In 2025 cinema, an Eroica moment is happening anew. Auteurist films that explore political abstractions versus love and systemic obligations versus human connection, are resonating broadly.

Not because every film succeeds—some stumble, some fail—but because auteurs are refusing the systematic thinking that promised to perfect entertainment. These films trust audiences with complexity. They insist human connection matters more than any system claiming to optimize it away.

The system can’t account for the moment in Superman when he saves the squirrel. It can’t systematize the devil buying you a drink in Sinners. It can’t optimize why Materialists makes you want to call someone you shouldn’t. It can’t engineer the terror in Weapons or the family loyalty in One Battle After Another.

These moments prove that what matters most—love, goodness, grace, human connection—can’t be engineered, only experienced. Is it any wonder the cinema feels alive again?

Many companies have stated plainly they prefer we permanently plug into virtual worlds, consuming systematically optimized content or AI-generated slop. They want Marvel’s Classical precision—clockwork entertainment delivering expected pleasures without risk, franchise logic that turns art into asset management.

New Romantic cinema says no.

It says the most important things about being human can’t be reduced to data points or demographic targeting. It says being in the room together, experiencing art that resists every attempt to turn it into content, proves through collective feeling that human connection is the thing no system can replace.

Not data. Truth.

Not systems. Love.

Not content. Art.

We’re compiling a comprehensive list of New Romantic Cinema on Letterboxd—films from the past ten years that anticipated and now embody this movement. From Ex Machina to Eddington, from Barbie to One Battle After Another, these are the films reclaiming cinema’s capacity to make us feel without systematic mediation.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the New Romantic movement, and films—American or global—that meet the definition.

Doug Hesney is the founder of the Cognitive Film Society and editor of Cognitive Frames. He’ll be sharing a full recap of our experiences at the New York Film Festival in our next “In the Room” newsletter.

It's an unexpected comparison that reveals something profound about solitude versus loneliness, and how we perform ourselves even—or especially—when we think we're alone.

After exploring how we perform for cities and audiences, Geoff now examines the most intimate performance of all: the stories we tell ourselves when no one's watching. Or when we pretend no one's watching. – D.H.

I'm a pretty social guy. I love being around people. I love talking to people and finding out who they are and what they're about. I love talking to servers in restaurants and the people checking out my groceries in Trader Joe's1. I love finding common ground with people. For me, it's one of the best things about being alive.

But I also love my alone time - to read, to write, to work, to solve a problem, to think or to just lounge and do nothing. And there are people out there who love doing that the way that I love being around people.

I don't say any of that with an ounce of judgment. But there's a nervous reality here, which is that solitude sits uneasily in our culture. We're conditioned to see it as loneliness, eccentricity, or loss, rather than as a space for creativity, resilience, and self-definition. Or, even more simply, a choice. Film is one way to peer into that choice from a lot of different angles: sometimes tragic, sometimes whimsical, sometimes deeply humane.

From the decaying East Hampton mansion of Grey Gardens (1975)2 to the tiny domestic world of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021), these two films invite us to sit with characters who create meaning in solitude.

They're wildly different in tone and form, but they both ask the same question: what does it mean to live with yourself?

Solitude vs. Loneliness

In our culture, being alone is often seen through two opposing lenses: as a sign of failure or as a badge of self-sufficiency. The stigma of loneliness sits on one side and suggests that aloneness must mean social rejection or personal shortcoming.

The other side is this romanticized ideal of fierce independence: the quirky genius, the stoic wanderer, the person who just doesn't need anyone else to feel whole.3 As always, what sits between these poles is a far more nuanced truth: being by yourself is not just a condition to power through or celebrate, but something to be practiced. And art, with its ability to capture the inner workings of its subjects while at the same time inviting us to witness them, offers a compelling lens for exploring the tension between solitude and society.

So when I think about solitude vs loneliness on the screen, I think of Grey Gardens and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. They're very different films, but I can't help but connect them in my head because they both feature lead characters who've been thrust into solitude.

And because they're on the screen being filmed, they help us see solitude not just as a state but as an act. One presents a decaying, performative, theatrical version of life on the margins; the other offers a whimsical, almost childlike portrait of a tiny being navigating an enormous world. And when you take the two together, they ask us to reconsider what it actually means to be alone, and whether solitude might be less about absence and more about one's ability to author their own path.

Grey Gardens: Solitude as Performance and Survival

Albert and David Maysles' Grey Gardens immerses us in the bizarre, crumbling world of Edith Bouvier Beale ("Big Edie") and her daughter, Edith ("Little Edie"), relatives of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The Beales were once fixtures of Hamptons high society, but now live in near-total isolation in a decrepit, decaying mansion, sharing their home with raccoons, cats, and a tangle of memories of what once was. Little Edie, more than her mother, turns her isolation into a kind of bohemian performance art. Her outlandish costumes, monologues to the camera, and improvised dances have the movie vacillating between documentary and cabaret. Their solitude is both tragic and melodramatic.4

This is both prison and stage: the Beales may be cut off from the outside world, but they also seize the opportunity to construct their own narrative. Honestly, there's defiant resilience in this. As a viewer, it's easy to respect and admire their outright refusal to disappear quietly after they'd been cast out of their elite universe. But there is also a wild delusion here, as we wonder whether performance has overtaken reality for them.

Big Edie and Little Edie keep each other company, but it's easy to forget they're also trapped together. Their shared isolation is both their comfort and their curse. Grey Gardens is a reminder that solitude is never purely individual; it is always shaped by the people with whom we do (or do not) share our lives.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On: Solitude as Whimsy and Wonder

If Grey Gardens is an exploration of eccentric isolation on the precipice, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is its gentle, hopeful counterpoint. Marcel is a tiny shell with one googly eye and a pair of shoes, living in a house now mostly empty after its human occupants have gone. Unlike the Beales, Marcel does not seem embittered by his circumstances. Instead, he creates meaning from what remains, turning everyday domestic objects into tools, furniture, and playgrounds.5

The tone of Marcel reframes solitude as a space for wonder, not tragedy. The miniature scale of Marcel's world relative to the immensity of the outside world works as a metaphor for the richness of his inner life: small and detailed, but full of invention. And it's that curiosity that leads him beyond his solitude, as he seeks to reconnect with his lost family and build new forms of community. In Marcel's story, solitude is not the end state but the beginning, a space from which connection becomes more intentional and profound.

Between the Films: Echoes Across Tone and Form

What makes these two films so fascinating to compare is how they both blur the boundaries between documentary and performance. Grey Gardens is nonfiction, but the Beales' ostentatious self-presentation and delusions of grandeur only serve to complicate the idea of "truth." Marcel, though animated and fictional, is stylized as a mock-documentary, with its own earnest interviews and vérité-style. And one of the most remarkable things that links these two films is that they both suggest that solitude invites self-mythology. When we're alone, we can fashion and create whatever stories we want to explain our lives to ourselves (and to whoever might be watching).6

Space itself plays a critical role in shaping these myths. The Beales' mansion, overrun with decay, is both a symbol of lost glamour and also the physical manifestation of their isolation. By contrast, Marcel's home is bright and ordinary and a blank space for his ingenuity. But both films force the viewer to contend with their own position as furtive witness: are we intruding on private lives or invited into them? Do these portraits of solitude comfort or are they unsettling?

The Art of Solitude: Lessons Across the Spectrum

Grey Gardens and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On reveal that solitude can be more than just a condition. It can be the ultimate creative act. The Beales turn their exile into theater, while Marcel fashions meaning from his small corner of the world. The camera becomes a companion; a mirror that helps the subject see themselves.

It's that reframing that invites us to think of solitude not as a void but as fertile ground for shaping ourselves. When we opt to engage with our aloneness — whether to turn it into art, ritual, or story, we transform it into something worth witnessing (whether someone witnesses it or not).

And if that's true, then solitude is not simply the absence of others but the presence of ourselves. Grey Gardens and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, one eccentric and tragic, the other tiny and tender, offer a wide spectrum of what it means to live within your own company. They remind us that the art of solitude lies not in withdrawing from life, but in writing it on our own terms. Whether in a decaying mansion or a cozy nook, solitude can become a stage, a workshop, even a sanctuary.

In the end, living with yourself is less about being apart from the world and more about choosing how to inhabit it.

Where to Watch

Grey Gardens (1975): Available for streaming on HBO Max, and for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and other platforms.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021): Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and other platforms

Editor's Note: Sometimes the perfect piece finds you at exactly the right moment. —whose fiction and photography have appeared in The New York Review of Books, n+1, and Threepenny Review—discovered Cognitive Frames just as she published this extraordinary essay on her Substack, My Dead Flowers.

Winner of the Andrew Nelson Lytle Prize, author of the monograph Photowali Didi, and co-writer of “The Shameless” (which premiered at Cannes' Un Certain Regard in 2024), she reached out asking if we "accept submissions or do collaborations."

The answer, emphatically, is yes.

We're incredibly proud to work with Sarkar and to republish—with her permission—this remarkable piece on Rear Window. It exemplifies everything we seek: criticism that weaves personal memory through theoretical insight without losing either thread. Writing from Paris, drawing on her childhood in Calcutta, she transforms Hitchcock's voyeuristic masterpiece into something startlingly new. Her book “Not Quite a Disaster After All” arrives in the US this Fall. - D.H.

In the dim light of the courtyard, a figure lingers by the window, her gaze fixed on the world beyond. She is not merely observing; she is participating in a delicate dance of presence and absence. This act of watching, of being both seen and unseen, is the essence of the flâneur—a term that Edmund White explores in his work The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. White describes the flâneur as someone who "merges with the crowd," an observer who is simultaneously detached and deeply engaged with the city around them. This duality allows the flâneur to witness the unnoticed, to find stories hidden from the visible world, , and to understand life outside (and ironically, inside), like a spy but with a degree of fascination.

One watches Rear window and then the film watches you back—a film that turns every viewer into a co-conspirator, a fellow voyeur peering through venetian blinds at the messy theater of human existence. We are all complicit in the film. Us the viewer watching James Stewart watch his neighbours through his windows. The window behind which he remains incapacitated but becomes a witness to a larger drama playing out on the other side.

What makes Rear Window so unnervingly brilliant isn’t just what we see, but how we see it. Hitchcock constructed the film entirely on a colossal composite set, “pre-lit every one of the 31 apartments for both day and night,” orchestrating a lighting symphony that resembled “the console of the biggest organ ever made.” Each ray of illumination becomes a character in its own right. The courtyard is alive, each apartment a window into loneliness, desire, despair, and resilience—a vertical village where privacy becomes performance and solitude turns spectacle.

Miss Torso dances in her skimpy leotard, shadow and sinew flitting against the backdrop of her lit window, resisting the advances of men in fleeting glimpses—hips, shoulders, and the occasional dismissive hand flick captured in high contrast black-and-white. Miss Lonelyhearts arranges a table for two in an almost ritualistic precision, raising her glass to an invisible companion, rehearsing conversations that will never occur. And the songwriter, a top-floor specter of melody, lets his piano provide the courtyard’s soundtrack, each note drifting through the open windows like whispered gossip. Thorwald’s apartment, by contrast, is a study in absence and menace. We see him leaving at odd hours, carrying packages that invite speculation; we watch him scrub his bathroom walls, each stroke of the sponge a potential confession. And yet, it is his darkened, cigar-lit silhouette that lodges in memory, the absence of illumination more revealing than any light.

Edmund White describes the flâneur as someone who “merges with the crowd,” an observer who is simultaneously detached and deeply engaged with the city around them. But Jeff cannot merge with anything. His broken leg has transformed him into a stationary observer, a reluctant prisoner of his own apartment. The mobility that defines White’s Parisian wanderer becomes, in Jeff’s case, an obsession, a desperate reaching through lenses and windows toward lives he cannot touch.

At eight, I adopted my own methods of observation. Our apartment in Calcutta faced another complex across a narrow courtyard, and every afternoon after school, I perched on our terrace after school. I followed movements: the old man on the ground floor hacking through invisible ailments; the twin toddlers pressing their foreheads to windowpanes; the third-floor lady with her white fluffy dog, combing its fur with the devotion . Inside, I arranged my Grace Kelly paper dolls—pistachio suits, flowing negligees, pencil skirts and silk blouses—across the floor. Each posed in scenarios mirroring the courtyard’s dramas. I knew everything that happened in that building across from our house: who fought, who whispered, who paused. And I was secretly so proud that I managed to do so within months of watching Rear Windows for the first time completely undetected.

Yet one day, the third-floor lady looked up, caught my gaze, and called out: “Would you like to come play with him?” My secret surveillance dissolved into exposure. I was not the observer but the observed, and the lesson was exquisite and mortifying. This moment of recognition—the sudden reversal from watcher to watched—captures the essential anxiety at the heart of both flaneurism and voyeurism. Teju Cole’s Julius in Open Cities experiences similar moments of uncomfortable visibility, when his carefully maintained anonymity crumbles and he finds himself seen, catalogued, perhaps even judged by those he has been observing.

The window is never merely a frame. In Rear Window, it becomes a lens, a threshold between self and other, public and private, freedom and confinement. Each apartment is a discrete channel, each gesture a story. Windows frame, they isolate, they reveal— a different world, each frame a different story; they construct a panopticon in which every observer is also observed. François Truffaut wrote, “The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses.” In this space, to watch is to participate, to be complicit, to wrestle with desire, empathy, and dread simultaneously.

Both White’s and Cole’s flaneurs explore urban watching. White acknowledges the flâneur’s potentially predatory gaze, the way that aesthetic distance can become emotional callousness. Cole pushes this further, examining how the act of looking is inevitably shaped by power, race, class, and history. Julius’s wanderings through New York are not innocent—they are informed by his position as a Black intellectual navigating predominantly white spaces, his observations colored by an awareness of how he himself is being observed and categorized.

But in Rear Window, voyeurism is more simple—a deep desire to know the ‘other’. Hitchcock is not moralizing on the idea of ‘watching’. He is meditating on the act itself. This obsession of the ‘other’, outside, while being home bound and trapped inside, is the very marrow of Rear Window. The Kuleshov effect merges us with Jeff’s gaze: Miss Lonelyhearts raises her glass, Thorwald moves in shadow, Lisa’s sleeve catches a sliver of light—and we are implicated in every moment. The ethics of voyeurism unfold in layers, mirrored by obsession: Stewart’s relentless curiosity, Thorwald’s secretive compulsions, Miss Lonelyhearts’ yearning—all trapped, all observing, all being observed. Freedom becomes perspective; confinement, clarity.

Consider Miss Lonelyhearts at dinner. At precisely 7:01, she sets her table: a single plate, a knife to the left, fork to the right, glasses aligned with obsessive care. At 7:03, she seats herself, adjusts the napkin, begins to pour wine. At 7:05, she raises her empty glass to an imagined companion. At 7:06, she inhales deeply, closes her eyes, whispers a toast. The candlelight flickers across her face, a mirror of isolation that is nonetheless alive, deliberate, performative. This repetition is punctuated by the distant piano of the songwriter, every note a reminder of the external world intruding upon her solitude.

Here is flaneurism turned inward, the urban walker become urban dweller, still moving through ritual and routine but contained within the four walls of a single room. Miss Lonelyhearts embodies what might be called the domestic flâneur, creating her own geography of observation within the limited landscape of her apartment. Her nightly dinner performance transforms solitude into spectacle, privacy into a kind of public art. She is simultaneously the observer of her own life and the observed subject of Jeff’s—and our—fascination.

Jeff’s gaze is never neutral. It is implicated, ethical, invasive, compassionate, and obsessive. His interest in Thorwald, in Miss Lonelyhearts, in Lisa, mirrors our obsessions with the ‘other’. The film interrogates whether observing is inherently exploitative or necessarily human. We watch to understand, to control, to empathize, to survive. But in doing so, we expose ourselves to the same scrutiny. Confinement is relative: Stewart’s body is trapped; Thorwald’s actions are constrained; Lisa navigates social expectation; Miss Lonelyhearts is a voluntary prisoner of ritual. Who, in this courtyard, is free, and who is not?

This question echoes through Cole’s Open City, where Julius’s apparent freedom to wander masks deeper forms of constraint—psychological, historical, cultural. His walks through Manhattan become a form of working through trauma, a way of processing not just personal history but collective memory. The city becomes both text and context, a palimpsest where past and present overlap, where observation becomes a form of archaeology. Similarly, White’s flâneur is both liberated and limited by his role as professional observer, free to move but bound by the very detachment that enables his mobility.

And of course, no writing of Rear Window is complete without a dedication to Grace Kelley and her outfits.

The first time Lisa Fremont appears on screen, she is luminous, a close-up so incandescent it seems to cast its own shadow. Grace Kelly enters in “a gorgeous silk negligee” that “looks fancy enough to be an evening gown,” yet the black-and-white dress with its “deep V neckline at the front and back, and full, frothy skirt” steals your breath entirely. It is elegance rendered motionless, a silent promise of transformation. This is the perfect Grace Kelly balance between sexy and chic, the 1950s distilled into a single frame of fabric and bone structure, and it signals immediately that this woman is both spectacle and observer.

Edith Head, the legendary designer behind these garments, orchestrates a narrative through cloth. That first evening dress—a fitted black bodice with off-the-shoulder, deep V cut neckline, cap sleeves, and mid-calf layered chiffon tulle skirt—unfurls like a choreography of light as she illuminates each lamp in Jeff’s apartment. Every thread whispers sophistication, every fold marks a boundary between her world and his, a Parisian elegance landing in Manhattan’s gritty courtyard. She describes it as “straight off the Paris plane”—and the camera, in its intimacy, believes her. Later, in a pistachio-colored suit over a white halter top, paired with a pillbox hat and short veil, Lisa becomes an exercise in transformation. A single removal of the jacket and hat alters her entirely—society lady dissolves into approachable, into intimate. Each gesture, each piece of fabric, marks a transition: from observer to participant, from distance to proximity.

This says something deeper than mere fashion. Like Teju Cole’s Julius wandering through New York in *Open City*, Kelly’s Lisa exists in a liminal space between watching and being watched. Cole’s protagonist moves through the city with the measured gait of the contemporary flâneur, absorbing fragments of overheard conversations, glimpsed interiors, the accidental intimacies that urban life affords. But where Julius remains largely invisible, a ghost drifting through Manhattan’s arteries, Lisa’s visibility is her power. Her costumes announce her presence even as they protect her secrets, each outfit a carefully constructed persona that allows her to navigate between worlds.

The black silk organza dress with translucent cap sleeves emerges “darkly, at the pivotal point in the film, when Lisa starts to believe Jeff, and that the man they are watching is a murderer.” Costume is character. Fabric is foreshadowing. And it acts as a way to seduce a man who is not just wheelchair bound but seems more interested in his neighbours than her attention, which she throws at him. Even the overnight bag, with its silk negligee that “honestly looks fancy enough to be an evening gown,” becomes a silent actor in the story, hinting at the dangers and intimacies to come. When Lisa climbs into Thorwald’s apartment, her wardrobe functions as armor and signal. The soft shimmer of her silk blouse catches the faint light of the room, revealing apprehension, curiosity, daring—all without dialogue. Her pencil skirt clings just so, suggesting elegance maintained under duress. Each shoe click against the hardwood floor is amplified in the stillness of the apartment, a Morse code of grace, poise, and silent rebellion.

The genius of *Rear Window* lies not in its resolution of these tensions but in its insistence on their perpetual presence. The film ends not with clarity but with a return to watching—Jeff, both legs now in casts, asleep while Lisa reads, the courtyard continuing its endless cycle of revelation and concealment. The surveillance has not ended; it has simply been redistributed. Lisa now holds the binoculars, her gaze directed not at the neighbors but at Harper’s Bazaar, a different kind of window into lives she might inhabit.

Rear Window reminds us, that behind every window, behind every drawn curtain, behind the blinds where we hide, is a parallel life, inaccessible yet so deliciously imaginable and witnessed—What would we do without these windows? Behind each a different story, all the lives we will never know.

For decades, comic books were dismissed as mindless entertainment for children and fanboys. Today, they are one of the most powerful engines driving the global film industry. The journey from spinner racks to cinematic dominance is not just a story of popular entertainment — it's a cultural shift that has redefined how films are conceived, produced, and received.

The Early Crossovers: From Serial Reels to Cult Adaptations

Comic book characters leapt from the page to the screen almost as early as the 1940s, with serials like The Adventures of Captain Marvel and Batman. Made with shoestring budgets and aimed squarely at young audiences, these adaptations rarely penetrated mainstream cinema, remaining the domain of Saturday matinees.

As we approached the 1950s and 1960s, the two biggest superheroes in history cemented themselves as pop culture icons beyond the world of comic books. The Adventures of Superman reinforced Superman as the embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way — a perception that still remains prevalent today. The 1966 Batman series took things a step further by launching the world into "Batmania." With the help of his colorful rogues' gallery, Batman was able to reach a wider audience, making the show both a massive cultural and commercial success — albeit still playful and campy.

In the latter half of the 20th century, directors like Richard Donner (Superman, 1978) and Tim Burton (Batman, 1989) proved that superhero films could combine artistic vision with box office appeal. Still, these were exceptions — Hollywood largely viewed comic adaptations as risky bets, hampered by budget constraints and special effects limitations.

Geek Culture Goes Mainstream

The late 1990s and early 2000s marked a turning point. Advances in CGI, coupled with the rising influence of fan communities online, created fertile ground for a new wave of adaptations. Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002) demonstrated that films grounded in comic book mythology could appeal to both hardcore fans and general audiences.

At the same time, the internet amplified the voices of "geek culture" — a once-insular community of comic readers, gamers, and enthusiasts. For the first time ever, message boards, fan sites, and later social media became the billboards on which fans could advertise what they wanted to see, and studios began listening. Casting decisions, storylines, and even costume designs were influenced by fan discourse, making comic book culture a participatory force in filmmaking.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Rise of the Shared World

No discussion of comics in cinema can avoid the seismic impact of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Beginning with Iron Man (2008), Marvel Studios pioneered the concept of a meticulously planned, interconnected series of films. This approach borrowed heavily from comic book storytelling, where decades of continuity and crossover events created a sprawling fictional universe.

The MCU's success reshaped Hollywood economics. Studios realized that "franchises" could be more than sequels — they could be vast, interlinked worlds that encourage long-term audience investment. This model has since been adopted by properties ranging from Star Wars to The Conjuring, with varying levels of success.

Beyond Capes and Cowls

While superheroes dominate the conversation, comic book adaptations extend far beyond Marvel and DC. Films like From Hell (2001), Road to Perdition (2002), Sin City (2005), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) showcase the medium's versatility, translating personal memoirs, crime dramas, and surreal comedy from page to screen.

These works have helped expand the perception of comic books as a legitimate art form — not simply a genre, but a medium capable of telling stories across genres.

The Latest Evolution: Everything You Know is Wrong

Just when audiences might be experiencing "superhero fatigue" at the multiplex, comics themselves are undergoing their most radical reinvention in years. At LI Comic Shop, we're watching longtime readers discover these changes with the excitement of new converts.

DC's Absolute Universe, launched in October 2024, strips away everything familiar: Batman is now a 25-year-old construction worker without wealth or Alfred. Wonder Woman was raised in Hell as the last Amazon. Superman arrived on Earth without the Kents to guide him. Absolute Batman #1 became 2024's best-selling comic with nearly 400,000 copies and 7 subsequent reprints— proving audiences are hungry for fresh takes on familiar myths.

Meanwhile, Skybound's Energon Universe has united Transformers and G.I. Joe in one shared continuity overseen by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman. No more endless reboots — just solid storytelling that respects both properties while finding new angles.

This hunger for "familiar but different" also explains anime's explosion in Western culture.

Films like Ghost in the Shell ask the same identity questions as superhero comics but through a completely different cultural lens.

At our shop, we're seeing Marvel readers discover manga, DC fans explore anime, and kids raised on streaming services work backwards to discover the original comics.

A Lasting Impact on the Film Industry

Comic books and geek culture have transformed filmmaking in ways that go beyond the box office. They've accelerated the technology of visual effects, normalized serialized storytelling, redefined global marketing strategies, and given rise to the massive world of convention culture — a promotional powerhouse in its own right.

What was once considered niche is now the economic and cultural backbone of modern Hollywood.

Superhero fatigue has proven to be a cyclical complaint, at the comic shop as well as the cinema. But just as Absolute DC's working-class Batman and the Energon Universe's fresh continuity shattered sales records on the page, James Gunn's Superman demonstrated this summer that a reinvention works at the multiplex too.

The lesson is clear: audiences aren't tired of heroes, just tired formulas.

But the real innovations? The next big storyline? It's still happening every Wednesday at comic shops like ours, where the next evolution is always just one issue away.

On August 21st at 6:30 PM, join us and the Cognitive Film Society for a screening of Ghost in the Shell at the Hewlett-Woodmere Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett

Free admission.

We'll be there after the screening to discuss how comics and cinema continue to influence each other

LI Comic Shop
1 Stauderman Avenue, Lynbrook, NY
Mon 10-6, Weds 10-8pm, Thurs-Fri 10-6, and Sat 11-5.

Editor’s Note: Yelena Fradlis returns to Cognitive Frames with her signature insight into costume design as cultural argument.

Having spent over 15 years building fashion brands that help people construct their aspirational selves, Yelena finds in Byrne’s work a complete worldview of how clothing creates meaning.

This is costume design as resistance—against fast fashion, against cultural amnesia, against the false binary between historical accuracy and contemporary relevance. — DH

Alexandra Byrne designs costumes like a philosopher builds arguments—through careful layering, strategic accumulation, and the understanding that complexity emerges from intelligent constraints

Her name is synonymous with period drama—lavish, layered, and alive with storytelling. From the brocade-laden courts of Elizabeth: The Golden Age and the sherbet confections of Autumn de Wilda’s Emma (2020), to the fantastical worlds of Doctor Strange (2016), Byrne’s work is beautiful, rigorously researched and built on an understanding that clothes are never mere ornament.

Her work achieves historical authenticity while maintaining contemporary relevance, but in Emma, that duality becomes something more quietly revolutionary: a manifesto for how fashion could function in an age of ecological crisis.

The Architecture of Reinvention

In the early 19th century, white muslin dresses were the most democratic textiles—affordable, washable, endlessly reworn. For a character like Emma Woodhouse, wealthy and perpetually curated, this might sound like sartorial purgatory.

Byrne’s solution was practical and poetic: layered silk skirts in radiant tones—mint, saffron, rose, pistachio—wrapped around those same muslin foundations.

Anya Taylor-Joy glides through Highbury as an early template for modular dressing. One base garment. Infinite reinvention. Each silk layer signals mood, status, and story, but the principle remains elegantly simple: reuse, reimagine, refresh.

The effect is sumptuous on screen, but the lesson translates directly to contemporary closets, more creativity within a fixed environment. The need to acquire more and more is replaced by a finer eye towards creativity.

This was historically accurate innovation. As she explained in Filmmaker Magazine, the Regency era represented “the biggest change that had ever happened in women’s fashion, to go from big, heavy, brocade corseted court dresses to these sheer muslin dresses.”

Byrne’s approach begins with total historical immersion.

“I like to know that if I’m changing something or breaking the rules, I’m making those decisions deliberately as opposed to through ignorance,” Byrne once noted. This distinction defines her entire methodology.

For Emma, this meant studying museum pieces, fashion plates, and surviving garments to understand not just how Regency clothes looked, but how they functioned. Several of Emma’s pieces, including her pale pink spencer jacket, are direct copies of museum garments

According to Byrne, the original fabrics were “quite unsophisticated in terms of how they’re made and cut, but the fabrics are just so delicate and so light—that’s not through age, that was the fashion of the time.”

Each garment served multiple functions, every element could be recombined, and the aesthetic emerged from practical constraints.

Sustainable Superheroes?

Here’s where Byrne’s split career between period dramas and Marvel spectacles demonstrates her singular worldview. As she notes, “both superhero films and period films, require the same core skill: problem solving”

Working on the superhero costumes of Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange taught her techniques she’d later apply to Mr. Knightley’s riding pants:

“You could effectively say he’s wearing part-super hero riding britches,” describing how she fused leather and Lycra using Marvel methods.

This cross-pollination is core to Byrne’s philosophy of creative reinvention of clothing and styles:

“Going from film to film, I’ve created a bank of knowledge, which I can access as I move between these different worlds. The end result may be very different, but the work process is the same.”

Byrne approaches each project as an engineering challenge: How do you make garments that serve story, survive action, and create meaning through materiality?

This engineering mindset—where function drives beauty rather than undermining it—connects directly to fashion history's most innovative periods.

History’s Closet: Other Lessons in Reinvention

Byrne has long championed this ethos, often because history itself demanded it. Clothing in the past was expensive, textiles precious. Wardrobes were modular, multifunctional, and made to last.

That necessity bred an elegance we often mistake for extravagance

From Elizabethan mix-and-match bodices to Marvel's practical durability requirements, Byrne consistently applies this historical wisdom: the most elegant solutions emerge from intelligent constraints, not unlimited choice.

That necessity bred an elegance we often mistake for extravagance. When Byrne resurrects these techniques for contemporary screens, they resonate as something more than period accuracy—they become quiet protest against our culture of disposability.

In Emma, this meant creating "one-offs" where vintage fabrics, jewelry, and embroidery could be worked into new pieces. Each costume became a form of haute couture upcycling, designed to function across multiple scenes—proof that even fantasy worlds can embrace sustainable practices.

These strategies were not statements in 16th or 19th-century England; they were survival. But when Byrne resurrects them for the screen, they resonate as something else: a quiet protest against disposability. 

From Highbury to High Street: The Modern Takeaway

What does this mean for us, watching Emma sweep through Highbury in pistachio silk? That the most modern thing about her may not be her confidence, but her closet.

Byrne’s work asks us to consider: 

What if our wardrobes behaved more like Emma’s? A single slip dress, worn under a rotation of skirts, jackets, or bold accessories, becomes ten outfits. A neutral foundation, reinterpreted endlessly, is suddenly luxury. 

Fashion today is in crisis—ecologically, ethically, existentially.

Byrne doesn’t sermonize; she stages a Regency comedy and lets the clothes do the talking. But the message lingers long after the credits: elegance is not about accumulation, but imagination.

Alexandra Byrne reminds us that fashion’s future might just live in its past—and that the most romantic thing we can do for our clothes is keep them in play. 

What cracked in 2020?

Was it the culmination of long-standing injustices finally rupturing the surface? Or did we all just go collectively insane from being trapped inside with our screens? The answer hardly matters when fear and frustration twist the mind the same way, giving license to our worst and most animalistic impulses.

Ari Aster's Eddington takes us back to May 2020 and shows a very human path toward anger and violence—one that perhaps we're still on. Like Robert Altman's Nashville and the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, it presents American division and violence as both cyclical and inevitable.

Aster won't let us escape the brutal truths of those times. While we performed our politics for each other, tearing our communities apart over masks and protests, the dehumanizing march of big tech carried onward.

In Eddington, every character—progressive or conservative, conspiracy theorist or centrist—is performing. And their performances serve powers that profit from division.

These aren't new lessons. They work particularly well in Eddington’s Western setting, where small-town values often mask darker impulses, or heroes are forced to stand alone and principled.

But ruminating on the film, I kept coming back to a different provincial setting: George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I'd recently finished reading. While Eliot's novel differs considerably in tone, it shares DNA with Eddington.

Published in 1871-72, Middlemarch is often called the greatest English novel—a panoramic study of provincial life set forty years earlier during the Reform Act of 1832. Eliot dissects an entire community with scientific precision, showing how personal ambitions and social pressures corrupt even the most idealistic intentions. It's a novel about how good people fail, how reformers become hypocrites, and how the machinery of society grinds down individual nobility.

George Eliot takes as dim a view of political activism in Middlemarch as Aster does in Eddington.

Performative Politics and "Reform"

In his recent analysis of the novel, author says Middlemarch is "a novel about sympathizing with everyone." For Eliot, that sympathy extends to how we all perform political positions when it suits our personal interests or glory.

Take Mr. Brooke, who runs for Parliament on Reform despite neglecting his tenants for decades. His campaign speech ends with suffering workers pelting him with eggs while he fumbles progressive talking points he can't remember. As Eliot writes: "He had never been insulted on his own land before."

He can't see his neglect as insult, only their response.

Or Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious doctor whose medical reforms get compromised the moment he needs funding. He votes against conscience for hospital money, moderates his methods for social acceptance. He marries the vapid Rosamond Vincy, whose expensive tastes drain both finances and idealism. As Eliot writes, his revolutionary plans become "dispersed among all the little local concerns." His idealism is literally swallowed by Middlemarch. Whatever core he begins with is whittled away by the rabbit hole he blithely climbs into.

Eddington's characters are their algorithmic descendants.

The film centers on Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) running for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who Cross believes once slept with his wife Louise (Emma Stone). As Aster explained on the Mixed Signals podcast, he wanted to capture how "every character in this film is somebody who really cares about the world and knows deep down in their bones that something is really wrong. They just all are living in different realities and they disagree on what that thing is."

Pascal, in a New York Times profile of Aster, found the script painfully accurate in capturing our culture's "anxiety, paranoia, despairing isolation and aimless individualism"—conditions that make genuine reform impossible.

As the Times noted about the film's characters, they have "various grievances, most of which are justified," but they "use bad information to make terrible choices."

The Dark Research Libraries of the Mind

The saddest parallel to our anti-social age is Edward Casaubon. Dorothea Brooke—Middlemarch's idealistic young heroine who hungers for meaningful work in a world that offers educated women few options—marries the much older scholar believing she'll assist in great intellectual labor. Instead, she discovers Casaubon has spent decades on his "Key to All Mythologies"—a doomed project connecting all world religions.

Casaubon thinks he's in dialogue with great minds but sits alone in his library, mistaking accumulation for understanding.

"In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities," Eliot writes, "he had become indifferent to the sunlight."

Casaubon is so busy fighting dead scholars about sun gods he can't see actual daylight. Today's Casaubons "do their own research"—our era's "Key to All Mythologies."

Aster frames them perfectly: faces lit by laptop screens in dark rooms, printouts left on bedroom pillows. Each alone but convinced they're part of a truth-seeking community. As Aster observed on Mixed Signals: "nobody knows what's going on. There's no contending with anything."

When Aster created fake social media profiles for research, he discovered: "the deeper I went on any given one and you know depending on what you're clicking on and what you're liking... the more kind of irretrievable you are." He spent time "slapping everything down on paper... scrolling a lot and taking screenshots" of what "this culture feels like, you know, which is horrible, just like just total garbage."

The theorists see themselves as heroes: "I need to bring light to something that has been buried." Both Casaubon and the conspiracy theorists use "research" as political pretext. "I've done my research" becomes the modern way to end conversation rather than start it.

The Data Center Always Wins

Aster's vision is ultimately darker than Eliot's. While the sheriff and mayor tear each other apart over masks and political theater, the data center being built outside town advances its agenda regardless of who's in charge. By the film's end, after the violence erupts, we see Cross's conspiracy theorist mother-in-law at its ribbon-cutting ceremony, blessing the very development she once manically opposed.

This is Aster's masterstroke: showing how our political performances, whether progressive or conspiratorial, serve the same masters. The data center doesn't care if you're posting Black squares or QAnon theories. It profits from both equally. As Aster insisted in the New York Times profile, "the movie is just really about a data center being built."

While the town tears itself apart, algorithmic capitalism quietly advances.

The third act violence—which at first seems to erupt from community tensions—may actually be fostered by those who benefit from a divided populace. The data center represents pure algorithmic control. We're performing our politics for machines that feed on our division.

The Personal Nature of Real Progress

Eliot's idealistic Dorothea achieves genuine transformation—but only through private struggle, away from political platforms. After marrying Casaubon with dreams of assisting great intellectual work, she discovers both his fraudulent scholarship and her own naive projections. Through this profound disappointment, watching her husband's jealous decline and eventual death, she alone "reformed herself," moving from rigid Puritanism to genuine sympathy.

Her transformation accelerates through her growing connection with Will Ladislaw—Casaubon's young cousin, an artist and political writer who represents everything her husband is not: vital, engaged with the world, capable of genuine feeling. Despite Casaubon's posthumous attempt to control her through his will (which disinherits her if she marries Will), Dorothea chooses love and active engagement over wealth and social position.

As she tells Will: "by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

Her real reforms happen quietly after her remarriage: properly built workers' cottages, financial support for the disgraced Lydgate when scandal threatens his practice. Individual acts, not movements.

Eddington offers no Dorothea—perhaps because machines don't allow for her sort of patient moral development.

Characters exist in separate frames, lit by different screens showing different realities. Where Altman's Nashville used overlapping dialogue to show people talking past each other, Aster uses overlapping feeds. They're not even having the same conversation.

When Aster visited actual New Mexicans for research—"going back out to New Mexico, driving around the state, going to different counties, talking to sheriffs, going to small towns and talking to mayors and police chiefs and public officials"—he found something revealing. According to the Times profile, many people he met "were full of passion and conviction and genuinely wanted to see the world improve" but "saw reality in ways that were totally contrary to how Aster understood it."

As Aster continued: "There's a tendency to just dehumanize people who don't agree with you." But we're "being pumped 24/7 full of messaging and a lot of people's hearts and minds are being poisoned."

Neither side achieved what Henry Oliver highlights as Dorothea's great discovery—recognizing that others have "an equivalent centre of self."

Unhistoric Acts

Middlemarch ends with quiet acts of humanistic grace. Eddington with the bright lights of a data center born from violence. Yet both reach similar conclusions about political posturing and how real good is done in the world.

Eliot insists "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts." Dorothea's influence spreads quietly through individual kindnesses. Those who "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs" matter most.

Eddington offers no such comfort. There are no unhistoric acts when every gesture feeds the algorithm. No hidden lives when everything is data. No patient accumulation of good when the machine demands instant performance.

The most terrifying thing about Eddington isn't the violence or the performances or even the absence of heroes. It's that it feels impossible a Dorothea could exist in this world. The film's closest analogue—Cross's wife Louise—is deeply broken by past traumas.

Middlemarch shows how petty jealousies, performative politics, and lack of self-awareness are core to the human experience. Their contradictions are particularly visible in a small town.

Eddington shows the same provincial narcissism—but now it's weaponized by algorithms. We're all performers now, feeding the machine that feeds on us. And unlike Dorothea's embrace of realistic divine grace, the algorithm offers no redemption.

Only more content. And maybe more violence.

I'm not talking about big CGI battles or cosmic stakes—I mean truly seeing the visually impossible, the way Jack Kirby's cosmic energy crackled across the page, Steve Ditko's mystical dimensions warped reality itself, or Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man contorted through impossible positions that somehow felt more authentic than anatomical correctness.

There’s no question that despite the opening weekend success of the Fantastic Four: First Steps, the MCU has seen better days.

I've been collecting comics since the mid-1980s, starting at the Paperback Exchange in Nanuet, NY, where Walter and Louise Simonson would regularly do signings because they were locals. I can still remember the electric anticipation of picking up my pull list, those polybagged issues with trading cards that felt like treasure.

The 1980’s and early 1990’s were a high watermark in comic book storytelling. Spider-Man got married and was promptly buried alive in “Kraven’s Last Hunt”. Daredevil was taken apart and put back together in Frank Miller’s classic “Born Again”.

The X-Men exploded in popularity - with books like Excalibur, Uncanny X-Men, and X-Factor showing different sides of the Mutant experience. Huge universe shaking events like “Secret Wars” and “Inferno” and “Acts of Vengeance” deepened the interconnected stakes.

Like the MCU’s lead up to Infinity War and Endgame, each issue was a masterclass in world building, adventure and humor.

Then things got really lame.

The best creators fled to Image Comics to own their creations and publishing rights. Marvel storylines spun into irrelevance - with forgettable runs like Spider-Man’s “Clone Saga”, and never-ending series of X-Men reboots.

An unsustainable collector’s market collapsed - as people realized that hoarding 100 copies of the latest X-Men #1, polybagged, foil cover was not going to pay for their kids’ college.

Which is all to say the MCU’s decline feels very familiar. And why I remain hopeful that it can — like the comic books — creatively reinvigorate.

Why I'm Making This Definitive Ranking (And Yes, I Know How That Sounds)

These days, you'll still find me most Wednesdays picking up the latest single issues at LI Comic Shop in Lynbrook—a fantastic store that actually understands pull lists and doesn't judge when you add yet another variant cover to your stack.

Tes and Jim (is it the highest nerd honor to be on a first name basis with the comic book guys?) are also fans from my original era of collecting - and their shop is a great throwback to the days of the Paperback Exchange - when the world of Marvel fandom was a much smaller club.

So I think we all agree that much like Marvel comic books the MCU can also regain its former glory.

After 40 years of collecting, we OG fans have developed a particular set of skills. We survived the '90s comic boom and bust (yes, I still have those polybagged hologram covers). We've lived through Inferno, Age of Apocalypse, House of M, Secret Wars (both of them), The Infinity Gauntlet, Dark Reign, and more multiversal reboots than I can count. We've watched our favorite characters die, return, get replaced by clones, turn evil, turn good again, and get rebooted back to square one.

We know when Marvel's chasing trends versus when they're setting them.

This experience makes us uniquely qualified to judge the MCU's post-Endgame output. We've seen these cycles before. We know the difference between creative risk-taking and corporate wheel-spinning. We can spot when a film understands its source material versus when it's just mining for easter eggs.

And because I'm exactly that kind of nerd, I'll be illustrating these rankings with photos from my own secret stash.

When you've been collecting this long, your shelves become your credentials. Consider it visual evidence from an expert witness in the case of The People vs. Marvel Studios' post-Endgame Output.

Post-Endgame Rankings for True Believers Only

The Merry Marching Marvel Society

1. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) - ★★★★

Tony Leung alone elevates this film into the stratosphere. This is the last peak MCU film—taking relatively obscure source material and making it essential through brilliant casting and cultural specificity. The film fully embraces Hong Kong action cinema aesthetics, giving us actual kung fu choreography instead of shaky-cam nonsense. That underground super-powered, fight club sequence? The MCU at its best. The easter eggs feel organic rather than obligatory.

This is what Marvel used to do best: make B-listers feel like they've always been A-listers. It respects the source material while bringing something new to the table. More of this, please.

2. Thunderbolts* / New Avengers (2025) - ★★★½

Great performances, solid action, no obvious Volume use, no pink blobby CGI. The film understands its assignment: give us a team of misfits and antiheroes who actually feel dangerous and damaged.

Florence Pugh and David Harbor's chemistry from Black Widow pays off beautifully here, while Sebastian Stan's Bucky brings real star power and acting chops that elevate the entire ensemble. Watching him navigate between reformed assassin and reluctant leader gives the film its emotional core, alongside Yelena’s bored, exhausted killer. The stakes feel appropriate to the characters—no one's saving the multiverse, they're just trying not to die while completing their mission. Was that so hard, Marvel? This gives me actual hope for future films.

When Marvel trusts good actors with solid material and practical action, magic still happens.

3. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - ★★★½

It's 90% fan service, but it's fan service deployed with surgical precision. The premise—Peter's identity crisis literally breaking the multiverse—actually makes emotional sense. Willem Dafoe returning as Green Goblin reminded everyone why he's still the best Spider-Man villain ever filmed.

Alfred Molina's Doc Ock gets actual character development two decades later. Even Jamie Foxx's Electro works better here than in his own movie. This is the Sinister Six film by other means, capturing some genuine Raimi magic despite massive plot holes you could swing through. Sometimes fan service IS the story, and that's okay when it's done with this much heart. It understands that nostalgia works best when paired with genuine emotion.

Not Brand Echh…

4. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) - ★★★½

This should have been a masterpiece. Sam Raimi directing Steve Ditko's psychedelic creation? That's the dream match-up every fan wanted. And for about half the runtime, it delivers—the paint dimension, the musical note battle, Scarlet Witch as horror movie villain, zombie Strange. Patrick Stewart's Professor X! John Krasinski finally playing Reed Richards!

But then the third act devolves into the same CGI slop we've seen too many times. The cast chemistry between Cumberbatch, Olsen, and Gomez keeps it watchable, but this might be a tale of what could have been if Marvel had fully trusted Raimi's vision.

5. Black Widow (2021) - ★★★½

Better late than never? Not really, but at least Florence Pugh and David Harbor make this worthwhile. The film works best when it's a grounded spy thriller about a deeply dysfunctional family of Russian sleeper agents.

Watching Yelena and Natasha fight together delivers the sister dynamic that years of MCU films never gave us. Yes, the third act goes full CGI nonsense with a flying fortress, but the character work preceding it earns enough goodwill. This should have come out in 2016, but at least it plants seeds for better things.

6. Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) - ★★★

Believe me when I say I wanted to love this more than anything. The Fantastic Four are Marvel's first family—they deserve to soar.

What works: The period setting, practical sets, the Fantasti-car design, comic-accurate Galactus (finally seeing him tower over everything was genuinely thrilling!), some nice Storm sibling moments, and the Mole Man cameo.

What doesn't: Pedro Pascal plays Reed Richards like he's apologizing for existing. The Thing spends the entire movie moping—why is Ben Grimm a sad chef who hates saying "It's Clobbering Time"? Why gender-swap Silver Surfer just to reduce the character to “love interest” and “mother”? Why does this first family have zero joy?

Save for the climactic battle (90% of which was in the trailers), they literally never fight anyone. These characters shaped Marvel Comics—they deserve a film that better understands their dynamic.

Receives a “No Prize”

7. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) - ★★★

It's fine. Genuinely. Better than most post-Endgame entries, with some effective emotional beats around Rocket's origin. But you can feel James Gunn's attention already shifting to DC—his Superman is a considerably more inspired film. This feels like contractual obligation executed with professional competence.

The High Evolutionary never quite lands as a villain, and the team dynamics that made the first two films special feel more like going through the motions. Still, "fine" is practically Shakespeare as we head down this list.

8. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) - ★★★

The ultimate "what if?" movie, forced to exist under impossible circumstances. It's hard to judge harshly given the real-world tragedy, but this is clearly Coogler's weakest film (especially now that Sinners exists).

The Namor changes work well—making him Mayan gives him cultural specificity the comics never managed. Some sequences are genuinely powerful, particularly anything dealing with grief. But the film feels as lost as its characters without T'Challa. A noble effort that never quite coheres.

9. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) - ★★★

A perfectly adequate Spider-Man adventure. Some of the illusion sequences work, and Jake Gyllenhaal tries his best, but this feels like MCU homework between bigger events.

The Peter/MJ romance is sweet, the European vacation setting is fun, but there's no escaping that this is placeholder cinema. Mysterio has always been one of Spider-Man's lamest villains conceptually, and nothing here changes that.

Remembered as Fondly as the “Clone Saga”

10. The Marvels (2023) - ★★½

Not the worst MCU movie, but that's damning with faint praise. Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan is genuinely fantastic—Iman Vellani's enthusiasm and love for these characters shines through every scene. The body-swapping gimmick creates some fun action beats. The post-credits scene got legitimate gasps in my theater.

My kids loved it, which reminds me why these stories matter—every generation deserves their entry point into this universe. It just deserves to be better than cotton candy cinema.

11. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) - ★★½

The worst CGI I've seen in a major Hollywood production. Filming the entire thing on the Volume with pink digital goo as your primary design aesthetic makes this film hard to watch visually. MODOK looks like a screensaver. The "city" in the Quantum Realm looks like a Windows 95 wallpaper.

Embarrassing on every level.

12. Eternals (2021) - ★★½

A boring film that wastes a solid cast and director. The ensemble lacks chemistry—you could rearrange their characters randomly and nothing would change. The stakes are simultaneously cosmic and completely weightless. The powers feel underwhelming for beings who've supposedly guided humanity for millennia. Did COVID-era filming break this? Maybe, but it's also fundamentally misconceived.

Hiring Chloé Zhao to make a Marvel movie then stripping away everything that makes her interesting as a filmmaker is a tragedy.

13. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) - ★★½

The quality drop from Ragnarok to this film is a steep cliff. The Volume usage is egregious—you can see the LED walls reflected in their eyes. Treating Jane's cancer as comedy subplot material? Awful. Completely butchering Jason Aaron's incredible Thor run? Unforgivable. The jokes aren't funny. Gorr the God Butcher becomes Gorr the Barely-In-The-Movie. Christian Bale tries but he's acting against nothing in a digital void.

One of the worst pieces of corporate slop in the modern era.

14. Captain America: Brave New World (2025) - ★★

What are we even doing here? This looks bad, is scripted worse, and wastes Harrison Ford slumming for a paycheck. But the real crime? The Leader. Tim Blake Nelson is an incredible actor, and you turn him into... this?

This made MODOK look like James Cameron’s finest work.

I paid opening weekend prices for this. I sat through the entire thing.

15. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) - ★★

Fan Service: The Movie: The Experience. This is corporate cynicism at its most naked—a film that practically winks at you while picking your pocket.

The movie doesn't even pretend to have a reason to exist beyond "people will pay to see Deadpool and Wolverine together." It's two hours of "remember this?" and "hey, it's that guy!" masquerading as irreverent comedy.

When your R-rated, fourth-wall-breaking anarchist becomes just another content delivery system, spouting references instead of actual jokes, the formula has officially calcified beyond repair. Hugh Jackman tries, but even he seems exhausted by the whole enterprise. The film's contempt for its audience is palpable—it knows you'll watch anyway, so why bother?

We deserve better. Marvel can do better—they just need to remember why we fell in love with these stories in the first place.

The Real Best Marvel Movies Right Now? They're Animated

Here's what kills me: while the MCU has spent the better part of 15 features churning out Volume-trapped slop, the best Marvel movies aren't even MCU films. They're Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

These films do the impossible—they don't adapt comics, they ARE comics. Every frame crackles with the energy of turning a page and seeing something impossible. The mixed animation styles—noir shadows, manga speed lines, watercolor washes—create the first truly comic book movies.

They've single-handedly made all of Pixar and Disney's 3D animation look outdated and boring.

People are desperately anticipating Beyond the Spider-Verse not just for story resolution but to see what visual impossibilities they'll achieve next.

That's what Marvel Comics inspire at their best.

Three Films for Fans of Comic Book Cinema's True Potential

If you're a fan of superhero cinema and want to see films that capture the visual boldness and emotional truth of the best Marvel comics, let me share three discoveries from recent deep dives into 1960’s Japan and 1990’s Hong Kong and Hollywood action rarities.

These aren't comic book movies, but they understand what makes the medium magical:

Black Tight Killers (1966)

This psychedelic Japanese ninja thriller from director Yasuharu Hasebe follows a war photographer tangled up with color-coded female assassins. It feels like someone weaponized a box of Skittles on screen—pure "vibe" that operates as the ancestor of every anime and video game that gets it.

Each assassin's distinct color scheme doesn't just identify them but suggests entire worldviews in chromatic form. When urban environments suddenly transform into psychedelic showcases, it achieves what great comic artists do—using visual technique to externalize internal experience.

A Moment of Romance (1990)

Benny Chan's Hong Kong romance stars Andy Lau as a motorcycle-riding gangster who falls for a wealthy student during a botched robbery. This film delivers knife fights and motorcycle stunts where rain pours and explosions bloom every time the characters embrace.

Chan understood what Todd McFarlane grasped when drawing Spider-Man—that exaggeration can feel more authentic than realism when expressing heightened emotional states. The visual audacity doesn't distract from the emotional core but constitutes it.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Renny Harlin's action thriller stars Geena Davis as a suburban teacher with amnesia who discovers she was once a lethal government assassin. Her evolution from domestic softness to lethal precision transforms the film's entire visual approach—warmer to colder, stable to kinetic, safe to dangerous.

By the time Davis fully embraces her assassin identity with platinum blonde hair gleaming like a weapon, she has literally transformed the film's visual world through personal evolution. When she applies lipstick while snarling "Life is pain—get used to it," the scene connects beauty rituals to combat preparation with the kind of visual boldness Marvel comics once celebrated.

What's particularly telling is that Samuel L. Jackson's relationship with Geena Davis here—as the scrappy, overwhelmed sidekick to an amnesiac super-soldier—is remarkably similar to his dynamic with Brie Larson in Captain Marvel. But where Captain Marvel plays it safe, The Long Kiss Goodnight delivers raw, visceral action and genuine danger. Jackson's Mitch Henessey feels genuinely vulnerable, making Davis's Charly Baltimore feel genuinely lethal. It's the R-rated, uncompromising version of a story Marvel would later sanitize.

Why I Keep Watching (It's Not Obligation, It's Optimism)

So why do I keep showing up? Why did I pay to see Captain America: Brave New World opening weekend?

Because I'm a collector, and collectors understand that every story is part of a larger tapestry. These characters have given me four decades of stories, and we’ve seen Marvel recover from worse before1. The X-Men and Secret Wars loom on the horizon. Even the comics themselves cycle—we survived the '90s, we'll survive this.

And honestly? The trend might already be turning.

Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four: First Steps are considerable improvements over Quantumania and Brave New World. I have my issues with the film, but the practical effects, and inventive production design of the FF movie beats the hell out of pink CGI goo and Volume prisons. Thunderbolts delivered actual character work. The X-Men are coming. Secret Wars looms.

Marvel knows how to course-correct. They did it after the comic crash. They'll do it again.

Until then, I'll be at LI Comic Shop every Wednesday, arguing these rankings with Tes and Jim, and remembering why these stories mattered enough to collect for 40 years.

WHERE TO WATCH

The MCU is available on Disney+

Black Tight Killers (1966)

• Streaming: Available to rent on Amazon Prime

• Physical Media: Radiance Blu Ray (Region A/B)

A Moment of Romance (1990)

• Streaming: Available for Free on YouTube

• Physical Media: Radiance Blu-ray (Region A).

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

• Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon Prime

• Physical Media: Arrow Video Blu-ray, recently reissued with new special features

Editor's note: Geoff Wolinetz returns to Cognitive Frames after his sharp analysis of Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life. This time, he tackles Steve Martin's L.A. Story—a film that treats Los Angeles as both setting and character, using Shakespearean themes to explore how we perform ourselves into existence.

As someone five years into his own L.A. journey, Geoff writes from a perfect vantage point: close enough to feel the city's rhythms, distant enough to see its absurdities. The result is criticism that does what the film itself does—finds meaning in the space between illusion and reality. – D.H.

Full disclosure: I live in Los Angeles.

I haven't lived here long - just 5 years - but I do live here. When I lived in New York, I would gripe and complain - about the subways always being late, about the streets being crowded with tourists, about my rent being too high1. But when someone else did - someone who didn't live there - I'd get angry and defensive. Hey, I can complain about New York, but you can't! You're not from here. There's a certain right - a privilege - that comes with being a native.

Steve Martin is not technically a native of Los Angeles, but L.A. Story cements him as the quintessential Angeleno - it's a love letter to a city that makes itself so hard to love, filtered through a lens of Shakespearean magic and modern absurdity. That filter pushes at the central theme of the entire film, one that resonates through identity, through love and through the city itself - illusion vs. reality. In a city where the lines between performance and authenticity are constantly blurred - can you ever truly find yourself or will you always be playing a role?

And it's through the lens of Shakespearean whimsy, the film becomes more than a romantic comedy. It transforms into a modern-day Midsummer Night's Dream, where freeway signs whisper advice and love is as unpredictable as LA weather2. Like Shakespeare's enchanted forest, Los Angeles is both setting and character, a magical landscape where the absurd feels perfectly plausible.

And that sign! We should all have someone in our lives like the freeway sign in this film: sage, direct, funny and irreverent at all the right times. Like Puck or even Horatio, whom the film quotes at its end, the freeway sign is not just the perfect combination of form and function for the plot of the film, it's a perfect foil to Harris as he navigates the emotion and cracks in the facade of his reality that have come on. The freeway sign is Harris's guide, his conscience, and his reminder that even in a city built on illusions, moments of truth still flash by if you know where to look.

The freeway sign can offer advice, but it can't make choices for Harris. Like many Angelenos, he's left to navigate a world where performance often replaces authenticity, and where finding the truth about love, about ambition, about himself requires pulling back the curtain on his own carefully constructed illusion. Harris's life is a careful performance: quirky enough to seem interesting, safe enough to avoid real risk. It's only when his relationship cracks and his routine begins to falter that Harris is forced to confront the uncomfortable question underneath it all: which parts of his life are real and which are part of the veneer?

Illusion and Image in LA Culture

Los Angeles is a city built on illusion, not just movie magic but personal branding as a way of life. L.A. Story doesn't just point this out, it roasts it with love. Take the scene with the group lunch3, where the table fires off increasingly ridiculous drink orders both as a one-upsmanship tactic and also without even thinking twice: "half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon," then the rest of the table adding a twist of lemon because you've got to have a twist of lemon. The gravest thing you can be seen as in LA is out of touch or passé.

In this version of LA, your beverage order is your personality, and the more complicated it is, the more you must have your life together. It's hilarious, but also quietly brutal: identity becomes performance, and performance becomes currency. Who you are is less important than how impressively you can describe it out loud.

That same logic plays out in places like L'Idiot - the film's absurdly exclusive, hilariously named restaurant4, where getting a table is treated like some amalgam of corporate M&A and a religious experience. The hostess acts like a gatekeeper to Nirvana, and patrons treat proximity to truffle foam like social capital. Even basic human behavior gets folded into the spectacle: the restaurant hands out flavored dental floss between courses and people casually floss their teeth in public, as if oral hygiene at the dinner table is some kind of weird status flex. In L.A., not even self-maintenance is private; it's performance. It's a curated version of self as a stand-in for depth.

"When I'm around you, I find myself showing off, which is the idiot's version of being interesting."

Harris nails it with one of the film's most cutting lines: "When I'm around you, I find myself showing off, which is the idiot's version of being interesting." In that moment, this self-referential comment is a punchline, yes, but also a mirror to the world he inhabits. Because the grand underlying joke of L.A. Story is that everyone is showing off - loudly, weirdly, and with the best possible lighting.

Cracks in the Facade

L.A. in the early 1990s, like many large cities, was in many ways a different place than it is today. Edgier, more dangerous, sharper. One of the film's most striking satirical moments arrives during a freeway shootout, which isn't staged as a dramatic set piece, but presented as a very routine part of everyday life. Bullets fly. Chaos erupts. It's so routine that even an elderly couple is involved.

And yet, the surrounding characters treat it with a kind of detached bemusement, as though it's no more disruptive than a traffic jam or a Jamba Juice order gone wrong5. In fact, the most stressful part for them isn't the shootout itself - it's Harris's girlfriend's inability to get his gun out of the glove compartment and loaded efficiently enough. It's ridiculous but it's also an incisive critique of a city that, at the time, was grappling with real violence, rising crime, and deep social unrest. Just like the tiniest details peppered throughout this movie, even this is meant to capture how normalized the extreme can become in a place so steeped in image and illusion. The violence is part of the background noise, both literally and metaphorically, because Los Angeles can feel like just another part of the show even in crisis.

Reality Through Love: Finding Truth in the Surreal

But beneath all this absurdity, the film starts to peel back something more vulnerable. For all of Harris's charm and wit, over the course of the film we begin to see how much of his identity is curated. His own carefully maintained performance stitched together by cleverness and convenience. In many ways, Los Angeles rewards that kind of performance, even demands it. But as Harris stumbles through romantic misfires and supernatural interventions, something cracks. The world around him, so polished and so performative, begins to feel hollow.

And that's the deeper truth the film is quietly working toward all while making you laugh: that love, connection, and meaning - the things Harris claims to want - require more than a good script and an agent to sell it. They demand presence. Vulnerability. They have to have something at stake. It's in the moments where Harris drops the act that we begin to see the faintest outline of something real. In a city that teaches people to edit themselves into perfection, through facelifts and BBLs6 and exaggerated resumes and perfect headshots, L.A. Story reminds us that perfection is the enemy of true intimacy.

Harris K. Telemacher's emotional arc is the quiet engine of L.A. Story. At the outset, he floats through life buoyed by charm, absurdity, and a kind of curated detachment - almost dissociated. His relationships, much like the city he lives in, are all about the surface. That's especially true of his affair with SanDeE7, a relationship built on manic energy and mutual self-interest. She's all flash: fashionable, fast-talking, and famously shallow. And yet, for a time, Harris convinces himself that this is what connection looks like. It's L.A. love, filtered through irony and image.

But then there's Sara.

Sara is everything SanDeE isn't: grounded, skeptical, resistant to Harris's one-liners and self-mythologizing, even if she feels the same immediate physical attraction that he does. Where SanDeE reflects the illusion of Los Angeles back at Harris, Sara refuses it. She instead becomes a mirror in which he can actually see himself. Their relationship isn't smooth or immediate. Harris vacillates between the two women, between comfort and risk, between the illusion he's used to and the authenticity he claims to want. That tension becomes the heart of his transformation. Because loving Sara demands more than cleverness. It demands vulnerability. And letting the performance drop is terrifying to Harris.

That's where the film's magic literally steps in. The city itself seems to rise up around Harris to push him toward the truth with which he's struggling. A freeway sign begins giving him advice. Coincidences pile up like fate trying to break through the noise. Even the weather - famously predictable in Los Angeles8 starts to behave unpredictably, like Shakespearean stage direction. These elements aren't just whimsical touches; they function like the enchanted forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream or the ghosts in Hamlet: surreal interventions meant to disrupt the order of things just long enough for characters to gain clarity.

In a lesser film, this would all build to a message about tearing down the illusion, escaping the city, choosing "reality" over artifice. But L.A. Story doesn't take that easy out. Instead, it suggests something subtler and more honest. Reality, it argues, doesn't require us to abandon the illusion entirely. We just need to see it clearly, name it for what it is, and decide what matters within it. Illusion is part of the structure. But so is intention. So is love.

"In a city built on storytelling, perhaps that's the real story: not whether what we're living is real, but whether we're choosing it with our eyes open."

In the end, Harris doesn't escape the performance of Los Angeles. He learns to live his truth within it. And in a city built on storytelling, perhaps that's the real story: not whether what we're living is real, but whether we're choosing it with our eyes open.

Ultimately, if the central framework of the movie is using Shakespeare not just as homage or adaptation, but as a useful tool to navigate the contradictions of Los Angeles, then there's one central question worth asking: In a city built on illusion and facade, can love still be real? L.A. Story's pretty definitive answer is yes—but only if you stop performing and start feeling. The film's great triumph is that it functions as both satire and a sincere tribute to the city that it so accurately represents. In Los Angeles, absurdity and beauty co-exist and Shakespearean truths still echo through freeway signs and half double decaffeinated half-cafs … with a twist of lemon.

Where to Watch: Available to rent or purchase on Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu/Fandango at Home, and Microsoft Store.

Lionsgate issued a Bluray for the film’s 30th anniversary

Not currently included with any major streaming subscriptions.