In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri—about the year in cinema.

Dear all,

Alison, it’s good to meet a fellow Is This Thing On? fan—not that we constitute some sort of suppressed minority or anything. But I’ll admit, I’ve been especially curious, and maybe a little anxious, about the reactions to this one ever since mid-July, when my New York Film Festival colleagues and I selected Bradley Cooper’s movie—a sweet, funny, insistently optimistic crowd-pleaser about the importance of love and laughter and self-care—for our closing-night slot. Super-early programmer screenings can be a disorienting privilege; there’s something about the cone-of-silence vacuum in which they take place that can mess with your perceptions, in ways that prerelease press screenings don’t. Will the audience go for this? Does it matter, so long as we do? I saw Is This Thing On? in an empty screening room and found myself utterly charmed—and wondered, over the three quiet months or so until its premiere, if others would feel remotely the same way.

I rewatched the film at that premiere, this time, of course, with an audience, and fell hard for it all over again. I love Will Arnett’s self-effacing sad-boy act and Laura Dern’s good-humored exasperation and the balance of grit and gloss in the filmmaking, the way Cooper’s canny showbiz instincts meld so fluidly with his lived-in, observational insights. I love the kids, and I knew the damn thing was working when, at the climax, I didn’t think even once about the immortal “Under Pressure” needle drops in Grosse Pointe Blank and Aftersun. I love that, even while casting himself as a character named Balls, Cooper shows what an astute and graceful director he’s become—something that I’d already been convinced of by Maestro, the most underappreciated great-artist biopic of recent vintage. Above all, I love the film’s highly unfashionable conviction—drawn from the British comedian John Bishop, the movie’s real-life inspiration—that sometimes, the end doesn’t have to be the end. It’s like an upbeat corrective to all those addictive, mostly A.I.-generated “Am I the Asshole?”–style posts I’ve been mindlessly devouring in between long bouts of doomscrolling—you know, the ones where the commenters recommend divorce because your spouse put a spoon in the wrong drawer.

As a story about significant others navigating post-separation limbo, Cooper’s movie reminded me less of the glib, coldly virtuosic Splitsville than of the wonderful Icelandic drama The Love That Remains, about a failed marriage that has drifted into its own uncharted, it’s-complicated waters. Directed by Hlynur Pálmason (Godland), it follows Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), a visual artist, and Magnus (Sverrir Guðnason), her soon-to-be-ex-husband, who’s perplexed to increasingly find himself a stranger in his former home and to their three children. Awash in gorgeous landscapes, biting humor, and sometimes surreal jolts of violence (two words: giant rooster), The Love That Remains is a more elliptical, enigmatic piece of work than Is This Thing On?, and, in the end, a less reassuring one. But in both movies, we’re seeing flawed human characters trying to figure themselves out, in the hands of a filmmaker willing to extend them the time and space they need.

The opposite of a Josh Safdie or Mary Bronstein approach, in other words, though I’d be curious to see their version of Is This Thing On? Lots more standup-comedy flop sweat, I’m guessing, and maybe halfway through, Balls gets crushed by a falling bathtub. Having paired Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You on my year-end list, I’m with Alison on those films’ claw-your-face-off pleasures, but no less appreciative of Dana’s sharp evisceration of same. “Silver-tongued dickweed,” an instant-classic insult, describes Marty Mauser perfectly. What does it say about me that I didn’t actually find him all that unbearable—or, rather, that I think he usefully complicates the term? One common assumption of narrative cinema is that unbearable tension is good but unbearable characters are bad—an interesting axiom to apply to Marty Supreme, in which tension all but becomes a character in itself. I’m struck by how the movie amps up our adrenaline by mimicking the proportions of an actual table-tennis marathon. Safdie isn’t just pushing Marty forward; he’s playing him. With every cut and every pan, it feels as though the director himself is slamming the ball back across the net, as if he and his protagonist/star (and Timothée Chalamet’s great performance does make them feel almost interchangeable) were locked in a ferocious competition to win every scene, pushing each other toward greatness in the process.

Taking up your earlier invitation, Dana, for us to openly embrace our inner and perhaps outer cranks, I would gladly spend two and a half more hours in the company of a character as unbearable as Marty than another minute in a Situation Room with all the hopelessly unpersuasive noncharacters who proliferate (sorry not sorry) in that paper-thin excuse for a nuclear-countdown thriller, A House of Dynamite. I’ll try not to pile on much more than I already have, but as unfortunate trends go, I will note that, between Kathryn Bigelow’s movie and Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab—and hell, we can also throw in September 5, last year’s sports-journalist’s-eye view of the 1972 Munich massacre—I may be done with the political control-room thriller as a subgenre, one that Bilge aptly identified in his last dispatch.

I don’t mean to be reductive: The flaws and virtues of A House of Dynamite and The Voice of Hind Rajab, both from directors whose work I’ve admired (to say the absolute least), are not created equal. A House of Dynamite strikes me as an unusually half-assed episode of 24 (a show that I once loved, dubious pro-torture politics and all), with a three-part, up-the-chain-of-command structure that cheesily undercuts whatever point about the limits of government competence it’s trying to make. The Voice of Hind Rajab is a trickier thing to dismiss: It’s heroically determined to preserve and lift up the story of a young victim of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza—a victim whose actual voice we hear throughout the movie—but that impulse is not strengthened so much as trivialized by the ticking-clock call-center melodramatics that Ben Hania has concocted, as both a narratively accessible entry point and a hyper-Brechtian counterpoint to that excruciating real-life audio. Bilge is absolutely right when he says that, as critics and audiences, we sometimes prefer “a light dusting of political flattery over our entertainment.” Ben Hania’s film is hardly a light dusting; it’s fearlessly confrontational on a subject that many who are anti-Palestinian would prefer we overlook. But the movie also strikes me as more of an entertainment than its formal ambition warrants, and, in discussing it with fans and detractors, I haven’t been alone in suggesting that a better, truer version of the film might have forced us to sit with Hind Rajab’s voice alone, played over a blank screen. The definition of unbearable? Maybe so—and maybe what’s called for.

Bilge, I know you could school me on this with your eyes closed (or at least open mine), and, as someone who genuinely wanted to like or at least appreciate both films, I’d welcome it. Or not! We have common ground with Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which I loved and admired deeply for its spareness of means and the sense of entrapment that Sepideh Farsi’s approach engenders—which makes Fatma Hassouna’s joy and radiance feel all the more like a precious gift.

Or perhaps now, per Alison, is the time to adopt a Leonard Cohen basso profundo and sing the very different praises of Who by Fire, which has been drifting just under the radar of a few posts now. Philippe Lesage’s drama is a vacation-from-hell movie, and even if unbearability is in the eye of the beholder, it’s a term that can be safely applied to at least two of the film’s many characters. Blake (Arieh Worthalter), an arrogant director with an Oscar on his shelf but little in the way of mainstream recognition these days, owns an accessible-only-by-seaplane woodland cabin, to which he’s invited several guests, the most prominent and combative of whom is his old friend and colleague Albert (Paul Ahmarani), a screenwriter whose career has also seen better days.

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What ensues is, essentially, a multiday airing of gripes and grudges, in which the festering resentments of an older generation are more than matched by the ambitions and jealous insecurities of a younger one, embodied here by Jeff (Noah Parker), who’s tagged along for the trip with Albert’s teenage son. Jeff is an aspiring filmmaker and possibly a stand-in for Lesage, who’s more than willing to indict himself in this concentrated brew of toxic manhood. Lesage is a master at sustaining tension, but unlike Bronstein and Safdie, he has no use for extreme, exposed-nerves subjectivity. A documentarian by training, he’s a precise observer of group dynamics, never cutting unless absolutely necessary, and letting emotional suspense build and dissipate naturally over the course of a scene. Who by Fire would make a superb double bill with Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, another single-location portrait of an awkward reunion between two former artistic collaborators—in this case, Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers (Ethan Hawke and Andrew Scott, in the acting duet of the year)—who are bound by an irreducible weave of love, rivalry, bitterness, affection, wit, and genius. Man, their Slate Theater Club posts would have been epic.

Unbearably yours,

Justin

Read all of the entries in Slate’s 2025 Movie Club.

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