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.
Chers camarades,
I like to think of movie Club as a safe space where we can let go of our yearlong effort to enter each new screening with a Zen mindset, resetting our brains, to the degree this is possible, to the status of neutral blank slates.Am I the only one among us who has a specific ritual to help perform this reset? As the lights go down and the first production logos appear, I close my eyes and make a silent vow that, no matter what assumptions I’ve brought in with me based on the director’s or performers’ prior work, no matter my accumulated knowledge about the movie’s production history or source material or, God help us, awards-season campaign story, for the next couple of hours I will attempt to give myself over entirely and solely to the sights and sounds unfurling onscreen. (I don’t actually say all that to myself; it’s become a mental shorthand I can get through in the time it takes to open a notebook and uncap a pen.)
But now we’re in the club,a pleasingly grotty 1970s-style conversation pit where we can be our cranky selves: veteran filmgoers and opinion-havers with viewing histories by now thousands of movies deep,histories that have shaped our personal preferences in ways we rarely get a chance to explore (since we’re hired to review the movies,not ourselves). So I will kick off this second round by workshopping a theory about a preference I’ve had to work extra-hard this year to keep erasing from my mental blackboard: I am not a fan of the increasingly influential style that for clarity’s sake I will call the Safdie school, though it’s not limited to works directed by the brothers of that name, either together or separately. The two films that best exemplified the style this year, Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, were not even both made by Safdies; the second was written and directed by Mary Bronstein, who’s connected to the brothers through her husband, their shared producer (and onetime director himself) Ronald Bronstein. But a filmmaker need not belong to this small circle to make movies that display elements of this emerging tendency. A 2025 release that Justin praised in his last post, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, shares some characteristics with the Safdie school, as does Ari Aster’s Eddington (and, to some degree, his 2023 feel-bad epic beau Is Afraid).
Byrne and Chalamet have been much lauded for their work in these highly demanding roles, and both get the chance to prove, if we weren’t aware already, that they are prodigiously gifted actors with the stamina of elite athletes. It’s undeniably notable how tirelessly they commit to their directors’ vision as the chaos piles up around their seemingly doomed (but in the end perhaps too hastily redeemed) characters. It’s that directorial vision itself, maybe, that’s too narrow in its conception of what a messed-up, destructive, but potentially redeemable human being can be. As I wrote in my review of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (a 2025 film that, it’s worth noting, does not make use of the amped-up narrative style under discussion here, though it has its own problems), I’ve always found the brothers’ guiding philosophy to be to “proceed from the principle that one of the highest aims of cinema is to successfully transfer the anxieties of a film’s characters onto its audience.”
That’s certainly an effective technique for creating bonding among audiences-the crowd I saw If I Had Legs with came out buzzing with conversation about their vicarious flop sweat on the Byrne character’s behalf.