Below, I highlighted some of the other movies and documentaries I watched in 2025 and managed to jot down a few thoughts. Thanks for reading!

Koln 75

Like the modern biopic, it’s cheekily self-aware, but it’s also good fun. Koln 75 slaloms through time and space, German and English, while pledging an abiding love for jazz music. For the uninitiated, it documents the unlikely rise of teenage concert promoter Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) and her ultimate coup to get world-renowned pianist Keith Jarrett to bring his improvisational style to Germany. 

One of the pleasures of a smaller musical biography comes with the element of surprise because the average viewer likely does not know this story backwards and forwards, thus leaving room to sit back and enjoy without overanalyzing.

The movie does get a bit sidetracked upon finally introducing Jarrett (John Magaro) to the degree that it almost feels like a different movie. However, the chaotic thrills up to the actual performance make for a handy thriller we can feel in our beings. It makes the final product all the more exhilarating, and for those who have dabbled in Jarrett only sparingly, it feels like an encouragement to take another plunge to meet the real artist and his improvisational virtuosity. 

Riefenstahl

In one sense, Leni Riefenstahl is a complex figure to begin to decipher. She was a pioneering woman within film of the 20th century and a centenarian who lived to see the 21st. However, her work during the rise of Hitler during the 1930s raises questions of complicity. Triumph of the Will was labeled a “Pied Piper” film for creating a god-like ethos around a mere man. In controversial talk show appearances, she was questioned about how much she knew about the Holocaust and why she didn’t rebel, and each and every time, she comes back with indignation. 

In one sequence from an unaired special, she throws a fit on camera from a similar line of questioning, denying she was ever a close friend or confidante of the Nazi inner circle, including Hitler and Goebbels. It feels a bit like Peter vehemently denying he knew Christ. It points to a deeper regret even as the documentary frames this conversation with many candid interactions between the filmmaker and the German high command. 

Riefenstahl’s rapport with architect Albert Speer fascinates me because he is one of the archetypes of “The Good German,” who fashioned himself as an artist, not a war criminal. It does feel like Riefenstahl is even more ripe for film because it is the very medium she helped to push forward. 

One notable contradiction for me was how Jesse Owens featured so prominently in Olympia, where his speed and agility almost feel like a joke for how easily he blows out the competition. Riefenstahl gave us documentation even as she was closely aligned with such a disturbing ideology propped up by eugenics, antisemitism, and all kinds of racism. And yet a point is made, Riefenstahl would never show a disabled body; it would not be worthy of the screen. 

It’s difficult for me to pronounce judgment on a scared human being, but across what feels like a sprawling account, we see Riefenstahl caught in these “little white lies.” There’s the cumulative effect of someone trying to alter and control the narrative around them. Still, the cracks continue to form. One of the biggest was the realization she was chosen to document the Polish campaign at the start of the war. She asked to be released as a war correspondent after what she had seen….

Later, she made a movie called The Lowlands during the war and had gypsie children carted in as extras. Records later indicated all these children were eventually shipped to concentration camps and perished…Riefenstahl is not a character who needs to be redeemed. However, I do wish I could understand her better. This documentary begins a conversation worth having. 

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore

I had no recognition of Marlee Matlin’s early career when she reached audiences again with the Oscar-winning CODA (2022). This new documentary about her life and career quickly rectified this blind spot. It’s such an obvious realization, but she was so young when she shot into the public eye with Children of a Lesser God across from William Hurt. 

The landscape in Hollywood for deaf actresses felt mostly untrod, and she was learning as she went along, leading an initial title wave of change, even as the progress after her early win seemed incremental. Certainly, the format of this documentary is oriented around Matlin, but she was also a changemaker in getting closed captioning, which is now ubiquitous. 

The moment when she recounts experiencing her favorite childhood movie, The Wizard of Oz, anew is a fitting moment. And even when the movies weren’t there, it was inspiring to see how she carved out a space for herself in television, pushing representation of her community in the limelight from Seinfeld to The West Wing. As an avowed Henry Winkler fan, I knew he had been a lifelong supporter of those with dyslexia, but what a wonderful discovery that he and Matlin have been close for decades. In a fickle industry, it’s a joy to celebrate such stalwart relationships and the irrepressible vigor of Matlin herself. 

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley 

I knew Jeff Buckley tangentially because of Leonard Cohen, but I came to know him better through my folk phase when I came to listen to Tim Buckley. If he wasn’t much of a father, maybe their devotion to music was aligned, even if their ambitions were different. They shared the voice passed down through a family tree. 

St. Ann’s Brooklyn tribute to Tim was part of Jeff’s coming-out party in 1991, and from then on, Jeff jumped out of this documentary. He comes off as a soulful, thoughtful individual, full of thoughts and poetry, and a desire to be a great songwriter and a vocalist in a tradition as diverse as Nina Simone and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

He had the fire in his eyes and the remarkable chords, but we quickly recognize the incubator of community provided to him in places like Shanay’s coffee shop, where he got to hone his craft with a receptive audience. 

He parlayed it into Grace — a death prayer of an album – articulating this idea of not fearing anything because there is finally someone who loves you for real. You can achieve a state of grace from someone else loving you…

What becomes evident is the many remarkable women who had a part in Buckley’s life, but he is also always reaching for the transcendent, even if he cannot quite grasp it. 

I think of one perceptive line where he notes that without an ordinary life, there is no art:  balanced meals, reading, sleeping, relationships, love. It’s a quiet moment after the onslaught of celebrity and touring, but it’s one of many moments slowly reclaiming his story. Lest we think otherwise, this is not another star who burned out brightly, but instead a young man who was finding himself and settling into a life to manage the stressors of fame so he could sustain his art. 

What comes through is not the destructive nature of creativity, but the sensitivity radiating out from him and the genuine sense of loss because it doesn’t feel like the story was meant to end. He had so much to live for, and it seems like he recognized it within the core of his being. He was aware of mortality, even the death of his father, and that gave him a desire to love and conjure up beauty through his lyrics and songs. Whatever he says, when I hear his rendition of “Hallelujah,” it puts me in touch with something greater than myself. For that, I thank him.

Secret Mall Apartment 

The rule follower inside of me gets intense anxiety watching Secret Mall Apartment, but there’s also something quite spectacular about it, taking something which could have been a stunt and turning it into something more. It’s part commentary on gentrification and a group art project. What’s more, this vibrant community of hungry artists galvanized by Michael Townsend stretched out their hands to offer their creativity in service of memorials to the Oklahoma City attack and 9/11 and countless patients in local children’s hospitals. 

It’s a reminder that art need not have utility. Giving people hope and making them smile is enough. However, what are we to do when public art crosses barriers and breaks societal rules? This is part of the tension, and what we get is not only a time capsule of a certain time and place at Providence Mall in New Hampshire. All the sensible among us can live vicariously through their ambition to do something wild and still somehow domesticated.

Others will wonder what the point is. They didn’t make any money, and they put all their time and effort into ventures without any lasting impact. And yet not many people can say they’ve lived in a Secret Mall Apartment. This doc, executive-produced by Jesse Essenberg, is more fascinating than it has any right to be. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded we live in a wild world full of wacky people. Part of what makes it mean something is banding together and looking to bring hope and beauty into existence. 

Rental Family

Rental Family has a premise that might feel like a punchline. But living in Japan and even meeting people who seem to stick out like Philip-san (Brendan Fraser), it feels quite believable. It’s the kind of movie I would have appreciated growing up because it deals in cross-cultural and cross-generational storytelling. It feels as if we have found ourselves in a world where more people are curious and even familiar with these liminal spaces of navigating different cultures. 

The best moments get Japanese culture and dynamics so well, and part of this is embodied by Fraser. He’s not fluent in Japanese, but you can sense him getting the hang of it, and enough so that it works for an expat.

The services they provide are meaningful when it revolves around companionship in an isolated landscape or providing an outlet for personal grieving. It does cross a line, however, when it facilitates a lie or mobilizes harmful behavior.  Philip learns this firsthand with the clientele. The storytelling itself becomes quite twisty because so much of the movie is designed around this sense of performance and what is fiction vs. reality. Sometimes these fictions can be pernicious.  

There’s a kind of poeticism to the movie being framed by funerals. In the end, regardless of what it says about ethics or religion seen through the lens of Shintoism and Buddhism, the most universal themes are about chosen family. My only other realization worth sharing is how director Hikari took her name from the Japanese word for “light,” and I can see how, in an age of loneliness, her movie is meant to guide people toward the beacon of community and human connection. 

Wake Up Dead Man: Knives Out

Rian Johnson seems like a windsome human being, and I want to like his films more than I do. My greatest compliment for Wake Up Dead Man is the charitable posture he seems to have in a movie surprisingly preoccupied with faith, and it at least extends partially beyond “Christians” as an amorphous political bloc. 

Because it is a film laying bare the cult of personality that builds around any divisive leader, but specifically those in religious communities who promote a narrative of a culture war and a traditional way of life under attack. 

There is language and rhetoric bandied about – what people might normally call Christianese – without any of the Biblical gospel. This must be disconcerting for anyone who has actually ever sat and ruminated over Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount.

But in the earnestness of Father Jud (Josh O’Connor), who becomes our primary protagonist, it tries to offer an alternative point of view of what a genuine life of faith looks like. He takes on the mantle carried by Ana de Armas and Janelle Monáe, effectively living as a minority in the world around them – in this case, the world of Christendom. 

Watching the film, it becomes apparent that much of the story is invested in the ritual and iconography of faith. It reminds me of the distinction of how having a cross as a necklace is tantamount to having an electric chair on a chain around your neck. It holds no significance, and it’s little better than a church without a cross if it doesn’t lead you anywhere else. 

Two of the most compelling moments come initially when Jud first meets Detective Blanc, and they speak about the Christian story. Blanc is an avowed skeptic and distrustful of organized religion, understandably so. The young Father Jud welcomes it even as he asks whether these stories convince us of a lie, or perhaps they resonate with something deep inside of us that is profoundly true. It echoes much of the ongoing debate of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis about myth becoming fact. 

And although Wake Up Dead Man functions first as a mystery film and a faith dialogue second, we do get a moving interaction of the Father ministering. He takes a call from a grieving woman and extends her the utmost compassion, slowing the pulse of the movie down so he can pray for her. It felt like the high point of a movie from a series that, while still intermittently clever, provides diminishing returns as genre fare. 

Familiar Touch

There is a small canon of aging parent movies, including the likes of Away from Her, The Father, and Thelma. Familiar Touch is fit to join this small but mighty cadre of films made in conjunction with a retirement community, and a few professional actors leading the ensemble. What makes it slightly different is how it maintains the subjective point of view of our heroine, Ruth. 

Despite getting disoriented and disrupted by her own bout of memory loss, we witness her acclimate to life in assisted living and her innate gifts for food preparation born from years of life experience. Even as her facilities continue to deteriorate, there’s a beautiful gift in seeing glimpses of her talents when they come in the service of others. We see not where she ended up but who she was in her former life, imbuing her with dignity.  

Familiar Touch has my favorite needle drop of the year: Dionne Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over.” Sometimes music has a way of expressing feelings and emotions we cannot articulate in any other way – it brought tears to my eyes. It could easily be the emotional ending of the movie. However, first-time director Friendland opts for the realistic, not so much the feel-good or cinematic. Amid the minor victories of caregivers, life keeps moving on for our loved ones, whether we’ve made peace with it or not. 

Lurker

Lurker’s narrative conceit is ripe for a modern-day psychological thriller. It observes the ecological and potentially parasitic framework around modern celebrities, where unbalanced parasocial relationships suggest the semblance of real friendship. 

In a storyline imprinting itself on the dynamics of All About Eve, a no-name creative who works in a clothing store, crosses paths with an up-and-coming musician. His obliviousness in the face of this emerging pop star makes him unique and cool because of his perceived indifference. 

However, after being swept up into this world and the posturing it entails, it becomes an intoxicating web pulling him in continually. He wants to ride the waves of this lifestyle without conventional work hours or experiences, all the while vying for acceptance. The most pointed needle drop pops up multiple times in the form of Jame and Bobby Purify’s 60s classic “I’m Your Puppet.” 

At times, the movie feels like a modern incarnation of C.S. Lewis’s concept of the inner ring, where people just want to be in proximity of celebrity and what is perceived as cool. People will do anything to maintain their place with the in-crowd, and the movie shows the creative relationship taken to its most harrowing extreme. 

I compiled some reviews of a handful of the films that stood out to me from this past year. Please enjoy!

Little Amelie or The Character of Rain

I had the opportunity to spend a long summer in England when I was just a year older than Amelie. It’s that time as much as my time living and working in Japan, which makes me appreciate the quotidian beauty of such a movie as this, following the youngest daughter of a transplanted Belgian family. 

It is a coming-of-age story, but one assembled around the earliest of recollections, when our memories are hazy and as much myth and dreams passed down through family lore as anything else. Part of me was wondering what it would be like to have a double bill with this film set in Kobe, Japan, 1969, with Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood.

What’s so striking about this film is how it so vividly represents the bond Amelie forms with her Japanese caregiver, Nishio-san. The greatest testament to the film is how there is joy and benevolence on all sides. She adores this Nishio-san, and yet it’s not to say her parents don’t love her. They are not mutually exclusive, even as these formative relationships take hold so young. Likewise, a brother can tease, a Japanese landlord might seem strict and severe, and even they are shown to be sympathetic figures. 

Although I have not read the autobiographical novella, the animation breathes such exhilarating life into the material, and some of the fanciful images, particularly in the montage sequences, take the breath away. The sweeping countryside of Kobe, as well as Amelie’s association with the Japanese word for rain (“ame”), creates such an evocative landscape for childhood wonderment to still bump up against reality. 

Little babies might come into the world thinking they are gods, and then a few years of life, experiencing death, pain, and change, remind them soon enough that they are not. And that’s okay. That’s part of what it means to be human. 

Souleymane’s Story

Here is a film with some debt to the Dardennes while also sharing some themes with The Bicycle Thief and Dirty Pretty Things. We follow a young Guinean asylum-seeker as he makes ends meet on the days leading up to his immigration appointment. It’s a fast-paced, stressful life where he must live hour to hour and day to day, making food deliveries on his e-bike. 

We watch as he’s taken advantage of and also shown charity. It is the small acts of humanity that stand out, like an Asian woman giving him a piece of candy as he picks up an order or a man giving him a drink on the house. These are never the focal point, but they give us some semblance of hope in people. More importantly, they subtly and still powerfully impute him with worth as a fellow human being. 

The way the film is set up through flashback is an opportunity to get to know him and understand even a sliver of what he has gone through just to end up in the room for his asylum interview. In the back of my mind, I almost wanted to ask if what we are seeing is manipulative in how it uses the framework of a fiction film. However, this should not be my foremost question. The fact that we get to experience the life of one of the least of these feels like something worth its own weight, and Abdou Sangare gives a performance worth remembering. 

This Was Just an Accident

The movie really gets started when an Azerbaijani man, Vahid, kidnaps someone after hitting him with his van’s passenger door. There’s a queasy black comedy to it, almost reminiscent of The Trouble with Harry because as long as they don’t deal with it, everywhere they go there lies the body of this man who may or may not have been a government enforcer with a peg leg who tortured them…Even when he’s not visible, he’s there in the scene, exerting a narrative influence.

Vahid spends most of the movie making his way around town to various people who were in a similar situation to his. Some want to let it go, leave it in the past, but the pain is too great for others to do nothing. It nags at them even as the act exhumes latent pain they tried to bury. We witness this burning desire for retribution, for justice to be doled out. And yet we also see how humanity cannot be disregarded.

Vahid goes from almost burying this man alive to picking up a phone call left by the man’s young daughter. They still haven’t decided what to do with him, but in his absence, his pregnant wife falls unconscious. A show of callousness would be understandable given the circumstances, and yet Vahid is overcome with compassion, even responsibility. There’s a sheepishness to it, defusing the intensity of the hatred just long enough to complicate the feelings at the core of the film.

What a prideful thing it is to use religious rhetoric to justify actions and to lord over others like judge and executioner. Perhaps this is part of the epiphany because the rage and lust for blood hanging over them makes them little different than their enemies. 

Although Panahi’s latest film did not strike me as much as No Bears or even his son’s Hit The Road, like last year’s Killing of The Sacred Fig, there is an unequicoable danger I feel watching this contemporary crop of Iranian films. Not just the stakes of the films themselves, but the great risks the filmmakers have taken on in potentially defying their government. But danger is also in the eye of the beholder. Putting these films out into the world feels equally dangerous to the status quo, especially if they speak to our shared humanity and the necessity of connection and grace to cover all our iniquities. 

Sentimental Value

One might be quick to try to draw parallels between the familial works of Ingmar Bergman and fellow Scandinavian Joachim Trier’s new family drama. However, after watching it, the films of Olivier Assayas came to mind first. There’s a kinship with the latter’s Summer Hours, as shared family memories are so closely tied to the childhood home. Like Assayas, Trier’s affection for film, along with his co-writer Eskil Vogt, is supremely evident to the point of metaness. Here we see Trier fit a Hollywood actress alongside his typical players (Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie), the way Assayas might use a Maggie Cheung, Kristen Stewart, or Chloe Grace Moretz. 

Sometimes the film milieu feels convenient, and yet to have it grounded in family makes it mean something more resonant. We cannot get away from how these people are connected, and the film-within-a-film framework cannot dilute the bare essentials of people trying to relate to one another and reconcile past hurts. 

Trier refashions the archetypes in ways familiar and somehow rejuvenated and interesting. Stellan Skarsgard plays a distant father who has been consumed by his directorial career and left his two grown daughters (Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) feeling discarded. Fanning comes in as a genuine Hollywood starlet who doesn’t quite fit, and yet she knows it’s not right, and has enough humility to recognize this very thing. 

Trier also offers us some soulful needle drops, including “Nobody Knows” and “Cannock Chase.” They’re so good I wish they had longer to breathe. But this is a minor qualm in a movie with so much worth celebrating. First, by acknowledging there may be wounds and trauma spanning generations of families – sometimes elements far outside of our control – but we do have control of the moments in front of us. Reaching out a hand, opening up, and fighting for the relationships with family with all the love and capacity for care we can muster. 

It is not easy, it is imperfect, and no all-encompassing talk will paper over the wounds. But like that house, we can hold onto the memories and still move forward together. Sometimes we do it through art, and other times it’s simply a matter of being present where there was once absence. 

When you think of some of the great filmmakers, they have made relationship movies because human connections are the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it. I will need to see it again and reconsider my misgivings, but it’s still not too early to add Sentimental Value to this age-old conversation reaching down through the annals of cinema. Again, what makes it is not the reflexivity but the family. 

Sinners

At the heart of Ryan Coogler’s horror flick Sinners is the history of the Delta Blues. What he offers us is a reimagining of history a la Tarantino, but I find Coogler more generous and somehow grounded in reality. He brings in strains of other cultures from Chinese-Americans to Irish-Americans on top of the vibrant African-American lineage of 1930s Mississippi. 

Like a modern genre smuggler, Coogler joins forces with Michael B. Jordan and uses the traditional form to court some fascinating ideas. Because we hear of Jim Crow, lynchings, and there are some references to the Klan around the fringes, but while acknowledging this history, Coogler takes his story somewhere else, allotting ample time for music and joy to go with the melancholy.

There’s a poignant moment when a rising blues guitarist asks a passing woman, “What are you?” He can’t help it, but in Hailee Steinfeld, we recognize this space of the in-between that is not easy to categorize.  

The oppressed black community that finds a sliver of jubilation in a local juke joint, nevertheless, is confronted by otherworldly creatures, who come to embody so much more. I was struck by how they offer such a flawed sense of heaven, or rather a sliver of hell: an opportunity to fellowship together forever, but at what cost? Being bloody carcasses of human beings without life or humanity.  

I will admit Jordan’s dual role feels like a gimmick until it comes up against the core dramatic question of the movie. In this heightened moment, with or without vampires as dressing, it feels like the world the black community has created of power and expression is a lie about to be razed to the ground. Are they just a threshing floor for the Klan? Are these vampires actually a lot like them?

It’s no coincidence the film is deeply tapped into the mythos of Robert Johnson and the Faustian deal with the devil. In a peturbing baptismal scene in the river, young Sammie is confronted. He is told religion lies about a God above and a devil below, where man has dominion over the beast. But how do we reconcile this with slavery, colonialism, and sharecropping? 

The moment is terrifying, only for this evil to be confronted with the dawning of the light and the breaking of a new day. Sammie wanders back into his father’s church, and it hardly feels like a place of refuge. There’s an implication as he leaves the legalism behind with his guitar in tow to pursue his God-given art. 60 years on and he’s Buddy Guy! 

But this feels like a false dichotomy between faith and music. It’s the 90s, and Sammie receives an unusual visitation. He’s satisfied with his life and seems unafraid to die. He’s had enough of this existence. He might not be the teacher out of Eccelesiastes, but he’s built up a life of experience. He knows the immorality offered to him once again is a pale imitation and muses that he’s had enough of this place. We cannot know if he has visions of heaven or just something beyond the temporal world. 

For me, the final glimpses of a young Sammie playing “This Little Light of Mine” within the four walls of the church give me pause and a visual inkling of hope in a world that seems to pit artistic expression and institutional faith against one another. It’s not a definitive answer, but it certainly colors the conclusions of the entire film up to that point. 

The beauty is how it can be interpreted in many ways. Darkness and vampires alike recede in the face of light, but it could also mean it is God and not the religious who bring light into the world.

Sammie, no doubt, was a sinner. All of us have our flaws, but that also leaves the door open for redemption. It’s a battle and a search only God knows, but that’s part of what makes this film mean more than an accumulation of tropes. It’s about our search for meaning, purpose, and community on this side of existence.

The Secret Agent

It occurs to me, The Secret Agent has a sprawling self-confidence in the story it’s telling, which mostly serves it well. Wagner Moura anchors the movie with a calm charisma, but the beauty of a movie with this much runtime is the allowance for so many nooks and crannies to be filled with side characters. The shaggy, disjointed layers of storytelling perfectly mimic the sense of time it’s looking to project. 

Armando seeks refuge in a rural safe haven only to get installed in a desk job navigating between an uneasy chemistry with a corrupt local police chief and a hit put out against our protagonist by an old adversary. It hangs over the rest of the picture as we drift in and out of his past and wait with dreaded anticipation for the violent catharsis torquing like a coiled spring.  

Against a tableau of 1970s Brazil, there’s a soundscape supplied by Chicago and Donna Summer and a plot that owes a debt to Jaws as much as the American paranoia thrillers of the 70s. However, it functions as much as a thriller as it is a meditation on the nation’s shared historical memory. And in this way, it shares something in common with last year’s I’m Still Here in content if not so much form. Both are reckoning with a nation’s authoritarian past with a point of view supplied by the present. Somehow, it reframes the moment while reminding us of the complexity of stitching together a multifaceted historical narrative. 

A Little Prayer

In the opening minutes of A Little Prayer, an unseen woman walks by in the early morning hours, singing her gospel spirituals. For some, she’s a nuisance, but for others who appreciate the quiet moments in between, she captures their imagination. 

Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate the career David Straitharn has carved out for himself. He’s not an onstentatious performer, but anyone who has built up a stockpile of his roles in their memory bank no doubt respects him. Because he’s always a steady, reliable presence time and time again. 

He sits at the breakfast counter talking with his daughter-in-law before the day’s activities pick up. Although the family’s church attendance has dwindled, he is still drawn to beauty, particularly Christmas carols. In the intervening moments, he sings a few stilted bars of “Bring a Torch Jeanette Isabella” in the original French. It hints at something else in their lives. 

Because as life sets in, we see the hardships of small-town existence in the South. Alcoholism, infidelity, and the stress on returning war vets. It’s not a new phenomenon, but each family has stressors they must find ways to weather, even as new members are grafted into their unit. 

A man and his daughter-in-law aren’t usually the focal point of a movie, but here it makes sense because of the struggles they both face daily. Amid it all, they go to an art museum together and marvel at the sublime of a panorama on the canvas of the paintings – shards of beauty they can take with them back into their lives to fortify them against the pains of the world.

If you’re like me, the final scenes are deeply moving. Once again, they are seated side by side, and in the quiet, we recognize them for what they are: Kindred spirits who want the best for one another. This is a small movie, difficult to watch at times, but it’s a reminder that if we have the seeing eye, we can witness God’s grace just about anywhere.