The Best Films of 2025 As Chosen By Some of Its Key Directors
As 2025 unfolded, returning to the ritual of asking filmmakers about the films that moved them feels both fragile and necessary. This exercise appears days after yet another grotesque display of interventionism in Latin America, an event so swiftly normalized that its violence dissolves into the background noise of the present. In this context, cinema—even in its most superficial, market-driven or seemingly shallow dynamics—reasserts its essence: a place of resistance, a safer space, a memory capsule. Against a futile and often despicable world, the cinema persists not because it is pure, but because it is collective, embodied, and stubbornly alive. […]
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After spending the last Knives Out entry on a billionaire’s private Greek island, master sleuth Benoit Blanc’s latest mystery Wake Up Dead Man takes him to a remote parish in upstate New York to solve the murder of a priest (Josh Brolin). It’s a classic locked door mystery, with Brolin’s monsignor stabbed mid-mass in a closet a few feet from his pulpit. The suspects include a recently reassigned young priest (Josh O’Connor) and a tightly knit clique from the church’s flock (Jeremy Renner’s recently dumped doctor, Cailee Spaeny’s injured concert musician, Andrew Scott’s paranoid novelist and Kerry Washington’s lawyer). Like […]
Kimball Farley is the future. His breakthrough role in Hippo, the critically acclaimed dark comedy that RogerEbert.com called “an unholy fusion of A Clockwork Orange and Napoleon Dynamite” established him as a talented, chameleon-like actor to watch, then his performance in The Righteous Gemstones, opposite Bradley Cooper, displayed his range. And now 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for him, with upcoming releases from filmmakers like Tim Sutton, Mark H. Rapaport, and Henry Chaisson showcasing more of what he can do. On this episode, he details his “outside-in” approach to character work, and why changing his appearance […]
When 28 Days Later arrived on screens in 2002, it marked a leap forward for both zombie movies and digital cinema. Eschewing the shambling undead of George Romero, the film’s infected sprinted after prospective human snacks. Technologically, 28 Days Later represented one of the first wide theatrical releases to shoot on digital cameras. Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle belatedly returned with 28 Years Later. With the British Isles quarantined from the rest of the world, the story follows a 12-year-old boy (Alfie Williams) who leaves behind the relative safety of his island community to search the infected-strewn […]
Telluride is not on my annual festival calendar—too distant, too costly—and rarely I’m at Toronto, only with a film. So as a New Yorker, my personal fall awards season kicks off with the New York Film Festival. Like Telluride, it’s a non-competitive festival that showcases and celebrates the best of each year’s new crop, and it has the advantage of relying less on premieres and more on outstanding films gleaned from earlier festivals like Berlin, Cannes, and Sundance. As such, it’s a pretty good sampler of the latest trends coursing through the art and practice of cinematic expression. This year […]
Michael Imperioli is best known for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Christopher Moltisanti onThe Sopranos, a role that made him one of the most recognizable faces of prestige television. Some of his other credits include Goodfellas, Jungle Fever, Summer of Sam (which he also co-wrote), The White Lotus, and his latest, Song Sung Blue, the real-life story behind Neil Diamond tribute performers, where he plays Mark Shrilla, opposite Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. On this episode he talks about the technical mountain he had to climb before he allowed himself to take on that role. Then he takes us back to his early days and two giant, back-to-back acting […]
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things required a full calendar year of production in Atlanta, a marathon of 240 shooting days that will bring the beloved Netflix series to a close with eight super-sized episodes. A job of that scale and duration is an arduous undertaking that could rightfully intimidate any crewmember. For Caleb Heymann, it’s kind of his thing. The cinematographer has spent much of the last five years shooting color contrast-laden Netflix feats of endurance in Georgia. That association began with the 100 days Heymann toiled on the trio of Fear Street films that the streamer […]
Kevin Corrigan, the consummate actor, true student of the craft, friend of all actors, the best friend of Back To One, the very first guest of this podcast, returns for the 8th time in what might be his most vulnerable and relatable episode yet. He generously details a crisis he had acting on a series this past year, ponders what he would do with power, asks the question he thinks every actor should ask themselves, reads a moving instagram tribute to Diane Keaton by Jarrod Allan, shares his own wonderful memories of working with Keaton, delivers a couple wonderful impersonations, […]
30 years after his debut feature Kicking and Screaming (1995), writer-director Noah Baumbach, having crafted a notable career both in Hollywood and outside of it, has made his softest film yet, and that’s not meant as a pejorative. George Clooney stars as a fading movie star who embarks on a European trip to attend a film festival that’s planning to gift him a career tribute, using the honor as an excuse to spend time with his unsuspecting, backpacking daughter. Jay Kelly is a movie made by a parent in a time of reflection. That it was co-written by actress Emily […]
Released 30 years ago, Michael Mann’s Heat is an almost-three-hour-long odyssey through Los Angeles and the minds of two ideologically opposed men who inhabit it. Codes are established and broken, thrills are tempered by sobering terror, paths are chosen and exit routes mapped. If high-level thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) has steeled himself to sever relationships to anyone or anything at a moment’s notice, the man pursuing him, police detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), is defined by a refusal to let go. He holds on to his angst, he tells his wife (Diane Venora), refusing to engage in cathartic […]