Marty Supreme has a loathsome protagonist. I loved it.

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.

Hello pals,

Dana, I enjoyed the eloquent case you’ve mounted against the formation of the Safdie school of anxiety-inducing art, even as I simply cannot relate to it at all. I love an interesting abrasive experience at the movies, I have a thing for a compellingly repellent protagonist, and I have cherished many a film that acts downright hostile toward its viewers, something I should probably talk to a therapist about (and not the kind played so excellently by Conan O’Brien). I don’t think you’re wrong that the Safdie school has picked up a cinephile cult following because it resonates with our precarious present, when everything feels as if it’s teetering on the verge of collapse and the only way to move through the world is to join all the hustlers, scammers, and bullies already out there grubbing for whatever they can get their hands on. But to Bilge’s point about how “the so-called moment lasts a century” or, in this particular case, a decade or two, I actually fell for a nascent version of this aesthetic back in 2007, when I wandered into the SXSW premiere of Frownland, Ronald Bronstein’s first and only directorial effort to date.

In terms of wallowing in discomfort, Frownland makes Marty Supreme look like Forrest Gump, following the travails of a wet-lipped homunculus of a door-to-door salesman named Keith, played by a brilliant Dore Mann (who never made another movie), who is abused by everyone around him, but who is also an inherently grating presence himself, something he seems anxiously aware of and helpless to change. To watch the movie is to be torn between feeling for Keith and feeling as if you yourself want to scream at him in disgust. It summons a sensation akin to being locked in with your own self-loathing, which is the opposite of pleasant but which offers its own inexplicable satisfaction. The best way I can sum it up is by way of the scene in which Keith’s high school–age girlfriend, played by Mary Bronstein, drops by because she’s upset. She flings herself down onto his pillows, then comes up with hives already forming on her cheeks to ask if they’re made of down, which she’s allergic to. Then she deliberately rubs her face all over the offending items. Sometimes, you just need to revel in the repulsive.

Frownland, like Mary Bronstein’s own sandpaper-on-skin debut Yeast, which came out a year later, was grouped with mumblecore even though they didn’t have much in common tonally with a subgenre praised for its stripped-down naturalism. It isn’t surprising to me that the Bronsteins’ and the Safdies’ sensibilities have eclipsed the legacy of the scene they came up through, which has more in common with streaming comedies and YouTube and TikTok videos these days than anything you tend to find in theaters. One of the exceptions is The Baltimorons, a low-key rom-com about a comedian in recovery and the divorced dentist he seeks out due to an unfortunately timed tooth emergency, a film that comes from another mumble-alum, Jay Duplass, and which I was happy to see Bilge give a shoutout to on his list. It’s a lovely, warm movie that played incredibly well with festival audiences, and in another era, I could see it lingering in art houses and becoming an indie hit through word of mouth.

But the era we exist in rewards yelling, not mumbling, in part because that’s the only way to get heard over the roar of all the other things competing for your attention. I’ve thought a lot in recent years about the onus that’s put on movies to feel expansive in order to compel people to seek them out in theaters rather than just waiting for them to hit streaming—often budgetarily, but also in scope, themes, length, urgency. When I was writing about One Battle After Another, my first giddy thought was, There’s just so much movie here. But My Undesirable Friends, for all that it mainly consists of groups of journalists talking, has its own epic sweep, in addition to that 324-minute runtime. So does Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, even as it was born out of his previous film, the personal doc Pictures of Ghosts, remixing similar elements into a grand thriller-adjacent ’70s saga that, halfway through, also takes an unexpected stutter step into the present. The Mastermind is the biggest film Kelly Reichardt has ever done, albeit in her own inimitable Kelly Reichardt way. The Naked Gun pitched itself, in a tongue-in-cheek way, as holding the fate of the studio comedy in its box-office returns. Even Sex/Love/Dreams, for all its close-up intimacy, has the benefit of sprawling over three installments.

Timothée Chalamet Is Great in Marty Supreme. But His Greatest Performance May Be What He’s Doing Outside It.

I don’t necessarily want to frame this as a complaint (sorry to Dorothy Parker), because who doesn’t appreciate a big swing and a bold show of ambition? But I do worry about what becomes of smaller stories, ones that struggle to get a toehold in an increasingly tough theatrical market and that lack the right algorithm-friendly hook to get traction once they hit streaming or VOD. I’m not sure what solution there is to this pressure, if one even exists, so I guess I’ll just take this opportunity to sing the praises of Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, a portrait in miniature that’s no less wondrous. What I enjoy so much about the film, which is a mere 76 minutes long and consists entirely of photographer Peter Hujar (played by Ben Whishaw) talking about his day to the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), isn’t just the portal it opens into New York City on Dec. 18, 1974. It’s the way it understands that the minutiae of someone’s life can be fascinating, even (or especially) if it involves wrangling a truculent Allen Ginsberg and taking calls from Susan Sontag. Hujar’s actual ruminations on ordering Chinese food and wanting to quit smoking are as worthy of their time on-screen as a giant action set piece, even if they’re a tougher sell.

Justin, since you just wrote about it, and since I was a fan too, I wonder whether you also found Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? to feel like a film from another time simply because of its earnest and grown-up focus on two people trying to figure out what happened to their marriage. And maybe this is finally the opportunity for you to delve into Who by Fire, which sounds as if it fits a rich, complicated history into a weekend in a cabin in the woods.

No such thing as a wasted day,

Alison

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

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.