A movie you loved (or didn't get) as a kid or teenager that became a totally different movie when you came back to it years later, maybe you finally understood it, maybe it lost its magic, maybe you realised it was about something you couldn't have grasped at the time. What was it, and what changed on the rewatch?
Not just "beautifully shot", a film where the camera, the lighting, or the color is quietly shaping how you feel without you registering why. The kind of craft that works on you subconsciously, and only on a second watch do you realize how much the visuals were doing. What's the film, and what's the technique once you actually look for it?
The kind of show where you blew through the whole thing way too fast, hit the end, and felt that specific emptiness of "well, now what." Not just bingeable, genuinely good enough that you envy anyone who hasn't seen it yet. What's the series, and what made it impossible to pace yourself with?
One you'll genuinely go to bat for, fully aware it has real flaws and that you're probably wrong. The kind of film where you've had the argument before and you'll have it again. What's the hill, and why are you dying on it?
Some shows have a weak or misleading first few episodes that almost make you quit, and then they click into something genuinely great, the kind of show where the people who stuck with it can't believe how close they came to dropping it. What's a Netflix series that's worth pushing through a rough start, and where does it actually turn the corner for you?
Films from the last couple years that are actually doing something with the form, and still somehow slipped out of the conversation.
Flow (2024): A dialogue-free animated film from Latvia about animals surviving a flood. No humans, no words, and it builds an entire emotional world through movement and sound design alone. Won the Oscar and most people still haven't seen it.
All We Imagine as Light (2024): Payal Kapadia's Cannes Grand Prix winner. What's striking is the structure, it systematically refuses to show its own climaxes, letting the most important moments happen off-screen. The ellipsis is the film. Topped Sight & Sound's year-end poll.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024): Jane Schoenbrun's film uses a fake 90s TV show as a formal device to explore dissociation and identity. Deliberately polarizing, the split audience reaction is part of what it's doing. Stays with you for weeks.
Janet Planet (2024): Playwright Annie Baker's debut, calibrated to the actual pace of childhood observation. It "looks like nothing happens" for two hours and then you realize the whole film was a held breath.
That's four. What's your fifth? A recent film that's actually doing something with the form, not just telling a good story?
Every year a handful of genuinely great films slip through the cracks — limited release, no marketing budget, buried by the algorithm. Here are four from the last couple years I keep recommending to people who've never heard of them:
Sing Sing (2024): Colman Domingo leads a drama set inside a real prison theater program, with most of the cast played by actual formerly incarcerated men. A24's highest-rated film of the year and it still barely made a dent. Quietly devastating.
The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025): British comedy where an eccentric lottery winner hires a folk duo (who are also exes) for a private concert on a remote island. Sounds twee, plays as one of the warmest, sharpest films in ages.
Robot Dreams (2023): A dialogue-free animated film about a lonely dog and his robot friend in 1980s NYC. Oscar-nominated, lost to Miyazaki, and almost nobody saw it. Will wreck you in the best way.
Bob Trevino Likes It (2024): A lonely young woman accidentally befriends a stranger online who shares her absent father's name. Won both the Grand Jury and Audience Award at SXSW. Sounds like a Hallmark movie, is anything but.
That's four. What's your fifth? The recent movie you can't believe more people haven't seen?
Some actors you always see as themselves. Others vanish so fully you don't recognize them across films. Who does this best, and which performances made you double-check it was the same person?
Not necessarily the best-written, the one with the most forward momentum, where every episode ends and you can’t not start the next. What had you saying “one more” until 3am?
Not a hyped film that lived up to it, the opposite. Something you put on as background noise, or only watched because nothing else was on, and it floored you. What was it, and what was the moment you realized it had you?
Every year a few great shows get buried under newer releases and disappear from the conversation. What’s a Netflix series you rarely see recommended today, despite thinking it’s still worth watching? What makes it hold up better than most people remember?
Some films are impressive immediately. Others don’t really click until you already know where they’re going. Maybe it was the themes, the structure, the performances, or details you completely missed the first time. What’s a movie that improved dramatically on a rewatch, and what changed your perspective?
Some actors become synonymous with one iconic role, but their strongest work can often be found elsewhere. Which actor do you think is remembered most for one performance, while their actual best acting came from a different film? What makes that lesser-discussed performance stand out to you?
When a movie feels immersive, audiences usually credit the story or performances. But immersion is often built through dozens of smaller creative decisions that rarely get discussed on their own. Which filmmaking choice do you think has an outsized impact on immersion, and can you think of films where it was especially effective?
The one you've somehow watched several times despite it not even being top-50 for you, the one that's just on whenever you can't decide what to watch, and you end up watching the whole thing again anyway.
For me it's The Mummy (1999). I'm not going to argue it's a great film. It's a perfectly fun adventure movie. But I've seen it so many times I could narrate it with my eyes closed, and I have absolutely no memory of ever choosing to watch it most of those times. It just keeps happening. Brendan Fraser running from a sandstorm has soundtracked an unreasonable percentage of my life.
What's yours? The movie your watch count makes no sense for.
Once someone points out a technique, you start seeing it everywhere and you can't stop. The thing you now notice in every film whether you want to or not.
For me it's the way some directors use focus to control where your guilt goes. Ever since I noticed it in There Will Be Blood, the way Paul Thomas Anderson racks focus to force you to look at exactly the thing a character is trying not to look at, I see it constantly. The focus pull isn't just technical, it's moral. It decides what you're complicit in watching.
Now I can't watch any well-directed film without tracking what's sharp and what's soft in every frame, and what that's doing to me as a viewer.
What's the detail that ruined you in the best way? The thing you notice now in everything.
Every couple of years a thinkpiece tries to argue Dune Part Two or some new prestige adaptation might be in the conversation. They aren't.
The thing that makes the LOTR trilogy untouchable isn't the production design, the casting, or the practical effects, though all of those are exceptional. It's the structural problem Peter Jackson solved that no other adaptation has solved at this scale: he took a 1,200-page book widely considered unfilmable and produced three films that work as both faithful adaptation and as standalone cinema. The films change a lot from the book. They also feel completely faithful. That's an extraordinarily hard trick to pull off.
Every other epic-fantasy adaptation since has either been too faithful (cluttered, joyless) or too loose (the Hobbit trilogy, The Wheel of Time, etc.). LOTR found the exact midpoint and that midpoint is harder than it looks. Twenty years on, no one has equaled it. Probably no one will. The combination of source material, director, country (filming in NZ pre-Hollywood-tax-credit era), and pre-streaming financial conditions doesn't exist anymore.
It's the only adaptation where you can argue the films are better than the books and not get laughed out of the room.
There's a small group of working directors who have full creative control, work consistently with the same collaborators, and produce films that feel like genuinely no one else could have made them. Yorgos Lanthimos belongs in that group and we should probably just admit it.
The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness. Five films, none of which could be confused for the work of another director. Every one of them has the same off-kilter performance style, the same fish-eye visual signature, the same comedic dread that doesn't resolve. He's built an authorial signature that other directors take a career to develop, and he did it in about a decade.
What's underrated is how much he's grown technically film to film. The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer are formally rigorous but emotionally cold. The Favourite started incorporating warmth without losing the strangeness. Poor Things hit a synthesis between absurdity and tenderness that he wouldn't have been able to access ten years earlier.
I don't think his current pace is sustainable. Most directors in this mode flame out or repeat themselves. But right now, mid-career, with full collaboration with Emma Stone locked in, Lanthimos is doing the most interesting major-studio work in cinema and there isn't a close second.
Not a hot take for the sake of being contrarian. A movie where the critical reception genuinely feels like it missed what was actually on screen, and you can articulate why.