What We Are Hungry For: 10 Films that Made Cinema Matter Again.
John Merritt - Ten films that dared to ask what we were hungry for.
The theater went dark. The projector hummed. And somewhere in the space between anticipation and image, something happened that had been happening for over a century but felt, this year, startlingly new.
Great cinema never died. But in 2025, it remembered what it was for.
Looking back at this turbulent year—another round of hand-wringing about theatrical survival, young attention spans, and franchise fatigue—what emerges is not decline but defiance. A diverse harvest of films that refused to settle for mere distraction. Major studios spent large budgets on more than costumed heroics. Movie stars proved they could still hold a room. And underneath the spectacle, filmmakers were asking the questions that matter: What are we seeking? What remains when the credits roll? What, exactly, makes a life feel full?
Here are ten films that stayed with me. Not because they entertained—though they did—but because they revealed.
10. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)
The film opens with an image that demands you stop breathing. A woman dressed as Missy Elliott drives past a body collapsed on the road. The body belongs to her uncle. What follows is an absurd reckoning—funeral planning as dark comedy, family as both wound and salve. Nyoni's second feature cements her as a filmmaker unafraid to hold grief and laughter in the same hand.
9. Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
Can an entire film sustain itself on one man's meltdown? In Linklater's hands, yes. Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart as a diminutive genius poisoned by jealousy, his career fading while others rise. The bar where he drowns his sorrows becomes a confessional. Hawke and Linklater have long been collaborators; here, they achieve something close to intimacy—the kind that only comes from artists who have nothing left to prove to each other.
8. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Rose Byrne delivers a performance that feels like an exposed nerve. A mother struggling with a sick child, a career unraveling, a life lived at the edge of collapse. Bronstein's camera invades her face, shuddering close, refusing comfort. And yet—Conan O'Brien as a prissy therapist offers belly laughs amid the chaos. The tonal whiplash is the point. Life arrives this way: all at once, nothing in order.
7. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
Timothée Chalamet disappears into a postwar hustler chasing glory through table tennis. Safdie's solo debut operates on a grander scale than his earlier work, but the engine remains the same: the foolhardy underdog, the train-wreck charmer, the margins of America where dreamers either rise or burn. The 1950s setting lends new maturity. The question underneath: what does it cost to make your name?
6. 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)
A legacy sequel that earns its existence. Boyle returns to the world of his 2002 zombie masterpiece and finds something more than nostalgia—an allegory for Britain's recent isolationism, a meditation on what we preserve and what we abandon. The undead themselves feel reimagined. The action exhilarates. But the film lingers because it asks: what survives when everything collapses?
5. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Set in 1930s Mississippi, Coogler's vampire thriller is rip-roaring entertainment wrapped around something much deeper. Michael B. Jordan plays dual roles; the blues itself becomes a character, elemental and exploited. Beneath the supernatural surface lies a sober examination of assimilation's false promise, of what gets taken when a people are absorbed into someone else's dream.
4. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke)
Jia has spent two decades gathering footage of China's transformation. Here, he assembles those fragments into something whole—a woman wandering from province to province, searching for a lost love, moving through landscapes both industrial and intimate. The result is one of the finest films yet made about the twenty-first century: its upheaval, its decay, its strange persistence of longing.
3. Weapons (Zach Cregger)
An entire classroom of children vanishes. What follows is not merely horror but diagnosis—a film about the American tendency toward mob mentality when tragedy strikes. Cregger delivers plot twists and satisfying action, but refuses easy catharsis. You leave the theater having cheered for carnage you should have fled from. That discomfort is intentional. That discomfort is the point.
2. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
A car mechanic recognizes a customer's shuffling gait and becomes convinced this man tortured him in prison. What follows is a journey through Tehran, a gathering of evidence, a test of conviction. Panahi—who has made films in secret under government oppression—knows something about certainty and its costs. The mood toggles between high comedy and devastating drama until the unforgettable conclusion arrives. I saw this film months ago. I think about it every day.
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Sometimes a film arrives that makes everything else step aside. Anderson's adaptation of Pynchon's Vineland rushes at contemporary America with both fists: war brewing at the margins, political resistance flickering, young activists contending with their elders' compromises. It is also a rollicking action film with a sweet center. Somehow, nothing tips into seriousness or absurdity—Anderson holds both in balance, the way only the finest filmmakers can. You laugh at the white supremacist cabal called the Christmas Adventurers; you shudder at what they represent.
The lights came up. The credits rolled. And the question remained—not answered but alive, humming in the chest like something waiting to be named.
What are we hungry for?
These ten films, in their different ways, refused to pretend the question doesn't matter. They reminded us that a darkened theater can still be a place of encounter. Not escape, but arrival. Not distraction, but recognition.
The way light finds a face turned upward. The way a story meets its listener.
Waiting.