My newfound appreciation for film happened over two long haul flights. That may sound paradoxical, given airline movies suffer from low resolution screens, compressed audio, engine noise, and turbulence. But sixteen hours in economy somehow gave me a new perspective on what makes movies great.
Only with air travel can I glance at and compare multiple films in progress on other passenger screens. A cursory scan across the cabin would usually reveal at least six different movies side by side. Stripped to their essentials, films become mini highlight reels. Some command your attention, while others disappear from memory immediately.
Even the compromises of glancing at your seat mates’ films become more a forcing function than a practical limitation. A lack of sound focuses my attention to the film’s visuals: camera blocking, actors’ expressions, color palettes, and bodies in motion stand out. Because any scene could be playing, narrative takes a back seat to vibes and immediacy.
In an era where the major studios mostly release sequels, reboots, and superhero movies, Warner Bros. took a more diversified approach this year. Half of its 2025 slate came from original screenplays without connections to popular intellectual property, roughly double the rate of its competitors. Unlike original films from Sony, Universal, or Disney, most of WB’s were R rated, high budget, and gave filmmakers wide creative control.
WB’s approach has proven lucrative and consistent. They are the first studio to surpass four billion in revenue this year, with fifteen number one weekends, and nine movies with opening weekends over $40 million. I predict WB’s success will push majors and mini-majors like Amazon MGM to expand their high budget lineups beyond franchises. It’s a smart financial movie that also helps keep movies culturally relevant.
It may seem odd to anchor such cultural weight to massive studio conglomerates. But these companies produce most of what mainstream audiences watch. Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount, and WB bankroll films with broad genre appeal, recognizable stars, and huge marketing campaigns. For casual moviegoers who only see a few movies a year, there’s a good chance at least one of them came out of the studio system, whether in theaters or on streaming platforms.
Smart, tailored film recommendations are one of the best ways to get friends and family more into movies. The right selection can open someone’s eyes to great cinema beyond Netflix originals and the occasional blockbuster at the local multiplex.
For many people, it’s not that movies are universally bad, it’s they rarely encounter films they really love. Local theaters show few films outside of big franchise blockbusters. Theaters are often old, with expensive tickets and unruly audiences. At home, algorithmic-based streaming recommendations tend to be poor and unfocused. Finding good movies can feel like chasing a moving target. Digital rental and streaming release dates are often unclear. Movies regularly shuffle in and out of streaming services every month.
However, through streaming services and digital rentals, a mainstream audience can access more high quality movies than ever before. Good recommendations in this landscape need minimal resistance. Access and convenience are key. Focus on movie recommendations from digital services your audience already uses regularly, be they monthly subscription services or rental stores. Services like JustWatch help to browse what’s available across multiple services.
Now that we’re halfway through the 2020s, I’ve been thinking about which films will be regarded as the best of the decade many years from now. To stand out among tens of thousands of movies requires widespread critical appreciation that deepens over the years, along with enough originality in a film’s plotting or construction to keep it to memorable decades later.
Using that logic for the 2010s, I’d include films like Children of Men, Mad Max: Fury Road, Phantom Thread, The Social Network, and The Tree of Life. Each movie is broadly appreciated today, regardless of how many wins it received from various critics groups and craft guilds they received at the time. Each also stands out for its bold, original filmmaking, even if the film’s distinctiveness may not be apparent at first glance.
Take Phantom Thread, which has the outward appearance of a stately, serious period piece. But Paul Thomas Anderson injects enough humor and cattiness to make the picture play like a romantic comedy. He adds modernist flourishes like coded S&M and a partner who grows from muse to equal.
We undervalue how challenging it is to be both critically lauded and steadfastly original. Most movies that regularly crowd top ten lists and win Oscars succeed in one area but not both.
4K movies are almost always objectively better than their HD counterparts, but how much better? What visual improvements does the more expensive 4K UHD provide over a standard Blu-ray? When is it worth splurging on a 4K digital copy over an HD version available on streaming? Do you have to be a film enthusiast with a high end TV to appreciate the difference?
Complicating matters, not all 4K upgrades are created equal. The gap between a poor and high quality transfer is noticeable to even the most untrained eye. This topic spawns heated debates across enthusiast sites like Blu-ray.com and the 4K Blu-ray subreddit. These discussions can get highly technical, with commenters dissecting zoomed in screenshot comparisons and debating compression methods.
Fortunately, you don’t have to invest as much research as the hardcore crowd. Two basic features about any movie will, in most cases, predict how beneficial 4K will be.
High quality older movies are hard to find across most streaming services. Titles more than a decade old are largely buried under noisy home pages and poor algorithmic recommendations. Even specific searches for a title, actor, or director often give disappointing results.
When we lose cinema’s past greats, I worry we’re losing a treasure trove of films that could appeal to potential movie lovers. Without them, many view movies only as modern blockbuster franchises, limiting their interest to occasional trips to the multiplex.
Older movies expand our perspective through the lens of different time periods and creative teams. Many remain exceptional highlights of genre or showcase remarkable performances. Mainstream studio releases from decades ago regularly featured original, non-franchise stories across a range of genres. Genres that were once commonplace — romantic comedies, courtroom dramas, adult-oriented thrillers — rarely get much exposure given today’s blockbuster-dominated theaters. Ultimately, a richer back catalog encourages interest in the medium.
Movies using unorthodox aspect ratios like 4:3 and 1.66:1 have surged in recent years. Notably, this trend has grown beyond arthouse and festival circuits into mainstream releases like Longlegs, Maestro, and The Holdovers.
For the right movie, boxier ratios convey intimacy, making the shift both welcome and long overdue. The narrower and taller frame mutes the impact of landscapes, moving action, and large ensembles of actors. Characters take center stage, and this focus can make them loom larger than life. This approach harkens back to the classic 1.5:1 aspect ratio of 35mm photography, a format especially flattering for portraiture and full body shots. As director Andrea Arnold notes, who has favored the 4:3 ratio for her films, people are “not small in the middle of something.”
It’s understandable that several of my favorite recent films using 4:3 or 1.66:1 feature humble, low key character studies. For example, Perfect Days follows the routines of a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. The Holdovers presents a holiday-set chamber piece featuring a college professor, a few of students, and a school cook. All We Imagine As Light centers on the lives of two nurses in Mumbai.
But a shakeup in aspect ratio benefits more than small scale stories; it’s also an effective visual signifier of history. The 4:3 ratio originated in television and early studio films like Casablanca and The Third Man. When Osgood Perkins shoots Longlegs in 2:39 for present day scenes while setting flashbacks in 4:3 with rounded corners, he cleverly nods to seventies and eighties VHS horror. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro captures the Leonard Bernstein’s early days in 4:3 and black and white, matching the cinematography of the era.
I’ve written here about film’s changing cultural cache and the evolution of what it means to be a devoted cineaste in 2025. But the subject extends far beyond film. In the on-demand attention era, with its endless variety of entertainment, audiences are fragmenting, widening the gap between casual fans and hardcore enthusiasts.
To predict the future of any media form — TV, gaming, music, movies — one must examine what’s most convenient for the casual audience to adopt, along with the depth and availability of content available for enthusiasts. (I hesitate to use the word ‘content’ given its tendency to devalue or anonymize artistry, but it’s the most concise way to describe such a wide variety of entertainment.)
Let’s break this logic down further. Time and money have always distinguished newcomers from superfans, from NFL football to indie horror movies. Someone dabbling with dance pop listens occasionally to Charlie XCX on a mixed playlist, while the obsessive house head buys a crate of DJ sets on vinyl.
Every year people talk about the gap between movies that garner big box office returns (e.g., Deadpool & Wolverine, Inside Out 2) and those that win awards with smaller, more cineaste audiences (e.g., Anora, The Brutalist). Those in the former category are practically everywhere, while many would be moviegoers have never even heard of the latter.
Are movies just becoming less mainstream? Is it an art form in cultural decline in favor of TV, music, gaming, and other forms of entertainment?
Box office and moviegoing habits point in this direction. Most people are heading out to theaters and splurging on PVOD less often, focusing mostly on huge blockbuster “events”. The rest of their free time goes elsewhere. If a movie doesn’t end up on their streaming service of choice, it ceases to exist.
I’ll never forget my first David Lynch movie and the one time I saw the visionary director in person.
Like many other budding teenage cinephiles, I was in a phase where I was actively seeking out “edgy” and “messed up” movies. It was the mid nineties, and I was on a tear: Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, unrated cuts of Natural Born Killers, Scarface, and RoboCop. A friend recommended Blue Velvet as “dark shit”, so I rented it on VHS.
The film’s Rockwellian intro left me a little baffled. White picket fences, red roses, blue sky, fireman waving in slow motion — this was a dark film? But then a man watering the lawn had a stroke and fell to the ground. A nearby child looked confused by what was happening. A dog growled in slow motion as the camera pushed into the grass and the sound gave way to bugs gnawing and one of Lynch’s trademark drones. The transition from idyllic suburbia to dread piqued my interest. Lynch’s direction left me unsettled, even though nothing on screen was as explicit as the many other ultra violent movies I had watched prior.