The Best Films of 2025 (So Far)

2025 Virginia Film Festival Dispatch

A little recap of my weekend at the 38th Annual Virginia Film Festival where I saw films like Hamnet, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, and more.

TIFF 25 Dispatch & A Conversation with Kahlil Joseph

It’s September, which means it’s time for the Toronto International Film Festival! In this episode, I share my experience on the ground at TIFF — from the atmosphere of the festival to some of the highlights of the trip so far. I also dive into a few standout films I’ve seen, including Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, which I had the chance to discuss with him (25:20). We talked about the process of working as both filmmaker and archivist, the power and responsibility of images in relation to Black history, the tension between journalism and representation, and how BLKNWS reimagines media itself as a subject.

The Best Films of 2025 (So Far)

Mid-year dispatch time! In this episode I talk about my five favorite movies of 2025... at least so far.

A Double Feature Deep Dive with Hard Light Cinema: Killer of Sheep & Compensation

In this episode, I sit down with my friends from the Hard Light Cinema crew, Lewis Peterson and Kyle Mayo-Blake, to talk about two landmark works of the L.A. Rebellion: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Zeinabu Irene Davis’ Compensation. We dig into the visceral and poetic realism of Burnett’s vision, the radical tenderness of Davis’ storytelling, and how the L.A. Rebellion reimagines Black life beyond spectacle and stereotype. This conversation is in celebration of our upcoming co-presented double feature on July 20th at Studio Two Three, where both films will screen back-to-back. Grab your tickets now at hardlight.online [https://hardlight.online/], and if you aren't already, go and give them a follow at @hardlightrichmond on Instagram.

In Bloom + A Conversation with Rohan Kalyan

In this episode, we're talking about June's series of films, In Bloom, a series of films from around the world that I want us to use to reframe and explore the complexities of the coming-of-age experience. The series explores the transformative power of these periods in our lives to uncover narrative, visual, and sonic connections that run through each of them. We're often told that coming of age is linear, a private journey of heartbreak, embarrassment, and eventual clarity. But what if it isn't? What if growing up feels like dislocation, like trying to arrive in a place that isn't ready for you? These five films—The Spirit of the Beehive, Peppermint Soda, Alma's Rainbow, Moving, and Return to Seoul— grapple with those questions. They offer comfort, sure, but also ask harder things: about identity, alienation, and what it means to grow up when the systems around us fail. To help us parse through these complex ideas and questions, I had a conversation with Rohan Kalyan, political ethnographer, filmmaker, and Associate Professor and Acting Director of the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University