10 heartfelt movies to ease you into 2025

Some jewels from me to you

Hello, I hope you’re well and had a restful and merry festive period. I’m not quite ready for any challenging NY resolutions yet (though good for you if you are!) but I AM ready for a gentle intention to watch more brilliant films! I hope you enjoy this post. If you’re new to this Substack, you can read more about my writing and find out more about my online circles and subscriber posts here. Now, on with a lovely list.

In the days after Christmas I often feel full of ideas for writing projects, just when there are lots of people around and few quiet windows for uninterrupted work. It reminds me of how I felt in both my postpartum eras - tired but with a steady creative energy bubbling under, and not much time to write (I suppose both periods are a release of sorts, after much-anticipated events). Instead I scribble things in my notebook for another time, stay up late or take the odd stolen hour to put something together, small piece by small piece.

A few days after Boxing Day I woke up and had the urge to write a list of films for you, ones I’ve loved over the years. At this stage in my life, there’s something about the attention my kids require, plus work time and energy, that makes sitting down for a whole film in the evening feel hard. I suspect I also find it hard to give myself permission to do something that feels “unproductive”, which is, of course, exactly why watching movies is so pleasurable, and exactly why I should do it more. In the holidays, when the risk of fatigue from late nights feels lower, when mental space opens up, I want to rediscover the person inside me who could sit, without guilt, and put on a film.

The films I’ve chosen are loosely connected via a characteristic of tenderness, mainly indie movies, with lots of amazing female stars and/or directors. Some are a bit more obscure but you will definitely have seen at least some of them. Books, songs and films are deeply subjective of course, but I know some of you will also have loved these films, or would love them. I am excited to hear your thoughts, and please share some of your favourites too! (If you’re reading in your inbox the message may be truncated, so click on the post to view it in your browser/Substack app).

So here we go, in no particular order, with no spoilers: ten films to make your heart swell.

1. Enough Said, 2013

Let’s start with a rom-com! The utterly delightful pairing of James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus play two LA-based divorcees who meet before one of them discovers an awkward connection in their past. Can it stay a secret, and if it doesn’t, can their fledging romance make it through? All of director Nicole Holofcener’s films are smart and funny, often exploring middle-class, middle-aged women navigating their lives and their relationships. Her characters are flawed individuals: neurotic and talky, which give her films an unproblematic Woody Allen vibe, and they nearly always feature Catherine Keener, which is reason enough to watch anything, right? Enough Said is touching and funny, and if you like it you should definitely watch Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings too, released in 2023.

2. Tick, Tick … Boom!, 2021

Andrew Garfield, who I think I’d watch in anything, really brings the feeling to this semi-biographical tale about Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright most famous for his musical Rent.

We begin in a theatre workshop in New York for Larson’s rock monologue, and flash-back to the events leading up to his thirtieth birthday. There’s the agony of the creative process, the shitty day jobs and difficult decisions he must navigate while he pursues his dream, the knock-backs and the triumphs (his agent breaks the news that no one wants to produce his musical, but at least Stephen Sondheim calls to let him know he believes in him!), all interspersed with Larson’s songs, performed by Garfield and cast. I neither adore nor detest musicals, but this one is so well pitched and not annoying at all, probably because it’s directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. There’s a very sad, real-life end to this story, but it manages to be extremely gorgeous and life-affirming all the same.

3. All That Heaven Allows, 1955

I first saw Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows at the BFI over a decade ago, in a double-bill with Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven, the latter of which is a (more tragic) re-telling of the former - this is the kind of thing I used to do before I had children! I’ve probably watched it every year since, around Christmas-time, because there’s a Christmas and snow in this romance set in small-town Connecticut. Jane Wyman stars as a widower, senior in years and superior in finances to her yard boy landscaper Rock Hudson (wall to wall phwoar, from beginning to end). But Hudson’s character has something she admires - a commitment to freedom, a capacity to not give a shit about the disapproval of Wyman’s stuffy grown-up children, friends and neighbours. Does love win? To find out you’ll have to watch this film, which feels timeless and relatable in its themes of class, gender inequality and undeniable connection between two people. Not quite as much emotional heft as Brief Encounter, which almost made it here, but lesser known, hence my choice, you’re welcome!

4. Your Name, 2016

My film-buff husband takes all the credit for this one, which we watched a few months ago on his recommendation. It wins the award for most full-body weeping from both of us (with Never Let Me Go in second place, in 2010 a year after we’d first met, in the Curzon Bloomsbury in London, from which we eventually emerged, soggy and broken). I nearly didn’t watch it because it is a cartoon - this is a hard mental barrier for me to get over, but he pitched it as Studio Ghibli for adults, which won me over. And I’m glad, because Your Name is completely beautiful and heart-wrenching. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I doubt I will again. It’s a fantasy, with a plot surrounding a body-swap between a girl and boy who have never met, one living in Tokyo and one in rural Japan. It tips from dreamland to reality, semi-consciousness to consciousness and asks questions about memory and the things we are always trying to find. The beautiful Japanese landscapes and voices are the right amount of escapism from the rainy UK in winter, too.

5. The Farewell, 2016

Awkwafina, the second-generation immigrant experience and warm but nuanced intergenerational family bonds - everything to love in this movie about a Chinese American family who decide not to tell the matriarch of the family about her terminal cancer diagnosis. Awkwafina plays Billi, a writer who is dismayed to find out that her relatives have decided to hide such life-changing information from her grandmother. Directed by Lulu Wang, the film gently raises cross-cultural questions about Western values of individualism vs more collective ideals, where a family bears the brunt of bad news rather than one person. But overall it’s a tender family drama, with lots of laughs and love for a motherland and a grandmother at the same time.

6. Wendy and Lucy, 2008

I wanted to include both actor Michelle Williams in this list and slow cinema director Kelly Reichardt, so Wendy and Lucy made the cut. Reichardt makes observational cinema, frequently about poor characters down on their luck in rural America, and almost always with Michelle Williams, hooray!

This film is pretty sad, with a dose of realism about the difficult choices, stress and heartache people without financial security are more exposed to. Williams plays Wendy, a woman travelling to Alaska for work with her dog, Lucy. Various mishaps occur and leave Wendy with a heartbreaking decision, or perhaps, no decision at all.

Probably not for you if you like a lot of action and plot, but it’s spacious and tender, and Michelle Williams is, of course, a joy to watch on screen. Big reccos for other Reichardt-directed films Old Joy, about a dwindling male friendship, and Meek’s Cutoff, about a group of American pioneers travelling across Oregon in 1845. I haven’t seen Certain Women but it has Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart in, so it must be amazing?

7. Arrival, 2016

Arrival is sci-fi thriller based on a spectacular short story written by Ted Chiang (it’s in this compilation and all the stories are incredible). Amy Adams was another actor I wanted on this list, and in this film she plays a linguist tasked with communication with an alien population that’s landed on earth. That sounds very silly, but it manages to be wonderfully profound, with a fantastic plot that unwinds to reveal something spectacular. Trigger warning: the film includes the death of a child, which is normally a topic I can’t deal with, but it’s not the main focus and the sub-theme of maternal love (radiant, unlimited) and how it infuses our choices and way of being in the world makes it ultimately affirming, I think.

8. Past Lives, 2023

There’s beauty all around in this film: scenes from Seoul and New York, the themes of lost love and long-term friendship and the beautiful beautiful faces of actors Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro. This was a directorial debut for Celine Song, who sensitively handles a story of friendship and something maybe more than that between two classmates in South Korea, before one of their families emigrate. They eventually reconnect online - the chemistry sizzles off the screen - but how will their relationship develop with so many miles between them? There’s much gentle wisdom here about longing, how lives can diverge and converge and the paths we end up taking. And the last scene will absolutely get you.

9. Women Talking, 2022

Women Talking has a fairly heavy plot, a female director and stonking cast including Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Clare Foy, Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. Based on a novel of the same name, the film depicts a Mennonite community whose female members have been subjected to rapes (facilitated via drugging) by unknown men in the community. The majority of the story unfolds in a barn where the women meet to decide their fate: “stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave”.

Although this is clearly serious and traumatic subject matter, it doesn’t feel depressing at all. The film centres on the characters’ attempt to find some agency in a narrow space and offers a nuanced view of their lives, the power of their anger and the bonds between them, provided by the kind of connected, communal life the rest of us no longer live. Powerful stuff from director/retired actor/child actor Sarah Polley (whose documentary about her family Stories We Tell is a must-see, and who also wrote an unmissable book of essays, Run Towards The Danger).

10. Aftersun, 2022

Full disclosure: Aftersun pretty much destroyed me, and it will probably will destroy you too. Directed by Charlotte Wells, who spent six years writing the script into her early 20s, it’s also utterly exquisite, so divine that it feels worth the emotional steamrolling (though if you’re in a raw place grief-wise or otherwise, it might not be the right film for you).

Early on in the film we meet Sophie, a woman looking back on a holiday she spent with her dad when she was 11 in the late 90s. Paul Mescal plays her father Callum, undoubtedly a Good Dad but also clearly tortured by something. The film is interspersed with camcorder footage of the holiday as well as some gorgeously creative and achingly sad dream sequences, devices which serve to explore Callum’s inner turmoil and the ache inside Sophie as she attempts to reach towards impossible things. The film vibrates with love and melancholy and for anyone who went on a package holiday in the 90s, there will also be deep nostalgia. Frankie Corio, the 10 year old who plays the Sophie, had never acted before and is astonishingly competent. Just breath-taking cinema.

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There you go! I hope there’s something for you in this list, and that 2025 brings you health, rest, contentment, fun and just the right amount of challenge. I’m really looking forward to writing and connecting more on this platform this year.

Chloe

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