While this column focuses on physical media with an appetizer of Netflix options, it’s worth noting that one of the essential films of 2025 is exclusively available on PVOD through the rest of the year. Go spend money to see “One Battle After Another” if you haven’t done so yet, exclusively On Demand until January 2026.

Also, stay tuned for a special edition of this column in December with limited editions and box sets for the holiday season, including new versions of “Scarface,” “Pride & Prejudice,” and several John Woo masterpieces.

10 NEW TO NETFLIX

“Back to the Future“
“Baby Driver“
“Collateral“
“Doctor Sleep“
“Ghost“
“Star Trek“
“Tenet“
“This is the End“
“Whiplash“
“Zodiac“

11 NEW TO BLU-RAY

“Burden of Dreams” (Criterion)

One of the craziest productions in the history of moviemaking was Werner Herzog’s feverish shoot of his masterful “Fitzcarraldo” in Peru in the early ’80s. Just watching Herzog’s story of a maniacal robber baron (the unforgettable Klaus Kinski), one can sense the chaos that must have been unfolding behind the scenes, but it takes Les Blank’s stunning documentary to really comprehend the insanity. Basically, Herzog decided to make a movie about someone who tried to do something crazy, and so did something crazy himself, trying to move a 320-ton steamship over a Peruvian mountain. A lost star (Jason Robards), multiple on-set injuries, and arguments of exploitation followed, and all of it makes for riveting viewing in Les Blank’s essential documentary, now remastered by Criterion. It also includes a great short film called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,” which is pretty self-explanatory.

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by filmmaker Harrod Blank, director Les Blank’s son, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Alternate uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• Audio commentary featuring Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Fitzcarraldo director Werner Herzog
• Interview with Herzog
• Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a short film by Blank
• Deleted scenes
• Behind-the-scenes photos taken by Gosling
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur and a book of excerpts from Blank’s and Gosling’s production journals

“Caught Stealing“

Darren Aronofsky tries to do the Guy Ritchie thing to mostly positive results in this dark comedy that moves as well as it does largely due to the blinding star power of Austin Butler (Zoe Kravitz, Matt Smith, Bad Bunny, and Regina King don’t hurt). Butler plays an average guy who gets caught up in a violent plot involving a key hidden in a kitty litter box. Some of it feels like it should be a bit more chaotic than Aronofsky allows, but there’s an energy to the piece that keeps it moving from one twist to another. It’s an especially easy watch at home. Consider it the anti-holiday movie this season.

Special Features

• Aronofsky: The Real Deal – Director Darren Aronofsky and Screenwriter/Author Charlie Huston explore the genesis of the film, the process of adaptation, and how to keep audiences guessing.
• Casting Criminals, Chaos, and a Cat – Austin Butler leads an incredible ensemble of actors – hear from the cast & crew on their characters, filming on set, and more!
• New York Story – From nosy neighbors to Black & White cookies, Caught Stealing is a love letter to New York.
• I Don’t Drive – Whether he’s running through traffic or hanging from a sixth-story balcony, Austin Butler brought an intense physicality to his performance as washed-up baseball player Hank Thompson.

“El” (Criterion)

Every Luis Buñuel film that joins the Criterion Collection is an occasion for celebration. The latest is the 4K restoration of his 1953 surreal nightmare adaptation of Pensamientos by Mercedes Pinto. Arturo de Cordova, Delia Garces, and Luis Beristain star in a film about an overprotective husband that’s arguably minor for Buñuel, but one would never know that from this excellent release that includes not just a new video essay about the film but an appreciation from none other than Guillermo del Toro. Another cool piece of supplemental material is an interview with the director himself from 1981 but none other than Jean-Claude Carrière.

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by photographer Gabriel Figueroa Flores, director of photography Gabriel Figueroa’s son, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New video essay on director Luis Buñuel by scholar Jordi Xifra
• Appreciation by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro
• Interview with Buñuel from 1981 by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a longtime collaborator of the director’s
• Panel discussion from 2009, moderated by filmmaker José Luis Garci
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Fernanda Solórzano and an interview with Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent

“Eyes Wide Shut” (Criterion)

The Criterion release of the year is the 4K restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece, now available in a color grading that looks better than ever before, one overseen by D.P. Larry Smith. It’s hard to convey how PERFECT “Eyes Wide Shut” looks on this release, one of my favorite transfers, maybe ever. It’s not overdone, allowing the shadowy underworld of this film to offset the bright colors that make it feel like a nightmare. The movie itself also feels like it would be a masterpiece if it came out today, over a quarter-century later. A study of masculine insecurity and the systems that control society, it’s an incredible drama, one of the best of its era. The Criterion release also includes tons of great special features, my favorite being “Lost Kubrick,” a short documentary about two abandoned Stanley projects: “Napoleon” and “The Aryan Papers.”

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration of the international version of the film, supervised and approved by director of photography Larry Smith, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• New interviews with Smith, set decorator and second-unit director Lisa Leone, and archivist Georgina Orgill
• Archival interview with Christiane Kubrick, director Stanley Kubrick’s wife
• Never Just a Dream (2019), featuring interviews with producer Jan Harlan; Katharina Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter; and Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s personal assistant
• Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick (2007)
• Kubrick Remembered (2014), featuring interviews with actors Todd Field and Leelee Sobieski and filmmaker Steven Spielberg
• Kubrick’s 1998 acceptance speech for the Directors Guild of America’s D. W. Griffith Award
• Press conference from 1999, featuring Harlan and actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
• Teaser, trailer, and promos
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott and a 1999 interview with filmmaker and actor Sydney Pollack

“Familiar Touch“

Everyone should see this one before making any proclamations on the films of 2025. It’s haunted me since I first saw it around the time of its Venice premiere in September 2024, and we were proud to program it for the 2025 Chicago Critics Film Festival. Now, Sarah Friedland’s delicate drama about the subtlety of dementia is available to rent on VOD and on physical media from Music Box Films. Kathleen Chalfant gives one of the best performances of the year as a woman forced to move from being on her own into assisted living. It’s a great study in how tactile memories can often linger longer than traditional ones. It’s smart, empathetic, and beautiful.

Special Features

• Roundtable Cast Conversation presented by Caring Across Generations
• Familiar Touch: The Creative Process – A Conversation with Sarah Friedland
• Q&A with Kathleen Chalfant from Jacob Burns Film Center
• Behind the Scenes at Villa Gardens
• Image Gallery
• Theatrical Trailer

“Hell’s Angels” (Criterion)

It’s funny to think that an entire generation of movie lovers probably know this flick better from how its production was essential to the story of Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator.” Remember all the crazy flight scenes in that movie? They were capturing the production of Howard Hughes shooting “Hell’s Angels,” now restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection. A film that changed aerial filmmaking and launched the career of Jean Harlow, it’s an essential part of movie history, and an unexpected choice for Criterion. The release includes an interview with one of my favorite film historians, the brilliant Farran Smith Nehme, and outtakes from the film with commentary by a Harlow biographer. There’s even a direct connection to “The Aviator” as Criterion interviews the VFX supervisor for Scorsese’s film about the production of this one. It all comes full circle.

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration of the Magnascope road-show version of the film, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with Robert Legato, the visual-effects supervisor for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, on the groundbreaking aerial visuals of Hell’s Angels
• New interview with critic Farran Smith Nehme about actor Jean Harlow
• Outtakes from the film, with commentary by Harlow biographer David Stenn
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by author and journalist Fred Kaplan

“In the Mouth of Madness” (Arrow)

While fans bow at the altar of ’70s and ’80s John Carpenter, they’re often quick to dismiss his later work. Listen, I’m not here to defend “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” or “Village of the Damned,” but I will go to bat for the one in between, this 1994 surreal nightmare that’s arguably the filmmaker’s last true vision. Closing out what he called his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” it stars Sam Neill as a man investigating the disappearance of a famous horror novelist when he discovers a Lovecraftian nightmare. The incredible Arrow edition is oe of their best of the year, including two archival commentaries with Carpenter himself and tons of new material. The exclusive stuff includes a new interview Jurgen Prochnow, a new featurette, a new appreciation, fantastic cover art, and a great collector’s book. It may not be Halloween, but it’s never too late to snag this one.

Special Features

• Archive audio commentary with director John Carpenter and producer Sandy King Carpenter
• Archive audio commentary with director John Carpenter and director of photography Gary B. Kibbe
• Brand new audio commentary by filmmakers Rebekah McKendry & Elric Kane, co-hosts of Colors of the Dark podcast
• Making Madness, a newly filmed interview with producer Sandy King Carpenter
• Do You Read Sutter Cane?, a newly filmed interview with actor Jürgen Prochnow
• The Whisperer of the Dark, an archive interview with actress Julie Carmen
• Greg Nicotero’s Things in the Basement, an archive interview with special effects artist Greg Nicotero
• We Are What He Writes, a new featurette in praise of John Carpenter and In the Mouth of Madness
• Reality Is Not What It Used To Be, a new appreciation by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
• Horror’s Hallowed Grounds, an archive featurette looking at the locations used in the film
• Home Movies From Hobb’s End, behind-the-scenes footage
• The Making of In the Mouth of Madness, a vintage featurette
• Theatrical trailer and TV spots
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla
• Perfect bound collector’s book featuring new writing on the film by Guy Adams, Josh Hurtado, Richard Kadrey, George Daniel Lea, Willow Catelyn Maclay, and Alexandra West

“The Long Walk“

It really has been quite a year for Stephen King fans with “The Running Man,” “IT: Welcome to Derry,” “The Institute,” and this theatrical hit, arguably the best of the bunch. To this viewer, Francis Lawrence never quite figured out how to update what was a story written by a young man in the wake of the Vietnam War, but he did something essential to this long-awaited adaptation’s success: he cast two future stars. Years from now, it’s going to be fun to look back on this one in the wake of how critically and commercially successful I expect Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson to be. They’re both just fantastic here, even if the movie around them sometimes struggles to keep pace.

Special Features

• Alternate Ending – 4K Blu-ray SteelBook Exclusive
• Stephen King: An Appreciation – 4K Blu-ray SteelBook Exclusive
• Cooper & David Scene Read – 4K Blu-ray SteelBook Exclusive
• “Ever Onward: Making The Long Walk” Multi-Part Documentary
• Theatrical Trailers

“Sea Fog”

Am I including this in this month’s guide just because I wrote the essay for it? So what if I am?!? In all seriousness, “Sea Fog,” co-written by Bong Joon-ho, is a propulsive piece of filmmaking, a tense true story starring the fantastic Kim Yoon-seok (“The Chaser”) and Han Ye-ri (“Minari”). It’s the tale of a fishing vessel that agrees to smuggle a few dozen illegal immigrants into Korea on a stormy, dangerous night. The sequence in which the “cargo” is transferred to their shop is haunting and brilliant. And, yes, if you want to read more about the film’s production and craft by yours truly, that’s included in your purchase.

Special Features

• Cast and Crew Interviews
• Making of Featurette
• Trailers
• 16-page booklet with essay by Brian Tallerico, managing editor of RogerEbert.com

“Shin Godzilla“

The deserved love for “Godzilla Minus One” has brought people back to the timeless franchise overall, allowing for a bit of renewed interest in this 2016 gem, one of my favorite Godzilla flicks. It’s technically the 31st Godzilla film, but the first in the Reiwa era. And it rules. One of many things I love about it is how directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi lean into the idea that red tape is the real monster that’s going to destroy us all. A story of how bureaucratic incompetence only makes international disasters worse was almost prescient in 2016. And now you can own it in a beautiful steelbook 4K edition.

Special Features

• Promotional Video Collection
• Making Of SHIN GODZILLA
• Deleted Scenes
• Outtakes
• News Reels
• Previs Reel Collection
• Previs and Special Effects Outtakes
• Visual Effects Breakdown
• Trailer 1
• Trailer 2
• Teaser 1
• Teaser 2

“Splitsville“

One of the funnier films of 2025 is this adult comedy starring Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin, Dakota Johnson, and Adria Arjona. Marvin, who co-wrote with director and co-star Covino, plays an ordinary guy whose partner (Arjona) up and leaves him one day, pushing them into the arms of his BFF’s wife, who happens to be in an open marriage. A comedy of sexually active, bed-hopping adults doesn’t come along that often in the 2020s. So while this one isn’t perfect, it’s willingness to comedically examine the insecurities of man-children who don’t know how to keep anyone but themselves happy is more than welcome. It also has the best fight scene of the year. Yeah, I said it.

Special Features

• The Making of Splitsville – Featurette
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• TV Spots

Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) is an elegant, inquisitive woman in her 80s. Living independently in southern California, she prepares breakfast for herself in the sun-dappled kitchen of her quiet residence, surrounded on all sides by finely crafted furniture, photo frames, bookshelves, and other mementos from a life well-lived. A retired cook, Ruth knows this recipe by heart. But her mind and body are less in harmony than they once were; hearing a ding, she retrieves a crisp slice of bread from the toaster and instinctively places it on the dishrack. 

It’s not the only moment of confusion that Ruth has been experiencing. At her dining-room table with a son (H. Jon Benjamin) whom she fails to recognize, she speaks of her late husband in the present tense and sometimes mistakes her guest for a suitor. After they finish eating, he drives her to Bella Vista, a memory-care facility that he reminds Ruth she had selected herself, some time ago. And so begins Ruth’s transition to an assisted-living community where—with the support of care workers Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle) and Brian (Andy McQueen)—she finds new ways to retain a sense of self. 

Ruth is suffering from dementia, but her condition is not treated as some terrible revelation, nor as a period of crisis. In “Familiar Touch,” as her cognitive faculties ebb and flow, Ruth’s other senses become heightened and more meaningful. In place of verbal conversation, taste and texture can communicate volumes, and the comforting sensation of a hand touching her back brings the lucidity of a lost memory rushing back. 

Now in select New York theaters and expanding wider June 27, via Music Box Films, this tender and evocative feature debut by writer-director Sarah Friedland—a filmmaker and choreographer inspired by both her grandmother’s experiences and her own time spent working as a caregiver for New York artists with dementia—remains grounded in Ruth’s evolving perspective even as it reveals her personality through external means, her clarity of expression through movement and gesture. Though Ruth’s psychological interiority remains fluidly (sometimes elusively) hers, what Friedland conveys is the sense of a woman still coming of age in this next stage, finding and rediscovering sides of herself that her surroundings—and the symptoms of her illness—make newly relevant and accessible. 

Filmed at Villa Gardens, a retirement community in Pasadena, in collaboration with its residents and care workers, “Familiar Touch” is an exercise in intergenerational empathy, challenging stereotypes around aging and care work through its attentive portrait of an older woman’s continuing agency, dignity, and desires. At its heart is a masterful performance from Chalfant, a veteran stage actress too rarely seen on screen; though her work is extraordinarily subtle and intimate, Chalfant brings to it also a galvanizing force of presence. Through their sensitively embodied and observed accumulation of detail, she and Friedland show us the journey of a life.

“Familiar Touch” premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where it won three top prizes from the Orizzonti competition, including the Lion of the Future (for best feature debut), Best Director (for Friedland), and Best Actress (for Chalfant). Since then, the film has traveled far on the worldwide festival circuit, including as the opening title of this year’s New Directors/New Films and an official selection of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, Friedland and Chalfant sat down to discuss “the politics of embodiment,” the fine nuances of scripting movement, and disrupting old narratives of decline. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Sarah, you’re a filmmaker and choreographer, and you’ve described yourself as “working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies.” How did you arrive at that intersection, exactly?  

Sarah Friedland: They were on a collision course during my teen years. I had been studying dance, but never had the skill to be a professional dancer, nor the interest. I loved studying dance as a way to almost learn a language, to break down the world around me. It helped me figure out how much of our social world exists through movement patterns and these social choreographies that we all perform. 

I continued studying choreography in college and was, at the time, first starting to play with filmmaking. My first student films were all of dances that I had made, but those dances were largely about pedestrian and everyday movement. There was this collision course of the two, and I found that I kept making dances as a student, whereas I actually just wanted to be making films of movement. I would choreograph these pieces where I wanted someone to be looking at the performer’s face or their elbow, with this level of specificity around scale, of what you see when. 

Making experimental dance films was my entry point into filmmaking, and my first experiences directing were with dancers. Through these relationships and practicing on my peers as a student, I really learned how to work with a company of performers. After university, my first forays into filmmaking involved making this series of shorts looking at different patterns of social choreography, from how older adults move around their homes to active-shooter drills, lockdown drills, and the history of Boy Scout preparatory exercises. I’m really fascinated by the politics of social choreography. 

My work up until “Familiar Touch,” and what I would take into “Familiar Touch,” was focused on the politics of embodiment. And as much as this is a scripted, fictional film, Kathy and I would talk about Ruth through her body as well. We were definitely thinking about the relationship between embodiment and aging, also in terms of her character’s desire. That was a significant thread for us. “Familiar Touch” isn’t a dance film, but I went about writing it as if it were, and that practice is very much woven into the DNA of this film.

Kathy, to build upon what Sarah’s saying about scripting movement: you’ve appeared in many Broadway and off-Broadway plays. How did that stage training and theater career inform your performance in this film, particularly as it pertained to that idea of physical embodiment?

Kathleen Chalfant: One of the things that’s important, always, to remember about the movies—which is different from working on the stage—is that someone else decides what the audience looks at. The only thing that happens, from the point of view of the movie, is the thing that there’s a picture of. This means that it is the filmmaker, the editor, and the cinematographer who decide what movement is to be seen. Coming from the theater, I guess, I had the idea that your entire body is always engaged, that it isn’t a neck-up activity, right? 

Also—quite by accident, because I’m not a dancer—I’ve been involved very closely with two choreographers: Yvonne Rainer, with whom I’ve made a whole bunch of movies, not dances, and Pam Tanowitz in the “Four Quartets.” That was one of the connections that Sarah and I had. I think it is the idea that, when you work on the stage, you act from the bottom of your feet to the end of your fingers, all the time. People always talk about the difference between film acting and stage acting, and I don’t think there’s an enormous difference; the thing they have in common is that you fill the available space, both in speaking and in moving. 

The great thing about the movies is that they really are play-pretend, because you’re in a real environment. And this movie was so meticulously planned; Sarah and Gabe [C. Elder,] the cinematographer, had a shot list, because we had a very short time—just 18 and a half days—to shoot it. It was a wonderful circumstance for an actor, because you could walk into this entirely safe place, know where you were supposed to go, and trust that the people who were watching would take what they needed from what you had to offer.

Self-expression is everything in “Familiar Touch,” and your film’s focus on bodily experience has the effect of heightening our understanding of not only Ruth’s memory loss but the senses of self that emerge from that condition. Even with her cognitive self fading, Ruth’s agency and expression are carried forward in movements and gestures, through touch and taste.

Friedland: The way I would describe that idea is that I was thinking about a character study where the character’s sense of self is located not primarily in her cognition, but in her senses. The realization for me, which led to writing the film in that way, came from my experience working as a care worker for New York City artists with dementia. One of the things I learned about memory loss is that, as much as people’s cognition declines, their other senses are often heightened. I started thinking about the tragic narrative that we have surrounding people with memory loss: that they’re losing themselves, that they’re declining, that they’re slipping away. 

Here, I was trying to think about what parts of them still persist—and not only persist but are intensified. Who we are as people is not just cognitive; that’s a very rational, neoliberal idea of a person, that we are our brain, its functioning, and what that allows us to do productively in a market-based society. Who we are is actually expressed through all of our senses; we literally make sense of the world and ourselves through our touch, taste, smell, proprioception, etc. 

If we were to make a character study that wasn’t reinforcing this tragic narrative of decline, then the film had to find a language visually, sonically, and editorially that would capture Ruth’s personhood through her senses. As much as it’s a coming-of-old-age film, I think it’s just as much a film about a kind of sensory selfhood, if you will. 

There are a number of ways that we did that. One was crafting a shot list that was primarily static. There are only a few occasions where the camera is tilting, panning, tracking. Most of the time it’s very still. The hope was, that way, once Kathy stepped into the frame and performed, we would be deeply attuned to the smallest of shifts in her expression, posture, and gesture. 

Another was wanting to use what our cinematographer and I referred to as echoes; we would frame the same way and use the same lens for gestures that Kathy did that were similar in different parts of the movie. For example, when she opens her palm to Steve in the car ride, we use the exact same lens and optical diffusion as we do when she’s in the exam room, touching herself. We want there to be these experiences where a viewer might not know that we used the same lens but will almost feel a sense of déjà vu in their own body, so that these little sensory details might actually be experienced in a viewer’s body, rather than so much in their cognitive, conscious experience of the film. 

The other way involved getting very particular about the sound design. In most films, you mix the sound in such a way that ambient sounds of a room go away. We did the opposite in this film: the HVAC, the person having a conversation on the other side of the room, and all of those details are amplified and orchestrated. This is all to say that we tried to craft a grammar for the film that would attune you to Ruth’s experiences through her senses, rather than through her cognition or ocular experience. There are only two POV shots in the film, so we were trying to find the perspective in her body, rather than in her cognition. On set, obviously, it comes alive with Kathy’s performance. That’s really what brings you to Ruth.

Chalfant: There’s a subject that no one ever wants to talk about, even though it’s important to the movie, and it’s certainly true for all human beings from the beginning to the end, which is Ruth’s sexuality. That was one of the things that particularly drew me to the project, because that part of your life, experience, and desire never goes away. 

It was also wonderful to find a circumstance in which it wasn’t also thought to be creepy or something. It was just what happens, what people sense, what people live from the inside. People don’t feel loss all day, every day, from the inside. What people feel is life in all its parts: in its sound, in the wind blowing, in their sense of space. One of the most moving parts of the movie for me to play was the scene with Ruth alone on the street, because it was the only time in the movie in which she was adrift in space.

Friedland: That just resurfaced a memory from production that I hadn’t thought about since, in terms of Ruth’s sexuality. Of course, the film itself is really clear about not wanting to make her sexuality the butt of a joke, as older women’s sexuality so often is made into something to be laughed at in cinema. In trying to echo that on set, the first scene that we shot where Ruth is expressing her sexuality was the scene where she’s touching herself in the exam room, which we would call “the masturbation scene.” I remember we had a closed set, meaning most of the crew had to go outside the room, and I leaned down to you and quietly said, “Kathy, can we talk about masturbation?” And I remember you bellowed, “Yes, let’s talk about masturbation,” so the whole group could hear. [laughs] And that set the tone that we were not going to tiptoe around this.

What sense memory and desire share, as well, is this ability to summon forth sides of ourselves from different stages of our lives. Ruth revisits elements of her identity that exist within her but are called up by what she experiences sensorially. Kathy, one role that you have played at multiple points in your career—including just earlier this year—is that of Joan Didion, in a one-woman performance of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” adapted from her memoir. There, it’s grief over the loss of her husband that provokes intense memories and emotions, triggering what Joan describes as a “vortex effect.” Did you find points of overlap between these roles, related to that connection between memory and desire? 

Chalfant: Well, it’s interesting, because I actually did “The Year of Magical Thinking” quite a lot, including for a four-week run in New York and a four-week run in New Haven. And then, every once in a while, I’ll do it again. My swan song for “The Year of Magical Thinking” has happened; I did it in a small chapel, in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. And there’s a way in which “The Year of Magical Thinking” is actually the opposite of “Familiar Touch,” because “The Year of Magical Thinking” is the description of an act of will. She finally lets go, at the very end, but the entire book—and her entire life for those three years—was spent staving off reality. 

Ruth doesn’t have will in that way that’s connected, so she lives in the moment. I keep saying one of the joys of doing this movie was that it was finally a way to exercise what they always tell you in acting school, which is that you’re supposed to live in the moment. People with memory loss, by definition, live in the moment. I’m trying to think about whether thinking about Ruth informed this last performance of “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I’m sure it did, and I’m not quite sure how. Ruth was no longer in a circumstance in which she could stave off the vortex by will. And what happens, from time to time, in “The Year of Magical Thinking” is that Joan gives herself over to the vortex. In a way, it’s a form of abstinence. It’s falling off the wagon, willfully. 

I’m from California too, and I’ve always loved Joan Didion. She writes better about California than anyone I know, and she always writes in the rhythm of driving. There’s a whole section in “The Year of Magical Thinking” about the way in which she used driving and routes—which is such a California thing to do—to stave off the vortex: by her not driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, John would still be wrapping Quintana in a towel on the deck outside the office. That was a kind of thinking that Ruth was not capable of any longer.

Friedland: Although… There’s one exception, I feel: the scene where she interprets the dining room as a restaurant. I mainly think that Ruth truly believes it’s a restaurant. 

Chalfant: That’s what I think. 

Friedland: But I think there’s a little bit of room for possibility that there’s magical thinking there.

Chalfant: There could be. 

I wanted to ask about the scene with the care workers at the grocery store, after Ruth runs away from the community. Confronted by Ruth about the nature of the facility where she’s staying, Vanessa reflects that her truth is just a little different than Ruth’s, which distills that dual consciousness inherent in care work, between professional obligation and personal connection. Tell me about making a film set at a continuing-care community and illuminating the experience of care workers. 

Chalfant: The nobility and the elegance of it are shown. The possibilities of it, the way in which it’s a creative activity all the time, is an important part of the movie.

Friedland: If you spend any amount of time with care workers, as Kathy said, you’ll see that it’s the most skilled and nuanced work. You have to be a sort of emotional detective. You’re working with people who aren’t always able to tell you their needs. You have to be able to understand their needs as they are constantly shifting. What was really important to me, as much as we couldn’t really leave Ruth’s orbit and had to stay with her, was to show enough glimmers and interactions with Vanessa, Brian, and their colleagues to really understand the immense skill of their work. It was also to gain a sense of just how precarious this labor is for the people who do it. 

To ground us in this moment, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a budget bill that would enact the largest cuts to Medicaid in U.S. history. We tend to think of Medicare as the program that supports healthcare for older adults, but Medicaid is actually the main funder of home and nursing care for 17 million older adults in this country. 60% of nursing home residents, including those with Alzheimer’s and dementia, rely upon Medicaid. 

This is a moment where our care infrastructure, which not only supports older adults but also supports the wages of care workers—which are already cruelly insufficient—is in peril of collapsing. Our hope is certainly that this film will help people understand the value of that labor. It’s the labor that makes all our lives possible, from birth until death. 

Chalfant: And it’s not only the people we think of as skilled workers. One of the most potent scenes in the movie is the cooking scene in the kitchen. Those people who work as ancillary staff in these kinds of communities are also called upon to make nuanced choices, and they spend their lives making the lives of other people livable—and joyful, when they work.

It’s a film that shows the value of that labor, but also the experience of a woman outside of how productive she is in the working world. In both senses, though without leaving Ruth’s side, “Familiar Touch” invites dialogue about how insidious ageism is within contemporary culture and politics.

Friedland: In terms of your beautiful observation about ageism, one of the moments when I realized my own ageism as a young adult was when I was working as a care worker. I had this thought one day while working with one of my clients: “Old people are just like us.” [Both laugh] It was such a stupid, obvious observation, but ageism is so ingrained in our society that we see old people as other, rather than as us in a few years, if we are lucky. Some of the most moving moments of the festival circuit have been young people coming up to me and saying they identified with Ruth because, just like them as younger people, older adults have desires, whims, agency, and dreams. It’s so basic to say that, but I don’t think we have a cinema in America that shows us that experience of selfhood. I think we should all be anti-ageists.

Chalfant: We keep making this joke about our collaboration, which is that it’s a collaboration between a young filmmaker and an old actor. But we could talk to each other. There was never a moment when we couldn’t talk to each other or when we didn’t understand each other.

“Familiar Touch” opens in New York on June 20, expanding wider June 27, via Music Box Films.

Some readers may be old enough to remember when every network was actively trying to find the next “Friends,” hiring often random collections of unknown young performers and throwing them into comic hijinks together. The result was a wave of awful television with a few standouts (long live “Happy Endings”) and a form that quickly burned out. It’s hard to watch beautiful idiots live better lives than you do in the name of forced situation comedy. Network TV largely gave way to “more serious” cable TV post-“Friends,” meaning the end of the subgenre of twentysomething buddy comedies (although one could argue that the mega-hit “The Big Bang Theory” worked from a similar template).

All of this makes FX’s “Adults” feel almost like a throwback, a show that recalls the big city energy of Ross & Rachel but with a dark, modern sense of humor built around things that Joey could never understand, like AirTags, online dating, and Ketamine. As with most of these shows, the success of “Adults” comes down to casting: By the end of the six episodes sent to press, the five main characters had won me over enough that I was willing to go on their admittedly idiotic journeys with them into adulthood. Sometimes being a grown-up can be remarkably dumb.

“Do you remember when the plan on a Saturday was just “Park”?”

This funny question sums up the thrust of “Adults,” a show about people who have to balance paying medical bills with wanting to ride the seesaw again. Stuck between the hazy days of college social life and actual responsibility, the characters of “Adults” are sincerely likable, which is really half the battle on a show like this. We’re willing to accept stupid behavior if we also have reasons to root for and like the characters participating in it.

“Adults” is about five friends living in the same house, the family home of a sweet guy named Samir (Malik Elassal), jobless and hapless in a way that makes him easy to relate to. He’s joined by lifelong buddies Billie (Lucy Freyer), Anton (Owen Thiele), Issa (Amita Rao), and Issa’s boyfriend Paul Baker (Jack Innanen). Most of the plotting revolves around finding work or love, and how these characters so commonly mess up both.

Samir has a job interview for a desk gig that goes memorably awry before pivoting to food delivery work, only to end up partying with the teens who keep ordering beer from him. Billie tries to use a cancel culture moment to get ahead, only to watch her life cascade into a series of medical bills before a funny arc involving a fling with a former teacher, played by Charlie Cox. Unlike a lot of “Friends” rip-offs, plots often roll from one episode into the next, employing a structure that’s reminiscent of FX comedy giant “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in how episodes have standalone lunacy weaved into season-long recurring jokes (like Charlie’s waitress obsession in early seasons, for example). There’s also a willingness to go a step or two too far to get a laugh that’s “Sunny”-esque.

Of course, everyone on “Adults” would look at the “Sunny” gang as ancient, and creators Ben Kronengold & Rebecca Shaw do have a habit of falling back on the language of the current twenty-something generation in a manner that can feel forced. The show is often at its best when it remembers that being in your twenties wasn’t easy for Millennials or Gen X-ers either—the little beats like not knowing what the word “waft” means or not fitting in with a new friend group of someone you’re dating work better than when it feels like the writers are using a TikTok FYP for punchlines. And the writers also have a habit of taking their plotting one notch too far, such as in the weakest episode sent to press, wherein three of the characters act legitimately insane around a potential criminal.

What makes me think that “Adults” is going to last is how much it gets easier to overlook the writing flaws as the characters and their performers engender more goodwill with each episode. Casting makes such a difference in a project like “Adults,” and all five of the leads bring their own comic energy in a way that distinguishes them without stealing focus or throwing off the rhythm of the entire piece. It’s truly hard to pick a standout, a title that I would say shifts over these six episodes from Rao to Elassal to Thiele to Freyer as they get plotting that plays to their strengths. There’s a saying that a comedy is only as good as its weakest player, and there really isn’t one here. Even with the inherent growing pains in a comedy about people figuring out who they are, it feels like the sometimes-mediocre writing will rise to meet the talent of the cast. It’s gonna be fun to watch this one grow up.

Six episodes screened for review. Premieres on FX on May 28^th with episodes on Hulu the next day.