MAY 2025 WAS A MOVIE
The Letterboxd diary may have been slim, but my life was ripe with horrors this past month.
WAS A MOVIE is the recap of my life lately, the movies I watched, and the bits that made my life feel cinematic.
May was one hell of a month for the film industry: In the United States, President Donald Trump added movies to the list of imports to be slapped with tariffs. Jon Voight showed his ass subsequently.
Cannes Film Festival went on as usual, with whispers of Trump’s tariffs lingering like a cloud over the international cinema celebration and buying extravaganza. Either way, U.S. attorneys say the parameters of the movie tariffs are unclear.
Vague, shot-from-the-hip policy proposals? In this administration? Shocker.
Movies I mentioned in my Substack posts this month
Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler
Ashes and Embers, dir. Haile Gerima
Movies I watched this month that I didn’t write about on Substack
The Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier
Late Night with the Devil, dir. Cameron & Colin Cairnes — this goes in this category on a technicality, because I just scheduled my review to go up later in June.
Boomerang, dir. Reginald Hudlin — thank you to
for hosting a virtual movie night to close out the month!
Movie moment: Going to sleep in unfamiliar places
I just so happen to have lived 1,000 lives in the past 20 days — hence the tardiness of this month’s WAS A MOVIE recap.
I was an expert speaker on two panels for my day job; I went to Florida to visit my grandmother; I went on a reporting trip for SENSUAL TERRORS; I moved from the first place I ever lived on my own to my parents’ house, to which I feel no connection.
My brain can’t even process how much I’ve experienced in the last fortnight. All I can say right now is that home invasion slashers hit different once you’ve moved from an apartment in the gentrifying hood to the pitch-black, isolated suburbs.
I also stayed in an Airbnb that reminded me of the digs in Barbarian (2022), so I’m 2/2 for horror movies feeling too close for comfort.