5 Films I Enjoyed Discovering in July 2025
Welcome to the dog days of summer, and I hope you're staying cool, wherever you are. July was a particularly busy month for me, so not only did I fail to catch up with as many films as some previous months, but I also didn't get around to writing up any more blog posts... and there's definitely some topics I've been wanting to cover. Maybe I'll find some time in August, but in the meantime, allow me to recommend five films well worth watching that I caught up with in July.
There's not as many "hidden gems" on this list, and odds are you may have heard of some of these films, but the five films on here are all titles I've been meaning to watch for a long time, and I was rewarded for finally knocking them off my watchlist. In particular, I knocked off big blind spots from three of my all-time favorite filmmakers, and also finally started the filmography of a director whose work I've been intrigued by for years. It's also a fun mix of films with massive ensemble casts and ones with very few key characters to keep track of. So here, without any further unnecessary babbling, are 5 films I enjoyed discovering in the month of July 2025:
Exte: Hair Extensions (2007)directed by Sion Sono
It was great to finally watch something directed by Sion Sono, a filmmaker who's been on my radar for a while and has an extensive filmography, including cult classics like Suicide Club and Love Exposure. A film with the title Exte: Hair Extensions sure seems like it should be a goofy horror comedy - evil hair? are we serious here? - and I was half expecting something along the lines of Night of the Lepus or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but much to my surprise, Exte: Hair Extensions is played pretty effectively as straight-up horror, along with a compelling narrative and great performances.
The film is anchored by the performance of Chiaki Kuriyama as Yuko, a 20-year-old hairdresser who seems to really enjoy her job and lives with her roommate Yuki. I thought Kuriyama looked familiar, and she'll likely look familiar to many because she was Gogo in the Kill Bill movies. She's committed to the bit and is able to show off the sunny sides of her character while also getting into final girl mode as needed. The key role for Yuko, however, is as a loving aunt to her niece Mami, who gets unceremoniously dropped off at her apartment one day and is suffering from abuse at the hands of her mother, Yuko's sister.
When it comes to the hair itself, the origin story is quite grim - involving dead bodies and human trafficking - and there's this hair-obsessed creep named Yamazaki who discovers the mysterious ability of the hair of these dead bodies to grow at an insane rate. He naturally starts packaging bits and pieces of the hair as hair extensions for salons to try out. This leads to two memorable moments in the film. The first is a great kill scene involving lots of body horror as hair comes out of every opening imaginable (eyes, mouth, an open cut, etc.). The second is an out-of-nowhere musical moment where Yamazaki starts singing (in English, no less) about his hair. Out of everything in this film, it's those two moments that are likely to stick with me the most.
While the tonal variance between the film's darker moments and its lighter ones seems like it shouldn't work on paper, I found it to hold up pretty effectively in practice. Maybe my expectations for this one were too low considering the subject matter, but I found the fusion of effective scares, strong plotting, and moving moments genuinely surprising, and I'm eager to check out more in the Sion Sono filmography.
My Dinner with Andre (1981)directed by Louis Malle
I definitely have an affinity for films that are heavy on conversation (see the rest of this list for more examples), but it's not the easiest thing in the world to pull off a film dedicated entirely around characters chatting with each other while keeping the audience engaged. It's especially a challenge when the entire film is one conversation between two characters - no breaks and no subplots! It may be that element that makes My Dinner with Andre feel so impressive, as I found it to be one of the more gripping and consistently exciting films I've seen this year.
No doubt the first step in pulling off a film like My Dinner with Andre is casting two great actors who can command your attention for the entirety of a film, and it's hard to imagine a better pairing than Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, who each play fictional versions of themselves here. I've been a fan of Wallace Shawn ever since my first exposure to him in The Princess Bride when I was a child (funnily enough, he does utter the word "inconceivable" in this film) and find his entire screen presence compelling, from his distinct voice to his physique to the type of dialogue he's often speaking. When it comes to Andre Gregory, I'm less familiar outside of Vanya on 42nd Street (also with Shawn and with Louis Malle behind the camera) and his small but very funny role in The Linguini Incident. Fortunately, that doesn't matter much here, because he's undoubtedly one of the great storytellers captured on screen. He carries much of the first half of the film, with Shawn essentially a spokesperson for the audience, listening intently and becoming too intrigued to do anything except ask Gregory to share more.
The conversations range from a variety of topics, starting with Gregory's cult-like experiences in Tibet and transforming into discussions about self, performance, happiness, and much much more. It's deep and thoughtful stuff but never feels inaccessible, and the direction makes it feel like you're right there with Shawn and Gregory having this conversation. It's naturalistic and plays out in real time, and there's the proper amount of breaks for the waiter to come by and take orders and offer the dessert menu. There's no shortage of moments to take from this, but one of the key items that's had me thinking comes before the conversation actually starts, when Shawn shares that he enjoys asking questions because it makes him feel like a private investigator, which has now totally shifted the way I think about asking questions in a conversational setting.
Above all else, this made me long for a night of conversation, perhaps with an old friend in an unexpected way, just like this conversation played out. It's rare to have a discussion and connection in life that really hits on this deep of a level, so it's all the more valuable to savor these opportunities when they arise. And I'm certain I can already see myself returning to My Dinner with Andre frequently in the future, to at least pretend I'm acquainted with Shawn and Gregory and to see what words of wisdom I can learn as I continue to mature through life.
Having said that, be careful what you wish for. Just a day or two after watching the film, I had the chance to have a conversation about life's purpose... with some drunk moms on a train. Thanks, universe. The train was also full of high schoolers on their way back from a country music festival, which, speaking of...
Nashville (1975)
directed by Robert Altman
One of the film-watching highlights of my summer has been the Robert Altman Centennial retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Every Wednesday night from June through August, a different Altman classic has been screened, and so far I've had the opportunity to revisit MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, California Split, 3 Women, and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean on the big screen, while also checking out the goofy and fun Popeye for the first time. The crown jewel experience for me, however, was finally knocking a major title off my cinematic bucket list - Altman's sprawling ensemble piece Nashville, considered by many to be his masterpiece.
I almost hesitated to put Nashville on here since it's a title that doesn't need any help from me to enter the cinematic lexicon, but it was too good of an experience to pass up writing about. Centering around a political convention in the titular city, Altman's direction and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury's script give one of the greatest ensemble casts I've ever seen ample room to establish a bevy of memorable characters that weave in and out of each other's lives over the course of a few days. The cast is too large to name in full, but among the many names are favorites of mine like Karen Black, Shelley Duvall, Henry Gibson, Jeff Goldblum, Ned Beatty, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, and Keenan Wynn. Ronee Blakley and Keith Carradine both have particularly strong musical moments, while Geraldine Chaplin was the unexpected comedic MVP as an English reporter who is woefully out of touch with everything going on in the world.
Nashville certainly isn't driven by plot, but it has captivating scene after captivating scene which creates a world and atmosphere that really sneaks up on you by the end. It has a deceptively laid-back, easygoing vibe, but there's not just political tension building underneath the surface, but character tension as well, as scenes take their time to build to transcendent points. What starts as one of the key musical numbers performed by Blakley slowly unravels into a cry for help, for example, or the relationships that Carradine develops such that there's an incredible payoff when he's performing "I'm Easy" and three different women in the audience think he's singing about them. Where it all goes at the end I don't want to spoil, but I will say it features a famous Nashville landmark that I've visited and I'm not thinking of that location the same way ever again.
After the screening, we were treated to a nice discussion which touched on some of the improvised moments of the films (including Blakley's breakdown as mentioned above, as well as how Lily Tomlin altered a key scene where she leaves Keith Carradine) as well as the importance of women in the film. While most '70s New Hollywood films had a tendency to be centered around men, this film dedicates a lot to its female characters and their issues, which is a welcome shift from the norm.
Nashville probably requires multiple viewings in order to take in everything that's going on in its truly massive scope, but on a first watch it was about as breezy as 160 minutes can be, and it felt so good to finally see this masterwork from one of my favorite filmmakers of all time.
From one favorite filmmaker to another, I kicked off the month by finally watching the breakthrough film from one of my very favorite directors, Mr. Richard Linklater. Slacker in many ways kickstarted the '90s indie cinema boom and was a major influence on lots of directors (Kevin Smith, for example, has always been very vocal about the importance Slacker had on his desire to make movies). Watching Slacker as a huge Linklater fan is fascinating because it truly is the blueprint for everything he'd go on to explore in his later films, from effectively managing and utilizing a large ensemble cast to developing engaging walk-and-talk dialogue between characters to exploring time and its relationship to the world of the film.
Much like Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise, everything that goes on here takes place over a single day/night, as we meet countless inhabitants of Austin, Texas, for brief vignettes on their lives, going around doing whatever they're doing on that given day. There's no conventional narrative plot here at all (something of a theme with my selections this month), the film instead just relies on the natural passage of time between characters walking, talking, hanging out, fighting, etc. There's somewhat of a gimmick employed here as each character we meet had some sort of interaction with the character we were previously following (and everything starts with Linklater himself taking a taxi ride into town from a bus stop). So while there's not much depth to each individual character that we meet, as they're only on screen for a few minutes, there's plenty of depth to the community as a whole. Linklater crafts a vision of Austin that is one-of-a-kind, rooted in reality but off-kilter enough that it remains unpredictable and engaging through to the very end. The use of local actors, unknown to the rest of the world, helps a lot as well in cultivating this vision of Austin.
If Slacker doesn't feel quite like a top-tier Linklater film I think it's only because he outdid himself with future films like Dazed and Confused, the three films in the Before trilogy, and Boyhood, which all take ideas from this and further establish them in incredible ways. Taken on its own, however, Slacker feels like it should be held in higher regard than it feels like it is. There's no question that this is a new favorite of mine and I feel like it perfectly establishes the blueprint for low-budget indie filmmaking that centers around slice-of-life stories and their many key ingredients: interesting characters, entertaining dialogue that toes the line between profundity and stupidity, fluid camera movements, and a strong sense of place and location.
The work of Linklater will never cease to excite me, and I'm so glad that I found his breakthrough feature to be just as good, if not even better, than I had been hoping for. There's still several titles in his filmography that I need to check out for the first time, and I'm hoping I get to all of those sooner rather than later.
I'm not sure if I've seen enough of his work to put him up on the pedestal that I have Altman and Linklater on when it comes to my personal taste in film, but I've developed a strong passion for the films of Eric Rohmer and have yet to be disappointed by anything I've seen from him. Rohmer's films typically center around awkward romances and relationships and characters who struggle to communicate or make decisions and as such often face complex dilemmas involving the relationships in their lives. Like many other French directors of his generation, Rohmer first came to prominence in the 1960s as part of the French New Wave and then continued churning out films until his passing in 2010.
I wanted to bring up Rohmer's history a little when discussing A Summer's Tale, because it blows my mind that Rohmer was 76 years old in 1996 when this film came out. Despite being in his seventies, Rohmer crafted a film about twentysomethings that feels like it was made by a much younger filmmaker, and I hope I still have the energy he had when I'm 76 years old. The film was known to be personal to Rohmer and semi-autobiographical, based on some combination of events in his life and events he witnessed happen to others, which may have added a certain spark to the proceedings here.
On one hand, I can't help but be jealous about some of Rohmer's experiences, as his main character Gaspard here had the opportunity to not just hang out on the beautiful beaches of Brittany for a month, but he also found three different women who have varying degrees of interest in him. On paper it sounds like a male fantasy come true, but have no fear, Gaspard has enough flaws that whatever dream scenario it seems like he may be developing is actually a great look at his commitment and what he values in relationships with other human beings. There's probably a version of this setup that could be turned into an erotic thriller, but with Rohmer we instead get a film full of great dialogue and conversation, and it's never not engaging.
The three relationships themselves are all fascinating. Gaspard first meets Margot, a waitress, and the two have immediate chemistry and feel so open when communicating with each other, but Margot feels their relationship becoming a deep friendship rather than anything romantic. Solène, an acquaintance of Margot's with whom Gaspard meets one night at a club, has an immediate interest in Gaspard, but he doesn't fully want to commit to her. And then there's Lena, Gaspard's current girlfriend, who is gone from most of the film on a trip to Spain but shows up later, and it's hard to say if what the two of them have going feels like anything that could really hold up on a long-term basis. I don't want to go much further into what happens here, but each one of these connections is explored beautifully, and I found the ending pretty much perfect and quite funny.
Of course, I'd be remiss not to mention just how beautiful the film looks, which is another major draw. I found the colors so visually appealing and the Brittany locations made me want to go there immediately. This film was recently restored and the new restoration currently streaming on the Criterion Channel looks incredible and feels like the next best thing to seeing it in the theater. I've been going through Rohmer's four tales of the seasons this year, having also watched A Tale of Winter in January and A Tale of Springtime in April and I'm planning to get to A Tale of Autumn in October. I think A Tale of Summer is my favorite of the bunch so far, and it's not too far off from The Green Ray, my favorite Rohmer film, also set during a summer vacation. There's so many more Rohmer films that I need to seek out and at this point I feel like I need to watch his entire filmography at some point!
That will do it for July, a busy month without as much time for movies as some previous months, but I still got to catch up with some new-to-me classics that I'd been eager to see for some time. Hopefully I'll get around to some more posts on here in August - I've got a few ideas so stay tuned!
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