what's your coldest movie take? (+ PTA giveaway 💝)

On taking a short break ahead of my favorite time of the year.

My friend just sent me a voice note asking if she should include "Concerning Hobbits" from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack in her wedding playlist because she wants her ceremony to feel "cinematic but not too nerdy." I listened to this four-minute monologue about how Howard Shore's compositions elevate Tolkien's world-building while I was sitting in my local café, surrounded by people who probably think a film score is just background noise, and I realized something: I've spent so much time in my life analyzing every single artistic choice in every single piece of media that I've forgotten how to have simple, uncomplicated opinions about anything.

She wants to walk down the aisle to Hobbiton theme music. It's beautiful, it makes her happy, and it captures the feeling she wants for her wedding day. End of analysis. But because I've trained myself to find deeper meaning in everything—because my entire identity revolves around understanding why things work and how they connect to broader cultural narratives—I immediately started thinking about how the Shire represents domestic bliss and how wedding ceremonies are essentially rituals of homecoming and whether using fantasy music for real-life milestones says something about our collective desire to escape into fictional worlds where love stories have guaranteed happy endings.

Jesus Christ, Sophie. Sometimes people just like pretty music.

This revelation hit me while I’m preparing to take short break from Substack for a couple of weeks. Wedding season has descended upon me with all the subtlety of a Christopher Nolan explosion sequence—loud, elaborate, and requiring extensive preparation to fully appreciate. A friend of my partner is getting married (who happens to be Greek too), which means I'll be dancing traditional Greek folk dances while wearing shoes that cost more than my monthly streaming subscriptions combined. There will be random aunts asking when I'm having kids, old papas giving speeches that somehow incorporate both ancient Socratic philosophy and football metaphors, and enough food to feed a small Mediterranean village. It's going to be beautiful and overwhelming and exactly the kind of real-world experience I need before diving headfirst into London Film Festival season.

Because October means my favorite time of year: three weeks of consuming cinema like it's oxygen, stumbling out of Picturehouse Central theaters at midday with my head buzzing from whatever I just witnessed. This year's lineup has me genuinely vibrating with excitement—Yorgos Lanthimos is back with Bugonia, and if his track record is anything to go by, I'll be walking out of that screening questioning everything I thought I knew about narrative structure and Jesse Plemons' range. Guillermo del Toro doing Frankenstein means I'll definitely cry at least once about the monster's humanity while admiring whatever absolutely unhinged practical effects he's cooked up this time (we love to see his press tour on this).

I'm desperate to see what Chloé Zhao does with Hamnet—her take on grief and storytelling could be devastating in the best way. Plus there's The History of Sound with Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, which has piqued my curiosity. I’m also deadly curious about After the Hunt with Julia Roberts doing serious drama, and Roofman because anything with Channing Tatum living inside a Toys"R"Us has my attention. The Testament of Ann Lee sounds like the type of period piece that either works brilliantly or fails spectacularly, and I love those odds. Rental Family with Brendan Fraser in Tokyo will certainly be wonderfully bizarre, and Sentimental Value reuniting Joachim Trier with Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World might actually kill me.

Also in my watchlist: Becoming Human from Polen Ly (Cambodian ghost story about reincarnation), A Useful Ghost where someone returns as a vacuum cleaner, Sink - a Jordanian domestic thriller, One Woman One BRA which sounds like incred satire, The Voice of Hind Rajab from Kaouther Ben Hania, Black Rabbit White Rabbit - an Iranian mystery that'll probably melt my brain, Rose of Nevada about a time-traveling fishing vessel, Landmarks from Lucrecia Martel, Songs of Forgotten Trees about female friendship in Mumbai, and Diamonds in the Sand - a decade-in-the-making story about loneliness and belonging.

AND A TON MORE ✨

I'll be sharing all my thoughts, half-coherent reactions, and probably some very long essays with you all in the weeks following.

The full lineup is HERE btw, so if you have any specific review requests, drop them in the comments so I can take note.

My annual time at the festival the closest I get to religious experience, this annual pilgrimage to worship at the altar of cinema. But to properly survive 100+ films without my soul evacuating my body, I need to remember what it feels like to experience art without immediately dissecting it. I need to watch people in love get married without thinking about how the ceremony structure mirrors the three-act narrative format. I need to eat my mum's cooking without analyzing how food functions as cultural storytelling. I need to exist in the world for a few weeks without producing something, anything, every week.

Which brings me back to that voice note and my friend's wedding playlist dilemma. After overthinking her question for approximately twenty-seven seconds, I texted her back: "Howard Shore is a genius. Play whatever makes you happy. Your wedding, your soundtrack." Because sometimes the simplest answer is the right answer, even when you're capable of writing a dissertation about why.

And that's when it occurred to me: some of my most strongly held film opinions are also the most boringly obvious ones. The Princess Bride is perfect because it does everything it sets out to do without a single wasted moment. Cate Blanchett can make reading a phone book look like Shakespeare. Movies are better when you can actually hear the dialogue. Horror movies are scarier when you care about the characters. Studio Ghibli films make the world feel more beautiful than it actually is, and that's exactly why we need them.

These aren't hot takes. They're not even lukewarm takes. They're room temperature observations that would make Letterboxd users yawn so hard they'd dislocate their jaws. But I hold them with the same conviction that other people hold for their most controversial opinions.

There's comfort in the mundane, in the universally agreed-upon, in the things that don't require footnotes or cultural context to understand. Not everything needs to be interrogated through the lens of postmodern theory. Sometimes Paddington 2 is just a really good movie about a polite bear who makes marmalade, and the reason it makes people cry is because kindness is rare and beautiful and we all wish we lived in a world where problems could be solved with sandwiches and good intentions.

So while I'm gone, I want to celebrate the radical act of having completely normal, utterly uncontroversial opinions about movies. I want to hear your coldest takes, your most room-temperature truths about cinema that you hold with tight to your chest despite their complete lack of intellectual sophistication.

But most importantly, I want to leave you with a gift 💝

Would you like to win this? 🥹

For a chance to win a copy of Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, I want your coldest possible film takes.

I'll start: Going to get ratio'd for this but...Jaws works better with the shark.

The rules:

• Drop your coldest take in the comments by next Thursday

• You must be a TFS subscriber (free or paid // it doesn’t matter)

• Winner will be chosen randomly (I’ll assign numbers to each comment & then pick a random number here)

• Yes, I’ll ship internationally (yay for payday 🙂‍↔️)

A genuine thank you to everyone who reads my essays. And a HUGE thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting truly long-form writing and receiving my monthly watchlists (like the hotties y’all are).

Whether you've been here since day 1 or you just subscribed yesterday, you've made this little corner of the internet feel less like shouting into the void and more like having the world's most precious little film club.

🫶 AND FINALLY! There's a reader survey here I’d love for you to fill. Because if a thousand of you trust me with your inbox, I should ask what you want to see in it 🫶

Now give me those lukewarm opinions. Make them tepid. Make them beige. Make them so mild they could be served at a Midwestern potluck.

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A final note for people with taste 🫦

While the internet's prioritizing hot takes and SEO-optimized nothingness, I’m here building a sanctuary for people who believe film and television criticism can be thoughtful, accessible and fun all at once.

For the price of a truly mediocre sandwich, consider joining the resistance with a paid subscription – it keeps independent film writing alive and the algorithms at bay.

Plus, you'll get exclusive access to After Credits, my monthly handpicked selection of films & tv shows that will stop you from doomscrolling Netflix AND exclusive access to my more personal reflections.

Now go forth and raise those standards, darling.

- Sophie x