Chandler Levack's "I Like Movies" is both a warm embrace and a gentle slap across the face. It's a film that understands the early 2000s video store era not just as a setting, but as a state of mind, a last gasp of analog cinephilia before streaming flattened film culture into an endless scroll. For cinephiles of a certain age, this isn't just nostalgia; it's self-recognition. No wonder festival circuits embraced it with open arms.
The film's visual language reinforces this comfort. Shot in letterbox aspect ratio with a warm, 70s-inspired color palette of browns and oranges, "I Like Movies" feels like cozying up under a blanket to watch Saturday Night Live on a cold Ontario evening. The regional specificity, Burlington's strip malls, and the particular texture of Southern Ontario suburbia, grounds the film in a reality that feels lived-in rather than constructed.
At the center sits Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), an obnoxious, narcissistic teenage film snob who, by all conventional wisdom, should make the film unbearable. Yet he doesn't. The brilliance lies in Levack's compassionate screenplay, and in Lehtinen's unflinchingly honest performance. We don't like Lawrence, but we want to help him, just as Alana does. Romina D'Ugo's phenomenal turn as Alana, Lawrence's video store manager, is the film's beating heart. She sees past his insufferable exterior to the frightened kid underneath.
But beneath the coming-of-age charm lies something more profound: a exposition of psychological resistance. Humans, for the most part, do not willingly change, even when trapped in unhappiness. We cling to familiar misery like a security blanket. Therapists call this "psychological resistance," the phenomenon where abused spouses can't leave, where people remain in jobs that destroy them, and where teenagers build defensive walls of superiority to avoid confronting their fears. Both Alana and Lawrence are stuck in psychological spaces that don't serve them, and through their unlikely friendship, they crack each other open just enough to allow transformation. It takes trauma, as it so often does, to catalyze change.
"I Like Movies" understands that we watch films not just to dream, but to learn. And sometimes, the most important lesson is the hardest one: that staying the same can be its own kind of suffering.
