popsublime: come see me in the good light

It’s a demanding task to make something durable out of loss. That’s the central theme of Sara Bareilles’ immersive and instructive new album Good Grief, her first studio album (and accompanying tour) in seven years. Set into motion by the relatively early deaths of her close friends and career collaborators Gavin Creel and Chad Joseph, these fourteen exquisite songs chart Bareilles’ journey of mourning and healing; they also serve as a generous gift to her listeners worldwide who might be struggling with similar losses of their own and be grateful to find some redemption in what the Grammy-winning singer/songwriter has so carefully crafted and calibrated here. Last week, I watched Josh Alexander’s excellent documentary about the making of the album at a cinema in Boston, and in the film Bareilles mentions, lightheartedly but seriously, that she’s a total control freak. Having listened to the songs from Good Grief on a loop since watching the documentary, and also having heard her and her band perform the songs live at MGM Music Hall in Boston a couple of nights ago, it’s quite evident to me that the kind of control she’s referring to is what assisted her in creating the most mature album of her career so far, one with a totally clear-eyed vision which I’m certain will cut across all sorts of demographics and generations to help shape works of art that respond to human mortality, and furthermore, that guide us in navigating and transcending the levels of grief that our mortality ongoingly requires.

The album opens with “Home,” which Bareilles has explained was inspired by the Stephen Colbert episode of Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, where Colbert recounted losing his father and brothers back when he was only ten-years-old. The song’s refrain, “So tell me your story / I’ll tell you mine,” is the very intentional heart and mission of the album, demonstrating how the pain and difficulty of grief can become “good grief” by relying on the human capacities for narrative and memory. That transformative power can only really be accessed through sharing with others our stories and recollections of those who have passed from our lives. In the midst of inhabiting the tale of Colbert’s own losses and the wake of silence that followed in his childhood home, lines such as, “You be the universe / Nothing to hide” show how Bareilles’ aim is to widen her specific thematic focus to include and embrace all of us. That thread of far-ranging truthfulness continues on the album’s second track, “Just a Kid,” Bareilles’ homage to her college soulmate and first manager, Chad Joseph, who died young at the age of 40: “You never got to get married / And I hate where you’re buried / You never got old / You were just a kid… / This one’s for my best friend and he’s everywhere.”

Other forms of grief enter into the album’s midsection as well, with the powerful “Hands Off My Body” reacting to recent upheavals surrounding women’s physical autonomy and right to choose, and “Ladies in a Line” movingly addressing visits to the fertility clinic and attempts to have a child just a bit later in life because of career obligations throughout one’s younger adult years. The former song cleverly interrogates political right-wing Christian fundamentalism, while also sharply critiquing the cultural notion that women should just be as submissive as patriarchal authorities expect them to be: “So if I whisper it in silence / And deliver it swiftly / If I can make it sound godly / Would you get your hands off my body? / If I call for it gently / While I’m burning up / Would it be enough?” The latter song, by comparison and counterpoint, quietly and contemplatively speaks to the women hoping to be mothers and grappling with infertility: “Empty arms / With lists of names / The cruel truth of starting late / Life was asking / Other questions until now… / The depths of this are changing / Reminds me of the ocean floor / I’m just swimming where they tell me to / Till I can’t swim no more.” In the documentary’s studio scene before and after recording “Ladies in a Line,” Bareilles and her background vocalist Butterfly Boucher bond and cry together since they’re both struggling through the exact same issues at that time, which of course lends the song and its beautifully consoling harmonies an even greater resonance.

Two of the album’s finest songs showcase the work of the late non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who wrote unforgettably about their last few years before dying of metastatic ovarian cancer in July of 2025 at age 49, as documented in last year’s Oscar-nominated film Come See Me in the Good Light. Gibson’s voice is featured in a profound excerpt from their poetry on the song “A Love Story,” and the end-credits song from the documentary about Gibson, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” is Bareilles’ astounding duet with Brandi Carlile that also should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It’s followed by the album’s penultimate track, “Forever,” which finds Bareilles taking on the tender posthumous perspective of her recently departed friend, Tony Award winner Gavin Creel, with whom she co-starred on Broadway and spoke on the phone nearly every single day, right up until his death from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma at age 48: “And if you need me / And we’re not together / Close your eyes to see me better / I’ll be here forever… / If you are the bird I am the movement / If you are the words I am the music.”

Perhaps my favorite moment from Bareilles’ wonderful and memorable concert in Boston this past Thursday night, after she and her band had performed most of the songs from Good Grief and had expertly led the audience through that amount of thematic weight, came when she suddenly launched into a spirited and rousing rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and got the audience up on its feet to dance joyfully in unison. It was such a smart, unexpected move, and the perfect balance and antidote to everything that she’d played just before it. That particular and very precise song selection (out of the many upbeat, affirmative pop songs by other artists that I’m sure the band could have played instead) actively embodied what the closing excerpt of Andrea Gibson’s poem “The Nutritionist” from the song “A Love Story” exemplifies and rhythmically urges us all to do as the survivors:

“So let me say right now for the record,
I am still gonna be here
asking this world to dance,
even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet.

You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.

Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so, so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,
‘Live. Live. Live.’”

Thursday, January 1, 2026

Five Favorite Films of 2025

None of the five films that I’m including here as favorites from 2025 were movies that I ever thought that I’d be writing about for my year-end post, not even remotely, and three of them are contenders only because 2025 was the weakest year for cinema thus far in my 52-year lifetime. A couple of them I’ll be writing about only in part, one for its central performance, and another for its final twenty minutes or so. This was a year in which I saw Wicked: For Good twenty (yes, twenty) times in cinemas, a personal record that I doubt I’d ever have broken were 2025 not such an underwhelming year for cinema as art (vs. mere commerce). I’m championing these five films because in most cases they were ignored, not taken seriously, or even outright ridiculed. Audiences in general can’t be relied upon as any kind of critical barometer anymore at all, neither mainstream audiences nor critical audiences. Do the majority of people these days know cinema history and critical history well enough to do the actual work? No, they do not, which only makes me even more proud of how bizarre, eclectic, disparate, and surprising this list of my five favorite films of 2025 truly is.

Tonatiuh, who stunningly portrays Molina (and Molina’s imaginary, fictionalized counterpart) in Bill Condon’s spectacular musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, should rightly become a massive star, and I predict that he/they will. Tonatiuh acts, dances, emotes, and sings the hell out of this role, and the fact that this movie has been so unjustly overlooked is pure downright homophobia, y’all. Produced by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Diego Luna, this so-called remake is miles and miles ahead of its 1985 predecessor. (I mean, William Hurt got an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Molina? Get real, Academy! Give Tonatiuh EVERY DAMN THING, or I will simply lose my mind.) I’m totally convinced that the reason this movie has been cruelly and almost entirely ignored is because it’s a tender, moving, and somewhat unprecedented gay/trans love story. Watch it, and you’ll know exactly that I mean. This world has a lot of catching up to do.

Diego Luna’s performance as the Argentinian political prisoner Valentin is equally multifaceted and exact. He inhabits his role in a manner that’s both full of heart and replete with talent, in that he sings & dances expertly (while making it come across intentionally as semi-amateurish), menaces, becomes a heartthrob after first being a stubborn fool who cannot be loved but then finally is loved because he opens himself up to it. What a joy to watch the kind of character transformation that we so rarely see in cinema these days. Through to the film’s final image, Luna ably and fully carries the torch of understanding for both his own character AND Tonatiuh’s, to the extent that their relationship in the film bears the burden of real historical meaning, especially with regard to trans-identified individuals, their romantic and sexual desires, and their intimate relationships. It’s revealing that during their audition conversation via Zoom, Diego Luna told Tonatiuh (who’d prepared multiple elaborate scenarios for the occasion) simply to relax and have a conversation with him. That sort of humanity and mutual respect shines through both of their performances, ultimately, and buoys the movie in ways that very few films are successfully borne by their actors anymore. (And yes, Jennifer Lopez is excellent as the Spider Woman. Mindless detractors, please go away.)

Black Phone 2 is the film that I’m most perplexed ended up in this post. While I thought the first Black Phone installment (adapted from Stephen King’s son Joe Hill’s suspenseful yet sparkless story) was tolerable, it was kind of just an archetypal (yet intelligent enough) retread of the whole “abducted boy trapped in a disgusting basement dungeon who fights his way out and kills the killer” horror movie staple. Black Phone 2 is on another level entirely, and that’s largely due to its distinctive setting: a wintertime Christian camp on a frozen alpine lake in the depths of blizzard season. It’s an origin story on several levels (ho-hum), but no matter since the actors all get it and firmly lock in the narrative, especially the brilliant Mexican actor Demián Bichir as the longtime overseer of the camp’s employees and counselors.

Mason Thames reprises his role as Finney Blake a few years later, and it’s really his performance (played against the relentless menace of Ethan Hawke as the Grabber) that distinguishes Black Phone 2 from standard horror movies. (Horror was the ONLY film genre that actually grew in 2025 by the number of films released.) Whether Mason Thames was directed as such or made his own choice as an actor, it’s clear that there’s an atypical commentary on pedophilia threaded throughout Black Phone 2, from as early as a scene where Finney is smoking out on his front porch at night and imagines the masked Grabber, whom he murdered by strangulation at the climax of the first film’s finale, beckoning to him from beside some breeze-filled trees. Finney has a simultaneous flashback to an image of the Grabber gently stroking his fallen bangs from across his forehead, remembers what he said to defend himself, and quietly stares ahead into the distance as he takes a drag from his joint.

It’s as though the filmmakers are suggesting that teenage Finney is somehow, on some level, slightly now more at peace in himself with what transpired through the mundane abduction plot of the first film, or at least he now has a grasp of the Grabber’s carefully planned motives that younger boyhood Finney did not. The subdued tension brought about by that smoking-at-night-on-the-porch scene in particular feels uniquely innovative to me in the horror genre, and for me it tilted forward the entire balance of the movie in ways that I hadn’t anticipated whatsoever. Re-emphasizing that aspect of the film is the central plot device of three young boys whose ghosts are trapped under the thick sheet of ice atop the frozen alpine lake, who were killed by the younger version of the Grabber long ago (hence the ho-hum origin story), and whose unburied spirits are restlessly urging Finney and his sister to save them.

Ryan White’s profoundly moving documentary Come See Me in the Good Light should win this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary, full-stop. The film focuses on the final years in the life of the celebrated non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who died of complications from ovarian cancer in July of this year at age 49, just one month prior to what would have been their fiftieth birthday. Gibson’s brave partner Megan Falley is equally a part of the film, both as the foundational heart that keeps their relationship together through the very hardest of times, and often as an initiator of some much-needed humor to buoy them through things that young couples should never have to endure, though I’m sure that plenty of people do every day. I just want everybody to stream this film on Apple TV, so I won’t say much else except that 1) I cried about seven times while watching this film at the IFC Center in New York City, from like three minutes into the film until all the way through the heart-stopping closing credits song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile (which should also receive an Oscar for Best Original Song, to be honest), and 2) I downloaded every single one of Andrea Gibson’s e-books the very moment I walked out of the cinema. Like their inspiration Mary Oliver, Gibson aimed to make their poetry a mission of redemption and a gift to other human beings, a way to try to help them through their lives and survive.

Jacob Elordi’s indelible physical and vocal performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will stay with me probably for the rest of my life. By the end of the movie, I wanted to walk around every day in his character’s awesomely ragged, burnt-out, “I’ve survived every kind of catastrophe” shredded black ribbons streaming backwards in the arctic winds costume like some kind of gangly Gothic matinee idol. Jacob Elordi should be, will be, and is one exactly: a matinee idol for the ages, and this performance absolutely cements it. As much as I appreciate online commentaries by those in-the-know about the deep significance of the physically masterful elements that Elordi brings to his role (since the Creature begins as an infantile semi-being and advances through the gauntlet of every tragedy that the world can possibly throw at him in a nonstop onslaught of violently desperate bombardment), I was even more taken in by Elordi’s voice, a voice that learns as it goes, that philosophizes and grapples and soothes and eventually understands, or attempts to. Whoever marries this man someday will be a very, very lucky person. He’s the real deal: a reader, a scholar, a tall kind heart, and one hell of a phenomenal actor.

Finally, I loved the final twenty minutes or so of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and I could probably watch Noah Jupe’s face as Hamlet in that scene at the Globe Theatre for most of 2026, to be honest. What makes the scene work is how it captures Shakespeare’s genius (in part via Paul Mescal’s performance as the Ghost and as Will himself). Rather than having the ghost of his dead son Hamnet appear in the play, which would have been the logical choice for any other playwright, of course William Shakespeare would write Hamlet’s father as the ghost, since grief in the wake of Hamnet’s death has made a ghost of Will as Hamnet’s own father (and obviously of Jessie Buckley’s often too over-performed character as Hamnet’s mother). Art abstracts the truth, a lesson that even Zhao’s film doesn’t quite learn, unfortunately, for the vast majority of it leading up to its final scene. And just as sadly, the vast majority of films released throughout 2025 didn’t learn that vital lesson either, and so on we go to 2026.

popsublime

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Sara Bareilles, Good Grief (Epic Records, 2026)

Thursday, January 1, 2026

Five Favorite Films of 2025

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