I Like Movies (2023)

It’s admirable when someone has obvious enthusiasm for a personal passion and is eager to share that sentiment with others. However, it’s something else entirely when that burgeoning zeal is expressed with condescension, arrogance and disdain toward others when they share their views on the subject. That’s the issue 17-year-old Canadian high school senior Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) wrestles with when it comes to his love of movies. As an aspiring film student seeking to attend New York University after graduating as part of the class of 2003, he speaks about his obsession – often quite naively – as a pompous, self-absorbed aesthete who doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does (and doesn’t realize it either). He routinely puts down fellow students in his media studies class, co-workers at the video store where he works, his widowed, hard-working single mother who struggles to make ends meet and even his supposed best friend and film project collaborator, Matt (Percy Hynes White). While it’s true that some of Lawrence’s behavior is attributable to psychological troubles and personal trauma, there are limits to what others will tolerate. The result of this is a series of hard lessons in comeuppance, especially when his inflated, entitled attitude is slapped back by those looking to put him in his place. Writer-director Chandler Levack’s debut feature serves up a smart, sassy, edgy comedy-drama about learning how to be legitimately inspired and impassioned without making an insufferable ass out of oneself, youthful inexperience notwithstanding. The picture is loaded with hilarious and poignant movie references that avid cinephiles are sure to love and appreciate, as well as an array of sidesplitting coming of age bits that probably take many of us back to the geeky ways of our own adolescence. Admittedly, some of the story threads seem a little implausible and don’t work as well as they might have (especially in the final act), and a few of the jokes – though funny – nevertheless stand alone like comic islands that seem disconnected from the main narrative. Nevertheless, “I Like Movies” is an otherwise-whimsical, delightful, engaging indie gem that will remind us of what it was once like to be idealistic yet blissfully ignorant, one that we can only hope will leave an indelible impression on younger viewers whose off-screen behavior tends to mirror that of the protagonist. Indeed, it’s one thing to love movies, but it’s something else entirely to think that life operates the same way.

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.