Closing 2025 in Discomfort and Reflection

At Projected Hues, Jessica, Brad, and I are closing out Season of the Sphere and wrapping up our time with Phantasm. As the year winds down, we’re shifting focus toward the final stretch of 2025, a run of episodes that leans into reflection, discomfort, and the strange sentimentality that comes with the holidays. It’s the part of the year where the lights get softer, the conversations get heavier, and movies start to feel a little too familiar in the best and worst ways.

Episode 32: Son In Law (1993), November 27

Our Thanksgiving entry examines Son In Law, a film that, beneath its cartoonish exterior, encapsulates a clash between authenticity and assimilation. Pauly Shore’s Crawl is an emblem of early 1990s performative openness colliding with the static traditions of small-town Americana.

Episode 33: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946),December 15

Few films are more frequently invoked and less deeply examined than It’s a Wonderful Life. In this episode, we dissect Capra’s classic as a study in moral and economic systems, the transactional nature of virtue, the despair that accompanies duty, and the myth of communal redemption.

Episode 34: The Ref (1994), December 25

We end the year with The Ref, a black comedy that treats familial dysfunction as both spectacle and therapy. Denis Leary’s hostage-turned-arbiter forces a suburban couple to externalize their grievances, transforming the holiday dinner table into a stage for truth-telling.

2025 has been a year that never stopped fraying at the edges. But the light of the screen cuts through the dark, and for now, that’s enough.