Video: alexis__aaron/TikTok, Empty Netters/YouTube, iamdelilahdee/TikTok, Nick & Cory/YouTube, Reel Rejects/YouTube |
On a live watch-along video recorded in late December, the bro-y, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing hosts of the podcast Empty Netters stare at their screens and whisper breathlessly into their mics. The hockey podcast usually offers detailed, intensive analysis of game footage and career arcs and draft picks. In this video, though, the hosts are watching the finale of Heated Rivalry — the scene in which gay hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov finally declare their love after nearly a decade of secret hookups. “Rozy’s breaking,” Dan Powers says, as Ilya begins passionately murmuring to his lover. “What’s he saying?” Dan’s brother Chris asks frantically. “Are you getting subtitles?!” As the characters at last say the words “I love you,” Chris, Dan, and their podcasting producer Sean Buffini’s eyes all go wide. Dan gasps. Chris grips his hair. “And we’re getting forehead kisses!” Dan says in the mode of play-by-play commentator. Chris, overwhelmed, launches himself off the couch and out of the frame. “Nobody look at me right now,” he says.
American culture is in an overwhelmingly conservative and puritanical moment. Social feeds are full of Ben Shapiro watching and deriding “woke socialist TikToks” or the Pod Save guys horrified by footage of violent ICE raids. But in the Heated Rivalry reaction videos, the hockey bros have to take a minute because they’re overcome with joy when two gay professional players start fucking. So much of culture is now consumed alone in the tiny individualized bubble of algorithmic media feeds, and reaction videos are the closest digital equivalent to actually sitting next to someone and experiencing the world with them. The videos cross all genres and audiences — young people listening to classic songs for the first time, commentators reacting to sports footage, recordings of unsuspecting viewers shocked by a huge twist reveal. They’re cathartic, even if they’re just digital echoes of a communal experience. Still, it’s rare for any one piece of culture to inspire as many reaction videos as Heated Rivalry has.
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Open in NY and LA on January 16, 2026, nationwide on January 30. |
Rebecca Zlotowski’s comedic mystery is so Gallic that its star, Jodie Foster, performs the bulk of her role as psychiatrist-turned-amateur sleuth Lilian Steiner en français. But, despite the elegant Parisian setting, the cigarettes, and the wonderfully Euro romance that rekindles between Lilian and her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), what A Private Life most brought to my mind was the show Search Party. Like a late-middle-aged sibling to Dory Sief, Lilian clings to a mystery — the suspiciously sudden suicide of one of her patients — because it provides the ballast she didn’t realize she needed in an existence that otherwise has gone adrift. Not all of A Private Life’s quirky discursions work, especially a sequence in which Lilian sees a hypnotherapist for what turns out to be a session of past life regression. But the film’s off-kilter rhythms are more charming than not, and Foster makes for a winning, if not always likable, detective-shrink, one who reminds us that not even sophisticated bilingual professionals are immune to the allure of a case, especially when it allows them to avoid their own more mundane problems. —Alison Willmore
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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms throws a Westeros celebration that doesn’t end in murder, and it is a joyous relief. |
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Mixed reality yields full banality. Plus: Better ideas at the January theater festivals. |
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The “Last Emperor” of fashion died in Rome, surrounded by family. |
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“I just thought I failed Elmo.” |
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While slamming ICE’s “Gestapo tactics.” |
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A reporter asked Affleck if he remembers meeting Lisa Barlow. |
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