How do you hold onto yourself amid threat, abuse, and constant attempts to make you feel “less than”? Elwood Curtis does, in RaMell Ross’s powerful, disturbing, and timely 2024 film, Nickel Boys. Abuse can tear a person down—create hopelessness, despair, and resignation. Repeated abuse, with no way to protect yourself, makes it difficult for many traumatized people to remain determined to do more than merely survive.

Why do so many people who’ve suffered severe trauma live with complicated guilt? Guilt that has nothing to do with anything they’ve actually done? Or, like László Tóth in Brady Corbet’s 2025 The Brutalist—guilt about lesser things that is blown way out of proportion?

Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging yet beautiful actress, hates herself. That’s why The Substance is a sad, gory story of a woman’s self-hate. Self-loathing always stems from early trauma. And both childhood trauma and self-hate are devastating. You never feel good enough, are vulnerable to feelings of rejection, and do everything you can to prove you’re desired and loved.

Numbing pain is not a conscious choice. It’s a common survival strategy, a self-protection from emotional overwhelm, during and after trauma. And it is often passed down for generations. Take cousins Benji and Dave, for example, in Jesse Eisenberg’s film, A Real Pain.

A Complete Unknown is … yes … Bob Dylan – even though I can’t completely see Timothy Chalamet as Bob. The music is undoubtedly Dylan and, although I wouldn’t presume to speak to Bob Dylan’s psychology, this film tells us volumes about someone bent on (personal) “freedom” at any price.

What happens when love hurts you? In Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine as Light, Nurse Prabha’s sad, lonely, closed-up face tells us (almost) all we need to know. Prabha has been failed twice by love. No voice against an arranged marriage.

Why do people keep secrets? Mostly, shame, terror, fear of being found out, or a desire for power and control. Edgar Berger’s Conclave shows a struggle with secrets, past and present.

It’s frightening how quickly freedoms can disappear. The question is: Why is it sometimes hard to see the complicated forces, in the outside world and living inside us, that want to deceive us if we aren’t aware. What blinds us can make us vulnerable.

John M. Chu‘s 2024 film, Wicked, shows us in spades what happens to an abused child. That’s Elphaba. Abandoned. Shamed. Blamed. Rejected. Bullied. Shunned. Of course, rage fills Elphaba. It’s a terrible injustice to label her Wicked. Elphaba’s no different than many abused children. Hungry for love, she keeps her hurt bottled up. Caters to the wishes of others, “grateful” for scraps of attention. Until her rage explodes, with all the power Elphaba has.

Pain. We see that in Anora, Sean Baker’s raw and brutally poignant new film. Pain. Although Ani, the film’s main character does her best to hide her feelings, mostly from herself, no one becomes addicted to sex (or drugs or alcohol) if they aren’t trying to escape unbearable pain. Ani and Vanya don’t want to face the pain of lovelessness and hunger for love.

Who will hurt you the most? That’s the hidden question in Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour. And, as a woman, how do you tell? It’s by seeing (or not seeing) red flags. Sometimes, you can’t see them when you’re lonely or hungry for attention and love.

It Ends With Us is about ending the cycle of domestic violence. At least on the surface, it is. But, looking more deeply into Justin Baldoni’s film, we find different ways traumatized children (then adults) react. All these reactions, painfully and tragically played out by Lily, Ryle, and Atlas in It Ends With Us, lead to later problems with love.

Jordan Peele’s brilliantly conceived film Get Out does its job of shattering the myth that we’re living in a post-racial America. My great uncle, Leo Hurwitz’s film Strange Victory, did the same in 1948 after we won the war against Hitler but came home to racism here. It’s now 72 years later, and there’s still too much to be scared of.