Theresa’s 2025 Movie List
Each December I like to recommend movies to see you through long nights and the change of rhythm that comes with the approaching holidays. Popular entertainment can feel like rubbing salt in the wound of a violent, angry world. I don’t want to watch people attacking one another or fighting entities from beyond. Meanness and dumbness - especially for the sake of laughter - misses the mark. Intrigue, suspense, and dark secrets hold energy hostage and interrupt the rhythmic flow of breath. We don’t need to encourage that.
These movies uplift and inspire and leave the viewer crossing the threshold into hope. Kindness and love are alive in the world and flowing abundantly if you know where to look. Courage is present in quiet individuals. The truth, presented calmly and clearly, allows us to live with greater awareness. These films hold up to that reality and help create it.
The Last Repair Shop
Winner of the Oscar for best documentary short for 2024, The Last Repair Shop turns 40 minutes into a sweep of gratitude for people you’ve never met –the ones in this movie and the ones who helped shape your life in the background.
As a musician, I was touched listening to young people talk about what music is bringing to their lives. As the wife of a maker, I was heartened to see others whose handiwork is making the world a more harmonic place. As a yogi, I was delighted to watch a movie where people are contributing to and committed to transformation that feeds the soul.
The L.A. Times website, where the film can be watched, summarizes The Last Repair Shop:
In a warehouse in the heart of Los Angeles, a dwindling handful of devoted craftspeople maintain more than 80,000 student musical instruments, the largest remaining workshop in America of its kind. Meet four unforgettable characters whose broken-and-repaired lives have been dedicated to bringing so much more than music to the schoolchildren of this city.
The craftspeople in this movie are repairing more than instruments, and for hearts in need of repair, this movie is magic.
Watch The Last Repair Shop at the L.A. Times. Also available on YouTube.
Four Letters of Love
Glenn and I watched this movie, the only drama on my list, two times in a row. After discussing it the morning after we first saw it, we realized we had different takes on the ending. We returned to Kanopy (our favorite streaming service) to see it again, enjoying it the second time just as much.
Four Letters of Love is written by Niall Williams, one of the writers we deeply respect in our house. He adapted his book of the same name for the screen. I had just finished reading his In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden, a year that happened to be the year the movie project was developing. I felt I was arriving to this movie from behind the scenes.
Descriptions of this movie do not capture its essence. The only line worth sharing is that the lives in this movie “spiral toward …connection.” The synopsis describes the connections as “improbable.” I see them more as “destined” and “eternal,” but then, you know that I believe in miracles.
Set in Ireland, the landscape and the accents are enthralling, as is Helena Bonham Carter, whom I’ve loved since I first saw her in Room with a View when I was a teenager. All the acting and the directing is top quality.
Watch Four Letters of Love on Kanopy. (Also available on Prime and Apple TV.)
The Age of Disclosure
This full-length documentary, released while I was at SoHum this November, was Kaliji’s choice for our movie night.
I remember when Kaliji came to Spring Mills in 2009, I prepped her to meet the nearly 100 students gathering in the gym by suggesting it would be good to limit Sanskrit terminology and stay on the simple side of yoga philosophy. Students were just becoming intrigued with yoga, and I didn’t want to scare them away. Kaliji was not concerned.
I returned from the restroom and was standing by the door as I heard Kaliji saying how surely, we were all evolved enough in our thinking by this point to no longer think we were the only form of life in the Universe. I remember thinking, “Uh oh. This might be harder to swallow than Sanskrit.”
That was also the first moment of my life I gave this premise serious consideration, and what I noticed was that I was not very evolved.
I’ve been around Kaliji enough since then to have given this question plenty of consideration and formed my own opinion. The Age of Disclosure contributes to a collective body of knowledge that seems to be quite relevant for our lifetime.
This documentary features testimony from 34 U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community insiders. Their stories weave together a reality that is far from science fiction but may turn your mind over a few times as you digest what they are saying.
Rent/buy The Age of Disclosure on Amazon Prime.
As the darkest weeks and holidays approach, cozy in under your snuggly blanket and pull your kin in close. Find inspiration to tend the world with more care, stretch toward someone with greater tenderness, and expand your thinking about the Universe with more awe.
I wish you a very happy movie-watching holiday season.
Theresa Shay is the founding director of TriYoga of Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches weekly yoga and meditation online and trains others to teach TriYoga®. Each week, she shares wisdom cultivated from decades of TriYoga study and practice.
Learn more about her here. Theresa can be reached at Theresa@PennsylvaniaYoga.com. Find her on Instagram @theresa_of_triyoga for more inspiration and light.