I’ll come right to the point about this one: As it stands now, the latest work from writer-director Ira Sachs is a strong candidate for my worst film of 2025. This is likely to be an unpopular opinion, especially among arthouse aficionados, particularly in light of its (inexplicable) five Independent Spirit Award nominations. However, this easily has to be one of the most overrated releases of the year for a variety of reasons. The film is based on a book of the same name written by author Linda Rosenkrantz, a good friend of the title character, Peter Hujar, a New York art photographer who attained only a modest level of success during his lifetime (1934-1987) but who has since been the subject of greater notoriety and a number of retrospective gallery shows. In 1974, Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) launched a book project in which she asked a number of her artist friends to write down all of the events in a day of their lives, after which she planned to interview them about their accounts, with Hujar (Ben Whishaw) being one of her subjects. The book itself never came to fruition, but, many years later, a transcript of her interview with Hujar surfaced, providing the basis for the subsequent book and this film. In essence, this release is a filmed chronicle of that interview, a day-long conversation between the two friends, somewhat in the same vein as “My Dinner with Andre” (1981).…

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