It’s award season, culminating in the Oscars this weekend, but while everyone is still caught up talking about this year’s award darlings — especially One Battle After Another — one film that was completely and utterly overlooked by the big awards was one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in a long time.
Now I’ll ask: have you ever had a conversation so good, so easy and alive, that you wished you could bottle it up and live inside it forever? That’s exactly what director Ira Sachs — the filmmaker behind some of my favorite American films in recent years, like Passages and Little Men — has done with Peter Hujar’s Day. And the result is one of the most quietly transporting films of the year.
The film is set in December 1974 in New York City, and the premise is simple: photographer Peter Hujar sits down with his friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz, and tells her about his day. That’s it. Just two brilliant and engaging people talking in a series of rooms and on the roof of a New York City apartment building — shot austerely but beautifully on 16mm film, channeling the spirit of Eric Rohmer in the best possible way.
For most people, I’m aware that two people talking for an hour and fifteen minutes sounds horrifically boring — but when you give yourself over to this film, you’ll find that Sachs has conjured something genuinely magical.
Ben Whishaw plays Hujar, and Rebecca Hall plays Rosenkrantz. Through their freewheeling, intimate exchange, Hujar shares vivid stories of his interactions with literary and cultural figures like William S. Burroughs, Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, and Allen Ginsberg, while also reflecting on the rhythms of everyday life in 1970s New York — which never fails to make me feel like I was born in the wrong time and I’m living in the wrong place.
Whishaw is extraordinary here. Reciting the quotidian events of these hours, his delivery conjures a poetic rhythm while musing on philosophy and the idea that even the most uneventful days are actually full of interactions and choices. Hall matches him beat for beat — hers is the art of listening, of being present, something we rarely see honored in modern cinema. Together, their chemistry — along with Sachs’s decision to simply let the film breathe — is the film. It’s like watching two people who genuinely love each other just be together, and somehow that’s enough.
What surprised me most is how emotionally rich the film becomes as it goes on. It starts as a celebration of the everyday, but transforms into something sadder and more reflective. Knowing what would eventually happen to so many of these downtown New York artists — knowing that Hujar himself would be gone within just over a decade — gives the whole thing a quiet ache that sneaks up on you.
What emerges is a touching celebration of creativity, connection, and simply being present. It’s a time capsule of a world that no longer exists, made with enormous love and care.
This is a film that rewards patience and presence. If you go in expecting a conventional narrative, you might feel lost. But if you let yourself settle into its rhythm — the way you might settle into a really good conversation with an old friend — Peter Hujar’s Day will reward you in ways that are hard to describe but easy to feel. It may be best experienced with your favorite beverage — a glass of wine or a cup of tea.
I loved it. This is my kind of film — small in scale, but rich in thoughtfulness and humanity.
Peter Hujar’s Day is streaming on VOD and the Criterion Channel. For KIOS, I’m Joshua LaBure.
