'LOVE, BROOKLYN' TURNED THIS LOVE CYNIC INTO A TOTAL SAP

Brooklyn is becoming something of a character unto itself in American cinema—not just backdrop, but mood, pressure, and nostalgia all tangled in red-brick alleys. And Rachael Holder’s feature debut Love, Brooklyn enters this lineage. It's a tender, visually lush romance-drama that tries, sometimes desperately, to hold together love, change, and the heartbreak of letting go. It’s a film that knows what it wants to say about loss and longing, but occasionally seems more smitten with its own postcards than the people inhabiting them.

*MILD SPOILERS FOR 'LOVE, BROOKLYN'  FROM THIS POINT*

We're Just Hanging Out

The film's center of gravity is Roger (played by André Holland with a kind of weary charisma), a writer with a deadline he keeps delaying. He’s supposed to be working on an essay about gentrification, but really he’s just drifting through it—ordering another latte, opening another blank document (I feel that, bro); Casey (played by Nicole Beharie), his ex and longtime connection, a gallery owner navigating the strain of gentrification; and Nicole (played by DeWanda Wise), a widow and single mom whose life intersects Roger’s in a gentler sort of way, complicated by grief and the tug between safety and risk. She’s cautious, tender, and—against her better judgment—drawn to Roger too.

Together, they make up the borough’s most unlikely love triangle, all longing stares and bad timing. And Holder and writer Paul Zimmerman surround this triangle with Brooklyn’s shifting geography: brownstones and new developments, the parks, bars, quiet streets, the energy that pulses just behind nostalgia. It’s all very atmospheric. But the illusions of permanence, in buildings, in relationships, in self-conception, begin to crack. And the tension between wanting to stay and needing to move forward is the real love story here.

We Had Our Time.

Where Love, Brooklyn shines is in its smallest gestures. Roger has that maddening hesitation of a man who knows he can’t stand still but is terrified of moving forward. And Holland plays Roger with the sort of charming, regretful hesitation that suits a guy caught between what’s comfy and what might hurt less in time. Casey wears her disappointment like a second skin—quiet but palpable, as though she’s learned to carry the weight of being unseen. She embodies someone wounded by what she’s held onto, yet trying her best to be brave. And Nicole is grounded by grief that isn’t melodramatic, just lived-in, shaping her tenderness and her resistance to easy love. She's soft, steady, and haunted in a way that gives the film some of its strongest emotional gravity.

The performances give the film a natural weight that never tips into cliché. When they talk, the silences feel as meaningful as the words. When they fight, it’s messy but human.

And yet, the film sometimes seems more captivated by its mood than its people. The gallery scenes, the art-world chatter, the dreamy shots of late-night cafés; They’re pretty, atmospheric, almost Instagram-ready. But they don’t always deepen the characters’ inner worlds. There are nods to the borough’s shifts—who gets to stay, who's pushed out, what gets preserved only as memory—but the stakes feel more intellectual than visceral. We’re told that Casey’s gallery is under threat, that Brooklyn itself is slipping away, but the tension stays at the edges, more thesis statement than gut punch.

That doesn’t make the film shallow, but it does make it frustrating. Because when Love, Brooklyn lets its characters breathe—when it gives us Roger biking home at night, or Nicole sitting alone at her kitchen table, or Casey scanning a street she no longer recognizes—the film finds something raw. These moments are the ones that whisper rather than declare, and they’re the ones that stay with you. The movie is at its most powerful when it trusts the quiet.

It helps that Holder avoids the typical romantic traps. There's no villainous rival, no dramatic race to the airport. Instead, we watch people trying not to hurt each other, ultimately failing, and learning what kind of grief they’re willing to live with. Roger isn’t indecisive for the sake of drama; he’s indecisive because change is terrifying, because letting go of the Brooklyn he knew means letting go of the person he was when he loved Casey, when he believed in permanence. Casey, meanwhile, aches with the knowledge that she’s been both anchor and afterthought. Nicole refuses to be anyone’s escape, especially not when her grief is still so present. This triangle is less about competition than about timing, about how love often falters not because it isn’t strong enough but because it arrives either too early or too late.

An Evolving City, What Does That Even Mean?

Its pace definitely mirrors its mood—languorous, lingering, sometimes bordering on inert. The film doesn’t care if you’re impatient. In fact, it dares you to be. If you’ve ever walked across the Brooklyn Bridge after midnight, rehearsing conversations that never happened (or maybe I'm just out here telling on myself), you’ll recognize the rhythm: slow, meandering, but punctuated by flashes of clarity. For some viewers, this will feel like intimacy. For others, inertia. But it’s undeniably intentional.

There’s also a certain poetry in how the film aligns its characters’ emotional malaise with the borough’s own transformation. Brooklyn is becoming unrecognizable, and so are they. Roger can write about change more easily than he can live through it. Casey wants to believe her gallery can outlast the tide, even as she doubts her own resilience. Nicole’s grief means she sees the future not as promise but as demand. These stories don’t fully converge, but they echo each other in ways that make the film truly unique.

Still, the romance between image and substance doesn’t always balance. The film is at times so in love with its own atmosphere that it forgets to give us the stakes that make atmosphere matter. It’s a beautiful problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

Even so, Love, Brooklyn finds a way to stick with you. It makes me want to take the long way home, think about the people who made me who I am and the ones I never quite stopped loving. It’s less about catharsis than it is about recognition: yes, this is what it feels like to hold onto something you know you should release; yes, this is how it feels when your city betrays you with its newness.

Holder’s debut may not be flawless, but it is tender, sincere, and quietly bold in what it refuses to do. It won’t give you the grand declarations or the sweeping gestures. But it will give you the kind of beauty that hurts a little. Brooklyn deserves nothing less.

Love, Brooklyn is, in the end, exactly what its title promises: a love letter. To the borough and to the impossible task of moving on without erasing what came before. If you’re looking for seismic romantic revelations, big acts of sacrifice, or a story that jolts you with plot twists, this ain't it. But if you want something gentler, more reflective, and a little bittersweet, it might be exactly what you need.

4/5 ★: A messy, modern romance.