Thirty years ago this month, I sat in a suburban movie house and watched America’s sweetheart stumble backward into love. No, the picture wasn’t Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, or You’ve Got Mail, though those 1990s classics deserve columns of their own. Rather, it was a film that nearly fell apart before it could be made — an arch-reactionary romance whose politics, incredibly, feel newly relevant today. 

Few critical platitudes are mustier than the complaint, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.” But in this case, they really don’t. Indeed, While You Were Sleeping might seem a strange candidate for the full “retrospective” treatment. Though well-received upon its April 1995 release, the film secured no Oscar nominations and locked up only one Golden Globe nod for star Sandra Bullock. Despite massive commercial success, the picture is now mostly neglected, gathering dust on Disney+ even as fellow ’95ers Toy Story and Apollo 13 remain iconic. Amusingly, the movie almost self-destructed at the “table read” stage, surviving only because co-star Bill Pullman had quit his previous film (For Better or Worse) and couldn’t abandon another. Yet, however modest it appears, While You Were Sleeping deserves to be watched anew, if only so that contemporary audiences can be startled by its warmth, traditionalism, and utter unlikeness to anything coming out of Hollywood in 2025.