Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Asteroid City:
Barbie
Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie deliver one of 2023’s most colorful and sincere trips to the movies. Barbie is a movie that transcends style and set design, offering a visual feast with enough laughs along the way.
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Royal Tenenbaums not only stands as one of Wes Anderson’s best movies of his career, but also a defining work of the independent filmmaking scene in the early 2000s. It’s dripping with color and visual intensity, masking a story with deep themes of broken families.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
To put into words how exhilarating Everything Everywhere All at Once is isn’t easy to do. A film unlike any other, it pushes every filmmaking possibility to the brink in 2022. Many films come and go with the wind, but Everything Everywhere All at Once will be in our culture for years – even decades. The phrase “modern classic” doesn’t apply to films very frequently, but this is one of those instances where it feels justified.
The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson’s films have always existed in their own meticulously crafted worlds, filled with idiosyncratic characters, symmetrical framing, and a deep reverence for storytelling. With The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson takes that reverence to the extreme, creating an anthology film structured like a literary magazine—an ode to journalism, complete with winding prose, dense narration, and rapid-fire dialogue. It’s visually dazzling and conceptually ambitious, but in its relentless pursuit of style and structure, it lacks the emotional resonance that makes Anderson’s best work so enduring.
White Noise
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise has often been considered unfilmable. The postmodern classic grows more and more timely by the year, which may be the exact reason why acclaimed auteur Noah Baumbach decided to try his own hand at it. The source material is rich – mostly commenting on consumerism and global warming amid a fractured landscape between the media and internal families. As you can imagine, some pretty weighty material that’s difficult to precisely package together in the span of two hours.
Licorice Pizza
Licorice Pizza is a love letter to Paul Thomas Anderson’s childhood experience. The movie is overflowing with teenage emotional drama. One of 2021’s best films. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman both give extraordinary first leading performances.
Arrival
Arrival is a beautifully presented, excellently edited piece of work that stands as a testament to Denis Villeneuve’s directorial ability and taste. Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner costar in one of the 2010s best science fiction movies.
Adaptation
I’ve never fully connected with Charlie Kaufman’s work, so it’s no surprise that Adaptation leaves me feeling indifferent. It’s arguably the most Kaufman-centric film ever made, literally placing him at the center of his own story, with Nicolas Cage delivering a fantastic dual performance as both Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald. The supporting cast—including Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper—is strong, but if you’re not particularly invested in Kaufman’s neurotic, self-reflective storytelling, Adaptation can feel more like an intellectual exercise than a satisfying narrative.
The Fabelmans
The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, effectively mines through his childhood to examine his love for film. A complex set of ideas mixed in a way only the master filmmaker could pull together.
Wicked
Monetarily speaking, Wicked is shaping up to be the movie sensation of the fall. Each year, a few family-friendly blockbusters dominate the holiday season box office, drawing in swarms of extended families and raking in massive earnings. In 2024, Wicked is one such standout, serving as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz and kicking off a two-part franchise. The film explores the origins of the Wicked Witch of the West, framed through the eyes of her closest classmate from years prior.