Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like We Live in Time:
Hamnet
Hamnet is uneven, sometimes too tidy and sometimes too hushed, yet it closes with a knockout. Jessie Buckley gives a performance that reframes everything around it, and Paul Mescal matches her once the material lets him. The last act is worth the price of admission on its own, a clean and crushing argument for how art can hold the unsayable.
Materialists
Materialists feels like a transitional work. It shows Celine Song experimenting with scale, ensemble dynamics, and new narrative textures—but it lacks the intimacy and precision that defined her first film. It’s a movie with moments that flirt with those same highs in small doses, but one that ultimately falls short. Still, it leaves me hopeful: the emotional territory Song wants to chart is rare in contemporary cinema, and while Materialists stumbles, it’s a sign that she’s aiming high. Her best films are likely still ahead.
Eternity
Eternity has a sweet, sentimental charm that fits David Freyne’s A24 rom-com mold, then asks a clever what-if of the afterlife. When you die, you enter a hub and choose where to spend forever. For Joan, played by Elizabeth Olsen, the question is less where than who. Freyne, working from a script co-written with Pat Cunnane, leans into humor and physical business rather than plumbing for deeper grief. The emotion largely comes from familiar highlight reels, meet cutes and proposal flashbacks that remind Joan what each love felt like in its best light. When the movie wants to go big, it does not hesitate.
Splitsville
Splitsville is the better of Dakota Johnson’s two 2025 relationship comedies, a looser, livelier counterpoint to Celine Song’s Materialists. Directed by and co-starring Michael Angelo Covino with frequent collaborator Kyle Marvin, it plays like a pinball machine of modern romance, funny more often than not, rarely profound, yet consistently watchable. Covino and Marvin build a brisk farce around two couples whose ideas about fidelity collide, and the result is breezy and entertaining in the moment, and a little thin after.
Love, Brooklyn
Love, Brooklyn starts light on its feet and mostly stays that way. I liked watching André Holland drift through the borough as Roger, a writer dodging a commission about Black history and Brooklyn culture while splitting his time between two relationships. One is with his ex Casey, played by Nicole Beharie, and the other is with Nicole, played by DeWanda Wise. Everyone knows where they stand. There are no secrets. The dynamic feels modern and unusually honest for a romance, which gives the film a soft charge even when it keeps things quiet.
Crossing Delancey
Crossing Delancey is the kind of romantic comedy that remembers what adulthood feels like. Joan Micklin Silver builds a world so specific that it becomes universal, a New York where bookstores, delis, and family kitchens carry as much weight as flirtations. The movie sits alongside the late eighties high points, close to Moonstruck and When Harry Met Sally…, yet it leans a little more serious and a little more tender.
The History of Sound
Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound is defined by its restraint, almost to a fault. For a film centered on a romance between two men traveling the U.S. in the late 1910s to capture music, it feels surprisingly muted, with its emotional undercurrents often simmering too quietly to ever fully ignite. On paper, the pairing of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor—two of the most compelling actors of their generation—should be electrifying. In practice, both give strong performances, but the film rarely provides them with material that resonates beyond fleeting moments.
Preparation for the Next Life
Bing Liu’s Preparation for the Next Life is a patient, unvarnished drama about two people trying to build a life together with nothing to fall back on. After the nonfiction clarity of Minding the Gap, Liu shifts to narrative without losing the documentary instincts that made his debut so piercing. You feel that in the way the camera lingers on kitchens in Chinatown, cramped rooms, and the small rituals of work and survival. The story is familiar, yet the texture is specific.
The Taste of Things
Make sure not to watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach, because the latest film from director Tran Anh Hung depicts the art of cooking about is delectably as any movie this decade. There are long, uninterrupted sequences that simply observe the act in its purest form, with dishes that you wish would leap through the screen and onto your dinner table.
Sometimes I Think About Dying
Sometimes I Think About Dying has a distinct tone, but I was able to look past its understated delivery and find a lot to appreciate. Daisy Ridley and Dave Merheje share a unique chemistry that stands out among the early 2024 releases.
READ MORE: We Live in Time (2024), Best Movies of 2024, Best A24 Movies of All Time
