Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Sheep in the Box:
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.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a towering science fiction epic, one jostling with personal trauma, grief, and existential anxiety about the end of the human race – all rolled together in a narrative so expansive compared to its contemporary turn-of-the-century sci-fi epics that it almost defies categorization. It’s a lot of movie. Most of it is simultaneously entertaining and thoughtful, and it genuinely looks remarkable, especially for its era.
Blue Heron
The very concept of memory sits at the center of Sophy Romvari’s fantastic feature-length debut Blue Heron. And not necessarily about how memory works, but more so about how it doesn’t. The vague, fuzzy recollection of specific moments in life that make up how you remember someone years and years later. Each memory may not even be specific, or concrete and absolute, but the collection of feelings coming together seemingly with duct tape to help you remember foundational people in your life who may not be with you anymore.
Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier has earned enough goodwill at this point that even his “minor” films arrive with a sort of built-in reverence, especially after The Worst Person in the World became such an instant modern staple. Sentimental Value is a very different kind of Trier movie: less messy, less slippery, more refined, and more self-conscious about its own prestige. I liked it more the second time around, mostly because the first viewing had me fighting the weight of its reputation. It premiered in competition at Cannes with a lot of immediate hype swirling around it, and you can feel that aura baked into the framing.
The Love That Remains
There’s real ache to Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains, a divorce movie that almost refuses to behave like one. It’s less interested in the usual big cathartic blowups and courtroom beats than it is in the day-to-day weirdness of a family trying to reconfigure itself after the center can’t hold anymore.
The Artifice Girl
A movie that accomplishes so much with so little given it’s tight budget, The Artifice Girl announces Franklin Ritch as a director to watch for in the future. The film works through three separate timelines, fastened together by a thoughtful story about artificial intelligence.
Monster
Hirokazu Kore-eda juxtaposes his 2023 movie, Monster, against its own title. Naming your movie Monster instills an inherent sense of danger and hostility, and while Kore-eda’s latest film isn’t void of those emotions, it stills packs the same humanistic punch that has helped the writer/filmmaker gain such acclaim throughout the 21st century.
WALL-E
Over fifteen years later, I’m not sure Disney Pixar Studios has made a movie nearly as insightful, colorful, and ambitious as WALL-E. As an allegory for corporate greed and environmental neglect, the film operates on such a concise and straightforward manner – Pixar’s strongest thematic statement in their catalogue.
Ex Machina
What separates Ex Machina from Alex Garland’s later work is the precision. There’s no narrative bloat, no sprawling ensemble, no overwrought metaphor. The film is lean, sharp, and exacting. It interrogates A.I., not as some future hypothetical, but as an inevitability already here—an intelligence quietly watching, learning, waiting for its moment. Garland doesn’t break new ground in what he says about artificial intelligence, but he repackages it with such clarity and visual elegance that the result feels new anyway.
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.
READ MORE: Movies Like Ex Machina, Movies Like Sentimental Value
