Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Primetime:
Cloud
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud is a taut, unnerving slow-burn thriller that reminds us just how masterfully he captures the quiet dread of modern life. Known for his foundational work in J-horror like Cure and Pulse, Kurosawa has always operated in a unique tonal register – where isolation, societal rot, and moral ambiguity simmer just beneath the surface. With Cloud, he’s returned to that sensibility in striking form, offering something that isn’t quite horror, not quite crime, but unmistakably Kurosawa: eerie, deliberate, and steeped in existential tension.
Love Lies Bleeding
There’s really nothing like Love Lies Bleeding. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the blanket notion that they don’t make movies like they used to anymore – but I will say, Hollywood hasn’t consistently made films as erotic and thrilling like this since the 1980s and 90s. Rose Glass directs the dynamic duo of Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart.
Roofman
Roofman is the kind of “they don’t make them like this anymore” adult caper that suits Channing Tatum better than almost anything. He dials down the movie-star wattage and leans into hangdog charm as Jeffrey Manchester, a serial McDonald’s robber who perfects the art of dropping through rooftops, then graduates to a more audacious escape-and-hide scheme after he is finally caught. Derek Cianfrance treats the true story with a straight face and a curious heart, finding room for procedure, romance, and the melancholy of a guy who is always one step from being found out.
Nightmare Alley
Guillermo del Toro has built a career on finding beauty in darkness, crafting stories that, even in their bleakest moments, hold onto some sense of wonder, nostalgia, or hope. Movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and his stop-motion Pinocchio remake all explore the perseverance of the human spirit, even in the face of terrible atrocities. That’s what makes Nightmare Alley such a striking outlier in his filmography—it’s a film almost entirely devoid of hope, a cynical neo-noir that suggests people are, at their core, selfish and opportunistic. Instead of offering redemption, Nightmare Alley leaves you with a sick feeling in your stomach, hammering home its central thesis: trust is a liability, and grifters will always find a way to exploit it.
The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt continues to be one of the most observant American filmmakers, and The Mastermind is a perfect fit for her patient, detail-driven gaze. Where Showing Up tracked an artist circling her own potential and Night Moves watched activists fumble toward consequence, this new film follows another of her quietly blinkered strivers. Josh O’Connor plays James Blaine “JB” Mooney, a small-town amateur who has mapped out an “easy” art-gallery heist, convinced meticulous lists can substitute for competence. He forgets the one variable he cannot control, the people he brings along, and the plan collapses in slow motion as his frequent gallery visits and affection for art make him an obvious suspect.
The Card Counter
Paul Schrader has often explored the psychology of men trapped by their pasts, from Taxi Driver to Light Sleeper, and The Card Counter feels like a natural extension of that lineage. It’s a film that lingers—methodical, unrelenting, and quietly devastating. Perhaps not his flashiest work, but unquestionably one of his most powerful late-career efforts.
Backrooms
Kane Parsons’ deliriously scary YouTube creepypasta series The Backrooms has been adapted to the big screen, and he is not the first to graduate from YouTube filmmaking and short-form horror to feature auteur in the last few years. Zach Cregger and Curry Barker have similar trajectories off the success of Barbarian/Weapons and Obsession, respectively. But Parsons makes a direct adaptation of his own highly successful and notorious Backrooms project here, becoming A24’s youngest feature director in the process.
Eddington
Ari Aster’s Eddington is a jagged political mirror—scattershot with ideas, audacious in tone—and somehow plays like a slow-burn powder-keg farce that detonates exactly when it means to. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival to chilly early notices, the film was quickly read as opportunistic, a movie “profiting” off COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd protests rather than meaningfully engaging with them. But taken on its own terms, Eddington is a bracingly self-reflective work: an American fever dream about paranoia, doomscrolling, and the grifters who materialize when anxiety becomes a commodity.
Blue Velvet
If for nothing else, Blue Velvet serves as a key to unlock the filmography of David Lynch, as if every subsequent movie would take bits and pieces from Blue Velvet and expand them into their own ideas and themes. It’s cryptic, morally ambiguous, and set in the heart of a deep underbelly within small town life. The film is beguiling as hell, and even features many of Lynch’s recurring actors and actresses, led by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern. The movie isn’t as nearly as cut-and-dry as its noir elements suggest and its contemporaries often were, and it seems that public consensus has only further improved since Blue Velvet‘s release in 1986.
How to Make a Killing
Glad to see John Patton Ford continue a lot of the success of Emily the Criminal with How to Make a Killing, and equally glad to see Glen Powell land a leading role that at least somewhat fits his talents as charming and conniving, as opposed to the more empathetic, everyman or out-and-out heroic protagonist that hasn’t exactly suited his strengths over the last few years since his meteoric rise post-Top Gun: Maverick. The guy has movie star gravity to spare, but the roles haven’t always known what to do with it.
READ MORE: Movies Like Cloud, Movies Like Love Lies Bleeding
