Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Holland:
Babygirl
25 years after co-starring in Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman revisits similar thematic territory in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, another holiday-set exploration of lust, power, and dissatisfaction. In Babygirl, she plays Romy, a high-powered tech CEO whose meticulously crafted life seems perfect on the surface. With a doting husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), two well-adjusted children, and a dreamlike home, Romy appears to have it all. Yet, beneath this pristine façade, she is deeply unfulfilled, yearning for something—or someone—to awaken her buried fantasies.
Black Bag
Black Bag is good—clean, confident, and technically sound—but it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Soderbergh’s best recent work. What plays out in the film is less Mission: Impossible and more an anxious domestic drama cloaked in the sharp suits and icy exteriors of the spy genre. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett star as a couple with their relationship put to the ultimate stress test.
Woman of the Hour
Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour is a taut genre piece with a few thrilling plot threads that pull you along. It’s one of the better releases in 2024 under the Netflix brand. And although I prefer my serial killer movies to have a lot less style and window dressing than this, the 1970s aesthetic doesn’t entirely suffocate the story that the movie is trying to tell. Kendrick stars with a worthy leading performance, while Daniel Zovatto is eerily effective as the big bad opposite her.
Bound
It’s hard to argue the Wachowskis ever made a movie as defining and revelatory as The Matrix, but to offer a film as succinct as Bound right off the bat is a generational accomplishment, and easily one of the best movies of 1996.
Longlegs
Longlegs makes good on the promise of being a freaky horror tale that injects dread in every frame and through every nook and cranny possible. Director Oz Perkins, if for nothing else, continues to prove himself as a singular horror director, with a style that no soul could replicate and a thirst for the absurd, demented, and disturbed. Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood offer enough to have you engaged, and Perkins is talented enough behind the camera to keep things rolling.
Hold Your Breath
Hold Your Breath has a premise that is fit for a 20 minute short film, not a full length feature. It has a rather easy one sentence elevator pitch to sell you on its terror. A mother of two believes a sinister presence that takes the form of “The Grey Man” is closing in on her home during the Dust Bowl in 1930s Oklahoma. Directors Will Joines and Karrie Crouse use this place and time period to tell a story of guilt and grief set to the backdrop of a historical event shutting people indoors and with their own thoughts.
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.
Emily the Criminal
Emily the Criminal is a tense star vehicle for one of the industry’s biggest risers, the committed and ambitious Aubrey Plaza. The movie lives and dies by her performance, and she’s able to carry the weight of this thriller a majority of the time.
Eileen
Eileen is a movie about blurred and dangerous relationships, many of them fraught, and a few of them deadly. I didn’t find it nearly as rewarding as I see many others have on the internet, but there are a few stylistic and dramatic choices that make it worthwhile. Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway co-star.
Saltburn
Emerald Fennell‘s sophomore movie, Saltburn, emerges from the rubble of her polarizing debut, Promising Young Woman, with a cast that elevates the material despite its endlessly convoluted and plainly put narrative. This comedy-drama-thriller hybrid film weaves a perplexing tale of obsession, deception, and tragedy within the confines of the aristocratic Catton family’s titular estate.