Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Is This Thing On?:
Marriage Story
Rewatching Marriage Story now, the heat of the initial discourse recedes and the calibration stands out. You can sense when the pot simmers and when it boils. You catch jokes that sting and kindnesses that matter. It remains Noah Baumbach’s mainstream peak because it takes his usual acerbic wit and marries it to a stubborn empathy. The result is bruising, funny, and finally tender, a portrait of two people who are not monsters or saints, just human beings figuring out how to share a child and a past.
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.
Blue Moon
Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke reunite for Blue Moon (2025), a compact character study that plays in similar fashion to their collaboration nearly 25 years ago Tape. Set almost entirely inside Sardi’s Bar in 1943, the film follows a single night in the life of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the evening that his ex-creative partner Richard Rodgers’ Oklahoma! premieres to rapturous success nearby. Hawke’s Hart drinks, riffs and ricochets through memories and resentments, bending conversations to his own restless monologue whether the audience is Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), the much younger Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), or Rodgers himself (Andrew Scott).
Song Sung Blue
Song Sung Blue feels like the platonic ideal of a holiday release, for better and for worse. It goes down easy, it wants to comfort you when you are feeling low, and it never risks getting too sharp or strange. If you are in the market for a warm, crowd-pleasing musical drama built around familiar songs, Craig Brewer gives you exactly that. If you are looking for anything with bite, surprise, or a point of view that cuts deeper than its own inspirational messaging, Song Sung Blue mostly plays like polite background noise dressed up as uplift.
Moneyball
Moneyball might not look or sound like your typical sports movie, but that’s precisely what makes it the greatest one ever made. Directed by Bennett Miller and written by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, this 2011 adaptation of Michael Lewis’ bestselling nonfiction book isn’t just about baseball—it’s about systems, failure, reinvention, and what it means to succeed on your own terms. At its core, it’s a somber, deeply human character study, anchored by what may be the best performance of Brad Pitt’s career.
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.
About Schmidt
About Schmidt is a good film, one that sits comfortably in Alexander Payne’s filmography but doesn’t quite reach the heights of his later classics. For fans of Payne’s more nuanced works, it’s an important piece, but it doesn’t carry the same emotional punch or cultural impact as his more well-known projects.
Jay Kelly
Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach at his most openly sentimental, a movie about a movie star in late middle age looking back at the breaks that made him and the choices that cost him. For a filmmaker whose sweetness usually rides under acid, this is a different rhythm. The big emotional swells are front and center, sometimes moving, sometimes blunt, almost always unusual for Baumbach.
Maestro
Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro, on paper, sings a seductive aria. A biopic of the iconic composer Leonard Bernstein, it promises a kaleidoscope of artistic genius, turbulent love affairs, and the intoxicating swirl of New York City’s cultural elite. Yet, the movie that stumbles onto the screen feels more like a rehearsal gone awry, leaving audiences with a bittersweet longing for the unplayed potential.
Sacramento
Sacramento is a good-not-great entry into the buddy road trip genre. It won’t blow you away, but if you’re a fan of its cast—Michael Cera, Michael Angarano, and Kristen Stewart included—there’s enough charm here to make it worth the ride.
READ MORE: Is This Thing On? (2025), Movies Like Jay Kelly, Movies Like Song Sung Blue
