Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Marriage Story:
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.
The Fabelmans
The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, effectively mines through his childhood to examine his love for film. A complex set of ideas mixed in a way only the master filmmaker could pull together.
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.
Anatomy of a Fall
In Justine Triet‘s hands, the courtroom becomes a darkly comic battleground, where the stakes are life and death, but the weapons are wit. Anatomy of a Fall is as much a legal thriller as it is a front-row seat to the most outrageous courtroom circus you’ll see in 2023.
We Live in Time
A movie like We Live in Time really shouldn’t work. The overly sentimental cancer drama is a well-trodden path, with its fair share of genuinely touching entries but even more bogged down by predictability and melodrama. We Live in Time doesn’t completely avoid these familiar pitfalls, as it leans into some of the same cheesy tropes that often plague this subgenre.
White Noise
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise has often been considered unfilmable. The postmodern classic grows more and more timely by the year, which may be the exact reason why acclaimed auteur Noah Baumbach decided to try his own hand at it. The source material is rich – mostly commenting on consumerism and global warming amid a fractured landscape between the media and internal families. As you can imagine, some pretty weighty material that’s difficult to precisely package together in the span of two hours.
Nebraska
In classic Alexander Payne fashion, the setup for Nebraska is equal parts funny, sad, and deeply personal. And the payoff is well worth the wait due to remarkably nuanced and layered performances from Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a complicated father-son duo.
Nightbitch
I get what Nightbitch is trying to do. This Amy Adams-led satirical drama movie digs deep into the physical and emotional transformations women experience during and after motherhood. Adams plays a new stay-at-home mother who feels trapped in her role, spending long, monotonous hours watching her child while grappling with a profound sense of loss.
The Tender Bar
While the surrounding pieces of The Tender Bar don’t do much to move the needle, the core connection between Ben Affleck and Tye Sheridan stands out. A movie that could go either way for viewers.
Rushmore
Even if decades have passed since Rushmore first hit movie theaters, Wes Anderson’s sophomore film still has characters and tonal inflections that he hasn’t quite matched since. Jason Schwartzman proves he’s a perfect match for Wes’ desired movie-making style.
READ MORE: Marriage Story (2019), Noah Baumbach Movies Ranked
