Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Mayday:
Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick still feels fresh – for its direction, for its acting, and for its precise attention to emotion and payoff. Every moment feels important and finely tuned, and every actor and actress fits perfectly within this nostalgia-laden juggernaut. A real hit, and one of my favorite movie theater experiences of all time.
The Phoenician Scheme
The Phoenician Scheme finds Wes Anderson at perhaps his most emotionally direct since The Grand Budapest Hotel, yet without sacrificing the signature aesthetic and structural quirks that define his work. Where recent efforts like Asteroid City and The French Dispatch relied heavily on narrative framing devices, nested storytelling, and dense, text-heavy scripts, The Phoenician Scheme plays more like an emotional adventure story—a film that hits hardest on first viewing, even as it leaves behind layers to explore on rewatches.
Mickey 17
Following up Parasite was never going to be easy for Bong Joon-ho. The 2019 film was a global phenomenon, breaking language barriers at the Academy Awards and cementing Bong as one of the most exciting directors of his generation. With Mickey 17, his first film since that historic win, he dives headfirst into sci-fi, adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7 with an all-star cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, and Toni Collette.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Chris Pine leads a team of ragtag thieves on a journey throughout an expansive world. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a movie that contains a mighty cast and includes many moving parts – all of which excel in harmony.
Read our full review of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Fountain of Youth
Fountain of Youth doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t even inflate the tires. But it doesn’t burst them either, and in a genre flooded with big-budget, charisma-sapping clunkers, that might be faint praise—but it’s praise nonetheless. It’s a forgettable but harmless addition to Apple TV+’s library, with just enough star power and personality from John Krasinski and Natalie Portman to make it mildly palatable.
Project Hail Mary
A tremendous amount of heart went into Project Hail Mary, and a ton of heart and sentimentality bleeds through the final product. Whether that’s a detriment for any given audience member will only be up to them. I’ve seen a few reviews note they felt they were being overworked or sold a specific tone to the point of exhaustion. But for my money, if I could have any director or pair of directors trying this sort of pop-culture-riffing, winking blockbuster with a constant tongue-in-cheek tone, I’d pick Phil Lord and Christopher Miller every single time.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
There are four or five moments in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie where my brain basically short-circuited, not because the movie is confusing, but because it feels borderline impossible that it exists at this scale with this kind of scrappy, “how did they pull that off?” energy. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have always had a particular talent for turning cringe into momentum and turning momentum into a full-on set piece. Here, they do it on a bigger canvas without sanding down what made Nirvanna the Band the Show special in the first place.
Read our full review of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Predator: Badlands
Predator: Badlands is a baffling turn for Dan Trachtenberg after the clean thrills of Prey and the surprise bite of the animated Predator: Killer of Killers. Coming off those entries in his Predator reboot, I expected craft, tension, and clever constraint. What arrives is scale without spectacle, a loud, CG smeared detour that forgets why this series works.
Devotion
Jonathan Majors has to do much of the heavy lifting in Devotion – a film attempting to comment on much more than its obvious counterpart Top Gun: Maverick, but sacrifices the momentum and drive in doing so.
The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy is a mixed bag of ideas and execution, but the overall experience of seeing the movie is worth considering because of the sheer star power at play – notably Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. The film is humming best as it moves along, thanks to lengthened action sequences where director David Leitch squeezes every ounce of juice from the movie.
READ MORE: Movies Like Fountain of Youth, Movies Like Project Hail Mary
