Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Misty Green:
Jay Kelly
If Misty Green left you thinking about what fame takes from the people who chase it, Jay Kelly is the natural next stop. George Clooney plays an aging movie star taking stock of his career on a trip across Europe, with Adam Sandler as the manager who has sacrificed more than anyone for him. Noah Baumbach lets the sentiment swell more than usual, and not every wave lands, but the ache of a performer who never stopped performing is real.
The Substance
Coralie Fargeat takes the industry’s treatment of women past a certain age and turns it into a grotesque, gleeful nightmare. Demi Moore is magnetic as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading TV fitness star who agrees to an underground treatment that spawns a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. It is far louder and bloodier than Chris Rock’s film, but it shares the same anger about a business that discards its stars the moment they stop selling.
Mulholland Drive
No film captures the seductive rot of Los Angeles quite like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Naomi Watts arrives as Betty, a bright-eyed hopeful with dreams of acting, and Laura Harring plays the amnesiac woman she takes in. What starts as a sunny mystery curdles into something far stranger, a portrait of ambition and heartbreak in a town that sells dreams and collects the debts. More than two decades later, it still feels bottomless.
Babylon
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is Hollywood history as a three-hour bender. Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy and Brad Pitt’s matinee idol ride the silent era to the top, then watch the arrival of sound rewrite who gets to stay famous. It is excessive, provocative, and frequently exhausting by design, and its fixation on stars who fall out of fashion overnight makes it a fascinating companion to Misty Green’s story of a performer fighting her way back.
Late Fame
Second chances are rarely as simple as they look, and Kent Jones’ Late Fame knows it. Willem Dafoe plays a long-forgotten New York poet who is suddenly rediscovered by Greta Lee and a circle of young admirers, and the attention flatters and unsettles him in equal measure. It is a wry, low-key character study about ego and what an artist owes the people who finally notice him.
The Christophers
Ian McKellen is a delight as a narcissistic art-world legend in The Christophers, sparring with Michaela Coel as a painter drawn into his orbit. Steven Soderbergh keeps it brisk and funny, but underneath the barbs is a thoughtful look at legacy and who profits from an artist’s reputation, questions that sit right beside the ones Misty Green asks about Hollywood.
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg turns the camera on his own childhood in The Fabelmans, with Gabriel LaBelle as a young filmmaker learning that movies can reveal as much as they hide. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play the parents whose marriage he captures without meaning to. It is a love letter to the moving image, but a clear-eyed one, alert to the cost of loving a medium that much.
Marriage Story
Before he joined Chris Rock’s ensemble, Adam Driver delivered one of his finest performances opposite Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story. Johansson plays an actress who returns to Los Angeles for a TV role as her marriage to a New York theater director comes apart. Baumbach balances the comedy of lawyers and logistics with scenes of raw devastation, and both leads are extraordinary.
Nope
Daniel Kaluuya, another member of the Misty Green cast, anchors Jordan Peele’s Nope as a horse wrangler whose family ranch supplies animals to Hollywood productions. When something strange appears in the sky above it, he and his sister, played by a scene-stealing Keke Palmer, try to catch it on camera. Peele uses the sci-fi spectacle to needle the entertainment industry’s hunger for the perfect shot and the people it chews up getting it.
Get Out
Kaluuya’s breakout remains one of the defining genre films of its decade. In Get Out, he plays a young photographer whose weekend visit to his girlfriend’s family slowly reveals something sinister beneath their smiles. Peele’s debut is funny, pointed, and terrifying in turn, and like Misty Green, it comes from a comedian with plenty to say behind the camera.
READ MORE: Movies Like Jay Kelly, Movies Like Babylon, Movies Like Mulholland Drive
