Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Roofman:
Bottle Rocket
There’s a looseness to Bottle Rocket that sets it apart from Wes Anderson’s later films. The plotting is messy, the pacing uneven, and the tone swings between comedy and melancholy without much warning. But it’s precisely that raw, unrefined energy that makes it feel authentic. While the meticulously crafted worlds of Anderson’s later films can sometimes feel like dioramas, Bottle Rocket feels like life — confusing, small-scale, and full of moments that don’t always go anywhere but still matter.
Hit Man
Despite my love for nearly all things Richard Linklater and Glen Powell, I just couldn’t bring myself to fall for their newest release on Netflix – Hit Man, which tries its hardest to hide its superstar lead behind a thick layer of nerdy, undesirable heft that I saw right through from beginning to end.
The Naked Gun
The Naked Gun is the kind of spoof that lives or dies on joke density, and on that metric Akiva Schaffer mostly delivers. The film fires off multiple gags a minute, often piling one topper on another until you miss a punchline because you are still laughing at the last. Schaffer has done this before with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and here he teams with writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, with Seth MacFarlane producing. You can feel that lineage in the barrage of cutaway bits and Family Guy style throwaway one liners. In pure joke-per-minute terms, the movie works.
Zola
Zola is an A24 film that fully embraces the chaotic, anything-goes energy of its source material—a viral Twitter thread detailing a Florida road trip gone terribly wrong. Directed by Janicza Bravo, the film blends Scorsese-like brashness with Sean Baker-style realism, offering a flashy, unfiltered look at the underground world of sex work. At times, it’s as glamorous as it is grimy, a fever dream that refuses to look away from its characters’ choices, even when things spiral out of control.
Trap
There is some fun to be had with M. Night Shyamalan‘s Trap, but it’s hard to tell how intentionally awkward and cheeky much of the script is. Josh Hartnett is the quirky glue that kinda holds it together, but the plot unfolds in a clunky fashion and morphs into something completely different in the third act. A middling Shyamalan movie.
The Instigators
The Instigators features an occasionally entertaining set piece and an ensemble cast of industry mainstays (headlined by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), but this Apple TV+ streamer has all the common tropes and vibes of streaming content, best enjoyed passively and without thinking critically.
The Last Stop in Yuma County
Francis Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County probably won’t reinvent the wheel, but hopefully it’s a sign that we’ve found a new director that’ll do his best to keep slick, low-budget genre exercises alive. These down-the-middle genre movies (excluding horror) are hard to come by nowadays.
Drive-Away Dolls
Despite Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls feeling like “lesser Coen brothers” at times, there are still some great lines and hilarious set pieces to make the movie worthwhile. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan shine, and the noir elements hint at a style that the Coens have only ventured into a few times with their earlier films.
Marmalade
Marmalade isn’t short on style and set pieces. Keir O’Donnell‘s directorial debut packs enough narrative turns and endless visual flourishes to last an entire career. Unfortunately, the final product feels overstuffed as a result. Joe Keery and Camila Morrone co-star in an occasionally fun, frustratingly complex crime movie.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Although it’s still setting the pace in terms of quality that other murder mysteries strive for, Netflix’s latest Knives Out installment, Glass Onion, feels like a rehashing of every character arch and narrative beat that the original did so much better.