Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like The Darjeeling Limited:
The Straight Story
Endlessly fascinating as a divergence from the usual style of David Lynch, The Straight Story is the acclaimed director at his friendliest. Made for Disney and sandwiched between Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, this movie of a farmer just trying to see his brother is an uncomplicatedly intimate and sincere picture of family at its warmest.
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.
The Daytrippers
Even if The Daytrippers struggles to evolve due to sluggish pacing and typical genre tropes, it’s still worth your time to see early Greg Mottola work his magic. Excellent direction, and a starry cast, manages to keep the movie afloat.
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.
Adaptation
Maybe Adaptation rewards multiple viewings, but on this watch, I found it less interesting than I expected. It’s undeniably one of the most metatextual films ever made, but it also feels like Kaufman disappearing into his own self-obsession. He wrote a movie entirely about himself, and I’m still not sure whether to applaud him for it or roll my eyes.
Punch-Drunk Love
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is the rare romantic comedy that hums like a live wire. The movie finds Anderson collapsing love and rage into the same nervous system, paring down the sprawl of Magnolia to something smaller, stranger, and sharper. The film’s scale is modest compared with Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood, but its voltage is unmistakable—an anxious fairytale painted in glowing blues and reds, propelled by Jon Brion’s jittery, percussive score and bursts of abstract color.
American Fiction
Cord Jefferson’s first movie, American Fiction, didn’t blow me away, and I was hoping for a more cohesive film to get me excited about his big themes and sensibilities. A few stylistic choices are pleasant on the eyes, and the performances from Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown are worthy of their acclaim, but the final product is a lackluster satire.
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.
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.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
To put into words how exhilarating Everything Everywhere All at Once is isn’t easy to do. A film unlike any other, it pushes every filmmaking possibility to the brink in 2022. Many films come and go with the wind, but Everything Everywhere All at Once will be in our culture for years – even decades. The phrase “modern classic” doesn’t apply to films very frequently, but this is one of those instances where it feels justified.
READ MORE: The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
