Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like The Help:
Nickel Boys
Where The Help keeps the cruelty of the Jim Crow South at a polite distance, Nickel Boys puts you right inside it. RaMell Ross adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black teenagers sent to an abusive Florida reform school, and he shoots much of it from the boys’ own point of view. The result is formally daring, deeply humane, and one of the major achievements of its year.
The Holdovers
Da’Vine Joy Randolph won an Oscar for playing Mary Lamb, the head cook at a New England boarding school who is grieving a son lost in Vietnam, and her performance belongs in the same conversation as Octavia Spencer’s Minny. Alexander Payne pairs her with Paul Giamatti’s cranky teacher and newcomer Dominic Sessa for a funny, wounded holiday story about the people an institution forgets.
The Favourite
Emma Stone trades Skeeter’s notepad for something far sharper in Yorgos Lanthimos’ royal satire. She plays Abigail, a fallen gentlewoman who arrives at Queen Anne’s court as a lowly servant and schemes her way upward against Rachel Weisz’s Sarah Churchill. Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning queen sits at the center of a darkly funny story about class, power, and the women who run a household.
She Said
At its core, The Help is about a writer persuading frightened women to go on the record, and She Said tells a real version of that story. Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor as they build the Harvey Weinstein investigation source by source. Maria Schrader keeps the focus on the women who risked everything to speak, a natural pick for fans of journalism movies.
American Fiction
American Fiction asks a question that The Help has invited for years: who gets to tell Black stories, and who profits from them? Jeffrey Wright plays Monk, a frustrated novelist who writes an outrageously stereotypical book under a pseudonym and watches it become a hit. Cord Jefferson’s Oscar-winning script is sharpest as satire, even if the film gets muddied when it shifts toward family drama.
Sinners
Ryan Coogler returns to Mississippi, three decades before The Help, for a genre film that is far bloodier but just as invested in Black Southern community. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers who open a juke joint in the 1932 Delta, and the opening night draws more than paying customers. It’s a blues musical, a vampire movie, and a story about who owns Black art, all at once, and a standout of the Best Picture race.
Hamnet
For viewers who come to The Help for its big emotional swings, Hamnet is a full-on weepie. Chloé Zhao adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, and the grief that follows the death of their son. Jessie Buckley gives a fierce, earthy performance opposite Paul Mescal, and she keeps the film from feeling manipulative even when it reaches for every tear.
Sing Sing
Sing Sing shares The Help’s belief that telling your story out loud can be an act of survival. Colman Domingo leads Greg Kwedar’s prison drama about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, where incarcerated men stage plays together. Many of the supporting players are alumni of the real program, including Clarence Maclin, who plays a version of himself. It’s warm, unsentimental, and excellent.
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical drama shares The Help’s nostalgic, mid-century glow and its fondness for a young artist finding a voice. Gabriel LaBelle plays Sammy, a teenager obsessed with making movies, while Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play the parents whose marriage he slowly starts to see clearly through his lens. It’s a tender love letter to the moving image and to a complicated family.
Small Things Like These
Like Skeeter, Bill Furlong is a quiet member of a respectable community who notices what everyone else has agreed not to see. Cillian Murphy plays the coal merchant in 1980s Ireland, adapted from Claire Keegan’s novella, who discovers the abuse of young women at a local convent laundry in the run-up to Christmas. The film is more muted than its subject demands, but the moral question at its center lingers.
READ MORE: Movies Like The Holdovers, Movies Like Hamnet, Movies Like Little Women
