Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Uncut Gems:
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a movie of firsts that never feels tentative. It is his first modern-set feature since Punch-Drunk Love, his first collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, and his first film of this scale, reportedly in the $130 to $175 million range. What is not new is the command. From the first explosion to the last chase, this is PTA in full control, turning a feverish political thriller into one of 2025’s most purely thrilling big-screen experiences.
Read our full review of One Battle After Another
Anora
Anora is a film that announces Sean Baker as one of cinema’s pinnacle filmmakers. It’s a starry movie that puts you through the ringer and makes you feel just about every emotion possible. It’s grandiose filmmaking at a very high degree of execution. Baker likes to explore similar themes and character types with each of his films, and he’s never been so clear as to why he finds these particular stories so fascinating.
Babylon
Damien Chazelle announces himself as the antichrist with Babylon – a film focused on the fake it til you make it side of the industry, and Chazelle might just be faking it after all. I’ll be tossing and turning in my head for months about whether he deserves the ending that he presents, because he’s having his cake and eating it to with that final montage, but at least along the way he also throws it up and laughs at you for thinking he’d do anything else. I love it.
Marty Supreme
Marty Supreme is Josh Safdie working at his widest canvas, a 1950s period piece about a showman who can sell anything until he sells himself short. Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, is a ping pong phenom, a sneaker salesman for his uncle, a serial charmer who glides from city to city on other people’s dimes. The world fits neatly in his palm until it does not. Safdie’s favorite subject has always been appetite colliding with reality, and this time the arc is bookended by matches that frame a life lived at match point.
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.
Highest 2 Lowest
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, his reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, proves how easily one of cinema’s greatest stories can be adapted to the modern era. The update doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but with Lee behind the camera and Denzel Washington in the lead, it’s both stylish and engrossing – one of the stronger Spike Lee movies of the century and one of the best Apple TV+ originals to date.
Love Lies Bleeding
There’s really nothing like Love Lies Bleeding. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the blanket notion that they don’t make movies like they used to anymore – but I will say, Hollywood hasn’t consistently made films as erotic and thrilling like this since the 1980s and 90s. Rose Glass directs the dynamic duo of Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart.
Magnolia
Magnolia might feel a bit like the film that got away from Paul Thomas Anderson (because it kinda is), but it’s the sort of big-budget passion project that up-and-coming filmmakers rarely get to make nowadays. The ensemble cast of Magnolia is littered with A-listers and common Paul Thomas Anderson players, from Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman to Tom Cruise and John C. Reilly, each actor adds their own weight to this shotgun blast of characters.
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino directs one of his best movies with Challengers, which pairs his interests in yearning, miscalculated protagonists to the competitive world of tennis. It’s exhilarating and wild, with three prophetic performances from Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor that’ll challenge many of 2024’s best efforts.
A History of Violence
Leave it to David Cronenberg to deconstruct the mythical American hero with odd wit and clinical detail. A History of Violence looks like a small-town melodrama on the surface, then peels back skin to expose identity, impulse, and the stories we tell to survive. Viggo Mortensen gives one of his sharpest performances as Tom Stall, a soft-spoken diner owner whose quick, efficient dispatching of two spree killers turns him into a local legend and blows up the quiet life he has built with Edie, played with fierce tenderness by Maria Bello.
READ MORE: Uncut Gems (2019), Movies Like Marty Supreme, Best Movies of 2019
