Seeking Recommendations

+ an illustrated guide to the watchlist

Happy New Year! I am sure you have been anxiously biting your fingernails in anticipation of news of the Deeper Into Movies signature fragrance giveaway, and for that I have some bad news for the 99.65% of you who did not already receive an email from me this month. The random number generator has spoken, and you were not chosen as a winner this time around. Catch me at a movie theater and I’ll let you get a whiff of my wrist.

In the entry form, I encouraged people to ask for a movie recommendation. I loved reading them, and unfortunately I got too many for me to realistically answer with the level of scrutiny (see: last year’s 1500 word screed on fake flags in movies) that I try to bring to this newsletter. But I did ask two of the winners if I could share the highly interesting requests they made for me to answer here. That’s right, this month’s newsletter is a full-color mailbag episode! Thank you to the supremely talented Claire Wyman, who has kindly created these bespoke illustrations for this issue. Please go look at her Instagram and admire her portrait of Lee Pace in The Fall.

If I might share a resolution with you in 2025: get away from the algorithm. If Gen-X got one thing infallibly right, it was their cultural disdain for the type of all-seeing corporate overlord that now dictates basically everything you see or hear online. The age of algorithms is increasingly bad for art and culture, as the onslaught of AI sewage has proved, but it’s also just really embarrassing and boring. 

Today’s recommendations are brought to you not by an algorithm but by my fallible memory and, I hope, by you, in the comments, as you weigh in on what should join these lists. I will even let you plug your Letterboxd, and I have linked watchlists I’ll update.

“Woman on a quest” — Ginny

I was immediately attracted to the specific nonspecificity of Ginny’s query: woman singular, quest vague. Women’s journeys in film, especially when we are on a solo mission, tend to be internal. We seek love, revenge, fulfillment, empowerment, and other things that come from (groan) within. Two of 2023’s discoursiest movies fall into this category, Barbie and Poor Things—but in the 2010s, every female A-lister got one of these, of varying quality and myopia. Reese Witherspoon in Wild (2014), Amy Adams in Julie & Julia (2009), Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love (2010), J.Lo in Second Act (2018). 

Illustration by Claire Wyman

The female fulfillment movie itself feels like a response to the “career woman” movie of previous generations: Joan Michelin Silver’s wry Crossing Delancey (1988) and Gillian Armstrong’s alternatingly lush and dusty My Brilliant Career (1979) are two of my personal favorites. These women have those same internal aspirations of love and fulfillment but they’re secondary to their socially disapproved desires for tangible artistic success. 

One day I will write The curly hair newsletter … illustration by Claire Wyman

But for true “girl on a mission” flicks, let’s return to our Gen-x compatriots. You can’t be better served than 1998’s Run Lola Run, a bullet-fast real-time thriller about a young woman trying to scrounge up 100,000 marks to save her listless but dance-club-hunky boyfriend. I was delighted by last year’s restoration of Naked Acts (1996), which sees a young actress go on a mission to understand her body when a new role calls for nudity. And finally, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) stars Dunye as a deeply curious, open-hearted video clerk looking for a forgotten Black actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age. It’s a buoyant ode to the glory days of the video store and analog research, and a clever reenvisioning of film history.

Letterboxd list for the unwell

“Underseen ‘maximalist’ sci-fi? I always think of Thomas Vinterberg It’s All About Love.” — Matthew

Okay, well Megalopolis.¹

Anyway, I am similarly drawn to maximalist sci-fi, and so I know your problem well: almost all of what we get stateside is bad. The Rogue One director ripping himself off for John David Washington vehicle/cyborg commercial The Creator (2023), Adam Driver dodgin’ dinos in 65 (2023). Cuckoo (2024), Infinity Pool (2023), Vivarium (2019), Color Out of Space (2019), A Cure for Wellness (2016): all high-concept, none worth remembering. The movies in this category that are good attain a memetic, almost mythic status because success is so rare (Dark City, Moon, Primer², The Cell etc.)

Fortunately, the Criterion Channel’s series on surveillance cinema has some stuff worth watching. I just saw and loved A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story that sees a future where we have brutally lost the war on drugs. After years of being impossible to find, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days popped onto Max for a few months last year and it’s available to rent now. I was able to catch it on 35mm but would love for it to get a splashy remaster for its thirtieth anniversary. 

For more recent stuff, I much preferred Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s 2022 collaboration, Something in the Dirt, to their cult (literally and figuratively) The Endless—think maximalist in thought, rather than production. And I assume that most readers will be already on board for Kogonada’s supremely lovely After Yang (2021), a compassionate study of character, humanity, and diaspora that is easily one of the best pieces of science fiction in years.

Letterboxd list for the pervs

But none of these I would consider underseen, and I think your instinct to head international will probably yield the most fruit. I adored Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023), which imagines a technology that can remove the cellular trauma of your ancestors unspooling across three periods, and features rapturous performances from Léa Seydoux and George McKay. I also caught I’m Your Man (2021) last year and adored it—a contemplative non-romance about an anthropologist who is asked to test-drive an android prototype designed to be her perfect partner.³ The Brazilian film Bacurau (2019) is something between science fiction and western, and has been impossible for me to forget since I watched it, literally a thousand movies ago, during the pandemic. And finally, stay tuned for Cronenberg’s forthcoming film, The Shrouds. It might be underseen only because it has not yet received a wide release but it’s more tensely plotted than his previous feature, Crimes of the Future, and a lot more rewarding.

That concludes this month’s mailbag. Please share the films you’d add to the comments, and I’ll include them in the lists. And thank Claire, Ginny, and Matthew for being such willing participants of this little experiment. See you for the Awards in February.

1. How did so many people write about this movie if it grossed ~10% of its budget

2. Hesitant to add this one since director Shane Carruth seems like such an unrepentant piece of shit but this movie was literally inescapable if you were stumbling around the blogosphere in the pre-Letterboxd Internet … and it’s not really maximalist but neither is Moon

3. Ignore the schlocky rom-com trailer clearly cobbled together for an American audience they did not respect