433 Best Slice-of-Life Movies to Watch (Page 17)

When Castro took over Cuba in the 1950s, Havana’s nightlife shifted as clubs and casinos were closed down, leading to certain traditional step-based genres like son, bolero, and danzón to decline. A few decades later, prominent American musician Ry Cooder travelled to Cuba with his friend documentarian Wim Wenders, to pay homage to traditional Cuban music in an album and its respective documentary. Wenders weaves in illuminating interviews and shots of Cuba today in between the band’s Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall performances, with a certain intuition that makes each song feel like a triumph. While the documentary does focus more on Cooder, Buena Vista Social Club is a delight to watch, even with its 90s digital grain.

Genre: Documentary, Music

Actor: Compay Segundo, Eliades Ochoa, Ibrahim Ferrer, Joachim Cooder, Omara Portuondo, Ry Cooder

Director: Wim Wenders

Rating: G

This stirring peek into the final days of a shuttering Las Vegas dive might be one of the finest odes to American bar culture yet. It also serves as a powerful portrait of a particular moment deep into the disastrous Trump years, yet right before the pandemic struck.

Directors Bill and Turner Ross capture the good, bad, and ugly, allowing conversations to unfold naturally. The colorful hues of the bar create a cinematic canvas for the patrons, who awash with booze and nostalgia, uncertainty, fear, and love, spend their last day together. If there was ever a film for those who miss the rough and tumble nightlife of the pre-Covid world, this is it. 

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Actor: Michael Martin, Shay Walker

Director: Bill Ross, Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross

Sophie Compton and Reubyn Hamlyn's British-American documentary about the harm of deepfakes won the SXSW Special Jury Award for its innovative storytelling and deservingly so. The two filmmakers use a clever and considerate way to let a young woman fictitiously named Taylor share her story of how she found deepfake pornography of herself online. With testaments, desktop form reconstructions, and lots of deepfakes, Compton and Hamlyn alert the audience to how terrifyingly widespread this kind of abuse is, and even more: how unregulated it is. Across the globe and 48 US states deepfake pornography is legal to make and spread, while victims remain helpless and unprotected. More than 90% of them are women. These chilling statistics are only part of the reason this documentary takes an activist stance and wants to raise awareness against the uncontrolled spread of face-swapping algorhythms amidst heated discussions around AI and ethics.

Genre: Documentary

Director: Reuben Hamlyn, Sophie Compton

Rating: NR

Having an ordinary life isn't a bad thing, but it can feel like a huge disappointment, hearing of other people and characters having extraordinary lives. However, when Harvey Pekar started writing down that ordinary life, his life became… still quite ordinary, but at least with an outlet through his autobiographical comic book American Splendor. That being said, his biopic isn't quite ordinary, transforming Pekar’s eccentric musings into fourth-wall-breaking comic book panels, vignettes, and documentary-esque work, shifting between Pekar animated, acted by Paul Giamatti, and voiced occasionally by Pekar himself. And like his work, American Splendor resonates with the ordinary viewer, who, like him, just wants to try to make the best of life. It's pretty cool for someone that called himself a nobody.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Daniel Tay, Donal Logue, Earl Billings, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Hope Davis, James McCaffrey, James Urbaniak, Josh Hutcherson, Judah Friedlander, Madylin Sweeten, Maggie Moore, Molly Shannon, Paul Giamatti, Rae Sunshine Lee

Director: Robert Pulcini, Shari Springer Berman

Rating: R

Places evoke certain emotions, but even the most rundown, cramped projects feel special when they’re home. We Grown Now is set in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex, an area that was notorious for its crime and poverty, but to Malik and Eric, it’s a place where they became friends. The friendship they share leads them to classic coming-of-age moments like skipping school, egging each other to ask their crush out, and having fun, but unlike other coming-of-age films, these moments aren’t as carefree and consequence-less in the place they live in. We Grown Now is a genuine, full picture of growing up in a rough neighborhood, with both the happiness and hardships the place has to offer.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Avery Holliday, Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez, Jurnee Smollett, Lil Rel Howery, Ora Jones, S. Epatha Merkerson

Director: Minhal Baig

Rating: PG

With more and more young people moving to the city for jobs, there’s a certain beauty in the countryside that is being missed out. The Road Home is a simple and straightforward love story, one that is mostly composed of Zhang Ziyi as a country girl stealing glances at the handsome city boy who’s come to teach in the village, but there’s a certain magic in the way director Zhang Yimou depicts the rural traditions of the village, the charming and distinct rhythms of life that continues to this day. While the film glosses over the reasons for Luo’s temporary departure, which some reviewers speculate is due to China’s then Anti-Rightist campaign, The Road Home beautifully depicts the way love can bloom despite these troubles, and how this love can shift the lives of an entire town.

Genre: Drama, Romance

Actor: Li Bin, Song Yuncheng, Sun Honglei, Yulian Zhao, Zhang Ziyi, Zheng Hao

Director: Zhang Yimou

When depicting a person known best for an advocacy, you have to be accurate to their story, but it’s rare to see a biopic match the ideas of that advocacy in its direction. It’s because of this that the HBO film Temple Grandin is great. While made for TV, it’s not a by-the-numbers biopic that just depicts the academic’s life straight. No, instead, the film experiments with visual ways to depict her unique visual intelligence– as Grandin’s autism also granted her photogenic memory, an above-average instinct for mechanical smarts, and a focus and drive to understand that’s not as shakable as other neurotypical academics. This novel approach matches the very advocacies she lived throughout her life– the systematic, more humane treatment in slaughterhouses, and the idea that autism doesn’t mean deficiency, it just needs support to allow that different intelligence to thrive.

Genre: Drama, History

Actor: Barry Tubb, Blair Bomar, Brady Coleman, Carl Savering, Catherine O'Hara, Charles Baker, Cherami Leigh, Claire Danes, David Blackwell, David Born, David Strathairn, Gabriel Luna, Gerry Robert Byrne, Joe Nemmers, Julia Ormond, Kurt Cole, Melissa Farman, Michael Crabtree, Michael D. Conway, Nicole Holt, Richard Dillard, Rick Espaillat, Tamara Jolaine, Toby Metcalf, Xochitl Romero

Director: Mick Jackson

Education isn’t always a guarantee, especially in less privileged areas that are underfunded, overlooked, and underprioritized, in the belief that these kids wouldn’t amount to much in the end. That being said, sometimes, what changes that fate is having a teacher that believed in his students and encouraged them to learn more than what they were expected. Stand and Deliver is a dramatization of the real life Jaime Escalante, who transformed a math program in an east LA high school to the point where his entire class ace California’s calculus test. The film definitely takes some dramatic liberties, but it does capture a sense of his quiet determination, the personality that pushed him to believe in and connect with students differently. While Escalante’s program eventually ended due to admin changes and staff in-fighting, Stand and Deliver is a reminder of the importance of nurturing ganas, or desire, in the classroom.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Andy Garcia, Betty Carvalho, Bodie Olmos, Carmen Argenziano, Edward James Olmos, Eliot, Estelle Harris, Graham Galloway, Ingrid Oliu, Irene Olga López, Karla Montana, Lou Diamond Phillips, Lydia Nicole, Manuel Benitez, Mark Phelan, Rosanna DeSoto, Vanessa Marquez, Virginia Paris, Will Gotay

Director: Ramón Menéndez

Rating: PG

Small Things Like These is the kind of film that doesn’t have a grand resolution, a dramatic climax, or a widespread shift that would change the world forever. What happens might not even change the country, or the town Bill Furlong lives in. But that doesn’t mean the film is unimportant. While Cillian Murphy masterfully reckons with Furlong’s conscience, the community is silent… So too is the score, but it challenges the automatic flinch when we hear the background– the screams, the wailing, and the pain. It challenges the way we, and the town of New Ross, try to make sense of the sounds, explaining it away with more plausible, more palatable reasons, or justifying them with excuses. Small Things Like These can be a tad understated in its approach, but it’s a smart comparison to the way community can silence the conscience, and how abuse can lay rampant in secret.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Abby Fitz, Agnes O'Casey, Aidan O'Hare, Amy De Bhrún, Cillian Murphy, Clare Dunne, Eileen Walsh, Emily Watson, Helen Behan, Joanne Crawford, Mark McKenna, Michelle Fairley, Patrick Ryan, Peter Claffey, Zara Devlin

Director: Tim Mielants

Rating: PG-13

Generally, a mentorship is a great way to find guidance and direction, but rarely do we discuss the importance of finding the right mentor– or the right mentors– and that it sometimes takes a while to find a great fit. Searching for Bobby Fischer is about real-life child chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, but rather than depicting the straightforward mentorship plot we’ve seen in many sports films before, the film captures the journey of a boy who needs both the freedom and the structure for his chess career. Searching for Bobby Fischer does take on the tone and style typical of these child prodigy biopics, but Waitzkin’s story is worth telling, especially for children trying to find their own voice outside of their guardians.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Andrew Sardella, Anthony Heald, Austin Pendleton, Ben Kingsley, Bobby Fischer, Caroline Yeager, Chelsea Moore, Dan Hedaya, David Paymer, Hal Scardino, Joan Allen, Joe Mantegna, John Bourgeois, Josh Kornbluth, Josh Mostel, Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Ricossa, Max Pomeranc, Michael Nirenberg, Nathan Carter, R.D. Reid, Robert Stephens, Steven Randazzo, Tom McGowan, Tony De Santis, Tony Shalhoub, Vasek Simek, William Colgate, William H. Macy

Director: Steven Zaillian

Rating: PG