Chasing the feel of watching Gifted ? Here are the movies we recommend you watch right after.
Expect both heavy emotional punches and great comedic moments in this engaging comedy-drama. Boosted by amazing writing, the characters are easy to relate to but remain interesting throughout the movie, with many ideas and layers to them. Jenny Slate and Chris Evans are both great as a very gifted child and her uncle who find themselves at the center of a custody battle. The plot may be a little unusual but it offers a great vehicle to explore the dynamics between a caring uncle, a gifted child, and an obsessive mother.
Genre: Documentary
Actor: Bob Dylan, Dick Cavett, H. Rap Brown, Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, Joey Starr, Malcolm X, Marlon Brando, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Paul Weiss, Ray Charles, Robert F. Kennedy, Samuel L. Jackson, Sidney Poitier
Director: Raoul Peck
After Love is a beautifully powerful and quietly moving outing by emerging British filmmaker Aleem Khan. It follows Mary (Joanna Scanlan), a white Muslim convert who discovers a life-changing secret her husband has managed to keep from her all these years.
Without spoiling anything, I will say that After Love is charged with the sort of deep-seated emotion we sometimes don’t know how to express. It’s also a powerful reminder that there’s no one way to love or grieve or celebrate the people around us; sometimes, there’s just feeling. And Scanlan does a wonderful job of restraining then conveying all of that in devastating and commanding moments throughout the film, a feat that earned her the much-deserved best actress award at the 2021 BAFTAs.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Adam Karim, Elijah Braik, Jabeen Butt, Jeff Mirza, Joanna Scanlan, Narayan David Hecter, Nasser Memarzia, Nathalie Richard, Nisha Chadha, Subika Anwar-Khan, Sudha Bhuchar, Talid Ariss
Director: Aleem Khan
Shia Laboeuf and Stellan Skarsgård star in this true story about one of the greatest tennis matches in history: the 1980 Wimbledon final. The movie dissects what drives both competitors (one played by Laboeuf and the other by Sverrir Gudnason). Their personalities, considered opposites, are studied through their paths and how they got into tennis. All this leads to that one match, in this beautiful story of dealing with competition and fear of failure. Don’t stop watching when the credits roll, read what they say!
Genre: Drama, History
Actor: Anders Berg, Ben Bradshaw, Bjorn Granath, Bob Boudreaux, Colin Stinton, Dag Malmberg, David Bamber, Ian Blackman, Iva Šindelková, Jackson Gann, James Sobol Kelly, Jamie Marshall, Jane Perry, Janis Ahern, Leo Borg, Marcus Mossberg, Mats Blomgren, Robert Emms, Roy McCrerey, Scott Arthur, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Sverrir Gudnason, Thomas Hedengran, Tuva Novotny, Wille Glyt, Zuzana Geislerová
Director: Janus Metz, Janus Metz Pedersen
This moving biopic is about Maud Lewis, the legendary Canadian painter who suffered from arthritis. In the film, Maud gets away from her controlling family by finding a job as a live-in housekeeper for a local fish peddler. It is there where she begins to paint, before marrying the fish peddler in spite of their different personalities. Sally Hawkins, who plays Lewis, brings undeniable spark and soul to the role, for which she had to undergo an astonishing physical transformation.
Maudie is a beautiful and uncomplicated film that challenges the conventions of marriage and relationship roles, while at the same time celebrating Maud Lewis’ paintings and life’s simple pleasures.
Genre: Drama, Romance
Actor: Billy MacLellan, Brian Marler, David Feehan, Denise Sinnott, Erin Mick, Ethan Hawke, Gabrielle Rose, Greg Malone, Kari Matchett, Kate Ross, Lawrence Barry, Lisa Machin, Marthe Bernard, Mike Daly, Nik Sexton, Sally Hawkins, Zachary Bennett
Director: Aisling Walsh
Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) runs a high-brow art gallery in Chicago and has to take a trip to North Carolina to meet with an artist she wants to sign. She uses this opportunity to also meet her husband’s family, who is originally from there.
She is introduced into the small world of rural North Carolina, personified in Ashley (Amy Adams), the wife of her husband’s brother. Ashley is a wide-eyed but good-hearted person who has never left her town and who is in a bad relationship but pregnant with her first child.
Ashley is the true main character of this movie (even if all Adams accolades were for ‘best supporting’ awards). Her joyfulness, her pregnancy, and her interactions with Madeliene are studied closely in this subtle but touching family drama.
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Van Couvering, Amy Adams, Ben McKenzie, Bobby Tisdale, Celia Weston, David Kuhn, Embeth Davidtz, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Jerry Minor, Jill Wagner, Joanne Pankow, Matt Besser, R. Keith Harris, Scott Wilson, Will Oldham
Director: Phil Morrison
Everyone has those days where nothing goes right, but no one’s having as bad of a day as detective Yuji Kudo is in Hard Days. It isn’t just that nothing goes right– everything goes wrong, and he’s just a hair away from losing it all each time. This Japanese adaptation might take a slightly more serious tone than the South Korean original, but it does retain its ridiculous escalation of increasingly terrible things that could possibly happen, with Junichi Okada and Go Ayano letting loose in their detective characters’ morally dubious behavior. Hard Day is a decent watch, if a bit bloated, especially for those familiar with the story.
Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller
Actor: Akira Emoto, Go Ayano, Hayato Isomura, Junichi Okada, Kurumi Shimizu, Maho Yamada, Mario Kuroba, Ryoko Hirosue, Ryusuke Komakine, Takashi Yamanaka, Taro Suruga, Tetta Sugimoto
Director: Michihito Fujii