7 Movies Like Like Stars on Earth (2007)

Staff & contributors
Mary and Max is the tale of an overlooked 8-year-old girl from Australia starting an unlikely friendship via mail with a middle-aged Jewish man from New York. Shot completely in monocromatic claymotion, it is the first feature film by Australian stop-motion animation writer, Adam Elliot, and the first ever animated film to score the opening slot at Sundance Festival. In all its playful absurdity, Mary and Max is an emotional and wise gem of a film that examines the human condition through the eyes of a troubled child and an autistic American. In contrast to its clay-based animation, it deals with some pretty dark and adult themes, but succeeds in balancing those with happiness and absurd humor. Moreover, Elliott gathered an ensemble cast to do the voice-overs, which includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toni Collette, and Eric Bana. We recommend it 8 condensed milks out of 10.

Genre: Animation, Comedy, Drama

Actor: Adam Elliot, Barry Humphries, Bethany Whitmore, Carolyn Shakespeare-Allen, Christopher Massey, Eric Bana, Henry Karjalainen, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum, Ian Meldrum, John Flaus, Julie Forsyth, Michael Ienna, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Renée Geyer, Renée Geyer, Toni Collette

Director: Adam Elliot

Rating: Not Rated

Capernaum is both the highest-grossing Middle Eastern movie of all time and the highest-grossing movie in Arabic of all time. Lebanese director Nadine Labaki was the first female Arab director to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Capernaum is thus duly considered a masterpiece, as it follows an angry 12-year-old kid in Lebanon, who leaves his negligent parents and tries to make it in the streets on his own. It's a tale of grinding poverty as experienced by a boy with a good heart, who meets many kindly people on the way as well as sinister characters. An acting tour de force by the fierce child actors, especially Zain Al Rafeea, Capernaum is harrowing, emotional, and, maybe, a touch melodramatic. However, it doesn't compromise when asking some hard questions about parental failure and love, putting them into the context of the bigger regional picture. It can be a tough watch, but the furious acting and pitch-black humor, ultimately, make this an uplifting movie, likely to stir up some debate.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Alaa Chouchnieh, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Cedra Izzam, Elias Khoury, Fadi Kamel Yousef, Farah Hasno, Joseph Jimbazian, Kawsar Al Haddad, Nadine Labaki, Yordanos Shifera, Yordanos Shiferaw, Zain Al Rafeea

Director: Nadine Labaki

Rating: R

"Sometimes even the wrong train takes you to the right destination". In this thoughtful feature film debut by Ritesh Batra, we follow a lonely Indian housewife, Ila (Nimrat Kaur), as she tries to come to terms with a cheating husband, a stale relationship, and a dying father, while seeking love, attention, and appreciation through her cooking. One day, she sends out a special lunch to her husband, but her delivery goes to the wrong address. Spicy food is complemented with a spicy note and thus begins an unlikely and unique romance through the letters she packs in the lunchbox day after day. The man on the receiving end is Saajan, a middle-aged office worker, played by Bollywood star Irrfan Khan. With its delightful characters and beautiful acting, this was a huge success in India, but there is no reason to believe that this bittersweet, Mumbai-based story couldn't be a hit anywhere in the world.

Genre: Drama, Romance

Actor: Bharati Achrekar, Denzil Smith, Irrfan Khan, Kyeron Kandoria, Lillete Dubey, Nakul Vaid, Nasirr Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Nimrat Kaur, Shruti Bapna, Yashvi Puneet Nagar

Director: Ritesh Batra

Rating: PG

Daniel Day-Lewis earned his breakout performance as Johnny, a reformed skinhead in this tale of  interracial gay romance in Thatcher’s Britain. Gordon Warnecke plays Johnny's lover Omar, the aimless son of a Pakistani intellectual who is given a leg-up by a successful uncle when he’s put in charge of rescuing a failing laundrette in gritty South London. Remarkably, Omar and Johnny’s romance isn’t presented as all that transgressive; far more central are the experiences and attitudes towards “assimilation” of Omar’s British-Pakistani family, the elders of whom live double lives and indulge both their financial and sexual greed. My Beautiful Laundrette is transgressive in many ways, but mostly in the dizzying array of tensions it sets its sights on — racial, ideological, class, generational, and gender — an ambitious quality that can, admittedly, overwhelm at times. But ambition is an admirable flaw for a film to have, particularly one as sharp and groundbreaking as this.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Ayub Khan-Din, Badi Uzzaman, Bhasker Patel, Charu Bala Chokshi, Chris Pitt, Colin Campbell, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dawn Archibald, Derrick Branche, Dulice Liecier, Garry Cooper, Gerard Horan, Gordon Warnecke, Gurdial Sira, Jonathan Moore, Neil Cunningham, Nisha Kapur, Ram John Holder, Richard Graham, Rita Wolf, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey, Shirley Anne Field, Souad Faress, Stephen Marcus, Walter Donohue

Director: Stephen Frears

The Cuban bolero, not to be confused with the Spanish dance, is a Latin ballad form that spread all throughout the Americas, and even the whole world, that mixed and mingled with and influenced jazz in the 1940s and 50s. Chico & Rita celebrates this music, as well as the nightlife that made these sounds possible, through a stirring star-crossed romance that recalls the typical inspiration behind these songs. There are moments that do falter– like the way Chico tries to woo Rita back– but the familiar, if slightly cliché, beats work in this animation through a unique, thick-lined art style, and of course, excellent music. It's no wonder it was the first Spanish full-length animated film nominated for an Oscar.

Genre: Animation, Music, Romance

Actor: Eman Xor Oña, Jon Adams, Ken Forman, Limara Meneses, Mario Guerra, Ray Gillon, Renny Arozarena

Director: Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, Tono Errando

Rating: NR

This musical drama about a Mumbai street rapper was India’s official submission to the Oscars. It was also produced by U.S. artist Nas.

Murad, who grew up poor and with an abusive father, starts working as a part-time chauffeur, which exposes him to the substantial inequalities that exist in Mumbai.

He incorporates all of this into his lyrics, and hopes to make it as a rapper in a story that sits somewhere between a musical and an adventure movie.

Genre: Drama, Music

Actor: Alia Bhatt, Amruta Subhash, Chaitanya Sharma, Jasleen Kaur Royal, Jyoti Subhash, Kalki Koechlin, Krishna Kaul, Kubbra Sait, Mona Ghosh Shetty, R. Bhakti Klein, Rahul Piske, Raja Kumari, Ranveer Singh, Sheeba Chaddha, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Srishti Shrivastava, Sushant Singh, Svar Kamble, Vijay Maurya, Vijay Raaz, Vijay Varma

Director: Zoya Akhtar

After the sudden death of a teacher, 55-year-old Algerian immigrant Bachir Lazhar is hired at an elementary school in Montreal. Struggling with a cultural gap between himself and his students at first, he helps them to deal with the situation, revealing his own tragic past. A strong portrait without any weird sentimentality. 11-year-old actress Sophie Nélisse makes her brilliant debut.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: André Robitaille, Brigitte Poupart, Daniel Gadouas, Danielle Proulx, Denise Lamontagne, Émilien Néron, Evelyne de la Chenelière, Francine Ruel, Gabriel Verdier, Jose Arandi, Judith Baribeau, Jules Philip, Louis Champagne, Marie Charlebois, Marie-Ève Beauregard, Mohamed Fellag, Nathalie Costa, Nico Lagarde, Sophie Nélisse, Stéphane Demers, Vincent Millard

Director: Philippe Falardeau

Rating: PG-13