21 Movies Like November (2022) (Page 2)

Unlike in other films that only seem to evoke a previous era to make a target demographic feel warm and fuzzy inside, there's something vaguely artificial about Death of Nintendo's air of nostalgia—which is exactly what helps it tell its story. There isn't anything particularly novel about this movie's plot or characters, but Raya Martin's direction has us consider various themes between all the stuff you'd expect to see in a young adult movie. In moments of quiet unease that seem to punctuate every other sequence, we're drawn towards the absence of father figures, the inability of the women to get through to their sons (already embedded in patriarchal customs), and the idea that one's childhood in a Catholic country seems to be marked by physical pain. Beyond the film's feathery lighting and colorful production design, there's a surprising amount to think about.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Agot Isidro, Elijah Alejo, Jigger Sementilla, John Vincent Servilla, Kim Chloe Oquendo, Lou Veloso, Mailes Kanapi, Moi Bien, Nikki Valdez, Noel Comia Jr., Ramon Bautista

Director: Raya Martin

If you’ve seen the bone-chilling Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, then The Commandant's Shadow isn’t just supplementary but necessary viewing. It interviews and interrogates the son of SS officer Rudolf Höss, who describes his childhood in Auschwitz as “idyllic,” and parallels his life with that of an Auschwitz survivor and her family. They’re not asked “gotcha” questions, though there are some moments where Höss’s family members’ insularity shocks you. Instead, everyone is given the time and space to reflect honestly about the pain and trauma that continues to live on in their families. It’s a difficult film to sit through, but insightful and ever-so-resonant in an age where mass torture and genocide continue in many parts of the world.

Genre: Documentary, History, War

Actor: Adolf Hitler, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Hans-Jürgen Höss, Kai Höss, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch

Director: Daniela Völker

Rating: PG-13

With an ensemble cast featuring a young Natalie Portman and a less murderous Uma Thurman, Ted Demme's "Beautiful Girls" recreates the worries and woes that thrive in the minds of a tight knit group of working class friends stuck in their own small town Massachusetts world. Warm, quirky and filled with champagne diamonds, both metaphorical and tangible, for anybody who's ever walked the thirty something walk, it's a film that'll make you want to remember all the friends you wish you still had and actually still do.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Adam LeFevre, Annabeth Gish, Anne Bobby, David Arquette, Frank Anello, John Carroll Lynch, John Scurti, Lauren Holly, Martha Plimpton, Matt Dillon, Max Perlich, Michael Rapaport, Mira Sorvino, Natalie Portman, Noah Emmerich, Oliver Osterberg, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Rachel Oliva, Richard Bright, Rosie O'Donnell, Sam Robards, Timothy Hutton, Tom Gibis, Tomas Settell, Uma Thurman

Director: Ted Demme

Rating: R

The opening titles of this French procedural drama explicitly tell us that the crime it chronicles will go unsolved, confessing that it’s about one of the approximately 160 murder cases that police don’t crack each year. An ambitious and intriguing opener — suggesting that, in the absence of a clean resolution, the film will nonetheless offer us something equally compelling, as Zodiac does. 

In following the investigation of the brutal murder of 21-year-old Clara (Lula Cotton-Frapier) — for which the police interrogate various of her exes, all misogynistic potential murderers in their own ways — the film seeks to explore the society-wide “problem between men and women” that has given the police its surplus of suspects. Alas, it’s much more interested in the psychological impact cold cases have on policemen like frustrated captain Yohan (Bastien Bouillon). There’s something deeply ironic about making a movie about the systemic dehumanization of women just to center male perspectives, especially when their only insight into the epidemic of toxic masculinity is Yohan’s clunky “We can’t find the murderer because all men killed Clara.” The film’s treatment of the victim herself — incurious and downright gratuitous in the depiction of her murder — cements it as a shallow, un-self-aware, and failed attempt to reckon with a subject that deserved its full focus.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Anouk Grinberg, Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Camille Rutherford, Charline Paul, David Murgia, Johann Dionnet, Jules Porier, Julien Frison, Lula Cotton-Frapier, Marc Bodnar, Matthieu Rozé, Mouna Soualem, Nicolas Jouhet, Paul Jeanson, Pauline Serieys, Pierre Lottin, Théo Cholbi, Thibaut Évrard

Director: Dominik Moll