92 Movies Like The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) (Page 5)

After Nimona's long journey to the big screen (involving the shutdown of animation studio Blue Sky, and Disney's resistance to LGTBQ+ themes), the fact that the movie has been completed and allowed to tell its story at all is something to be celebrated. The film itself is pretty standard fare for American children's animation, with a script that spends far too much time on quips, and visuals that don't take advantage of the movie's science-fantasy world. But if you can get beyond its more ordinary aspects, Nimona becomes a surprisingly thorough metaphor of Otherness and queerness—best represented in the title character's shapeshifting abilities, and how people fear and become violent with her before even trying to understand her. It's a film that's sadly become more relevant than ever now, addressing how prejudice is something that's taught and passed down, packaged in an easy, entertaining manner for younger audiences.

Genre: Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Science Fiction

Actor: Beck Bennett, Chloë Grace Moretz, Cindy Slattery, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy, Indya Moore, Jarrett Bruno, Julio Torres, Karen Ryan, Lorraine Toussaint, Matthew J. Munn, ND Stevenson, Nick Bruno, Riz Ahmed, RuPaul, Sarah Sherman, Tim Nordquist, Troy Quane

Director: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane

Rating: PG

Inside is a technical wonder and a fascinating vehicle for Dafoe’s character Nemo, who holds the entire thing together with a singularly insane performance. It also poses interesting questions about art, namely, what value does it hold at the end of the day? When you’re seconds away from dying of hunger and thirst, what good is a painting, a sculpture, a sketch? Are they really only as good as what they’re materially made out of or can they contribute something more? Inside plays with these questions, but unfortunately, not in any engaging, thoughtful, or creative way. The movie stretches on and on, recycling the same ideas and leaning on the inevitably disgusting ways humans survive as a crutch. An argument could be made that that is the point, to reveal the emptiness and dullness of expensive art, but Inside tries so hard to capture that feeling that it becomes the thing it critiques in the end.  

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Actor: Andrew Blumenthal, Cornelia Buch, Eliza Stuyck, Gene Bervoets, Josia Krug, Vincent Eaton, Willem Dafoe

Director: Vasilis Katsoupis

Rating: R

Right off the bat, Bad Things looks gorgeous. Shot in 16mm, it plays with dreamy pastels and 1970s aesthetics, all while having its all-queer cast roam around the hotel’s haunted halls in mesmerizing ways. The setup is straightforward, but not too obvious: Ruthie’s problems with her girlfriend and her mother are exacerbated by the hotel’s strange and haunted aura. At this point, Bad Things hints at being an arthouse, slasher, and psychological thriller all at once, fueling anticipation for what’s to come. But as it moves along, nothing noteworthy happens. The awkward chase scenes and the overdramatic reveals kill whatever momentum the film has built, but the real problem is that it tries to juggle too many things at once. It’s creepy, but never achieves true-fright status. It’s bloody, but never fully commits to the gore. It’s smart and weird, but never goes beyond answering the very questions it poses. It’s happy to leave a lot of things unanswered, which in turn leaves us all confused, much less satisfied with what we’ve just sat through. 

Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller

Actor: Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Jared Abrahamson, Molly Ringwald, Patrick Klein

Director: Stewart Thorndike

Set in the quaint city of Burlington, Vermont, Paint is a cute and folksy comedy that has a Wes Anderson-esque charm to it. The characters are dressed in blocked pastels and wooly sweaters, while the protagonist Carl seems stuck in the ‘70s, and not just sartorially, too. He drives a “Vantastic” custom van, swears off cell phones, and manages to incorporate phrases like “far out” in his daily lingo. It all makes for whimsical viewing, but underneath the flair, there’s very little substance holding this picture up. It tells the tale of an aging narcissist who learns the error of his ways when a younger version of himself is hired to aid and eventually replace him. Narratively, it’s familiar and forgettable, and it becomes immediately clear that style is a crutch that the film leans on. It’s funny, at times, thanks to a very likable Wilson and a strong supporting cast (there are occasional laugh-out-loud moments too, like when Carl does the big reveal about his portrait). But ultimately, it’s just too flat to be as special as the art it admires. 

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Aidan T.K. Baker, Brit McAdams, Ciara Renée, Colin J. Sweeney, Crystal Tweed, Denny Dillon, Elisabeth Henry-Macari, Elizabeth Loyacano, Evander Duck Jr., Jen Smedley, Joel Leffert, Kristin Hensley, Lucy Freyer, Lusia Strus, Lynda Suarez, Michael Pemberton, Michaela Watkins, Noa Graham, Owen Wilson, Paul Kosopod, Rob Figueroa, Ryan Czerwonko, Ryan Gaul, Sarah Baker, Scott Beehner, Stephen Root, Vin Craig, Wendi McLendon-Covey

Director: Brit McAdams

In Marlowe, Liam Neeson joins the lofty lineup of actors who have stepped into the shoes of Raymond Chandler's titular detective, famously played by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Elliott Gould. These are big boots to fill — and, if you’ve been paying attention to Neeson’s career over the last decade or so, you’ll be aware that he hasn’t exactly been stretching himself, dramatically speaking.

But Marlowe is something of a happy anomaly in Neeson’s filmography, because it has more than just adrenaline-pumping ambitions. Written by director Neil Jordan (of Michael Collins fame) and William Monahan (the screenwriter behind The Departed), the 1930s Hollywood-set plot is steeped in noir’s characteristic cynicism, giving it the seductive pull of that well-loved genre. It’s true that a not insignificant portion of the dialogue is so hard-boiled you can see the cracks — a clunkiness that’s repeated in a couple of the phoned-in supporting performances and the movie’s awkward action sequences. However, with a couple of bright spots in the starry cast, handsome production values, and a labyrinthine plot that just about passes muster as homage and not muddle, there are enough noir trappings here to keep the movie slinking along well enough, even if it ultimately isn't nearly as memorable as Marlowe’s previous screen incarnations.

Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Alan Cumming, Alan Moloney, Colm Meaney, Daniela Melchior, Danny Huston, Darrell D'Silva, Diane Kruger, François Arnaud, Gary Anthony Stennette, Ian Hart, Jessica Lange, Julius Cotter, Kim DeLonghi, Liam Neeson, Mark Schardan, Michael Garvey, Minnie Marx, Mitchell Mullen, Patrick Muldoon, Roberto Peralta, Seána Kerslake, Stella Stocker, Tony Corvillo

Director: Neil Jordan

Rating: R

Love Again is cute. It’s cheesy and predictable, but it’s cute. Chopra makes for a fine leading lady who is able to switch between sorrow and sappy in a heartbeat. Heughan, though painfully generic, isn’t all that bad either; his hopelessly awkward attempts at getting Mira’s attention provides much of the film’s needed laughs. But outside of the bare minimum, Love Again doesn’t give us anything of value. The jokes are few and far between and the chemistry, if you can believe it, is even thinner. And for two people who are supposedly writers (Mira is children book’s author and Rob is a music journalist), none of their writings, much less their texts to one another, are particularly good. 

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Amanda Blake, Arinzé Kene, Celia Imrie, Céline Dion, Harry Attwell, Lydia West, Nick Jonas, Omid Djalili, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Russell Tovey, Sam Heughan, Sofia Barclay, Steve Oram

Director: Jim Strouse

Rating: PG-13

This biopic of the little-known Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the world’s first prominent Black classical composer, opens with a fierce indictment of history’s ignorance of its subject. Even if it’s one example of the movie’s dramatic license-taking, the scene — in which the Chevalier (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) challenges his eminent contemporary Mozart to an onstage musical “duel” and easily bests him — is a dramatically thrilling statement of intent for the movie.

Unfortunately, the rest of its overlong runtime doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of that opener. That’s largely because of the writing, which leaves uber-talented performers like Harrison Jr. with only a limited range of notes to play. What’s more, Chevalier stops short of exploring some of the most fascinating facts of its multihyphenate subject’s life — like the role he played in the French Revolution, commanding the first all-Black regiment in Europe — in favor of hewing to a predictable screenwriting formula that demands a romantic element to the plot, even if the one in question is only thinly backed by actual evidence. Still, while some of Chevalier’s filmmaking choices seem to misjudge what makes its subject so interesting, the key facts of his life — his extraordinary skill at music and fencing, the role racism played in blocking his greatest ambitions — still get enough exposure here to make it an enlightening watch.

Genre: Drama, History, Music

Actor: Alec Newman, Alex Fitzalan, Ben Bradshaw, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Jessica Boone, Jim High, Joseph Prowen, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Lucy Boynton, Marton Csokas, Minnie Driver, Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo, Sam Barlien, Samara Weaving, Sian Clifford

Director: Stephen Williams