50 under-appreciated movies that deserve your attention

Watching

TIME film critic Stephanie Zacharek thinks it’s time to take a closer look at the “terrific, surprising, yet undersung films that, in the old days of moviegoing—let’s say before the pandemic—would roll by week by week.” What ever happened to these fantastic films? She pulled together of 50 films that are worth your attention. Here are just a few to consider.

• Mustang. This 2015 drama, directed by Turkish-French filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven, follows five sisters in a remote Turkish town sometime in the 2010s. Punished for “improper” behavior, their grandmother confines them to the family home where some find ways to push back against the misogynist constraints of family and culture.

• Only Lovers Left Alive. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play vampire lovers—named Eve and Adam—who have been together for centuries, bonded by a love of music, books, and art in general. Only Lovers Left Alive is not just a gorgeous meditation on the qualities of lasting love, but a reverie about art’s ability to sustain us, both as individuals and as a civilization.

• Dolemite Is My Name. Dolemite was a largely self-funded enterprise that would become both a huge hit and a landmark of Blaxploitation cinema, and Craig Brewer’s joyous and hugely entertaining 2019 Dolemite Is My Name tells the story of how Rudy Ray Moore almost single-handedly willed this weird little movie into being.

• I Could Never Be Your Woman. Writer-director Amy Heckerling’s early-2000s romantic comedy might be the best you’ve never seen. This is an unapologetically delightful picture, one that’s fully in tune with the stresses and joys of the December-May romance.

See the full list here.

Reading

• The End of Romance. Sylvie Broder, the protagonist of Lily Meyer’s dark valentine of a novel, flees an abusive marriage and her family’s Holocaust-inflected history by indulging in flings that require minimal, if any, commitment—pleasures “without rules.” Read more.

• Language as Liberation. We’ve long known the late Toni Morrison as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and an astute cultural critic. Here we engage her as a scholar in a collection of Princeton University lectures enriched by marginalia, a beguiling testament to a prodigious mind in motion. Read more.

• Good People. In her debut novel, Patmeena Sabit tells of the Sharaf family’s odyssey from a war-pillaged Afghanistan to the affluent suburbs of northern Virginia, where they check off the American Dream list. Then a devastating tragedy scuttles those aspirations. Read more. 

Talking About

• A number of celebrities who were in attendance at the Grammys—including those who took home its top honors—seized the opportunity to make pointed statements criticizing President Donald Trump and his Administration.

• Melania, a new documentary about the sitting First Lady of the United States, has arrived in theaters worldwide. Here’s what to know about the film.