the screening room
movies i love
People ask me for film recommendations more than for anything else, and I kept answering in comments that sink after a day. So this is the permanent answer. Everything I gave four stars or more, newest first, and when I love a new one it goes on the wall.
The ratings are mine and they are not adjusted for anything. Under each one it says where it actually is, and I only put a Prime link on the films that are genuinely there, so nothing here sends you to an empty page. Checked on 2026-09-01, and streaming rights move, so take the older end of the wall with a pinch of salt.
now showing
★★★★★
One Night Only
Will Gluck, 2026
In an America a few degrees off from this one, there are twelve hours a year when the rules come off, and two strangers spend the whole night crashing into each other.
in cinemas
★★★★★
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026
Everyone has forgotten Peter Parker, so he spends four years protecting a city that has no idea who he is.
in cinemas
★★★★★
The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan, 2026
Odysseus takes ten years getting home from Troy while Penelope holds the house against the men who have decided he is dead. Nolan shot all of it on IMAX film, which nobody had done before.
in cinemas
★★★★★
Hadestown: The Musical
Brett Sullivan, 2026
The Broadway Orpheus and Eurydice, filmed on the stage, with five of the original cast still in it.
★★★★½
Project Hail Mary
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2026
A science teacher wakes up on a ship with no memory of boarding it and works out that he is the last thing standing between us and a dying sun.
★★★★
Hoppers
Daniel Chong, 2026
Pixar's thirtieth. A student puts her mind into a robot beaver to save a habitat, and starts an uprising she cannot call off.
rent it on prime included on disney+
★★★★
Wuthering Heights
Emerald Fennell, 2026
Fennell bills it as the greatest love story of all time, and every piece of evidence it hands you for these two is physical. I wrote about what that does to the book at /guide/wuthering-heights-limerence.
rent it on prime included on hbo max
held over
★★★★★
Obsession
Curry Barker, 2025
A shop worker buys a toy that grants wishes and wishes his coworker would fall for him. She does, and it goes about as badly as it can. Made for under a million dollars and took more than four hundred.
rent it on prime included on peacock
★★★★★
Homebound
Neeraj Ghaywan, 2025
Two childhood friends in a North Indian village go after police jobs for the dignity the uniform promises, and the chasing gets in between them. India's entry for the Oscars that year.
on netflix
★★★★½
Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025
Two conspiracy theorists kidnap a pharmaceutical chief executive because they are certain she is an alien. A remake of Save the Green Planet.
rent it on prime included on netflix
★★★★
Nimrods
Lee Kirk, 2025
Three teenagers drive from Kansas City to Los Angeles certain their band is opening for Green Day. The invitation was somebody winding them up.
still in cinemas
★★★★
Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay, 2025
A new mother in rural Montana comes apart, and the film does not look away while it happens.
content note: postpartum psychosis, self-harm
rent it on prime included on mubi
★★★★★
Sinners
Ryan Coogler, 2025
Twin brothers come home to Jim Crow Mississippi to open a juke joint, and find something waiting for them that is worse than the people they were already afraid of.
content note: racism, graphic violence
rent it on prime included on hbo max
★★★★
Winter Spring Summer or Fall
Tiffany Paulsen, 2024
Two teenagers meet four times, once in each season of one year, and that is all of it.
rent it on prime included on paramount+
★★★★
The Idea of You
Michael Showalter, 2024
A forty year old single mother starts seeing a twenty four year old in a boy band, and most of the film is about what other people do with that.
★★★★
The Bikeriders
Jeff Nichols, 2024
A Midwestern motorcycle club turns, over about ten years, from a place for outsiders into something a lot harder.
the revival screen
★★★★½
Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan, 2023
He builds the bomb, and then he has to go on living afterwards. It won seven Oscars.
rent it on prime included on peacock
★★★★½
Babylon
Damien Chazelle, 2022
Silent Hollywood collapses into sound and takes most of the people in it down as it goes.
rent it on prime included on paramount+
★★★★½
Parasite
Bong Joon Ho, 2019
A poor family talks its way into a rich household one job at a time. The first film not in English to win Best Picture.
rent it on prime included on kanopy, free with a library card
★★★★½
Baby Driver
Edgar Wright, 2017
A getaway driver runs every job to whatever is playing in his headphones, and the film cuts itself to the same music.
rent it on prime included on paramount+
★★★★½
The Age of Adaline
Lee Toland Krieger, 2015
She stops ageing at twenty nine and spends the next century leaving before anybody can notice.
rent it on prime included on hbo max
★★★★★
Interstellar
Christopher Nolan, 2014
He leaves his children to go looking for somewhere else for us to live, and what that costs him is the actual film.
★★★★★
The Prestige
Christopher Nolan, 2006
Two Victorian magicians take each other apart over a single trick.
★★★★
Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe, 2000
A fifteen year old goes on tour with a band he is supposed to be writing about for Rolling Stone.
rent it on prime included on paramount+
★★★★
X-Men
Bryan Singer, 2000
Mutants split over whether to live alongside the people who are hunting them.
rent it on prime included on disney+
★★★★
Girl, Interrupted
James Mangold, 1999
A young woman is committed to a psychiatric hospital in the late sixties. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar out of it.
content note: self-harm, suicide, institutionalisation
rent it on prime included on tubi, free with ads
★★★★½
The Sixth Sense
M. Night Shyamalan, 1999
A child psychologist takes on a boy who says he sees dead people.
rent it on prime included on peacock
★★★★
The Matrix
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999
A hacker finds out the world is a simulation and joins the people fighting it.
rent it on prime included on peacock
★★★★★
The Silence of the Lambs
Jonathan Demme, 1991
An FBI trainee consults one imprisoned killer to catch another one. It is the third and last film to win all five of the big Oscars.
content note: graphic violence, transphobic characterisation
and two that are not on the wall
Finding Emily
Alicia MacDonald, 2026
Not rated on my Letterboxd, so it is not in the list, but it is on this site twice already because I keep going back to it. A man gets a number wrong and spends four months looking for a woman he met once.
in cinemas why it works, at length
Off Campus
a series, not a film. Prime Video, 2026
Eight episodes of the Elle Kennedy books, and the first season is The Deal: a fake dating arrangement between a music major and the captain of the hockey team, which stops being an arrangement.
keep going: romance films with no sex scenes, the argued version · this year's romance films, ranked by how real the love is · the reading list, if you want the same thing on the page
poster art from TMDB. this page is not endorsed by them.
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