The Best Character-driven Movies to Watch on Youtube

Sure, many of the tropes in this feel-good romcom would be familiar. Naveen, a shy Indian doctor, loves Jay, a white photographer, though of course, like in many gay and interracial romances, his family is reluctant to support them. However, writers Eric Randall and Madhuri Shekar take these tropes and weave them into something new. […]

In Sorry, Baby, an unspeakable act of cruelty disrupts Agnes’ ambitious rise to the top. Despite being a literature professor, she struggles to find the words to describe what happened to her. Likewise, the audience isn’t made privy to the details of the incident and relies only on what Agnes chooses to show. It’s a […]

With the anonymity of the internet, it’s hard to trust that the stranger on the other side would be a good person. There’s catfishers and scammers and trolls, oh my! Once in a while, however, you do meet someone cool. Bob Trevino Likes It was inspired by a real life friendship writer-director Tracie Laymon had, […]

Taking a page from ghost movies past, My Dead Friend Zoe follows Merit as she struggles to move on from the death of her closest friend in the army. We’re given hints, but the true cause of Zoe’s death isn’t revealed till the end. In the meantime, we see Merit struggle with guilt, grief, and […]

The first things that grab your attention in Nickel Boys are its beauty and technicality. Director RaMell Ross, a large-format photographer, ensures every frame relays something deep, intimate, and moving. Then there’s how he takes these shots: we see things unfold through the POV of Elwood and Turner, students at an abusive reform school in […]

A Real Pain is a deceptively simple film. There’s not a lot going on on the surface, but Eisenberg’s smart script and tight direction, coupled with Culkin’s firecracker performance fuel the film with heart and infectious energy. A Real Pain shines when it focuses on the cousins’ bond​​at once pained and precious—but it also works […]

All We Imagine as Light is a political film that has many smart and moving things to say about the loneliness of migrating from the country to the city, the double standards women face on the daily, and the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor. But thanks to director Payal Kapadia’s deft hands, these […]

With the internet able to connect people from miles away, the concept of the one that got away has become unromantic– after all, with instant messaging, their distance just means that you’ve been ghosted. But for the longest time, romance stemmed from the fated circumstances that kept or lost love, and this is excellently portrayed […]

Written, directed, and scored by Viggo Mortensen, The Dead Don’t Hurt is a visually stunning, emotionally potent, but still impressively restrained period drama that flips the script on typical Westerns. On the surface, it looks like it could be one—there’s even a bad guy clad in black who slings guns outside a saloon—but the film […]

Just a few minutes in, you can already feel the immensity of The Brutalist. The rousing score stirs you. The weight of The Holocaust and Toth’s immigration story, which is also one of xenophobia and addiction, pulls you in. The visuals, shot in VistaVision, demand your attention. The period setting calls for nostalgia, but the […]

Often deemed as South Asian John Wick, Monkey Man, of course, has plenty of the stylish action that’s been captivating today’s filmmakers and audiences alike. Dev Patel, now writing and directing alongside leading the film, created a crazy combination of action sequences that mess around with perspective, that’s fuelled by insane choreography, and that take […]

When modern systems like law enforcement and forensics fail to come up with definite answers to a murder, loved ones of the victim usually have no recourse, which is the fear at the heart of Irish horror film Oddity. To lose someone you care about, forever, hurts. So when Darcy takes more strange and esoteric […]

While the film is calm, contemplative, and never goes into histrionics, there’s a deep-seated anger in All Shall Be Well that powers every scene. Sure, most of the scenes revolve around estate planning, talking with lawyers, and hashing things out through civil discussion. And sure, Pat’s biological family calmly explain their reasons behind their decisions. […]

Places evoke certain emotions, but even the most rundown, cramped projects feel special when they’re home. We Grown Now is set in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex, an area that was notorious for its crime and poverty, but to Malik and Eric, it’s a place where they became friends. The friendship they share leads them […]

Exhibiting Forgiveness does what it says in the title. The plot moves when a repentant family member returns to the protagonist’s life to reconcile with them, and in doing so, there’s hope that things would work out between them. Many a depiction would often treat this moment as a simple hurdle to jump over, but […]

The Outrun, which follows Rona as she struggles to acknowledge and eventually overcome her alcoholism, is understandably in shambles. It’s non-linear (our only cues are her hair color) and occasionally fractured to show just how messed up Rona’s headspace is. These decisions may or may not feel necessary to the viewer, but what centers the […]

Be prepared to have the expectations you form after reading Scrapper’s synopsis shattered: though it is about a 12-year-old dealing with grief following her mother’s death, it’s remarkably upbeat. It gets that quality by positioning itself in the buoyant headspace of young Georgie, a resilient, cheeky youngster who retains much of her whimsical childlike spirit […]

You don’t have to be a theater kid to enjoy this feel-good mockumentary set in a summer camp for junior thespians. While there are plenty of in-jokes here for those who might have spent a summer or two somewhere like AdirondACTS, Theater Camp also good-naturedly lampoons every instantly recognizable stereotype of theater kids and the […]

The Royal Hotel sees Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) resorting to take up a dire live-in job behind the bar in a remote desert part of Western Australia. Although they’re warned that they’d “have to be okay with a little male attention” in the outcast mining town, their financial precarity overrides the potential […]

Aptly for a film partly set in a fortune cookie factory, Fremont deals with luck — specifically, the other side of good luck: survivor’s guilt. Donya (played by real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada) is a former translator for the US Army who fled her home city of Kabul on an emergency evacuation flight when […]

Who among us hasn’t committed a white lie to save a relationship? And who among us hasn’t yearned for the full and brutal truth? In You Hurt My Feelings, Nicole Holofcener digs into that paradox and delivers a film that is honest and funny in equal measure. Here, the writer-director doesn’t just use a hilarious […]

As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]

While the market for animation is mostly dominated by American 3D and Japanese anime, once in a while, a film outside the two industries comes up with an entirely new style of its own, with the design inspired by their respective countries. European animation has garnered some interest with Loving Vincent, but Chicken with Linda! […]

Surreal, off-putting, and extremely disturbing, Infinity Pool plays with the concepts of cloning and the death penalty to craft an examination on colonial tourism. It’s a thematically rich horror film, with hazy neon-lit sex scenes and absolutely terrible behavior, enabled by their wealth and advanced technology that could have been put to better use. Mia […]

2023 was a great year for animation with films like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Nimona, and The Boy and the Heron, but there was another animated gem that flew under the radar and that’s jazz drama Blue Giant. It’s a pleasure to both the eyes and the ears as Dai Miyamoto blows on his saxophone, […]

At once intimate and sweeping, A Thousand and One seamlessly weaves Inez’s personal turmoil and familial troubles with the systemic inequality that was rampant in ’90s New York. The hideous faces of gentrification, poverty, and police brutality are constantly appearing in the film, not merely because they lend weight to the story, but because they […]

True to its name, Joy Ride is a raucous delight that has everything you want out of a road trip comedy and more. There’s love, sex, adventure, and even music, but most of all there’s friendship, the interesting complexities of which are explored against the backdrop of race. There’s something meaningful keeping everything together at […]

South African director John Trengove follows-up his debut The Wound with another take on masculinity, this time set in the States. Manodrome stars Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody as a newbie and a veteran in a support group for men who have been emasculated by women and feminism. That’s right, this is a film about […]

The agonizing tug of war between dogma and desire is sharply illustrated in writer-director Laurel Parmet’s feature debut, set inside the claustrophobic confines of a conservative Christian community in Kentucky. Seventeen-year-old Jem (Eliza Scanlen) is at the age her elders believe is the right time to start thinking about a lifelong partner — a choice […]

That this film, an adaptation of a beloved classic and girlhood staple for 50 years and counting, is able to retain the same power, charm, and wisdom as the source material by Judy Blume is impressive in and of itself. Director Kelly Fremon Craig (Edge of Seventeen) turns the must-read novel into a must-see film, […]

There’s an elephant lurking in the room from the outset of Biosphere, in which two men are the last survivors of an apocalypse: how will humanity live on? Best friends Billy (Mark Duplass) and Ray (Sterling K. Brown) have only survived thanks to the ingenuity of Ray, who built the glass dome in which they […]

There is a world where all of Little Wing’s ideas make thematic sense, as a story about a young woman reeling from the difficulty of her home life. But as it is now, the film just isn’t tightly woven enough, with various characters and subplots making little effect on the whole and major conflicts barely […]

Based on the documentary short she helmed with actor Taylor Russell, Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama is an intimate, unabashedly political, and decisively non-judgmental look at one mother’s determined attempts to regain custody of her two children. Gia (Tia Nomore) is struggling to work enough hours at her part-time photo studio job to pay for the […]