22 Best Movies To Watch After The Flash (2023)
The Garfield Movie
SimilarArmageddon (1998), Batman Begins (2005), Batman Forever (1995), Batman Returns (1992), Ben-Hur (1959), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), Bugsy Malone (1976), Code of Silence (1985), Constantine (2005), Enchanted (2007), Fantasia (1940), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), I've Always Liked You (2016), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Mary Poppins (1964), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Paris Can Wait (2016), Princess Mononoke (1997), Shall We Dance? (2004), Strange Days (1995), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), The Science of Sleep (2006), True Romance (1993), Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), You Only Live Twice (1967), Zatoichi (2003),
Watch after1917 (2019),
Barbie (2023) Oppenheimer (2023) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), The Flash (2023), The Suicide Squad (2021),
StarringAyane Sakura, Brett Goldstein, Hannah Waddingham, Hisako Kanemoto, Junko Minagawa, Kotono Mitsuishi, Marina Inoue, Mariya Ise, Megumi Hayashibara, Samuel L. Jackson, Sayaka Ohara, Shizuka Itoh, Shoko Nakagawa,
StudioColumbia Pictures, dentsu, King Records, Studio Deen, Toei Animation, Toei Company,
When I was around thirteen, two classmates, Christina and Taylor (their real names, it’s not like they’re going to read this), played a prank on me that resulted in my eating dog food. In retrospect, it could have been worse: nobody else saw it happen, and for whatever reason they kept it to themselves. But when I think about my teenage years (and I try not to much at this point in my life, other than at a superficial pop culture level), my mind often goes to that moment. Continue Reading →
Meg 2: The Trench
Ever since James Cameron boldly wrote “S” after ALIEN on a chalkboard and then changed it to a dollar sign, the quickest way to sequel-ize your killer extraterrestrial/reptile/mammal/whatever has been to add more of it. You scored a hit with people fighting one giant mosquito? Great, here’s a sequel with six of them. Continue Reading →
Heart of Stone
SimilarAliens (1986), Armageddon (1998), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Code of Silence (1985), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Dr. No (1962), Face/Off (1997), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964),
Live and Let Die (1973) Men in Black II (2002), North by Northwest (1959), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003),
In the 2023 sea of action movies, setting yourself apart from others becomes increasingly hard. John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part 1, Extraction 2, and more have sparked an action cinema revival. It’s a rebirth that I am incredibly grateful for, certainly. Continue Reading →
Barbie
SimilarBridget Jones's Diary (2001), Catwoman (2004), Enchanted (2007), Ghost (1990), Ghostbusters (1984), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), The Holiday (2006), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), Volver (2006),
Watch afterBlue Beetle (2023), Elemental (2023), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), Meg 2: The Trench (2023),
Oppenheimer (2023) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Flash (2023),
The news that director Greta Gerwig’s follow-up project to her celebrated adaptation of Little Women would be a movie about Barbie dolls was met with skepticism and even disappointment when first announced in mid-2019. What did it mean for the future of one of Hollywood’s few high-profile female directors? Would she abandon her apparent passion for telling intimate stories about coming of age? Continue Reading →
Bird Box Barcelona
SimilarA Christmas Carol (1938), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Die Hard (1988), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016),
Jackie Brown (1997) Live and Let Die (1973) Mystic River (2003),
Rebecca (1940) Shaft (2000) The 39 Steps (1935), The Handmaid's Tale (1990),
The Name of the Rose (1986) The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Road (2009), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Wild at Heart (1990),
Okay, fine, Bird Box Barcelona isn’t exactly a sequel. It’s more of a continuation, as Netflix gets a belated start on making a franchise out of 2018’s Bird Box, a perfectly fine but unremarkable film that inexplicably became a smash hit. Smash or not, five years is a long time, so you might need a refresher course. Much of Earth’s population has been decimated by malevolent beings with visages so emotionally overwhelming that anyone who looks at them immediately commits suicide, and the survivors are forced to navigate what’s left of the world with their eyes covered, lest they see whatever “they” are. That’s really all you need to remember. Continue Reading →
The Out-Laws
SimilarBlown Away (1994), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Sissi (1955), The Party 2 (1982), Wild at Heart (1990),
Watch afterThe Flash (2023),
Director Tyler Spindel's track record is scattered, composed of primarily-for-streaming movies including The Wrong Missy and Father of the Year. He has an affinity for the David Spade experience, in other words. His latest, The Out-Laws, doesn't feature Spade and doesn't do much to suggest that Spindel's body of work will ever grow more than scattered. Continue Reading →
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
SimilarArmageddon (1998), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Godzilla Raids Again (1955),
Jackie Brown (1997) Jaws: The Revenge (1987),
Live and Let Die (1973) Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Ocean's Twelve (2004), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Spider-Man 3 (2007), Superman Returns (2006), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) Five Nights at Freddy's (2023), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023),
Oppenheimer (2023) The Equalizer 3 (2023), The Flash (2023), The Nun II (2023),
One of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One's earliest pieces of marketing was a trailer-by-way-of-behind-the-scenes featurette. In that clip, Tom Cruise, strapped to a motorcycle, rockets off the edge of a cliff in the Swiss Alps. He lets the bike drop away before popping his parachute and sailing into the horizon. It's one of the most death-defying sequences ever captured on film and, as we now know, it's one Cruise himself did again and again and again. The sequence, even devoid of context, sums up exactly what director Chris McQuarrie and Cruise (the two are also co-producers) hoped to achieve in Dead Reckoning: grade A movie spectacle. Continue Reading →
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
SimilarAlex Strangelove (2018), Billy Elliot (2000), Bring It On (2000), Enchanted (2007), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006),
StarringColman Domingo, Sam Richardson,
Studiodentsu,
It’s not easy being a teenager. It’s especially not easy being a teenager like the titular protagonist of Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken. As that title would suggest, Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor) is a Kraken living in a seaside town with her family. Her parents and younger brother seem to have no trouble assimilating to the broader world, while Ruby struggles. All she wants is to blend in as a normal human-- albeit one with blue skin and no spine. However, to be an average teen, she’ll likely have to break some of her mom’s strict rules, namely, never going near the ocean. Continue Reading →
Stan Lee
Watch afterElemental (2023), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Flash (2023),
Thanks to decades of cameos in movies and promotional stunts intertwining him with the very word “Marvel,” audiences across the planet have a deep connection to comic book legend Stan Lee. Though he passed away in the final weeks of 2018, Lee’s legacy lives on. Marvel Studios even utilized existing audio of his voice in a special 2021 video. It helped them announce the return of its features to movie theaters. Artistic individuals like this tend to endure, no matter what happens to their physical bodies. Continue Reading →
Elemental
SimilarBorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), Ocean's Eleven (1960), Poseidon (2006), Snakes on a Plane (2006), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Volver (2006),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) Meg 2: The Trench (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Flash (2023),
StudioWalt Disney Pictures,
Over the years, Pixar has enlisted a variety of creatures to populate their wholesome stories of love and acceptance. There have been toys, monsters, cars, disembodied souls, and even the occasional human. In their new film Elemental, the characters are personifications of the four elements. It’s a choice that may leave you asking, “Have they run out of ideas at this point?” Continue Reading →
The Blackening
SimilarSaw (2004), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Shrek (2001), Shrek the Third (2007),
Watch afterThe Flash (2023),
StudioMRC,
The Blackening is a horror-satire based on a popular 2018 short film of the same name. It mercilessly skewered the genre conceit that the Black character is always the first to die—a notion so familiar that this year saw the publication of an examination of Black-related horror films entitled The Black Guy Dies First. To do so, it presented a scenario in which all the potential victims are Black. They argue about who among them is truly the Blackest while downplaying their own ethnicity to survive. (“I qualified for the Winter Olympics.”) Continue Reading →
Past Lives
SimilarA Real Young Girl (1976), Copying Beethoven (2006), The Holiday (2006),
Watch afterBlue Beetle (2023), Elemental (2023), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023),
Oppenheimer (2023) The Flash (2023), tick tick... BOOM! (2021),
StudioA24,
It doesn’t take much for someone who once meant a whole lot to you to creep into your thoughts every now and then. It’s not an everyday obsessive thing, where they’re a shadow lingering over you. It’s softer, more subtle: a snippet of a song, or something that reminds you of a private joke once shared. Even if the fire has long burned out, an ember or two will glow for an instant. Then it’s gone, and the life you’ve lived without them goes on. Continue Reading →
Asteroid City
SimilarStalker (1979),
Watch afterIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023),
Oppenheimer (2023) The Flash (2023),
StarringFisher Stevens, Willem Dafoe,
About twenty miles or so outside of Marfa, Texas, there’s a mural dedicated to the production of George Stevens’ Giant. Big wooden standees display James Dean with his arms draped over a rifle, framing him in the iconic Christ pose which would be the last image to represent Dean in the public consciousness before he died. Giant is about a great number of things, though, fittingly, what resonates all these years later is its ideas about the passing of time. Continue Reading →
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
SimilarA.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Aliens (1986), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), Face/Off (1997), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Shrek the Third (2007),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Flash (2023),
StarringColman Domingo, Cristo Fernández,
The blockbuster landscape shifted with Michael Bay's 2007 Transformers movie. It fit his directing style, with his love of explosions and male gazing, but what it amounted to was a guy playing with big, expensive cinematic toys. There was knowledge gained from those five previous installments when the 2018 spin-off Bumblebee had more personality and excitement than any of its predecessors. Continue Reading →
Flamin' Hot
Watch afterSaw X (2023), Thanksgiving (2023), The Flash (2023),
StudioSearchlight Pictures,
Of all the oddball trends in 2023’s multiplex movies, the strangest has to be Hollywood’s current obsession with films about the origins of familiar consumer lines and products, including Air Jordans, Tetris, and the BlackBerry PDA. The films have been okay—and Air’s genuinely quite good—but even so, when all is said and done, it is hard to shake the sense that what you have been watching is less a movie than an elaborate brand extension designed to remind viewers of the benevolence and vision of our corporate overlords. That is especially true in the case of Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, a film whose story is almost too good to be true (more on that later) but which is, in practice, an ironically bland bit of product placement even more processed and devoid of nourishment than the snack food it celebrates. Continue Reading →
シン・仮面ライダー
SimilarBatman Begins (2005), Batman Forever (1995), Batman Returns (1992), Catwoman (2004), La Haine (1995),
StudioToei Company,
Shin Kamen Rider became my favorite movie of the year when it ripped my heart out with a one-sided conversation. Continue Reading →
Watch afterElemental (2023), The Flash (2023),
It's so, so wonderful that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse loves comics. Not just their characters (though it does) or the superhero genre (though it does)—the medium of comics itself. Comics are an infinitely flexible form. They can engage in dialogue with popular works in other mediums! They can use space to shape their readers' perception of time! They can use form and illustration style to capture the difference between perception and reality! Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is, amongst other things, a celebration of comics and their possibilities. It is glorious. Continue Reading →
Kandahar
Watch afterBlue Beetle (2023), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Flash (2023),
Gerard Butler's CIA-agent-on-the-run thriller aims to be more than a power fantasy, but for all its virtues, it doesn't stick that landing.
There's an expected cognitive dissonance that comes with watching a man-on-a-mission genre piece set in the Middle East. Whether it's a glorified shooting gallery or a power fantasy where the hero stops just short of bleeding red, white, and blue - one needs to practice a mental limbo to either ignore or maybe be pleasantly surprised with the bare minimum concessions to showing the opposite side's perspectives.
Ric Roman Waugh's expertly mounted, ambitiously scattered Kandahar is, at its core, a Stagecoach riff. One where our leading man, career CIA operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler leveraging his soulful full-time divorced dad essence), has 30 hours to make a mad 400-mile dash across an Afghanistan desert from an impossibly large group of following forces. It's a foolproof premise, yet intriguingly, Kandahar refuses to embrace its conceptual neatness. Continue Reading →
The Little Mermaid
SimilarAladdin (1992), Dirty Dancing (1987), Fantasia (1940), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Moulin Rouge! (2001), West Side Story (2021), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) Meg 2: The Trench (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Flash (2023),
StudioWalt Disney Pictures,
The spate of recent live-action Disney remakes has run the gamut in quality from pleasantly diverting (Cinderella, Pete’s Dragon) to unwatchable abominations (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast.) Even the most well-received entries of the bunch struggle to find reasons they should exist in the first place. Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid is no different, but for one crucial factor that sets it apart from the rest: Halle Bailey as Ariel. Bailey is so captivating and winsome in the titular role that this remake almost feels worth it just to launch her into movie stardom. Unfortunately, sub-par CGI effects and clunky changes to Howard Ashman’s classic songs often make it feel like Bailey is left to carry the movie on the strength of her remarkable talent alone. With a shaggy runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes—a full hour longer than the original cartoon—it’s a heavy load for one performer to bear. Continue Reading →
Fast X
SimilarBen-Hur (1959), Blown Away (1994), Ocean's Twelve (2004), Oldboy (2003), The Godfather Part III (1990), The Interpreter (2005), Zatoichi (2003),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Flash (2023), The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023),
Let's face it: At this point, you're either in for the overamped, Saturday-morning-cartoon lunacy of a Fast and Furious movie or you're not. Building from its humble roots as a 2001 street-racing Point Break riff to the gargantuan action tentpole it's after a whopping ten movies (eleven if you count Hobbs & Shaw), the series has built quite the convoluted lore over the decades. There are dead characters who come back to life (Sung Kang's Han), living characters who can never come back because their actors are no longer with us (see: Paul Walker's Brian), sworn enemies who join the familiar just one film later. It's dudebro soap opera, fueled by nitrous oxide and every weird, bonkers thing the filmmakers can think to do with a car. Continue Reading →
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
SimilarAladdin (1992), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Free Willy (1993), Godzilla Raids Again (1955), Hellboy (2004), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Night at the Museum (2006), Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007), Superman Returns (2006), The Legend of Zorro (2005),
Watch afterAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023),
Barbie (2023) Oppenheimer (2023) Thanksgiving (2023), The Flash (2023), The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023),
StarringDee Bradley Baker,
A lot's happened since we last saw the Guardians of the Galaxy (well, besides their brief cameo in Thor: Love and Thunder). Writer/director James Gunn was fired from Marvel in 2018 after some problematic tweets joking about pedophilia were unearthed, in one of the few instances of a successful cancellation from the right wing. Of course, it didn't last long, considering how thin the ground was for said cancellation in the first place; and in the interim, he swanned off to DC, made the fantastic The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, and eventually found himself sharing the throne of a newly-revamped DC movie universe. Continue Reading →