10 Underrated Films To Watch If You Loved The Big Hits

Where Marriage Story explored divorce through courtroom monologues and devastating arguments in LA apartments, Blue Valentine is its grungier, more emotionally chaotic cousin. Told across two timelines – the early, hopeful days of a relationship and its slow, painful collapse – it’s a heartbreak story without neat conclusions. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling give some of their best performances as a couple who love each other deeply but still fall apart. It’s raw, messy and difficult to watch – but unforgettable for exactly the same reasons.

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Luca Guadagnino’s sun-drenched story of first love set against the backdrop of a sleepy Italian summer felt like an instant classic – sensual, slow and quietly devastating. But a few years earlier, British director Andrew Haigh – whose most recent work includes All Of Us Strangers – delivered a similarly powerful love story on a much smaller scale. Weekend takes place over just two days in Nottingham, where a one-night stand between two men deepens into something far more meaningful. Stripped back and emotionally raw, it captures the same fleeting magic of connection and the ache of knowing it can’t last. 

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Gone Girl gave us icy aesthetics, twisted relationships and a masterclass in psychological manipulation. If that dark, stylish vibe is your thing, Nocturnal Animals is a must-watch. Directed by Tom Ford, it’s a film within a film – part high-gloss LA drama, part Southern gothic revenge story. Amy Adams plays an art dealer who receives a disturbing manuscript from her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), and as she reads it, the line between fiction and memory begins to blur. Visually stunning, emotionally brutal and dripping in dread, it’s a noir-tinged exploration of guilt, grief and artistic, vindictive revenge.

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Damien Chazelle’s candy-coloured musical about dreams, love and missed timing struck a chord with hopeless romantics everywhere. If you’re drawn to that nostalgic, whimsical tone, try God Help The Girl. Set in a vintage-tinged Glasgow and driven by songs written by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, it follows a group of misfit musicians who form a band one summer. It’s much less polished than La La Land but still bursting with charm – a lo-fi musical that blends mental health, friendship and yearning with sweet melodies and 60s-inspired style.

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If Past Lives left you reeling with its quiet emotional weight and questions of fate, timing and connection, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy is essential viewing. Spanning nearly two decades, the films follow Jesse and Céline (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) as they meet by chance on a train, fall in love walking around Vienna, and reconnect – first nine, then eighteen years later. Like Past Lives, these films thrive on conversation, subtle glances and all the things left unsaid. They’re romantic, melancholic and devastating in their realism – a masterclass in how people grow together, apart, and sometimes, in parallel.

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Edward Berger’s Conclave is a tight, cerebral thriller about faith, secrecy and political manoeuvring within the Vatican – think House of Cards, but holier. If you were drawn in by its meditative tone and spiritual tension, Martin Scorsese’s Silence makes for a perfect, though more harrowing, companion piece. Set in 17th-century Japan, it follows two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) on a journey to find their mentor and convert locals – only to face unimaginable suffering and moral compromise. Both films explore the price of belief, institutional power and the silence of God in a world full of noise.

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If the courtly chaos, black comedy and scheming of The Favourite appealed to your darker sense of humour, The Death Of Stalin is essential viewing. Armando Iannucci’s razor-sharp satire follows the power struggle that erupts after Stalin’s sudden death, with a cast of grotesque, hilarious men vying for control. It’s absurd, horrifying and somehow laugh-out-loud funny – think Succession in Soviet Russia. The tone is biting, the dialogue lightning-fast and the performances (Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs) pitch-perfect.

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