Watch · 29 April 2026

Five feel-good films off the beaten path.

Comedy, music documentaries, Norwegian dramedy — the cuts your streaming homepage won't surface. All cleared the IMDb ≥ 7.6 / RT ≥ 80% bar, calibrated to the warm-redemptive axis your eights keep landing on (Green Book, Life Is Beautiful, Barfi!).

Summer of Soul

Pick One · 2021

Summer of Soul

Questlove · 117 min · IMDb 8.0 · RT 99 / 98

The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival ran the same summer as Woodstock, a hundred miles south, with three hundred thousand attendees — and the forty hours of footage sat in a basement for fifty years until Questlove dug it out. Stevie Wonder at nineteen, Nina Simone, a Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples gospel duet, Sly, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension. Won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2022.

Why it fits Krall, Salvant, Holly Cole, Gardot in your library are direct musical descendants of what's happening on that stage. The rare doc you'll want a glass of something nice for, and probably rewatch. Mark Kermode called it the best music documentary he'd ever seen.

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What We Do in the Shadows

Pick Two · 2014

What We Do in the Shadows

Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi · 86 min · IMDb 7.6 · RT 96 / 87

Mockumentary about four vampire flatmates in suburban Wellington bickering over whose turn it is to do the dishes — an issue made awkward by the bodies in the basement. Pre-Wilderpeople, pre-Jojo Waititi at his deadpan best. Pure laughs, zero horror — vampire-lore rules treated as flat-share house rules.

Why it fits Sits in your Big Lebowski 8/10 lane — dry ensemble comedy, deadpan delivery, eccentrics in mundane situations. Eighty-six minutes, no drag. The kind of film you'll be quoting at Rian by Friday.

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Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Pick Three · 2018

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Morgan Neville · 94 min · IMDb 8.3 · RT 97 / 94

Documentary on Fred Rogers, the unassuming Presbyterian-minister-puppeteer who somehow built America's most-beloved children's show on radical kindness. Less of a US cultural touchstone in the UK, so likely fresh ground. Obama listed it as one of his favourite films of 2018.

Why it fits Doesn't feel like a doc — feels like a feel-good film. Sits on the same warm-redemptive axis as your Green Book 8/10, in ninety-four quieter minutes. Leaves you genuinely better.

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Searching for Sugar Man

Pick Four · 2012

Searching for Sugar Man

Malik Bendjelloul · 86 min · IMDb 8.2 · RT 95 / 92

Sixto Rodriguez, a Detroit folk-rocker, made two albums in the early seventies, sold nothing in America, was dropped, became a construction worker. Meanwhile in apartheid-era South Africa he was unknowingly bigger than Elvis for two decades. Two Cape Town fans set out to find out how he died. Won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2013.

Why it fits One of the purest feel-good redemption arcs ever filmed — the same emotional engine as your Shawshank 9/10 calibration, in documentary form. The post-script the film doesn't yet know — Bendjelloul took his own life fifteen months after winning the Oscar; Rodriguez himself in August 2023 — adds an unintended elegy that lands quietly afterwards.

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The Worst Person in the World

Pick Five · 2021

The Worst Person in the World

Joachim Trier · 128 min · IMDb 7.7 · RT 96 / 88

Renate Reinsve (Best Actress, Cannes) as Julie, drifting through twelve chapters of her late twenties in Oslo — careers, men, indecision, the works. Final film of Trier's Oslo trilogy. Funnier than the title suggests, sadder than the comedy beats let on.

Why it fits Hits your Eternal Sunshine 8/10 lane — unconventional structure wrapped around a romance that never quite resolves, with a time-freezing sequence in the middle that's worth the runtime by itself. Same restraint and emotional precision as your Shoplifters 8/10, in a contemporary European register. Mubi got behind it hard in the UK — they were right to.

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