25 Feel-Good Films You’ll Want to Watch Again—and Again
Over the course of 2020, I’ve compiled several movie-recommendation lists for viewers who are at once in desperate need of distraction and yet never able to fully escape the year’s pressing realities. A global pandemic. Economic turmoil. An impending election showdown. Natural disasters. Police killings and unrelenting national protests. With movie theaters shut down around the world, I curated collections of films to watch at home—works that were unheralded upon release, took singular approaches to storytelling, or told stories about horror, government mistrust, and the end of the world.
But I think this fall season calls for lighter fare—movies that don’t make serious emotional or mental demands of you, that entice you to sink deeper into the couch and give yourself over to the screen. These films lend themselves best to multiple viewings (and eventual line-memorization). Everyone has their own personal list of “comfort movies,” but the films I rewatch the most have no particular theme or genre. Some of the movies that relax me the most are intense action epics, while others are quiet conversational comedies. Comfort movies don’t have to be low energy or low stakes to be soothing; they simply have to evoke a certain mood or atmosphere, or transport viewers to a world they’ll want to revisit. Below are 25 of my own favorite feel-good watches, films I cue up again and again whenever I need a brief break from the world.
Addams Family Values (1993, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld)
Some of the best comedies are endlessly rewatchable because of the sheer density of the humor—movies such as , or anything from Mel Brooks, with too many jokes per minute to process in a single viewing. , Barry Sonnenfeld’s brilliant sequel to , is not only a , but also a breakneck laugh-fest that throws a clever line or visual gag at the viewer every chance it gets. On top of that, it creates compelling character arcs for all its big stars, particularly Wednesday Addams (played by Christina Ricci), Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd), and the villainous Miss Debbie (Joan Cusack). The most comforting comedies are the ones you can quote line by line; , which I first saw at
