Feel Good Movies to Watch Alone

Julie & Julia

Two parallel stories: Julia Child mastering French cuisine in postwar Paris and writing the cookbook that would change American cooking, and Julie Powell cooking every recipe in that cookbook over one year in a tiny Queens apartment. Nora Ephron weaves them together with the lightest possible touch. The film is about ambition and frustration and the particular satisfaction of finishing something you were not sure you could finish. Meryl Streep's Julia Child is one of the great performances of her career - and her career has a lot of competition for that title.

It works alone because it makes a quiet evening feel like enough. You finish it and you want to cook something. That is a very specific and very good reaction to a film.

Make something to eat while you watch it. Even something simple. The film earns this.

Chef

A talented chef, burned out and boxed in by a restaurant that won't let him cook what he wants, loses his job and starts a food truck. What follows is a film about creative freedom, about fatherhood, about what happens when you stop doing work you don't believe in. Jon Favreau wrote, directed, and starred in it, and the commitment to the food sequences - the real cooking, the real technique - gives the film a weight that most comedies don't bother with.

Watch it hungry. The Cuban sandwich scene has caused more late-night cooking decisions than any film in recent memory.

Ratatouille

A rat in Paris dreams of becoming a chef and forms an unlikely partnership with a clumsy kitchen assistant at one of the city's great restaurants. Ratatouille has one of the best final acts in Pixar's history - the food critic's review, and what triggers it, is as good as anything the studio has produced. But what makes it a feel good film for solo viewing specifically is the central idea: that anyone can be great at something, and that greatness doesn't require permission. Anton Ego's closing monologue is quietly one of the best pieces of writing in any animated film.

If you haven't seen this since childhood, watch it again. It is a different film at thirty than it was at ten.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Ono is eighty-five years old and runs a ten-seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station that holds three Michelin stars. This documentary is about what it looks like to spend a lifetime doing one thing with complete dedication. It is not a film about food. It is a film about mastery, about the strange peace that comes from knowing exactly what you are for, and about the particular loneliness of being truly great at something. It is calm and focused and leaves you wanting to be better at whatever you do.

85 minutes. Requires no commitment, delivers everything. One of the best documentaries made this century.

About Time

A young man discovers he can travel back in time within his own life, and uses this ability to improve his relationships, fix his mistakes, and be with the woman he loves. Richard Curtis's film sounds like a standard romantic comedy and becomes something much more specific and moving by the end. The time travel mechanics eventually give way to something simpler: a film about paying attention, about noticing the ordinary days before they are gone. Its final act, which doesn't involve romance at all, is the emotional payoff the whole film has been building toward.

It works alone because the thing it is really about - the quality of a life lived with full attention - is something you sit with privately rather than share.

Give it until the hour mark before forming an opinion. The film earns its ending over time, not up front.

The Intouchables

A wealthy Parisian quadriplegic hires an ex-convict from the projects as his live-in caregiver, and an unlikely friendship develops. The Intouchables was one of the highest-grossing French films of all time on release, and it earned it: the chemistry between the two leads is one of the most purely enjoyable things in recent European cinema, and the film never pities its disabled protagonist or sentimentalises the friendship. It is funny, surprisingly funny, and the warmth is structural rather than decorative.

Do not let the subtitles put you off. Ten minutes in, you won't notice them.

Amélie

A shy Parisian waitress decides to secretly improve the lives of the people around her, while navigating her own loneliness and an impossible romance. Amélie is one of the most visually inventive feel good films ever made - every frame is constructed with the precision of a jeweller - and it understands solitude in a way that most feel good films don't attempt. It doesn't resolve loneliness by eliminating it. It finds joy inside it. This is why it works so well to watch alone.

The best film on this list for a rainy solo evening. It makes being by yourself feel like a deliberate and interesting choice.

Brooklyn

A young Irish woman emigrates to Brooklyn in the 1950s, builds a life she didn't expect, and is pulled between two worlds when a family tragedy calls her home. Brooklyn is one of the warmest films of the last decade without ever being soft. Saoirse Ronan's performance is extraordinary - she does more with a half-second of reaction than most actors do with a full scene. The film is about the homesickness that doesn't have a direction, the particular longing of someone who has made a life somewhere new and can't go back even when they want to.

The closing sequence will stay with you. Don't spoil it.

Billy Elliot

An eleven-year-old boy in a Northern English mining town during the 1984 strike discovers that he wants to dance. His father is a miner. His world does not have space for this. Billy Elliot is the feel good film that earns its lift by putting it through real resistance first - the obstacles are economic, cultural, and deeply personal, and the film doesn't paper over them. When the payoff comes, it comes from somewhere real. The scene where his adult self performs for his father is one of the most quietly powerful moments in British cinema.

The film is funny as well as moving, which people forget. The comedy comes from the same honesty as the drama.

Legally Blonde

A fashion-obsessed sorority president follows her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School to win him back, and discovers she is better at this than anyone expected, including herself. Legally Blonde is a much smarter film than its premise suggests, and Reese Witherspoon's performance is what makes it work - Elle Woods is not the butt of the joke. She is in on every joke, and she wins. The film's central argument - that competence and warmth are not opposites, and that being underestimated is an advantage - is stated clearly and delivered satisfyingly. The courtroom sequence is one of the most rewatchable in 2000s comedy.

If you haven't seen it since it came out, watch it again. It has aged better than most of its contemporaries.

Midnight in Paris

A nostalgic American screenwriter in Paris discovers, on a series of midnight walks, that he is somehow transported back to the 1920s, where he meets Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Woody Allen's film is the best argument for being alone with your imagination - the protagonist is most alive when he is most himself, separated from the people who don't understand him. It is gentle and funny and the fantasy sequences have a warmth that Allen was not always capable of. Its closing idea about nostalgia is the simplest and most accurate thing the film could have said.

Best watched on an evening when you're feeling a little unmoored. It reorients quietly.

Little Miss Sunshine

A deeply dysfunctional family drives a broken VW bus across the American Southwest to get their seven-year-old daughter to a beauty pageant. Every character is failing at something they care deeply about. The comedy comes from the gap between their aspirations and their reality, and it is sharp and dark in a way that the feel good label doesn't quite capture. But the ending earns its warmth by never pretending that failure is fine. It suggests something slightly different: that people who have failed at everything can still show up for each other, and that this is worth something.

The final sequence is one of the great ensemble comedy endings. The family's decision in that moment is the whole film in one scene.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

A rebellious city kid and his grumpy foster uncle end up accidentally on the run through the New Zealand bush. Taika Waititi's film is funny in a way that rewards solo viewing - the deadpan timing lands better when you're not checking whether someone else caught it. But underneath the comedy is something real: a story about two people who don't know how to be cared for, learning it from each other in the most inconvenient possible circumstances. Sam Neill gives the best performance of his career.

Watch it without looking it up first. The structure surprises you in a way that is worth preserving.

La La Land

Two people in Los Angeles fall in love while chasing their impossible dreams - she wants to be an actress, he wants to open a jazz club. La La Land is a musical about the cost of ambition, about what gets left behind when you choose the thing you were made for over the person you love. It is more complicated than a feel good film ought to be, which is precisely why it works. The final sequence - a five-minute fantasy that plays out what could have been - is one of the most quietly devastating things in recent cinema. You leave it lifted and aching simultaneously. That is a rare combination.

Watch it with the lights off. The cinematography is built for darkness and it rewards full immersion.

Soul

A jazz musician on the verge of his big break dies in a freak accident and finds himself in the Great Before - a place where souls are assigned their personalities before birth. Soul is Pixar's most philosophically ambitious film and its most adult. It asks, directly, what a life is for. Whether the answer it gives is the right one is something you will sit with for days. What makes it a feel good film is not the answer but the question - it takes the ordinary texture of a day seriously in a way that very few films do, and you come away from it more awake to your own.

The jazz sequences were scored with the involvement of Jon Batiste. Even if jazz is not your thing, the music here is something else.

Singin' in the Rain

Hollywood, 1927. The silent film era is ending and the talkies are arriving. A silent film star and a young actress navigate the transition, the ego of a terrible leading lady, and the beginning of something between them. Singin' in the Rain is the purest distillation of why the Hollywood musical existed: to make the world feel, for two hours, like it is full of possibility and colour and people who express their best feelings through dancing. It is seventy years old and it has not aged. The title sequence, Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, remains one of the most joyful two minutes in the history of film.

If you have never watched a classic Hollywood musical alone, this is the one to start with. The joy is contagious even without an audience.

Good Will Hunting

A janitor at MIT turns out to be a mathematical genius who has spent his life self-sabotaging every opportunity in front of him. His court-ordered therapist, played by Robin Williams, is the first person who refuses to give up on him. Good Will Hunting is the feel good film on this list that earns its lift through the longest and most difficult route - by going directly into the damage first. The therapy scenes between Damon and Williams are among the best in the genre. The final act is one of the most quietly perfect in 1990s American cinema.

Robin Williams plays it completely straight, which is the key to everything. His final scene with Damon is the whole film in three minutes.