Mental exhaustion has its own logic. These films match it.
Bud Baxter is a minor clerk in a huge New York insurance company, until he discovers a quick way to climb the corporate ladder. He lends out his apartment to the executives as a place to take their mistresses. Although he often has to deal with the aftermath of their visits, one night he's left with a major problem to solve.
Low cognitive demand, high reward. The rare film that works when you have nothing left.
1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl, Sook-hee, is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress, Hideko, who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle Kouzuki. But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count to help him seduce the Lady to steal her fortune.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
A family dog – with a near-human soul and a philosopher's mind – evaluates his life through the lessons learned by his human owner, a race-car driver.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
In 1999, a teen girl keeps close tabs on a boy in school on behalf of her deeply smitten best friend – then she gets swept up in a love story of her own.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
A retired San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
Not every film needs to be a challenge. Some nights, being pulled along is exactly right.
Emotionally clear without being complicated. Absorbs well.
In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.
Low cognitive demand, high reward. The rare film that works when you have nothing left.
In 1927 Hollywood, a silent film star falls for a chorus girl just as he and his paranoid screen partner struggle to make the difficult transition to talking pictures.
Low cognitive demand, high reward. The rare film that works when you have nothing left.
A bullied teenage girl forms an unlikely friendship with a mysterious young man who protects her from her assailants, while she copes with the pressures of her final examinations.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
In the summer of 1983, a 17-year-old Elio spends his days in his family's villa in Italy. One day Oliver, a graduate student, arrives to assist Elio's father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.
Asks almost nothing of your processing power. You can be fully present or half asleep and still get it.
These films work because they match where you actually are, not where you think you should be.