Insomnia
Stella:
After Hours (1985) by Martin Scorsese
Let’s imagine this. You toss and turn in bed, unable to sleep. Maybe it’s too hot, maybe you are thinking too much, the result is the same. What I do is accept my fate instead of counting sheep. It’s extra time in the day, if you really think about it. Tomorrow’s dark circles are a problem for Future Stella.
So I put on a movie where the protagonist is going through (almost) the same thing I am. I can’t think of anything better than After Hours. I’ve always felt this film is underrated, simply not enough people have seen it.
We follow Paul (Griffin Dunne) through a Kafkaesque fever dream. His plan is simply to have a good time with Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in downtown SoHo (New York’s art district in the 1980s), but a series of mishaps, bizarre characters, and strange encounters turn it into the longest night of his life. I won’t reveal any of Paul’s nocturnal misadventures because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun.
“I could go to a party, get drunk, talk to somebody… who knows?”
Valisia:
Miracle Mile (1988) by Steve De Jarnatt
If insomnia had a flavour, it would taste like Miracle Mile. A hidden gem of 1980s filmmaking.
It starts innocently enough: a chance phone call in the middle of the night, a man accidentally learning that nuclear missiles are about to hit Los Angeles, and suddenly the entire world collapses into 70 minutes of pure panic.
Miracle Mile feels like the result of an 80s romcom that suddenly caught a severe bout of nuclear fear. What begins almost like a love story quickly transforms into an intense, eerily euphoric romantic thriller. What follows is a descent through a very specific kind of 80s night: neon-lit, slightly artificial, full of late diners, glowing signage, and that strange American optimism that always feels like it’s about to crack open. The real genius of the film, though, is the people the protagonist meets along the way: peculiar, fragmented strangers who drift in and out of the story like half-remembered dreams. Everyone feels slightly off, like they’ve been woken up too early or never went to sleep at all.
Alexandra:
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) by Krzysztof Kieślowski
Some nights insomnia feels like two versions of me colliding: the one who performs all day, and the one I keep caged — who finally breaks free at 3am. Carl Jung called that second one the Shadow, the counterpart that lives parallel to your Persona. So what else to watch but Kieślowski's La Double Vie de Véronique, a film literally about being split in two?
Irène Jacob plays both halves: Weronika in Poland, Véronique in France, strangers who’ve never met yet somehow feel each other from across the map. I first saw it young and came away strangely sad, not even sure I'd followed the plot. Turns out that’s the whole design. This isn’t a film to follow, but one to feel, the way you feel a dream slipping away the second you wake up.
Sławomir Idziak's gold-green cinematography looks lit from somewhere inside a memory, while Zbigniew Preisner's operatic score basically plays the third lead - aching, choral, and completely inseparable from the images. The whole thing is dreamlike by design.
Summer Indolence
Alexandra:
The Naked Island (1960) by Kaneto Shindō
I picked a film set on an island, in summer, that still refuses to be a "summer film." I wanted to dodge the trap of everything looking magical just because the season demands it, because usually, it doesn't. The Naked Island is exactly what I love, minimalistic and pure - an incredibly poignant cinematic poem.
A family of four are the only people on Sukune Island, a tiny, rocky, and remote island in southern Japan, spending their days rowing to the mainland for water, then hauling it back to irrigate their crops. That's the entire plot. That's also everything.
It’s a film about the brutal math of survival, how effort and reward rarely line up, and how the majority of people spend their entire lives working just to keep existing. Their one glimpse of modern life - cable cars, restaurants, television on the mainland - barely registers. It’s too far removed from their world to inspire envy.
So they return to the island, to the same water, the same rhythm, the same crops. And somehow, they’re happy, because that’s what people do: find peace inside even the hardest conditions. Stop working, though, and everything stops with them.
Valisia:
Teen Witch (1989) by Dorian Walker
No list of mine would be truly mine without at least one gloriously goofy ‘80s cult film. This time, it’s Teen Witch.
Louise is your classic high-school misfit with a hopeless crush on the captain of the football team. On her sixteenth birthday, she discovers (thanks to the wonderfully theatrical psychic Madame Serena) that she’s a witch. Forget Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Teen Witch plays by its own wonderfully unhinged rules.
The film never takes itself too seriously, and that's exactly its charm. It's unapologetically camp, delightfully awkward, and a perfect time capsule of '80s pop culture. The soundtrack is ridiculously catchy - my personal favourite is "Never Gonna Be the Same Again", a song I've shamelessly slipped into my DJ sets more than once. Guilty? Don’t think so.
Then there's the fashion, the ultimate geek-to-popular fantasy, and the fact that characters regularly abandon normal conversation in favour of fully choreographed musical numbers. The scene: "Top That" is my absolute favourite. A flirty street rap battle in which two teenagers repeatedly yell "Top that!" in each other's faces before casually walking away as if they'd just settled an ancient rivalry. It's so aggressively '80s, so gloriously weird, that it has lived rent-free in my head for years.
Stella:
The Comfort of Strangers (1990) by Paul Schrader
To be honest, any of these Summer Films could have fit this category, but I decided to mentally travel to Venice.
There’s something about Venice that soothes me during the summer. Maybe it’s the immense body of water that isn’t a beach, yet is so closely associated with the season in my mind, even though, in reality, summer is probably the worst time to visit. Maybe that’s exactly why seeing its beauty on film is so alluring.
In stark contrast to Summertime (1955), however, there is nothing soothing about this film—quite the opposite. We follow the increasingly intense relationship that develops between the members of two couples: the unmarried Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson), and the older, long-married Robert and Caroline (Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren). It unfolds in a twisted, sensuous way, with the Venetian canals, mysterious alleys, four lovers, and an unexpected ending sealing the deal.
Heartbreak
Valisia:
Dracula (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola
When you're heartbroken, you don't need restraint. You need a centuries-old, impossibly attractive, cursed aristocrat crossing continents and defying mortality just to reunite with the love of his life.
Gary Oldman’s Dracula is just enchanting. Every glance, every declaration, every dramatic entrance feels as though it was designed specifically for people who insist they’re “fine” while listening to the same song on repeat.
And don’t even try to convince me Jonathan Harker was the romantic hero here. Keanu Reeves is lovely, but if you watched this film and weren’t secretly rooting for Dracula, I have questions. Quite frankly, it borders on blasphemy.
Heartbreak is temporary. Eternal longing has better costumes.
Stella:
The War of the Roses (1989) by Danny DeVito
There are two kinds of heartbreak: the sad kind and the angry kind. I think I’m covering both here.
Although I’m very much a “Feeling low? Let’s watch something that will make me feel even worse” kind of girl, I can understand why some people would rather watch something that cheers them up. And what could be better than The War of the Roses? It’s a delectable, witty, cruel, fast-paced take on divorce, filled with perfectly vicious irony as we watch Barbara (Kathleen Turner) and Oliver (Michael Douglas) destroy each other through the very competitive spirit that first brought them together.
They want revenge, and they pursue it with relentless spite. They destroy everything the other cherishes most, leaving no room for hope.
Even in the film’s emblematic final scene, where Oliver reaches out for Barbara’s hand one last time, she coldly pushes him away. If that film won’t make you lose faith in relationships, nothing will.
Alexandra:
Sid and Nancy (1986) by Alex Cox
LOVE KILLS! And I mean that literally here, so consider this your warning.
FRIDAY 13 OCTOBER 1978
CHELSEA HOTEL, ROOM 100
Sid Vicious sits on a blood-stained bed. Tall, rail-thin, bruised and pasty white. 21-years-old. Sid gazes towards the bathroom of the tiny room. The only window opens on to a ventilator shaft. The walls are dark. The floor is thick with garbage, black with blood.
VOICE
Who called 911?
That's exactly how the movie starts, and how the love story finishes.
In between, there are happy days. Sid meets Nancy, falls for her completely, and for a while it's just that — two people in love. Then his bandmates make him travel without her, leaving her to meet him in New York later. But Sid was too far gone for her already, so when the band splits and he tries to go solo in a city that wants nothing to do with him, the two of them just keep sinking, together, into addiction.
*Gary Oldman is outstanding as Sid Vicious.
Heatwave
Alexandra:
Body Heat (1981) by Lawrence Kasdan
How else could we possibly kick off this category if not with the pinnacle of sweaty cinema? This movie where every single character is visibly drenched in sweat, every single scene. Set in the middle of a scorching summer, a beautiful Florida woman convinces her lover—a small-town, shoddy lawyer—to help her murder her wealthy husband. As the temperature rises, so does the suspense.
Body Heat is essentially a neo-noir remix of the Double Indemnity (1944) formula, but it also proves how endlessly adaptable noir can be, even while its roots stay firmly planted in its golden age. Classic noir came out of the specific anxieties of the post-war era. That look could always be updated, retrofitted for whatever moment needed it.
Here, it’s a small Florida town where time seems frozen (for now). The film opens with fire in the distance: Ned Racine, sweating for reasons that go beyond the heat, watches the Seawater Inn burn.
“My family used to eat here twenty-five years ago,” he says. “Now somebody’s torched it to clear the lot.” Then: “My history is burning.”
Stella:
Woman in the Dunes (1964) by Hiroshi Teshigahara
As it goes with my "Feeling low? Let’s watch something that will make me feel even worse" philosophy, the same applies when I’m suffering from the heat. I want to watch people suffer too.
There are plenty of great films that fit the bill, but today I’m choosing a dose of existentialism. Woman in the Dunes is a modern retelling of the myth of Sisyphus. We follow an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) who leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle in a vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune.
Throughout the night, the woman shovels away the sand that has accumulated at the bottom of the dune during the day, only to repeat the same endless task again the next morning.
As the film asks: "Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?"
Valisia:
Cape Fear (1991) by Martin Scorsese
A convicted rapist is released from prison after serving fourteen years and begins stalking the family of the lawyer who defended him. Not exactly light summer viewing, but bear with me.
This is a film that feels hot. The kind of relentless, sticky heat that makes everyone slightly irrational. Sun-drenched Florida, heavy air, sweat, oversized linen, and the constant sense that something terrible is about to happen. It’s smart, stylish, and anchored by a phenomenal cast. Robert De Niro had played intimidating men before, but Max Cady is something else entirely: sinister, unpredictable and genuinely frightening. Every time he appears on screen, you feel the temperature rise another few degrees.
Visually, it's everything I love: immaculate early-'90s oversized minimalism wrapped around a grubby, deeply unsettling story. Scorsese turns humid Southern landscapes, harsh lighting and religious symbolism into something almost hypnotic. Somehow, a film that makes you want to take another shower.
When you just want to disappear for 3+ hours
Alexandra:
Inland Empire (2006) by David Lynch
It's almost self-evident that the easiest way to fully disappear from planet Earth for three hours or more is by watching my biggest cinematic love of all time: David Lynch. Inland Empire is peak Lynch. It’s long, unhinged, hypnotic, and built to resist every attempt to decode it.
The 180-minute theatrical cut is the definitive, Lynch-approved version. An earlier 197-minute festival edit technically exists, but it's essentially vanished from public access (damn it!).
The plot, loosely: a woman in trouble. That's Laura Dern. Fading Hollywood actress Nikki Grace lands the lead in a cursed film, and her reality starts unraveling from there. infidelity, reincarnation, gigantic rabbits, forces that feel supernatural but are never explained.
The first hour is almost coherent. You start thinking, wait, am I actually following a Lynch movie for once? Then the hour mark hits, and it dissolves into something closer to a fever dream. If you’re a true Lynch fan, you know exactly what’s coming next…
By the end, I just felt like David Lynch had crawled directly into my dreams and started directing them, because none of it made any fucking sense.
Stella:
Kaos (1984) by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
I remember watching this film at Cine Zefyros, completely unaware of what it was about or just how much it would stay with me. It’s long, but you never want it to end.
Adapted from the short stories of Luigi Pirandello, it explores 19th-century Sicilian life through a blend of comedy, tragedy, and folklore.
"The Other Son" tells the story of a mother who rejects her devoted son because his face reminds her of the man who raped her. "Moon Sickness" follows a newlywed wife as she discovers that her husband transforms into a violent "werewolf" during the full moon. "The Jar" focuses on a wealthy, arrogant landowner who purchases a giant olive jar to assert his authority. "Requiem" follows a marginalized peasant community fighting the local Baron for the basic human right to bury their dead in their ancestral graveyard. Finally, "Conversing with Mother" is a metafictional sequence in which a grown Pirandello returns to his childhood home to converse with the ghost of his mother.
Valisia:
It (1990) by Tommy Lee Wallace
If I want to disappear for three hours, I’m choosing horror. Every single time.
I’ve loved horror movies since I was a kid. Give me haunted houses, cursed towns, supernatural mysteries, psychological terror, outrageous splatter... I’ll happily take all of it. Just don’t give me zombies. We’ve never really connected.
My disappearing act of choice is Stephen King's It (1990), the two-part TV miniseries that clocks in at just over three hours. In 1960, a group of outcast children known as the “Losers' Club” faces an ancient shape-shifting creature that usually appears as Pennywise, a child-killing clown. Thirty years later, they're forced to return home and finish what they started.
I first watched it when I was around twelve, and I was completely mesmerised. Stephen King’s It felt unlike anything I’d ever seen on television. It was genuinely creepy, strangely beautiful, and somehow managed to be terrifying while also being wonderfully camp. Tim Curry’s Pennywise is, of course, the reason this miniseries became iconic. He’s unsettling, theatrical, funny, grotesque and impossible to look away from. It’s one of those performances that permanently rewires your brain.
Happy watching!
To the point as always!