Need a last-minute gift?

Not another holiday sales pitch

If you’re anything like me, it’s about this time — one week away from Christmas — when you start getting the panic about gifts. The shipping deadlines start to loom and your options get limited fast. It’s tough to find a gift that shows someone in your life how much you appreciate them, and all the consistent touchpoints of our consumerist enterprise have you ready to do this after the umpteenth all-caps promo email 👇

Elf, 2003. © New Line

I won’t take up too much of your time, only offer a humble suggestion for a unique gift idea for the movie lover in your life. (Maybe that’s you, no judgment!) One of the benefits of being a paid subscriber to Marshall and the Movies is that you’re eligible for a “Marshall’s Movie Mixtape.” Provided you submit your request by December 23, I’ll give you something that you can stuff inside a stocking for the big day.

Just fill out a Google Form and give me whatever mood, direction, or prompt you want a curated list of recommendations around. We can keep tinkering with it to make sure it’s not inclusive of things you’ve already seen and excludes things you don’t want, though I do my best to get your big no-nos at the briefing stage. I’ll also provide write-ups for each entry that makes the case for why I think they’ll fit the assignment you provided me.

In an age of algorithms, curation counts. Nothing speaks louder in this time of digital noise than a human touch. To show you what this looks like in practice, I’m sharing two recent mixtapes I made for paying subscribers.

ANONYMOUS: "Movies about the human connection (like Lost in Translation, La La Land, In the Mood for Love, Before Sunrise) and the social contracts that exist (like The Square)"

• Brief Encounter: Arguably the great yearning melodrama - and it's inspired everything from Carol to Decision to Leave in recent years. A classic that still hits.

• Hiroshima Mon Amour: A devastating tale of a Japanese man and a French woman attempting to learn what exactly their love means in the context of the atomic bomb's devastation. The opening sequence with its repeated rhythmic intonations of "you did not see Hiroshima" can serve as a guidepost to watch all other films by reminding us how often we can look at something without really seeing it.

• Scarecrow: For two actors as well known as Gene Hackman and Al Pacino (who's fresh off making The Godfather here but hasn't absorbed its success), it's shocking how few people have seen this beautiful road trip drama about two mismatched men trying to chart a path through an uncertain future together. It's hilarious and devastating in equal measure.

• Fallen Angels: There would be no Sofia Coppola and Lost in Translation without Wong Kar-Wai, the poet laureate of urban isolation. In the Mood for Love is rightly heralded as a masterpiece, but a slightly deeper cut of Fallen Angels captures that same sense of mood and place with equally intriguing (and less immediately palatable) effect.

• Weekend: This quiet romance between two men sorting out all sorts of feelings — sexual, societal, interpersonal — presents itself rather unassumingly, yet the effortlessness with which it conjures intimacy keeps this movie always lingering in my mind. How Andrew Haigh draws such vulnerability out of male characters without any situation or sentiment feeling contrived still astounds me.

• Paths of Glory: Is it lame to say this is my favorite Stanley Kubrick movie? I love the moral clarity with which this wartime drama calls out the hypocrisy of cowardly leadership, and it's matched by his remarkable eye for visualizing the drama - I'd argue it's his first of many masterpieces.

• Adoption: I adore the ambiguity in this Hungarian film about the odd relationship between a childless woman and a ward of the state that escapes obvious labels. They seem tailor-made for a mother-daughter narrative, yet director Marta Mészáros resists the urge to simplify their dynamic into something so clean-cut. The thrill of Adoption comes from the lack of boundaries between the two women that leave every moment feeling on the verge of transgression.

• La Promesse: The social contract is at the very heart of every Dardenne brothers movie; I think if you were to program a career retrospective, you could easily title it "What We Owe to Each Other." Each of their films follows a breakdown of the social and economic order on a micro-scale, then follows characters as they navigate the fallout. Their debut feature La Promesse is as good as any place to start with its gripping moral drama of Belgian businessmen covering up the death of an illegal migrant worker on their watch.

• Code Unknown: One of the three movies I picked out of the mobile Criterion Closet at NYFF! Michael Haneke was decades ahead of the rest of the world at detecting the fault lines emerging in post-Soviet Europe with migration and open borders transforming the continent. It's a presciently haunting, and at times disturbing, look at our present-day from the vantage point of a new millennium beckoning.

• Alps: By far Yorgos Lanthimos' most underrated film, Alps marks his most profound interrogation of social norms. By showing how people can deal with their grief through the hiring of a crack team of impersonators to play their recently deceased loved ones, he gives us the tools to understand our own oblique way of processing similar events.

RACHEL GREGORY: “Psychological thrillers/horror”

• Notorious: Notorious is an underrated gem in the Hitchcock back catalog - I was truly on the edge of my seat watching this cat-and-mouse thriller about trying to catch a Nazi on the run in the immediate wake of WWII.

• Hour of the Wolf: Bergman rarely goes full genre mode like he does here, and I think it's a really interesting (and underappreciated) way to observe his mastery of cinematic form.

• Sisters: No one can get inside your head quite like vintage De Palma, and he's as playful as ever inside this story that finds both visual and narrative rationale for his pet themes of twinning and splitting.

• Law of Desire: Almodóvar often focuses on the liberation inherent in indulging your desire, but Law of Desire casts a starker light on the danger that might lurk as well in this thriller starring an amusingly young Antonio Banderas.

• Cure: The cure, pun intended, for the common "the monster is just trauma" modern horror film. It’s less the crimes themselves that matter in this film — though I found myself squirming at his depictions of ordinary people mutilated with a slashed “X” on their corpses — as it is that the investigator is trying to figure out why the perpetrators do it given that they all remember their deeds but not the motivation for them.

• Swimming Pool: A crotchety old author trying to beat writers' block heads to her publisher's house in the countryside, only to deal with the host's capricious and coquettish daughter distracting her. But annoyance gives way to a perverse inspiration from Julie’s various romantic exploits. As she begins to observe, the real-life drama begins to spill onto the page … or perhaps it’s the other way around? Those blurred boundaries are where director François Ozon derives his most subversive and seductive power.

• Custody: "I was interested in seeing how I could start something in an office and end up in a bathtub," Xavier Legrand once told me, "So, in other words, start like Kramer vs. Kramer and end up like The Shining." Domestic violence has never been rendered so horrifyingly real and immediate as it has been here.

• Dark River: I feel like the cinema lacks rich portraits of the interior lives of those who live and work in rural areas. Clio Barnard's Dark River is at least a start, and Ruth Wilson's deeply embodied portrayal of a farmhand involved in a bitter property dispute with her siblings gives her dimension beyond simply what she does.

• The Other Lamb: Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska does the cult film a little differently in The Other Lamb, focusing less on the nuts and bolts of how the women came to be under the spell of a charismatic leader and more on the mechanics of his control. It's a film that plunges you more into feelings and sensations rather than explanations, which feels more fitting for the subject matter.

• The Royal Hotel: "I think when you see an image of two women with backpacks on in the Outback, you assume they’re gonna die or be horrifically attacked," Kitty Green told me about the premise of The Royal Hotel. She's constantly playing with the tension inherent in having these two young women working at an Australian bar with increasingly agitated patrons. Like many a frog in boiling water, you won't feel the heat ratcheting up until you're cooked.

I’ll link to the form once again behind the paywall in case you already are a subscriber and just haven’t claimed this paid perk yet!