If You Like This 2025 Movie, Watch This Late '90s Movie

You’ll also like this movie, I promise.

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As a movie year, 2025 has been off to a bit of a slow start. Beginnings of years are always tough, what with the post-prestige comedown and all, but we've had a few films stand out regardless. If you liked any of those movies, I've got some throwback picks for what you should watch next. This is not a list of double features, just recommendations, as a lot of these movies might not work back-to-back because of how similar they are.

If you liked Mickey 17 (2025), you’ll like Starship Troopers (1997)

In my review for Mickey 17, I wrote about how acclaimed director Bong Joon-Ho was the perfect fit for the source material novel. His work is almost always about class disparity and the differences between the haves and the have-nots. Director Paul Verhoeven, also a foreign director who brought a unique perspective to the Hollywood system, was often interested in the same thing. Science fiction is arguably the perfect genre for this parody because it can be so heightened and so ridiculous that, to make the commentary as aggressive as possible, it can only happen far away from Earth. In both of these films, humans, solely in an attempt to show how awesome and badass they are, attempt to colonize planets beyond our own and start a terrible war against bug monsters. "The only good bug is a dead bug!" is the iconic quote from Starship Troopers and one that could easily appear in Mickey 17. What are the odds?

If you liked The Day the Earth Blew Up (2025), you’ll like The Faculty (1998)

When The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie hit theaters, many folks were just glad to have fun 2D animation on the big screen again. It could be imperfect, which it was, but that didn't even really matter. I understood this and felt it also, but I was equally excited to have classic alien invasion science fiction again. I like sci-fi farce as much as the next guy (see above), but there's something about that mid-century style that the genre today is sorely lacking.

When Robert Rodriguez, a director bursting at the seams with ideas and influences, made his first science fiction film The Faculty, he couldn't help himself but make a contemporary version of the movies that inspired him. It even goes as far as to have characters say things like, "This is just like Invasion of the Body Snatchers!" With these two films, you'll get throwback vibes from many different angles.

If you liked Black Bag (2025), you’ll like The Thomas Crown Affair (1998)

Similarly, every time a new Steven Soderbergh movie comes out (which is, thankfully, quite often), the internet is lit up with, "Finally, a movie made for adults!" I don't mean to make this a column about "the state of movies today," where four-quadrant feature-length commercials dominate the multiplex, but if we're comparing current cinema to the late '90s, it's hard not to notice that movies like this used to come out all the time.

The Thomas Crown Affair, itself a remake of a Steve McQueen film from the '60s, is one of those movies. It's about mystery and art and hot people kissing. It even has a lot of Denis Leary doing a lot yelling, so you know it's from the '90s. Black Bag is about spying and lying and hot people eating dinner together. These are movies for adults.

If you liked One of Them Days (2025), you’ll like Girl 6 (1996)

When it comes to mainstream black cinema from the '90s, your options are pretty limited. To find a story about a young woman caught up in a crappy job just to make a buck, the best option is Spike Lee's Girl 6. The authenticity here comes from screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks (this was Spike's first movie that he didn't write himself), who would win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama just a few years later for her play Topdog/Underdog.

It's definitely not as laugh-out-loud funny as One of Them Days, so if you're looking for a similar straight-up comedy, maybe this won't be the recommendation for you. But if you're looking for the real-life difficulties and dramas of a similar story (in this case, Theresa Randle plays a woman moonlighting as a phone sex operator), this is a great work of art.

If you liked The Monkey (2023), you’ll like Idle Hands (1999)

We'll round out this list with the gross-out pairing. The Monkey is Oz Perkins' follow-up to last year's breakout hit Longlegs. Therefore, it was a pretty highly anticipated 2025 film for a lot of people, myself included. And...well...it's no Longlegs. And it's my fault for hoping it would be. What we got instead is a gore-fest horror comedy that's equally interested in both genres. Based on the Stephen King short story, it's about a cursed monkey toy that will kill anything in its path.

Idle Hands, on the other...um...hand, is an equally disgusting story of a possessed hand that will kill anything it wants - even when it's cut off from its human. That human is Devon Sawa (if you're thinking about rewatching his Final Destination in anticipation of the new one, I can't recommend doing that) and he's surrounded by a very late '90s cast of Jessica Alba, Seth Green, and the band The Offspring as themselves. And don't even get me started on the soundtrack...