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15 Movies You Can’t Handle Twice

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Nazarii Verbitskiy

TV Shows & Movies - November 10th 2026, 01:00 GMT+1

Cropped Manchester by the Sea — 15. Manchester by the Sea (2016)

It’s the frozen chicken that finally gets Patrick. He can play hockey, juggle two girlfriends and argue with his uncle Lee about where he’s going to live. Then some chicken falls out of the freezer, and all he can think about is his dad waiting for the ground to thaw so they can bury him. Kenneth Lonergan understands how grief can ambush a kid who only went downstairs for a snack. | © Amazon Studios

14. Never Let Me Go (2010)

Imagine finding out that the art you made at boarding school might help prove you’re in love. Would you remember which drawings you handed in? Tommy would. Andrew Garfield gives his painstaking little animal illustrations the weight of a lifetime’s work, because Tommy believes they might buy him and Kathy a little more time together. The embarrassing earnestness of a schoolboy crush suddenly feels like the most precious thing anyone in this film possesses. | © Fox Searchlight Pictures

13. Martyrs (2008)

Anna makes the mistake most of us hope we’d make. Her friend Lucie calls, something terrible has happened, and she goes to help. That loyalty carries her from the bloodshed of the opening act into a house where people have given an appalling amount of thought to what suffering might reveal. Pascal Laugier’s cruelest decision is to leave us with questions about their experiment after making us wish nobody had ever asked. | © Wild Bunch

Lilya 4 ever — 12. Lilya 4-ever (2002)

Oksana Akinshina lets Lilya be funny, impatient and occasionally pretty rotten to Volodya, the younger boy who wants to hang around with her. Thank goodness she does. When a man offers the abandoned teenager work in Sweden, we know enough about the girl accepting that offer to understand its appeal. The ugliest part of Lukas Moodysson’s trafficking drama is how little the man has to promise. An ordinary life will do. | © Memfis Film

The Vanishing 1988 — 11. The Vanishing (1988)

Saskia goes into a service station to buy drinks. Rex waits by the car. It’s such a familiar division of labor on a road trip that you can practically feel his irritation in those first minutes, before it occurs to him that she might never come back. George Sluizer understands exactly how badly we want to know what happened in that interval. So does the one man willing to tell Rex. | © Golden Egg Films

10. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Seita pours water into an almost-empty candy tin and shakes it so his little sister can drink the sweetness left inside. If you’ve ever stretched the last of a treat to cheer up a kid, you know the pleasure he takes in that small success. Isao Takahata gives the gesture room to register. For a moment, Seita gets to enjoy being Setsuko’s big brother. He should have had years of that. | © Studio Ghibli

Cropped Irreversible 2002 — 9. Irréversible (2002)

Gaspar Noé runs one night backward, which means the audience meets Alex as a victim before getting to spend an ordinary morning with her. During the sexual assault in the tunnel, a camera that has barely stopped moving plants itself on the ground and stays there. Later, watching Monica Bellucci tease Vincent Cassel in bed, you realize how much you would give to have met these two in the opposite order. | © StudioCanal

8. Come and See (1985)

Look at Flyora’s grin when he digs up a rifle. He’s a Belarusian kid who wants to join the partisans, and at last he has something to bring along. Remember that grin when a bombardment damages his hearing and the soundtrack starts ringing in your ears. Elem Klimov keeps returning to the face of young Aleksei Kravchenko. Eventually you have to search it for any trace of the boy who found the gun. | © Belarusfilm Studios

Björk Dancer in the Dark 2000 1 — 7. Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Give Björk a factory floor and she can hear a musical in it. As Selma, a worker losing her sight, she picks a beat out of the machinery until you start listening for the next bit of percussion yourself. It’s a lovely game to play with her. Coming out of the number is another matter entirely, because those machines are still running and Selma can barely see where she’s putting her hands. | © Zentropa Entertainments

6. An Elephant Sitting Still (2018)

Somewhere in Manzhouli, the story goes, an elephant sits perfectly still and ignores whatever people do to it. That sounds like a pretty thin reason to cross northern China until you’ve spent a day in the company of Hu Bo’s characters. A schoolboy fears retaliation after a fight, an old man’s family wants his room, and gradually you’d quite like to see the elephant yourself. Nearly four hours buys a remarkable degree of fellow feeling. | © Dongchun Films

5. Threads (1984)

Sheffield has council officials, emergency plans and people whose job it is to think about the bomb. Frankly, it’s a relief to see them at work. Then the bomb falls, the officials are trapped under rubble, and you start wondering who’s supposed to dig out the people in charge of organizing the digging. That practical streak is what makes the BBC drama so frightening. It follows questions most disaster movies can duck simply by rolling the credits. | © BBC

4. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Omaha Beach gets most of the attention, but it’s the medic who makes *Saving Private Ryan* such a tough return trip. Wade has spent the film knowing what to do when somebody gets hit. Now his friends are crowded around him, asking him to put that training to use on himself. Giovanni Ribisi lets the medical vocabulary slip away until the only person Wade can think to call for is his mother. | © DreamWorks Pictures

3. Hereditary (2018)

Peter drives home, gets into bed and waits for his mother to go outside. Anyone who’s seen *Hereditary* knows exactly which night that is. Ari Aster could have followed Annie out to the car. Staying with her son means we hear what he hears, after spending what feels like hours hoping morning will somehow never come. All the occult clues in the corners of the frame are a good argument for a rewatch. That bedroom is my counterargument. | © A24

2. The Green Mile (1999)

Of all the things John Coffey might ask for on death row, he’d like to see a movie. So the guards put on *Top Hat*, and Michael Clarke Duncan watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance with the delighted concentration of somebody discovering what a movie can do. Frank Darabont gives us time to enjoy watching him watch it. Then these same men have to walk John down the hall, and we have to go with them. | © Castle Rock Entertainment

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“Have you seen it?” and “Want to watch it with me?” are two very different questions when the movie is Requiem for a Dream. Knowing what’s coming can make a second viewing even rougher. You spend the happy scenes watching the wrong person walk through the door or quietly begging somebody to make a different choice. I’d recommend these 15 movies to a friend. For a few of them, I’d also need an alibi for movie night.

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“Have you seen it?” and “Want to watch it with me?” are two very different questions when the movie is Requiem for a Dream. Knowing what’s coming can make a second viewing even rougher. You spend the happy scenes watching the wrong person walk through the door or quietly begging somebody to make a different choice. I’d recommend these 15 movies to a friend. For a few of them, I’d also need an alibi for movie night.