Tully (2018)

First of all, Tully is touching and hilarious and you should watch it just for the bittersweet laughs as exhausted mother of three Charlize Theron invites a young, charismatic night nanny into her home to help with the baby and to be the other half of late-night heart-to-hearts about her molecular makeup, the lost dreams of her pre-pregnancy days, and her marriage, and always just below the surface lies the possibility that you're watching a thriller about a sinister interloper with free run of a family home, ostensibly in the house to help but in fact quietly dividing and conquering until the time is right to kill the children, steal the husband, and leave the mother hobbling on crutches.

★★★★☆

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Adaptation (2002)

Adapting US journalist Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen causes screenplay writer Charlie Kaufman an existential crisis because it is a largely narrative-free contemplation on flowers and disappointment, but by inserting himself into the story and finding parallels between his own midlife crisis and the article's eponymous hero Laroche's obsessive work hunting the elusive ghost orchid, Kaufman succeeds in creating a thought-provoking and often funny, self-referential drama that won Meryl Streep an Oscar for her performance as Orlean.

★★★★☆

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Office Space (1999)

Thanks to a hypnosis accident, disengaged and disgruntled office worker, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) starts impressing upper management in this comedy that perfectly articulates the plight of many modern-day cubicle dwellers lost in soulless corporations and particularly those employees working under insipid middle managers like the one here portrayed in a perfectly irritating manner by a hilarious Gary Cole.

★★★★☆

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