Best movies like I've Been Trying to Tell You

Saint Etienne present a beautiful and enveloping nostalgia trip through 1990s Britain.

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like I've Been Trying to Tell You Starring Kit Butler, Fern Bain Smith, Nora Attal, AJ Adamu, and more. If you liked I've Been Trying to Tell You then you may also like: We Live in Public, The Nifty Nineties, Nitrate Kisses, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Blind Date and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

Do you look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era as a lost golden age, or do you see it as a period of naïvety, delusion and folly? There’s a lot of nostalgia for the nineties at the moment, especially from people too young to remember it who see the decade as a simpler, pre-internet time. Modern nostalgia often draws on corporate American-90s mall culture, but what about British culture? With I’ve Been Trying To Tell You – made to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name – director Alasdair McLellan evokes the era through the fog of memory. The resulting film, shot in locations from Grangemouth to Portmeirion to Southampton, is both beautiful and enveloping.

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We Live in Public

A documentary focusing on the life of dot-com entrepreneur Josh Harris, and his exploits over the last decade.

The Nifty Nineties

Mickey courts Minnie in the Gay Nineties: they take in a vaudeville show and go for a drive in his horseless carriage, to the strains of "While Strolling Through the Park" and "In the Good Old Summertime". Goofy rides by on a penny-farthing bicycle, and the whole Duck family rides by on a bicycle built for five.

Nitrate Kisses

Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

Based on a local legend and set in an unknown era, it deals with universal themes of love, possessiveness, family, jealousy and power. Beautifully shot, and acted by Inuit people, it portrays a time when people fought duels by taking turns to punch each other until one was unconscious, made love on the way to the caribou hunt, ate walrus meat and lit their igloos with seal-oil lamps.

Blind Date

A man goes blind when remembering his lost girlfriend, but the doctors can't find anything wrong with his eyes. They fit him with an experimental device which allows him to see with the aid of a computer interface and brain electrodes. Meanwhile, a taxi driver is taking young women up to their apartments, giving them gas, and performing a little fatal amateur surgery on them. Their paths inevitably converge, and the blind man must try to stop the psychopath.

Bloody Mama

Sexually abused as a young girl, Kate "Ma" Barker grows into a violent and powerful woman by the 1930s. She lovingly dominates her grown sons and grooms them into a pack of tough crooks. The boys include the cruel Herman, who still shares a bed with Ma; Fred, an ex-con who fell in love with a fellow prisoner; and Lloyd, who gets high on whatever's handy. Together they form a deadly, bizarre family of Depression-era bandits.

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy

A pharmaceutical scientist creates a pill that makes people remember their happiest memory, and although it's successful, it has unfortunate side effects.

I Remember Mama

Norwegian immigrant Marta Hanson keeps a firm but loving hand on her household of four children, a devoted husband and a highly-educated lodger who reads great literature to the family every evening. Through financial crises, illnesses and the small triumphs of everyday life, Marta maintains her optimism and sense of humor, traits she passes on to her aspiring-author daughter, Katrin.

The Madwoman of Chaillot

An eccentric Parisian woman's optimistic perception of life begins to sound more rational than the rather traditional beliefs of others.

The Eagle

In 140 AD, twenty years after the unexplained disappearance of the entire Ninth Legion in the mountains of Scotland, young centurion Marcus Aquila arrives from Rome to solve the mystery and restore the reputation of his father, the commander of the Ninth. Accompanied only by his British slave Esca, Marcus sets out across Hadrian's Wall into the uncharted highlands of Caledonia - to confront its savage tribes, make peace with his father's memory, and retrieve the lost legion's golden emblem, the Eagle of the Ninth.

The Man Whose Mind Exploded

In this "beautifully intimate and utterly unique piece of cinema", Toby Amies crosses the line between filmmaker and carer, trying to cope with the strange and hilarious world view of the fragile eccentric, Drako Zarharzar. A love story. Drako Oho Zaraharzar can remember modeling for Salvador Dali and hanging out with The Stones. But he can’t remember yesterday. Following a severe head injury, Drako Zaraharzar suffers from terrible memory loss, he can access memories from before his accident, but can’t imprint new ones. As he puts it, “the recording machine in my head doesn’t work”. Consequently, and as an antidote to depression he chose to live “completely in the now” according to the bizarre mottoes delivered to him whilst in a coma.

Roma

In 1970s Mexico City, two domestic workers help a mother of four while her husband is away for an extended period of time.

Children of Sorrow

Simon Leach is a very, very sick man. Thriving on despair, pain, and panic, he unites a group of broken and desperate people in the middle of the desert. He showers them with the love and affection they’re so desperate for, but Simon has a much greater plan for his followers.

Imaginaerum

Imaginaerum tells the story of an elderly composer, Tom, who suffers from severe dementia. As he has had the disease for years and has regressed into childhood, he remembers practically nothing from his adult life. His music, friends, all his past including the memory of his daughter are a blur in his fragile mind. All he has left is the imagination of a ten year old boy. As he drifts away into coma, it seems impossible to get back what he has lost. Or is it?

Titicut Follies

The film is a stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. TITICUT FOLLIES documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists.

Touch

A mechanic looking to save his faltering marriage strikes up an unlikely friendship with a shy Vietnamese-American manicurist.

My Perestroika

Tells the story of five people from the last generation of Soviet children who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition. Through the lives of these former schoolmates, this intimate film reveals how they have adjusted to their post-Soviet reality in today's Moscow.

Lonely Child

William is constantly shooting video journals of his life to have as souvenirs for himself. Feeling the end of his relationship with Médéric, his young lover, William spends two days camping with him, taking advantage of the situation by filming the trip and their time spent with another young gay couple. The camera never stops shooting, even when Médéric decides to get it on with another guy in a tent. As Canada's first Dogme95 film, the story is shot on location, with natural lighting and live sound, the camera is hand-held and all superficial elements are forbidden. Yet somehow, in spite of these harsh restrictions during the filmmaking process, the result is warm and beautiful.

Mouthpiece

Based on a stage play of the same name by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, the story follows Cassandra, who is portrayed by the two women, expressing the opposing voices that exist inside the modern woman's head, during a 48-hour period as she tries to organize the affairs for her mother's funeral.

Lapse

Renee wakes up one morning in the middle of the desert with blood on her hands. She cannot remember why she is there, how she got there or with whom she came. Her quest to uncover forgotten events leads her on a journey of discovery where reality and memory collide and people are not what they seem.

Guess What We Learned in School Today?

Parents in a small, conservative community don't think that the sex drive is a normal thing for children to experience. So much so, that they label education in that regard as a communist plot. The group of prudes is led by an impotent alcoholic and a gay policeman.

Blood & Donuts

In 1994, in Toronto, the vampire Boya awakens from his twenty-five years of sleep in a basement hit by a golf ball. He takes a cab to the local cemetery, retrieves his belongings from a grave and lodges in a low budget hotel nearby an all-night donut shop. Boya does not drink human blood anymore but rats and pigeons blood instead. While in the donut shop, Boya befriends and protects the taxi driver Earl, who is having trouble with two criminals, and falls in love for the waitress Molly. Meanwhile, his former passion of 1969, Rita, who misses her lost youth, is trying to locate him.

Man at the Top

Northerner Joe Lampton becomes involved with Lord Ackerman, the powerful chairman of a pharmaceutical concern, his beautiful wife Alex, and daughter Robin. But trouble starts when Joe is made Managing Director of one of Ackerman’s companies and makes a shocking discovery: his predecessor committed suicide...

Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude

It was one of humankind's most epic quests - a technical problem so complex that it challenged the best minds of its time, a problem so important that the nation that solved it would rule the economy of the world. The problem was navigation by sea—how to know where you were when you sailed beyond the sight of land - establishing your longitude. While the gentry of the 18th Century looked to the stars for the answer, an English clockmaker, John Harrison, toiled for decades to solve the problem. His elegant solution made him an unlikely hero and remains the basis for the most modern forms of navigation in the world today. This film will be both a celebration of Harrison's invention and an adventure story. An expedition on a period sailing vessel as it sails the open sea will demonstrate the life and death importance of finding your longitude at sea.

A Child's Christmases in Wales

One-off period comedy, peeping into the lives of a south Wales family's Christmases across the 1980s, written by comedian Mark Watson and inspired by a Dylan Thomas short story. Christmas in this household may be a less than poetic affair, but it is just as eventful. So much changes across a decade in any family, and yet so much manages to remain the same.

The Walking Dead: The Journey So Far

This two-hour retrospective in which the entire cast will tell the stories of their characters from the moment they were introduced through to where they were left at the end of the last episode of season 7. Beautifully shot interviews of the cast and the EPs are punctuated by clips of the most crucial moments in the series. If someone has never seen a moment of The Walking Dead before, this special will catch them up on the plot, characters, locations, and unique terminology of the series leading up to season 8.

The Saint Louis Browns: The Team That Baseball Forgot

St. Louis is viewed as one of the best baseball towns in America, however, the city's major league history is not confined to the Cardinals. For five decades, St. Louis fielded a second professional team - the St. Louis Browns. The Browns tendency to be remembered as a mere punchline has obscured their place in history, but their story is more than their reputation would suggest. It's the story of what could have been but never was. Of baseball legends lost to time. Of glorious gimmicks. As a beloved team turned fraternity of failure. This is the story of a team that found its place in history by losing its home. It's a story forgotten no more.

When Albums Ruled the World

A BBC4 Documentary on the rise and fall and resurgence of the venerable LP record, and the dynamics of marketing and consumption of music as told through artists and musicians of the classic album eras of the 60s and 70s.

Geri's 1990s: My Drive to Freedom

Geri Horner follows in the footsteps of Tom Jones, Keith Richards, Boy George and Jazzie B by revisiting the decade that has defined her life and career to date. For Geri, that decade is the 1990s, when she shot to international stardom as Ginger Spice. At the height of her Spice Girls fame, Geri helped to ensure `Girl Power' dominated the `Cool Britannia' scene with her iconic Union Jack dress, and here she reflects on how a working-class girl from Watford came to symbolise the gender politics of a turbulent era. She also discusses the key political and social moments of the '90s, including Nelson Mandela's release, the birth of New Labour, the launch of the World Wide Web, and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Includes contributions by Geri's friends and family, and other media personalities from the decade.

Take That: We've Come a Long Way

As Take That, one of Britain's most successful and best-loved bands, mark their 30th anniversary, they are celebrated in this special one-off programme. It features fans from all over the country, and beyond, sharing their stories of how the band touched their lives - and in some cases, changed their world completely. This most successful boy band in UK chart history are reunited, with Robbie Williams joining them to share favourite memories as they reflect on three decades in the spotlight. It also offers up candid, previously unseen material that they shot over the years. There is also a reunion for the boys' biggest fans of all - the five, proud Take That mums. The band takes us on a guided tour of significant Take That locations, with some memorable fan surprises along the way. With a glimpse of their preparations for their anniversary album, we also see them in the studio with Bee Gees legend Barry Gibb.

Estranged

Due to a near-fatal accident that has left her incapacitated and depleted of her long-term memory, a temporarily wheelchair-bound woman returns home after being abroad for six years accompanied by her bohemian boyfriend, the apparent cause of the accident. Unable to remember her family or her own childhood, she sets out, with the help of her boyfriend, to find the reason for her leaving all those years ago and quickly discovers her relatives may not be as loving as she’d thought

Ghost Light

Opportunist and liar, Joseph Watkins, puts on a play at a theatre with a murderous past to impress, Virginia, an actor on the verge of leaving town. While evading two detectives and to the alarm of his stage manager, Joseph becomes obsessed with the spirit of the theatre and begins killing those who get in his way.

Two Days Back

Five-year-old Emma follows a feral boy into the woods and is lost for two days. Remembering nothing of her ordeal, she avoids the woods, until seventeen years later when she accompanies a group of environmental students up a mountain to catch forestry students suspected of illegal foresting. When people go missing and bodies begin to surface, the groups join forces, but before they can make it back down the mountain, they stumble across a hunter's cabin and Emma comes face to face with the dark mystery of her past.

Gull Lake Vice II: The Delusion Continues

In this second and unneeded installment, the Delusion is so Strong that Brandon and Elliot Find themselves in a Real Narrative Film as Two Washed-up Vice Cops Resurrected from Retirement and Assigned to take down a Dangerous group of Criminals Dealing Drugs, Distributing Guns and Trafficking Women around the Gull Lake area.

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