Movies like Portions of Light, A Section (2020)
The best movies like Portions of Light, A Section (2020) are A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), Landline (2017) and Somewhere in Time (1980). If Portions of Light, A Section hooked you, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedMoonrise Kingdom (2012)7.7/10 from 6,570 votes
- NewestA Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)Released 2025
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)
Sarah and David are single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on a funny, fantastical, sweeping adventure together where they get to re-live important moments from their respective pasts, illuminating how they got to where they are in the present... and possibly getting a chance to alter their futures.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLandline (2017)
A teenager living with her sister and parents in Manhattan during the 1990s discovers that her father is having an affair.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisSomewhere in Time (1980)
Young writer Richard Collier is met on the opening night of his first play by an old lady who begs him to "Come back to me". Mystified, he tries to find out about her, and learns that she is a famous stage actress from the early twentieth century. Becoming more and more obsessed with her, by self-hypnosis he manages to travel back in time—where he meets her.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCardboard Boxer (2016)
Gentle and broken, a homeless man fights others on video for money but soon finds comfort in an unlikely friend and the lost diary of a young girl.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBunny and the Bull (2009)
A young shut-in takes an imaginary road trip inside his apartment, based on mementos and memories of a European trek from years before.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAshes in the Snow (2018)
The coming-of-age tale of 16-year-old Lina Vilkas who is deported to Siberia amid Stalin's reign of terror in the Baltic region during WWII. An aspiring artist, she secretly documents her harrowing journey with her drawings.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Draughtsman's Contract (1982)
R. Neville, a brash young draftsman, is hired to make a dozen landscape illustrations at the estate of Mr Herbert and his wife Virginia. Aside from monetary compensation, the arrangement includes a sexual liaison offered to Neville by Virginia while her estranged husband is away. But when the murdered body of Mr Herbert is discovered at the estate, mysterious clues found in Neville's drawings point to the identity of the killer.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMoonrise Kingdom (2012)
Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAbout Alex (2014)
When a group of old college friends reunite over a long weekend after one of them attempts suicide, old crushes and resentments shine light on their life decisions, and ultimately push friendships and relationships to the brink.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWhite Lie (2019)
Katie Arneson is faking cancer. A university dance major, Katie's falsified diagnosis and counterfeit fundraising have transformed her into a campus celebrity surrounded by the supportive community she's always dreamed of. But now dependent on a bursary for sick students to maintain her ruse, Katie learns the funding is in jeopardy unless she can provide copies of her medical records within the week.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDalíland (2022)
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
SnoozefestMovies like thisMeet John Doe (1941)
As a parting shot, fired reporter Ann Mitchell prints a fake letter from unemployed "John Doe," who threatens suicide in protest of social ills. The paper is forced to rehire Ann and hires John Willoughby to impersonate "Doe." Ann and her bosses cynically milk the story for all it's worth, until the made-up "John Doe" philosophy starts a whole political movement.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe World of Suzie Wong (1960)
A Hong Kong prostitute tries modeling and falls for the artist who's painting her.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDue Date (2010)
Peter Highman must scramble across the US in five days to be present for the birth of his first child. He gets off to a bad start when his wallet and luggage are stolen, and put on the 'no-fly' list. Peter embarks on a terrifying journey when he accepts a ride from an actor.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Other Sister (1999)
A mentally challenged girl proves herself to be every bit as capable as her "perfect" sister when she moves into an apartment and begins going to college.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisNorman (2010)
A teenager pretends to be dying from cancer as a way to cope with the realities of his daily existence and his father's terminal illness.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Landlord (1970)
At the age of twenty-nine, Elgar Enders "runs away" from home. This running away consists of buying a building in a black ghetto in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Initially, his intention is to evict the black tenants and convert the building into a posh flat. But Elgar is not one to be bound by yesterday's urges, and soon he has other thoughts on his mind.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAn Unmarried Woman (1978)
A wealthy woman from Manhattan's Upper East Side struggles to deal with her new identity and her sexuality after her husband of 16 years leaves her for a younger woman.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMute Witness (1995)
When a mute makeup/special effects artist working on a low-budget slasher film gets locked in a dilapidated Moscow movie studio late one night, she thinks she witnesses the making of a snuff film. Thus begins a night of terror.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisHenry Poole Is Here (2008)
Henry Poole abandons his fiancée and family business to spend what he believes are his remaining days alone. The discovery of a 'miracle' by a nosy neighbor ruptures his solitude and restores his faith in life.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
SnoozefestMovies like thisClouds (1969)
Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Me, Myself, and My Third Eye: 4 Enlightened Stories For 1 Imperfect God (2010)
Features four distinct, bizarre, existential tales about people whose lives are in transition, who are each asking questions about themselves, their environments, and about God(s).
Why it matches: Similar story and style
GOOD-BY ELVIS and USA (1971)
A trippy pop-art collage of phallic objects, naked women and American icons, most notably Elvis Presley.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
The Death of Abraham Lincoln (In Three Parts) (1998)
An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Daumë (2000)
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Extra Terrestrial (2004)
“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas
Why it matches: Similar story and style
The Twenty-One Lives of Billy The Kid (2005)
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
The Red and the Blue Gods (2005)
An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Impressions from the Upper Atmosphere (1989)
Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Closed Vagina (1963)
"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Why it matches: Similar story and style
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Portions of Light, A Section?
The closest matches to Portions of Light, A Section are A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), Landline (2017) and Somewhere in Time (1980). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Portions of Light, A Section?
Start with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), the closest match to Portions of Light, A Section.
What is the highest-rated movie like Portions of Light, A Section?
Moonrise Kingdom (2012), rated 7.7/10 by 6,570 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Portions of Light, A Section?
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Portions of Light, A Section?
Yes: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), Landline (2017) and Somewhere in Time (1980).
How are movies similar to Portions of Light, A Section chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Portions of Light, A Section, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.