Feel-Good Movies for a Bad Day: Six Films for the Night You Need to Hear 'Nobody's Perfect'

It started with the alarm you slept through, and it went downhill from there. The bus pulled away while you were still half a block back, waving like an idiot. Somebody hit reply-all. Now you're home with your coat half off, one shoe still on, staring at the couch as if it owes you an apology.

A bad day isn't a tragedy, which is exactly what makes it awkward. It's too small to call anyone about and too big to shake off with a shower. You don't need a movie that tries to fix you. You need one that knows somebody else has had a worse day and came out the other side, ideally with a laugh, a sandwich or a song.

So here are six feel-good movies for a bad day, ordered like an evening that gets better as it goes: a polite bear to warm you up, a quiet dance and a loud one, and a final line so forgiving it might be the best thing anyone has ever said at the end of a comedy.

1. Paddington 2 (2017)

What it is: Paul King's sequel finds Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) working odd jobs in London to buy a rare pop-up book for his Aunt Lucy's birthday. The book gets stolen by Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant), a vain actor with a closet full of disguises, and somehow it's the bear who ends up in prison.

Why it fits right now: Whatever happened to you today, Paddington's day was worse. He gets framed, convicted and handed a prison sentence, and answers it all with good manners and marmalade. King told the MPA's The Credits that the story clicked when he started rewatching Frank Capra films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where a decent man lands in a cynical world and his real test is holding on to his kindness when things go wrong. That's the whole bad-day survival guide, minus the lecture.

And Grant got the part after King sent him what the director called a delicately phrased letter: "We've created a character of a vain, narcissistic, washed up old ham and thought of you." Grant said yes.

One scene to look for: Paddington's first days in the prison kitchen. Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson), the cook every inmate is afraid of, tastes one of the bear's marmalade sandwiches by accident, and Gleeson lets the change happen almost entirely on his face. One small kindness, and the room changes.

2. Chef (2014)

What it is: Jon Favreau wrote, directed and stars as Carl Casper, head chef at a fancy Brentwood restaurant whose owner (Dustin Hoffman) makes him serve the same safe menu on the night a famous critic comes to eat. His dining-room meltdown gets filmed on phones and goes viral. Unemployable, he heads to Miami with his ex-wife and their son, Percy, and ends up fixing a rundown food truck to sell Cuban sandwiches.

Why it fits right now: This is the movie for the day you said the wrong thing at work. It treats public humiliation as a beginning, and it does it through food: butter hitting a hot pan, bread pressed flat and golden, a father showing his kid how to clean a flat-top grill.

Favreau hired Roy Choi, the chef behind LA's Kogi truck, as his culinary consultant and told LAist that Choi's real life was "uncanny how similar it was to the storyline that I wrote." Choi even kept correcting how Favreau held his kitchen towel, because, the actor recalled, a chef's towel tells you everything.

One scene to look for: Don't turn it off when the credits roll. Favreau kept the camera running on the day Choi taught him to make a Cuban pressed sandwich on the plancha, and that footage plays over the end credits.

3. Groundhog Day (1993)

What it is: Harold Ramis's comedy stars Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a sour TV weatherman sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for the fourth year running to cover the February 2 groundhog ceremony. Then he wakes up the next morning and it's February 2 again. And again.

Why it fits right now: Here is a bad day that literally won't end, which is why it's so oddly comforting. What finally works is just doing the day better, a little at a time.

And the town isn't even Punxsutawney. According to the AFI Catalog, Ramis scouted the real ceremony but felt the town lacked the center he needed, so he shot in Woodstock, Illinois, which he called "the classic small town of the imagination." The opera house on the square doubled as Phil's hotel. Woodstock now holds its own Groundhog Days festival, waking its groundhog, Woodstock Willie, at 6 a.m., the minute Phil's mornings begin.

One scene to look for: The clock radio. The digits flip from 5:59 to 6:00, Sonny & Cher start "I Got You Babe," and the same two DJs make the same jokes. Watch it every time it comes back, because Murray plays it differently every time: confusion, then dread, then fury, then something close to peace.

4. Shall We Dance? (1996)

What it is: Masayuki Suo's Japanese comedy follows Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho), a 42-year-old accountant with a good job, a loving family and a nagging feeling that something's missing. Every night on the train home he sees a woman (Tamiyo Kusakari) gazing sadly out the window of a dance school. One night he gets off at that stop. He signs up for ballroom lessons and tells no one, because in his world, holding a stranger in your arms on a dance floor feels almost as scandalous as an affair.

Why it fits right now: Not every bad day is a disaster. Some are just gray, the tenth identical one in a row, and this is the film for that kind. Shohei doesn't escape his life; he finds one small room inside it where his feet get to learn something new. Naoto Takenaka steals scenes as Aoki, a ballroom peacock with more confidence than sense.

It turns 30 this year, and Film Movement's new 4K restoration brings back the full 137-minute cut; American audiences first saw a version 19 minutes shorter.

One scene to look for: The opening commute. A lit window floats past above the tracks, the woman is standing in it, and the next night she's there again. On the third night, Shohei steps off the train at a station he never uses and climbs the stairs. Roger Ebert wrote that with these plain shots, Suo establishes "loneliness, mystery and allure."

5. Sing Street (2016)

What it is: John Carney's semi-autobiographical musical is set in Dublin in 1985. Money is tight at home, so teenage Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) gets moved to Synge Street CBS, a rough Christian Brothers school Carney himself attended. He meets Raphina (Lucy Boynton), an aspiring model, and tells her he needs her for his band's music video. He doesn't have a band. So he starts one, coached by his older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor), a sweet burnout who never leaves the house.

Why it fits right now: This is the night's high point, for when a bad day has left you a little mad. Every rotten thing that happens to Conor (a bully, a sneering principal, his parents' marriage coming apart) ends up in a song, and the songs, written by Carney and Gary Clark, are genuinely catchy. IndieWire caught the movie's spirit in one line Conor finally says to his bully: "You're just material for my songs." The film doesn't pretend the bad day didn't happen. It shows you how to use it.

What Sing Street understands, like every film here, is that a bad day makes you feel small and stuck, like the world has decided who you are. These films just keep pointing at a door: a kitchen, a dance floor, a guitar, one more try at the same morning. You don't have to walk through it tonight. It helps to know it's there.

One scene to look for: "Drive It Like You Stole It." About two-thirds of the way in, the band is shooting a music video on no budget, and the movie slips inside Conor's head. Suddenly it's a 1950s American prom: the band in matching maroon suits, Raphina watching him play, his parents dancing and laughing together, Brendan roaring up on a motorcycle. It's everything Conor wants and can't have, for one song.

6. Some Like It Hot (1959)

What it is: Billy Wilder's comedy follows two broke Chicago jazz musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who accidentally witness a gangland massacre loosely based on the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. To escape, they put on dresses and join an all-woman band heading to Florida, where Joe falls for the band's singer, Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), and a millionaire named Osgood Fielding III falls hard for Jerry, now going by Daphne.

Why it fits right now: End the night here. Joe and Jerry's day begins with a massacre and only gets more complicated, so yours will look manageable by comparison. Criterion's essay calls it "the exact opposite of an acquired taste." The Florida scenes were shot on location at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, so the back half feels like a seaside vacation from your own life.

One scene to look for: The morning after Osgood takes Daphne out for a tango. Joe climbs in through the window at dawn and finds Jerry, still in costume, lying on the bed in a daze of happiness because Osgood has proposed. Lemmon plays it shaking a pair of maracas, and he's never been funnier.

Spoiler warning: the next paragraph discusses the film's final line.

Then wait for the very last exchange, on Osgood's motorboat, when Jerry finally pulls off his wig and confesses he's a man, and Osgood, completely unbothered, replies: "Well, nobody's perfect." Wilder later recalled that he and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond wrote it the week before shooting as a placeholder. Nobody came up with anything better, so they shot it, still unsatisfied. When the film screened, he said, it got one of the biggest laughs he'd ever heard in a theater. Two words, written as a stopgap, that forgive everybody on screen. They ended up on Wilder's gravestone.

Before You Go to Bed

Take the other shoe off. The alarm will go off at the same hour tomorrow, but unlike Phil Connors, you'll get a different day, and you've already survived the worst version of this one. Short on time? Make it Paddington 2 to start and Some Like It Hot to finish.

On a rewatch of Groundhog Day, count the clock-radio mornings and notice exactly when Murray stops flinching at the song. And if tonight's bad day turns into a 3 a.m. one, our list of movies for when you can't sleep has Bill Murray waiting there too, wide awake in a Tokyo hotel. More moods are coming.