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12 Movies to Watch After You See ‘Snatched’

We recommend better movies with Goldie Hawn, Amy Schumer, mother/daughter relationships, South America kidnappings, and more.
By  · Published on May 12th, 2017

50/50 (2011)

Jonathan Levine is a talented filmmaker who has given us such movies as the Sundance award winner The Wackness, the underrated zom-rom-com Hard Bodies, and this comedic cancer drama based on the true story of its screenwriter Will Reiser and star Seth Rogen. Levine is better with more genuine-feeling material than the gross-out and farcical stuff of Snatched. You could also argue that the new movie, which was scripted by Katie Dippold (The Heat) shouldn’t have been directed by a man at all.

The Guilt Trip (2012)

Rogen also stars in this mother-son road movie that, like Snatched, co-stars an iconic actress who hasn’t been working much of late. Here it’s Barbra Streisand in the very familiar mom role, and like Hawn in Snatched she’s the main reason to check it out. But unlike Hawn in Snatched she’s not the only reason. The Guilt Trip never gets as terrible as the new comedy. It’s tamer but also more relatable. But it’s also different because Babs gets to be the source of comedy while Hawn is underutilized in straight man capacity.

Frozen (2013)

Two women have a strained relationship that grows even more so when one of them is wooed by a man who is too good to be true and turns out to be even more nefarious than imaginable. Fortunately, the two women eventually patch things up by the end of an ordeal that nearly kills them both. Wait, did we just get a live-action version of Frozen ahead of Disney’s inevitable remake? No, no we didn’t, and not just because one has an icy setting and the other a tropical one. But they are similar. Frozen is better.

Trainwreck (2015)

If you’ve stumbled upon Snatched without previously being a fan of Schumer, you have a lot of great material to catch up on. Stuff that doesn’t involve fart humor and her playing such a moronically naive and annoyingly whiny character. Even when she’s crass, she’s too smart for much of what she says and does in the new movie. Perhaps she’s just already peaked, but her Comedy Central series sketches and this hilarious Judd Apatow-helmed rom-com, which she wrote, will be what she’s best remembered for.

Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (2016)

When it comes to documentaries about a mother-daughter pair, there’s nothing better than Grey Gardens, but this newer profile of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, which debuted just before they died six months ago, is kind of like a modern day Grey Gardens. The relationship between the two actresses feel much more akin to the one between Hawn and Schumer’s characters in Snatched, though. It’s also more genuinely funny, especially when it comes to Fisher being crass.

Get Out (2017)

One of the best parts of Snatched is the dynamic between Ike Barinholtz, as Hawn’s agoraphobic son, and Bashir Salahuddin as the State Department agent he keeps bugging about his “ma ma” and sister being kidnapped. But they’re not as uproarious as Lil Rel Howery in pretty much the same functional role in Get Out, which satirically is about an African-American man being held captive in his own country. Schumer really should be starring in the Get Out of feminism, but that’s not what Snatched is.

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Christopher Campbell began writing film criticism and covering film festivals for a zine called Read, back when a zine could actually get you Sundance press credentials. He's now a Senior Editor at FSR and the founding editor of our sister site Nonfics. He also regularly contributes to Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and is the President of the Critics Choice Association's Documentary Branch.