Whatever Works
- warm
- brisk
- gentle
- intimate
- funny
Warm, kinetic, gentle comedy / romance, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Whatever Works explores the relationship between a crotchety misanthrope, Boris and a naïve, impressionable young runaway from the south, Melody. When Melody's uptight parents arrive in New York to rescue her, they are quickly drawn into wildly unexpected romantic entanglements. Everyone discovers that finding love is just a combination of lucky chance and appreciating the value of "whatever works."
Our read · Whatever Works (2009) reads as a warm, kinetic, grounded comedy · romance · misanthrope entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
More info & search links
The shape of Whatever Works
What watching it is actually like.
“You want chatty Manhattan farce where mismatched lovers keep trading partners without shame.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if Woody Allen banter, age-gap romance, or Larry David kvetching already grates.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself