Films and TV shows that feel like Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles

A bleakly beautiful portrait of lonely, forgotten people, a woman picking up rice at an empty wedding and a priest writing sermons no one hears, told with dry compassion.

1. Yellow Submarine (1968): The animated Beatles film features Eleanor Rigby in a sequence of empty, grey Liverpool streets and lonely faces.
2. Another Year (2010): Mike Leigh's quiet drama shows a lonely woman slowly fading beside other people's happiness.
3. About Schmidt (2002): A retired man faces the emptiness of his life with sad, comic honesty.
4. The Father (2020): An aging man's isolation and confusion are rendered with devastating tenderness.
5. Nowhere Boy (2009): It gives the Liverpool of the song's world, with its grey postwar roots and early Beatles years.
6. Vera Drake (2004): Mike Leigh's portrait of an ordinary, unnoticed working-class woman in postwar Britain has the same dry compassion.
7. Last Christmas (2019): Skip this one
8. Detectorists (2014): A gentle British comedy about overlooked people, with a wistful tone and a lonely English landscape.